— Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
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Preface
Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries. There are scores of people who could have written each chapter of my book better than I. My consolation is that few could have written all the chapters. My role has been to connect the patches of others’ research together into a quilt. But I remain deeply indebted and grateful to all those whose minds I raided.
The Red Queen
Chapter One: Human Nature
There is, it is safe to say, such a thing as the typical human stomach and it is different from a non-human stomach. It is the assumption of this book that there is also, in the same way, a typical human nature.
there are myriad human particulars as well as human universals.
Everything can be inherited except sterility.
Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so. We stick to the same monotonously human pattern of organizing our affairs. If we were more adventurous, there would be societies without love, without ambition, without sexual desire, without marriage, without art, without grammar, without music, without smiles–and with as many unimaginable novelties as are in that list. There would be societies in which women killed each other more often than men, in which old people were considered more beautiful than twenty-year-olds, in which wealth did not purchase power over others, in which people did not discriminate in favour of their own friends and against strangers, in which parents did not love their own children.
If man has evolved the ability to override his evolutionary imperatives, then there must have been an advantage to his genes in doing so. Therefore, even the emancipation from evolution that we so fondly imagine we have achieved must itself have evolved because it suited the replication of genes.
How can there be a universal, species-specific human nature when every human being is unique? The solution to this paradox lies in the process known as sex. For it is sex that mixes together the genes of two people and discards half of the mixture, so ensuring that no child is exactly like either of its parents.
Poker cards
All Britons are descended from the same set of people, a mere thirty generations ago. No wonder there is a certain uniformity about the human (and every other sexual) species. Sex imposes it by its perpetual insistence on the sharing of genes.
According to one estimate, only seven per cent of the genetic differences between two individuals can be attributed to the fact that they are of different race; eighty-five per cent of the genetic differences are attributable to mere individual variation (the rest is tribal or national). In the words of one pair of scientists: ‘What this means is that the average genetic difference between one Peruvian farmer and his neighbor, or one Swiss villager and his neighbor, is 12 times greater than the difference between the “average genotype” of the Swiss population and the “average genotype” of the Peruvian population.’
One day some scientist will know exactly how the brain of a young man becomes obsessed with the image of a particular young woman, molecule by molecule. But the why question is to me more interesting, because the answer gets to the heart of how human nature came to be what it is.
Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do.
In physics, there is no great difference between a why question and a how question.
Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.
Chapter Two: The Enigma
Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species.
Throughout the world of animals, individuals are fighting individuals, whether of the same species or of another.
But this argument confuses consequence with cause. Its advantages are far too remote; they will appear after a few generations, by which time any asexual competitor will long ago have outnumbered its sexual rivals. Besides, if sex is good at throwing together good combinations of genes it will be even better at breaking them up.
Thanks to sex, the moment the fabled synergy is found, it is lost again. Sex disobeys that great injunction: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Sex increases randomness. 34
Chapter Three: The Power Of Parasites
Biologists have persistently overestimated the importance of physical causes of premature death rather than biological ones.
The things that kill animals or prevent them reproducing are only rarely physical factors. Far more often they are other creatures–parasites, predators and competitors.
Parasites provide exactly the incentive to change genes every generation that sex seems to demand. The success of the genes that defended you so well in the last generation may be the best of reasons to abandon these same gene combinations in the next.
It is that an individual, by having sex, can produce offspring more likely to survive than an individual that produces clones of itself. The advantage of sex can appear in a single generation.
Some very powerful force is at work ensuring that most versions of each gene survive, and that no version changes very much. 38 That force is almost certainly disease. As soon as a lock gene becomes rare, the parasite key gene that fits it becomes rare, so that lock gains an advantage. In a case where rarity is at a premium, the advantage is always swinging from one gene to another and no gene is ever allowed to become extinct.
Bilharzia parasites, for example, grab password molecules from host cells and stick them all over their bodies to camouflage themselves from passing white cells.
‘The essence of sex in our theory,’ wrote Hamilton, ‘is that it stores genes that are currently bad but have promise for reuse. It continually tries them in combination, waiting for the time when the focus of disadvantage has moved elsewhere.’ There is no permanent ideal of disease resistance, merely the shifting sands of impermanent obsolescence.
Disease might almost put a sort of limit on longevity: there is little point in living much longer than it takes your parasites to adapt to you.
