Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair by Christopher Oldstone-Moore Page B

on elite men in Western Europe and North America who had time and resources to shape their bodies as they deemed appropriate, and whose choices dictated social norms. Men outside these centers of power could not ignore the styles established by the elite but were forced either to conform as best they could or to stand defiantly apart. Even so, writing the story of manly hair in other regions, and among minorities and other non-elite groups, remains an important task for future writers.
    Our voyage across time begins in prehistory, in the far-off evolutionary past. Some would argue that natural selection has determined and still determines the meaning of beards. With this idea in mind, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have strived valiantly to untangle the natural riddle that is the human beard.

The Evolution of Beards
    Beginning with Charles Darwin himself, evolutionary theorists have pondered the origins of the beard. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin described a process of sexual selection that operates in tandem with natural selection in shaping the course of human development. Natural selection changes a species by favoring individuals with traits that enhance their chances of survival and procreation. When it comes to procreation, however, there is another level of selection as individuals within a species compete with one another for the favor of sexual partners. Darwin reckoned that, for the purposes of this competition, animals evolved many secondary sexual characteristics that functioned either as weapons to defeat sexual rivals, such as horns or tusks, or as ornaments to attract potential mates, such as colored hair and feathers. Individuals with the more appealing ornaments or stronger weapons would succeed in reproducing themselves and propagating their distinctive traits. Darwin assigned the human beard to the category of ornament, and imagined that it had the power to attract women. 3 Over the millennia, the theory goes, bearded men were more successful in procreation than their smoother competitors, and the human beard evolved into its present form. In short, men now have beards because our prehistoric female ancestors liked them.
    1.2 Charles Darwin.
    But Darwin saw a problem with this idea. Anthropologists of his day reported that human populations varied widely in the fullness of the male beard. It was believed that Native Americans, for example, were nearly incapable of growing them. Darwin surmised that some ancestral women in some particular places must not have liked the beard and because of that prejudice continually selected against it. That is, the beard functioned as an ornament only among peoples who in fact considered it to be an ornament. To help resolve this conundrum, Darwin invoked still another evolutionary process: the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Before Darwin, Jean Baptiste Lamarck had argued that species change over time by passing along newly acquired traits to their offspring. If a giraffe, for example, spends a lifetime stretching its neck to reach food in the treetops, its progeny will be born with longer necks. Though many a schoolteacher or professor might dismiss the the inheritance of acquired characteristics as un-Darwinian, Darwin repeatedly invoked this this principle in The Descent of Man , and didso again on the matter of beards. Noting anthropological observations of peoples who were relentless in plucking unwanted facial hair, and referring to (very dubious) experiments that appeared to show that surgical alterations in animals could be passed on to the next generation, he concluded that “it is also possible that the long-continued habit of eradicating the hair may have produced an inherited effect.” 4 In other words, men who cut or pulled their facial hair would beget boys who grew less facial hair as adults. The inheritance of acquired characteristics thereby completed a process begun by sexual selection, leaving some groups of men with great