Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [13]
To accept the evolutionary point of view, we must first set aside our natural prejudice that each of us is a unique individual unlike any other. This is undoubtedly true in lots of small ways, but for now we are going to focus on human beings not as individuals but as a species. In truth, the amount of genetic variation among humans is quite small. And although myriad cultures shape us in vastly different ways, evolutionary psychologists look for traits that are shared across cultures, humanity in the aggregate rather than the particular. Evolutionary psychology is predicated on the idea that our thoughts and feelings and behavior—often lumped together under the banner of “human nature”—have been decisively shaped by the challenges our ancestors faced over the last several million years. In fact, if we truly adopt an evolutionary perspective, we are no longer even the main actors in our own stories but simply the puppets of our genes, which are the true units of consequence.
Accepting this premise will be more difficult than you might imagine. When confronted with evolutionary explanations for their actions, most people deny that those explanations have anything to do with their behavior. For example, if a man sleeps with a lot of women, and you suggest that he is doing that in order to increase the number of his offspring, he will point to the fact that he uses condoms and has no intention of impregnating any of the women. On a conscious level, he will be right. Only it doesn’t explain why he feels driven to sleep with so many women or why he is willing to expend so much time and energy and money to do that. Below the level of conscious thought lies a deep and instinctual desire in men for a variety of female sexual partners. There is a very good evolutionary reason for that desire—the more women he has sex with, the more opportunities he has to pass along his genes to future generations. And it is this unconscious level that we are interested in.
When you start to look at things from an evolutionary point of view, this kind of disconnect between conscious and unconscious explanations is common. Our culture evolves at a much faster rate than our biology. We are perpetually caught in what you might call an evolutionary time lag. Much of what constitutes our most fundamental drives and instincts developed hundreds of thousands of years ago to deal with the challenges of living in the grassy savanna of Africa. But the fact that our lives no longer resemble those of our prehistoric ancestors doesn’t mean that we have also discarded that evolutionary heritage. So, for now, we need to explore the law of the jungle to get a better understanding of just what goes on between men and women.
CHARLES DARWIN—THE WORLD’S FIRST DATING GURU
First, a little background on Charles Darwin, who has had a rough go of it in this country. A substantial portion of Americans still don’t believe in evolution, but that’s nothing new for Darwin, who has been fighting an uphill battle for quite some time. He first made the case for evolution in Origin of the Species—his most famous work—in 1859. But we’re interested in a later work of Darwin’s, his 1871 book Descent of Man, which explains one aspect of evolution: sexual selection.
When we think of Darwin, most of us remember the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” or what is known as natural selection. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is a subset of that, what you might call “reproduction of the fittest.” To put it in the most basic terms, natural selection has to do with the ability to adapt to the environment, while sexual selection is concerned with how to acquire mates. And it turns out that sexual selection is really the essential element because the key to any animal’s success is not simply