The Queen - Matt Ridley

The alliances of males and females need not be based on relatedness: Brothers tend to help one another because they are related; what 's good for your brother ' s genes is good for yours since you share half your genes with him: But there is another way to ensure that altruism pays: reciprocity. If an animal wants help from another, he could promise to return the favor in the future. As long as his promise is credible—in other words, as long as individuals recognize each other and live together long enough to collect their debts—a male can get other males to help him in a sexual mission. This seems to be what happens in dolphins, whose sex life is only just becoming known: Thanks to the work of Richard Connor, Rachel Smolker, and their colleagues, we now know that groups of male dolphins kidnap single females, bully them and display to them with choreographed acrobatics, then enjoy sexual monopoly over them. Once the female has given birth, the alliances of males lose interest in her, and she is free to return to an all-female group: These male alliances are often temporary and stitched together on a you-help-me-and-I 'll-help-you basis:'6

The more intelligent the species and the more fluid the coalitions, the less an ambitious male need be limited by his strength: Buffalos and lions win power in trials of strength: Dolphins and chimpanzees must not be weak if they are to win power but can rely much more on their ability to form winning coalitions of males: In people there is virtually no connection between strength and power, at least not since the invention of action-at-a-POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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distance weapons such as the slingshot, as Goliath learned the hard way. Wealth, cunning, political skill, and experience lead to power among men. From Hannibal to Bill Clinton, men gain power by putting together coalitions of allies. In mankind, wealth became a way of putting together such alliances of power. The rewards, for other animals, are largely sexual. For men?

HIGHLY SEXED EMPERORS

In the late 1970s an anthropologist in California, Mildred Dickemann, decided to try to apply some Darwinian ideas to human history and culture: She simply set out to see if the kinds of predictions that evolutionists were making for other animals also applied to human beings: What she found was that in the highly stratified Oriental societies of early history, people seemed to behave exactly as you would expect them to if they knew that their goal on Earth was to leave as many descendants as possible: In other words, men tended to seek polygamy, whereas women strove to marry upward with men of high status: Dickemann added that a lot of cultural customs—dowries, female infanticide, the claustration of women so that their virginity could not be damaged—were consistent with this pattern: For example, in India, high castes practiced more female infanticide than low castes because there were fewer opportunities to export daughters io still higher castes: In other words, mating was a trade: male power and resources for female reproductive potential:"

About the same time as Dickemann 's studies, John Hartung of Harvard University began to look at patterns of inheritance. He hypothesized that a rich person in a polygamous society would tend to leave his or her money to a son rather than a daughter because a rich son could provide more grandchildren than a Oich daughter: This is because the son can have children by several wives, whereas a daughter cannot increase the number of her children even if she takes many husbands: Therefore, the more polygamous a society, the more likely it will show male-biased inheritance: A sur-

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The Red Queen

vey of four hundred societies found overwhelming support for Hartung's hypothesis: 3e

Of course, that proves nothing: It could be a coincidence that evolutionary arguments predict what does happen. There is a cautionary tale that scientists tell one another about a man who cuts the legs off a flea to test his theory that fleas ' ears are on their legs. He then tells the flea to jump and it does not, so he concludes that he was right; fleas ' ears are in their legs: Nonetheless, Darwinians began to think that perhaps human history might be illuminated by a beam of evolutionary light. In the mid 1980s, Laura Betzig set out to test the notion that people are sexually adapted to exploit whatever situation they encounter: She had no great hopes of success, but she believed that the best way to test the conjecture was simply to postulate the simplest prediction she could make: that men would treat power not as an end in itself but as a means to sexual and reproductive success.

Looking around the modern world, she was not encouraged; powerful men are often childless. Hitler was so consumed by ambition that he had little time left for philandering.' 9

But when she examined the record of history, Betzig was stunned. Her simplistic prediction that power is used for sexual success was confirmed again and again. Only in the past few centuries in the West has it failed. Not only that, in most polygamous societies there were elaborate social mechanisms to ensure that a powerful polygamist left a polygamous heir.

The six independent "civilizations " of early history—Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru—were remarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute. These men were despots, meaning they could kill their subjects without fear of retribution. Without excep-tiop, that vast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity. The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave " wives " at his command. The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten procured 317 concubines and " droves" of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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Indian emperor Udayama preserved sixteen thousand consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guarded by eunuchs: The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem. The Inca Atahualpa, as we have seen, kept virgins on tap throughout the kingdom:

Not only did these six emperors, each typical of his predecessors and successors, have similarly large harems, but they employed similar techniques to fill and guard them. They recruited young (usually prepubertal) women, kept them in highly defensible and escape-proof forts, guarded them with eunuchs, pampered them, and expected them to breed the emperor 's children. Measures to enhance the fertility of the harem were common. Wet nurses, who allow women to resume ovulation by cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century B:C.; they were sung about in Sumerian lullabies. The Tang Dynasty emperors of China kept careful records of dates of menstruation and conception in the harem so as to be sure to copulate only with the most fertile concubines: Chinese emperors were also taught to conserve their semen so as to keep up their quota of two women a day, and some even complained of their onerous sexual duties. These harems could hardly have been more carefully designed as breeding machines, dedicated to the spread of emperors ' genes:'°

Nor were emperors anything more than extreme examples.

Laura Betzig has examined 104 politically autonomous societies and found that "in almost every case, power predicts the size of a man 's harem: "" Small kings had one hundred women in their harems; great kings, one thousand, and emperors, five thousand.

Conventional history would have us believe that such harems were merely one among many of the rewards that awaited the successful seeker of power, along with all the other accoutrements of despotism: servants, palaces, gardens, music, silk, rich food, and spectator sports. But women are fairly high on the list. Betzig 's point is that it is one thing to find that powerful emperors were polygamous but quite another to discover that they each adopted similar measures to enhance their reproductive success within the harem: