Editorial: “The rituals of royal nuptials“
The pomp and fluff of the royal wedding belie Kate Middleton’s ruthless mating intelligence
AH, THE eugenic thrill of it! Status weds beauty: a promising start. Royalty weds a good-genes commoner: excellent progress. A 6-foot, 3-inch prince who flies rescue helicopters and shows self-deprecating humour weds a 5-foot, 10-inch Amazon with a good eye for fashion. Truly, this is the romance at the end of the rainbow.
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On 29 April, these two fit young humans, Prince William and Kate Middleton, will be married, and 2 billion people will watch. What will you see? It depends on your sex – yes, really. One confusing thing about living in a two-sexed species is that certain social rituals have quite different meanings depending on whether you watch them with a male or a female brain. Nowhere is this divide greater than in the realms of courtship and reproduction, where aeons of sexual choice have shaped the evolution of human nature. A wedding may be played out against a backdrop of gauzy sentimentality, but beneath all the trimmings – the dress, the flowers and the finger-buffet – lie the iron imperatives of sexual conflict. The mating minds of men and women have evolved to achieve different ends, so it is hardly surprising that we interpret any wedding in entirely different ways – and maybe this one more than most.
Male brains will be sparked by Will’s military titles (flight lieutenant, captain in the Blues and Royals, commodore-in-chief of Scotland) and Kate’s signals of fertility and fitness (cheekbones, legs, style, humour) to conjure a primal mating scenario – King Kong and Ann Darrow, Genghis Khan and his many conquests, that sort of thing. After the fourth pint or second spliff, our imaginings may become more fanciful. Will is recast as the warrior prince, riding his awesome mounts – the charger called Ducati 1198S with the power of 170 horses, and the whirling-winged dragon called Sea King that he flies over the icy-dark Irish Sea to rescue drowning sailors.
To secure his future queen, this brave knight Will, or Wombat, as his royal parents called him in his youth, launched a daring bride-raid from Windsor, winding far to the west – nigh on 10 leagues up the great Thames river – to the very wilds of Bucklebury in Berkshire. Before her kinfolk could intervene, the prince and his retinue had snatched away the fair and highly symmetrical maiden. Chase was given, of course, but the prince’s gentle demeanour and ample land-holdings reassured them that he might, if appeased, treat their daughter well. Her parents had the wit to understand that he would make a good sire to their grand-whelps – better, at least, than any man from the neighbouring villages of Tutts Clump, Burnt Hill and Cold Ash. So, the prince is ready to celebrate, the wine to flow, and the bride to be bedded.
Female observers are likely to find their erotic imaginations following a different path. Whether inclined to coo over the gown and swoon as the fairytale glass carriage processes up The Mall, or to adopt a more critical appraisal of the ceremony’s extravagance, the feminine gaze understands that this wedding is really Kate’s triumph, not William’s. Kate holds out the hope to ambitious women everywhere that if your man-claim is staked early, and your mineshafts are sunk deep and well worked, you may strike gold.
Consider. When Kate was 5 years old, her mother launched a business to deliver royal-romance-themed party goods to children. A teenage Kate saw her friends at Marlborough College put posters of dreamy Prince William on their walls. At the University of St Andrews, Kate caught Will’s eye early in an art history class and in a translucent dress on a fundraiser’s fashion runway. Aware that there are many women at St Andrews, some brighter, some more beautiful, Kate perseveres with the standard female primate tend-and-befriend treatment of skittish males: spend time together, create comfort, share humour, elicit oxytocin. They become flatmates, then lovers, then make public appearances together. Small triumphs.
Yet time passes. Complacency sets in: Kate’s prince may still fancy himself a potential polygynist or roving Genghis Khan, and his novelty-seeking may yet prove stronger than her duration-seeking. Even after years of living together, she still has no real commitment from Will. The women of Britain, tabloid-keen, share her frustration. Following Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, she realised her Little Prince needs his taming. At some point, Kate must have looked at herself in the mirror and thought, “I can either be known to history as ‘That girl King William lived with before he met Queen Gaga,’ or else I can harness my Will-to-Power to fulfil my queenly ambitions.”
She apparently chose the latter, imposed a temporary separation, provoked his sexual jealousy by going out clubbing in that black sequined minidress (the 27 July 2007 one), and found same-sex support from her rowing team, aptly called Sisterhood. It worked! Using her formidable mating intelligence Kate somehow managed to coax a proposal from the previously reluctant William.
So finally the pay-off comes: the 18-carat sapphire engagement ring, once worn by Princess Diana, and the announcement at Clarence House. A date is set and 1900 guests invited for a ritual that will cost an estimated £20 million – despite Kate’s nod to straitened times, forfeiting the traditional carriage in favour of a mere limousine to take her to the church. The wedding at Westminster Abbey, the grand procession and the appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony together fulfil the key game-theory requirements for a ceremony to work as a reliable signal of romantic commitment: high cost and a big audience. And when the pomp and pageantry are over, Kate wins the ultimate biological prize: the opportunity to pass on her genes to a future king or queen.
Kate’s joy at these prospects appears intense and genuine, and is worthy of celebration. To me as an evolutionary psychologist, she exemplifies the triumph of female mating intelligence over the male mammalian brain’s default modes: complacency, indecisiveness and sloth. And she epitomises the active role that women have played throughout human evolution, not just through their powers of mate choice, but through coaxing from their men commitments of time, energy, parenting protection, meat and, nowadays, money.
