The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [98]
Of course, that proves nothing. It could be a coincidence that evolutionary arguments predict what does happen. There is a cautionary tale that scientists tell each other about a man who cuts the legs off a flea to test his theory that fleas’ ears are on their legs. He then tells the flea to jump and it does not, so he concludes that he was right: fleas’ ears are on their legs.
None the less, Darwinians began to think that perhaps human history might be illuminated by a beam of evolutionary light. In the mid 1980s, Laura Betzig set out to test the notion that people are sexually adapted to exploit whatever situation they encounter. She had no great hopes of success, but she believed that the best way to test the conjecture was simply to postulate the simplest prediction she could make: that men would treat power not as an end in itself but as a means to sexual and reproductive success. Looking around the modern world she was not encouraged: from Hitler to the Pope powerful men are often childless. They are so consumed by their ambitions that little time seems to be left for philandering.39
But when she examined the record of history, Betzig was stunned. Her simplistic prediction was confirmed again and again. Only in the past few centuries in the west has it failed. Not only that: in most polygamous societies there were elaborate social mechanisms to ensure that a powerful polygamist left a polygamous heir.
The six independent ‘civilizations’ of early history – Babylon, Egypt, India, China, the Aztecs and the Incas – were remarkable less for their civility than for their concentration of power. They were all ruled by men, one man at a time, whose power was arbitrary and absolute. These men were despots, meaning they could kill their subjects without fear of retribution. That vast accumulation of power was always, without exception, translated into prodigious sexual productivity. The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave ‘wives’ at his command. The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten procured three hundred and seventeen concubines and ‘droves’ of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed four thousand concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved sixteen thousand consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guarded by eunuchs. The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem. The Inca, as we have seen, kept virgins on tap throughout the kingdom.
Not only did these six emperors, each typical of his predecessors and successors, have similarly large harems, but they employed similar techniques to fill and guard them. They recruited young (usually pre-menstrual) women, kept them in highly defensible and escape-proof forts, guarded them with eunuchs, pampered them and expected them to breed the emperor’s children. Measures to enhance the fertility of the harem were common. Wet nurses, who allow women to resume ovulation by cutting short their breast-feeding periods, date from at least the code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BC: they were sung about in Sumerian lullabies. The Tang Dynasty emperors of China kept careful records of dates of menstruation and conception in the harem so as to be sure to copulate only with the most fertile concubines. Chinese emperors were also taught to conserve their semen so as to keep up their quota of two women a day, and some even complained of their onerous sexual duties. These harems could hardly have been more carefully designed as breeding machines, dedicated to the spread of emperors’ genes.40
Nor were emperors anything more than extreme examples. Laura Betzig has examined one hundred and four politically autonomous societies and found that ‘in almost every case, power predicts the size of a man’s harem