In the dank morning heat of Malaya a little fly has already visited several flowers, but the next will be his last. Though it appears to be a flower in every way, he has in fact alighted on a praying mantis in disguise, and in a heartbeat's time the mantis has gobbled up the fly and folded its artificial petals out again to wait for another visitor. In Thailand a lantern fly is about to be pecked by an insectivorous bird, but at the last moment the fly jets away, not in the direction in which the bird was prepared to make its aerial correction - the damned thing flew away backwards! For on the rear it has artificial eyes, antennae, and proboscis, and in reality it was flying away headfirst.
These are examples of the evolutionary adaptations of mimicry, of looking like something which you are not. Zoologists for years have understood some of the principles of mimicry of other species or objects, as in the case of the mantis and flower, but there is another form of mimicry which is just beginning to emerge in our understanding of evolutionary patterns. It is quite different from the usual type of mimicry. The little lantern fly can serve as an introduction to this form, yet it still shows the similarity in principle to other forms of mimicry. The lantern fly, in fact, just mimicked himself, but backwards. The head looked like the tail and vice versa.
Mimicking parts of oneself or other members of one's own species has been referred to as social automimicry. There are four main kinds of automimicry: (1) parts are shifted artificially to other areas (as in the lantern fly, or in snakes that have tails that look like their heads); (2) a duplication elsewhere on the body of characters from other areas of the body, a convergence sometimes of two different characters on the same signal theme (like the peacock who displays many stylized "eyes" making himself more intimidating by possessing all those "stares"); (3) replication in the immediate vicinity, like "eye stripes" scattered around the real eye stripe; and (4) and (5), one age class, or sex mimicking another juvenile rains have horns and body contours almost indistinguishable from those of females, so to dominant rams both are in the same status category of socially non-offensive).
Even the latest textbooks in evolutionary theory make little reference to the concept of automimicry. It is so new its implications are yet to be realized. For why mimic yourself when you are already you? But two heads are indeed often better than one. If an eye stripe or spot is intimidating, what then is the effect of two? Maybe not double, but perhaps more than one. If, say, tails are important communication organs, and a tipped tail carries a stronger signal of tail position, what about a tail with an adjacent ring in contrasting color, and another, and another, until there is a striped tail? That is how tail striping may have evolved. In essence, then, you can be just like yourself, only more so!
There are some cultural counterparts of automimicry that might make the concept more intelligible. Shaving is a form of automimicry, where we duplicate the signal from another age group - a more juvenile age class. Automobiles are an important status symbol, hence threat tools. As many have pointed out, autos are giant creatures, extensions of the driver headlights as eyes and the grill a gaping jaw of shiny teeth. The coming of the dual headlight was hailed as an automobile salesman's windfall - it almost doubled the threat value. The most threatening type of car is the "cherry-dome V-8" - a police car. Many officers have taken to putting two red flasher lights on top, and several I have seen had two sirens. These are all forms of automimicry.
How does all this affect us? We don't look like flowers, nor have our heads and tails reversed, nor do we have dual headlights; but we do exhibit, along with many other primate groups, some excellent organic examples of automimicry.
One of the categories of automimicry I mentioned was the mimicry of one age class by another. Human beings have done this as much or more than any other organism. All forms of social neotony (an evolutionary regression into a more youthful appearance) fall into this category.
Men have the same taboo against striking a heavy blow that would harm a woman as they do against striking a child. This is reinforced by the general similarity between women and children in skin texture, hair distribution and texture, voice pitch, and many other body signals. A more neotenic (small and childlike) woman generally has a wider range of males with whom she can mate, and a larger and more masculine woman, fewer. The male attraction to the baby-face is just that, an attraction from one age-class extended to another.
This type of automimicry - at least the argument for it - is not difficult to picture. The other forms of automimicry are a little more difficult to portray and assess, but they are nonetheless there and are important elements in our everyday body signals.
Desmond Morris argued in The Naked Ape that breasts are buttock's mimics, and arose because we have shifted our mode of copulation from "aft" to "fore." Rather than mounting from behind in the ancestral way, we usually go about it face to face. He argued that we simply moved our sexual fetish of double rounded curves to the front; hence, the gigantic breasts which are much larger than their mammary function warrants. I agree with his general conclusion, but for somewhat different reasons. I think the preceding two chapters add some insight into the interrelation between breasts and buttocks. The latter are the primary erotic zones; the former are erotic because they are inextricably involved in the development of our copulatory behavior - nursing, sucking, and so on. The two organs converge behaviorally into a sexual image; by making them do so physically, automimicry has strengthened the signal of sexual attraction.
We are not alone among the primates in the convergence of breasts and buttocks, as both Desmond Morris and Wolfgang Wickler have pointed out. Another terrestrial primate, the Gelada baboon, has some otherwise unaccountable resemblances between the buttock and breast areas. The nipples are vermilion and lie adjacent to each other like the red labia; a pink hourglass skin borders this, which in turn is separated from the surrounding hair by a white pearling of a skin fold, amazingly like the rump patch pattern.
It wasn't until the braless "natural" look came into vogue that human males became generally aware of the resilient breast mobility accompanying body movement, and its attention-getting role, very similar to swinging hips and buttocks.
