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ered by forest—at Hadar in Ethiopia and Olduvai in Tanzania. Presumably, these relatively open habitats favored larger groups as they did for chimps and baboons, the two other open-country primates.

As socioecologists find again and again, the more open the habitat, the bigger the group, both because big groups can be more vigilant in spotting predators and because the food is usually found in a patchier pattern. For reasons that are not especially persuasive (principally the apparently great size difference of males and females), most anthropologists believe the early australopithecines lived in single-male harems, like gorillas and some species of baboon."

But then, sometime around 3 million years ago, the hominid lineage split in two (or more). Robert Foley believes the increasingly seasonal pattern of rainfall made the life-style of the original ape-man untenable, for its diet of fruit, seeds, and perhaps insects became increasingly rare in dry seasons. One line of its descendants developed especially robust jaws and teeth to deal with a diet increasingly dominated by coarse plants. Australopithecus robus-tus, or nutcracker marl, could then subsist on coarse seeds and leaves during lean seasons. Its anatomy supplies meager clues, but Foley guesses that nutcrackers lived in multimale groups, like chimps:" s

The other line, however, embarked on an entirely different path: The animals known as Homo took to a diet of meat. By I.6

million years ago, when Homo erectus was living in Africa, he was without question the most carnivorous monkey or ape the world had ever known. That much is clear from the bones he left at his campsites. He may have scavenged them from lion kills or perhaps begun to use tools to kill game himself. But increasingly, in lean seasons, he could rely on a supply of meat: As Foley and P. C: Lee put it, "While the causes of meat-eating are ecological, the consequences would be distributional and social. " To hunt, or even more, to seek lion kills, required a man to range farther from home and to rely on his companions for coordinated help. Whether as a result of this or coincidentally, his body embarked on a series of coordinated gradual changes. The shape of the skull began to retain more POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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juvenile shape into adulthood, with a bigger brain and a smaller jaw.

Maturity was gradually delayed so that children grew slowly into adulthood and depended on their parents longer. 26

Then for more than a million years people lived in a way that couldn 't have changed much: They inhabited grasslands and woodland savannas, first in Africa, later in Eurasia, and eventually in Australasia and the Americas. They hunted animals for food, gathered fruits and seeds, and were highly social within each tribe but hostile toward members of other tribes. Don Symons refers to this combination of time and place as the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness, " or EEA, and he believes it is central to human psychology: People cannot be adapted to the present or the future; they can only be adapted to the past. But he readily admits that it is hard to be precise about exactly what lives people lived in the EEA. They probably lived in small bands; they were perhaps nomadic; they ate both meat and vegetable matter; they presumably shared the features that are universal among modern humans of all- cultures: a pair bond as an institution in which to rear children, romantic love, jealousy and sexually induced male-male violence, a female preference for men of high status, a male preference for young females, warfare between bands, and so on.

There was almost certainly a sexual division of labor between hunting men and gathering women, something unique to people and a few birds of prey. To this day, among the Ache people of Paraguay, men specialize in acquiring those foods that a woman encumbered with a baby could not manage to—meat and honey, for example!'

Kim Hill, at the University of New Mexico, argues that there was no consistent EEA, but he nonetheless agrees that there were universal features of human life that are not present today but that have hangover effects. Everybody knew or had heard of nearly all the people they were likely to meet in their lives: There were no strangers, a fact that had enormous importance for the history of trade and crime prevention, among other things. The lack of anonymity meant that charlatans and tricksters could rarely get away with their deceptions for long.

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Another group of biologists at Michigan rejects these EEA arguments altogether with two arguments. First, the most critical feature of the EEA is still with us: It is other people: Our brains grew so big not to make tools but to psychologize one another. The lesson of socioecology is that our mating system is determined not by ecology but by other people—by members of the same gender and by members of the other gender. It is the need to outwit and dupe and help and teach one another that drove us to be ever more intelligent.

Second, we were designed above all else to be adaptable. We were designed to have all sorts of alternative strategies to achieve our ends. Even today, existing hunter-gatherer societies show enormous ecological and social variation, and they are probably an unrepresentative sample because they mostly occupy deserts and forests, which were not mankind 's primary habitat. Even in the time of Homo trectus, let alone more modern people, there may have been specialized fishing, shore-dwelling, hunting, or plant-gathering cultures. Some of these may well have afforded opportunities for wealth accumulation and polygamy. In recent memory there was a preagricultural culture among the salmon-fishing Indians of the Pacific Northwest of America that was highly polygamous: If the local hunter-gathering economy favored it, men were capable of being polygamous and women were capable of joining harems over the protests of the preceding co-wives: If not, then men were capable of being good fathers and women jealous monopolizers: In other words, mankind has many potential mating systems, one for each circumstance.28

This is supported by the fact that larger, more intelligent and more social animals are generally more flexible in their mating systems than smaller, dumber, or more solitary ones. Chimps go from small feeding bands to big groups depending on the nature of the food supply. Turkeys do the same. Coyotes hunt in packs when their food is deer but hunt alone when their food is mice. These food-induced social patterns themselves induce slightly different mating patterns.

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MONEY AND SEX

But if humanity is a flexible species, then the EEA is in a sense still with us: Where people in twentieth-century societies act adaptively or where power raises reproductive success, it could be because adaptations shaped in the EEA (wherever and whenever that was) are still working. The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but th 'e human ones are not. We are still consumed by gossip about people we know or have heard about: Men are still obsessed with power-seeking and building or dominating male-male coalitions: Human institutions cannot be understood without understanding their internal politics. Modern monogamy may be just one of the many tricks in our mating-system repertoire, like harem polygamy in ancient China or gerontocratic polygamy in modern Australian aborigines, where men wait years to marry and then in their dotage enjoy huge harems:

If so, then the "sex drive " that we all acknowledge within us may be much more specific than we realize. Given the fact that men can always increase their reproductive success by philandering, whereas women cannot, we should suspect that men are apt to be behaviorally designed to take advantage of opportunities for polygamy and that some of the things they do have that end in mind: There is broad agreement among evolutionary biologists that most of our ancestors lived in a condition of only occasional polygamy during the Pleistocene period (the two million years of modern human existence before agriculture): Societies that hunt and gather today are not much different from modern Western society: Most men are monogamous, many are adulterous, and a few manage to be polygamous, sharing perhaps up to five wives in extreme cases: Among the Aka pygmies of the Central African Republic, who hunt for food in the forest using nets, 15 percent of men have more than one wife, a pattern typical of foraging societies. 29

One of the reasons hunting and gathering cannot support much polygamy is that luck, more than skill, plays a large part in

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hunters' success. Even the best hunter would often return empty-handed and would be reliant on his fellow men to share what they had killed. This equitable sharing of hunted food is characteristic of these people (in most other social hunting species there is a free-for-all) and is the clearest example of a habit of "reciprocal altruism" on which the whole of society sometimes appears to be based. A lucky hunter kills more than he can eat, so he loses little by sharing it with his companions but instead gains a lot because next time, if he is unlucky, the favor will be repaid by those with whom he shared now. Trading favors in this way was the ancient ancestor of the monetary economy. But because meat could not be stored and because luck did not last, hunter-gatherer societies did not allow the accumulation of wealth.'°

With the invention of agriculture, the opportunity for some males to be polygamous arrived with a vengeance. Farming opened the way for one man to grow much more powerful than his peers by accumulating a surplus of food, whether grain or domestic animals, with which to buy the labor of other men. The labor of other men allowed him to increase his surplus still more: For the first time having wealth was the best way to get wealth. Luck does not determine why one farmer reaps more than his neighbor to the same degree that it determines the success of a hunter: Agriculture suddenly allowed the best farmer in the band to have not only the largest hoard of food but the most reliable supply. He had no need to share it freely, for he needed no favor in return. Among the

//Gana San people of Namibia, who have given up their !Kung San neighbors ' hunting life for farming, there is less food sharing and more political dominance within each band. Now, by owning the best or biggest fields or by working harder or by having an extra ox or by being a craftsman with a rare skill, a man could grow ten times as rich as his neighbor. Accordingly, he could acquire more wives. Simple agricultural societies often see harems of up to one hundred women per top man."

Pastoral societies are, almost without exception, traditionally polygamous. It is not hard to see why. A herd of cattle or sheep is almost as easy to tend if it contains fifty animals as twenty-five.

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Such scale economies allow a man'to accumulate wealth at an ever-increasing rate. Positive feedback leads to inequalities of wealth, which leads to inequalities of sexual opportunity: The reason some Mukogodo men in Kenya have higher reproductive success than others is that they are richer; being richer enables them to marry early and marry often."

By the time " civilization " had arrived, in six different parts of the globe independently (from Babylon in 1700 B.C. to the Incas in A.D: 1500), emperors had thousands of women in their harems. Hunting and warrior skills had previously earned a man an extra wife or two, then wealth had earned him ten or more. But wealth had another advantage, too. Not only could it buy wives directly, it could also buy " power. " It is noteworthy that it is hard to distinguish between wealth and power before the ti me of the Renaissance. Until then there was no such thing as an economic sector independent of the power structure. A man's livelihood and his allegiance were owed to the same social superior." Power is, roughly speaking, the ability to call upon allies to do your bidding, and that depended strictly on wealth (with a little help from violence):

Power seeking is characteristic of all social mammals. Cape buffalo rise within the hierarchy of the herd to positions of dominance that bring sexual rewards. Chimpanzees, too, strive to become "alpha male" in the troop and in so doing increase the number of matings they perform: But like men, chimps do not rise entirely on brute strength: They use cunning, and above all they form alliances. The tribal warfare between groups of chimps is both a cause and a consequence of the male tendency to build alliances.

In Jane Goodall 's studies the males of one chimp group were well aware when they were outnumbered by the males of another group and deliberately sought opportunities to single out individual males from the enemy. The bigger and more cohesive the male alliance, the more effective it was."

Coalitions of males are found in a number of species. In turkeys, brotherhoods of males display competitively on a lek. If they win, the females will mate with the senior brother: In lions,

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brotherhoods combine to drive out the males from a pride and take it over themselves; they then kill the babies to bring the lionesses back into season, and all the brothers share the reward of mating with all the females. In acorn woodpeckers, groups of brothers live with groups of sisters in a free-love commune that controls one

" granary tree, " into which holes have been drilled that hold up to thirty thousand acorns to see the birds through the winter: The young, who are nieces and nephews of all the birds of whom they are not daughters and sons, must leave the group, form sisterhoods and brotherhoods themselves, and take over some other granary tree, driving out the previous owners."

The alliances of males and females need not be based on relatedness: Brothers tend to help one another 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 favor in the future. As long as his promise is credible—in other words, as long 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:'6

The more intelligent the species and the more fluid the coalitions, the less an ambitious male need be limited by his strength: Buffalos 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 form 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-POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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distance weapons such as the slingshot, as Goliath learned 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 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 upward with men of high status: Dickemann 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 practiced more female infanticide than low castes because there were fewer opportunities to export daughters io still higher castes: In other words, mating was a trade: male power and resources for female reproductive potential:"

About the same time as Dickemann 's studies, John Hartung of Harvard University began to look at patterns of inheritance. He hypothesized that a rich person in a polygamous society would tend to leave his or her money to a son rather than a daughter because a rich son could provide more grandchildren than a Oich daughter: This is because the son can have children by several wives, whereas a daughter cannot increase the number of her children even if she takes many husbands: Therefore, the more polygamous a society, the more likely it will show male-biased inheritance: A sur-

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vey of four hundred societies found overwhelming support for Hartung's hypothesis: 3e

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 one another 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 in their legs: Nonetheless, 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; powerful men are often childless. Hitler was so consumed by ambition that he had little time left for philandering.' 9

But when she examined the record of history, Betzig was stunned. Her simplistic prediction that power is used for sexual success 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, Aztec Mexico, and Inca Peru—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. Without excep-tiop, that vast accumulation of power was always translated into prodigious sexual productivity. The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave " wives " at his command. The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten procured 317 concubines and " droves" of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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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 Atahualpa, 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 prepubertal) 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 B:C.; 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:'°

Nor were emperors anything more than extreme examples.

Laura Betzig has examined 104 politically autonomous societies and found that "in almost every case, power predicts the size of a man 's harem: "" Small kings had one hundred women in their harems; great kings, one thousand, and emperors, five thousand.

Conventional history would have us believe that such harems were merely one among many of the rewards that awaited the successful seeker of power, along with all the other accoutrements of despotism: servants, palaces, gardens, music, silk, rich food, and spectator sports. But women are fairly high on the list. Betzig 's point is that it is one thing to find that powerful emperors were polygamous but quite another to discover that they each adopted similar measures to enhance their reproductive success within the harem:

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wet nursing, fertility monitoring, claustration of the concubines, and so on. These are not the measures of men interested in sexual excess: They are the measures of men interested in producing many children.

However, if reproductive success was one of the perks of despotic power, one peculiar feature stands out: All six of the early emperors were monogamously married. In other words, they always raised one mate above all the others as a "queen." This is characteristic of human polygamous societies: Wherever there are harems, there is a senior wife-who is treated differently from the others: She is usually noble-born, and crucially, she alone is allowed to bear legitimate heirs: Solomon had a thousand concubines and one queen: Betzig investigated imperial Rome and found the distinction between monogamous marriage and polygamous infidelity extending , from the top to the bottom of Roman society. Roman emperors were famous for their sexual prowess, even while marrying single empresses: Julius Caesar 's affairs with women were "commonly described as extravagant " (Suetonius). Of Augustus, Suetonius wrote, "The charge of being a womanizer stuck, and as an elderly man he is said to have still harbored a passion for deflower-ing girls—who were collected for him by his wife: " Tiberius 's

" criminal lusts" were " worthy of an oriental tyrant " (Tacitus).

Caligula "made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome "

(Dio), including his sisters. Even Claudius was pimped for by his wife, who gave him "sundry housemaids to lie with " (Dio): When Nero floated down the Tiber, he "had a row of temporary brothels erected on the shore " (Suetonius). As in the case of China, though not so methodically, breeding seems to have been a principal function of concubines.

Nor were emperors special: When a rich patrician named Gordian died leading a rebellion in favor of his father against the emperor Maximin in A:D: 237, Gibbon commemorated him thus:

" Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested to the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than osten-tation. "

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" Ordinary " Roman nobles kept hundreds of slaves: Yet, while virtually none of the female slaves had jobs around the house, female slaves commanded high prices if sold in youth: Male slaves were usually forced to remain celibate, so why were the Roman nobles buying so many young female slaves? To breed other slaves, say most historians. Yet that should have made pregnant slaves command high prices; they did not: If a slave turned out not to be a virgin, the buyer had a legal case against the seller: And why insist on chastity among the male slaves if breeding is the function of female slaves? There is little doubt that those Roman writers who equate slaves with concubines were telling the truth: The unre-stricted sexual availability of slaves "is treated as a commonplace in Greco-Roman literature from Homer on; only modern writers have managed largely to ignore it. "4z

Moreover, Roman nobles freed many of their slaves at suspiciously young ages and with suspiciously large endowments of wealth. This cannot have been an economically sensible decision: Freed slaves became rich and numerous: Narcissus was the richest man of his day. Most slaves who were freed had been born in their masters ' homes, whereas slaves in the mines or on farms were rarely freed: There seems little doubt that Roman nobles were freeing their illegitimate sons, bred of female slaves."

When Betzig turned her attention to medieval Christendom, she discovered that the phenomenon of monogamous marriage and polygamous mating was so entrenched that it required some disinterring. Polygamy became more secret, but it did not expire: In medieval times the census shows a sex ratio in the coun-tryside that was heavily male-biased because so many women were

" employed " in the castles and monasteries: Their jobs were those of serving maids of various kinds, but they formed a loose sort of

" harem" whose size depended clearly on the wealth and power of the castle 's owner: In some cases ,historians and authors were more or less explicit in admitting that castles contained "gynoeciums, "

where lived the owner 's harem in secluded luxury: Count Baudouin, patron of a literary cleric named Lambert,

" was buried with twenty-three bastards in attendance as well as ten legitimate daughters and sons. " His bedchamber had access to the

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servant girls ' quarters and to the rooms of adolescent girls upstairs.

It had access, too, to the warming room, "a veritable incubator for suckling infants. " Meanwhile, many medieval peasant men were lucky to marry before middle age and had few opportunities for fornication."

