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“Humans will make anything sexy. We can transfer some kind of sexiness to any trait.”
    “Like bound feet?” I asked.
    “Exactly,” he said. “In cultures that start to hide women’s bodies, that can explain why men are attracted to these traits. With breasts, men are just loading culturally a set of symbolizations onto something that really evolved for more direct reasons. We’ve got to be more scientific about it.”

    THESE ACADEMIC FISTICUFFS WERE VERY MUCH ON MY MIND IN Wellington. On my last morning in town, I joined Barnaby and Alan Dixson for coffee. Alan was wearing a pink button-down shirt, suspenders, and a tan blazer. A Maori fishhook made from cow bone hung from a cord around his neck. He was part gracious Englishman, part eccentric Englishman. With his bushy mustache and slightly wild white hair, he reminded me of some of the primates he has spent so many years studying.
    I asked Alan if he thinks it is possible that natural selection, not sexual selection, was driving the evolution of breasts. “I think the two went lockstep,” he answered judiciously. “Laying down the fat is naturally selective, because you need it. Then it becomes a question of where to put it. If you’re a dormouse, you put it in your tail. If you’re a mandrill, you put it in your ass.” Now the coffee was kicking in, and engaging professor mode was fully launched. “If you’re a human, and you put it in your chest, then maybe it’s sexually selected too, because in younger women, you’d have the appearance of healthy physiognomy. Men might prefer women with these attributes. We’re talking about a dynamic process. We’re not talking about the peacock’s tail, which is no bloody use at all. We’re talking about something that displays underlying health and well-being. I imagine there’s something to do with more than just lactation and pregnancy. I imagine breasts have something to do with displaying readiness for reproduction.”
    “Yes,” mused Barnaby, hunkering over his espresso and wrinkling his brow again. “These things may be linked together. It’s a fair point.”
    Ah. It seems we’d arrived at a happy medium. I could go home now. Except, for some reason, I still found myself not altogether satisfied. The more I thought about it, the less it seemed that sexual and natural selection of the breasts arrived in lockstep. In fact, I became increasingly convinced that breasts have been categorically miscast in modern history.
    I kept thinking as my plane thrummed out over the Pacific, which long ago men and women crossed in rickety dugouts following their human dreams of migration and survival. Then, as for all of our history on this planet, they fell in love or in lust, and everyone who could have children did.
    What if instead of men selecting breasts, the breasts selected the men? It’s possible that once upon a time, Early Man loved lots of different specimens of Early Woman, some with no breasts, some with small breasts, some with hairy breasts, whatever. Man, as we all know, is sometimes not that picky. Then, for the reasons described earlier—fat deposition, cranium shape, the development of speech, and the long neck—the women with the enlarged breasts and their infants gradually outlasted the others. That is, after all, the way natural selection works.
    Consequently, the people who could talk and sing and have the biggest, best-fed brains were the ones born of women with breasts. It makes perfect sense that we would grow up to appreciate and enjoy breasts, eventually putting pictures of them in eye-tracker machines in universities.
    Perhaps, all along, the breasts were calling the shots.

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CIRCULAR BEGINNINGS
… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

    — CHARLES DARWIN,
On the Origin of Species

    H OPEFULLY NOW WE CAN ALL RELAX AND UNDERSTAND that breasts are, truly, designed for the purpose of feeding infants. With