The Queen - Matt Ridley

We're back to square one.

This chapter has kept its focus resolutely on the male. In doing so it may seem to have trampled on the rights of women by ignoring them and their wishes: But then so did men for many generations after the invention of agriculture. Before agriculture and since democracy, such chauvinism was impossible; the mating system of humans, like that of other animals, was a compromise between the strategies of males and females. And it is a curious truth that the monogamous marriage bond survived right through despotic Babylon, lascivious Greece, promiscuous Rome, and adulterous Christendom to emerge as the core of the family in the industrial age. Even in the most despotic and polygamous moment of human history, mankind was faithful to the institution of monogamous marriage, quite unlike any other polygamous animal.

Even despots usually had one queen and many concubines. Explaining the human fascination with monogamous marriage requires us to understand the female strategy as closely as we have understood the male one. When we do, an extraordinary insight into human nature will emerge. That is what the next chapter is about: Chapter 7

MONOGAMY AND THE

NATURE OF WOMEN

SHEPHERD: Echo, I ween, will in the wood reply, And quaintly answer questions: shall I try?

ECHO: Try:

What must we do our passion to express?

Press:

How shall I please her who never loved before?

Be Fore:

What most moves women when we them address?

A dress:

Say, what can keep her chaste whom I adore?

A door.

If music softens rocks, love tunes my lyre: Liar.

Then teach me, Echo, how shall I come by her?

Buy her.

—Jonathan Swift, À Gentle Echo on Woman "

In an astonishing study recently undertaken in Western Europe, the following facts emerged: Married females choose to have affairs with males who are dominant, older, more physically attractive, more symmetrical in appearance, and married; females are much more likely to have an affair if their mates are subordinate, younger, physically unattractive, or have asymmetrical features; cosmetic surgery to improve a male 's looks doubles his chances of having an adulterous affair; the more attractive a male, the less attentive he is as a father; roughly one in three of the babies born in Western Europe is the product of an adulterous affair: If you find these facts disturbing or hard to believe, do not worry: The study was not done on human beings but on swallows, the innocent, twittering, fork-tailed birds that pirouette prettily around barns and fields in the summer months. Human beings are entirely different from swallows: Or are they?'

THE MARRIAGE OBSESSION

The harems of ancient despots revealed that men are capable of making the most of opportunities to turn rank into reproductive success, but they cannot have been typical of the human condition for most of its history. About the only way to be a harem-guarding potentate nowadays is to start a cult and brainwash potential concubines about your holiness. In many ways modern people probably live in social systems that are much closer to those of their hunter-gatherer ancestors than they are to the conditions of early history.

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The Red Queen

No hunter-gatherer society supports more than occasional polygamy, and the institution of marriage is virtually universal.

People live in larger bands than they used to, but within those bands the kernel of human life is the nuclear family: husband, wife, and children: Marriage is a child-rearing institution; wherever it occurs, the father takes at least some part in rearing the child even if only by providing food: In most societies men strive to be polygamists but few succeed: Even in the polygamous societies of pastoralists, the great majority of marriages are monogamous ones.'

It is our usual monogamy, not our occasional polygamy, that sets us apart from other mammals, including apes: Of the four other apes (gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees), only the gibbon practices anything like marriage. Gibbons live in faithful pairs in the forests of Southeast Asia, each pair living a solitary life within a territory.

If men are opportunists-polygamists at heart, as I argued in the last chapter, then where does marriage come from? Although men are fickle ("You 're afraid of commitment, aren 't you? " says the stereotypical victim of a seducer), they are also interested in finding wives with whom to rear families and might well be very set on stick-ing by them despite their own infidelity ( "You 're never going to leave your wife for me, are you? " says the stereotypical mistress).

The two goals are contradictory only because women are not prepared to divide themselves neatly into wives and whores.

Woman is not the passive chattel that the tussles of despots, described in the last chapter, have implied. She is an active adversary in the sexual chess game, and she has her own goals: 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?

THE HEROD EFFECT

In the 1980s a number of women scientists, led by Sarah Hrdy, now of the University of California at Davis, began to notice that MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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the promiscuous behavior of female chimpanzees and monkeys sat awkwardly alongside the Trivers theory that heavily female biased parental investment leads directly to female choosiness: Hrdy 's own studies of langurs and the studies of macaques by her student Meredith Small seemed to reveal a very different kind of female from the stereotype of evolutionary theory: a female who sneaked away from the troop for assignations with males; a female who actively sought a variety of sexual partners; a female who was just as likely as a male to initiate sex. Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females. A decade later it is suddenly clear what: A whole new light has been shed on the evolution of female behavior by a group of ideas known as " sperm competition theory. "'

The solution to Hrdy 's concern lay in her own work: In her study of the langurs of Abu in India, Hrdy discovered a grisly fact: The murder of baby monkeys by adult male monkeys was routine.

Every time a male takes over a troop of females, he kills all the infants in the group. Exactly the same phenomenon had been discovered in lions a short time later: When a group of brothers wins a pride of females, the first thing they do is slaughter the innocents: In fact, as subsequent research revealed, infanticide by males is common in rodents, carnivores, and primates. Even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are guilty: Most naturalists, reared on a diet of sentimental natural history television programs, were inclined to believe they were witnessing a pathological aberration, but Hrdy and her colleagues suggested otherwise. The infanticide, they said, was an "adaptation "—an evolved strategy_. By killing their stepchildren the males would halt the females ' milk production and so bring forward the date on which the mother could conceive once more. An alpha male langur or a pair of brother lions has only a short time at the top, and infanticide helps these animals to father the maximum number of offspring during that time.'

The importance of infanticide in primates gradually helped scientists to understand the mating systems of the five species of apes because it suddenly provided a reason for females to be loyal to one or a group of males—and vice versa: to protect their genetic