THE REWARDS OF VIOLENCE

If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause and reward of violence. This is presumably the reason that the early Church became so obsessed with matters of sex. It recognized sexual competition to be one of the principal causes of murder and mayhem. The gradual synonymy of sex and sin in Christendom is surely based more on the fact that sex often leads to trouble rather than that there is anything inherently sinful about sex. 4f Consider the case of the Pitcairn Islanders. In 1790 nine mutineers from HMS Bounty landed on Pitcairn along with six male and thirteen female Polynesians. Thousands of miles from the nearest habitation, unknown to the world, they set about building a life on the little island. Notice the imbalance: fifteen men and thirteen women. When the colony was discovered eighteen years later, ten of the women had survived and only one of the men. Of the other men, one had committed suicide, one had died, and twelve had been murdered: The survivor was simply the last man left standing in an orgy of violence motivated entirely by sexual competition. He promptly underwent a conversion to Christianity and prescribed monogamy for Pitcairn society. Until the 1930s the colony prospered and good genealogical records were kept. Studies of these show that the prescription worked. Apart from rare and occasional adultery, the Pitcairners were and remain monogamous. 46

Monogamy, enforced by law, religion, or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men. According to Tacitus, the Germanic tribes that so frustrated several Roman emperors attributed their success partly to the fact that they were a POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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monogamous society and therefore able to direct their aggression outward (though no such explanation applied to the polygamous and successful Romans): No man was allowed more than one wife, so no man had an incentive to kill a fellow tribesman to take his wife. Not that socially imposed monogamy need extend to captive slaves. In the nineteenth century in Borneo, one tribe, the Iban, dominated the tribal wars of the island. Unlike their neighbors, the Iban were monogamous, which both prevented the accumulation of sullen bachelors in their ranks and motivated them to feats of great daring with the prize of foreign female slaves as reward."

One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence.

Until the 1970s primatologists were busy confirming our prejudices about peaceable apes living in nonviolent societies. Then they began to observe the rare but more sinister side of chimp life: The males of a chimpanzee "tribe" sometimes conduct violent campaigns against the males of another tribe, seeking out and killing their enemies: This habit is very different from the territoriality of many animals, who are content to expel intruders. The prize may be to seize the enemy territory, but that is a small reward for so dangerous a business: A far richer reward awaits the successful male alliance: young females of the defeated group join the victors. 48

If war is something we inherited directly from the hostility between groups of male apes over female apes, with territory as merely a means to the end—sex—then it follows that tribal people must be going to war over women rather than territory. For a long time anthropologists insisted that war was fought over scarce material resources, in particular protein, which was often in short supply.

So when Napoleon Chagnon, trained in this tradition, went to Venezuela to study the tribal Yanomamo in the 1960s, he was in for a shock: " These people were not fighting over what I was trained to believe they were fighting over—scarce resources. They were fighting over women. "" Or at least so they said. There is a tradition in anthropology that you should not believe what people tell you, so Chagnon was ridiculed for believing them. Or as he puts it, "You are allowed to admit the stomach as a source of war but not the gonads. " Chagnon went back again and again and eventually accu-

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mulated a terrifying set of data that proves beyond doubt that men who kill other men (unokais) have more wives, independent of their social standing, than men who do not become murderers.'°

Among the Yanomamo, war and violence are both primarily about sex: War between two neighboring villages breaks out over the abduction of a woman or in retaliation for an attack that had such a motive, and it always results in women changing hands: The most common cause of violence within a village is also sexual jealousy; a village that is too small is likely to be raided for women, but a village that is too large usually breaks up over adultery.

Women are the currency and reward of male violence in the Yanomamo, and death is common. By the age of forty, two-thirds of the people have lost a close relative to murder—not that this dulls the pain and fear of murder. To Yanomamo who leave their forests, the existence in the outside world of laws that prevent chronic murder is miraculous and tremendously desirable. Likewise, the Greeks fondly remembered the replacement of revenge by justice as a milestone, through the legend of the trial of Orestes.

According to Aeschylus, Orestes killed Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, but the Furies were persuaded by Athena to accept the court ' s verdict and end the system of blood feuds." Thomas Hobbes did not exaggerate when he listed among the features of life of primitive mankind " continual fear and danger of violent death"; though he was much less correct in the second and more familiar part of the sentence: "and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. "

Chagnon now believes that the conventional wisdom—people only fight over scarce resources—misses the point. If resources are scarce, then people fight over them. If not, they do not: "Why bother, " he says, "to fight for mangango nuts when the only point of having mangango nuts is so that you can have women: Why not fight over women? " Most human societies, he believes, are not touching some ceiling of resource limitation. The Yanomamo could easily clear larger gardens from the forest to grow more plantain trees, but then they would have too much to eat.' Z

There is nothing especially odd about the Yanomamo. All POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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studies of preliterate societies done before national governments were able to impose their laws upon them revealed routinely high levels of violence: One study estimated that one-quarter of all men were killed in such societies by other men: As for the motives, sex is dominant:

The founding myth of Western culture, Homer' s Iliad, is a story that begins with a war over the abduction of a woman, Helen.

Historians have long considered the abduction of Helen to Troy to be no more than a pretext for territorial confrontation between the Greeks and the Trojans: But can we be so confidently condescending? Perhaps the Yanomamo really do go to war over women, as they say they do. Perhaps Agamemnon 's Greeks did, too, as Homer said they did. The Iliad opens with and is dominated by a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the cause of which is Agamemnon's insistence on confiscating a concubine, Briseis, from Achilles in compensation for having to give back his own concubine, Chry-seis, to her priest-father who has enlisted Apollo's aid against the Greeks: This dissension in the ranks, caused by a dispute over a woman, nearly loses the Greeks the whole war, which in turn has been caused by a dispute over a woman:

In preagricultural societies, violence may well have been a route to sexual success, especially in times of turmoil: In many different cultures the captives taken in war have tended to be women rather than men. But echoes reach into modern times. Armies have often been motivated as much by the opportunities that victory would present for rape as they have been by patriotism or fear.

Generals, recognizing this, turned blind eyes to the excesses of their troops and were sure to provide camp followers: Even in this century, access to prostitutes has been a more or less recognized purpose of shore leave in navies: And rape accompanies war still. In Bangladesh, during a nine-month occupation by west Pakistani troops in 1971, up to 400,000 women may have been raped by soldiers." In Bosnia in 1992, the reports of organized rape camps for Serbian soldiers became too frequent to ignore. Don Brown, an anthropologist in Santa Barbara, recalls his days in the army: "Men talked about sex night and day; they never talked about power.'

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MONOGAMOUS DEMOCRATS

The nature of the human male, then, is to take opportunities, if they are granted him, for polygamous mating and to use wealth, power, and violence as means to sexual ends in the competition with other men—though usually not at the expense of sacrificing a secure monogamous relationship: It is not an especially flattering picture, and it depicts a nature that is very much at odds with modern ethical preferences—for monogamy, fidelity, equality, justice, and freedom from violence: But my task is description, not prescription: And there is nothing inevitable about human nature: In The African Queen, Katharine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart,

" Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above: "

Besides, the long interlude of human polygamy, which began in Babylon nearly four thousand years ago, has largely come to an end in the West: Official concubines became unofficial mistresses, and mistresses became secrets kept from wives: In 1988, political power, far from being a ticket to polygamy, was jeopar-dized by any suggestion of infidelity: Whereas the Chinese emperor Fei-ti once kept ten thousand women in his harem, Gary Hart, running for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even get away with two.

What happened? Christianity? Hardly: It coexisted with polygamy for centuries, and its strictures were as cynically self-interested as any layman's: Women's rights? They came too late. A Victorian woman had as much and as little say in her husband 's affairs as a medieval one: No historian can yet explain what changed, but guesses include the idea that kings came to need internal allies enough that they had to surrender despotic power.

Democracy, of a sort, was born. Once monogamous men had a chance to vote against polygamists (and who does not want to tear down a competitor, however much he might also like to emulate him?), their fate was sealed.

Despotic power, which came with civilization, has faded again: It looks increasingly like an aberration in the history of POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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humanity. Before "civilization" and since democracy, men have been unable to accumulate the sort of power that enabled the most successful of them to be promiscuous despots. The best they could hope for in the Pleistocene period was one or two faithful wives and a few affairs if their hunting or political skills were especially great: The best they can hope for now is a good-looking younger mistress and a devoted wife who is traded in every decade or so.

We're back to square one.

This chapter has kept its focus resolutely on the male. In doing so it may seem to have trampled on the rights of women by ignoring them and their wishes: But then so did men for many generations after the invention of agriculture. Before agriculture and since democracy, such chauvinism was impossible; the mating system of humans, like that of other animals, was a compromise between the strategies of males and females. And it is a curious truth that the monogamous marriage bond survived right through despotic Babylon, lascivious Greece, promiscuous Rome, and adulterous Christendom to emerge as the core of the family in the industrial age. Even in the most despotic and polygamous moment of human history, mankind was faithful to the institution of monogamous marriage, quite unlike any other polygamous animal.

Even despots usually had one queen and many concubines. Explaining the human fascination with monogamous marriage requires us to understand the female strategy as closely as we have understood the male one. When we do, an extraordinary insight into human nature will emerge. That is what the next chapter is about: Chapter 7

MONOGAMY AND THE

NATURE OF WOMEN

SHEPHERD: Echo, I ween, will in the wood reply, And quaintly answer questions: shall I try?

ECHO: Try:

What must we do our passion to express?

Press:

How shall I please her who never loved before?

Be Fore:

What most moves women when we them address?

A dress:

Say, what can keep her chaste whom I adore?

A door.

If music softens rocks, love tunes my lyre: Liar.

Then teach me, Echo, how shall I come by her?

Buy her.

—Jonathan Swift, À Gentle Echo on Woman "

In an astonishing study recently undertaken in Western Europe, the following facts emerged: Married females choose to have affairs with males who are dominant, older, more physically attractive, more symmetrical in appearance, and married; females are much more likely to have an affair if their mates are subordinate, younger, physically unattractive, or have asymmetrical features; cosmetic surgery to improve a male 's looks doubles his chances of having an adulterous affair; the more attractive a male, the less attentive he is as a father; roughly one in three of the babies born in Western Europe is the product of an adulterous affair: If you find these facts disturbing or hard to believe, do not worry: The study was not done on human beings but on swallows, the innocent, twittering, fork-tailed birds that pirouette prettily around barns and fields in the summer months. Human beings are entirely different from swallows: Or are they?'

THE MARRIAGE OBSESSION

The harems of ancient despots revealed that men are capable of making the most of opportunities to turn rank into reproductive success, but they cannot have been typical of the human condition for most of its history. About the only way to be a harem-guarding potentate nowadays is to start a cult and brainwash potential concubines about your holiness. In many ways modern people probably live in social systems that are much closer to those of their hunter-gatherer ancestors than they are to the conditions of early history.

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No hunter-gatherer society supports more than occasional polygamy, and the institution of marriage is virtually universal.

People live in larger bands than they used to, but within those bands the kernel of human life is the nuclear family: husband, wife, and children: Marriage is a child-rearing institution; wherever it occurs, the father takes at least some part in rearing the child even if only by providing food: In most societies men strive to be polygamists but few succeed: Even in the polygamous societies of pastoralists, the great majority of marriages are monogamous ones.'

It is our usual monogamy, not our occasional polygamy, that sets us apart from other mammals, including apes: Of the four other apes (gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees), only the gibbon practices anything like marriage. Gibbons live in faithful pairs in the forests of Southeast Asia, each pair living a solitary life within a territory.

If men are opportunists-polygamists at heart, as I argued in the last chapter, then where does marriage come from? Although men are fickle ("You 're afraid of commitment, aren 't you? " says the stereotypical victim of a seducer), they are also interested in finding wives with whom to rear families and might well be very set on stick-ing by them despite their own infidelity ( "You 're never going to leave your wife for me, are you? " says the stereotypical mistress).

The two goals are contradictory only because women are not prepared to divide themselves neatly into wives and whores.

Woman is not the passive chattel that the tussles of despots, described in the last chapter, have implied. She is an active adversary in the sexual chess game, and she has her own goals: Women are and always have been far less interested in polygamy than men, but that does not mean they are not sexual opportunists: The eager male/coy female theory has a great deal of difficulty answering a simple question: Why are women ever unfaithful?

THE HEROD EFFECT

In the 1980s a number of women scientists, led by Sarah Hrdy, now of the University of California at Davis, began to notice that MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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the promiscuous behavior of female chimpanzees and monkeys sat awkwardly alongside the Trivers theory that heavily female biased parental investment leads directly to female choosiness: Hrdy 's own studies of langurs and the studies of macaques by her student Meredith Small seemed to reveal a very different kind of female from the stereotype of evolutionary theory: a female who sneaked away from the troop for assignations with males; a female who actively sought a variety of sexual partners; a female who was just as likely as a male to initiate sex. Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females. A decade later it is suddenly clear what: A whole new light has been shed on the evolution of female behavior by a group of ideas known as " sperm competition theory. "'

The solution to Hrdy 's concern lay in her own work: In her study of the langurs of Abu in India, Hrdy discovered a grisly fact: The murder of baby monkeys by adult male monkeys was routine.

Every time a male takes over a troop of females, he kills all the infants in the group. Exactly the same phenomenon had been discovered in lions a short time later: When a group of brothers wins a pride of females, the first thing they do is slaughter the innocents: In fact, as subsequent research revealed, infanticide by males is common in rodents, carnivores, and primates. Even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are guilty: Most naturalists, reared on a diet of sentimental natural history television programs, were inclined to believe they were witnessing a pathological aberration, but Hrdy and her colleagues suggested otherwise. The infanticide, they said, was an "adaptation "—an evolved strategy_. By killing their stepchildren the males would halt the females ' milk production and so bring forward the date on which the mother could conceive once more. An alpha male langur or a pair of brother lions has only a short time at the top, and infanticide helps these animals to father the maximum number of offspring during that time.'

The importance of infanticide in primates gradually helped scientists to understand the mating systems of the five species of apes because it suddenly provided a reason for females to be loyal to one or a group of males—and vice versa: to protect their genetic

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investment in each other from murderous rival males: Broadly speaking, the social pattern of female monkeys and apes is determined by the distribution of their food, while the social pattern of males is determined by the distribution of females. Thus, female orangutans choose to live alone in strict territories, the better to exploit their scarce food resources. Males also live alone and try to monopolize the territories of several females: The females that live within his territory expect their " husband" to come rushing to their aid if another male appears.

Female gibbons also live alone: Male gibbons are capable of defending the home ranges of up to five females, and they could easily practice the same kind of polygamy as orangutans: one male can patrol the territories of five females and mate with them all: What is more, male gibbons are of little use as fathers. They do not feed the young, they do not protect them from eagles, they do not even teach them much: So why do they stick with one female faithfully? The one enormous danger to a young gibbon that its father can guard against is murder by another male gibbon. Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University believes that male gibbons are monogamous to prevent infanticide:'

A female gorilla is as faithful to her husband as any gibbon; she goes where he goes and does what he does: And he is faithful to her in a manner of speaking: He stays with her for many years and watches her raise his children: But there is one big difference: He has several females in his harem and is, as it were, equally faithful to each: Richard Wrangham of Harvard University believes the gorilla social system is largely designed around the prevention of infanticide but that for females there is safety in numbers. (For fruit-eating gibbons there is not enough food in a territory to feed more than one female.) So a male keeps his harem safe from the attentions of rival males and pays his children the immense favor of preventing their murder:'

The chimpanzee has further refined the anti-infanticide strategy by inventing a rather different social system: Because they eat scattered but abundant food such as fruit and spend more time on the ground and in the open, chimps live in larger groups (a big MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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group has more pairs of eyes than a small group) that regularly fragment into smaller groups before coming back together. These

" fission-fusion" groups are too large and too flexible for a single male to dominate. The way to the top of the political tree for a male chimp is by building alliances with other males, and chimp troops contain many males. So a female is now accompanied by many dangerous stepfathers. Her solution is to share her sexual favors more widely with the effect that all the stepfathers might be the father. As a result, there is only one circumstance in which a male chimp can be certain an infant he meets is not his: when he has never seen the female before. And as Jane Goodall found, male chimps attack strange females that are carrying infants and kill the infants. They do not attack childless females.'

Hrdy 's problem is solved. Female promiscuity in monkeys and apes can be explained by the need to share paternity among many males to prevent infanticide. But does it apply to mankind?

The short answer is no. It is a fact that stepchildren are sixty-five times more likely to die than children living with their true parents,' and it is inescapable that young children often have a terror of new stepfathers that is hard to overcome: But neither of these facts is of much relevance, for both apply to older children, not to suckling infants. Their deaths do not free the mother to breed again.

Moreover, the fact that we are apes can be misleading. Our sex lives are very different from those of our cousins. If we were like orangutans, women would live alone and apart from one another. Men, too, would live alone but each would visit several women (or none) for occasional sex. If two men ever met, there would be an almighty, violent battle. If we were gibbons, our lives would be unrecognizable. Every couple would live miles apart and fight to the death any intrusion into their home range—which they would never leave: Despite the occasional antisocial neighbor, that is not how we live: Even people who retreat to their sacred suburban homes do not pretend to remain there forever, let alone keep out all strangers. We spend much of our lives on common territory, at work, shopping, or at play. We are gregarious and social.

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We are not gorillas, either. If we were, we would live in seraglios, each dominated by one giant middle-aged man, twice the weight of a woman, who would monopolize sexual access to all the women in the group and intimidate the other men: Sex would be rarer than saints' days, even for the great man, who would have sex once a year, and would be all but nonexistent for the other males.'

