Wanna Be Baller? Biology's Most Stuntin' and Zahavi's Handicap Principle
Who’s the ballingest of them all?
Easy. $crooge “multiple cubic acres of money” McDuck.
You know why he’s baller?
Not ‘cause he’s rich (Flintheart Glomgold is rich), but because he swims in gold. That’s what balling is. It’s driving “two miles an hour, so everybody sees you.”1 It’s being a hermaphroditic slug alien and keeping scantily clad humanoid females around just to show you can. It’s having antlers with the span of a small car.
He's as attracted to Oola as you are to him. Probably less.
The Irish Elk – James Potter would ask us to contemplate what they say about guys with big antlers.
The concept of balling is easily summarized by urban dictionary as “to be full of money”2 but I prefer a slightly more nuanced idea – after all, we don’t call someone balling until we know just how wealthy he, she, or it, is. And that comes from conspicuous consumption. i.e. making sure everybody knows just how much you can afford to waste.
Not surprisingly, flashy grills and giant chains worn without fear in dangerous neighborhoods have been a staple of evolution since time immemorial. The biological “baller” concept is known as the “handicap principle” (a term coined by zoologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975)3.
Think about antlers. Does it make sense to have gigantic, sprawling branches coming out of your head if your job is running through the forest really fast to avoid wolves? No. No it doesn’t. But when rutting season comes ‘round and your job is showing how much better you are at running through the forest really fast to avoid wolves than that other guy…if you can do that with a gigantic, hooked, obstruction on your head, the does are going to think you are teh sexx. Same goes for peacock trains and male cardinal colors and so on…(ibid).
You’re a pretty large bird that looks a lot like a nice turkey dinner living in the Indian jungle. How much of your energy could YOU afford to devote to growing, and then dragging around and showing off, something that makes it this much easier for leopards to catch you?
Ludacris feat. DJ Toomp, 2004, “Two Miles An Hour” on “The Red Light District.”
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=balling
Zahavi A (1975) Mate selection – a selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53:205-214