Women add sperm to their eggs because if they did not, the resulting babies would be identically vulnerable to the first parasite that picked their genetic locks.
Chapter Four: Genetic Mutiny And Gender
The line between a rogue gene and an infectious virus is a blurred one.
Two genders have been invented, killer which provides the organelles, and victim which does not. Laurence Hurst of Oxford uses these arguments to predict that two genders are a consequence of sex-by-fusion. That is, where sex consists of the fusing of two cells, as in Chlamydomonas and most animals and plants, you find two genders. Where it consists of conjugation–the formation of a pipe between the two cells and the transfer of a nucleus of genes down the pipe–and there is no fusion of cells, then there is no conflict and no need for killer and victim genders.
Gender, then, was invented as a way to resolve the conflict between the cytoplasmic genes of the two parents.
They are competing with pure males and pure females. Most of the sperm on offer comes complete with female-killer genes, and most of the eggs available to fertilize come complete with male-killer genes, so their offspring are constantly forced to specialize. The genders are separated.
A large female fish can lay only a few more eggs than a small one, but a large male fish, by fighting for and winning a harem of females, can have a great many more offspring than a small male. Conversely, a small male does worse than a small female because he fails to win a mate at all. Therefore, among polygamists the following strategy often appears: if small, be female; if large be male.
It is a curious statistical fact that between them all forty-two presidents of the United States have had ninety sons and only sixty-one daughters.
If males are polygamous, a successful son can give you far more grandchildren than a successful daughter, and an unsuccessful son will do far worse than an unsuccessful daughter because he will fail to win any mates at all. A son is a high-risk-high-reward reproductive option compared to a daughter. A mother in good condition gives her offspring a good start in life, increasing the chances of her sons winning harems as they mature. A mother in poor condition is likely to produce a feeble son who will fail to mate at all, whereas her daughters can join harems and reproduce even when not in top condition.
Among the two hundred and seventy from mothers who had been fed sardines, the sex ratio was nearly 1.4 to 1. Well-fed opossums are significantly more likely to have sons than poorly fed ones.
Women generally leave home when they marry.
Chapter Five: The Peacock’S Tale
Females choose; their choosiness is inherited; they prefer exaggerated ornaments; exaggerated ornaments are a burden to males. That much is now uncontroversial.
Sir Ronald Fisher had suggested then that females need no better reason for preferring long tails than that other females also prefer long tails. At first, such logic sounds suspiciously circular, but that is its beauty.
Surely, if sexually selected ornaments told a tale of their owner’s vigour, they would not be so utterly random?
Such copying is just what you would expect if Fisher were right, because it is fashion-following for its own sake. It hardly matters whether the male chosen is the ‘best’ male; what counts is that he is the most fashionable, as his sons will be.
Thus, the most disease-resistant male might often turn out to be the descendant of the least resistant one in a previous generation. The lek paradox is thus solved at a stroke. By choosing the healthiest male in each generation, females will be picking a different set of genes each time and never run out of genetic variety to select from.
It is almost impossible to see how females could avoid the Fisher effect as the male’s ornament gets more exaggerated, generation by generation: the female who is most discriminating picks the most sexy male and so has the most sexy sons, the one who has the most sexy sons has the most granddaughters, so females get more and more discriminating, more and more difficult to seduce or hypnotize.
Chapter Six: Polygamy And The Nature Of Men
The principles I have been trying to establish are better illustrated by aphids, dandelions, slime moulds, fruit flies, peacocks and elephant seals than they are by one peculiar ape. But the peculiar ape is not immune to those principles.
Human bodies are products of natural selection, but human minds and human behaviour are products of ‘culture’, and human culture does not reflect human nature, but the reverse. This restricts social scientists to investigating only differences between cultures and between individuals–and to exaggerating them. Yet to me the most interesting things about human beings are the things they share, not the things that differ between cultures: things like grammatical language, hierarchy, romantic love, sexual jealousy, long-term bonds between the genders (‘ marriage’, in a sense). These are trainable instincts peculiar to our species and are just as surely the products of evolution as eyes and thumbs are.
As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery.
It is that the gender that invests the most in creating and rearing each offspring, and so forgoes most opportunities for creating and rearing other offspring, is the gender that has the least to gain from each extra mating.
