What the Beautiful Male Argus Pheasant Teaches Us About Dating Apps, Social Media, and Abundance
The future may be a sad, bleak one
Consider the cockerel and the hen. Which is more beautiful?
The cock has vertically inclined tail feathers. They are glossy and sharper. The crop is larger, more crimson, and well-defined. The colours are crisp and clearly outlined.
The hen has smaller, more rounded feathers, duller in comparison. The crop is small and lacks lustre.
Unambiguously, the cockerel wins.
Among birds, especially those with females taking care of the clutch, the males are particularly attractive. The same goes for the male argus pheasant.
This bird has unparalleled beauty. The peacock doesn’t come close. Artistically, its feather has patterns of the big cat and the zebra, the predator and the prey. These are surrounded by eyes (ocelli) that are peppered and angulated when they fan out to show depth, as they fan out and increase in inter-eye length towards the tip.
When the male ruffles these secondary feathers and arches them towards the female, they look equidistant. The argus pheasant is an evolutionary example of when art meets math.
This bird gave Darwin nightmares. He couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that a bird would use its feathers to augment their beauty rather than improve their functionality. It was maladaptive. Indeed, it is, since a long tail feather is a disadvantage to a flying bird.
The long-tailed black widow has a lengthy tail, affecting its airborne manoeuvres. If adaptation had veto powers, we would never see such majestic portrayals in birds. It means adaptation isn’t the only powerful force. The other is beauty.
Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Beauty distinguishes taste. A plump lady may be undesirable in one continent but the pride of the village in another. Beauty is whimsical, and thus often discarded in evolution because it is difficult to model whim.
If beauty lacked such potential, it would have lost its riveting mystery. Beauty can be long-lasting, like the creation of translucent stone, or it can be fleeting, like a flower in its prime during springtime. There’s more to beauty than what the beauty industries continually advertise.
These birds showcase beauty in ways that allow us to draw parallels with our current relationship with technology. Keep in mind the hen and the cockerel.
Social media, dating apps, and the age of abundance
I want you to focus on the behaviour of these two birds. The male is the larger one, trying to woo the female, the smaller one:
Watch the male try to woo the female with its feathered display. Source — YouTube
The female is indifferent. Her nonchalance makes the male resort to extremes of distracting and entertaining her however it can. It will ruffle its feathers, move in circles, shimmer the fanned out display, and continue until hopefully, it convinces the female.
Meanwhile, the female will act disinterested. Also, it is the female who decides whether they will accept or move on.
Can you think of any such relationship?
Influencers can do their utmost to get the attention of their audience. They will make their lips fuller, their butts firmer, their breasts perkier, get semi-nude, flex their pecs, arms, abs, and continue in that line using whatever filters they can until they look completely different from how they began their online journey.
But that’s commercialized beauty. It can go the other way round. Nicholas Perry started making videos as a lean young man, but in a short span, became morbidly obese. The audience wanted him to continue doing what they preferred.
The audience, in this case, is like the female in the argus pheasant courtship display. She decides who she likes.
On social media, the acts, posts, and reels that gain preference are the ones replicated by online stars, the social media influencers.
The reinforcing feedback can take individuals to extremes that can be maladaptive. For Nicholas Perry, it was becoming morbidly obese. For birds, it is getting a set of secondary feathers whose principal function is to parade and announce their beauty before females, not warmth or flight.
The male club-winged manakin adjusted its bone morphology just so it could impress the females. It’s not that these are within the complete power of the male club-winged manakin, but over time and after several iterations, these are the birds that get chosen, the ones with exaggerated features. Now we have a bird that has reversed over 150 million years of bone morphology — a one-to-one comparison with the morbidly obese.
It’s maladaptive, but it’s preferred.
As for online creators, the audience chooses what they like and dismisses what they don’t. And if they don’t like you, like Jay-Z’s song, they move on to the next one. Reminds you of any app, the kind that swipes right or left?
Now, on these apps, potential partners would never put the photos of themselves looking as ‘yummy’ as they are in real life. They will use filters, polish it, perhaps take a studio pic, and adjust the lighting to pique a suitor’s interest. For them to be picked.