If we were hairless chimpanzees, our society would still look fairly familiar in some ways. We would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial, and aggressive toward other groups than those we belong to: In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist, and belligerent, which we are. Adult males would spend more time trying to climb the political hierarchy than with their families. But when we turn to sex, things would begin to look very different. For a start, men would take no part at all in rearing the young, not even paying child support; there would be no marriage bonds at all: Most women would mate with most men, though the top male (the president, let us call him) would make sure he had droir du seigneur over the most fertile women: Sex would be an intermittent affair, indulged in to spectacular excess during the woman 's estrus but totally forgotten by her for years at a time when pregnant or rearing a young child. This estrus would be announced to everybody in sight by her pink and swollen rear end, which would prove irresistibly fascinating to every male who saw it: They would try to monopolize such females for weeks at a time, forcing them to go away on a "consortship" with them; they would not always succeed and would quickly lose interest when the swelling went down: Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles has speculated on how disruptive this would be to society by imagining the effect on the average office of a woman turning up for work one day irresistibly pink.'°

If we were pygmy chimps or bonobos, we would live in groups much like those of chimps, but there would be roving bands of dominant men who visited several groups of women. As a consequence, women would have to share the possibility of paternity still more widely, and female bonobos are positively nymphomaniac in MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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their habits. They have sex at the slightest suggestion and in a great variety of ways (including oral and homosexual) and are sexually attractive to males for long periods. A young female bonobo who arrives at a tree where others of the species are feeding will first mate with each of the males in turn—including the adolescents—and only then get on with eating. Mating is not wholly indiscriminate, but it is very catholic.

Whereas a female gorilla will mate about ten times for every baby that is born, a female chimp will mate five hundred to a thousand times and a bonobo up to three thousand times. A female bonobo is rarely harassed by a nearby male for mating with a more junior male, and mating is so frequent that it rarely leads to conception: Indeed, the whole anatomy of male aggression is reduced in bonobos: Males are no larger than females and spend less energy trying to rise in the male hierarchy than ordinary chimps. The best strategy for a male bonobo intent on genetic eternity is to eat his greens, get a good night 's sleep, and prepare for a long day of fornication."

THE BASTARD BIRDS

Compared to our ape cousins, we, the most common of the great apes, have pulled off a surprising trick. We have somehow reinvented monogamy and paternal care without losing the habit of living in large multimale groups: Like gibbons, men marry women singly and help them to rear their young, confident of paternity, but like chimpanzees, those women live in societies where they have continual contact with other men: There is no parallel for this among apes. It is my contention, however, that there is a close parallel among birds: Many birds live in colonies but mate monogamously within the colony: And the bird parallel brings an altogether different explanation for females to be interested in sexual variety. A female human being does not have to share her sexual favors with many males to prevent infanticide, but she may have a good reason to share them with one well-chosen male apart from her husband.

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The Red Queen

This is because her husband is, almost by definition, usually not the best male there is—else how would he have ended up married to her? His value is that he is monogamous and will therefore not divide his child-rearing effort among several families. But why accept his genes? Why not have his parental care and some other male ' s genes?

In describing the human mating system, it is hard to be precise. People are immensely flexible in their habits, depending on their racial origin, religion, wealth, and ecology: Nonetheless, some universal features stand out: First, women most commonly seek monogamous marriage—even in societies that allow polygamy.

Rare exceptions notwithstanding, they want to choose carefully and then, as long as he remains worthy, monopolize a man for life, gain his assistance in rearing the children, and perhaps even die with him. Second, women do not seek sexual variety per se. There are exceptions, of course, but fictional and real women regularly deny that nymphomania holds any attraction for them, and there is no reason to disbelieve them. The temptress interested in a one-night stand with a man whose name she does not know is a fantasy fed by male pornography: Lesbians, free of constraints imposed by male nature, do not suddenly indulge in sexual promiscuity; on the contrary, they are remarkably monogamous: None of this is surprising: Female animals gain little from sexual opportunism, for their reproductive ability is limited not by how many males they mate with but how long it takes to bear, offspring. In this respect men and women are very different.

But third, women are sometimes unfaithful. Not all adultery is caused by men. Though she may rarely or never be interested in casual sex with a male prostitute or a stranger, a woman, in life as in soap operas, is perfectly capable of accepting or provoking an offer of an affair with one man whom she knows, even if she is

" happily " married at the time. This is a paradox. It can be resolved in one of three ways. We can blame adultery on men, asserting that the persuasive powers of seducers will always win some hearts, even the most reluctant. Call this the " Dangerous Liaisons " explanation.

Or we can blame it on modern society and say that the frustrations MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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and complexities of modern life, of unhappy marriages and so on, have upset the natural pattern and introduced an alien habit into human females. Call this the "Dallas " explanation. Or we can suggest that there is some valid biological reason for seeking sex outside marriage without abandoning the marriage—some instinct in women not to deny themselves the option of a sexual "plan B"

when plan A does not work out so well. Call this the "Emma Bovary " strategy:

I am going to argue in this chapter that adultery may have played a big part in shaping human society because there have often been advantages to both sexes from within a monogamous marriage in seeking alternative sexual partners. This conclusion is based on studies of human society, both modern and tribal, and on comparisons with apes and birds. By describing adultery as a force that shaped our mating system, I am not "justifying" it. Nothing is more " natural" than people evolving the tendency to object to being cuckolded or cheated on, so if my analysis were to be interpreted as justifying adultery, it would be even more obviously interpreted as justifying the social and legal mechanisms for discouraging adultery: What I am claiming is that adultery and its disapproval are both "natural: "

In the 1970s, Roger Short, a British biologist who later moved to Australia, noticed something peculiar about ape anatomy.

Chimpanzees have gigantic testicles; gorillas have minuscule ones.

Although gorillas are four times the weight of chimps, chimps' testicles weigh four times as much as gorillas'. Short wondered why that was and suggested that it might have something to do with the mating system. According to Short, the bigger the testicles, the more polygamous the females. 1z

The reason is easy to see. If a female animal mates with several males, then the sperm from each male competes to reach her eggs first; the best way for a male to bias the race in his favor is CO

produce more sperm and swamp the competition. (There are other ways. Some male damsel flies use their penis to scoop out sperm that was there first; male dogs and Australian hopping mice both

" lock " their penis into the female after copulation and cannot free

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The Red Queen

it for some time, thus preventing others from having a go; male human beings seem to produce large numbers of defective

" kamikaze" sperm that form a sort of plug that closes the vaginal door to later entrants.)" As we have seen, chimpanzees live in groups where several males may share a female, and therefore there is a premium on the ability to ejaculate often and voluminously—

he who does so has the best chance of being the father. This conjecture holds up across all the monkeys and across all rodents. The more they can be sure of sexual monopoly, as the gorilla can, the smaller their testes; the more they live in multimale promiscuous groups, the larger their testes."

It began to look as if Short had stumbled on an anatomical clue to a species' mating system: Big testicles equals polygamous females: Could it be used to predict the mating system of species that had not been studied? For example, very little is known about the societies of dolphins and whales, but a good deal is known of their anatomy, thanks to whaling: They all have enormous testicles, even allowing for their size: The testicles of a right whale weigh more than a ton and account for 2 percent of its body weight. So, given the monkey pattern, it is reasonable to predict that female whales and dolphins are mostly not monogamous but will mate with several males: As far as is known, this is the case. The mating system of the bottle-nosed dolphin seems to consist of forcible

"herding" of fertile females by shifting coalitions of males and sometimes even the simultaneous impregnation of such a female by two males at the same time—a case of sperm competition more severe than anything in the chimpanzee world." Sperm whales, which live in harems like gorillas, have comparatively smaller testicles; one male has a monopoly over his harem and has no sperm competitors.

Let us now apply this prediction to man. For an ape, man 's testicles are medium-sized—considerably bigger than a gorilla 's.

Like a chimpanzee 's, human testicles are housed in a scrotum that hangs outside the body where it keeps the sperm that have already been produced cool, therefore increasing their shelf life, as it were.'

This is all evidence of sperm competition in man: MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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But human testicles are not nearly as large as those of chimps, and there is some tentative evidence that they are not operating on full power (that is, they might once have been bigger in our ancestors): Sperm production per gram of tissue is unusually low in man. All in all, it seems fair to conclude that women are not highly promiscuous, which is what we expected to find:"

It is not just monkeys, apes, and dolphins that have large testicles when faced with sperm competition. Birds do, too. And it is from birds that the clinching clue comes about the human mating system. Zoologists have long known that most mammals are polygamous and most birds are monogamous. They put this down to the fact that the laying of eggs gives male birds a much earlier opportunity to help rear his children than a male mammal ever has: A male bird can busy himself with building the nest, with sharing the duties of incubation, with bringing food for the young; the only thing he cannot do is lay the eggs: This opportunity allows junior male birds to offer females a more paternal alternative than merely inseminating them, an offer that is accepted in species that have to feed their young, such as sparrows, and rejected in those that do not feed their young, such as pheasants.

Indeed, in some birds, as we have seen, the male does all these things alone, leaving his mate with the single duty of egg laying for her many husbands. In a mammal, by contrast, there is not much he can do to help even if wants to: He can feed his wife while she is pregnant and thereby contribute to the growth of the fetus, and he can carry the baby about when it is born or bring it food when it is weaned, but he cannot carry a fetus in his belly or feed it milk when it is born. The female mammal is left literally holding the baby, and with few opportunities to help her, the male is often better off expending his energy on an attempt to be a polygamist.

Only when opportunities for further mating are few and his presence increases the baby 's safety—as in gibbons—will he stay.

This kind of game-theory argument was commonplace by the mid-1970s, but in the 1980s when it became possible for the first time to do genetic blood testing of birds, an enormous surprise was in store for zoologists: They discovered that many of the baby

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The Red Queen

birds in the average nest were not their ostensible father 's offspring.

Male birds were cuckolding one another at a tremendous rate. In the indigo bunting, a pretty little blue bird from North America that seemed to be faithfully monogamous, about 40 percent of the babies the average male feeds in his nest are bastards. 1e The zoologists had entirely underestimated an important part of the life of birds. They knew it happened, but not on such a scale. It goes under the abbreviation EPC, for extra-pair copulation, but I will call it adultery, for that is what it is. Most birds are indeed monogamous, but they are not by any means faithful.

Anders Moller is a Danish zoologist of legendary energy whom we have already met in the context of sexual selection. He and Tim Birkhead from Sheffield University have written a book that summarizes what is now known about avian adultery, and it reveals a pattern of great relevance to human beings. The first thing they proved is that the size of a bird 's testicles varies according to the bird 's mating system. They are largest in polyandrous birds, where several males fertilize one female, and it is not hard to see why. The male who ejaculates the most sperm will presumably fertilize the most eggs.

That came as no surprise. But the testicles of lekking birds, such as sage grouse, where each male may have to inseminate fifty females in a few weeks, are unusually small: This puzzle is resolved by the fact that a female sage grouse will mate only once or twice and usually with only one male. That, remember, is the whole point of female choosiness at leks. So although the master cock may need to mate with many hens, he need not waste much sperm on each because those sperm will have no competitors. It is not how often a male bird copulates that determines the size of his testicles but how many other males he competes with.

The monogamous species lie in between. Some have fairly small testicles, implying little sperm competition; others have huge testicles, as big as those of polyandrous birds. Birkhead and Moller noticed that the ones with large testicles were mostly birds that lived in colonies: seabirds, swallows, bee eaters, herons, sparrows. Such colonies give females ample opportunity for adultery with the male from the nest next door, an opportunity that is not passed up."

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Bill Hamilton believes that adultery may explain why in so many " monogamous " birds the male is gaudier than the female: The traditional explanation, suggested by Darwin, is that the gaudiest males or the best songsters get the first females to arrive, and an early nest is a successful nest. That is certainly true, but it does not explain why song continues in many species long after a male has found a wife. Hamilton 's suggestion is that the gaudy male is not trying to get more wives but more lovers. As Hamilton put it,

"Why did Beau Brummel in Regency England dress up as he did?

Was it to find a wife or to find an ' affair ' ?"2o EMMA BOVARY AND FEMALE SWALLOWS

What 's in it for the birds? For the males it is obvious enough: Adulterers father more young. But it is not at all clear why the female is so often unfaithful: Birkhead and Moller .rejected several suggestions: that she is adulterous because of a genetic side effect of the male adulterous urge, that she is ensuring some of the sperm she gets is fertile, that she is bribed by the philandering males (as seems to be the case in some human and ape societies). None of these fit the exact facts. Nor did it quite work to blame her infidelity on a desire for genetic variety. There seems to be little point in having more varied children than she would have anyway: Birkhead and Moller were left with the belief that female birds benefit from being promiscuous because it enables them to have their genetic cake and eat it—to follow the Emma Bovary strategy. A female swallow needs a husband who will help look after her young, but by the time she arrives at the breeding site, she might find all the best husbands taken: Her best tactic is therefore to mate with a mediocre husband or a husband with a good territory and have an affair with a genetically superior neighbor. This theory is supported by the facts: Females always choose more dominant, older, or more "attractive" (that is, ornamented) lovers than their husbands; they do not have affairs with bachelors (presumably rejects) but with other females ' husbands; and they sometimes incite competition between potential lovers and choose the winners. Male swallows

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The Red Queen

with artificially lengthened tails acquired a mate ten days sooner, were eight times as likely to have a second brood, and had twice as high a chance of seducing a neighbor 's wife as ordinary swallows.'

(Intriguingly, when female mice choose to mate with males other than those they "live with, " they usually choose ones whose disease-resistance genes are different from their own.)''

In short, the reason adultery is so common in colonial birds is that it enables a male bird to have more young and enables a female bird to have better young:

One of the most curious results to come out of bird studies in recent years has been the discovery that "attractive" males make inattentive fathers: Nancy Burley, whose zebra finches consider one another more or less attractive according to the color of their leg bands, first noticed this,' and Anders Moller has since found it to be true of swallows as well: When a female mates with an attractive male, he works less hard and she works harder at bringing up the young. It is as if he feels that he has done her a favor by providing superior genes and therefore expects her to repay him with harder work around the nest. This, of course, increases her incentive to find a mediocre but hardworking husband and cuckold him by having an affair with a superstud next door.'

In any case, the principle—marry a nice guy but have an affair with your boss or marry a rich but ugly man and take a handsome lover—is not unknown among female human beings: It is called having your cake and eating it, too: Flaubert's Emma Bovary wanted to keep both her handsome lover and her wealthy husband: The work on birds has been conducted by people who knew little of human anthropology: Iri just the same way, a pair of British zoologists had been studying human beings in the late 1980s, largely in isolation from the bird work: Robin Baker and Mark Bellis of Liverpool University were curious to know if sperm competition happened inside women, and if it did, whether women had any control over it. Their results have led to a bizarre and astonishing explanation of the female orgasm.

What follows is the only part of this book in which the details of sexual intercourse itself are relevant to an evolutionary MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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argument: Baker and Bellis discovered that the amount of sperm that is retained in a woman 's vagina after sex varies according to whether she had an orgasm and when. It also depends on how long it was since she last had sex: The longer the period, the more sperm stays in, unless she has what the scientists call "a noncopulatory orgasm " in between:

So far none of this contained great surprises; these facts were unknown before Baker and Bellis did their work (which consisted of samples collected by selected couples and of a survey of four thousand people who replied to a questionnaire in a magazine), but they did not necessarily mean very much: But Baker and Bellis also did something rather brave: They asked their subjects about their extramarital affairs: They found that in faithful women about 55 percent of the orgasms were of the high-retention (that is, the most fertile) type: In unfaithful women, only 40 percent of the copulations with the partner were of this kind, but 70 percent of the copulations with the lover were of this fertile type: Moreover, whether deliberately or not, the unfaithful women were having sex with their lovers at times of the month when they were most fertile: These two effects combined meant that an unfaithful woman in their sample could have sex twice as often with her husband as with her lover but was still slightly more likely to conceive a child by the lover than the husband.

Baker and Bellis interpret their results as evidence of an evolutionary arms race between males and females, a Red Queen game, but one in which the female sex is one evolutionary step ahead: The male is trying to increase his chances of being the father in every way. Many of his sperm do not even try to fertilize her eggs but instead either attack other sperm or block their passage.