Every time he seduces a fresh female he wins the jackpot of her investment in his sons and daughters. Every time she seduces a fresh peacock she wins a little extra sperm which she probably does not need. No wonder he is keen on quantity of mates, she on quality.
Donald Symons of the University of California at Santa Barbara has argued that the reason that male homosexuals on average have more sexual partners than male heterosexuals, and many more than female homosexuals, is that male homosexuals are acting out male tendencies or instincts unfettered by those of women.
I am suggesting that heterosexual men would be as likely as homosexual men to have sex most often with strangers, to participate in anonymous orgies in public baths, and to stop off in public restrooms for five minutes of fellatio on the way home from work if women were interested in these activities. 12
But Symons’s point is that the desire for monogamous intimacy with a life companion and the desire for casual sex with strangers are not mutually incompatible instincts.
Symons is commenting not on homosexual men, but on men in general. As he says, homosexual men behave like men, only more so; homosexual women behave like women, only more so. 13
He became monogamous because the advantage that a junior father could supply in feeding the family outweighed the disadvantage in not being mated to the chief. Or he became polygamous because of the discrepancies in wealth between males.
As a Mormon lawyer put it recently, there are ‘compelling social reasons’ that make polygamy ‘attractive to the modern career woman’. 20 But think of the effect on men. If many women chose to be second wives of rich men, rather than first wives of poor men, there would a shortage of unmarried women and many men would be forced to remain unhappily celibate. Far from being laws to protect women, anti-polygamy statutes may really do more to protect men.
Let us erect the four commandments of mating system theory. First, if females do better by choosing monogamous and faithful males, monogamy will result–unless, second, men can coerce them. Third, if females do no worse by choosing already-mated males, polygamy will result–unless, fourth, already-mated females can prevent their males mating again, in which case monogamy will result. The surprising conclusion of the game theory is therefore that males, despite their active role in seduction, may be largely passive spectators at their marital fate.
If the local hunter-gathering economy favoured it, men were capable of being polygamous and women were capable of joining harems over the protests of the preceding co-wives. If not, then men were capable of being good fathers and women jealous monopolizers. Mankind, in other words, has many potential mating systems, one for each circumstance. 28 This is supported by the fact that larger, more intelligent and more social animals are generally more flexible in their mating systems than smaller, stupider or more solitary ones. Chimpanzees go from small feeding bands to big groups depending on the nature of the food supply. Turkeys do the same. Coyotes hunt in packs when their food is deer, but hunt alone when their food is mice. These food-induced social patterns themselves induce slightly different mating patterns.
However, if reproductive success was one of the perks of despotic power, one peculiar feature stands out. All six of the early emperors were monogamously married.
Chapter Seven: Monogamy And The Nature Of Women
Women are and always have been far less interested in polygamy than men. But that does not mean they are not sexual opportunists. The eager-male/ coy-female theory has a great deal of difficulty answering a simple question. Why are women ever unfaithful?
Female promiscuity in monkeys and apes can be explained by the need to share paternity among many males to prevent infanticide.
We have somehow reinvented monogamy and paternal care without losing the habit of living in large multi-male groups.
A female human being does not have to share her sexual favours with many males to prevent infanticide, but she may have a good reason to share them with one well-chosen male apart from her husband. This is because her husband is, almost by definition, usually not the best male there is–else how would he have ended up married to her? His value is that he is monogamous and will therefore not divide his child-rearing effort among several families. But why accept his genes? Why not have his parental care and some other male’s genes?
The first thing they proved is that the size of a bird’s testicles varies according to the bird’s mating system. They are largest in polyandrous birds, where several males are fertilizing one female, and it is not hard to see why. The husband who ejaculates the most sperm will presumably fertilize the most eggs.
