Evolution Explains Why We Want Expensive Crap, Literally

Of all the hot news this week, by far the most compelling, the most important was the report that an enterprising gentleman is going to start selling panda tea. Now, to be honest, it’s not made from actual panda. Nope, the $36,000-per-pound tea that wildlife expert An Yashi plans to bring to market is actually made from the panda’s fecal matter. Apparently, dried, partially-digested bamboo turds are a perfect fit for the well-off palate.

The panda tea isn’t even the first entry to the hot brewed poop drink market. Civet coffee has been around for years, and while it’s not quite as pricy as panda tea, it still fetches at least $170 a pound.

It’d be fun to talk about the evolutionary reasons behind consuming poo products, which is why I already have. Instead, let’s get at the real issue here: there are actually people willing to brew up a pot of joe using beans that have already been excreted by another animal. There are quite wealthy people, presumably of refined tastes, shelling out big bucks for panda droppings. It begs the question: How is it that we’ve evolved to define luxury as drinking poo tea?

We’ve talked about the evolutionary reasoning behind wanting to be rich in the first place. It simply comes down to sex. If you want an impressive mate (and you do), the easiest way to show that you yourself are a quality mate is to show that you’re a top-notch resource gatherer. We saw that point demonstrated by the bowerbirds, who build elaborate bird mansions just to show off. In human terms, a Ferrari and an Amex black card tug at the same evolutionary strings.

And for females throughout most of human history, sex meant a very real chance of getting pregnant, adding an extra nutritional burden in the form of an extra mouth to feed. Thus, a woman would likely prefer a mate that can provide resources to one that can’t. Of course, neither of these cases are hard and fast rules, especially not in modern times, but they have certainly influenced human evolution.

So, having lots of resources is a good thing. That’s an obvious enough statement that you can feel free to roll your eyes at it. But while it’s clear why someone would love to have a pool of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, how does shelling out 36 large on panda poop offer someone an evolutionary benefit?

In the mid-Seventies, biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed a hypothesis (PDF) that helps explain the luxury phenomenon. It’s called the handicap principle, and it’s driven by the one thing that plagues individuals trying to show off their quality as potential mates: fakers.

Imagine that for one species of bird, an essential nutrient that’s hard for the it to find happens to make it turn blue (flamingos are a good example of this color-changing phenomenon). In this case, the bird is able to signal how quality of a mate it is by how blue it is. But what if lower-quality mates were able to fake it, say by rolling around in blueberries? Suddenly, a blue bird isn’t necessarily a great resource gatherer. In the short term, the fakers get away with scoring quality mates through trickery. But over time, because being colored blue is no longer a guaranteed indicator of one’s high evolutionary fitness, it becomes irrelevant in mate selection. Working hard to turn blue the honest way then becomes a waste of time.

Enter the peacock. Zahavi’s theory suggests that male peacocks have their giant, ridiculous plumage because it’s impossible to fake. While, in our last example, a sickly bird might find a way to change color, only a truly healthy, successful bird is strong enough to handicap itself with such resource intensive plumage. In this case, fakers either fail because they aren’t healthy enough to grow such big feathers, or aren’t strong enough to run away with all that feather burden when predators come looking for a meal. By handicapping themselves with absurd trivialities (and still surviving) that can’t be copied, male peacocks are able to reliably signal that they are high-quality mates.

That also translates to luxury goods. There are millions of cheap knockoffs of Prada bags and Burberry scarves. Because they are easy to copy, they aren’t reliable indicators of wealth. A Rolls Royce, however, is basically impossible to copy even remotely correctly. As such, they are very reliable signals of wealth.

An odd result of this evolutionary pressure on humans is the economic theory of Veblen goods. Veblen goods are commodities whose perceived value rises with their cost. In this case, the same Rolls Royce is perceived as more valuable if it costs $300,000 rather than $200,000. Thorstein Veblen, the economist whom the effect is named after, was the first to come up with the concept of conspicuous consumption within an economic framework. And conspicuous consumption is really no different than any other animal behavior geared towards showing off resources.

Think of it this way: Evolutionarily, there’s no point to being rich unless you are able to demonstrate that fact to potential mates. Yet, because fakers exist, you don’t want to waste your money on something that can be copied, because that’s not a reliable indicator of your wealth. Instead, you want things that can’t be replicated, and the more expensive and thus exclusive those things are perceived to be, the better.

So when someone is dropping $36,000 on a pound of panda crap to drink, it’s not because it’s tasty (which it may or may not be). It’s because panda crap, being so expensive, so ostentatious and so seemingly rare, is a fabulously reliable indicator of wealth to potential mates. To be sure: People are driven to drinking multi-thousand dollar cups of panda poop tea because it will help get them laid.

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