The Queen - Matt Ridley

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The Rid Quern

investment in each other from murderous rival males: Broadly speaking, the social pattern of female monkeys and apes is determined by the distribution of their food, while the social pattern of males is determined by the distribution of females. Thus, female orangutans choose to live alone in strict territories, the better to exploit their scarce food resources. Males also live alone and try to monopolize the territories of several females: The females that live within his territory expect their " husband" to come rushing to their aid if another male appears.

Female gibbons also live alone: Male gibbons are capable of defending the home ranges of up to five females, and they could easily practice the same kind of polygamy as orangutans: one male can patrol the territories of five females and mate with them all: What is more, male gibbons are of little use as fathers. They do not feed the young, they do not protect them from eagles, they do not even teach them much: So why do they stick with one female faithfully? The one enormous danger to a young gibbon that its father can guard against is murder by another male gibbon. Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University believes that male gibbons are monogamous to prevent infanticide:'

A female gorilla is as faithful to her husband as any gibbon; she goes where he goes and does what he does: And he is faithful to her in a manner of speaking: He stays with her for many years and watches her raise his children: But there is one big difference: He has several females in his harem and is, as it were, equally faithful to each: Richard Wrangham of Harvard University believes the gorilla social system is largely designed around the prevention of infanticide but that for females there is safety in numbers. (For fruit-eating gibbons there is not enough food in a territory to feed more than one female.) So a male keeps his harem safe from the attentions of rival males and pays his children the immense favor of preventing their murder:'

The chimpanzee has further refined the anti-infanticide strategy by inventing a rather different social system: Because they eat scattered but abundant food such as fruit and spend more time on the ground and in the open, chimps live in larger groups (a big MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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group has more pairs of eyes than a small group) that regularly fragment into smaller groups before coming back together. These

" fission-fusion" groups are too large and too flexible for a single male to dominate. The way to the top of the political tree for a male chimp is by building alliances with other males, and chimp troops contain many males. So a female is now accompanied by many dangerous stepfathers. Her solution is to share her sexual favors more widely with the effect that all the stepfathers might be the father. As a result, there is only one circumstance in which a male chimp can be certain an infant he meets is not his: when he has never seen the female before. And as Jane Goodall found, male chimps attack strange females that are carrying infants and kill the infants. They do not attack childless females.'

Hrdy 's problem is solved. Female promiscuity in monkeys and apes can be explained by the need to share paternity among many males to prevent infanticide. But does it apply to mankind?

The short answer is no. It is a fact that stepchildren are sixty-five times more likely to die than children living with their true parents,' and it is inescapable that young children often have a terror of new stepfathers that is hard to overcome: But neither of these facts is of much relevance, for both apply to older children, not to suckling infants. Their deaths do not free the mother to breed again.

Moreover, the fact that we are apes can be misleading. Our sex lives are very different from those of our cousins. If we were like orangutans, women would live alone and apart from one another. Men, too, would live alone but each would visit several women (or none) for occasional sex. If two men ever met, there would be an almighty, violent battle. If we were gibbons, our lives would be unrecognizable. Every couple would live miles apart and fight to the death any intrusion into their home range—which they would never leave: Despite the occasional antisocial neighbor, that is not how we live: Even people who retreat to their sacred suburban homes do not pretend to remain there forever, let alone keep out all strangers. We spend much of our lives on common territory, at work, shopping, or at play. We are gregarious and social.

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The Red Queen

We are not gorillas, either. If we were, we would live in seraglios, each dominated by one giant middle-aged man, twice the weight of a woman, who would monopolize sexual access to all the women in the group and intimidate the other men: Sex would be rarer than saints' days, even for the great man, who would have sex once a year, and would be all but nonexistent for the other males.'

If we were hairless chimpanzees, our society would still look fairly familiar in some ways. We would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial, and aggressive toward other groups than those we belong to: In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist, and belligerent, which we are. Adult males would spend more time trying to climb the political hierarchy than with their families. But when we turn to sex, things would begin to look very different. For a start, men would take no part at all in rearing the young, not even paying child support; there would be no marriage bonds at all: Most women would mate with most men, though the top male (the president, let us call him) would make sure he had droir du seigneur over the most fertile women: Sex would be an intermittent affair, indulged in to spectacular excess during the woman 's estrus but totally forgotten by her for years at a time when pregnant or rearing a young child. This estrus would be announced to everybody in sight by her pink and swollen rear end, which would prove irresistibly fascinating to every male who saw it: They would try to monopolize such females for weeks at a time, forcing them to go away on a "consortship" with them; they would not always succeed and would quickly lose interest when the swelling went down: Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles has speculated on how disruptive this would be to society by imagining the effect on the average office of a woman turning up for work one day irresistibly pink.'°

If we were pygmy chimps or bonobos, we would live in groups much like those of chimps, but there would be roving bands of dominant men who visited several groups of women. As a consequence, women would have to share the possibility of paternity still more widely, and female bonobos are positively nymphomaniac in MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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their habits. They have sex at the slightest suggestion and in a great variety of ways (including oral and homosexual) and are sexually attractive to males for long periods. A young female bonobo who arrives at a tree where others of the species are feeding will first mate with each of the males in turn—including the adolescents—and only then get on with eating. Mating is not wholly indiscriminate, but it is very catholic.

Whereas a female gorilla will mate about ten times for every baby that is born, a female chimp will mate five hundred to a thousand times and a bonobo up to three thousand times. A female bonobo is rarely harassed by a nearby male for mating with a more junior male, and mating is so frequent that it rarely leads to conception: Indeed, the whole anatomy of male aggression is reduced in bonobos: Males are no larger than females and spend less energy trying to rise in the male hierarchy than ordinary chimps. The best strategy for a male bonobo intent on genetic eternity is to eat his greens, get a good night 's sleep, and prepare for a long day of fornication."