Kate’s accomplishment deserves recognition. The media praise female role models for any other form of savvy – emotional intelligence (Oprah), political intelligence (Hillary), acting intelligence (Meryl), even culinary intelligence (Nigella). But achievements such as Kate’s have been sidelined since the 1970s, when feminism questioned the legitimacy of women directing any of their wit or imagination to solving the problem of securing a long-term partner. These days any celebration of mating intelligence is a guilty pleasure, consigned to costume dramas, romantic comedies and women’s tabloid journalism. What has been a central application of female savvy throughout history, across cultures, even across species – getting a high-mate-value male to commit – has been devalued. Perhaps with this royal wedding we can rehabilitate mating intelligence as a fascinating and laudable form of human cognition.
Don’t forget, Kate will be the UK’s first merit-based princess, a commoner selected by William for her own natural fitness indicators rather than her family’s ancestry. Good genes, not blue blood, have helped her win her man. She is the most athletically gifted woman to marry into the Windsor family business for quite some time, talented in netball, rounders, hockey, swimming and rowing. With due respect to Diana, Kate is more beautiful. Kate is not apparently an intellectual, but she is intelligent by any normal standard, with a 2:1 degree from an internationally renowned university. Besides, she has flair. And if we intellectuals can only set aside our assumption that merit equals general intelligence expressed academically, we can appreciate how important this quality is. Kate’s major in art history, a form of applied perceptual psychology, taught her to question what the eye is telling the brain and to critically appraise every masterpiece – whether a medieval manuscript or a Daniella Issa Helayel dress. That Kate has a talent for this is clear in her sense of style – the most ancient, universal, personal and yet underrated form of art in our species. I have argued that artistry is a key attribute of the human mating mind, honed through sexual selection by the human attraction to creative mates. Kate clearly has it.
“Good genes, not blue blood, have helped Kate win her man”
Having said all that, what many know and few admit is that Kate’s triumph would not be so great were she more overwhelmingly beautiful or accomplished. If Anne Hathaway, the same age as Kate, had somehow taken an interest in Prince William rather than in an Italian fraudster, Will might have fallen for her all too easily. The face, the body and the major acting talent give a potent Hathaway-buzz to the male observer’s brain.
Yet such a match between an ultra-high-mate-value woman and a future king would not have been as outstanding an example of female mating intelligence. Nor would it have been as “romantically inspiring”. Insofar as Kate has any mediocre qualities, the Windsor/Middleton merger holds out the hope that ordinary women everywhere might aspire, despite their own imperfections, to extract similar commitment signals from their boyfriends. For the lonely female grad student, a Hathaway romance would have been depressing, whereas the Middleton romance is uplifting: put too crudely, Kate conquered the world’s tallest status-mountain with little more than cheekbones, legs, smart thinking and moxie.
More impressive yet, her prince is a bone fide good catch. He doesn’t just bring status and wealth to the marriage; he too possesses the good genes destined to make this a biologically beneficent union. Not for Will the Hapsburg jaw or another manifestation of royal inbreeding. He is tall, well-built and pin-up handsome. And he possesses many of the qualities women most value in a mate. He is empathic – he once spent a night sleeping rough on the streets of London in sub-zero temperatures to experience the pain of homeless people. He is generous – he supports a list of charities and foundations as long as your arm, including causes that range from AIDS and animals to refugees and weapons reduction. As if that weren’t enough, for his day job Will performs acts of heroic altruism. All this and then he is also second in line to the throne, with all the Big Man kudos that brings. What more could a girl want?
For many admirers, the royal wedding will be the beginning of a long relationship with Kate and Will. For a while at least, they are likely to be the most famous couple ever. Inspired by the romance and history of the British monarchy, and enabled by internet access and smartphones, hordes of people worldwide will follow every speech, interview, giggle and gaff the golden duo make.
Happily ever after
No doubt, advances in technology will change the rules of engagement. In years to come, royal-watchers will probably be gripped by the antics of the geno-paparazzi – titillated by their attempts to steal royal DNA contained within a strand of hair left in a restaurant or ski chalet, and intrigued by the publication online of a Kate or Will genome. Perhaps a black market will even offer replica Kate eggs, Will sperm, or baby clones of either. They may end up having many more children than they know. Such are the perils of celebrity and good genes. More felicitously, wealth and high status mean that Will and Kate may also be among the first to benefit from breakthrough research in longevity. By the time they reach middle age, the science should have made enough progress to keep them alive and youthful well into the 22nd century.
So expect to see a lot more of this couple, everywhere and for a very long time to come. On the occasion of their wedding, may we wish Will and Kate many children, and long life and happiness. I think they have a surprisingly good chance of all three.
The Darwin connection
Most human courtships recapitulate humanity’s sexual evolution to some degree, but this royal courtship is especially rich in Darwinian undertones.
• Kate Middleton’s beauty first caught Prince William’s attention at the University of St Andrews, where David Perrett runs the world’s leading lab on the Darwinian aesthetics of facial beauty.
• They were sitting in an art history class, with luminous works of beauty projected on a wall in a darkened room, as if admiring Palaeolithic cave paintings by torchlight.
• Kate and Will outwitted their sexual rivals to obtain each other’s affections in the university where primatologists Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne developed the idea that Machiavellian intelligence in great apes and humans evolved largely through social and sexual competition.
• Will proposed to Kate on holiday in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, Kenya, near the geographical centre of human evolution. He has said “Africa is my second home.” The officiant at their wedding will be the Primate of All England, Rowan Williams, aka the Archbishop of Canterbury, a progressive theologian who opposes the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution.
• They will marry at Westminster Abbey, just a couple of kilometres from Francis Galton’s old eugenics laboratory at University College London and a few metres away from Darwin’s burial place.
