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This contradicts Freud 's idea that incest taboos are there because people need to be told not to commit incest. Indeed, Freud ' s theory requires that evolutionary pressures have not just failed to generate some mechanism to avoid incest but have actually encouraged maladaptive incestuous instincts, which the taboos repress. Freudians have often criticized the Westermarck theory on the grounds that it would obviate the need for incest taboos at all.

But in fact incest taboos that outlaw marriage within the nuclear family are rare. The taboos that Freud observed are nearly always concerned with outlawing marriage between cousins: In most societies there is no need to outlaw incest within the nuclear family because there is little risk of its happening:'

So why are the taboos there? Claude Levi-Strauss invented a different theory called the "alliance theory, " which stressed the importance of using women as bargaining chips between tribes and therefore not letting them marry within the tribe, but since no two anthropologists can agree on exactly what Levi-Strauss meant, it is hard to test his idea. Nancy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico has argued that the so-called incest taboos are actually rules about marriage customs invented by powerful men CO prevent rivals from accumulating wealth by marrying their own cousins.

They are not about incest at all but about power:'

TEACHING OLD CHAFFINCHES NEW TRICKS

The incest story neatly demonstrates the interdependence of nature and nurture. The incest avoidance mechanism is socially induced: You become sexually averse to your siblings during your childhood: THE USES OF BEAUTY

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In that sense there is nothing genetic about it: And yet it is genetic, for it is not taught: It just develops within the brain. The instinct not to mate with childhood companions is nature, but the features by which you recognize them are nurture.

It is critical to Westermarck ' s argument that this aversion to mating with familiar people wear off for new acquaintances in later life: Otherwise, people would become averse to mating with their spouses within weeks of marrying them, which they plainly do not. Biologically, this is not hard to arrange: One of the most striking features of animal brains is the "critical period " of youth during which something can be learned and after which the learning is not erased or superseded: Konrad Lorenz discovered that chicks and goslings "imprint " on the first moving thing they meet, which is usually their mother and rarely an Austrian zoologist, and thereafter they prefer to follow that object: But chicks a few hours old will not imprint, nor will those two days old: They are at their most sensitive to imprinting at thirteen to sixteen hours old. During that sensitive period they will fix their preferred image of a parent in their heads:

The same is true of a chaffinch learning to sing: Unless it hears another chaffinch, it never learns the species 's typical song. If it hears no chaffinch until it is fully grown, it never learns the right song but produces a feeble half-song. Nor will it learn the song if it hears another chaffinch only when it is a few days old. It must hear a chaffinch during a critical period in between—from two weeks to two months of age—and then it will learn to sing correct-ly; after that period it never modifies its song by imitation:'

It is not hard to find examples of critical-period learning in people: Few people change their accents after the age of about twenty-five, even if they move from, say, the United States to Britain: But if they move at ten or fifteen, they quickly adopt a British accent: They are just like white-crowned sparrows, which sing with the dialect of the place where they lived at two months old:9 Likewise, children are remarkably good at picking up foreign languages just by exposure to them, whereas adults must laborious-ly learn them: We are not chicks or chaffinches, but we still have

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critical periods during which we acquire preferences and habits that are fairly hard to change.

This concept of the critical period is presumably what lies behind the Westermarck incest-avoiding instinct: We become sexually indifferent to those with whom we were reared during a critical period. Nobody is certain exactly what constitutes the critical period, but it is a plausible guess that it lasts from, say, eight to fourteen, the years before puberty. Common sense dictates that sexual orientation must be decided in such a fashion: A genetic predisposition meets examples during a critical period. Recall the fate of the baby chaffinch. For six weeks it is sensitive to learning chaffinch song. But during those six weeks of sensitivity, it hears all sorts of things: cars, telephones, lawn mowers, thunder, crows, dogs, sparrows, starlings. Yet it only imitates the song of chaffinches. It has a predilection to learn chaffinch song. (If it were a thrush or a starling, it could indeed imitate some of the other things. One bird in Britain learned the call of a telephone, causing havoc among backyard sunbathers.)'° This is often the case with learning: Ever since the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Peter Marler in the 1960s, it has been well known that animals do not learn anything and everything; they learn what their brains " want" to learn: Men are instinctively attracted to women thanks to the interaction of their genes and hormones, but that tendency is much influenced in a critical period by role models, peer pressure, and free will: There is learning, but there are predispositions.

A heterosexual man emerges from puberty with more than a general sexual preference for all women: ,He emerges with a distinct notion of beauty and ugliness. He is "stunned " by some women, indifferent to others, and finds others sexually repulsive. Is this, too, something that he acquired by a mixture of genes, hormones, and social pressure? It must be, but the interesting question is how much of each. If social pressure is everything, then the images and lessons we give to the youth of both sexes, through films, books, advertisements, and by example, are crucially important: If not, then the fact that men prefer, say, thin women is fixed by the genes and hormones and not a passing fad.

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Suppose you were a Martian interested in studying people as William Thorpe studied chaffinches. You want to know how men learn their standards of beauty, so you keep boys in cages. Some you expose to endless films of plump men admiring and being admired by plump women, while thin men and thin women are reviled; others you keep in total ignorance of womanhood so that their existence comes as a shock at the age of twenty.

It is revealing to speculate on what you think the outcome of the Martian 's experiment would be because what follows is an attempt to piece together from much inferior experiments and facts the same result: What kind of woman would the men who had never seen women prefer once they got over the shock of seeing women for the first time? Old ones or young ones, fat ones or thin ones? And would the men reared to believe that fat was beautiful really prefer plump women to skinny models?

Bear in mind the reason we are concentrating on male preferences. As we saw in the last chapter, men care more about the physical appearance of women than vice versa, and for good reason: Youth and health are better clues to women's value as a mate and potential mother than to a man's: Women are not indifferent to youth and health, but they are more concerned than men with other features.

