Christopher Ryan - Sex at Dawn

Like all myths, this one seeks to define who and what we are and thus what we can expect and demand from one another. For centuries, religious authorities disseminated this defining narrative, warning of chatty serpents, deceitful women, forbidden knowledge, and eternal agony. But more recently, it’s been marketed to secular society as hard science.

Examples abound. Writing in the prestigious journal Science, anthropologist Owen Lovejoy suggested, “The nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene [1.8 million years ago].” 14Well-known anthropologist Helen Fisher concurs, writing, “Is monogamy natural?” She gives a one-word answer: “Yes.” She then continues, “Among human beings ... monogamy is the rule.” 15

Many different elements of human prehistory seem to nest neatly into each other in the standard narrative of human sexual evolution. But remember, that Indian seemed to answer Cortes’s question, and it seemed indisputable to Pope Urban

VIII and just about everyone else that the Earth remained solidly at the center of the solar system. With a focus on the presumed nutritional benefits of pair-bonding, zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley demonstrates the seduction in this apparent unity: “Big brains needed meat . [and] food sharing allowed a meaty diet (because it freed men to risk failure in pursuit of game) . [and] food sharing demanded big brains (without detailed calculating memories, you could easily be cheated by a free-loader)” So far, so good. But now Ridley inserts the sexual steps in his dance: “The sexual division of labor promoted monogamy (a pair bond now being an economic unit); monogamy led to neotenous sexual selection (by putting a premium on youthfulness in mates).” It’s a waltz, with one assumption spinning into the next, circling round and round in “a spiral of comforting justification, proving how we came to be as we are.” 16

Note how each element anticipates the next, all coming together in a tidy constellation that seems to explain human sexual evolution.

The distant stars fixed in the standard constellation include:

• what motivated prehuman males to “invest” in a particular female and her children;

• male sexual jealousy and the double standard concerning male versus female sexual autonomy;

• the oft-repeated “fact” that the timing of women’s ovulation is “hidden”;

• the inexplicably compelling breasts of the human female;

• her notorious deceptiveness and treachery, source of many country and blues classics;

• and of course, the human male’s renowned eagerness to screw anything with legs—an equally rich source of musical material.

This is what we’re up against. It’s a song that is powerful, concise, self-reinforcing, and playing on the radio all day and all night ... but still wrong, baby, oh so wrong.

The standard narrative is about as scientifically valid as the story of Adam and Eve. In many ways, in fact, it is a scientific retelling of the Fall into original sin as depicted in Genesis —complete with sexual deceit, prohibited knowledge, and guilt. It hides the truth of human sexuality behind a fig leaf of anachronistic Victorian discretion repackaged as science. But actual—as opposed to mythical—science has a way of peeking out from behind the fig leaf.

Charles Darwin proposed two basic mechanisms through which evolutionary change occurs. The first, and better known, is natural selection. Economic philosopher Herbert Spencer later coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe this mechanism, though most biologists still prefer “natural selection.” It’s important to understand that evolution is not a process of improvement. Natural selection simply asserts that species change as they adapt to ever-changing

environments. One ofthe chronic mistakes made by would-be social Darwinists is to assume that evolution is a process by which human beings or societies become better. 17 It is not.

Those organisms best able to survive in a challenging, shifting environment live to reproduce. As survivors, their genetic code likely contains information advantageous to their offspring in that particular environment. But the environment can change at any moment, thus neutralizing the advantage.

Charles Darwin was far from the first to propose that some sort of evolution was taking place in the natural world. Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had noted the process of differentiation evident in both plants and animals. The big question was how it happened: What was the mechanism by which species differentiated from each other? Darwin was particularly struck by the subtle differences in the finches he’d seen on various islands in the Galapagos. This insight suggested that environment was crucial to the process, but until later, he had no way to explain how the environment shapes organisms over generations.

Evolutionary theory has been applied to the body pretty much since Darwin published On the Origin of Species. He’d been sitting on his theory for decades, fearing the controversy sure to follow its publication. If you want to know why human beings have ears on the sides of their heads and eyes up front, evolutionary theory can tell you, just as it can tell you why birds have their eyes on the sides oftheir heads and no visible ears at all. Evolutionary theory, in other words, offers explanations of how bodies came to be as they are.

In 1975, E. O. Wilson made a radical proposal. In a short, explosive book called Sociobiology, Wilson argued that evolutionary theory could be, indeed must be, applied to behavior—not just bodies. Later, to avoid rapidly accumulating negative connotations—some associated with eugenics (founded by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton)—the approach was renamed “evolutionary psychology” (EP). Wilson proposed to bring evolutionary theory to bear on a few “central questions . of unspeakable importance: How does the mind work, and beyond that why does it work in such a way and not another, and from these two considerations together, what is man’s ultimate nature?” He argued that evolutionary theory is “the essential first hypothesis for any serious consideration of the human condition,” and that “without it the humanities and social sciences are the limited descriptors of surface phenomena, like astronomy without physics, biology without chemistry, and mathematics without algebra.” 18

Beginning with Sociobiology, and On Human Nature, a follow-up volume Wilson published three years later, evolutionary theorists began to shift their focus from eyes, ears, feathers, and fur to less tangible, far more contentious issues such as love, jealousy, mate choice, war, murder, rape, and altruism. Juicy subject matter lifted from epics and soap operas became fodder for study and debate in respectable American universities. Evolutionary psychology was born.

It was a difficult birth. Many resented the implication that our thoughts and feelings are as hard-wired in our genetic code as the shape of our heads or the length of our fingers—and thus presumably as inescapable and unchangeable. Research in EP quickly became focused on differences between men and women, shaped by their supposedly conflicting reproductive agendas. Critics heard overtones of racial determinism and the smug sexism that had justified centuries of conquest, slavery, and discrimination.

Although Wilson never argued that genetic inheritance alone creates psychological phenomena, merely that evolved tendencies influence cognition and behavior, his moderate insights were quickly obscured by the immoderate disputes they sparked. Many social scientists at the time believed humans to be nearly completeiy cultural creatures, blank slates to be marked by society. 1But Wilson’s perspective was highly attractive to other academics eager to introduce a more rigorous scientific methodology into fields they considered overly subjective and distorted by liberal political views and wishful thinking. Decades later, the two sides of the debate remain largely entrenched in their extreme positions: human behavior as genetically determined versus human behavior as socially determined. As you might expect,