Conclusiones finales del estudio del caso

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no

meaning:

—Aristotle Onassis

Power is a great aphrodisiac:

—Henry Kissinger

In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry: The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many ^"houses of virgins^" throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain vir-gins 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. ^" Prin-cipal persons^" were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 1 00,000 people, twenty; leaders of I,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; gover-nors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 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 followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa^'s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas 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 holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men:

In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, 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 favored 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 nine-teenth-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.'

MANKIND, 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 molds, fruit flies, peacocks, and elephant seals than they are by one pecu-liar ape. But the pecupecu-liar ape is not immune to those principles.

Human beings are a product of evolution as much as any slime mold, and the revolution of the last two decades in the way scien-tists 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 bat-tles 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 bat-tles include psychological ones, to manipulate and exploit other members of the species; they are never won, for success in one gen-eration only ensures that the foes of the next gengen-eration are fitter to fight harder: Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish 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 behavior: Those who think this unjustified on the grounds that human beings are unique usually advance one of two arguments: that in humans everything about behavior is learned, and nothing is inherited; or inherited behavior is inflexible

POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN ::: 175 :::

behavior, and human beings are clearly flexible. The first argument is an exaggeration, the second false: A man does not experience lust because he learned it at his father^'s knee; a person does not feel hunger or anger because she was taught it. They are human nature:

We are born with the potential to develop lust, hunger, and anger.

We learn to direct hunger at hamburgers, anger at delayed trains, and lust at the object of our affection—when appropriate: So we

have ^"changed^" our ^"nature.^" Inherited tendencies permeate

every-thing we do, and they are flexible. There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature:

To say otherwise is like saying that the area of a field is determined by its length but not its width. Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience:

The study of human beings remained resolutely unre-formed by these ideas until a few years ago: Even now, most anthropologists and social scientists are firmly committed to the view that evolution has nothing to tell them: Human bodies are products of natural selection; but human minds and human behav-ior are products of ^"culture,^" and human culture does not reflect human nature, but the reverse. This restricts social scientists to investigating only differences between cultures and between indi-viduals—and to exaggerating them. Yet what is most interesting to me about human beings is the things that are the same, not what is different—things like grammatical language, hierarchy, romantic love, sexual jealousy, long-term bonds between the genders (^" mar-riage,^" in a sense). These are trainable instincts peculiar to our species and are just as surely the products of evolution as eyes and thumbs.'

THE POINT OF MARRIAGE

For a man, women are vehicles that can carry his genes into the next generation. For a woman, men are sources of a vital substance (sperm) that can turn their eggs into embryos. For each gender the other is a sought-after resource to be exploited: The question is,

how? One way to exploit the other gender is to round up as many as possible of them and persuade them to mate with you, then desert them, as bull elephant seals do: The opposite extreme is to find one individual and share all the duties of parenthood equally, as alba-trosses do: Every species falls somewhere on that spectrum, with its own characteristic ^"mating system.^" Where does humanity fall?

There are five ways to find out. One is to study modern peo-ple directly and describe what they do as the human mating system:

The answer is usually monogamous marriage. A second way is to look at human history and divine from our past what sexual arrange-ments are typical of our species: But history teaches a dismal lesson:

A common arrangement from our past was that rich and powerful men enslaved concubines in large harems: A third way is to look at people living in simple societies with Stone Age technologies and conjecture that they live much as our ancestors lived ten millennia ago. They tend to fall between the extremes: less polygamous than early civilizations, less monogamous than modern society: The fourth technique is to look at our closest relatives, the apes, and compare our behavior and anatomy with theirs: The answer that emerges is that men^'s testicles are not large enough for a system of promiscuity like the chimpanzee^'s, men^'s bodies are not big enough for a system of harem polygamy like the gorilla^'s (there is an iron link between harem polygamy in a species and a large size differential between male and female), and men are not as antisocial and adjust-ed to fidelity as the monogamous gibbon. We are somewhere in between. The fifth method is to compare humans with other animals that share our highly social habits: with colonial birds, monkeys, and dolphins: As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery:

It is at least possible to rule out some options. There are characteristically human things that we do, such as form lasting bonds between sexual partners, even when polygamous: We are not like sage grouse whose marriages last for minutes. Nor are we polyandrous, like the jacana or lily-trotter, a tropical water bird that has big fierce females that control harems of small domesticated males. There is only one truly polyandrous society on Earth; it is in

POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN ::: 177:::

Tibet and consists of women who marry two or more brothers simultaneously in an attempt to put together a family unit that is economically viable in a harsh land where men herd yaks to support women. The junior brother^'s ambition is to leave and obtain his own wife, so polyandry is plainly a second-best outcome for him.' Nor are we like the robin or the gibbon, which are strictly territori-al, each pair monopolizing and defending a home range sufficient to live their whole lives within. We build garden fences, but even our homes are often shared with lodgers or fellow apartment dwellers, and most of our lives are spent on some form of common ground, at work, shopping, traveling, entertaining ourselves: People live in groups.

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 antipolygamy laws and it flourishes. Utah has a tradition of theo-logically sanctioned polygamy and in recent years has been less forceful about prosecuting polygamists, so the habit has reemerged.

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 humans having a mat-ing system at all: They do what they want, adaptmat-ing their behavior to the prevailing opportunity.'

WHEN MALES POUNCE AND FEMALES FLIRT Until recently, evolutionists had a fairly simple view of mating sys-tems 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 nonetheless true that males are generally seducers and females the seduced:

Humanity shares this profile of ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females with about 99 percent of all animal species, includ-ing 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 ask-ing 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 on one knee but ^"discuss^" the matter with their girl-friends 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 who is expected to make the first move. Women may flirt, but men pounce:

Why should this be? Sociologists will blame it on condi-tioning, and they are partly right. But that is not a sufficient answer 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.

Since an insight of Robert Trivers^'s in 1972,' biologists have had a satisfying explanation for why male animals are usually more ardent suitors than females and why there are exceptions to the rule.

There seems to be no reason why it should not also apply to peo-ple. The gender that invests the most in creating and rearing the offspring, and so forgoes most opportunities for creating and rear-ing other offsprrear-ing, is the gender that has the least to gain from each extra mating. A peacock grants a peahen one tiny favor: a batch of sperm and nothing else. He will not guard her from other peacocks, feed her, protect a food supply for her, help her incubate her eggs, or help her bring up the chicks. She will do all the work.

POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN ::: 179:::

Therefore, when she mates with him, it is an unequal bargain. She brings him the promise of a gigantic single-handed effort to make his sperm into new peacocks; he brings just the tiniest—though seminal—contribution: She could choose any peacock she likes and has no need to choose more than one. At the margin, he loses noth-ing and gains much by matnoth-ing with every female who comes along;

she loses time and energy for a futile gain. Every time he seduces a fresh female, he wins the jackpot of her investment in his sons and daughters. Every time she seduces a fresh peacock, she wins a little extra sperm that she probably does not need. No wonder he is keen on quantity of mates, and she on quality.

In more human terms, men can father another child just about every time they copulate with a different woman, whereas women can bear the child of only one man at a time: It is a fair bet that Casanova left more descendants than the Whore of Babylon.

This basic asymmetry between the genders goes right back to the difference in size of a sperm and an egg. In 1948 a British scientist named A. J. Bateman allowed fruit flies to mate with one another at will. He found that the most successful females were not much more prolific than the least successful, but the most pro-lific males were far more successful than the least propro-lific males.' The asymmetry has been greatly enhanced by the evolution of female parental care, which reaches its zenith in mammals. A female mammal gives birth to a gigantic baby that has been nurtured inside her for a long time; a male can become a father in seconds.

Women cannot increase their fecundity by taking more mates; men can. And the fruit fly rule holds. Even in modern monogamous societies, men are far more likely to have lots of children than women are. For instance, men who marry twice are more likely to sire children by two wives than women who marry twice are to have children by both husbands.'

Infidelity and prostitution are special cases of polygamy in which no marriage bond forms between the partners. This puts a man^'s wife and his mistresses in different categories with respect to the investment that he is likely to make in his children: The man who can sufficiently arrange his business affairs to make time,

opportunity, and money available for supporting two families is as rich as he is rare.

FEMINISM AND PHALAROPES

The rule that parental investment dictates which gender will attempt polygamy can be tested by looking at its exceptions. In sea horses the female has a sort of penis that she uses to inject eggs into the male^'s body, neatly reversing the usual method of mating.

The eggs develop there, and as the theory predicts, it is the female sea horse who courts the male. There are about thirty species of birds, of which the phalaropes and jacanas are the best-known examples, in which the small dowdy male is courted by the large, aggressive female, and it is the male that broods the eggs and rears the chicks.'

Phalaropes and other seducer-female species are the excep-tions that prove the rule. I remember watching a whole flock of female phalaropes badgering a poor male so intensely he almost drowned. And why? Because their mates,were quietly sitting on their eggs for them, so these females had nothing better to do than look for second mates. Where males invest more time or energy in the care of the young, females take the initiative in courtship, and vice versa:'

In humans, the asymmetry is clear enough: nine months of pregnancy set against five minutes of fun: (I exaggerate:) If the bal-ance of such investment determines sex roles in seduction, then it comes as no surprise that men seduce women rather than vice versa.

This fact suggests that a highly polygamous human society represents a victory for men, whereas a monogamous one suggests a victory for women. But this is misleading. A polygamous society primarily repre-sents a victory for one or a few men over all other men. Most men in highly polygamous societies are condemned to celibacy.

In any case, no moral conclusions of any kind can be drawn from evolution. The asymmetry in prenatal sexual investment between the genders is a fact of life, not a moral outrage: It is ^"

nat-POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN ::: 181 :::

ural:^" It is terribly tempting, as human beings, to embrace such an evolutionary scenario because it ^"justifies^" a prejudice in favor of male philandering, or to reject it because it ^"undermines^" the pres-sure for sexual equality: But it does neither: It says absolutely noth-ing about what is right and wrong: I am trynoth-ing to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right: Murder is ^"natural^" in the sense that our ape relatives commit it regularly, as apparently did our human ancestors: Prejudice, hate, violence, cruelty—all are more or less part of our nature, and all can be effectively countered by the right kind of nurture: Nature is not inflexible but malleable: More-over, the most natural thing of all about evolution is that some natures will be pitted against others: Evolution does not lead to Utopia: It leads to a land in which what is best for one man may be the worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be the worst for a man. One or the other will be condemned to an

ural:^" It is terribly tempting, as human beings, to embrace such an evolutionary scenario because it ^"justifies^" a prejudice in favor of male philandering, or to reject it because it ^"undermines^" the pres-sure for sexual equality: But it does neither: It says absolutely noth-ing about what is right and wrong: I am trynoth-ing to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right: Murder is ^"natural^" in the sense that our ape relatives commit it regularly, as apparently did our human ancestors: Prejudice, hate, violence, cruelty—all are more or less part of our nature, and all can be effectively countered by the right kind of nurture: Nature is not inflexible but malleable: More-over, the most natural thing of all about evolution is that some natures will be pitted against others: Evolution does not lead to Utopia: It leads to a land in which what is best for one man may be the worst for another man, or what is best for a woman may be the worst for a man. One or the other will be condemned to an