But the testicles of lekking birds like sage grouse, where each male may have to inseminate fifty females in a few weeks, are unusually small. This puzzle is resolved by the fact that a female sage grouse will mate only once or twice and usually only with one male:
The monogamous species lie in between. Some have fairly small testicles, implying little sperm competition; others have huge testicles, as big as those of polyandrous birds. Birkhead and Møller noticed that the ones with large testicles were mostly birds that lived in colonies: sea birds, swallows, bee-eaters, herons, sparrows. Such colonies give females ample opportunity for adultery with the male from the nest next door, an opportunity that is not passed up. 19 Bill Hamilton believes that adultery may explain why in so many ‘monogamous’ birds the male is more gaudy than the female. The traditional explanation, suggested by Darwin, is that the gaudiest males or the best songsters get the first females to arrive and an early nest is a successful nest. That is certainly true, but it does not explain why song continues long after a male has found a wife in many species. Hamilton’s suggestion is that the gaudy male is not, like a peacock, trying to get more wives, but to get more lovers. He is advertising his availability for an ‘affair’.
marriage. A female swallow needs a husband who will help look after her young, but by the time she arrives at the breeding site she might find all the best husbands taken. Her best tactic is therefore to mate with a mediocre husband or a husband with a good nest site and have an affair with a genetically superior neighbour.
They found that in faithful women about fifty-five per cent of the orgasms were of the high-retention (i.e., most fertile) type. In unfaithful women, only forty per cent of the copulations with the partner were of this kind, but seventy per cent of the copulations with the lover were of this fertile type. Moreover, whether deliberately or not, the unfaithful women were having sex with their lovers at times of the month when they were most fertile. These two effects combined meant that an unfaithful woman in their sample could have sex twice as often with her husband as with her lover, but was still slightly more likely to conceive a child by the lover than the husband.
In the African pygmies Wrangham studied, gossip was rife and a husband’s best chance of deterring his wife’s affairs was to let her know that he kept abreast of the gossip. Wrangham goes on to observe that this is impossible without language. So he speculates that the sexual division of labour, the institution of child-rearing marriages and the invention of language–three of the most fundamental human characteristics that we share with no other ape–all depended on each other.
Women’s genes seem to have gone to inordinate lengths to conceal the moment of ovulation. With concealed ovulation came continual sexual interest.
They are ‘socially recognised marriage, the concept of adultery as a property violation, the valuation of female chastity, the equation of “protection” of women with protection from sexual contact and the special potency of infidelity as a provocation to violence’. In short, in every age and in every place, men behave as if they owned their wives’ vaginas. 41 Wilson and Daly reflect on the fact that love is an admired emotion, whereas jealousy is a despised one, when they are plainly two sides of the same coin–as anybody who has been in love can testify–for they are both part of a sexual proprietary claim. As many a modern couple knows, the absence of jealousy, far from calming a relationship, is itself a cause of insecurity: if he or she is not jealous when I pay attention to another man or woman, then he or she no longer cares whether our relationship survives. Psychologists have found that couples who lack moments of jealousy are less likely to stay together than jealous ones.
Open relationships
There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy affairs with other men’s wives who will bear bastards. It began with a man who shared a piece of prized fish or honey with an attractive neighbour’s wife in exchange for a brief affair and continues with a pop star ushering a model into his Mercedes. From fish to Mercedes, the history is unbroken: via skins and beads, ploughs and cattle, swords and castles. Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity. Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man. It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat.
Chapter Eight: Sexing The Mind
The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory.
Sex-blind education may be unfair education. In other words, to assume the sexes are mentally identical in the face of evidence that they are not is just as unfair as to assume sexual difference in the face of evidence that they are the same.
Of the many mental features that are claimed to be different between the sexes, four stand out as repeatable, real and persistent in all psychological tests. First, girls are better at verbal tasks. Second, boys are better at mathematical tasks. Third, boys are more aggressive. Fourth, boys are better at some visuo-spatial tasks and girls at others. Put crudely, men are better at reading a map and women are better judges of character and mood–on average. 5 (And, intriguingly, gay men are more like women than heterosexual men, in some of these respects.)
It is impossible to deny that even a highly conditioned trait can be without some basis in biology–or vice versa. Nurture always reinforces nature; it rarely fights it.
We give boys tractors and girls dolls. We are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them.
It is getting gradually more implausible to maintain that in the most egalitarian western societies women are prevented by social prejudice from becoming garage mechanics. Women rarely want to become garage mechanics.
You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally suited to all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women they would be done differently.