SKINNY WOMEN

But fashions change: If beauty is subject to fashion, however despotic, it can change. Consider a case where the definition of beauty does seem to have changed drastically in recent years: thinness. Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of 'Windsor, is credited with the remark that a woman "can never be too rich or too thin, "

but even she might be surprised at the emaciated appearance of the average modern model: In the words of Roberta Seid, thinness became a "prejudice" in the 1950s, a " myth" in the 1960s, an

" obsession" in the 1970s, and a "religion" in the 1980s." Tom Wolfe coined the term "social X rays " for New York society women

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who starve themselves into fashionable shape. The weight of the Miss Americas falls steadily year after year. So does that of Playboy centerfolds. Both categories of women are 15 percent lighter than the average for their ages.' Slimming diets fill the newspapers and the wallets of charlatans. Anorexia and bulimia, diseases brought on by excessive dieting, maim and kill young women.

One thing is painfully obvious: There is no preference for the average. Even allowing for the fact that abundant, cheap, refined food makes the average woman much plumper than was normal a millennium or two ago, women must go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the fashionable reedlike shape. Nor has it ever been sensible for men to pick the thinnest woman available: Today, as in the Pleistocene period, that is a sure way to choose the least fertile woman: A woman can be rendered infertile by a body fat content only 10—15 percent below normal: Indeed, one theory is that the widespread obsession of young women with their weight is an evolved strategy to avoid getting pregnant too early or before a man has committed himself to raising a family: But this does not help explain the male preference for skinniness, which seems positively maladaptive:"

If the male preference for thinness is paradoxical, how much more puzzling is the fact that it seems to be new. There is ample evidence from sculpture and painting that Victorian beauties were not especially thin, and from sculpture and painting as far back as the Renaissance that beautiful women were plump women: There are exceptions: Nefertiti 's neck was that of a thin, elegant woman: Botticelli 's Venus was not exactly overweight. And for a time, Victorians worshiped at the shrine of wasp waists, so much so that some women allegedly removed a pair of ribs to make their waists slimmer. Lillie Langtry could enclose her eighteen-inch waist with two hands, but even the slimmest of today 's models are twenty-two inches around the waist. And it is implausible that a Renaissance man would have found them ugly. Yet we need not rely only on our own culture for evidence that plump women can be more attractive than thin ones. There is a willingly expressed preference for plump female bodies among tribal people all over the world, and in many subsistence societies, thin women are shunned: THE USES OF BEAUTY

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As Robert Smuts of the University of Michigan has argued, thinness was once all too common and was a sign of relative poverty: Nowadays, poverty-induced thinness is confined to the Third World: But in the industrialized nations, wealthy women are able to afford a diet low in fat and spend their money on dieting and exercise. Thinness has become what fatness was: a sign of status: Smuts argues that male preferences, keying in on whatever signs of status prevailed, simply switched. They did this presumably by a switch of association. A young man growing up today is bombarded with correlations between thinness and wealth, from the fashion industry in particular. His unconscious mind begins to make the connection during his critical period, and when he is forming his idealized mental preference for a woman, he accordingly makes her slim:'°

STATUS CONSCIOUSNESS

Unfortunately, this theory conflicts directly with the conclusions of the last chapter, so something has to give: It is women, not men, who are supposed to be especially sensitive to the social status of their potential spouses. Sociobiologists argue that the reason men notice women 's looks is not as a proxy for their wealth but as a clue to their reproductive potential: Yet here we have men supposedly using women 's waists as clues to their bank balances and positively panting after infertile emaciates:

Several studies have come to the unambiguous conclusion that beautiful women and rich men end up together far more than vice versa: In one study the physical attractiveness of a woman was a far better predictor of the occupational status of the man she married than her own socioeconomic status, intelligence, or education—a rather surprising fact when you consider how often people marry within their profession, class, and education brackets:" If men are using appearance as a proxy for status, why do they not use knowledge of status itself?

Unlike female thinness, male status symbols are generally

" honest." If they were not, they would not remain status symbols.

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Only the very best con man can fake conspicuous consumption or get away for long with boasts about his prowess or rank. Thinness is altogether trickier because poor, low-status women once found it easier to be thin than rich, high-status women. Even today when poor women can afford only junk food while rich women eat let-tuce, it is hard to argue that every thin woman is rich and every fat one poor. 16

So the argument that links status with skinniness is not persuasive: Skinniness is a very poor clue to wealth, and in any case men are not much interested in women 's status or wealth. Indeed, the argument is circular: Social status and thinness are correlated because of a male preference for thinness. I find the explanation that men have cued in on a woman 's thinness as a clue to her status unconvincing.

The trouble is, I am not sure what to suggest in place of it.

Suppose it is true that in the days of Rubens men preferred plump women and that today they prefer thin women: Suppose between the plump matrons of Rubens 's paintings and the " no woman can be too thin " days of Wallis Simpson, men stopped preferring the fattest or some half-plump ideal and started preferring the thinnest women available. Ronald Fisher 's sexual selection theory suggests one way in which it may have been adaptive for men to like thin women. By preferring a thin female, a human male may have had thin daughters who would have attracted the attention of high-status males because other males also preferred thinness. In other words, even if a thin wife could bear fewer children than a fat one, her daughters would be more likely to marry well, and having married well, to be wealthy enough to rear more of the children they bore. So the man who marries a thin woman may have more grandchildren than the man who marries a fat one. Now imagine that a cultural sexual preference spreads by imitation and that young men learn the equation thin equals beautiful by watching others behave.

That in itself would be adaptive because it would be one way for males to ensure that they did not flout the prevailing fashion (just as females copying each other in mate choice is adaptive in black grouse). Were they to ignore the cultural preference for plump or THE USES OF BEAUTY

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for thin women, they would risk having spinster daughters as surely as a peahen would risk having bachelor sons by choosing a short-tailed mate. In other words, as long as the preference is cultural and the preferred trait is genetic, Fisher 's insight that fashion is despotic still stands."

