The Queen - Matt Ridley

Anthropologist Helen Fisher has argued that there is a natural term to marriage, which is why divorce rates peak after four years of marriage. Four years is long enough to rear a single child beyond utter dependence, and Fisher believes that when each child reached four, Pleistocene women sought a fresh husband for the next child. She argues that therefore divorce is natural. But there are several problems with her case: The four-year peak is merely what statisticians call a mode and not a very prominent one at that: Divorce rates are bound to peak in one of the years after marriage.

Moreover, her theory sits oddly alongside the fact that men consistently prefer younger women and that husbands contribute to their children's rearing long after the children reach four: A woman who divorced her husband four years after the birth of every child would be less attractive to new men every time, not only because she would be older but because she would bring a growing retinue of stepchildren: The male preference for young mates implies lifelong mateships."

Even the most cursory inspection of the personal advertisements in a newspaper confirms what we all know: that men seek younger wives and women seek older husbands—despite the fact that they will almost certainly outlive them by a decade or more. In

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his survey Buss found that men seek women of about twenty-five, slightly past their maximum reproductive potential (they have already missed several breeding years) but close to their period of maximum fertility: However, this result may be misleading, as two of those commenting on Buss 's data have suggested: First, as Don Symons points out, a twenty-five-year-old modern Westerner shows probably as much wear and tear as a twenty-year-old tribal woman: When asked what women they prefer, Yanomamo men do not hesitate to say moko dude women, meaning those betweenpuberty and first child: Other things being equal, that is also the Western man's ideal.42

RACISM AND SEXISM

This chapter, obsessed with differences between the sexes, has ignored the differences between races, yet they are often thrown together in the demonology of modern prejudice. In an extraordinary equation, to insist on sexual differences is to insist on racial differences, too. Sexism is the sister of racism. I confess to being baffled by this. I think it is easy and, given the evidence, rational to believe that the differences between the natures of men of different races are trivial, while the differences between the natures of men and women of the same race are considerable.

Not that racial and cultural differences cannot exist. Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind: But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely: The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the human mind—principally competitive relations with kin members, tribal allies, and sexual partners—are and have been the same for white and black men and were at work before the ancestors of whites left Africa 1 00,000

years ago. While skin color is affected by things such as climate, which differs markedly between Africa and northern Europe, the shape of the mind is affected only very marginally by nonhuman problems such as what kind of game to hunt or how to keep warm SEXING THE MIND

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or cool: Infinitely more important is how to deal with fellow human beings, and that is the same problem everywhere—that is, the same for men everywhere and the same for women everywhere: But not the same for men and for women.

This is the essential difference between anthropology and Darwinism. Anthropologists insist that a Western urban man is far different in his habits and thoughts from a bushman tribesman than either is from his wife: Indeed, it is the foundation of their discipline that this is so, for anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity: Men fight, compete, love, show off, and hunt all over the world: True, bushmen fight with spears and sticks, whereas Chicagoans fight with guns and lawsuits; bushmen strive to be headmen, whereas Chicagoans strive to become senior partners.

The stuff of anthropology—the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals—is to me but the froth on the surface.

Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian an anthropologist studying the differences between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field: The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant: It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing."

One of the most persistent of those universals is sexual role playing. As Edward Wilson put it: "In diverse cultures men pursue and acquire, while women are protected and bartered: Sons sow wild oats and daughters risk being ruined: When sex is sold, men are usually the buyers. "" John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put the challenge to cultural interpretations of this universal pattern even more baldly:

The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daugh-

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ters to protect their sons ' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other.'

Just as it is foolish to deny the differences between the sexes in the face of the evidence presented here, so it is foolish to exaggerate them. In the matter of intelligence, for example, there is no reason to believe that men are dumber than women or vice versa—nothing in evolutionary thinking suggests as much, and no data test the proposition. As noted earlier, the data do suggest that men are probably better at abstract and spatial tasks, women at verbal and social ones, which vastly complicates the job of trying to design a test that is gender-neutral: Indeed, it helps to demolish the farcical notion of general, unitary intelligence altogether.

Nor does an appeal to sexual difference excuse anything: In the words of Anne Moir and David Jessel, "We do not consecrate the natural just because it is biologically true; men, for instance, have a natural disposition to homicide and promiscuity, which is not a recipe for the happy survival of society: "46

People seem to forget easily that the word is is different from the word should: If we choose to redress the sexual differences between the minds of men and women through policy, we are going against nature, but no more than when we outlaw murder. But we should be clear that we are redressing a difference, not discovering an identity. Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex:

Chapter 9

THE USES OF BEAUTY

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceiversever

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To onething constant never.

—Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

In the early 199os, there was a flurry of interest that a "gay gene " had been found on the X chromosome. The excitement faded as it proved hard to replicate the original study: But twin studies show that homosexuality is heritable, and one day the genes that can cause a man to be gay—perhaps in response to maternal genes expressed in his mother's womb—will be found.