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By Root 495 0

eight – to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: they were the emperor’s concubines. Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular, legal size. Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. ‘Principal persons’ were given fifty women; leaders of vassal nations thirty; heads of provinces of a hundred thousand people, twenty; leaders of one thousand people, fifteen; administrators of five hundred people, twelve; governors of one hundred people, eight; petty chiefs over fifty men, seven; chiefs of ten men, five; chiefs of five men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that would follow any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of the Inca’s women he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers and all his llamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed and the site strewn with stones.

As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority shareholding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Inca people were, many of them, the children of powerful men.

In the west African kingdom of Dahomey, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use and the remainder he suffered to ‘marry’ the more favoured of his subjects. The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren. In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, ‘it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.’

The connection between sex and power is a long one.1

Man, an Animal

So far this book has taken only a few sideways glances at human beings. This is deliberate. The principles I have been trying to establish are better illustrated by aphids, dandelions, slime moulds, fruit flies, peacocks and elephant seals than they are by one peculiar ape. But the peculiar ape is not immune to those principles. Human beings are a product of evolution as much as any slime mould, and the revolution of the last two decades in the way scientists now think about evolution has immense implications for mankind as well. To summarize the argument so far, evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest; every creature on earth is the product of a series of historical battles between parasites and hosts, between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of one gender in competition for members of the other gender. Those battles include psychological ones, to manipulate and exploit other members of the species; they are never won, for success in one generation only ensures that the foes of the next generation are fitter to fight harder. Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster towards a finishing line that is merely the start of the next race.

This chapter begins to follow the logic of these arguments into the heart of human behaviour. Those who think this unjustified on the grounds that human beings are unique usually advance one of two arguments. First, that in humans everything about behaviour is learnt, nothing inherited. Second, most people believe that inherited behaviour is inflexible behaviour and human beings are clearly flexible. The first argument is an exaggeration, the second false. A man does not experience lust because he learnt it at his father’s knee, or feel hunger or anger because he was taught them. They are human nature. He was born with the potential to develop lust, hunger and anger. He learnt to direct hunger at hamburgers, anger at delayed trains and lust at women – when appropriate. So he has ‘changed’ his ‘nature’. Inherited tendencies permeate everything we do; and they are flexible. There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature.