Christopher Ryan - Sex at Dawn

An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Minilivestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in

Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company’s logo: “Mmm. That’s good Land Shrimp!” Three guesses what Land Shrimp is.

Witchetty grub tastes like nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella, wrapped in a phyllo dough pastry ... This is capital-D Delicious.

PETER MENZEL AND FAITH D‘ALUISIO,

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

Early British travelers to Australia reported that the Aborigines they met lived miserably and suffered from chronic famine. But the native people, like most hunter-gatherers, were uninterested in farming. The same Europeans reporting the widespread starvation in their letters and journals were perplexed that the natives didn’t seem emaciated. In fact, they struck the visitors as being rather fat and lazy. Yet, the Europeans were convinced the Aborigines were starving to death. Why? Because they saw the native people resorting to last resorts—eating insects, Witchetty grubs, and rats, critters that surely nobody would eat who wasn’t starving. That this diet was nutritious, plentiful, and could taste like “nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella” never occurred to the British, who were no doubt homesick for haggis and clotted cream.

Our point? That something feels natural or unnatural doesn’t mean it is. Every one of the examples above, including saliva beer, is savored somewhere—by folks who would be disgusted by much of what you eat regularly. Especially when we’re talking about intimate, personal, biological experiences like eating or having sex, we mustn’t forget that the familiar fingers of culture reach deep into our minds. We can’t feel them adjusting our dials and flicking our switches, but every culture leads its members to believe some things are naturally right and others naturally wrong. These beliefs may feel right, but it’s a feeling we trust at our own peril.

Like those early Europeans, each of us is constrained by our own sense of what is normal and natural. We’re all members of one tribe or another—bonded by culture, family, religion, class, education, employment, team affiliation, or any number of other criteria. An essential first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what mythologist Joseph Campbell called detribalization. We have to recognize the

various tribes we belong to and begin extricating ourselves from the unexamined assumptions each of them mistakes for the truth.

Authorities assure us that we are jealous of our mates because such feelings are only natural. Experts opine that women need commitment to feel sexual intimacy because “that’s just the way they are.” Some of the most prominent evolutionary psychologists insist that science has confirmed that we are, at base, a jealous, possessive, murderous, and deceitful species just barely saved by our precarious capacity to rise above our dark essence and submit to civilized propriety. To be sure, we humans have hankerings and aversions deeper than cultural influence, at the core of our animal being. We don’t argue that humans are born “blank slates,” awaiting operating instructions. But how something “feels” is far from a reliable guide to distinguishing biological truth from cultural influence.

Go looking for a book about human nature and you’ll be confronted by Demonic Males, Mean Genes, Sick Societies, War Before Civilization, Constant Battles, The Dark Side of Man, and The Murderer Next Door. You’ll be lucky to escape alive! But do these blood-splattered volumes offer a realistic depiction of scientific truth, or a projection of contemporary assumptions and fears onto the distant past?

In the following chapters, we reconsider these and other aspects of social behavior, rearranging them to form a different view of our past. We believe our model goes much farther toward explaining how we got to where we are today and most importantly, why many, if not most, sexually dysfunctional marriages are nobody’s fault. We’ll show why a great deal of the information we receive about human sexuality—particularly that received from some evolutionary psychologists—is mistaken, based upon unfounded, outdated assumptions going back to Darwin and beyond. Too many scientists are hard at work trying to complete the wrong puzzle, struggling to force their findings into preconceived, culturally approved notions of what they think human sexuality should be rather than letting the pieces of information fall where they may.

Our model might strike you as absurd, salacious, insulting, scandalous, fascinating, depressing, illuminating, or obvious. But whether or not you are comfortable with what we present here, we hope you’ll keep reading. We are not advocating any particular response to the information we’ve put together. Frankly, we’re not sure what to do with it ourselves.

Undoubtedly, some readers will react emotionally to our “scandalous” model of human sexuality. Our interpretation of the data will be dismissed and derided by stalwart souls defending the ramparts of the standard narrative. They’ll be shouting, “Remember the Alamo!” But our advice, as we lead you through this story of unwarranted assumptions, desperate conjecture, and mistaken conclusions, is to forget the Alamo, but always remember the Yucatan.

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man

A fig leaf can hide many things, but a human erection isn’t one of them. The standard narrative of the origins and nature of human sexuality claims to explain the development of a deceitful, reluctant sort of sexual monogamy. According to this oft-told tale, heterosexual men and women are pawns in a proxy war directed by our opposed genetic agendas. The whole catastrophe, we’re told, results from the basic

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biological designs of males and females. Men strain to spread their cheap and plentiful seed far and wide (while still trying to control one or a few females in order to increase their paternity certainty). Meanwhile, women are guarding their limited supply of metabolically expensive eggs from unworthy suitors. But once they’ve roped in a provider-husband, they’re quick to hike up their skirts (when ovulating) for quick-and-dirty clandestine mating opportunities with square-jawed men of obvious genetic superiority. It’s not a pretty picture.

Biologist Joan Roughgarden points out that it’s an image little changed from that described by Darwin 150 years ago. “The Darwinian narrative of sex roles is not some quaint anachronism,” she writes. “Restated in today’s biological jargon, the narrative is considered proven scientific fact.... Sexual selection’s view of nature emphasizes conflict, deceit, and dirty gene pools.” 1

No less an authority than The Advice Goddess herself (syndicated columnist Amy Alkon) voices the popularized expression of this oft-told tale: “There are a lot of really bad places to be a single mother, but probably one of the worst ever was 1.8 million years ago on the savannah. The ancestral women who successfully passed their genes on to us were those who were choosy about who they went under a bush with, weeding out the dads from the cads. Men had a different genetic imperative—to avoid bringing home the bison for kids who weren’t theirs—and evolved to regard girls who give it up too easily as too high risk for anything beyond a roll on the rock pile.” 2Note how so much fits into this tidy package: the vulnerabilities of motherhood, separating dads from cads, paternal investment, jealousy, and the sexual double standard. But as they say at the airport, beware of tidy packages you didn’t pack yourself.