I have argued that men and women are different and that some of these differences stem from an evolutionary past in which men hunted and women gathered. So I am dangerously close to arguing that a woman’s place is in the home, while her husband works as breadwinner. Yet that conclusion does not at all follow from the logic presented here. The practice of going out to work in an office or a factory is foreign and novel to the psychology of a savannah-dwelling ape. It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman. If, in the Pleistocene, men went off from the home base on long hunts, while women went a shorter distance to gather plants, then maybe men are mentally better suited to long commutes. But neither is evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day and talk into the telephone, or sit at a factory bench all day tightening screws. The fact that ‘work’ became a male thing and ‘home’ a female one is an accident of history: the domestication of cattle and the invention of the plough made food gathering a task that benefited from male muscle power. In societies where the land is tilled by hand, women do most of the work. The industrial revolution reinforced the trend. But the postindustrial revolution–the recent growth of service industries–is reversing it again. Women are going ‘out to work’ again as they did when they sought tubers and berries in the Pleistocene.
However, it is clear that the cause of homosexuality lies in some unusual balance of hormonal influence in the womb, but not later on, a fact that further supports the idea that the mentality of sexual preference is affected by prenatal sex hormones. This is not incompatible with the growing evidence that homosexuality is genetically determined. The ‘gay gene’ that I will discuss in the next chapter is widely expected to turn out to be a series of genes that affect the sensitivity of certain tissues to testosterone.
A modern woman is exposed to pressure from men to be sexually uninihibited, but she is also exposed to the same pressure from other women. Likewise, men are under constant pressure to be more ‘responsible’, sensitive and faithful–from other men as well as from women. Perhaps more out of envy than morality, men are just as censorious of philanderers as women are; often more so. If men are sexual predators it is despite centuries of social pressure not to be. In the words of one psychologist, ‘Our repressed impulses are every bit as human as the forces that repress them.’
Another way to look at it is to think of what a woman can most profitably seek in a husband that will increase the number and health of her children. The answer is not more sperm, but more money, or more cattle, or more tribal allies, or whatever resource counts. A man, by contrast, is seeking a mate who will use his sperm and his money to produce babies. Consequently he has always had an enormous incentive to seek youth and health in his mates. Those men who preferred to marry forty-year-old women rather than twenty-year-olds stood a small chance of begetting any children at all, let alone more than one or two. They also stood a large chance of inheriting a bunch of stepchildren from a previous marriage. They left fewer descendants than the men who always sought out the youngest, post-pubertal females on offer. We would expect, therefore, that while women pay attention to cues to wealth and power, men will pay attention to cues to health and youth.
‘A propensity to be aroused merely by the sight of males would promote random matings from which a female would have nothing to gain reproductively, and a great deal to lose.’
Sexual acts play a small part in these novels; the bulk of each book is about love, commitment, domesticity, nurturing and the formation of relationships. There is little promiscuity or sexual variety and what sex there is is described mainly through the heroine’s emotional reaction to what is done to her–particularly the tactile things–and not to any detailed description of the man’s body. His character is often discussed in detail, but not his body.
The degree to which an animal of either sex is choosy correlates exactly with the degree to which it invests in parental care.
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put the challenge to cultural interpretations of this universal pattern even more baldly: The assertion that ‘culture’ explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons’ virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other. 45
If we choose to redress the sexual differences between the minds of men and women through policy, we are going against nature, but no more than when we outlaw murder.
Chapter Nine: The Uses Of Beauty
If the gay gene is in the mitochondria, then a conspiracy theory springs to the devious minds of Hurst and Haig. Perhaps the gay gene is like those ‘male killer’ genes found in many insects. It effectively sterilizes males, causing the diversion of inherited wealth to female relatives. That would (until recently at least) have enhanced the breeding success of the descendants of those female relatives, which would have caused the gay gene to spread.
People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. Beauty is not arbitrary.
And yet this flexibility stays within limits.
If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, grey hair, hairy backs and Bardolph-like noses have never been ‘in fashion’?
In one study, the physical attractiveness of a woman was a far better predictor of the occupational status of the man she married than was her own socio-economic status, intelligence or education–a pretty surprising fact, when you consider how much people marry within their professions, classes and education brackets.
To avoid rearing stepchildren unwittingly, men must have developed an aversion to even a slight thickening of the waist, lest it indicated the early stages of pregnancy.
The evidence is beginning to accumulate that humanity is a highly sexually selected species and that this explains the great variations between races in hairiness, nose length, hair length, hair curliness, beards, eye colour–variations that plainly have little to do with climate or any other physical factor.