I confess, however, that these ideas do not really convince me. If fashions are despotic, they cannot easily be changed. The puzzle is how men stopped liking plump women without depriving themselves of eligible offspring by doing so. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the fashion in men 's preferences for women 's fatness cannot have changed adaptively. Either men ' s preferences shifted spontaneously and for no good reason or men always preferred some ideal shape that was always quite thin: WHY WAISTS MATTER

The solution to this puzzle may lie in the work of an ingenious Indian psychologist named Dev Singh, who now works at the University of Texas in Austin. He observed that women's bodies, unlike men's, go through two remarkable transitions between puberty and middle age: At ten a girl has a figure not unlike what she will have at forty. Then suddenly her vital statistics are transformed: The ratio of her waist to her chest measurement and to her hips shrinks rapidly. By thirty it is rising again as her breasts lose their firmness and her waist its narrowness. That ratio, of waist to breasts and hips, is not only known as the vital statistic but it is also the feature that, with a few brief exceptions, fashion has always emphasized above all else. Bodices, corsets, hoops, bustles, and crinolines existed to make waists look smaller relative to bosom and bottom.

Bras, breast implants, shoulder pads (which make the waist look smaller), and tight belts do the same today.

Singh noticed that however much the weight of Playboy centerfolds changed, one feature did not: the ratio of their waist width to their hip width. Recall that Bobbi Low at the University of Michigan argued that fat on the buttocks and breasts mimics broad hip

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bones and high mammary tissue content, while thin waists seem to indicate that these features could not be caused by fat: Singh 's theory is slightly different but intriguingly parallel. He argues that, within reason, a man will find almost any weight of a woman attractive as long as her waist is much thinner than her hips. 18

If that sounds foolish, consider the results of Singh 's experiments. First, he showed' men four versions of the same picture of the midriff of a young woman in shorts. Each picture was subtly touched up to alter slightly the waist-to-hip ratio: 0:6, 0.7, 0:8, and 0:9. Unerringly, men chose the thinnest-waist version as the most attractive: This was no great surprise, but he found a remarkable consistency among his subjects: Next he showed his subjects a range of drawings of female forms, which varied according to their weight and according to their waist-to-hip ratio: He found that a heavy woman with a low ratio of waist to hips was usually preferred to a thin woman with a high ratio. The ideal figure was the one with the lowest ratio, not the one with the thinnest torso.

Singh ' s interest is in anorexics, bulimics, and women obsessed with losing weight even when thin: He believes that because dieting in fairly thin women has no effect on the waist-to-hip ratio—if anything, it makes it larger by shrinking the hips—

they are doomed never to feel more attractive.

Why does the waist-to-hip ratio matter? Singh observes that a "gynoid" fat distribution—more fat on the hips, less on the torso—is necessary for the hormonal changes associated with female fertility: An " android " fat distribution—fat on the belly, thin hips—is associated with the symptoms of male disabilities such as heart disease, even in women. But which is cause and which effect? It seems to me more likely that both the shape and the hormonal effects of it are sexually selected by generations of males rather than males preferring the shape because it is the only way the hormones can be made to work. The relatively brief period during which women have hourglass bodies—from fifteen to thirty-five, say—is a sexually selected phenomenon: It owes more to competition to attract men than to any other biological need. Men have been unconsciously acting as selective breeders of women.

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Low provides one possible reason for the male preference for a low ratio—choosing broad-hipped women more able to give birth: Most apes give birth to babies whose brain is half-grown; human babies' brains are one-third grown at birth, and they spend far less time in the womb than is normal for a mammal, given the longevity of man: The reason is obvious: Were the hole in the pelvis through which we are born (the birth canal) commensurately larger, our mothers would be unable to walk at all: The width of human hips reached a certain point and could go no further; as brains continued to grow bigger, earlier birth was the only option left to the species: Imagine the evolutionary pressure of this process on female hip size. It was always wise for a man to choose the biggest-hipped woman he could find, generation after generation, for millions of years. At a certain point hips could get no bigger but men still had the preference, so women with slender waists who appeared to have larger hips by contrast were preferred instead:'

I do not know if I believe this tale or not: I cannot find the logical flaw in it (though on first reading there will seem to be many), nor can I quite match it to the male passion for thinness: I also have a nagging doubt about our assumptions that fashions have changed in the admiration of thinness: Suppose our assumptions are at fault, as in the story of the king and the goldfish: Suppose men always preferred slim women to fat ones because slimness meant youth and virginity. After all, as every cosmetic company and plastic surgeon knows, youth has always been the most reliable key to beauty. Perhaps men do not use slimness as a clue to status or childbearing ability but to youth.

YOUTH EQUALS BEAUTY?

A man cannot tell the age of a woman directly: He must infer it from her physical appearance, her behavior, and her reputation: It is intriguing to note that many of the most noticed features of female beauty decay rapidly with age: unblemished skin, full lips, clear eyes,

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upright breasts, narrow waists, slender legs, even blond hair, which, without chemical intervention, rarely lasts beyond the twenties except among the most Viking of people. These things are, in the sense developed in chapter 5, honest handicaps: They tell a tale of age that cannot be easily disguised without surgery, makeup, or veils.

That blond hair :on a woman has been considered by Europeans more beautiful than brown or black has long been noted: In ancient Rome women dyed their hair blond. In medieval Italy fair hair and great beauty were inseparable. In Britain the words fair and beautiful were synonymous. Z° Blond adult hair may be a sexually selected honest handicap, just like a swallow 's tail streamers. Blond hair in children is a fairly common gene among Europeans (and, curiously, Australian aborigines). So when a mutation arose in the not-so-distant past, somewhere near Stockholm, say, for that blondness to last into adulthood but not beyond the early twenties, any men with a genetic preference for blond women would have found themselves marrying only young women, which—in a heavily clothed civilization—others might not have done. They would therefore have left more descendants, and a preference for blond hair would have spread: This in turn would have increased the spread of the trait itself because it was indeed an honest indicator of female reproductive value. Hence, gentlemen prefer blondes!'

Of course, the part about the male genetic preference is optional or, if you like, a parable: It is more probable that the preference for blond hair among northern European men, if it exists, is a cultural trait instilled in them unconsciously by the association between blondness and youth—an association, incidentally, that the cosmetic industry is rapidly undermining. But the effect is the same: a genetic change brought about by a sexual preference. The alternative theory is to suggest some natural reason for blond hair 's being advantageous—for example, that it goes with fair skin, and fair skin allows the absorption of ultraviolet light to help stave off vitamin D deficiency. But the skin is not much fairer in blond than in dark Swedes; truly fair skin goes with red hair, not blond.

