The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [4]
What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How did they know it? Nowhere in Genesis is there even the merest hint of the equation: forbidden fruit equals sin equals sex. We know it to be true because there can only be one thing so central to mankind. Sex.
Of Nature and Nurture
The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design. Every living thing is ‘designed’ quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular lifestyle. Human nature was as carefully designed by natural selection for the use of a social, bipedal, originally African ape, as human stomachs were designed for the use of an omnivorous African ape with a taste for meat.
That starting point will already have irritated two kinds of people. To those who believe that the world was made in seven days by a man with a long beard and that therefore human nature cannot have been designed by selection but by an Intelligence, I merely bid a respectful good day. We have little common ground on which to argue, because I share few of your assumptions. As for those who protest that human nature did not evolve, but was invented de novo by something called ‘culture’, I have more hope. I think I can persuade you that our views are compatible. Human nature is a product of culture, but culture is also a product of human nature, and both are the products of evolution. This does not mean that I am going to argue that it is ‘all in our genes’. Far from it. I am vigorously going to challenge the notion that anything psychological is purely genetic, and equally vigorously challenge the assumption that anything universally human is untainted by genes. But our ‘culture’ does not have to be the way it is. Human culture could be very much more varied and surprising than it is. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, live in promiscuous societies in which females seek as many sexual partners as possible and in which a male will kill the infants of strange females he has not mated with. There is no human society that remotely resembles this particular pattern. Why not? Because human nature is different from chimp nature.
If this is so, then the study of human nature must have profound implications for the study of history, sociology, psychology, anthropology and politics. Each of those disciplines is an attempt to understand human behaviour, and if the underlying universals of human behaviour are the product of evolution, then it is vitally important to understand what the evolutionary pressures were. Yet I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of The Origin of Species, had never happened; it does so quite deliberately, for it insists that man’s culture is a product of his own free will and invention. Society is not the product of human psychology, it asserts, but vice versa.
That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but it is simply not true. Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so. We stick to the same monotonously human pattern of organizing our affairs. If we were more adventurous, there would be societies without love, without ambition, without sexual desire, without marriage, without art, without grammar, without music, without smiles – and with as many unimaginable novelties as are in that list. There would be societies in which women killed each other more often than men, in which old people were considered more beautiful than twenty-year-olds, in which wealth did not purchase power over