The Queen - Matt Ridley

Another way, practiced commonly among slave-owning dynasties in the American South, was to keep marriage within the family: Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill of the University of New Mexico has shown how in such families more often than not men married their first cousins: By tracing the genealogies of four southern families, she found that fully half of all marriages involved kin or sister exchange (two brothers marrying two sisters): By contrast, in northern families at the same time, only 6 percent of marriages involved kin: What makes this result especially intriguing is that Thornhill had predicted it before she found it: Wealth concentration works better for land, whose value depends on its scarcity, than for business fortunes, which are made and lost in many families in parallel:"

Thornhill went on to argue that just as some people have an incentive to use marriage to concentrate wealth, so other people have an incentive to prevent them from doing exactly that. And kings, in particular, have both the incentive and the power to achieve their wishes: This explains an otherwise puzzling fact: that prohibitions on "incestuous " marriages between cousins are fierce and numerous in some societies and absent in others: In every case MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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it is the more highly stratified society that most regulates marriage.

Among the Trumai of Brazil, an egalitarian people, marriage between cousins is merely frowned upon: Among the Maasai of East Africa. who have considerable disparities of wealth, such marriage is punished with "a severe flogging: " Among the Inca people, anybody having the temerity to marry a female relative (widely defined) had his eyes gouged out and was cut into quarters: The emperor was, of course, an exception: His queen was his full sister, and Pachacuti began a tradition of marrying all his half sisters as well: Thornhill concludes that these rules had nothing to do with incest but were all about rulers trying to prevent wealth concentration by families other than their own; they usually excepted themselves from such laws: 58

DARWINIAN HISTORY

This kind of science goes by the name of Darwinian history, and it has been greeted with predictable ridicule by real historians. For them, wealth concentration requires no further explanation: For Darwinians, it must once have been (or must still be) the means to a reproductive end: No other currency counts in natural selection.

When we study sage grouse or elephant seals in their natural habitat, we can be fairly sure that they are striving to maximize their long-term reproductive success. But it is much more difficult to make the same claim for human beings: People strive for something, certainly, but it is usually money or power or security or happiness. The fact that they do not translate these into babies is raised as evidence against the whole evolutionary approach to human affairs.59 But the claim of evolutionists is not that these measures of success are today the tickets to reproductive success but that they once were. Indeed, to a surprising extent they still are: Successful men remarry more frequently and more widely than unsuccessful ones, and even with contraception preventing this from being turned into reproductive success, rich people still have as many or more babies as poor people.`°

Yet Western people conspicuously avoid having as many

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The Red Quern

children as they could. William Irons of Northwestern University in Chicago has tackled this problem. He believes that human beings have always taken into account the need to give a child a "good start in life. " They have never been prepared to sacrifice quality of children for quantity: Thus, when an expensive education became a prerequisite for success and prosperity, around the time of the demographic transition to low birthrates, people were able to read-just and lower the number of children they had in order to be able to afford to send them to school. Exactly this reason is given today by Thai people for why they are having fewer children than their parents:'

There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of the modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: Strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy other men 's wives who will bear bastards. It began with a man who shared a piece of prized fish or honey with an attractive neighbor 's wife in exchange for a brief affair and continues with a pop star ushering a model into his Mercedes. From fish to Mercedes, the history is unbroken: via skins and beads, plows and cattle, swords and castles. Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity:

Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: Strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man: It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat. It continues with a rich tycoon 's wife bearing a baby that grows up to resemble her beefy bodyguard: Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes.

Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history:

Chapter 8

SEXING THE MIND.

No woman, no cry:

—Bob Marley

0, the trouble, the trouble with women,

I repeat it again and again

From Kalamazoo to Kamchatka

The trouble with women is—men:

—Ogden Nash and Kurt Weill

The pine vole, Microtus pinetorum, is a monogamous species of mouse. The males help the females look after the babies. Male and female pine voles have similar brains: In particular, the hippocam-pus of both the male and female is much the same size. When required to run a maze, male and female pine voles prove equally good at the task: The meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus, is a different story altogether: It is polygamous: Males, which must visit the scattered holes of their several wives, travel farther than females every day: Male meadow voles have bigger hippocampi than females and are better at finding and remembering their way through mazes. Their brains are simply better at such spatial tasks.'

Just like meadow voles, men are better at spatial tasks than women: When asked to compare the shapes of two objects seen from different angles and judge whether they are the same shape or to judge whether two glasses of different shape are equally full or any such task that involves spatial judgments, men generally do better than women: Polygamy and spatial skills seem to go together in several species.

EQUALITY OR 1DENTITY?

Men and women have different bodies: The differences are the direct result of evolution: Women 's bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men's bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family.

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The Red Queen

Men and women have different minds: The differences are the direct result of evolution: Women's minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food: Men's minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family: The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory. The proposition that men and women have evolved different minds is anathema to every social scientist and politically correct individual.