You may have dismissed him as gay, but your girlfriend assures you he's not; in fact he apparently does quite well with the lay-deez.
He - let's call him Captain Patchouli - is not a bad bloke, but at parties he seems to drift away from the chest-thumping theatrics of the boofier guys to a corner of the room where you'll find him sitting cross-legged, cackling over Sarah Silverman jokes with four or five girls.
Fast forward a couple of years and you run into your now ex-girlfriend, pregnant and arm-in-arm with Captain Patchouli. They're getting married you see and all you can think is: "Huh? How did that happen?"
You'll be happy to know you're not alone in your confusion; in fact this very phenomenon has been documented in other animal populations and even been given a quite unscientific name, Sneaky F---er Strategy ...
When somebody told me about Sneaky F---er Strategy a few months ago, I passed it off as one of those urban myths, or internet memes that sound a little too plausible to be true.
Then I did a bit of research (umm, Googling) and there's just enough mentions of the theory, attributed to one of the world's greatest evolutionary biologists, Professor John Maynard Smith, to convince me of its validity.
Maynard Smith or JMS, as he was known before his death in 2004, was famed for introducing mathematical models from Game theory into the study of animal behaviour, "showing that the success of an individual's behaviour often depends on what other individuals do."
"Before Maynard Smith applied the theory to natural selection, scientists had assumed that evolution inevitably favours organisms that act aggressively," says the London Telegraph.
"Maynard Smith showed that this is not necessarily true, and that selection may actually favour altruistic behaviour."
Like a guy watching Desperate Housewives with a chick 'buddy'.
Among deer, for example, the studly stags customarily fight among themselves, establishing a brutal pecking order that, it had been assumed, meant dominant males got to mate with the most attractive young does.
However, thanks to techniques such as genetic fingerprinting of herd bloodlines, it has been shown that while the Monarch of the Glen is off crossing antlers with Dasher and Dancer and Comet and Cupid, the Percy pants Rudolphs are lolling around, having sex to their heart's content with the bored females and getting them pregnant.
The less dominant males were in fact far more successful in evolutionary terms, passing their genes onto a larger number of female deer.
Maynard Smith was also known for his distaste of academic pretensions and "had a well-honed ability to cut to the heart of debate," so it's not surprising he dubbed this theory, Sneaky F---er Strategy.
So there you go.
While all those footballers are out on the town fighting bouncers and drinking 28 schooners, you now know who's really having the fun; the bloke with the floppy fringe in the cardigan who knows a little too much about Æon Flux.
Don't say you weren't warned.
Source:
Sneaky Fucker Strategy, Viewed at 8th March 2007