This is obviously because the human habits of lifelong marriage and long, slow periods of child-rearing are also unique. If a man is to devote his life to a wife, he must know that she has a long potential reproductive life ahead of her. If he were to form occasional short-lived pair bonds throughout his life it would not matter how young his mates were. We are, in other words, descended from men who chose young women as mates and so left more sons and daughters in the world than other men.
It is possible that facial features are a clue to genetic or nurtured quality, or to character and personality. Facial symmetry may well prove to be a clue to good genes or good health during development. 24 ‘The face is the most information-dense part of the body,’ as Don Symons put it to me one day.
The other noticeable feature of facial beauty is that the average face is more beautiful than any extreme.
Indeed, the faces of models are eminently forgettable. Despite seeing them on the covers of magazines every day, we learn to recognize few individuals. The faces of politicians, not known for their beauty, are much more memorable.
All that the Fisher effect requires is for men to show a tendency to prefer the average face and runaway selection will take over: any man who deviates from the average preference has fewer or poorer grandchildren because his daughters are considered less beautiful than the average.
Men consistently place physical features above personality and status when considering women; women do not when considering men. 28 The single exception is height. Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men.
Surveys reveal what everybody knows: men are attracted by women in revealing, tight or skimpy clothing; women are less attracted by such clothing on men.
For beauty cannot be commonplace in a monogamous species like man; it must stand out. Men are discriminating because they will get the chance to marry only one, or perhaps two, women, so they are always interested in the best they can get, never in the ordinary. In a crowd of women all wearing black, the single one in red would surely catch the eye of a man, whatever her figure or face was like.
Fashion is about status and yet the sex that is obsessed with fashion is trying to impress the sex that cares least about status.
Modern society is monogamous. So most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already. What happens to Mr and Ms Average? They do not remain celibate; they settle for something second best.
People end up married to their equals in attractiveness: the home-coming queen marries the football hero; the nerd marries the girl in glasses; the man with mediocre prospects marries the woman with mediocre looks. So pervasive is this habit that exceptions stand out a mile: ‘What on earth can she see in him?’
The game shows with uncomfortable realism how we measure our own relative desirability from others’ reactions to us. Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher. But it is worth getting off the Red Queen’s treadmill before you drop.
Chapter Ten: The Intellectual Chess Game
There was once a time when it was easy to define what made mankind different from (other) animals. Mankind had learning; animals had instincts. Mankind used tools and had consciousness, culture and self-awareness; animals did not. Gradually these differences have been blurred, or shown to be differences in degree rather than in kind. Snails learn. Finches use tools. Dolphins use language. Dogs are conscious. Orang-utans recognize themselves in mirrors. Japanese macaques pass on cultural tricks. Elephants mourn their dead.
But she did not learn that she needed a vocabulary store. She was born with it and with an acute curiosity to learn the names of things.
The psychologist William James argued a century ago that man had both more learning capacity and more instincts, rather than more learning and fewer instincts.
The point is that nothing could be more ‘instinctive’ than the predisposition to learn a language. It is virtually unteachable. It is hard-wired. It is not learnt. It is–horrid thought–genetically determined. And yet nothing could be more plastic than the vocabulary and syntax to which that predisposition applies itself. The ability to learn a language, like almost all the other human brain functions, is an instinct for learning.
The principal reason for the hostility to sociobiology was that it seemed to justify prejudice. Yet this was simply a confusion. Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of-ism have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed, because one believes in universals, the other in racial or class particulars.
It is not obvious to somebody with an evolutionary perspective quite why we must consider learning so valuable. If learning really did replace instincts rather than enhance and train them, then we would spend half our lives re-learning things that monkeys know automatically, like the fact that unfaithful mates can cuckold you.
Generation after generation of chipping a tool off a block of stone, or knowing where to look for tubers, calls for the same level of skill each time. With experience each gets easier. It is rather like learning to ride a bicycle. Once you know how to do it, it comes naturally. Indeed, it becomes ‘unconscious’, as if conscious effort were simply not needed every time.
It was logic like this that led Alexander to propose that the key feature of the human environment that rewarded intelligence was the presence of other human beings. Generation after generation, if your lineage is getting more intelligent, so is theirs. However fast you run, you stay in the same place relative to them.
