High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [30]
Whether or not humans spent their millions of prelegal years being faithful to one true love is anyone’s guess. If you look around now, you’ll find every arrangement imaginable: wives who routinely take several husbands at once in the Himalayas; the reverse in Africa and Utah; serial monogamy in Polynesia and the contemporary United States. Many societies that aspire to monogamy are blunt about the loopholes, by recognizing a type of lineage anthropologists call avuncular: a child’s paternal agent is the mother’s brother, since he’s the closest adult male who is known, with certainty, to be the child’s blood relative.
We are a tough study. It’s true our young are born fragile and witless as they come. But we are long-lived, too, and have so many opportunities to rethink the mate choice. “Rethink” is an important word—maybe we’ve traveled far enough from our origins so that biology has little to do with our amorous destiny. The wide variety of mating strategies we adopt across different cultures would suggest anything but biological determinism. But the battle of the sexes is such a persistent, bittersweet mystery the popular imagination seems convinced we are hard-wired for la différence. One extremely well-plowed argument goes this way: a male can increase his genes in the population by impregnating as many females as humanly possible, but it’s to a female’s advantage—since childbearing becomes her burden—to choose a mate who appears provident, loyal, thrifty, and inclined to stick around. So, the argument goes, men are predisposed to promiscuity, and women to being picky about their mates. Is it engraved upon us, this thing called adultery? It’s an unanswerable question that seems to enthrall us no end. Physical anthropologists and sociobiologists have produced far more reams on the subject than Hugh Hefner ever did.
Sociobiology, which made a big splash in the seventies, threw some valuable light on the field of evolutionary biology, but it also threw some hooey into the kettle, where human behavior is concerned. Edward O. Wilson produced an incendiary book, On Human Nature, in which he asserted that there are biological bases for a large number (he implies, all) of the characteristics that are general enough to be called our “nature,” and which we’ve integrated into our culture, political systems, and economy. I applaud Wilson (one of the world’s preeminent biologists) for trying to bring humans back into the fold of nature. But he was roundly and rightly attacked, I think, for presuming that so much of human behavior—everything from armed combat to flirtation—is directed by our genes. In seeking biological explanations Wilson provided almost no direct evidence for genetic control (as there is almost none to be found). He relied instead on analogy and “just-so” stories, suggesting that if a behavior appears to increase our likelihood of survival in certain contexts it must be biologically programmed. He ignored other levels of pressure—the social, material, and economic contexts—that influence decision making in the enormously flexible human brain. On Human Nature tried to draw us out onto the ice-thin proposition of biology as a new code of ethics: We are what we are, not because “God made us that way,” but because four million years of natural selection did. And we’d better pay attention, Wilson warned, citing as a cautionary tale an example of enforced gender equality in an Israeli kibbutz, against which women rebelled and demanded more time with their children. (He neglected to