This is because our species has a uniquely enormous forebrain. It's something like four or five times as large as the midbrain and hindbrain combined. This proportion is more than double that of any other ape, and an order of magnitude greater than most other mammals.
This results in an unprecedented ability to ignore, modify or override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. Couple this with the fact that we're a pack-social species in which the individual is programmed to watch and learn from his pack-mates throughout his entire life, rather than just in childhood. Then add to that the fact that we've increased the size of our "virtual pack" to include nearly the entire human race, and invented new communication technologies that make it easy to watch and learn from seven billion other individuals. Our instincts lose the battle with the clever invented and modified behaviors of a planet full of humans.
If I talk about people having "animal instincts" it probably is interpreted as the worst of all behaviors. But in fact something as basic as pair bonding and caring for young are clearly instinctive. The capacity to reason, for all its advantages, includes the capacity to be irrational. The "terrible twos" are thought to be a consequence of the emerging personality. And who knows how much the forebrain has hosted terrible nightmares, hallucinations and psychoses.
It's no wonder that instinctive behaviors don't make up a very large part of our activities.
Humans still practice sexual display, but the details of the behavior are constantly modified down through the generations.
- Victorian women corseted their chests and wore prosthetic buttocks. Modern American woman accent their chests and corset their buttocks.
- Throughout history men have cultivated our facial hair, our most visible form of dimorphism--unless we're naked. But when the technology of poison gas was invented in World War I, every soldier had to be ready to slip on a gas mask with a few seconds' warning. Gas masks don't seal over whiskers, so a generation of American and European men were taught to shave. (A cynic would look at the Gillette company's astronomical profits from inventing the disposable-blade safety razor and wonder if their parent company also owned the company that invented poison gas. )
The dawn of chemical warfare. Shock and awe. Induced psychoses. But by gum, it put bread on the table. Rationalizing. Damn liberals. Oops, my hindbrain is showing. Here, let me just stuff it back behind my false persona...
When these men came home (well some of them came home, quite a few never did), they created the new meme that heroes are clean-shaven. No American President since WWI has worn a beard, and it wasn't until the Counterculture movement of the 1960s--almost two generations later--that facial hair came back into vogue among the citizenry. Yet even today chest hair, another masculine gender-identifier, is not considered sexually attractive by many American women, and some men actually use depilatories to remove it.
Nit pickers and their follicle wars - kind of ironic. You're old enough to remember when Coolsville was goateed. Maybe that mix of unshaven and cleancut has a pattern recognition jamming effect. Considering how facial recognition is interwoven with infant imprinting, communication of emotion, and image recognition in general, the sense of style and preference, along with sexual display factors, probably runs deep. Interrupting the pattern could have a subliminal effect, and serve to unseat something closer to the brain stem, maybe just enough to stir the pot--if you're a Square and haven't worked through the issues of the day. Considering how the McCarthyites and John Birchers ran like Dobermans on alert, the billy goat chin was no doubt a clear threat to the worst ideas ever hosted by a neuronal network.
Ideally this would be the kind of mental fodder Maynard G Krebs could have been ruminating on when drifting off in the posture of
The Thinker, had he not been a clown. It was a bizarre era in which simple humor such as this almost completely masked all the skeletons in the closet. Then came the British Invasion and the Renaissance, springing out of meccas like Monterrey and the Village and spilling over into the Fillmore and then Woodstock.
Before it was over women were fully de-corseted, their leg and armpit shaving was optional and the sandlots gave way to Frisbee games with them, their Labs, the likenesses of Ulysses S Grant, Aristotle, Marx and Freud in braids and bandanas, half of the revelers with kaleidoscope eyes, and the other half trying to hold a job, stay in school, avoid the draft, avoid the pigs, and
be real--be anything but
plastic.
There are so many dimensions to this. Individual survival, from the most essential toolmaking capabilities of the primal intellect, to the instinctual flight-or-fight responses, to empathy, attachment and emotional needs gave way to collective behavior, civilization, and all of the insane consequences of striving to define what's good for the pack.
Out of all of that jumble of ideas you dredged up in me, I still regard the 60s as a Golden Age (even if its gold standard was calibrated in Acapulco
).
Peace, man.