Until recently, sexual selection was an argument of last resort, when appeals to natural selection by the "environment " had THE USES OF BEAUTY

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failed: But why should it be? Why is it more plausible to suggest that blond hair in Baltic people was selected by vitamin D deficiency than to suggest it was selected by sexual preferences? The evidence is beginning to accumulate that humanity is a highly sexually selected species and that this explains the great variations between races in hairiness, nose length, hair length, hair curliness, beards, eye color—variations that plainly have little to do with climate or any other physical factor. In the common pheasant, every one of forty-six isolated wild populations in central Asia has a different combination of male plumage ornaments: white collars, green heads, blue rumps, orange breasts. Likewise, in mankind, sexual selection is at work. 22

The male obsession with youth is characteristically human.

There is no other animal yet studied that shares this obsession quite as strongly: Male chimpanzees find middle-aged females almost as attractive as young ones as long as they are in season: This is obviously because the human habits of lifelong marriage and long, slow periods of child rearing are also unique. If a man is to devote his life to a wife, he must know that she has a potentially long reproductive life ahead of her: If he were to form occasional short-lived pair bonds throughout his life, it would not matter how young his mates were. We are, in other words, descended from men who chose young women as mates and so left more sons and daughters in the world than other men: 23

THE LEGS THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS

That many of the components of female beauty are clues to age, every woman and every cosmetic company well knows. But there is more to beauty than youth. The reasons that many youthful women are not beautiful are generally twofold: They are overweight or underweight, or their facial features do not fit our image of beauty.

Beauty is a trinity of youth, figure, and face.

A pop song from the 1970s included the cruelly sexist line

" nice legs, shame about the face. " The importance of regular, sym-

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metrical facial features is somewhat puzzling: Why should a man throw away a chance at mating with a young and fertile woman simply because she has a long nose or a double chin?

It is possible that facial features are a clue to genetic or nurtured quality, or to character and personality. Facial symmetry may well prove to be a clue to good genes or good health during development. 24 "The face is the most information-dense part of the body " is how Don Symons put it to me one day: And the less symmetrical a face, the less attractive. But asymmetry is not a common reason for ugliness; many people have perfectly symmetrical faces and yet are still ugly. The other noticeable feature of facial beauty is that the average face is more beautiful than any extreme: In 1883, Francis Galton discovered that merging the photographs of several women 's faces produced a composite that is usually judged to be better looking than any of the individual faces that went into making it:" The experiment has been repeated recently with computer-merged photographs of female undergraduates: The more faces that go into the image, the more beautiful the woman appears.26 Indeed, the faces of models are eminently forgettable.

Despite seeing them on the covers of magazines every day, we learn to recognize few individuals. The faces of politicians, not known for their beauty, are much more memorable: Faces that are "full of character " are almost by definition nonaverage faces. The more average and unblemished the face, the more beautiful, but the less it tells you about its owner 's character.

This attraction to the average—to a nose that is neither too long nor too short, to eyes that are not too close together nor too far apart, to a chin that is neither prominent nor receding, to lips that are full but not too full, to cheekbones that are prominent but not absurdly so, to a face that is the average, oval shape, neither too long nor too broad—crops up throughout literature as a theme of female beauty. It suggests to me that a Fisherian sexy-son—or rather, in this case, sexy-daughter—effect is at work: Given the importance of facial beauty, a man who chooses an ugly-faced mate will probably have daughters that marry late or marry second-rate husbands: Throughout human history men have fulfilled their THE USES OF BEAUTY

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ambitions through their daughters ' looks: In societies with few other opportunities for social mobility, a great beauty could always marry above her station:" Of course women inherit their looks from their fathers as well as their mothers, so a woman should also prefer regular features in a man—and women mostly do.

All that the Fisher effect requires is for men to show a tendency to prefer the average face, and runaway selection will take over. Any man who deviates from the average preference has fewer or poorer grandchildren because his daughters are considered less beautiful than the average. It is a cruel, despotic fashion, one that enforces its pitiless logic at the expense of many a brilliant, kind, and accomplished woman who happens to be plain, and one that has ironically been made worse by the demographic transition to prescribed monogamy. In medieval Europe and in ancient Rome, powerful men took all the beauties into their harems, leaving a general shortage of women for the other men, so an ugly woman stood a better chance of eventually finding some man desperate enough to marry her. That may not sound very just, but justice is rarely the consequence of sexual selection.

PERSONALITIES

So much for what in women attracts men: What draws women to certain men? ,Male handsomeness is affected by the same trinity as female beauty—face, youth, and figure: But in study after study, women consistently agree that these factors matter less than personality and status. Men consistently place physical features above personality and status when considering women; women do not when considering men. 28

The single exception is height: Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men: In the world of dating agencies, the principle that a man must be taller than his date is so universal that it has been called "the cardinal principle of date selection: " Out of 720 applications by couples for bank accounts, only one was from a couple in which the woman was

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taller than the man, and yet couples chosen at random from the population would show scores of such cases. People mate "assorta-tively " for height. Men seek shorter wives, and women seek taller husbands. This cannot be due only to the men. When shown drawings of men and women together and asked to write stories to go with them, even women who stated adamantly that the size of a man made no difference to them wrote stories about anxious or weak men more often when the man depicted was shorter than the woman: The laudatory metaphor " he's a big man " is found in many cultures. It has been calculated that every inch is worth $6,000 a year in salary in modern America."

Bruce Ellis has summarized the evidence that personality is critical in men. In a monogamous society a woman often chooses a mate long before he has had a chance to become a "chief, " and she must look for clues to his future potential rather than rely only on his past achievements. Poise, self assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverance, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition—these are the things that cause men to rise to the top of their professions. And not coincidentally, these are the things women find attractive. They are clues to future status: In one test of this truism, three scientists told their subjects stories about two different people of undefined gender taking part in a tennis match and doing equally well: One was portrayed as strong, competitive, dominant, and determined, the other as consistent, playing for fun rather than to win, easily intimidated by a stronger opponent, and uncompetitive. When asked to summarize the characters of these two people, women and men came up with similar descriptions. But whereas women said that the dominant one was more sexually attractive (if male), men did not find the dominant one more attractive (if female)."