Morris has proposed that lips are female genital mimics. To some secondary degree, they may be, but first and foremost they are blood flooded, exaggerated nursing organs. A woman with lipstick, rather than having a flashing vulva, has a child's distended nurser. And a tongue stuck through the lips in a "French or soul kiss" is at the same time a nipple and a penis. They have converged into a common pattern. Sticking one's tongue out at an opponent is intimidating, like a dilute penis display, but in early courtship it is a sexy gesture.
Those of us who gawk at Playboy foldouts or garage calendars are familiar with the degree of variation in female areolas, the pigmented area around the nipple. On some it is huge; on others it covers a small spot around the true nipple, and on others still it is distended as if the whole areola were nipple. I believe that the areola's function is a false nipple, an exaggeration of a real structure, a super-signal - not to children, but to adult males. Listen to Coon's description of Bushmen girls' breasts:
"The usual pubertal form of the feminine nipple, with its swollen areola, is exaggerated among Bushmen girls; to the extent that the nipples look like bright orange balls loosely attached to the breasts, a startling sexual attraction that wanes after the first baby has been suckled and weaned."
Children’s lips are redder and proportionally larger than lips of adults. Large red lips on an adult are a mimic of "baby lips." Coloring the lips red with lipstick artificially strengthens this child-like signal (in the same way rouge mimics the youthful rosy cheek). Some women with small lips paint out past the lip to artificially enlarge its appearance. Some other creatures even tattoo supernormal sized lips over the mouth.
Some variations of human lip form are: (A) full lips; (B) thin lips; (C) lips showing "trim" of skin line; (D) expanded trim; (E) large thick lips (Zulu); (F) Cupid’s-bow lips, more common among females than males; (G) New Zealand Maori scar trim ornamentation; (H) Ainu scar-tattoo lip exaggeration; (I) lip scar-tattoo from North Formosa; (J) waxed lips with red lipstick; (K) false contour constructed by putting lipstick on outer skin.
The mandrill has brilliantly colored genitals which have taken essentially the exact pattern and color combination as the mandrill snout, his primary fighting organ - the flaring, nostril-shaped prepuce and yellow scrotal goatee, the red penis shaft similar to the central red snout, and the scrotum and sides of the muzzle the same cobalt blue. The proboscis monkey is apparently one of the species which uses a penile display, but it also erects its male elongate snout in threat. Snouts and genitals have one important thing in common: they are both used in threat display. It is not unbelievable that these subtle duplications of visual threat patterns could have taken place in humans, with the glans being represented by the enlarged soft tip and the scrotum by the oval swollen alae.
Among many people the urethral slit is represented by a vertical nose dimple. Curly thick eyebrow hair (similar to pubic hair in texture and color) is placed at a fortunate spot at the base of the nose. Perutz refers to plastic surgeons having noted penis-nose association in psychological feedback following "nose jobs". Whether the intimidating qualities of a large nose come from the long association with the mouth, or as a duplication of a sexual threat, or whatever, they do appear to exist. The nose changes size and shape with age - being a flattened little pug in the young and tending toward bulbousness and magenta color with age. The significance of the "flared nostrils" accompanying the frown (notice the difficulty in moving either nostrils or brows separately) and the villain's long, warty beak in cartoons are recognized by everyone as offensive.
Nipple, areola and breast forms differ according to individuals and races. Some examples are shown above: (A) medium breast with, small areola and small nipple; (B) medium sized areola (C) exceptionally large areola; (D) pert erect areola and nipple; (E) inverted nipple in high placed breast; (F) sac-like nipple and breast; (G) undercut areola with posterior constriction (Micronesia); (H) acute case of hypermastigdia; (I) deflated breast with pendulous, nipple (Australia).
Not only does the vertically dimpled nose tip look suspiciously like a genital opening, the cleft chin seems to be an even greater exaggeration. This may sound a bit far-fetched, but one is at a loss for other more plausible alternatives. In an Italian poem by Uberti, its functional puzzle is well expressed:
"I look at her white easy neck, so well
From shoulders and from bosom lifted out;
And at her round cleft chin, which beyond doubt
No fancy in the world could have designed."
But listen to the description of one of the young lady-killers in The Godfather, by Mario Puzo:
"His face was that of a gross Cupid, the features even but bow shaped lips thickly sensual, the dimpled cleft chin in some curious way obscene."
Also, the parallel features of beard color and texture and pubic hair color and texture may not be fortuitous. They both are generally darker than scalp hair, coarser, and coil more, at least among Caucasians.
The graying patterns of human beards also fall into a kind of automimicry, which I referred to in the evolution of tail striping. The patches of gray radiate around the head in an alternating pattern, one on each side of the chin tip, another at the angles of the jaw, one above the ear on the temple, and still another at the forehead in the area of the "widow's peak," producing a swirl of variegated lights and darks.
Just as a mandrill has a theme of vermilion, cobalt blue, frosty gold, and black as its socio-sexual theme, we have hairy lilacness running through human social organs. The organs of status are not easily separated from the organs of copulatory attractions; just the same as for behavior there are strong cross-currents between sex and status, love and aggression, attraction and repugnance.