Arbit Raj

A speed dating event with a twist! Only wealthy men and beautiful women may apply!! Can you believe it? It can't get more politically incorrect than that, right??

The organisers Pocket Change (and I seriously recommend visiting the link to see the criteria they have laid down) have come up with this concept called 'Natural Selection Speed Dating'. They went ahead with the event with 40 men and women participating, and of course these were people who met the criteria.

What the organisers say is that they have latched on to folk wisdom. Men seek beautiful females for partners while females seek men with wealth and power. As you would expect they have got flak from many for being so blatantly 'sexist' and 'crass'.

You might notice that I have marked the last two adjectives above in quotes. Do I agree with what they are doing? Well, I have no comments to make on that. But there is quite some interesting background to what these people are saying.

A field of study called evolutionary psychology gives a nice angle to this whole 'wealthy men, sexy women' concept. The whole premise behind this field is that our mental makeup, behaviour and hardwiring that goes into what the brain is, has been shaped by thousands of years of evolution. The environments that we as a species have been through have molded your brain, your emotions, the way you react when you see a sibling, parental love, the choice of mate, why someone cheats on a partner among many other things. Not to say that, we are automatons without conscious control. But, accepting the fact that we have hardwired logic governing our thoughts, choices and interactions with others.

Does it sound too far fetched? Well, we agree with things evolution tells us like why people around the tropics have dark skin, right? The pigment melanin protects again sunlight, for example. Its an evolutionary development shaped by exposure to strong sunlight (environment). So, if you can extend the logic to the realm of the mind, many things can be explained in this framework.

From a purely reproductive angle, males look for a beautiful female, in the search for a healthy set of genes and females seek a male with status and wealth to further the benefits accruing to the potential offspring. Simply, put, evolutionary psychology says that sometimes folk wisdom has in-built logic. It did not get adopted by 'folk' if it did not have inherent sense. If it did not make sense, it would have withered away from collective memory.

But the twist about evolutionary psychology is that the adaptations are made for the environment that shaped us. If the environment changes drastically, the adaptations will not be particularly helpful usually. In the case of mankind, the environment (not environment in the conventional ecological sense, but that governing our interactions with others) has changed so rapidly over the last few thousand years that we are sometimes at the whims and fancies of commands from the past in a different today.

What the speed dating event has done is brought a fact of life forward. It is something that most know but few are ok with, accepting publicly.

As a side note, I would suggest reading a book called "Moral Animal - Why we are the way we are" by Robert Wright. Its rich and stimulating. For those who like their books with the thinking cap on, I assure you its a good read.