But the female has evolved a sophisticated set of techniques for preventing conception except on her own terms. Of course, women did not know this before now and therefore did not set out to achieve it, but the astonishing thing is that if the study by Baker and Bellis proves to be right, they are doing it anyway, perhaps quite unconsciously. This, of course, is typical of evolutionary explanations. Why do women have sex at all? Because they con-

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sciously want to. But why do they consciously want to? Because sex leads to reproduction, and being the descendants of those who reproduced, they are selected from among those who want things that lead to reproduction. This is merely a form of the same argument: The typical woman's pattern of infidelity and orgasm is exactly what you would expect to find if she were unconsciously trying to get pregnant from a lover while not leaving a husband: Baker and Bellis do not claim to have found more than a tantalizing hint that this is so, but they have tried to measure the extent of cuckoldry in human beings. In a block of flats in Liverpool, they found by genetic tests that fewer than four in every five people were the sons of their ostensible fathers. In case this had something to do with Liverpool, they did the same tests in southern England and got the same result. We know from their earlier work that a small degree of adultery can lead to a larger degree of cuckoldry through the orgasm effect. Like birds, women may be—quite unconsciously—

having it both ways by conducting affairs with genetically more valuable men while not leaving their husbands:

What about the men? Baker and Bellis did an experiment on rats and discovered that a male rat ejaculates twice as much sperm when he knows that the female he is mating with has been near another male recently. The intrepid scientists promptly set out to test whether human beings do the same: Sure enough, they do. Men whose wives have been with them all day ejaculate much smaller amounts than men whose wives have been absent all day. It is as if the males are subconsciously compensating for any opportunities for female infidelity that might be present. But in this particular battle of the sexes, the women have the upper hand because even if a man—again unconsciously—begins to associate his wife 's lack of late orgasms with a desire not to conceive his child, she can always respond by faking them. 2S

CUCKOLDRY PARANOIA

The cuckold, however, does not stand by and accept his evolutionary lot even unto the extinction of his genes: Birkhead and Moller MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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think that much of the behavior of male birds can be explained by the assumption that they are in constant terror of their wives ' infidelity. Their first strategy is to guard the wife during the period when she is fertile (a day or so before each egg is laid): Many male birds do this: They follow their mates everywhere, so that a female bird who is building a nest is often accompanied on every trip by a male who never lends a hand; he just watches. The moment she is finished laying the clutch of eggs, he relaxes his vigil and begins to seek adulterous opportunities himself.

If a male swallow cannot find his mate, he often gives a loud alarm call, which causes all the swallows to fly into the air, effectively interrupting any adulterous act in progress. If the pair has just been reunited after a separation or if a strange male intrudes into the territory and is chased out, the husband will often copulate with the wife immediately afterward, as if to ensure that his sperm are there to compete with the intruder 's.

Generally it works. Species that practice effective mate guarding keep the adultery rate low. But some species cannot guard their mates. In herons and birds of prey, for example, husband and wife spend much of the day apart, one guarding the nest while the other collects food. These species are characterized by extremely frequent copulation.

Goshawks may have sex several hundred times for every clutch of eggs.

26

This does not prevent adultery, but at least it dilutes it: Just like herons and swallows, people live in monogamous pairs within large colonies. Fathers help to rear the young if only by bringing food or money: And crucially, because of the sexual division of labor that characterized early human hunter-gathering societies (broadly speaking, men hunt, women gather), the sexes spend much time apart. So women have ample opportunities for adultery, and men have ample incentives to guard their mates or, failing that, to copulate frequently with them.

To demonstrate that adultery is a chronic problem throughout human society, rather than an aberration of modern apartment blocks in Britain, is paradoxically difficult: first, because the answer is so stunningly obvious that nobody has studied it, and second, because it is a universally kept secret and therefore almost impossible to study. It is easier to watch birds:

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Nonetheless, attempts have been made. The 570 or so Ache people of Paraguay were hunter-gatherers until 1971, living in twelve bands. They then gradually came into contact with the outside world and were lured onto government reservations run by missionaries: Today, they no longer depend on hunted meat and gathered fruit but grow most of their own food in gardens. But when they still depended on men's hunting skills for much of their food, Kim Hill of the University of New Mexico found an intriguing pattern: Ache men would donate any spare meat they had caught to women with whom they wanted to have sex. They were not doing so to feed children they might have fathered but as direct payment for an affair: It was not easy to discover. Hill found that he was gradually forced to drop questions about adultery from his studies because the Ache, under missionary influence, became increasingly squeamish about discussing the subject. The chiefs and the head men were especially reluctant to talk about it, which is hardly surprising in view of the fact that they were the ones having the most affairs. Nonetheless, by relying on gossip Hill was able to piece together the pattern of adultery in the Ache: As expected, he found that high-ranking men were involved most, which is consistent with the idea of having your paternal-genetic cake and eating it: However, unlike in birds, it was not just the wives of low-ranking men who indulged. It is true that Ache adulterers frequently ply their mistresses with gifts of meat, but Hill thinks the most important motive is that Ache women are constantly preparing for the possibility that they will be deserted by their husbands. They are building up alternative relationships and are more likely to be unfaithful if the marriage is going badly. That is, of course, a double-edged sword: The marriage could break up because the affair is discovered:''

Whatever the motive for women, Hill and others believe that adultery has been much underemphasized as an influence in the evolution of the human mating system. In hunter-gatherer societies the male opportunist streak would have been far more easily satisfied by adultery than by polygamy. In only two known hunter-gatherer societies is polygamy either common or extreme. In the rest it is rare to find a man with more than one wife and very rare MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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to find a man with more than two. The two exceptions prove the rule. One is among the Indians of the Pacific Northwest of America, who depended on abundant and reliable supplies of salmon and were more like farmers than hunter-gatherers in their ability to stockpile surpluses: The other is certain tribes of Australian aborigines, which practice gerontocratic polygamy: Men do not marry until they are forty, and by the age of sixty-five they have usually accumulated up to thirty wives: But this peculiar system is far from what it seems. Each old man has younger assistant men whose help, protection, and economic support he purchases by, among other things, turning a blind eye to their affairs with his wives. The old man looks the other way when the helpful nephew carries on with one of his junior wives.28

Polygamy is rare in hunter-gatherer societies, but adultery is common wherever it has been looked for. By analogy with monogamous colonial birds, therefore, one would expect to find human beings practicing either mate guarding or frequent copulation: Richard Wrangham has speculated that human beings practice mate guarding in absentia: Men keep an eye on their wives by proxy.

If the husband is away hunting all day in the forest, he can ask his mother or his neighbor whether his wife was up to anything during the day. In the African pygmies Wrangham studied, gossip was rife and a husband 's best chance of deterring his wife 's affairs was to let her know that he kept abreast of the gossip. Wrangham went on to observe that this was impossible without language, so he speculated that the sexual division of labor, the institution of child-rearing marriages, and the invention of language—three of the most fundamental human characteristics shared with no other ape—all depend on another. 29

WHY THE RHYTHM METHOD DOES NOT WORK

What happened before language allowed proxy mate guarding?

Here, anatomy provides an intriguing clue: Perhaps the most startling difference between the physiology of a woman and that of a

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female chimpanzee is that it is impossible for anybody, including the woman herself, to determine precisely when in the menstrual cycle she is fertile. Whatever doctors, old wives ' tales, and the Roman Catholic Church may say, human ovulation is invisible and unpredictable. Chimpanzees become pink; cows smell irresistible to bulls; tigresses seek out tigers; female mice solicit male mice—

throughout the mammal order, the day of ovulation is announced with fanfare. But not in man. A tiny change in the woman 's temperature, undetectable before thermometers, and that is all. Women 's genes seem to have gone to inordinate lengths to conceal the moment of ovulation:

With concealed ovulation came continual sexual interest.

Although women are more likely to initiate sex, masturbate, have an affair with a lover, or be accompanied by their husband on the day of ovulation than on other days,'° it is nonetheless true that human beings of both sexes are interested in sex at all times of the menstrual cycle; both men and women have intercourse whenever they feel like it, without reference to hormonal events. Compared with many animals, we are astonishingly hooked on copulation.

Desmond Morris called mankind " the sexiest primate alive " " (but that was before anybody studied bonobos): Other animals that copulate frequently—lions, bonobos, acorn woodpeckers, goshawks, white ibises—do so for reasons of sperm competition.

Males of the first three species live in groups that share access to females, so every male must copulate as frequently as he can or risk another male 's sperm reaching the egg first. Goshawks and white ibises do so to swamp any sperm that might have been received by the female while the male was away at work. Since it is clear that humanity is not a promiscuous species—even the most carefully organized free-love commune soon falls apart under the pressure of jealousy and possessiveness—the case of the ibis is the most perti-nent for man: a monogamous colonial animal driven by the threat of adultery into the habit of frequent copulation. At least the male ibis need only keep his sex-six-times-a-day routine up for a few days each season before egg laying. Men must keep up sex twice a week for years."

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But concealed ovulation in women cannot have evolved for the convenience of the man. In the late 1970s there was a flurry of speculative theorizing about the evolutionary cause of concealed ovulation. Many of the ideas apply only to human beings. An example is Nancy Burley 's suggestion that ancestral women with unconcealed ovulation learned to be celibate when fertile because of the uniquely painful and dangerous business of human childbirth; but such women left behind no descendants, so the rare exceptions who could not detect their own ovulation mothered the human race. Yet concealed ovulation is a habit we share with some monkeys and at least one ape (the orangutan). It is also a habit we share with nearly all birds. Only our absurdly parochial anthropocentrism has allowed us to think that silent ovulation is special.

Nonetheless, it is worth going through the attempted explanations of what Robert Smith once called human "reproductive inscrutability " because they shed an interesting light on the theory of sperm competition. They come in two kinds: those suggesting concealed ovulation as a way of ensuring that fathers did not desert their young, and those suggesting the exact opposite: The first kind of argument went as follows: Because he does not know when his wife is fertile, a husband must stay around and have sex with her often to be sure of fathering her children. This keeps him from mischief and ensures he is still around to help rear the babies."

The second kind of argument went this way: If females wish to be discriminating in their choice of partner, it makes little sense to advertise their ovulation. Conspicuous ovulation will have the effect of attracting several males, who will either fight over the right to fertilize her, or share her. If a female wishes (is designed) to be promiscuous in order to share paternity, as chimps do, or if she wishes to set up a competition so that the best male wins her, as buffalo and elephant seals do, then it pays to advertise the moment of ovulation. But if she wishes to choose one mate herself for whatever reason, then she should keep it secret."

This idea has several variants. Sarah Hrdy proposed that silent ovulation helps prevent infanticide because neither the hus-

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band nor the lover knows if he has been cuckolded: Donald Symons thinks women use perpetual sexual availability to seduce philanderers in exchange for gifts. L. Benshoof and Randy Thornhill suggested that concealed ovulation allows a woman to mate with a superior man by stealth without deserting or alerting her husband.

If, as seems possible, ovulation is less concealed from her (or her unconscious) than it is from him, then it would help her make each extramarital liaison more rewarding since she is more likely to

" know" when to have sex with her lover, whereas her husband does not know when she is fertile. In other words, silent ovulation is a weapon in the adultery game."

This intriguingly sets up the possibility of an arms race between wives and mistresses: Genes for concealed ovulation make both adultery and fidelity easier. It is a peculiar thought, and there is at present no way of knowing if it is right, but it throws into stark contrast the fact that there can be no genetic feminine soli-darity. Women will often be competing with women: SPARROW FIGHTS

It is this competition between females that provides the final clue to the reason adultery, rather than polygamy, has probably been the most common way for men to have many mates. Red-winged blackbirds, which nest in marshes in Canada, are polygamous; the males with the best territories each attract several females to nest in them. But the males with the biggest harems are also the most successful adulterers, fathering the most babies in their neighbors ' territories, too. Which raises the question of why the males ' lovers do not simply become extra wives.

There is a small owl called Tengmalm ' s owl that lives in Finnish forests. In years when mice are abundant, some of the male owls have two mates, one in each of two territories, while other males go without a mate at all: The females that are married to polygamous males rear noticeably fewer young than the females married to monogamous males, so why do they put up with it?

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Why not leave for one of the nearby bachelors? A Finnish biologist believes that the polygamists are deceiving their victims: The females judge potential suitors by how many mice they can catch to feed them during courtship. In a good year for mice a male can catch so many mice that Ire can simultaneously give two females the impression that he is a fine male; he can provide each with more mice than he could catch for one in a normal year. 36

Nordic forests seem to be full of deceitful adulterers, for a similar habit by a deceptively innocent-looking little bird led to a long-running dispute in the scientific literature of the 1980s.

Some male pied flycatchers in the forests of Scandinavia manage to be polygamous by holding two territories, each with a female in it, like the owls or like Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe 's Bonfire of the Vanities who keeps an expensive wife on Park Avenue and a beautiful mistress in a rent-controlled apartment across town: Two teams of researchers have studied the birds and come to different conclusions about what is going on. The Finns and Swedes say that the mistress is deceived into believing the male is unmarried: The Norwegians say that since the wife sometimes visits the mistress 's nest and may try to drive her away, the mistress can be under no illusions. She accepts the fact that her mate may desert her for his wife but hopes that if things go wrong at the wife 's nest—they often do—he will come back to help her raise her young: He gets away with it only when the two territories are so far apart that the wife cannot visit the mistress ' s territory often enough to persecute her: In other words, according to the Norwegians, men deceive their wives about their affairs, not their mistresses. 37

It is not clear, therefore, whether the wife or the mistress is the victim of treachery, but one thing is certain: The bigamous male pied flycatcher has pulled off a minor triumph, fathering two broods in one season. The male has fulfilled his ambition of bigamy at the expense of a female: The wife and the mistress would both have done better had each monopolized a male rather than shared him.

To test the suggestion that it is better to cuckold a faithful husband than leave him to become the second wife of a biga-

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mist, Jose Veiga studied house sparrows breeding in a colony in Madrid: Only about 10 percent of the males in the colony were polygamous: By selectively removing certain males and females he tested various theories about why more males did not have multiple wives: First, he rejected the notion that males were indispens-able to the rearing of young. Females in bigamous marriages reared as many young as those in monogamous ones, though they had to work harder. Second, by removing some males and observing which males the widows chose to remarry, he rejected the idea that females preferred to mate with unmated males; they were happy to choose already mated males and to reject bachelors.

Third, he rejected the idea that males could not find spare females; 28 percent of males remated with a female who had not bred in the previous year: Then he tried putting nest boxes closer together to make it easier for the male to guard two at once; he found that it entirely failed to increase the amount of polygamy.

That left him with one explanation for the rarity of polygamy in sparrows: The senior wives do not stand for it. Just as male birds guard their mates, so female birds chase away and harass their husbands ' chosen second fiancees. Caged females are attacked by mated female sparrows: They do so presumably because even though they could rear the chicks on their own, it is a great deal easier with the husband 's undivided help. 38

It is my contention that man is just like an ibis or a swallow or a sparrow in several key respects. He lives in large colonies.

Males compete with one another for places in a pecking order.

Most males are monogamous. Polygamy is prevented by wives who resent sharing their husbands lest they also share his contributions to child rearing. Even though they could bring up the children unaided, the husband 's paycheck is invaluable. But the ban on polygamous marriage does not prevent the males from seeking polygamous matings. Adultery is common. It is most common between high-ranking males and females of all ranks. To prevent it males try to guard their wives, are extremely violent toward their wives ' lovers, and copulate with their wives frequently, not just when they are fertile.

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That is the life of the sparrow anthropomorphized. The life of man sparrowmorphized might read like this: The birds live and breed in colonies called tribes or towns: Cocks compete with one another to amass resources and gain status within the colony; it is known as " business " and "politics. " Cocks eagerly court hens, who resent sharing their males with other hens, but many cocks, especially senior ones, trade in their hens for younger ones or cuckold other cocks by having sex with their (willing) wives in private: The point does not lie in the details of the sparrow 's life.

There are significant differences, including the fact that human beings tend to have a much more uneven distribution of dominance, power, and resources within the colony: But they still share the principal feature of all:colonial birds: monogamy, or at least pair bonds, plus rife adultery rather than polygamy. The noble savage, far from living in contented sexual equanimity, was paranoid about becoming, and intent on making his neighbor into, a cuckold. Little wonder that human sex is first and foremost in all societies a private thing to be indulged in only in secret. The same is not true of bonobos, but it is true of many monogamous birds.

One reason the high bastard rates of birds came as such a shock was that few naturalists had ever witnessed an adulterous affair between two birds—they do it in private: 39

THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER

Cuckoldry paranoia is deep-seated in men. The use of veils, chaper-ones, purdah, female circumcision, and chastity belts all bear witness to a widespread male fear of being cuckolded and a widespread suspicion that wives, as well as their potential lovers, are the ones to distrust: (Why else circumcise them?) Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University in Canada have studied the phenomenon of human jealousy and come to the conclusion that the facts fit an evolutionary interpretation. Jealousy is a "human universal, " and no culture lacks it: Despite the best efforts of anthropologists to find a society with no jealousy and so prove that it is an emotion

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introduced by pernicious social pressure or pathology, sexual jealousy seems to be an unavoidable part of being a human being.

