The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [116]
To test the suggestion that it is better to cuckold a faithful husband than leave him to become the second wife of a bigamist, José Veiga studied house sparrows breeding in a colony in Madrid. Only about ten per cent of the males in this colony were polygamous. By selectively removing certain males and females he tested various theories about why more males did not have multiple wives. First, he rejected the notion that males were indispensable to the rearing of young. Females in bigamous marriages reared as many young as those in monogamous ones, though they had to work harder. Second, by removing some males and observing which males the widows chose to remarry, he rejected the idea that females preferred to mate with unmated males: they were happy to choose already mated males and to reject bachelors. Third, he rejected the idea that males could not find spare females: twenty-eight per cent of males remated with a female who had not bred in the previous year. Then he tried putting nest boxes closer together to make it easier for the male to guard two at once; he found that it entirely failed to increase the amount of polygamy. That left him with one explanation for the rarity of polygamy in sparrows: the senior wives do not stand for it. Just as male birds guard their mates, so female birds chase away and harass their husbands’ chosen second fiancées. Caged females are attacked by mated female sparrows. They do so, presumably, because even though they could rear the chicks on their own, it is a great deal easier with the husband’s undivided help.38
It is my contention that man is just like an ibis or a swallow or a sparrow. He lives in large colonies. Males compete with each other for places in a pecking order. Most males are monogamous. Polygamy is prevented by wives who resent sharing their husbands lest they also share his contributions to child-rearing. Even though they could bring up the children unaided, the husband’s pay cheque is invaluable. But the ban on polygamous marriage does not prevent the males seeking polygamous matings. Adultery is common. It is commonest between high-ranking males and females of all ranks. To prevent it males try to guard their wives, are extremely violent towards their wives’ lovers and copulate with their wives frequently, not just when they are fertile.
That is the life of the sparrow anthropomorphized. The life of man, sparrowmorphized, might read like this. The birds live and breed in colonies called tribes, or towns. Cocks compete with each other to amass resources and gain status within the colony: it is known as ‘business’ and ‘politics’. Cocks eagerly court hens, who resent sharing their males with other hens, but many cocks, especially senior ones, trade in their hens for younger ones, or cuckold other cocks by having sex with their (willing) wives in private.
The point lies not in the details of the sparrow’s life. There are significant differences, including the fact that human beings tend to have a much more uneven distribution of dominance, power and resources within the colony than sparrows do. But they still share the principal feature of all colonial birds: monogamy, or at least pair bonds, plus rife adultery, rather than polygamy. The noble savage, far from living in contented sexual equanimity, was paranoid about becoming, and intent on making his neighbour into, a cuckold. Little wonder that human sex is first and foremost, in all societies, a private thing, to be indulged in only in secret. The same is not true of bonobos, but it is true of many monogamous birds. One reason the high bastard rates of birds came as such a shock was because few naturalists had ever witnessed an adulterous affair between two birds: they do it in private.39
The Green-eyed Monster
Cuckoldry paranoia is deep-seated in men. The use of veils, chaperones,