These are similar to the antics the male argus pheasant uses to get picked by the female. This female, on the other hand, is unfazed. They want something novel, something different, something extreme.
Currently, online users are like a female argus pheasant. Dull, easily bored, and nonchalant about most of the content they browse. Like the hen and the female argus pheasant, they become smaller, duller, appear more bored the more they continue scrolling.
The creators are like the cockerels and the male argus pheasant. They continue concocting new ways of attracting the female’s attention. The creatives and influencers will go to extremes they have never done before just so they can get the approval of an unfazed audience.
It’s a relationship embodied in evolution.
The females don’t need the male birds to raise the clutch. They just need the seed. The males can move on to the next one as soon as copulation is done. Just as much, the females don’t need to waste their time with a male bird they lack interest in. They can move on and find another.
On social media, you don’t need to waste your time with content you don’t like. You can continue scrolling. As Beyoncé sings, you can swipe to the left if the boxed image of the date lacks what you’re looking for.
Overabundance turns the consumers into nonchalant screen movers. Sherry Ning mentioned that we stare at each other, but I don’t think we do. We screen very fast and move on to the next option, hoping it’s better.
Because there’s an abundance of humans to survey, nobody wants to settle, because: what if there is someone better?
The relationship is between the creative/influencer/social media personality and the audience. The audience comprises 99% of users online. The 1% are the creators/influencers/social media personalities. Despite the numbers continuing to increase, the percentages remain largely the same.
What it means is you have to continue coming up with content that will please 99 people this year, and 999 in the next two years. In reality, there will be several people who will drop along the way, but the creatives who stay need to generate content that raises the audience from their nonchalant stupor.
A mother will force their child to cry so they can get likes and views. Someone will record a video of themselves weeping because their boa constrictor has died, then edit it to meet audience standards. Another couple will have a third party recording how they woke up and still look as fresh as daisies.
People will attend concerts and record videos so they can share with their audiences, in particular those who didn’t attend. Up-close shots and videos will receive better engagement, so the VIP sections will always be sold out, and phones with the best resolutions will continue to run out of stock as soon as they are launched. The reinforcing feedback can get extreme to the point of maladaptiveness.
Rappers will beef and produce song after song with the most hurtful of lines. The audience will wave it off as the-rules-of-the-game. Nonchalance en masse.
The Met Gala is perhaps the grandest manifestation of exaggeration with the intention to attract and stir conversations. Bear in mind that the museum will hardly increase in size, but the artists will. So it will always be sold out. The ticket, which was once $50,000, has now shot to $75,000. Over 50% rise.
If you had a dress that nearly broke the internet last year, you have to be extra creative next year. Oh, and cough up an extra $25,000. Little money. Perhaps. But extreme effort to please in comparison.
The future may have a sharp divide between the creative and the consumer. The consumers will look drab, and the creatives will be walking on hot coals trying to get approval.
This relationship is purely parasocial; it means that, like the argus pheasants, not everyone can easily have the kind of partner they want.
What does that mean for the 99% of consumers? They will be ready to dismiss potential partners based on the merits of the 1% of creators they interact with.
The future may indeed be a bleak one. Bleak for the influencers who have to exaggerate to gain approval and online engagement. Even if it means losing a little bit of cash through the boosting options in Meta or X, to remain ‘relevant’. Bleak for the internet users because they might develop insane standards for their friends and partners.
As Beyoncé sang, beauty hurts.
What I’m trying to say is…
Evolution is unpredictable.
So my predictions might not manifest as I paint them. However, massive evidence in different parts of the world and across various species shows that this might be the trend.
The male flame bowerbird is extremely brightly coloured, and can constrict and dilate its pupils separately for each eye, just so it can appease the dull-coloured female counterpart.
A fascinating show of what the flame bowerbird does to attract a female, even to the point of alternating its pupils’ size. Source — YouTube
We’re already seeing this online. How?
Just ask yourself how often you hit or tug the refresh button before you’re on to the next one.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube