The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [97]
The alliances of males and females need not be based on relatedness. Brothers tend to help each other because they are related; what’s good for your brother’s genes is good for yours since you share half your genes with him. But there is another way to ensure that altruism pays: reciprocity. If an animal wants help from another he could promise to return the favour in the future. So long as his promise is credible – so long, in other words, as individuals recognize each other and live together long enough to collect their debts – a male can get other males to help him in a sexual mission. This seems to be what happens in dolphins, whose sex life is only just becoming known. Thanks to the work of Richard Connor, Rachel Smolker and their colleagues, we now know that groups of male dolphins kidnap single females, bully them and display to them with choreographed acrobatics, then enjoy sexual monopoly over them. Once the female has given birth, the alliances of males lose interest in her and she is free to return to an all-female group. These male alliances are often temporary and stitched together on a you-help-me-and-I’ll-help-you basis.36
The more intelligent the species, and the more fluid the coalitions, the less an ambitious male need be limited by his strength. Buffaloes and lions win power in trials of strength. Dolphins and chimpanzees must not be weak if they are to win power, but can rely much more on their ability to stitch together winning coalitions of males. In people, there is virtually no connection between strength and power, at least not since the invention of action-at-a-distance weapons like the sling shot, as Goliath learnt the hard way. Wealth, cunning, political skill and experience lead to power among men. From Hannibal to Bill Clinton, men gain power by putting together coalitions of allies. In mankind wealth became a way of putting together such alliances of power. The rewards, for other animals, are largely sexual. For men?
Highly Sexed Emperors
In the late 1970s, an anthropologist in California, Mildred Dickemann, decided to try to apply some Darwinian ideas to human history and culture. She simply set out to see if the kinds of predictions that evolutionists were making for other animals also applied to human beings. What she found was that in the highly stratified oriental societies of early history, people seemed to behave exactly as you would expect them to do if they knew that their goal on earth was to leave as many descendants as possible. In other words, men tended to seek polygamy, whereas women strove to marry upwards with men of high status. She added that a lot of cultural customs – dowries, female infanticide, the claustration of women so that their virginity could not be damaged – were consistent with this pattern. For example, in India, high castes practised more female infanticide than low, because there were fewer opportunities to export daughters into still higher castes. In other words, mating was a trade: male power and resources for female reproductive potential.37
About the same time as Dickemann’s studies, John Hartung, at Harvard University, began to look at patterns of inheritance. He hypothesized that a rich man (or woman) in a polygamous society would tend to leave his money to a son rather than a daughter, because a rich son could give him more grandchildren than