The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [115]
This idea has several variants. Sarah Hrdy proposed that silent ovulation helps prevent infanticide: neither the husband nor the lover knows if he has been cuckolded. Donald Symons thinks women use perpetual sexual availability to seduce philanderers in exchange for gifts. L. Benshoof and Randy Thornhill suggested that concealed ovulation allows a woman to mate with a superior man by stealth without deserting or alerting her husband. If, as seems possible, ovulation is less concealed from her (or her unconscious) than it is from him, then it would help her make each extra-marital liaison more rewarding since she is more likely to ‘know’ when to have sex with her lover, whereas her husband does not know when she is fertile. In other words, silent ovulation is a weapon in the adultery game.35
This, intriguingly, sets up the possibility of an arms race between wives and mistresses. Genes for concealed ovulation make both adultery and fidelity easier. It is a peculiar thought, and there is at present no way of knowing if it is right, but it throws into stark contrast the fact that there can be no genetic feminine solidarity. Women will often be competing with women.
Sparrow Fights
It is this competition between females that provides the final clue to the reason adultery, rather than polygamy, has probably been the commonest way for men to have many mates. Red-winged blackbirds, which nest in marshes in Canada, are polygamous: the males with the best territories each attract several females to nest in their territories. But the males with the biggest harems are also the most successful adulterers, fathering the most babies in their neighbours’ territories, too. Which raises the question of why the males’ lovers do not simply become extra wives.
There is a small owl called Tengmalm’s owl that lives in Finnish forests. In years when mice are abundant, some of the male owls have two mates, one in each of two territories, while other males go without finding a mate at all. The females that are married to polygamous males rear noticeably fewer young than the females married to monogamous males, so why do they put up with it? Why not leave for one of the nearby bachelors? A Finnish biologist believes that the polygamists are deceiving their victims. The females judge potential suitors by measuring how many mice they can catch to feed them during courtship. In a good year for mice, a male can catch so many mice that he can simultaneously give two females the impression that he is a fine male; he can provide each with more mice than he could catch for one in a normal year.36
Nordic forests seem to be full of deceitful adulterers, for a similar habit by a deceptively innocent-looking little bird led to a long-running dispute in the scientific literature of the 1980s. Some male pied flycatchers, in the forests of Scandinavia, manage to be polygamous by holding two territories, each with a female in it, like the owls or like Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, who keeps an expensive wife on Park Avenue and a beautiful mistress in a rent-controlled apartment across town. Two teams of researchers have studied the birds and come to different conclusions about what is going on. The Finns and Swedes say that the mistress is deceived into believing that the male is unmarried. The Norwegians say that, since the wife sometimes visits the mistress’s nest and may try to drive her away, the mistress can be under no illusions. She accepts the fact that her mate may desert her for his wife, but hopes that if things go wrong at the wife’s nest – they often do – he will come back to help her raise her young. He gets away with it only when the two territories are so far apart that the wife cannot visit the mistress’s territory often enough to persecute her. In other words, according to the Norwegians, men deceive their wives about their affairs, not their mistresses.37
It is not clear, therefore, whether the wife or the mistress is the victim of treachery, but one thing is certain: the bigamous male pied flycatcher has pulled