The Demon, Jealousy, with Gorgon frown

Blasts the sweet flowers of pleasure not his own, Rolls his wild eyes, and through the shuddering grove Pursues the steps of unsuspecting Love:'°

Wilson and Daly believe that a study of human society reveals a mindset whose manifestations are diverse in detail but

" monotonously alike in the abstract. " They are "socially recognized marriage, the concept of adultery as a property violation, the valua-tion of female chastity, the equation of 'protection' of women with protection from sexual contact, and the special potency of infidelity as a provocation to violence: " In short, in every age and in every place, men behave as if they owned their wives ' vaginas:"

Wilson and Daly reflect on the fact that love is an admired emotion, whereas jealousy is a despised one, but they are plainly two sides of the same coin—as anybody who has been in love can testify: They are both part of a sexual proprietary claim: As many a modern couple knows, the absence of jealousy, far from calming a relationship, is itself a cause of insecurity. If he or she is not jealous when I pay attention to another man or woman, then he or she no longer cares whether our relationship survives: Psychologists have found that couples who lack moments of jealousy are less likely to stay together than jealous ones:

As Othello learned, even the suspicion of infidelity is enough to drive a man to such rage that he may kill his wife. Othello was fictional, but many a modern Desdemona has paid with her life for her husband's jealousy. As Wilson and Daly said: " The major source of conflict in the great majority of spouse killings is the husband 's knowledge or suspicion that his wife is either unfaithful or intending to leave him. " A man who kills his wife in a fit of jealousy can rarely plead insanity in court because of the legal tradition in Anglo-American common law that such an act is "the act of a reasonable man: "'

This interpretation of jealousy probably seems astonishing-MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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ly banal. After all, it is only putting an evolutionary slant on what everybody knows about everyday life. But among sociologists and psychologists it is heretical nonsense. Psychologists have tended to see jealousy as a pathology to be discouraged and generally thought shameful—as something that has been imposed by that eternal villain "society " to corrupt the nature of man: Jealousy shows low self-esteem, they say, and emotional dependency. Indeed it does, and that is exactly what the evolutionary theory would predict. A man held in low esteem by his wife is exactly the kind of person in danger of being cuckolded, for she has the motive to seek a better father for her children. This may even explain the extraordinary and hitherto baffling fact that husbands of rape victims are more likely to be traumatized and, despite themselves, to resent their raped wives if the wife was not physically hurt during the rape: Physical hurt is evidence of her resistance: Husbands may have been programmed by evolution to be paranoidly suspicious that their wives were not raped at all, or "asked for it.'

Cuckoldry is an asymmetrical fate. A woman loses no genetic investment if her husband is unfaithful, but a man risks unwittingly raising a bastard: As if to reassure fathers, research shows that people are strangely more apt to say of a baby, "He (or she) looks just like his father, " than to say, "He (or she) looks just like his mother "—and that it is the mother ' s relatives who are most likely to say this:" It is not that a woman need not mind about her husband 's infidelity; it might lead to his leaving her or wasting his time and money on his mistress or picking up a nasty disease: But it does imply that men are likely to mind even more about their wives' infidelity than vice versa: History and law have long reflected just that: In most societies adultery by a wife was illegal and punished severely, while adultery by a husband was con-doned or treated lightly: Until the nineteenth century in Britain, a civil action could be brought against an adulterer by an aggrieved husband for "criminal conversation: "" Even among the Trobriand islanders, who were celebrated by Bronislaw Malinowski in 1927 as a sexually uninhibited people, females who committed adultery were condemned to die:'°

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This double standard is a prime example of the sexism of society and is usually dismissed as no more than that. Yet the law has not been sexist about other crimes: Women have never been punished more severely than men for theft or murder, or at least the legal code has never prescribed that they be so. Why is adultery such a special case? Because man 's honor is at stake? Then punish the adulterous man as harshly, for that is just as effective a deterrent as punishing , the woman. Because men stick together in the war of the sexes? They do not do so in anything else. The law is quite explicit on this: All legal codes so far studied define adultery

" in terms of the marital status of the woman. Whether the adulterous man was himself married is irrelevant. "" And they do so because "it is not adultery per se that the law punishes but only the possible introduction of alien children into the family and even the uncertainty that adultery creates in this regard: Adultery by the husband has no such consequences. "48 When, on their wedding night, Angel Clare confessed to his new wife, Tess, in Thomas Hardy 's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that he had sown his wild oats before marriage, she replied with relief by telling the story of her own seduction by Alec D 'Urberville and the short-lived child she bore him: She thought the transgressions balanced.

" Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel:"

" You—yes you do."

"But do you not forgive me? "

"0 Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another: My God—how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque—prestidigitation as that! "

Clare left her that night:

COURTLY LOVE

Human mating systems are greatly complicated by the fact of inherited wealth. The ability to inherit wealth or status from a par-MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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ent is not unique to man. There are birds that succeed to the ownership of their parents ' territories by staying to help them rear subsequent broods: Hyenas inherit their dominance rank from their mothers (in hyenas, females are dominant and often larger); so do many monkeys and apes. But human beings have raised this habit to an art. And they usually show a much greater interest in passing on wealth to sons than to daughters. This is superficially odd: A man who leaves his wealth to his daughters is likely to see that wealth left to-his certain granddaughters: A man who leaves his wealth to his sons is likely to see the wealth left to what may or may not be his grandsons. In the few matrilineal societies there is indeed such promiscuity that men are not sure of paternity, and in such societies it is uncles that play the role of father to their nephews: 49

Indeed, in more stratified societies the poor often favor their daughters over their sons. But this is not because of certainty of paternity but because poor daughters are more likely to breed than poor sons. A feudal vassal 's son had a good chance of remaining childless, while his sister was carted off to the local castle to be the fecund concubine of the resident lord. Sure enough, there is some evidence that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Bed-fordshire, peasants left more to their daughters than to their sons.'°

In eighteenth-century Ostfriesland in Germany, farmers in stagnant populations had oddly female-biased families, whereas those in growing populations had male-biased families: It is hard to avoid the conclusion that third and fourth sons were a drain on the family unless there were new business opportunities, and they were dealt with accordingly at birth, resulting in female-biased sex ratios in the stagnant populations."

But at the top of society, the opposite prejudice prevailed.

Medieval lords banished many of their daughters to nunneries."

Throughout the world rich men have always favored their sons and often just one of them. A wealthy or powerful father, by leaving his status or the means to achieve it to his sons, is leaving them the wherewithal to become successful adulterers with many bastard sons. No such advantage could accrue to wealthy daughters.

This has a curious consequence: It means that the most

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successful thing a man or a woman can do is beget a legitimate heir to a wealthy man. Logic such as this suggests that philanderers should not be indiscriminate: They should seduce the women with the best genes and also the women with the best husbands, who therefore have the potential to produce the most prolific sons: In medieval times this was raised to an art: The cuckolding of heiress-es and the wives of great lords was considered the highest form of courtly love: Jousting was little more than a way for potential philanderers to impress great ladies: As Erasmus Darwin put it: Contending boars with tusks enamel'd strike, And guard with shoulder shield the blow oblique;

While female bands attend in mute surprise, And view the victor with admiring eyes: So Knight on Knight, recorded in romance,

Urged the proud steed, and couch'd the extended lance;

He, whose dread prowess with resistless force,

Bless'd, as the golden guerdon of his toils, Bow'd to the Beauty, and receiv'd her smiles:"

At a time when the legitimate eldest son of a great lord would inherit not only his father 's wealth but also his polygamy, the cuckolding of such lords was sport indeed: Tristan expected to inherit the kingdom of his uncle, King Mark, in Cornwall. While in Ireland he ignored the attentions of the beautiful Isolde until she was summoned by King Mark to be his wife. Panic-struck at the thought of losing his inheritance but determined to save it at least for his son, he suddenly took an enormous interest in Isolde. Or at least so Laura Betzig retells the old story: 54

Betzig's analysis of medieval history includes the idea that the begetting of wealthy heirs was the principal cause of Church-state controversies: A series of connected events occurred in the tenth century or thereabouts: The power of kings declined and the power of local feudal lords increased. As a consequence, noblemen gradually became more concerned with producing legitimate heirs to succeed to their titles, as the seigneurial system of primogeni-MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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ture was established. They divorced barren wives and left all to the firstborn son. Meanwhile, resurgent Christianity conquered its rivals to become the dominant religion of northern Europe: The early Church was obsessively interested in matters of marriage, divorce, polygamy, adultery, and incest. Moreover, in the tenth century the Church began to recruit its monks and priests from among the aristocracy:"

The Church 's obsessions with sexual matters were very different from St: Paul' s: It had little to say about polygamy or the begetting of many bastards, although both were commonplace and against doctrine. Instead, it concentrated on three things: first, divorce, remarriage, and adoption; second, wet nursing, and sex during periods when the liturgy demanded abstinence; and third,

" incest" between people married to within seven canonical degrees: In all three cases the Church seems to have been trying to prevent lords from siring legitimate heirs: If a man obeyed the doctrines of the Church in the year 1100, he could not divorce a barren wife, he certainly could not remarry while she lived, and he could not adopt an heir: His wife could not give her baby daughter to a wet nurse and be ready to bear another in the hope of its being a son, and he could not make love to his wife "for three weeks at Easter, four weeks at Christmas, and one to seven weeks at Pentecost; plus Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays—days for penance or sermons; plus miscellaneous feast days:" He also could not bear a legitimate heir by any woman closer than a seventh cousin—which excluded most noble women within three hundred miles: It all adds up to a sustained attack by the Church on the siring of heirs, and

" it was not until the Church started to fill up with the younger brothers of men of state that the struggle over inheritance—over marriage—between them began." Individuals in the Church (disinherited younger sons) were manipulating sexual mores to increase the Church 's own wealth or even regain property and titles for themselves: Henry VIII ' s dissolution of the monasteries, following his break with Rome, which followed Rome ' s disapproval of his divorcing the sonless Catherine of Aragon, is a sort of parable for the whole history of Church-state relations."

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Indeed, the Church-state controversy was just one of many historical instances of wealth-concentration disputes. The practice of primogeniture was a good way to keep wealth—and its polygamy potential—intact through the generations: But there were other ways, too: First among them was marriage itself. Marrying an heiress was always the quickest way to wealth: Of course, strategic marriage and primogeniture work against each other: If women inherit no wealth, then there is nothing to be gained from marrying a rich man ' s daughter: Among the royal dynasties of Europe, though, in most of which women could inherit thrones (in default of male heirs), eligible marriages were often possible: Eleanor of Aquitaine brought Britain 's kings a large chunk of France. The War of the Spanish Succession was fought solely to prevent a French king from inheriting the throne of Spain as the result of a strategic marriage: Right down to the Edwardian practice of English aristocrats marrying the daughters of American robber barons, the alliances of great families have been a force to concentrate wealth.

Another way, practiced commonly among slave-owning dynasties in the American South, was to keep marriage within the family: Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill of the University of New Mexico has shown how in such families more often than not men married their first cousins: By tracing the genealogies of four southern families, she found that fully half of all marriages involved kin or sister exchange (two brothers marrying two sisters): By contrast, in northern families at the same time, only 6 percent of marriages involved kin: What makes this result especially intriguing is that Thornhill had predicted it before she found it: Wealth concentration works better for land, whose value depends on its scarcity, than for business fortunes, which are made and lost in many families in parallel:"

Thornhill went on to argue that just as some people have an incentive to use marriage to concentrate wealth, so other people have an incentive to prevent them from doing exactly that. And kings, in particular, have both the incentive and the power to achieve their wishes: This explains an otherwise puzzling fact: that prohibitions on "incestuous " marriages between cousins are fierce and numerous in some societies and absent in others: In every case MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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it is the more highly stratified society that most regulates marriage.

Among the Trumai of Brazil, an egalitarian people, marriage between cousins is merely frowned upon: Among the Maasai of East Africa. who have considerable disparities of wealth, such marriage is punished with "a severe flogging: " Among the Inca people, anybody having the temerity to marry a female relative (widely defined) had his eyes gouged out and was cut into quarters: The emperor was, of course, an exception: His queen was his full sister, and Pachacuti began a tradition of marrying all his half sisters as well: Thornhill concludes that these rules had nothing to do with incest but were all about rulers trying to prevent wealth concentration by families other than their own; they usually excepted themselves from such laws: 58

DARWINIAN HISTORY

This kind of science goes by the name of Darwinian history, and it has been greeted with predictable ridicule by real historians. For them, wealth concentration requires no further explanation: For Darwinians, it must once have been (or must still be) the means to a reproductive end: No other currency counts in natural selection.

When we study sage grouse or elephant seals in their natural habitat, we can be fairly sure that they are striving to maximize their long-term reproductive success. But it is much more difficult to make the same claim for human beings: People strive for something, certainly, but it is usually money or power or security or happiness. The fact that they do not translate these into babies is raised as evidence against the whole evolutionary approach to human affairs.59 But the claim of evolutionists is not that these measures of success are today the tickets to reproductive success but that they once were. Indeed, to a surprising extent they still are: Successful men remarry more frequently and more widely than unsuccessful ones, and even with contraception preventing this from being turned into reproductive success, rich people still have as many or more babies as poor people.`°

Yet Western people conspicuously avoid having as many

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children as they could. William Irons of Northwestern University in Chicago has tackled this problem. He believes that human beings have always taken into account the need to give a child a "good start in life. " They have never been prepared to sacrifice quality of children for quantity: Thus, when an expensive education became a prerequisite for success and prosperity, around the time of the demographic transition to low birthrates, people were able to read-just and lower the number of children they had in order to be able to afford to send them to school. Exactly this reason is given today by Thai people for why they are having fewer children than their parents:'

There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of the modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: Strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy other men 's wives who will bear bastards. It began with a man who shared a piece of prized fish or honey with an attractive neighbor 's wife in exchange for a brief affair and continues with a pop star ushering a model into his Mercedes. From fish to Mercedes, the history is unbroken: via skins and beads, plows and cattle, swords and castles. Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity:

Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: Strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man: It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat. It continues with a rich tycoon 's wife bearing a baby that grows up to resemble her beefy bodyguard: Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes.

Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history:

Chapter 8

SEXING THE MIND.

No woman, no cry:

—Bob Marley

0, the trouble, the trouble with women,

I repeat it again and again

From Kalamazoo to Kamchatka

The trouble with women is—men:

—Ogden Nash and Kurt Weill

The pine vole, Microtus pinetorum, is a monogamous species of mouse. The males help the females look after the babies. Male and female pine voles have similar brains: In particular, the hippocam-pus of both the male and female is much the same size. When required to run a maze, male and female pine voles prove equally good at the task: The meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus, is a different story altogether: It is polygamous: Males, which must visit the scattered holes of their several wives, travel farther than females every day: Male meadow voles have bigger hippocampi than females and are better at finding and remembering their way through mazes. Their brains are simply better at such spatial tasks.'

Just like meadow voles, men are better at spatial tasks than women: When asked to compare the shapes of two objects seen from different angles and judge whether they are the same shape or to judge whether two glasses of different shape are equally full or any such task that involves spatial judgments, men generally do better than women: Polygamy and spatial skills seem to go together in several species.

EQUALITY OR 1DENTITY?

Men and women have different bodies: The differences are the direct result of evolution: Women 's bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men's bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family.

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Men and women have different minds: The differences are the direct result of evolution: Women's minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food: Men's minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family: The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory. The proposition that men and women have evolved different minds is anathema to every social scientist and politically correct individual.

Yet I believe it to be true for two reasons. First, the logic is impeccable: As the last two chapters have demonstrated, over long stretches of evolutionary time men and women have faced different evolutionary pressures, so the ones who succeeded will have been those whose brains produced behaviors well suited to those pressures: Second, the evidence is overwhelming: Gingerly, reluctantly, but with increasing conviction, physiologists and psychologists have begun to probe the differences between male and female brains: Often they have done so determined to find none. Yet again and again they come back with good evidence that there are such differences. Not everything is different; most things, in fact, are identical between the sexes. Much of the folklore about differences is merely convenient sexism—And there are enormous overlaps: Although it is a fair generalization to say that men are taller than women, nonetheless the tallest woman in a large group of people is usually taller than the shortest man: In the same way, even if the average woman is better at some mental task than the average man, there are many women who are worse at the task than the best man, or vice versa: But the evidence for the average male brain differing in certain ways from the average female brain is now all but undeniable.

Evolved differences are by definition "genetic, " and any suggestion that men and women have genetically different minds horrifies the modern conscience for it seems to justify prejudice: How can we strive to build an equal society when men are given

" scientific " support for their sexism? Give men an inch of inequality and they will claim a mile of bias. The Victorians believed men and women were so different that women should not even have the vote; in the eighteenth century some men thought women incapable of reason.

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These concerns are fair: But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality. Boys are interested in guns, girls in dolls. That may be conditioning, or it may be genes, but neither is "better " than the other. As anthropologist Melvin Konner put it: "Men are more violent than women and women are more nurturant, at least toward infants and children, than men. I am sorry if this is a cliche; that cannot make it less factual: "'' Moreover, suppose there are differences in the mentalities of men and women. Is it then fair to assume and act as if there were none? Suppose that boys are more competitive than girls. Would that not suggest that girls would be better educated apart from boys? The evidence suggests that girls are indeed more successful after education in a single-sex school. Sex-blind education may be unfair education.

