The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [136]
The anthropologist Helen Fisher has argued that there is a natural term to marriage, which is why divorce rates peak after four years of marriage. Four years is long enough to rear a single child beyond utter dependence, and Fisher believes that when each child reached four, Pleistocene women would seek a fresh husband for the next child. She argues that therefore divorce is natural. But there are several problems with her case. The four-year peak is merely what statisticians call a mode and not a very prominent one at that: divorce rates are bound to peak in one of the years after marriage. Moreover, her theory sits oddly alongside the fact that men consistently prefer younger women and that husbands contribute to their children’s rearing long after the children reach four. A woman who divorced her husband four years after the birth of every child would be less attractive to new men every time, not only because she would be older, but because she would bring a growing retinue of stepchildren. The male preference for young mates implies life-long mateships.41
Even the most cursory inspection of the personal advertisements in a newspaper confirms what we all know: that men seek younger wives and women seek older husbands – despite the fact that they will almost certainly outlive them by a decade or more. In Buss’s survey, he found that men seek women of about twenty-five, slightly past their maximum reproductive potential (they have already missed several breeding years) but close to their period of maximum fertility. However, this result may be misleading as two of those commenting on Buss’s data have suggested. First, as Don Symons points out, a twenty-five-year old modern westerner shows probably as much wear and tear as a twenty-year old tribal woman. When asked what women they prefer, Yanomamö men do not hesitate to say moko dude women, meaning those between puberty and first child. That, other things being equal, is also the western man’s ideal.42
Racism and Sexism
This chapter, obsessed with differences between the sexes, has ignored the differences between races, yet they are often thrown together in the demonology of modern prejudice. In an extraordinary equation, to insist on sexual differences is to insist on racial differences, too. Sexism is the sister of racism. I confess to being baffled by this. I think it is easy and, given the evidence, rational to believe that the differences between the natures of men of different races are trivial, while the differences between the natures of men and women of the same race are considerable.
Not that racial and cultural differences cannot exist. Just as a white man has different skin colour from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind. But, given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely. The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the human mind – principally competitive relations with kin members, tribal allies and sexual partners – are and have been the same for white men and black, and were at work mainly before the ancestors of whites left Africa one hundred thousand years ago. While skin colour is affected by things like climate, which differ markedly between Africa and northern Europe, the shape of the mind is affected only very marginally by non-human problems such as what kind of game to hunt or how to keep warm or cool. Infinitely more important is how to deal with fellow human beings and that is the same problem everywhere. The same, that is, for men everywhere, and the same for women everywhere. But not the same for men and for women.
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