Likewise, the same scientists videotaped an actor in two simulated interviews; in one he sat meekly in a chair near the door, with his head bowed, nodding at the interviewer, while in the other he was relaxed, leaning back and gesturing confidently: When shown the videos, women found the more dominant actor more desirable as a date and more sexually attractive, whereas men did THE USES OF BEAUTY

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not when the actor was female. Body language matters for male sexiness:"

If women select mates on the basis of personality more than men do, this correlates with the fact noted in chapter 8, and well known to many couples, that women are better judges of character. Good female judges of character left more descendants than bad. Good male judges did no better than bad male judges.

The importance of character may explain why Hollywood directors believe that the perfect box-office draw is a familiar, popular male star and a little-known female beauty (and pay them accordingly). Male stars, such as Sean Connery and Mel Gibson, build their reputations gradually: Female stars, such as Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone, rocket to fame in a single movie. The recipe of the James Bond films was perfect: a new girl every time but the same old Bond. (Man, though less than some male mammals, exhibits the "Coolidge effect ": a new female refreshes his libido: The effect is named after the famous story about President Calvin Coolidge and his wife being shown around a farm. Learning that a cockerel could have sex dozens of times a day, Mrs: Coolidge said: " Please tell that to the president. " On being told, Mr.

Coolidge asked, "Same hen every time? " "Oh, no, Mr. President. A different one each time. " The president continued: " Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.") '2

The evidence that women do use direct clues of male status is overwhelming: American men who marry in a given year earn about one and a half times as much as men of the same age who do not. In a survey of two hundred tribal societies, two scientists confirmed that the handsomeness of a man depends on his skills and prowess rather than on his appearance. Dominance in a man is universally considered attractive by women. In Buss 's study of thirty-seven societies, women put more value on men's financial prospects than vice versa. All in all, as Bruce Ellis put it in a recent review,

" status and economic achievement are highly relevant barometers of male attractiveness, more so than physical attributes."

What are the clues to status? Ellis suggests that clothes and ornaments provide one set of clues: an Armani suit, a Rolex

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watch, and a BMW are as blatantly revealing of rank as any admiral 's sleeve stripes or Sioux chief 's headdress. In a book that chronicled how fashion has always been, until recently, a matter of class emulation, Quentin Bell wrote: " The history of fashionable dress is tied to the competition between classes, in the first place the emulation of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie and then the more extended competition which results from the ability of the prole-tariat to compete with the middle classes: . : . Implicit in the whole is a system of sartorial morality dependent upon pecuniary standards of value.'

Bobbi Low has surveyed hundreds of societies and come to the conclusion that male ornaments almost always relate to rank and status—maturity, seniority, physical prowess, ferocity, or ability to indulge in conspicuous consumption—whereas female ornaments tend to signal marital or pubertal status and sometimes husband's wealth. Certainly a Victorian duchess was emphasizing not her own wealth but her husband 's in the class distinctions of her clothes: This applies as plainly in modern urban societies as it did in ancient tribal ones: Tom Wolfe was the first to comment on how the circular ornaments on the hoods of Mercedes-Benzes had become status symbols among Harlem drug dealers.

At this point some evolutionists seem dangerously close to arguing that women have evolved the ability to be impressed by BMWs: Yet BMWs have existed for only about one human generation: Either evolution is working absurdly fast, or there is something wrong: There are two ways to avoid this difficulty, one of which is popular at the University of Michigan, the other at Santa Barbara. The Michigan scientists say something like this: Women do not have an evolved ability to be impressed by BMWs, but they have an evolved ability to be flexible and to adapt to the social pressures of the society in which they grew up. The Santa Barbara scientists say: Behavior itself is rarely what has evolved; it is the underlying psychological attitude that evolves, and modern women possess a mental mechanism, evolved during the Pleistocene period, that enables them to read what correlates to status among men and find such clues desirable.

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In a sense, both are saying the same thing: Women are impressed by signals of status, whatever those specific symbols are: Presumably at some point they learn the association between BMWs and wealth; it is not a difficult equation to solve. i5

THE FASHION BUSINESS

We are back at a familiar paradox. Evolutionists and art historians agree that fashion is all about status. In their dress, women follow fashion more than men do: Yet women seek clues to status, which change with fashion, and men seek clues to fertility, which do not.

Men should not care less what women wear as long as they are smooth-skinned, slim, young, healthy, and generally nubile: Women should care greatly about what men wear because it tells them a good deal about their background, their wealth, their social status, even their ambitions. So why do women follow clothes fashions more avidly than men?

I can think of several answers to this question. First, the theory is simply wrong, and men prefer status symbols, whereas women prefer bodies. Perhaps, but that flies in the face of an awful lot of robust evidence: Second, women 's fashion is not about status after all: Third, modern Western societies have been in a two-century aberration from which they are just emerging: In Regency England, Louis XIV 's France, medieval Christendom, ancient Greece, or among modern Yanomamo, men followed fashion as avidly as women: Men wore bright colors, flowing robes, jewels, rich materials, gorgeous uniforms, and gleaming, decorated armor.

The damsels that knights rescued were no more fashionably attired than their paramours. Only in Victorian times did the deadly uniformity of the black frock coat and its dismal modern descendant, the gray suit, infect the male sex, and only in this century have women 's hemlines gone up and down like yo-yos: This suggests the fourth and most intriguing explanation, which is that women do care more about clothes and men do care less, but instead of influencing the other sex with their concerns,

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they influence their own. Each gender uses its own preferences to guide its own behavior. Experiments show that men think women care about physique much more than they actually do; women think men care about status cues much more than they actually do. So perhaps each sex simply acts out its instincts in the conviction that the other sex likes the same things as they do.

