The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [87]
None of this is much help, then. Most people live in monogamous societies, but this may only tell us what democracy usually prescribes, not what human nature seeks. Relax the anti-polygamy laws and it flourishes. Utah has a tradition of theologically sanctioned polygamy and in recent years has been less forceful about prosecuting polygamists, so the habit has re-emerged. Although the most populous societies are monogamous, about three-quarters of all tribal cultures are polygamous, and even the ostensibly monogamous ones are monogamous in name only. Throughout history powerful men have usually had more than one mate each, even if they have had only one legitimate wife. However, that is for the powerful. For the rest, even in openly polygamous societies, most men have only one wife and virtually all women have only one husband. That leaves us precisely nowhere. Mankind is a polygamist and a monogamist, depending on the circumstances. Indeed, perhaps it is foolish even to talk of mankind having a mating system at all. He does what he wants, adapting his behaviour to the prevailing opportunity.4
When Males Pounce and Females Flirt
He? What about she? Until recently, evolutionists had a fairly simple view of mating systems based on the essential differences between males and females. If powerful men had their way, women would probably live in harems like seals: that is certainly the lesson of history. If most women had their way, men would be as faithful as albatrosses. Although research has modified this supposition, it is none the less true that males are generally seducers and females the seduced. Humanity shares this profile of ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females with about ninety-nine per cent of all animal species including our closest relatives, the apes.
Consider, for example, the question of marriage proposals. In no society on earth do they usually come from the woman or her family. Even among the most liberated of westerners, men are expected to ask and women to answer. The tradition of women asking men on Leap Year’s Day reinforces the very paucity of their opportunities: they get one day to pop the question for every 1,460 that men can do so. It is true that many modern men do not go down upon one knee, but ‘discuss’ the matter with their girlfriends as equals. Yet even so, the subject is usually first raised by the man. And in the matter of seduction itself, once more it is the male that is expected to make the first move. Women may flirt, but men pounce.
Why should this be? Sociologists will blame it on conditioning, and they are partly right. But that is not a sufficient answer, partly because in the great human experiment called the 1960s much conditioning was rejected yet the pattern survives. Besides, conditioning usually reinforces instinct rather than overrides it. As we saw in the last chapter, since an insight of Robert Trivers’s in 1972,5 biologists have had a satisfying explanation of why male animals are usually more ardent suitors than female and why there are exceptions to the rule. There seems no reason why it should not also apply to people. It is that the gender that invests the most in creating and rearing each offspring, and so forgoes most opportunities for creating and rearing other offspring, is the gender that has the least to gain from each extra mating. A peacock grants a peahen one tiny favour: a batch of sperm and nothing else. He will not guard her from other peacocks, nor feed her, nor protect a food supply for her, nor help her incubate her eggs, nor help her bring up the chicks. She will do all the work. Therefore, when she mates with him it is an unequal bargain. She brings him the promise