The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [121]
Darwinian History
This kind of science goes by the name of Darwinian history, and it has been greeted with predictable ridicule by real historians. For them, wealth concentration requires no further explanation. For Darwinians, it must once have been (or must still be) the means to a reproductive end: no other currency counts in natural selection.
When we study sage grouse or elephant seals in their natural habitat we can be fairly sure that they are striving to maximize their long-term reproductive success. But it is much more difficult to make the same claim for human beings. People strive for something, certainly, but it is usually money, power, security or happiness. The fact that they do not translate these into babies is raised as evidence against the whole evolutionary approach to human affairs.59 But the claim of evolutionists is not that these measures of success are today the tickets to reproductive success, but that they once were. Indeed, to a surprising extent they still are. Successful men remarry more frequently and more widely than unsuccessful ones, and even with contraception preventing this from being turned into reproductive success, rich people still have as many or more babies as poor people.60
Yet western people conspicuously avoid having as many children as they could. Bill Irons of Northwestern University in Chicago has tackled this problem. He believes that human beings have always taken into account the need to give a child a ‘good start in life’. They have never been prepared to sacrifice quality of children for quantity. Thus, when an expensive education became a prerequisite of success and prosperity around the time of the demographic transition to low birth rates, people were able to readjust and lower the numbers of children they had in order to be able to afford to send them to school. Exactly this reason is given today by Thai people for why they are having fewer children than their parents.61
There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy affairs with other men’s wives who will bear bastards. It began with a man who shared a piece of prized fish or honey with an attractive neighbour’s wife in exchange for a brief affair and continues with a pop star ushering a model into his Mercedes. From fish to Mercedes, the history is unbroken: via skins and beads, ploughs and cattle, swords and castles. Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.
Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man. It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat. It continues with a rich tycoon’s wife bearing a baby that grows up to resemble her beefy bodyguard. Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth and genes.
Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sexing the Mind
‘No woman, no cry’
Bob Marley
O, the trouble, the trouble with women,
I repeat it again and again
From Kalamazoo to Kamchatka
The trouble with women is – men.
Ogden Nash/Kurt Weill
The pine vole, Microtus pinetorum, is a monogamous