In other words, to assume the sexes are mentally identical in the face of evidence that they are not is just as unfair as to assume sexual differences in the face of evidence that they are the same. We have always assumed that the burden of proof must rest with those who believe there are innate mental differences between the sexes: We may have been wrong:

MEN AND MAP READING

With that out of the way, let us examine the evidence. There are three reasons to expect evolution to have produced different mentalities in men and women. The first is that men and women are mammals, and all mammals show sexual differences in behavior. As Charles Darwin put it, "No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild boar from the sow, the stallion from the mare." ' The second is that men and women are apes, and in all apes there are great rewards for males that show aggression toward other males, for males that seek mating opportunities, and for females that pay close attention to their babies. The third is

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that men and women are human beings, and human beings are mammals with one highly unusual characteristic: a sexual division of labor. Whereas a male and a female chimp seek the same sources of food, a male and a female human being, in virtually every preagricultural society, set about gathering food in different ways: Men look for sources that are mobile, distant, and unpredictable (usually meat), while women, burdened with children, look for sources that are static, close, and predictable (usually plants).'

In other words, far from being an ape with fewer than usual sex differences, the human being may prove to be an ape with more than usual sex differences. Indeed, mankind may be the mammal with the greatest division of sexual labor and the greatest of mental differences between the sexes: Yet, though mankind may have added division of labor to the list of causes of sexual dimorphism, he has subtracted the effect of male parental care: Of the many mental features that are claimed to be different between the sexes, four stand out as repeatable, real, and persistent in all psychological tests. First, girls are better at verbal tasks: Second, boys are better at mathematical tasks. Third, boys are more aggressive. Fourth, boys are better at some visuo-spatial tasks and girls at others. Put crudely, men are better at reading a map and women are better judges of character and mood—on average.'

(And, interestingly, gay men are more like women than heterosexual men in some of these respects.) 6

The case of the visuo-spatial tasks is intriguing because it has been used to argue that men are naturally polygamous' by analogy with the case of the mice quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Crudely put, polygamist mice need to know their way from one wife's house to another—and it is certainly true that in many polygamous animals, including our relatives, orangutans, males patrol an area that includes the territories of several wives: When people are asked to rotate a diagram of an object mentally to see if it is the same as another object, only about one in four women scores as highly as the average man. This difference grows during childhood: Mental rotation is the essence of map reading, but it seems a huge jump to argue that men are polygamous because they are better at map reading just because the same is true of mice.

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Besides, there are spatial skills that women perform better than men: Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals at York University in Toronto reasoned that the male skill at mental-rotation tasks probably reflected not some parallel with polygamous male mice patrolling broad territories to visit many females but a much more particular fact about human history: that during the Pleistocene period, when early man was an African hunter-gatherer for a million years or more, men were the hunters. So men needed superior spatial skills to throw weapons at moving targets, to make tools, to find their way home to camp after a long trek, and so on.

Much of this is conventional wisdom, but Silverman and Eals then asked themselves: What special spatial skills would women gatherers need that men would not? One thing they predicted was that women would need to notice things more—to spot roots, mushrooms, berries, plants—and would need to remember landmarks so as to know where to look: So Silverman and Eals did a series of experiments that required students to memorize a picture full of objects and then recall them later, or to sit in a room for three minutes and then recall what objects were where in the room. (The students were told they were merely being asked to wait in the room until a different experiment was ready:) On every measure of object memory and location memory, the women students did 60—70 percent better than the men. The old jokes about women noticing things and men losing things about the house and having to ask their wives are true. The difference appears around puberty, just as the social and verbal skills of women begin to exceed those of men.'

When a family in a car gets lost, the woman wants to stop and ask the way, while the man persists in trying to find his way by map or landmarks. So pervasive is this cliche that there must be some truth to it. And it fits with what we know of the sexes: To a man, stopping to ask the way is an admission of defeat, something status-conscious males avoid at all costs: To a woman, it is common sense and plays on her strengths in social skills.

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NURTURE WITH NATURE

These social skills may also have had Pleistocene origins. A woman is dependent on her social intuition and skills for success at making allies within the tribe, manipulating men into helping her, judging potential mates, and advancing the cause of her children. Now this is not to claim that the difference is purely genetic: It could well be true—it is in my marriage—that men read maps more and women read novels more: So perhaps it is all a matter of training: Women think about character more, and so their brains get more practice at it: Yet where does the preference come from? Perhaps it comes from conditioning. Women learn to imitate their mothers who .are more interested in character than maps: So where did the mothers get the interest? From their mothers? Even if you suggest that the original Eve took an arbitrary step in deciding to be more interested in character than Adam, you cannot escape genetic change, for Eve's female descendants, concentrating on one another 's character, would have thrived in proportion to their skill at judging character and mood, and so genes for better ability to judge character and mood would have spread: If such skill was genetically influenced, people could not avoid being influenced by genes for preferring what they were genetically good at, and so genetic differences would be reinforced with cultural conditioning: This phenomenon—that people specialize in what they are good at and so create conditions that suit their genes—is known as the Baldwin effect since it was first described by one James Mark Baldwin in 1896. It leads to the conclusion that conscious choice and technology can both influence evolution, an idea explored at length by Jonathan Kingdon in his recent book Self-Made Man and His Undoing:' It is impossible in the end to deny that even a highly conditioned trait can be without some basis in biology—or vice versa: Nurture always reinforces nature; it rarely fights it: (An exception may be aggressiveness, which develops more in boys despite frequent parental discouragement:) I find it very hard to believe that the fact that 83 percent of murderers and 93 percent of drunken drivers in America are male is due to social conditioning alone.'°

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It is hard for a nonscientist to realize how revolutionary the implications of these ideas were when men like Don Symons first began to sketch them out in the late 1970s." What Symons was saying—that men and women have different minds because they have had different evolutionary ambitions and rewards—accords easily with common sense, but the overwhelming majority of the research that social scientists had done on human sexuality was infused with the assumption that there are no mental differences.

To this day many social scientists assume—not conclude, assume—that all differences are learned from parents and peers by identical brains: Listen, for instance, to Liam Hudson and Bernadine Jacot, authors of a book called The Way Men Think: " At the heart of men 's psychology is a ' wound, ' a developmental crisis experienced by infant boys as they distance themselves from mother 's love and establish themselves as male: This makes men adept at abstract reasoning but vulnerable to insensitivity, misogyny, and perversion:" Through their assumption that the cause must lie in a childhood experience, the authors are condemning 49 percent of the human race as " wounded" perverts. How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience: Deborah Tannen, author of a fascinating book about men 's and women 's styles of conversation called You Just Don't Understand, while not considering the possibility that men ' s and women ' s natures are on average innately different, at least has the courage to argue that the differences are better recognized and lived with than condemned and blamed on personality: "When sincere attempts to communicate end in stalemate, and a beloved partner seems irrational and obstinate, the different languages men and women speak can shake the foundations of our lives. Understanding the other's ways of talking is a giant leap across the communication gap between women and men, and a giant step toward opening lines of communication:"

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HORMONES AND BRAINS

There is, nonetheless, a sense in which sexual differences cannot be strictly left to the genes. If a gene appeared in a Pleistocene man for, say, better sense of direction at the expense of poorer social intuition, it might have been of benefit to him: But, as well as his sons, his daughters would have inherited it from him: In them the gene might have been positively disadvantageous because it left them less socially intuitive. So its net effect, over time, would be neutral, and it would not spread."

The genes that would spread would therefore be ones that responded to signals of gender: if in a male, improve the sense of direction; if in a female, improve the social intuition. And this is precisely what we find. There is no evidence of genes for different brains, but there is ample evidence of genes for altering brains in response to male hormones. (For reasons of historical accident, the

" normal brain" is female unless masculinized:) So the mental differences between men and women are caused by genes that respond to testosterone.

We last met the steroid hormone testosterone in fish and birds where it was rendering them more vulnerable to parasites by exaggerating their sexual ornaments. In recent years more and more evidence has been found that testosterone affects not just ornaments and bodies but also brains: Testosterone is an ancient chemical, found in much the same form throughout the vertebrates. Its concentration determines aggressiveness so exactly that in birds with reversed sex roles, such as phalaropes and in female-dominated hyena clans, it is the females that have higher levels of testosterone in the blood. Testosterone masculinizes the body; without it, the body remains female, whatever its genes. It also masculinizes the brain: Among birds it is usually only the male that sings. A zebra finch will not sing unless there is sufficient testosterone in its blood. With testosterone, the special song-producing part of its brain grows larger and the bird begins to sing. Even a female zebra finch will sing as long as she has been exposed to testosterone early in life and as an adult: In other words, testosterone primes the young SEXING THE MIND

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zebra finch 's brain to be responsive later in life to testosterone again and so develop the tendency to sing. Insofar as a zebra finch can be said to have a mind, the hormone is a mind-altering drug.

Much the same applies to human beings. Here the evidence comes from a series of natural and unnatural experiments. Nature has left some men and women with abnormal hormonal doses, and in the 1950s doctors changed the hormonal conditions of some wombs by injecting some pregnant women with certain hormones.

Women with a condition known as Turner 's syndrome (they are born without ovaries) have even less testosterone in their blood than do women who have ovaries: (Ovaries produce some testosterone, though not as much as testicles do.) They are exaggeratedly feminine in their behavior, with typically a special interest in babies, clothes, housekeeping, and romantic stories: Men with less than usual testosterone in their blood as adults—eunuchs, for example—are noted for their femininity of appearance and attitude. Men exposed to less than usual testosterone as embryos—for example, the sons of diabetic women who took female hormones during pregnancy—are shy, unassertive, and effeminate: Men with too much testosterone are pugnacious: Women whose mothers were injected with progesterone in the 1950s (to avert miscarriage) later described themselves as having been tomboys when young; progesterone is not unlike testosterone in its effects. Girls who were born with an unusual condition called either adrenogenital syndrome or congenital adrenal hyperplasia are equally tomboyish: This disorder causes the adrenal gland, near the kidney, to produce a hormone that acts like testosterone instead of cortisol, its usual product."

Somewhat like in the zebra finches, there are two periods when testosterone levels rise in male children: in the womb, from about six weeks after conception, and at puberty. As Anne Moir and David Jessel put it in a recent book, Brain Sex, the first pulse of hormone exposes the photographic negative; the second develops it: 1° This is a crucial difference from the way the hormone affects the body. The body is masculinized by testosterone from the testicles at puberty, whatever its womb experience. But not the mind.

The mind is immune to testosterone unless it was exposed to a suf-

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ficient concentration (relative to female hormones) in the womb. It would be easy to engineer a society with no sex difference in attitude between men and women: Inject all pregnant women with the right dose of hormones, and the result would be men and women with normal bodies but identical feminine brains: War, rape, box-ing, car racing, pornography, and hamburgers and beer would soon be distant memories: A feminist paradise would have arrived: SUGAR AND SPICE

The effect of this double-barreled burst of testosterone on the male brain is dramatic: The first dose produces a baby that is mentally different from a girl baby from its first day on the planet: Baby girls are more interested in smiling, communicating, and in people, boys in action and things. Shown cluttered pictures, boys select objects, girls people. Boys are instantly obsessed with dis-mantling, assembling, destroying, possessing, and coveting things.

Girls are fascinated by people and treat their toys as surrogate people. Hence, to suit their mentalities, we have invented toys that suit each sex. We give boys tractors and girls dolls: We are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them.

This is something every parent knows. Despairingly they watch their son turn every stick into a sword or gun, while their daughter cuddles even the most inanimate object as if it were a doll. A woman wrote to the Independent, a British national newspaper, on November 2, 1992, as follows: " I would be interested if any of your more learned readers could tell me why, from the time my twins could reach for toys and were put on a rug together with a mixed selection of 'boys ' and 'girls ' baby toys, he would inevitably select the car/train items and she the doll/teddy ones. "

The genes cannot be denied. And yet, of course, there are no genes for liking guns or dolls, there are only genes for channeling male instincts into imitating males and female instincts into imitating female behavior. There are natures that respond to some nurtures and not others:

SEXING THE MIND

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At school, boys are fidgety, difficult, inattentive, and slow to learn, compared to girls. Nineteen out of every twenty hyperac-tive children are boys. Four times as many boys as girls are dyslexic and learning disabled: "Education is almost a conspiracy against the aptitudes and inclinations of a schoolboy, " wrote psychologist Dianne McGuiness, a sentiment to which almost every man with a memory of school will raise a hearty cry of assent:"

But another fact begins to emerge at school. Girls are simply better at linguistic forms of learning, boys at mathematical and some spatial skills. Boys are more abstract, girls more literal. Boys with an extra X chromosome (XXY instead of the normal XY) are much more verbal than other boys: Girls with Turner ' s syndrome (no ovaries) are even worse at spatial tasks than other girls but just as good at verbal ones: Girls who were exposed to male hormones in the womb are better at spatial tasks: Boys who were exposed to female hormones are worse at spatial tasks. These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls: According to one researcher, such suppression has done both boys and girls far more harm than good. i8

And the brain itself begins to show strange differences.

Brain functions become more diffuse in girls, whereas they take up specific locations in the heads of boys: The two hemispheres of the brain become more different and more specialized in boys: The cor-pus callosum, which connects the two, grows larger in girls: It is as if testosterone begins to isolate the boy ' s right hemisphere from colonization by verbal skills from the left: These facts are far too few and unsystematic to be regarded as anything more than hints of what actually happens, but the role of language acquisition must be critical: Language is the most human and therefore most recent of our mental skills—the one we share with no other ape: Language seems to come into the brain like an invading Goth, taking the place of other skills, and testosterone appears to resist this: Whatever actually happens, it is indis-putable fact that at the age of five, when they first arrive at school, the average boy has a very different brain from the average girl.

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Yet at five the testosterone levels in the average boy are identical CO those of the average girl, and a fraction of what they were at birth: The pulse of testosterone in the womb is a distant memory, and there will be little difference between the sexes in testosterone levels until the age of eleven or twelve. A boy of eleven is far more similar to a girl of the same age than he has been before or will be again. He is academically her equal for the first time, and his interests are not so far apart. Indeed, there is one piece of medical evidence that at this age a person can still grow up to be, mentally, either a typical man or a typical woman, despite the hormonally induced differences of childhood: This evidence comes from thirty-eight cases of a rare congenital disorder in the Dominican Republic: Called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, this disorder causes its male possessor to be unusually insensitive to the effect of testosterone before birth. As a result, such people are born with female genitalia and reared as girls. Suddenly, at puberty, their testosterone level rises, and they turn into almost normal men: (The main difference is that they ejaculate through a hole at the base of the penis:) Yet, despite their childhood as girls, these men have for the most part adapted fairly easily to male roles in their society, which suggests either that their brains were masculinized even as their genitalia were not or that their brains were still adaptable at puberty."

Puberty strikes a young man like a hormonal thunderbolt: His testicles descend, his voice breaks, his body becomes hairier and leaner, and he begins to grow like a weed. The cause of all this is a veritable flood of testosterone from his testicles. He now has twenty times as much of it in his blood as a girl of the same age: The effect is to develop the mental photograph laid down in his head by the womb 's dose and to make his mind into that of an adult man.'

SEXISM AND THE KIBBUTZ LIFE

Asked about their ambitions, men from six different cultures replied with much the same answer. They wanted to be practical, shrewd, SEXING THE MIND

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assertive, dominating, competitive, critical, and self-controlled. They sought power and independence above all. Women from the same cultures wanted to be loving, affectionate, impulsive, sympathetic, and generous. They sought to serve society above all." Studies of male conversation find it to be public (that is, men clam up at home), domineering, competitive, status-obsessed, attention-seeking, factual, and designed to reveal knowledge and skill: Female conversation tends to be private (that is, women clam up in big groups), cooperative, rapport-establishing, reassuring, empathetic, egalitarian, and meandering (that is, to include talk for talk 's sake)."

There are, of course, exceptions and overlaps. Just as there are women who are taller than men, so there are women who want to be assertive and men who want to be sympathetic.

But just as it is still valid to make the generalization that men are taller than women, so it is valid to conclude that the adjec-tives listed above are fairly typical of the natures of men and women. Some must be related to the differences between hunting and gathering, the most uniquely human of the sex differences.

