His patchy beard.

Although I normally tame most of my above-the-neck hair and shave it into a funny little chinny beard (and I wear it ever so self-consciously – Ricky Gervais really hurt us), I posses the hirsute wherewithal to grow a full and manly, Grizzly Adams-type beard. As an aside, I do so every now and then, until my wife wears me down and I shave again.

This is the way things were meant to be. If you were a lady, in need of a mate, stuck on a frozen tundra somewhere, you’d pick the grizzly bloke with the small family of ground-sloths living in his whiskers and not the patchy-faced chap because the former would be far more useful stabbing pointy rocks into mammoths and at carrying a hairy elephant leg back to camp. Old Bare-But-Striking-Cheekbones there would be next to useless with mammoths and could only impress you by helping you pick berries and by listening to your interminable stories about last night’s episode of Sex And The Small Encampment Of Animal-Skin Huts. Who wants that in a mate?

But things have changed. Men no longer need to head off in the morning to kill various Proboscidea (and they call this progress). Now, men can attract a mate by having dark, piercing eyes, nice hair and a scraggy beard.

What hope for the rest of us. Or, more to the point, me.

But this is not a selfish rant. It’s bigger than that.

You see, the more that Johnny Depp’s beard is selected for, the more patchy will be the beards of future generations. In a few dozen generations, no more manly, grizzled, bewhiskered fuzzfaces will exist. All the faces of humanity will become less furry and, soon, there will be no beards at all. Is that what you want; a world without beards? ‘Cos that’s what’s definitely going to happen.

Natural selection can be a beautiful and vicious thing.

Don’t let Johnny Depp’s beard win. Don’t let Johnny Depp’s beard’s smooth genes depilate your descendants until humanity resembles some sort of bipedal dolphin. You can beat evolution, ladies. You can do it, but only if you eschew handsome men with inadequate facial hair and, instead, take as your mates, bristly, shaggy, hairy and homely blokes.

You know it makes sense.