One experiment seems to support the idea that men and women mistake their own preferences for those of the opposite sex.

April Fallon and Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania showed four simple line drawings of male or female figures in swimsuits to nearly five hundred undergraduates. In each case the figures differed only in thinness: They asked the subjects to indicate their current figure, their ideal figure, the figure that they considered most attractive to the opposite sex, and the figure they thought most attractive in the opposite sex. Men 's current, ideal, and attractive figures were almost identical; men are, on average, content with their figures. Women, as expected, were far heavier than what they thought most attractive to men, which was heavier still than their own ideal. But intriguingly, both sexes erred in their estimation of what the other sex most likes. Men think women like a heavier build than they do; women think men like women thinner than they do:''

However, such confusions cannot be the whole explanation of why women follow fashion because it does not work for other features of attraction. Women are far more concerned with their own youth than men despite the fact that they mostly do not themselves seek younger partners.

And yet the notion that fashion is about status revolts us in a democratic age. We pretend instead that fashion is actually about showing off a body to best advantage. New fashions are worn by gorgeous models, and perhaps women buy them because they subconsciously credit the beauty to the dress and not the model.

Surveys reveal what everybody knows: Men are attracted by women in revealing, tight, or skimpy clothing; women are less attracted by such clothing on men. Most female fashions are more or less explicitly designed to enhance beauty; for example, a gigantic crinoline made a waist look small simply by contrast. A woman is careful THE USES OF BEAUTY

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to choose clothes that "suit" her particular figure or hair color.

Moreover, since most men grow up seeing women dressed and spend their critical periods seeing clothed women, their ideals of beauty include images of clothed women as well as naked ones.

Havelock Ellis recounted the story of a boy who, standing before a painting of the Judgment of Paris, was asked which goddess he thought was the most beautiful: He replied: "I can't tell because they haven 't their clothes on: ""

But the most characteristic feature of fashion, today at least, is its obsession with novelty. We have already seen how Bell thinks this comes about, as the trendsetters try to escape their vul-gar imitators: Low thinks the key to women's fashion is novelty.

"Any conspicuous display which signals the ability to read fashion trends " is a clue to a woman's status. 38 Being the first in fashion is certainly a status symbol among women. Without the ability to induce constant obsolescence, fashion designers would be a lot less rich than they are.

This brings us back to the shifting sands of cultural standards of beauty. Beauty cannot be commonplace in a monogamous species like man; it must stand out: Men are discriminating because they will get the chance to marry only one or perhaps two women, so they are always interested in the best they can get, never in the ordinary. In a crowd of women all wearing black, the single one in red would surely catch the eye of a man, whatever her figure or face was like.

The very word fashion used to mean something between conformity and custom, where now it means novelty and modernity: Remarking on painful corsets and the hypocrisy of low necklines in a puritanical society, Quentin Bell observed: "The case against the fashion is always a strong one; why is it then that it never results in an effective verdict? Why is it that both public opinion and formal regulations are invariably set at nought, while sartorial custom, which consists in laws that are imposed without formal sanctions, is obeyed with wonderful docility, and this despite the fact that its laws are unreasonable, arbitrary, and not infrequently cruel.""

I am left feeling that this puzzle is, in the present state of

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evolutionary and sociological thinking, insoluble. Fashion is change and obsolescence imposed on a pattern of tyrannical conformity.

Fashion is about status, and yet the sex that is obsessed with fashion is trying to impress the sex that cares least about status: THE FOLLY OF SEXUAL PERFECTIONISM

Whatever determines sexual attraction, the Red Queen is at work: If for most of human history beautiful women and dominant men had more children than their rivals—which they surely did because the dominant men chose beautiful wives, and together they lived off the toil of their rivals—then in each generation women became that little bit more beautiful and men that little bit more dominant: But their rivals did, too, being descendants of the same successful couples. So standards rose, too: A beautiful woman needed to shine still more brightly to stand out in the new firmament: And a dominant man needed to bully or scheme still more mercilessly to get his way. Our senses are easily dulled by the commonplace, however exceptional it may seem elsewhere or at other times: As Charles Darwin put it, "If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard. "'° This, incidentally, is as concise a statement as could be made for why eugenics would never work: A page later Darwin describes the Jollof tribe of West Africa, famous for the beauty of its women; it deliberately sold its ugly women into slavery. Such Nazi eugenics would indeed gradually raise the level of beauty in the tribe, but the men 's subjective standards of beauty would rise as fast: Since beauty is an entirely subjective concept, the Jollofs were doomed to perpetual disappointment:

The depressing part of Darwin 's insight is that it shows how beauty cannot exist without ugliness: Sexual selection, Red Queen—style, is inevitably a cause of dissatisfaction, vain striving, THE USES OF BEAUTY

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and misery to individuals. All people are always looking for greater beauty or handsomeness than they find around them. This brings up yet another paradox. It is all very well to say that men want to marry beautiful women and women want to marry rich and powerful men, but most of us never get the chance. Modern society is monogamous, so most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already. What happens to Mr: and Ms. Average? They do not remain celibate; they settle for something second best. In black grouse the females are perfectionist, the males indiscriminate. In a monogamous human society, neither sex can afford to be either perfectionist or indiscriminate. Mr. Average chooses a plain woman, and Ms. Average chooses a wimp. They temper their idealist preferences with realism. People end up married to their equals in attractiveness: The homecoming queen marries the football hero; the nerd marries the girl in glasses; the man with mediocre prospects marries the woman with mediocre looks: So pervasive is this habit that exceptions stand out a mile: "What on earth can she see in him?" we ask of a model 's dull and unsuccessful husband, as if there must be some hidden clue to his worth that the rest of us have missed. "How did she manage to catch him? " we ask of a high-flying man married to an ugly woman.