For example, it cannot be a coincidence that men enjoy hunting, fishing, and eating meat much more than women do. Some may be more recent, reflecting social norms that the sexes have i mposed on themselves through peer pressure and education (which was not always as sex blind as it strives to be today). For example, the male desire to be self-controlled may be a modern attribute, a recognition that he has a nature that needs controlling. Others may be more ancient, reflecting basic patterns that all apes share and that baboons do not, such as the fact that a woman generally leaves her group on marriage and lives with her offspring among what were hitherto strangers, whereas a man lives among kin. Others may be more ancient still and shared with all mammals and many birds, such as the fact that women nurture babies while men compete with other men for access to women. It surely cannot be a coincidence that men are obsessed with status in hierarchies and that male chimpanzees compete for status in strict hierarchies of dominance: The Israeli kibbutz system has proved to be a large natural

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experiment in the persistence of sex roles. Men and women were initially encouraged to drop all sex roles in kibbutzim: Haircuts and clothes were unisex; boys were encouraged to be peaceful and sensitive, while girls were treated like tomboys; men did household chores and women went out to work: Yet three generations later, the attempt has largely been abandoned, and kibbutz life is actually more sexist than life in the rest of Israel. People have returned to stereotypes. Men politick, while women tend the home; boys study physics and become engineers, while girls study sociology and become teachers and nurses: Women manage the morale, health, and education of the kibbutz, while men manage the finances, security, and business: To some this is easily explicable: People have simply rebelled against the eccentric pattern set by their parents: Yet that explanation is more condescending than one that treats them as agents of their own choice, choosing according to their natures: Women clean house in a kibbutz because, like women everywhere, they complain that men would not do it properly. Men do not clean house in a kibbutz because, like men everywhere, they complain that if they did, their wives would say it had not been done properly. 2'

Nor are the kibbutzim unique: Even in liberated Scandinavia, it is women who feed the family, wash the clothes, and care for the children. Even where women go to work, some professions remain male bastions (for instance, garage mechanics, air-traffic controllers, driving test examiners, architects), while others have become female bastions (for instance, bank tellers, elementary school teachers, secretaries, interpreters): It is getting gradually more implausible to maintain that in the most egalitarian Western societies women are prevented by social prejudice from becoming garage mechanics. Women rarely want to become garage mechanics: They do not want to become garage mechanics because the world of the garage mechanic is an uninviting "man ' s world " in which they would feel unwelcome. But why is it a man 's world? Because it is a job that men have molded to suit their personalities, and male personalities are different from female ones.

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FEMINISM AND DETERMINISM

The bizarre thing about this assertion of different natures is that it is a thoroughly feminist assertion: There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally capable of all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women, they would be done differently: So feminism itself is anything but egalitarian: Feminists argue explicitly that if more women were in charge, more caring values would prevail: They begin from the presumption that women are by nature different beings: If women ran the world, there would be no war: When women run companies, cooperation, not competition, is the watchword: These are all explicit and firm assertions of sexism: that the personalities and natures of women are different from men. If women ' s personalities are different, is it not likely that they will prove better or worse at certain jobs than men? Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not:

Nor does it help to appeal to social pressure as the source of personality differences: If social pressure is as powerful as social scientists would have us believe, then a person 's nature is irrelevant; only his or her background counts: A man from a broken home who has led a life of crime is the product of that experience, and there is no spark of decent "nature" in his soul to redeem: Of course we scoff at such nonsense: We recognize him to be a product of both his background and his nature: It is the same with sex differences: To say that Western women do not enter politics in the same numbers as men because they have been conditioned to think of it as a man 's career is to patronize women: Politics is all about status-seeking ambition, which many women have a healthy cynicism about: Women have their own minds: They are capable of deciding to enter politics if they want to, whatever society says (and Western society, if anything, now affirms that they should). One of the things that make a political career uninviting may well be the sexism of those around them, but it is absurd to assume it is the only thing.

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I have argued that men and women are different and that some of these differences stem from an evolutionary past in which men hunted and women gathered. So I am dangerously close to arguing that a woman 's place is in the home while her husband works as the breadwinner: Yet that conclusion does not at all follow from the logic presented here. The practice of going out to work in an office or a factory is foreign and novel to the psychology of a savanna-dwelling ape: It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman.

If in the Pleistocene period men went off from the home base on long hunts while women went a shorter distance to gather plants, then maybe men are mentally better suited to long commutes. But neither is evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day and talk into a telephone or sit at a factory bench all day tightening screws: The fact that " work" became a male thing and "home " a female one is an accident of history: The domestication of cattle and the invention of the plow made food gathering a task that benefited from male muscle power: In societies: where the land is tilled by hand, women do most of the work: The industrial revolution reinforced the trend, but the post industrial revolution—the recent growth of service industries—is reversing it again: Women are going " out to work" again as they did when they sought tubers and berries in the Pleistocene period."

Therefore, there is absolutely no justification from evolutionary biology for the view that men should earn and women should darn their socks. There may be professions, such as car mechanic or big-game hunter, that men are psychologically more suited to than women, just as there are professions, such as doctor and nanny, that women are probably naturally better at: But there is no general support in biology for sexism about careers: Indeed, in a curious way, an evolutionary perspective justifies affirmative action more than a more egalitarian philosophy would, for it implies that women have different ambitions and even more than different abilities. Men's reproductive success depended for generations on climbing political hierarchies. Women have rarely had an incentive to seek success of that kind, for their reproductive success depended on other things. Therefore, evolutionary thinking predicts that women often will not seek to climb political SEXING THE MIND

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ladders, but it says nothing about how good they would be if they did: I suggest it is no accident that women have reached the top rung (as the prime minister in many countries) in numbers dispro-portionate to their strength on the lower rungs. I suggest that it is no accident that queens of Britain have a far more distinguished and consistent history than the kings. The evidence suggests that women are on average slightly better than men at running countries. The evidence supports the feminist assertion that men can only envy the female touches they bring to such jobs—intuition, character judgment, lack of self-worship. Since the bane of all organizations, whether they are companies, charities, or governments, is that they reward cunning ambition rather than ability (the people who are good at getting to the top are not necessarily the people who are best at doing the job) and since men are more endowed with such ambition than women, it is absolutely right that promotion should be biased in favor of women—not to redress prejudice but to redress human nature.

And also, of course, to represent the woman 's point of view.

Feminists believe that women need to be proportionally represented in Parliament and Congress because women have a different agenda.

They are right if women are by nature different. If they were the same as men, there would be no reason for men not to represent women 's interests as competently as they represent men ' s. To believe in sexual equality is just. To believe in sexual identity is a most peculiar and unfeminist thing to do.

Feminists who recognize this contradiction are pilloried for their pains. Camille Paglia, literary critic and gadfly, is one of the few who sees that feminism is trying an impossible trick: to change the nature of men while insisting that the nature of women is unchangeable. She argues that men are not closet women and women are not 2

closet men: "Wake up," she cries. "Men and women are different."

THE CAUSES OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

A man develops a sexual preference for women because his brain develops in a certain way. It develops in a certain way because

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testosterone produced•by his genetically determined testicles alter the brain inside his mother 's womb in such a way that later, at puberty, it will react to testosterone again: Miss out on the genes for testicles, the testosterone burst in the womb, or the testosterone burst at puberty—any one of the three—and you will not be a typical man: Presumably, a man who develops a preference for other men is a man who has a different gene that affects how his testicles develop or a different gene that affects how his brain responds to hormones or a different learning experience during the pubertal burst of testosterone—or some combination of these: The search for the cause of homosexuality has begun to shed a great deal of light on the way the brain develops in response to testosterone. It was fashionable until the 1960s to believe that homosexuality was entirely a matter of upbringing: But cruel Freudian aversion therapy proved incapable of changing it, and the fashion then changed to hormonal explanations. Yet adding male hormones to the blood of gay men does not make them more heterosexual; it merely makes them more highly sexed. Sexual orientation has already been fixed before adulthood: Then, in the 1960s, an East German doctor named Gunter Dorner began a series of experiments on rats which seemed to show that in the womb the male homosexual brain releases a hormone, called ,luteinizing hormone, that is more typical of female brains. Dorner, whose motives have often been questioned on the grounds that he seemed to be searching for a way to "cure" homosexuality, castrated male rats at different stages of development and injected them with female hormones: The earlier the castration, the more likely the rat was to solicit sex from other male rats. Research in Britain, America, and Germany has all confirmed that a prenatal exposure to deficiency of testosterone increases the likelihood of a man becoming homosexual. Men with an extra X chromosome and men exposed in the womb to female hormones are more likely to be gay or effeminate, and effeminate boys do indeed grow up to be gay more often than other boys: Intriguingly, men who were conceived and born in periods of great stress, such as toward the end of World War II, are more often gay than men born at other times: (The stress hormone cor-SEXING THE MIND

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tisol is made from the same progenitor as testosterone; perhaps it uses up the raw material, leaving less to be made into testosterone.) The same is true of rats: Homosexual behavior is more common in rats whose mothers were stressed during pregnancy. The things that male brains are usually good at gay brains are often bad at, and vice versa. Gays are also more often left-handed than heterosexuals, which makes a sort of sense because handedness is affected by sex hormones during development, but it is also odd because left-handed people are supposed to be better at spatial tasks than right-handers. This only demonstrates how sketchy our knowledge still is of the relationship between genes, hormones, brains, and skills."

It is clear, however, that the cause of homosexuality lies in some unusual balance of hormonal influence in the womb but not later on, a fact that further supports the idea that the mentality of sexual preference is affected by prenatal sex hormones. This is not incompatible with the growing evidence that homosexuality is genetically determined: The "gay gene " that I will discuss in the next chapter is widely expected to turn out to be a series of genes that affect the sensitivity of certain tissues to testosterone.27 It is both nature and nurture:

It is no different from genes for height: Fed on identical diets, two genetically different men will not grow to the same height: Fed on different diets, two identical twins will grow to different heights. Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both: The genes for height are really only genes for responding to diet by growing. i8

WHY DO RICH MEN MARRY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN?

If homosexuality is determined by hormonal influences in the womb, then so, presumably, are heterosexual preferences. Throughout our evolutionary history, men and women have faced different sexual opportunities and constraints: For a man casual sex with a stranger carried only a small risk—infection, discovery by the wife—and a potentially enormous reward: a cheap addition of an

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extra child to his genetic legacy. Men who seized such opportunities certainly left behind more descendants than men who did not.

Therefore, since we are by definition descended from prolific ancestors rather than barren ones, it is a fair bet that modern men possess a streak of sexual opportunism: Virtually all male mammals and birds do, even those that are mainly monogamous. This is not to say that men are irredeemably promiscuous or that every man is a potential rapist, it is just that men are more likely to be tempted by an opportunity for casual sex than women: Women are likely to be different: Having sex with a stranger not only encumbered a Pleistocene woman with a possible pregnancy before she had won the man 's commitment to help rear the child, but it also exposed her to probable revenge from her husband if she had one and to possible spinsterhood if she did not.

These enormous risks were offset by no great reward. Her chances of conceiving were just as great if she remained faithful to one partner, and her chances of losing the child without a husband 's help were greater. Therefore, women who accepted casual sex left fewer rather than more descendants, and modern women are likely to be equipped with suspicion of casual sex: Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women. It is fashionable to deny such differences and to maintain that only social repression prevents women from buying explicit pornography about men or that only socially paranoid machismo drives men to promiscuity. Yet this is to ignore the enormous social pressures now placed on men and women to disregard or minimize differences between them. A modern woman is exposed to pressure from men to be sexually uninihibited, but she is also exposed to the same pressure from other women. Likewise, men are under constant pressure to be more

" responsible, " sensitive, and faithful—from other men as well as from women. Perhaps more out of envy than morality, men are just as censorious of philanderers as they are of women; often more so: If men are sexual predators, it is despite centuries of social pressure not to be: In the words of one psychologist, "Our repressed impulses are every bit as human as the forces that repress them:""

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But what exactly are the differences between men and women in their sexual mentalities? I argued in the last two chapters that men, for whom the reproductive stakes are higher, are likely to be more competitive with one another and therefore are more likely to end up wielding power, controlling wealth, and seeking fame.

Consequently, women are more likely to have been rewarded for seeking power, wealth, or fame in a husband than men are in a wife.

Women who did so probably left more descendants among modern women, so it follows from evolutionary thinking that women are more likely CO value potential mates who are rich and powerful.

Another way to look at it is to think of what a woman can most profitably seek in a husband that will increase the number and health of her children. The answer is not more sperm but more money or more cattle or more tribal allies or whatever resource counts:

A man, by contrast, is seeking a mate who will use his sperm and his money to produce babies: Consequently, he has always had an enormous incentive to seek youth and health in his mates: Those men who preferred to marry forty-year-old women rather than twenty-year-olds stood a small chance of begetting any children at all, let alone more than one or two: They also stood a large chance of inheriting a bunch of stepchildren from a previous marriage: They left fewer descendants than the men who always sought out the youngest, postpubertal females on offer: We would expect, therefore, that while women pay attention to cues of wealth and power, men pay attention to cues of health and youth.

This may seem a startlingly obvious thing to say. As Nancy Thornhill put it, "Surely no one has ever seriously doubted that men desire young, beautiful women and that women desire wealthy, high-status men:"'' The answer to her question is that sociologists do doubt it. Judging by their reaction to a recent study, only the most rigorous evidence will convince them: The study was done by David Buss of the University of Michigan, who asked a large sample of American students to rank the qualities they most preferred in a mate: He found that men preferred kindness, intelligence, beauty, and youth, while women preferred kindness, intelligence,

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wealth, and status: He was told that this may be the case in America, but it is not a universal facet of human nature.

So he repeated the study in thirty-seven different samples from thirty-three countries, asking over one thousand people, and found exactly the same result: Men pay more attention to youth and beauty, women to wealth and status: To which came this answer: Of course women pay more attention to wealth because men control it: If women controlled wealth, they would not seek it in their spouses. Buss looked again and found that American women who make more money than the average American woman pay more attention than average to the wealth of potential spouses, not less:" High-earning women value the earning capacity of their husbands more, not less, than low-earning women: Even a survey of fifteen powerful leaders of the feminist movement revealed that they wanted still more powerful men. As Buss 's colleague Bruce Ellis put it, "Women's sexual tastes become more, rather than less, discriminatory as their wealth, power, and social status increase.'

Many of Buss 's critics argued that he ignored context altogether: Different criteria of mate preference develop in different cultures at different times: To this Buss replied with a simple analogy. The amount of muscle on the average man is highly context-dependent: In the United States young men tend to be beefier about the shoulders than in Britain, perhaps partly because they eat better food and perhaps partly because their sports emphasize throwing strength rather than agility: Yet this does not negate the generalization that " men have more muscle on their shoulders than women." So, too, the fact that women pay more attention to men 's wealth in one place than in another does not negate the generalization that women pay more attention to the wealth of potential mates than men do."

The main difficulty with Buss 's study is that it fails to distinguish between a partner chosen as a spouse and a partner chosen for a fling: Douglas Kenrick of Arizona State University asked a group of students to rank various attributes of potential mates according to four levels of intimacy: When seeking a marriage partner, intelligence is important to both sexes: When seeking a sexual SEXING THE MIND

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partner for a one-night stand, intelligence matters much less, especially to men: There is little doubt that people of both sexes are sensible enough to value kindness, compatibility, and wit in those with whom they may spend the rest of their lives."

The difficulty with measuring sexual preferences is that they are compromises: An aging ugly man does not mate with several young and beautiful women (unless he is very rich indeed). He settles for a faithful wife of the same age. A young woman does not mate faithfully with a wealthy tycoon. She chooses whatever is available, probably a slightly older man with no more money but a steady job: People lower their expectations according to their age, looks, and wealth: To discover just how different the sexual mentalities of men and women are, it is necessary to do a controlled experiment. Take an average man and an average women and give each the option of faithful marriage to a familiar partner or continual orgies with beautiful strangers. The experiment has not been done, and it is hard to imagine its getting a grant. But it need not be, for it is in effect possible to do exactly that experiment by looking inside people 's heads and examining their fantasies: Bruce Ellis and Don Symons gave 307 California students a questionnaire about their sexual fantasies. Had their subjects been Arabs or English people, the study would have been easily dismissed by social scientists because any sex differences that emerged could be attributed to social pressures from a sexist background.

But there can be no people on Earth or in history so steeped in the politically correct ideology that there are no psychological sex differences as students at a university in California: Any differences that emerged could therefore be regarded as conservative estimates for the species as a whole.

Ellis and Symons found that two things showed no sex differences at all. The first was the students ' attitudes toward their fantasies. Guilt, pride, and indifference were each as common among men as among women: And both sexes had a clear image of their fantasized partner 's face during the fantasy. On every other measure there were substantial differences between the men and the women: Men had more sexual fantasies and fantasized about more

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partners. One in three men said they fantasized about more than one thousand partners in their lives; only 8 percent of women imagined so many partners. Nearly half the women said they never switch partners during a sexual fantasy; only 12 percent of men never switch: Visual images of the partner(s) were more important for men than touching, the partner ' s response, or any feelings and emotions: The reverse was true of women, who were more likely to focus on their own responses and less likely to focus on the partner. Women overwhelmingly fantasized about sex with a familiar partner:"

These results are not alone: Every other study of sexual fantasy has concluded that "male sexual fantasies tend to be more ubiquitous, frequent, visual, specifically sexual, promiscuous, and active: Female sexual fantasies tend to be more contextual, emotive, intimate, and passive."' Nor need we rely on such surveys alone.