Defining intelligence as the ability to ‘modify behaviour on the basis of valid inference from evidence’, Humphrey argued that the use of intelligence for practical invention was an easily demolished straw man. ‘Paradoxically, subsistence technology, rather than requiring intelligence, may actually become a substitute for it.’ The gorilla, Humphrey noted, is intelligent as animals go. Yet it leads the most technically undemanding life imaginable. It eats the leaves that grow abundantly all around it. But the gorilla’s life is dominated by social problems. The vast majority of its intellectual effort is expended on dominating, submitting to, reading the mood of and affecting the lives of other gorillas.
A person must calculate the consequences of his own behaviour and calculate the likely behaviour of others. For that he needed at least a glimpse of his own motives in order to guess the things that were going through others’ minds in similar situations, and it was this need for self-knowledge that drove the increase in conscious awareness.
As Horace Barlow of Cambridge University has pointed out, the things of which we are conscious are mostly the mental events that concern social actions: we remain unconscious of how we see, walk, hit a tennis ball or write a word. Like a military hierarchy, consciousness operates on a ‘need to know’ policy. ‘I can think of no exception to the rule that one is conscious of what it is possible to report to others and not conscious of what it is not possible to report.’
Through a long series of experiments Cosmides and Gigerenzer proved that people are simply not treating the puzzles as pieces of logic at all. They are treating them as social contracts and looking for cheats. The human mind may not be much suited to logic at all, they conclude, but is well suited to judging the fairness of social bargains and the sincerity of social offers.
Of course that only proves that people are cleverer than chimpanzees, which is no great surprise, but it starkly poses the question: why? If Figan had had a bigger brain he might have seen what was coming. So the evolutionary pressure that Nick Humphrey identified–to get better and better at solving social puzzles, reading minds and predicting reactions–is all there in the chimpanzees and baboons, too.
The neocortex is largely a courtship device to attract and retain sexual mates: its specific evolutionary function is to stimulate and entertain other people, and to assess the stimulation attempts of others. 51
Surveys consistently place intelligence, sense of humour, creativity and interesting personality above even such things as wealth and beauty in lists of desirable characteristics in both sexes. 52 Yet these are characteristics that fail entirely to predict youth, status, fertility or parental ability, so evolutionists tend to ignore them, but there they are, right at the top of the list. Just as a peacock’s tail is no guide to his ability as a father but despotic fashion punishes those who cease to respect it, so Miller suggests that men and women dare not step off the tread mill of selecting the wittiest, most creative and articulate person available with whom to mate
Our standards for what is considered entertaining have, if Miller is right, evolved as fast as our wit.
Miller’s theory draws attention to several facts that have remained unexplained in other theories, namely the fact that dance, music, humour and sexual foreplay are all features unique to human beings. Following the Tooby–Cosmides logic we cannot argue that these are mere cultural habits foisted upon us by ‘society’. Plainly a desire to hear rhythmic tunes, or to be made to laugh by wit develops innately. Following Miller we note that they are characterized by obsessions with novelty and virtuosity and much practised by the young.
Although he may prefer variety more than females do, man is a highly sexually selective male as males go. Selectivity by one or the other sex is the prerequisite of sexual selection.
If men began selecting mates that appeared youthful, then any gene that slowed the rate of development of adult characteristics in a woman would make her more attractive at a given age than a rival.
Remember it presupposes sexual choosiness by one or other sex. But what caused that choosiness? Presumably, the cause was the fact that men took part in parental care, which gave women an incentive to confine probable paternity to one man and gave men an incentive to enter into a long-term relationship so long as they could be certain of paternity. Why then did men take part in parental care? Because by doing so they could increase the chances of rearing a child more than by trying to seek new partners. The reason for this was that children, unusual for ape infants, took a long time to mature and men could help their wives during child-rearing by hunting meat for them. Why did they take a long time to mature? Because they had big heads! The argument is circular.
I began this book by asking why all human beings were so similar and yet so different, and suggesting that the answer lay in the unique alchemy of sex. An individual is unique because of the genetic variety that sexual reproduction generates in its perpetual chess tournament with disease. An individual is a member of a homogeneous species because of the incessant mixing of that variety in the pool of fellow human beings’ genes. And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective upon the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating.
Epilogue: The Self-Domesticated Ape
The western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves, because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative and religious.