The Queen - Matt Ridley

There are two difficulties with this theory, however. The first is that it says nothing about the first wife ' s views: There is little advantage to a first wife in sharing her husband and his wealth with others: Among the Mormons of Utah it is well known that first wives resent the arrival of second wives: The Mormon church officially abandoned polygamy more than a century ago, but in recent years a few fundamentalists have resumed the practice and have even begun to campaign openly for its acceptance. In Big Water, Utah, the mayor, Alex Joseph, had nine wives and twenty children in 1991. Most of the wives were career women who were happy with their lot, but they do not all see eye to eye. " The first wife does not like it when the second wife comes along, " said the third Mrs: Joseph, "and the second wife doesn 't care for the wife who came first: So you can get some fighting and bad feeling. "19

Supposing that first wives usually object to sharing their husbands, what can the husband do about it? He can force her to accept the arrangement, as presumably many despots did in times past, or he can bribe her to accept it: The legitimacy a first wife 's children usually has compared with those from a second wife is a

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bonus that must go some way toward mollifying the former. In parts of Africa it is written into the law that the first wife inherits 70 percent of the husband 's wealth.

Incidentally, the polygyny threshold leads me to ask the question In whose interest is it that polygamy be outlawed in our society? We automatically assume it is in the interest of women.

But consider; it would presumably be illegal, as it is now, for people to be forced to marry against their will, so second wives would be choosing their lot voluntarily. A woman who wants a career would surely find a menage a trois more, not less, convenient; she would have two partners to'help share the chores of child care. 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 be a shortage of unmarried women, and many men would be: forced to remain unhappily celibate. Far from being laws to protect women, antipolygamy 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 from mating again, in which case monogamy will result: The surprising conclusion of game theory is therefore that males, despite their active role in seduction, may be largely passive spectators at their marital fate.

WHY PLAY SEXUAL MONOPOLY?

But the polygamy threshold is a bird-centric view. Those who study mammals take a rather different view, for virtually all mammals lie so far above the polygamy. threshold that the four commandments are irrelevant: Male mammals can be of so little use to their mates during pregnancy that it need not concern the females whether the POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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males have already married. Humanity is a startling exception to this rule. Because children are fed by their parents for so long, they are more like baby birds than baby mammals. The female can do a great deal better by choosing an unmarried wimp of a husband who will stay around to help rear the young than by marrying a philandering chief if she has to do all the work herself. That is a point to which I shall return in the next chapter. For the moment, forget people and think about deer.

A female deer has little need of a monopolized male. He cannot produce milk or bring grass to the young. So the mating system of a deer is determined by the battle among males, which in turn is determined by how females decide to distribute themselves.

Where females live in herds (for example, elk), males can be harem masters. Where females live alone (white-tailed deer), males are territorial and mostly monogamous: Each species has its own pattern, depending on the behavior of the females: In the 1970s zoologists began to investigate these patterns to try to find out what determined a species ' mating system. They coined a new term, "socioecology," in the process. Its most successful forays were into antelope and monkey society: Two studies concluded that the mating system of an antelope or a primate could be safely predicted from its ecology. Small forest antelopes are selective feeders and, as a consequence, are solitary and monogamous: Middle-sized, open-woodland ones live in small groups and form harems. Big plains antelopes, such as the eland and African buffalo, live in great herds and are promiscuous: At first a very similar system seemed to apply to monkeys and apes. Small nocturnal bush babies are solitary and monogamous; leaf-eating indris live in harems; forest-fringe-dwelling gorillas live in small harems; tree-savanna chimps live in large promiscuous groups; grassland 22

baboons live in large harems or multimale troops.

It began to look as if such ecological determinism was on to something: The logic behind it was that female mammals set out to distribute themselves without regard to sex, living alone or in small groups or in large groups according to the dictates of food and safety. Males then set out to monopolize as many females as

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possible either by guarding groups of females directly or by defending a territory in which females lived. Solitary, widely dispersed females gave a male only one option: to monopolize a single female 's home range and be her faithful husband (for instance, the gibbon). Females that were solitary but less far apart gave him the chance to monopolize the home ranges of two or more separate females (for instance, the orangutan): Small groups of females gave him the chance to monopolize the whole group and call it his harem (for instance, the gorilla). He would have to share large groups with other males (for instance, the chimp).

That picture has been complicated by one factor: A species '

recent history can influence what mating system it ends up with: Or, to put it more simply, the same ecology can produce two different mating systems depending on the route taken to get there. On Northumbrian moors the red grouse and the black grouse live in virtually identical habitats. The black grouse prefers bushy areas and places that are not too heavily grazed by sheep, but apart from that, they are ecological brothers: Yet the black grouse gather in spring at spectacular leks where all the females mate with just one or two males, those that have most impressed them with their displays. They then rear their young without any help from the males.

The nearby red grouse are territorial and monogamous; the cock is almost as attentive to the chicks as the hens: The two species share the same food, habitat, and enemies, yet have entirely different mating systems. Why? My preferred explanation, and that of most biologists who have studied them, is that they have different histories. Black grouse are the descendants of forest dwellers, and it was in the forest that their maternal ancestors developed the habit of choosing males according to genetic quality rather than territory:"

HUNTERS OR GATHERERS

The lesson for humanity is obvious: To determine our mating system we need to know our natural habitat and our past: We have lived mostly in cities for less than one thousand years. We have POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN