PRUEBA DE HIPÓTESIS

Dimity Reed is an architect and writer who lives in Mel- bourne, not far from where I live. She is also the mother of Josh. At nineteen, Josh became seriously ill. The diagnosis was kidney failure. He went on dialysis, but over the next

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three years, his health gradually deteriorated. He was on a waiting list for a 'transplant; so, however, were many others whose condition was just as bad or worse. After Josh gradu- ated from university his uncertain health caused him to miss out on a job he wanted. Dimity had read somewhere that parents may be able to donate kidneys to a child. She sug- gested the possibility to Josh's doctor. He told her that while she could live in good health with one remaining kidney, if something were to happen to it, she could die. She replied: 'We're a family of optimists'. That was three years ago. Dim- ity and Josh now have one healthy kidney each.8

Renuka Natarajan lives in the village of Villivakam, near Madras, in India. Renuka is a mother who, like Dimity Reed, has given up her kidney to help her child. But Renuka's child did not have kidney disease. She and her husband had no work. They had debts, and they were worried that, without a dowry, their daughter would be unable to marry. Renuka's husband saw an advertisement in the local newspapers offer- ing about $1,500 for a kidney. That was the equivalent of about eight year's wages for an Indian villager. Renuka sold the kidney, paid off some debts, and set aside some money for her daughter's dowry. But her operation did not go well. She was in pain afterwards, and had to spend some of the money she had been paid on further medical treatment.9

These two stories come from worlds that are far apart, culturally, economically and geographically; but they reveal the same readiness of a mother to make a significant sacrifice for a child. There is nothing in such stories to surprise any evolutionary biologist. We do not pass on our genes simply by spreading our seeds and leaving the resulting offspring to fend for themselves as best they can. Having children is only the first step. If our genes are to survive, our children must themselves live long enough to have their own children, who must in turn have children, and so on. Immediately, therefore,

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we can see that we must care for one very significant group of other beings: our children. Not every parent would undergo a major operation and give up a kidney for a child, but the fact that some do indicates the extent to which caring for our children can lead us to act unselfishly, for the good of another person.

That people often put the interests of their children ahead of their own interests is something we take for granted. We notice it only in extreme cases, like those of Dimity and Renuka, or in the opposite cases, when parents abandon or neglect their children. The love of parents for their children is so basic to human nature that when people occasionally behave in aberrant ways that show neglect or lack of concern for their children, we fail to comprehend how a mother or father can lack something that is so natural to us. We will be satisfied only if we can find an explanation as to why they are missing something that the rest of us take for granted - and the explanation is itself often in terms of a deprived childhood, thus testifying once again to the importance we place on family life for both the parents and the children. We are (and were, even in more puritanical times) more ready to pardon mothers who resort to prostitution to feed their children, than mothers who neglect or abandon them.

Around the turn of the century, Edward Westermarck gathered all the information he could find on the ethical sys- tems of different societies into a bulky two-volume work called The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. In this he points out that a mother's duty to look after her children has seemed so obvious that most anthropological accounts scarcely bother to mention it. What of a father's duty to look after his chil- dren? Although Westermarck says that the duty of a married man to support and protect his family is as widely recognized as that of a mother to care for her children, he does not say that the father's duty is taken for granted, as he does in the

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case of a mother's duty to her children. Evolutionary theory gives grounds for believing that mothers might generally be more prepared to make sacrifices for their children than fathers. First, mothers can be sure that the children for whom they care are indeed their genetic children; fathers often cannot. Second, barring multiple births, or the application of modern reproductive technology of the kind now used with prize cows, women are limited in the number of children they can have to an absolute maximum of one every nine months between the ages of approximately thirteen and forty-five (or possibly just a few more, since she may have some twins or other multiple births). There is no obvious physical limit to the number of children a man can have. Thus men might leave more descendants if they spread their seed widely and give no support to their offspring. Some of the mothers could succeed in rearing the children alone or with the support of other males. (I am not, of course, suggesting that males consciously pursue this strategy in order to have more children; only that this pattern of behaviour, among males, could be passed on to future generations of male descendants.)

On the other hand, a woman who abandoned her children without caring for them would be much less likely to have descendants with a similar pattern of behaviour. In addition to women's inability to produce as many children as a male, f more of her children would die, because, until very recently, infants needed to be breastfed to survive. The biological facts of pregnancy mean that a woman necessarily has a larger investment of time and energy in each child than the father of the child need have.

Nevertheless, that fathers do care for their children is undeniable. David Gilmore, a comparative anthropologist, studied a wide range of societies in order to discover if there are any universal traits which are regarded as 'manly'. He found that having children, and providing for and protecting

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one's family, are universally respected in a man.10 In general,

then, we can speak of parental care, and not only maternal care.

The readiness of parents to put the interests of their chil- dren ahead of their own interests is a striking counter-example to the general thesis that people are selfish. When parents comfort a crying baby, they are not doing it because they are thinking of the time, twenty or thirty years ahead, when the child may be able to support them in their old age. They are responding directly from their love for the baby and their empathy with the picture of misery that a crying baby pre- sents - especially when it is your crying baby. To provide comforts for their children, parents go without things that they need. If necessary, to see that their children are well fed, well clothed and well educated, parents go without the holi- day they would like to take or the new car they would like to drive. 'I always wanted the best for you', they say in expla- nation to their children, and it is usually true. In many coun- tries, prudent people take out life insurance so that their families will have some money if they should die. Paying an annual premium means that they have less money to spend now than they would otherwise have. There is nothing odd about that — except that they are not being 'prudent' for themselves at all. This very common precaution makes sense only on the assumption that we care for the welfare of at least one other being.

To be effective parents we must be able to understand what our children need, and we must want to give them what they need. I may have just eaten a large meal; the thought of eating more makes me ill; but if I find that my child is hungry, I will try to get some more food. This is the first step beyond egoism. The nineteenth century British philosopher John Stuart Mill described the family as 'a school of sympa- thy, tenderness and loving forgetfulness of self." The full

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story is not quite so simple, but the importance of sympathy, tenderness and loving forgetfulness of self in the family is, in one sense, exactly what biological theories tell us to expect. Biologists, however, will only classify an action as altruistic or unselfish if it reduces one's 'reproductive fitness' - that is, one's prospects of leaving descendants. Hence they often fail to acknowledge that what happens between parents and chil- dren is a step beyond egoism at all.