Here is a synopsis of an episode of Seinfeld titled “The Bizarro Jerry”:
Elaine sets Jerry up with a friend who is very beautiful, but she has “man hands.” George uses a picture of her and passes her off as his dead finance Susan; that gets him into the “Forbidden City” where high priced models hang out.
Remember that episode? Here is the IMDB profile for the actress whose picture George was showing around. The fact that such a hot woman ostensibly married George triggers something on other hot women, who now give him the time of day. In my own life, there was a girl at my high school who I will call “Tara.” She dated the most popular guy in school in 8th grade. I would have rated the girl a “5.5,” but inexplicably she had the status of a “hottie.” In fact, guys would say she was hot, though further querying on my part tended to evince obfuscation on the issue from my peers.
It is with these obvious truths in mind that I came to reading The Imitation Factor: Evolution Beyond The Gene by ethologist Lee Alan Dugatkin. The author edited (and was a contributer to) the text Game Theory and Animal Behavior, which I also just read. The Imitation Factor had positve blurbs from Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine) and Nancy Etcoff (Survival of the Prettiest), so that also got my attention. So what was the book about? If I had to sum it up: guppy see, guppy do!
Dugatkin’s general thesis is that imitation is a behavior that can be expressed by extremely simple animals, in this case, guppies. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of imitation in sexual selection. It has been known in many species the females tend to prefer males that other females prefer. But how do you gauge the importance of this factor in comparison to genetic constraints?