The Basic Drive That Humans Might Be Losing

After a newspaper profile of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, otherwise known as Clavicular, went viral last month, many critics focused on how divorced his nihilistic quest for beauty—he’d call it “sexual market value”—was from any pursuit of women, relationships, or even sex. I was especially flummoxed by this sad man because I had just immersed myself in The Intimate Animal, a new book by the evolutionary biologist Justin R. Garcia on intimacy’s starring role in perpetuating our species. From an evolutionary perspective, the handsome, muscle-bound Clavicular is, by his own accounting, a dud: He suspects that the testosterone-replacement therapy he takes to appear more manly has decimated his fertility, and in any case, he considers sex a waste of time, telling the reporter that it “is going to gain me nothing.”