Two industries relentlessly exploit the sexual fantasizing of men and women: pornography and the publishing of romance novels: Pornography is aimed almost entirely at men. It varies little from a standard formula all over the world: "Soft porn " consists of pictures of naked or seminaked women in provocative positions: Such pictures are arousing to men, whereas pictures of naked (anonymous) men are not especially arousing to women: "A propensity to be aroused merely by the sight of males would promote random matings from which a female would have nothing to gain reproductively and a great deal to lose. " "

" Hard porn, " which depicts actual acts of sex, is almost invariably about the gratification of male lust by willing, easily aroused, varied, multiple, and physically attractive women (or men, in the case of gay porn): It is virtually devoid of context, plot, flirtation, courtship, and even much foreplay. There are no encumbering relationships, and the coupling duo are usually depicted as strangers: When two scientists showed heterosexual students pornographic films and measured their arousal by them, they found a consistent pattern of the kind common sense would suggest. First, men were more aroused than women. Second, men were aroused more by depictions of group sex than by films of a SEXING THE MIND

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heterosexual couple, whereas for women it was the other way around. Third, women and men were both aroused by lesbian scenes, but neither was aroused by male homosexual sex.

(Remember, all these students were heterosexual:) When watching pornography, men and women are both interested in the women actors. But porn is designed for, marketed to, and sought out by men, not women:"

The romance novel, by contrast, is aimed entirely at a female market. It, too, depicts a fictional world that has changed remarkably little except in adapting to female career ambitions and to a less inhibited attitude toward the description of sex. Authors adhere strictly to a formula provided by the publishers. Sexual acts play a small part in these novels; the bulk of each book is about love, commitment, domesticity, nurturing, and the formation of relationships. There is little promiscuity or sexual variety, and what sex there is, is described mainly through the heroine 's emotional reaction CO what is done to her—particularly the tactile things—

and not to any detailed description of the man 's body. His character is often discussed in detail but not his body: Ellis and Symons claim that the romance novel and pornography represent the respective utopian fantasies of the two sexes.

Their data on the sexual fantasies of California students would seem to support this contention: So does the repeated failure of magazines that try to repackage the male-porn formula for women (much

'

of Playgirl s readership is gay men), plus the burgeoning business of selling explicit novels about promiscuous sex at air-ports—for men: In any bookstore there are magazines for men with pictures of women on the covers, promising more inside, and magazines for women with pictures of women on the covers, promising hints about improving relationships inside. There are romance novels aimed at women with pictures of women on the covers and sexy novels aimed at men with pictures of women on the covers. The publishing industry, living by the market, not the prevailing ideology, has no doubts about the differences between men and women 's attitudes toward sex.

As Ellis and Symons put it,

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The data on sexual fantasy reported here, the scientific literature on sexual fantasy, . : : the consumer-driven selective forces of a free market (which have shaped the historically stable contrasts between male-oriented pornography and female-oriented romance novels), the ethnographic record on human sexuality, and the ineluctable implications of an evolutionary perspective on our species, taken together, imply the existence of a profound sex difference in sexual psychology:"

This is a far more enlightened view than the peculiarly uncharitable assumption among the politically correct that the reason women are not more turned on by nudity and pornography is that they are repressed:

CHOOSY MEN

A paradox looms: Men are promiscuous opportunists at heart and in their fantasies: Truly promiscuous opportunists would not be too choosy, one would think: And yet men care about women 's looks more than women care about men ' s looks. A sports car and an expense account can turn a frog into a prince for women, but even a rich woman cannot afford to be ugly (although in these times of cosmetic surgery, she can sometimes afford the means not to be ugly): Advertisements for "escorts" emphasize looks. A man contemplating an affair should not restrict himself to what he considers a good-looking woman, yet he usually does. This is rather unusual: A male gorilla or sage grouse does not refuse to mate with a female because of her appearance: He takes every opportunity on offer regardless of looks. Polygamous despots of ancient times may have been promiscuous, but they were still choosy; their harems were always recruited from among the young, the virginal, and the beautiful.

The paradox is soluble. The degree to which an animal of either sex is choosy correlates exactly with the degree to which it SEXING THE MIND

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invests in parental care. A black grouse, investing no more than sperm, is prepared to copulate with anything that even resembles a female: A stuffed bird or a model will do:'° A male albatross, who will put all his best efforts into raising one female 's young, is elaborately suspicious and selective, striving for the best female on offer. So man's choosiness reflects once more the fact that man does indeed form a pair bond and invest in his young, unlike some of his undiscriminating ape cousins: It is a legacy of his past monogamy: Choose well, for it may be the only chance you will get.

Indeed, the overwhelming fascination of men with female youth argues that pair bonds have lasted lifetimes. In this we are quite unlike any other mammal: Chimpanzees find old females just as attractive as young ones as long as both are in estrus. The fact that men do prefer twenty-year-olds adds one piece of evidence to the theory that a Pleistocene man, like a rpodern man, married for life.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher has argued that there is a natural term to marriage, which is why divorce rates peak after four years of marriage. Four years is long enough to rear a single child beyond utter dependence, and Fisher believes that when each child reached four, Pleistocene women sought a fresh husband for the next child. She argues that therefore divorce is natural. But there are several problems with her case: The four-year peak is merely what statisticians call a mode and not a very prominent one at that: Divorce rates are bound to peak in one of the years after marriage.

Moreover, her theory sits oddly alongside the fact that men consistently prefer younger women and that husbands contribute to their children's rearing long after the children reach four: A woman who divorced her husband four years after the birth of every child would be less attractive to new men every time, not only because she would be older but because she would bring a growing retinue of stepchildren: The male preference for young mates implies lifelong mateships."

Even the most cursory inspection of the personal advertisements in a newspaper confirms what we all know: that men seek younger wives and women seek older husbands—despite the fact that they will almost certainly outlive them by a decade or more. In

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his survey Buss found that men seek women of about twenty-five, slightly past their maximum reproductive potential (they have already missed several breeding years) but close to their period of maximum fertility: However, this result may be misleading, as two of those commenting on Buss 's data have suggested: First, as Don Symons points out, a twenty-five-year-old modern Westerner shows probably as much wear and tear as a twenty-year-old tribal woman: When asked what women they prefer, Yanomamo men do not hesitate to say moko dude women, meaning those between puberty and first child: Other things being equal, that is also the Western man's ideal.42

RACISM AND SEXISM

This chapter, obsessed with differences between the sexes, has ignored the differences between races, yet they are often thrown together in the demonology of modern prejudice. In an extraordinary equation, to insist on sexual differences is to insist on racial differences, too. Sexism is the sister of racism. I confess to being baffled by this. I think it is easy and, given the evidence, rational to believe that the differences between the natures of men of different races are trivial, while the differences between the natures of men and women of the same race are considerable.

Not that racial and cultural differences cannot exist. Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind: But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely: The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the human mind—principally competitive relations with kin members, tribal allies, and sexual partners—are and have been the same for white and black men and were at work before the ancestors of whites left Africa 1 00,000

years ago. While skin color is affected by things such as climate, which differs markedly between Africa and northern Europe, the shape of the mind is affected only very marginally by nonhuman problems such as what kind of game to hunt or how to keep warm SEXING THE MIND

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or cool: Infinitely more important is how to deal with fellow human beings, and that is the same problem everywhere—that is, the same for men everywhere and the same for women everywhere: But not the same for men and for women.

This is the essential difference between anthropology and Darwinism. Anthropologists insist that a Western urban man is far different in his habits and thoughts from a bushman tribesman than either is from his wife: Indeed, it is the foundation of their discipline that this is so, for anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity: Men fight, compete, love, show off, and hunt all over the world: True, bushmen fight with spears and sticks, whereas Chicagoans fight with guns and lawsuits; bushmen strive to be headmen, whereas Chicagoans strive to become senior partners.

The stuff of anthropology—the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals—is to me but the froth on the surface.

Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian an anthropologist studying the differences between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field: The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant: It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing."

One of the most persistent of those universals is sexual role playing. As Edward Wilson put it: "In diverse cultures men pursue and acquire, while women are protected and bartered: Sons sow wild oats and daughters risk being ruined: When sex is sold, men are usually the buyers. "" John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put the challenge to cultural interpretations of this universal pattern even more baldly:

The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daugh-

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ters to protect their sons ' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other.'

Just as it is foolish to deny the differences between the sexes in the face of the evidence presented here, so it is foolish to exaggerate them. In the matter of intelligence, for example, there is no reason to believe that men are dumber than women or vice versa—nothing in evolutionary thinking suggests as much, and no data test the proposition. As noted earlier, the data do suggest that men are probably better at abstract and spatial tasks, women at verbal and social ones, which vastly complicates the job of trying to design a test that is gender-neutral: Indeed, it helps to demolish the farcical notion of general, unitary intelligence altogether.

Nor does an appeal to sexual difference excuse anything: In the words of Anne Moir and David Jessel, "We do not consecrate the natural just because it is biologically true; men, for instance, have a natural disposition to homicide and promiscuity, which is not a recipe for the happy survival of society: "46

People seem to forget easily that the word is is different from the word should: If we choose to redress the sexual differences between the minds of men and women through policy, we are going against nature, but no more than when we outlaw murder. But we should be clear that we are redressing a difference, not discovering an identity. Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex:

Chapter 9

THE USES OF BEAUTY

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

—Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

In the early 199os, there was a flurry of interest that a "gay gene " had been found on the X chromosome. The excitement faded as it proved hard to replicate the original study: But twin studies show that homosexuality is heritable, and one day the genes that can cause a man to be gay—perhaps in response to maternal genes expressed in his mother's womb—will be found.

The first implication will be political: Although it raises the possibility of selective abortion by mothers who do not wish to have gay sons, the theory of the gay gene has been largely welcomed in recent years by homosexual activists: The reason is that they find it will convince their more stubborn detractors that homosexuality is a condition into which they were born rather than a choice they made: In the eyes of disapproving heterosexuals, it exculpates them, their parents, and their education for their sexual proclivity. It also relieves parents of any anxiety they might have that their son might be led into homosexuality simply because his favorite rock group consists of homosexuals or because he has been seduced by a homosexual during adolescence:

The second implication is moral: The gay gene would at last demolish the myth that there is something "better" and less evil about theories that ascribe conditions to nurture or environment than theories that ascribe them to innate nature: In the name of Freudian nurture theories, gays were once treated with aversion therapy—electric shocks and emetics accompanied by homoerotic images: The most compelling of the new evidence for the gay gene is that fraternal twins, carried in the same womb and reared in the

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same household, have only a one-in-four chance of being gay: Identical twins, on the other hand, with the same nurture and the same nature, have a one-in-two chance of being gay. If one identical twin is gay, the chances that his brother is also gay are 50 percent: There is also good evidence that the gene is inherited from the mother and not from the father:'

How could such a gene survive, given that gay men generally do not have children? There are two possible answers: One is that the gene is good for female fertility when in women, to the same extent that it is bad for male fertility when in men: The second possibility is more intriguing: Laurence Hurst and David Haig of Oxford University believe that the gene might not be on the X

chromosome after all: X genes are not the only genes inherited through the female line. So are the genes of mitochondria, described in chapter 4, and the evidence linking the gene to a region of the X chromosome is still very shaky statistically: If the gay gene is in the mitochondria, then a conspiracy theory springs to the devious minds of Hurst and Haig: Perhaps the gay gene is like those "male killer " genes found in many insects: It effectively sterilizes males, causing the diversion of inherited wealth to female relatives. That would (until recently at least) have enhanced the breeding success of the descendants of those female relatives, which would have caused the gay gene to spread: If the sexual preferences of gay men are greatly influenced (not wholly determined) by a gene, then it is probable that so are the sexual preferences of heterosexuals: And if our sexual instincts are heavily determined by our genes, then they have evolved by natural and sexual selection, and that means they bear the imprint of design: They are adaptive: There is a reason that beautiful people are attractive: They are attractive because others have genes that cause them to find beautiful people attractive. People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. Beauty is not arbitrary: The insights of evolutionary biologists are transforming our view of sexual attraction, for they have begun at last to suggest why we find some features beautiful and others ugly.

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BEAUTY AS A UNIVERSAL

Botticelli's Venus is beautiful: Michelangelo 's David is handsome.

But were they always thus? Would a Neolithic hunter-gatherer have agreed? Do Japanese or Eskimo people agree? Will our great-grandchildren agree? Is sexual attraction fashionable and evanescent or permanent and inflexible?

We all know how dated and frankly unattractive the fashions and the beauties of a decade ago look now, let alone those of a century ago. Men in doublet and hose may still seem sexy to some, but men in frock coats surely do not. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a person 's sense of what is beautiful and sexy is subtly educated to prefer the prevailing norms of fashion. Rubens would not have chosen Twiggy as a model. Moreover, beauty is plainly relative, as any prisoner who has spent months without seeing a member of the opposite sex can testify.

And yet this flexibility stays within limits. It is impossible to name a time when women of ten or forty were considered "sexier " than women of twenty. It is inconceivable that male paunches were ever actually attractive to women or that tall men were thought uglier than short ones: It is hard to imagine that weak chins were ever thought beautiful on either sex. If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, gray hair, hairy backs, and very long noses have never been "in fashion "? The more things change, the more they stay the same. The famous sculpture of Nefertiti's head and neck, 3,300 years old, is as stunning today as when Akhenaten first courted the real thing.

Incidentally, in this chapter on what makes people sexually attractive to one another, I am going to take almost all my examples from white Europeans, and from northern Europeans at that. By this I am not implying that white European standards of beauty are absolute and superior but merely that they are the only ones I know enough about to describe. There is no room for a separate investigation into the standards of beauty that black, Asian, or other people employ. But the problem that I am principally concerned with is universal to all people: Are standards of beauty cultural whims or

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innate drives? What is flexible and what endures? I will argue in this chapter that only by understanding how sexual attraction evolved is it possible to make sense of the mixture of culture and instinct, and understand why some features flow with the fashion while others resist. The first clue comes from the study of incest: FREUD AND INCEST TABOOS

Very few men have sex with their sisters. Caligula and Cesare Borgia were notorious because they were (rumored to be) such exceptions.

Even fewer men have sex with their mothers, in spite of what Freud tells us is an intense longing to do so. Sexual abuse by fathers of daughters is far more common. But it is still rare.

Compare two explanations of these facts. First, that people secretly desire incest but are able to overcome these desires with the help of social taboos and rules; second, that people do not find their very close relatives sexually arousing, that the taboo is in the mind. The first explanation is Sigmund Freud ' s. He argued that our first and most intense sexual attraction is toward our oppositesex parent. That is why, he went on to say, all human societies impose on their subjects strict and specific taboos against incest: Since the taboo "is not to be found in the psychology of the individual, " there is a " necessity for stern prohibitions. " Without those taboos, he implied, we would all be dreadfully inbred and suffer from genetic abnormalities:'

Freud made three unjustified assumptions. First, he equat-ed attraction with sexual attraction. A two-year-old girl may love her father, but that does not mean she lusts after him. Second, he assumed without proof that people have incestuous desires. Freudians say the reason very few people express these desires is that they have "repressed" them—which makes Freud 's argument irrefutable.

Third, he assumed that social rules about cousins marrying were

" incest taboos. " Until very recently scientists and laymen alike followed Freud in believing that laws forbidding marriages between cousins were enacted to prevent incest and inbreeding. They may not have been.

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Freud 's rival in this field was Edward Westermarck; in 1891 he suggested that men do not mate with their mothers and sisters not because of social rules but because they are simply not turned on by those they were reared with: Westermarck 's idea was simple: Men and women cannot recognize their relatives as relatives, so they have no way of preventing inbreeding as such. (Curiously, quail are different; they can recognize their brothers and sisters even when reared apart.) But they can use a simple psychological rule that works ninety-nine times out of a hundred to avert an incestuous match. They can avoid mating with those whom they knew very well during childhood. Sexual aversion to one 's closest relatives is thus achieved. True, this will not avert marriage between cousins, but then there is nothing much wrong with marriage between cousins: The chance of a recessive deleterious gene emerging from such a match is small, and the advantages of genetic alliance to preserve complexes of genes that are adapted to work with one another probably outweigh it: (Quail prefer to mate with first cousins rather than with strangers.) Westermarck did not know that, of course, but it strengthens his argument, for it suggests that the only incestuous relations a human being should avoid are the ones between brother and sister, and parent and child.'

Westermarck 's theory leads to several simple predictions: Stepsiblings would generally not be found to marry unless they were brought up apart. Very close childhood friends would also generally not be found to marry: Here the best evidence comes from two sources: Israeli kibbutzim and an old Chinese marriage custom. In kibbutzim, children are reared in creches with unrelated companions.

Lifelong friendships are formed, but marriages between fellow kibbutz children are very rare. In Taiwan some families practice "shim-pua marriage" in which an infant daughter is brought up by the family of the man she will marry. She is therefore effectively married to her stepbrother. Such marriages are often infertile, largely because the two partners find each other sexually unattractive: Conversely, two siblings reared apart are surprisingly likely to fall in love with each other if they meet at the right age.4

All of this adds up to a picture of sexual inhibition between people who saw a great deal of each other during childhood; frater-

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nal incest, as Westermarck suggested, is therefore prevented by this instinctive aversion that siblings have for each other: But Westermarck 's theory would also predict that if incest does occur, it will prove to be between parent and child, and specifically between father and daughter, because a father is past the age at which familiarity breeds aversion and because men usually initiate sex. That, of course, is the most common form of incest.'