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By Root 564 0

charm. Disquieting and yet not altogether convincing. The sexual selection of the human mind is much the most speculative and fragile of the many evolutionary theories discussed in this book, but it is also very much in the same vein as the others. I began this book by asking why all human beings were so similar and yet so different, and suggesting that the answer lay in the unique alchemy of sex. An individual is unique because of the genetic variety that sexual reproduction generates in its perpetual chess tournament with disease. An individual is a member of a homogeneous species because of the incessant mixing of that variety in the pool of fellow human beings’ genes. And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective upon the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different.

EPILOGUE

The Self-domesticated Ape

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,

A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;

In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little, or too much.

Alexander Pope, from An Essay on Man

The study of human nature is at about the same stage as the study of the human genome, which is at about the same stage as the mapping of the world in the time of Herodotus. We know a few fragments in detail and some large parts in outline, but huge surprises still await us, and errors abound. If we can free ourselves of the sterile dogmatic dispute about nature and nurture, we can gradually uncover the rest.

But just as Mercator could not get the relative sizes of Europe and Africa correct until he had the perspective that longitude and latitude provided, so the perspective of other animals is vital to the study of human nature. It is impossible to understand the social life of a phalarope or a sage grouse or an elephant seal or a chimpanzee in isolation. You can describe each in glorious detail, of course: they are respectively polyandrous, lekking, harem-defending, fission – fusion. But only with the perspective of evolution can you truly understand why. Only then can you see the part that different opportunities for parental investment, different habitats, different diets and different historical baggage have played in determining their natures. It is the purest nonsense to abandon the perspective of comparisons with other animals just because of our hubristic belief that mankind alone is a learning creature that reinvents itself at whim. So I make no apologies for mixing animals and human beings together in this book.

Nor is the fact of civilization sufficient to rescue our parochial egotism. We are, it is true, as domesticated as any dog or cow, perhaps more so. We have bred out of ourselves all sorts of instincts that were probably features of our Pleistocene nature, in just the same way that human beings have bred out of the cow many of the characteristics of the Pleistocene aurochs. But scratch a cow and you still find an aurochs underneath: a herd of dairy calves released into a forest would soon reinvent the polygamous herd, in which males competed for status. Dogs left to their own devices still become territorial pack animals, in which the senior animals monopolize breeding. Turned loose on an African savannah, a group of young Britons would not recreate the exact existence of their ancestors; indeed, they would probably starve, so dependent have we been for millennia on cultural traditions