The answer is that we each instinctively know our relative worth as surely as in Jane Austen's day people knew their place in the class system. Bruce Ellis showed how we manage this "assorta-tive mating " pattern: He gave each of thirty students a numbered card to stick on their foreheads. Each could now see the others '

numbers, but nobody knew his or her own: He told them to pair up with the highest number they could find. Immediately the person with 30 on her forehead was surrounded by a buzzing crowd, so she adjusted her expectations upward and refused to pair up with just anybody, settling eventually for somebody with a number in the high twenties: The person with number I, meanwhile, after trying to persuade number 30 of his worth, then lowered his sights and went progressively down the scale, steadily discovering his low status, until he ended up taking the first person who would accept him, probably number 2:4'

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The game shows with uncomfortable realism how we measure our own relative desirability from others ' reactions to us.

Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher: But it is worth it to get off the Red Queen's treadmill before you drop: Chapter to

THE INTELLECTUAL

CHESS GAME

Were I (who to my cost already am

One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man: A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleased to weare, I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear: Or anything but that vain Animal,

Who is so proud of being rational:

The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive A Sixth, to contradict the other Five;

And before certain instinct, will preferr Reason, which Fifty times for one does err.

—John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

The time: 300,000 years ago: The place: the middle of the Pacific Ocean: The occasion: a conference of bottle-nosed dolphins to discuss the evolution of their own intelligence: The conference was being held over an area of about twelve square miles of ocean so that the participants could fish in between meetings; it was during the squid season: The sessions consisted of long soliloquies by invited speakers followed by a series of commentaries in Squeak, the language of Pacific bottle-noses. Squawk speakers from the Atlantic were able to hear memorized translations at night. The matter at issue was simple: Why did bottle-nosed dolphins have brains that were so much bigger than those of other animals? The bottle-nose brain was twice as large as that of many other dolphins.

The first speaker argued that it was all a matter of language: Dolphins needed big brains to enable them to hold in their heads the concepts and the grammar with which to express themselves: The ensuing commentaries were' merciless: The language theory solved nothing, said the commentators. Whales had complex language, and every dolphin knew how stupid whales were: Only the year before a group of bottle-noses had fooled an old humpback whale into attacking his best friend by sending out soliloquies about infidelity in humpback language: The second squeaker, a male, was more favorably received, for he argued that this was indeed the purpose of dolphin intelligence: to deceive: Are we not, he squeaked, the global masters of deception and manipulation? Do we not spend all our time scheming to outwit one another in the pursuit of female dolphins? Are we not the only species in which " triadic" interac-

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tions among alliances of individuals are known? The third speaker replied that this was all very laudable, but why us? Why bottle-nosed dolphins? Why not sharks or porpoises? There was a dolphin in the River Ganges whose brain weighed only five hundred grams.

A bottle-nose brain weighed fifteen hundred grams. No, he replied, the answer lay plainly in the fact that of all the creatures on earth, bottle-nosed dolphins were the ones that had the most varied and flexible diet: They could eat squid or fish or . . . well, all sorts of different kinds of fish: That variety demanded flexibility, and flexibility demanded a big brain thaot could learn: The final speaker of the day was scornful of all his predecessors: If social complexity was what required intelligence, why were none of the social animals on land intelligent? The speaker had heard stories of an ape species that was almost as big-brained as dolphins; indeed, for its body size it was even bigger. It lived in bands on the African savanna and used tools and hunted meat as well as gathered plants for food: It even had language of a sort, though with none of the richness of Squeak. It did not, he squeaked drolly, eat fish.'

THE APE THAT MADE IT

Around 18 million years ago there were tens of species of ape living in Africa and many others in Asia: Over the next 15 million years most of them became extinct. A Martian zoologist who arrived in Africa about 3 million years ago would probably have concluded that the apes were bound for the trash heap of history, an outdated model of animal made obsolescent by competition with the monkeys. Even if he noticed that there was one ape, a close relative of the chimpanzee, that walked on two feet, entirely upright, he would not have predicted much of a future for it: For its size, midway between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, the upright ape, known to science now as Australopithecus

afarensis and to the world as " Lucy, "2 had a " normal " brain size: about four hundred cubic centimeters—bigger than the modern THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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chimp, smaller than the modern orangutan. Its posture was peculiarly humanlike, undoubtedly, but its head was not. Apart from its uncannily human legs and feet, we would not have had any trouble thinking of it as an ape. Yet over the next 3 million years the heads of its descendants exploded in size. Brain capacity doubled in the first 2 million years and almost doubled again in the next million, to reach the fourteen hundred cubic centimeters of modern people.

The heads of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans stayed roughly the same. So did the other descendant of Lucy 's species, the so-called robust australopithecines, or nutcracker people, who became specialist plant eaters.

What caused the sudden and spectacular expansion of that one ape 's head, from which so much else flowed? Why did it happen to one ape and not another? What can account for the astonishing speed, and the accelerating speed of the change? These questions may seem to have nothing to do with the subject of this book, but the answer may lie with sex. If new theories are right, the evolution of man 's big head was the result of a Red Queen sexual contest between individuals of the same gender.

On one level the evolution of big-headedness in man 's ancestors is easily explained. Those that had big heads had more young than those that did not. The young, inheriting the big heads, therefore had bigger heads than their parents ' generation. This process, moving in fits and starts, faster in some:places than in others, eventually caused the trebling of the brain capacity of man.

It could have happened no other way. But the intriguing thing is what made the big-brained people likely to have more children than the small-brained ones. After all, as a diverse array of observers from Charles Darwin to Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, have noted with regret, clever people are not noticeably more prolific breeders than stupid people.

