Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [14]
If you are willing to take the Darwinian view seriously, I have some good news, some bad news, and one disappointing truth. First, the good news. You are a spectacular evolutionary success story, representing an unbroken chain of thousands of ancestors who managed not just to survive but to attract a sexual partner and successfully rear a child. So, let me be the first to say, kudos to you!
Now, for the bad news. You are surrounded by people who are every bit as much of an evolutionary success as you are. In fact, you are caught in what biologists have called a Red Queen situation, named for the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, who says to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.” And that’s the situation all of us find ourselves in now. You see, no matter how well we adapt to our current environment, our competition and our enemies keep adapting as well. We don’t have to worry too much about our enemies anymore. Very few of us are likely to be eaten by a lion after all, but we have to worry a great deal about our competition, i.e., other humans, billions strong and growing more numerous every day.
And now for the disappointing truth. Dating—the whole effort to find a lifetime partner with whom to mate—doesn’t just seem hard. It is hard. And it’s supposed to be hard. That’s the necessary outgrowth of a Red Queen situation. Do you ever watch television shows from the 1950s or even the 1980s and find that they seem slow, that the dialogue and plot are crude, the characters shallow and obvious? That’s a cultural example of the kind of Red Queen situation I’m discussing. You’ve come to expect faster pacing and more complex characters. In short, you’ve become a much more sophisticated consumer of television shows than the previous generation. The problem is that everyone else has become more sophisticated as well, so your growth in understanding doesn’t provide a competitive advantage. It only helps you keep pace with the pack. Now, imagine the same scenario for dating. All your hard work in terms of looking good and developing an interesting personality only serves to hold your place. That’s why it seems so difficult. The romantic story line blinds us to that fact by serving up the fantasy that finding the right person is as easy as slipping your foot into a glass slipper.
I have an added piece of good news. If you accept Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection, then the animal kingdom can shed quite a bit of light on the nature of human relationships. Before I turn to the world of animals, though, I want to add one caveat. I will be discussing biological tendencies, but that is not the same thing as offering moral justifications. For example, just because men have an evolutionary tendency to commit adultery, that does not mean adultery is okay. We are not slaves to our biological urges. We are also products of cultures that establish certain moral and legal codes. But we’ll get to cultural explanations in the next chapter.
CHIMPS OR BONOBOS?
So, let’s look at man the animal. Our closest relatives are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The first hominid (not yet a homo sapien but of the same genus) diverged from them roughly six to seven million years ago, which is far more recent than the fifteen to twenty million years biologists once thought separated us. This is actually a very short time in evolutionary terms. At the molecular level, there is only about a 1 percent difference between humans and chimpanzees. We are closer to the chimpanzee than the chimpanzee is to the orangutan, and chimps are not only our closest relative—we are their closest relative as well.