A time-traveling Martian could go back and examine the three consecutive descendants of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo

erectus, and so-called archaic Homo sapiens. He would find a steady progression in brain size—that much we know from the fossils—

and he would be able to tell us what the clever ones were using

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their bigger brains for. We can do something similar today simply by looking at what modern human beings use their brains for: The trouble is that every aspect of human intelligence you consider as uniquely human applies to the other apes as well: A vast chunk of our brains is used for visual perception; but it is hardly plausible that Lucy suddenly needed better visual perception than her distant cousins: Memory, hearing, smell, face recognition, self-awareness, manual dexterity—they all have more space in the human than in the chimp brain, yet it is hard to understand why any of them was more likely to cause Lucy to have more children than it was to cause a chimp to have more. We need some qualitative leap from ape to man, some difference of kind rather than degree that transformed the human mind in ways that for the first time made the biggest possible brain the best possible brain: There was a time when it was easy to define what made humans different from other animals: Humans had learning; animals had instincts: Humans used tools; animals did not: Humans had language; animals did not. Humans had consciousness; animals did not: Humans had culture; animals did not: Humans had self-awareness; animals did not. Gradually these differences have been blurred or shown to be differences in degree rather than in kind: Snails learn: Finches use tools. Dolphins use language: Dogs are conscious: Orangutans recognize themselves in mirrors: Japanese macaques pass on cultural tricks: Elephants mourn their dead: This is not to say that all animals are as good as humans at each of these tasks, but remember that humans were once no better than them and yet they came under sudden pressure to get better and better, while animals did not. A well-trained humanist is already scoffing at such sophistry: Only people can make tools as well as use them. Only people can use grammar as well as vocabulary: Only people can empathize as well as feel emotion: But this sounds uncannily like special pleading. I find the instinctive arrogance of the human sciences thoroughly unconvincing because so many of its bastions have already fallen to the champions of animals: Beaten back from position after position, the humanists simply pretend they never intended to hold them in the first place and THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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redefine the retreat as tactical: Almost all discussions of consciousness assume a priori that it is a uniquely human feature when it is patently obvious to anybody who has ever kept a dog that the average dog can dream, feel sad or glad, and recognize individual people; to call it an unconscious automaton is perverse.

THE MYTH OF LEARNING

At this point the humanist usually retreats to his strongest bastion: learning: The human, he says, is uniquely flexible in his behavior, adapting to skyscrapers, deserts, coal mines, and tundra with equal ease: That is because he learns far more than animals and relies on instincts far less. Learning how the world is rather than simply arriv-ing in it with a fully formed program for survival is a superior strategy, but it demands a bigger brain: Therefore, the bigger brain of the human reflects a shift away from instinct and toward learning.

Like just about everybody else who has ever thought about these things, I found such logic impeccable until I read a chapter in a book called The Adapted Mind by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby of the University of California at Santa Barbara.' They set out to challenge the conventional wisdom, which has dominated psychology and most other social sciences for many decades, that instinct and learning are opposite ends of a spectrum, that an animal that relies on instincts does not rely on learning and vice versa. This simply is not so. Learning implies plasticity, whereas instinct implies preparedness. So, for example, in learning the vocabulary of her native language, a child is almost infinitely plastic. She can learn that the word for a cow is vache or cow or any other word. And likewise in knowing that she must blink or duck when a ball approaches her face at speed, a child would not need to have plasticity at all. To have to learn such a reflex would be painful. So the blink reflex is prepared, and the vocabulary store in her brain is plastic:

But she did not learn that she needed a vocabulary store.

She was born with it and with an acute curiosity to learn the names

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of things. More than that, when she learned the word cup, she knew without being told that it was a general name for any whole cup, not its contents or its handle and not the specific cup she saw first, but the whole class of objects called cups. Without these two innate instincts, the " whole object assumption " and the "taxonom-ic assumption, " language would be a lot harder to learn. Children would often find themselves in the position of the apocryphal explorer who points at a never-before-seen animal and says to his local guide, "What' s that? " The guide replies, "Kangaroo, " which means in his language "I don't know. "

In other words, it is hard to conceive how people can learn (be plastic) without sharing assumptions (being prepared). The old idea that plasticity and preparedness were opposites is plainly wrong: The psychologist William James argued a century ago that man had both more learning capacity and more instincts, rather than more learning and fewer instincts: He was ridiculed for this, but he was right.

Return to the example of language: The more scientists study language, the more they realize that hugely important aspects of it, such as grammar and the desire to speak in the first place, are not learned by imitation at all. Children simply develop language.

Now this might seem crazy because a child reared in isolation would not, as James I of England hoped he might, simply grow up to speak Hebrew. How could he? Children must learn the vocabulary and the particular rules of inflection and syntax specific to their language. True, but almost all linguists now agree with Noam Chomsky that there is a " deep structure " that is universal to all languages and that is programmed into the brain rather than learned: Thus, the reason all grammars conform to a similar deep structure (for example, they use either word order or inflection to signify whether a noun is object or subject) is that all brains have the same "language organ."

Children plainly have a language organ in their brains ready and waiting to apply the rules. They infer the basic rules of grammar without instruction, a task that has been shown to be beyond the power of a computer unless the computer has been endowed with some prior knowledge.

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From about the age of one and a half until soon after puberty children have a fascination with learning a language and are capable of learning several languages far more easily than adults can. They learn to talk irrespective of how much encouragement they are given: Children do not have to be taught grammar, at least not of living languages that they hear spoken; they divine it. They are constantly generalizing the rules they have learned in defiance of the examples they hear (such as "persons gived " rather than

"people gave" ): They are learning to talk in the same way that they are learning to see, by adding the plasticity of vocabulary to the preparedness of a brain that insists on applying rules: The brain has to be taught that large animals with udders are called cows. But to see a cow standing in a field, the visual part of the brain employs a series of sophisticated mathematical filters to the image that it receives from the eye—all unconscious, innate, and unteachable. In the same way, the language part of the brain knows without being taught that the word for a large animal with an udder is likely to behave grammatically like other nouns and not like verbs.`

The point is that nothing could be more " instinctive" than the predisposition to learn a language: It is virtually unteachable. It is hard-wired: It is not learned. It is—horrid thought—genetically determined. And yet nothing could be more plastic than the vocabulary and syntax to which that predisposition applies itself: The ability to learn a language, like almost all the other human brain functions, is an instinct for learning.

If I am right and people are just animals with more than usually trainable instincts, then it might seem that I am excusing instinctive :behavior. When a man kills another man or tries to seduce a woman, he is just being true to his nature: What a bleak, amoral message. Surely there is a more natural basis for morality in the human psyche than that? The centuries-old debate between the followers of Rousseau and Hobbes—whether we are corrupted noble savages or civilized brutes—has missed the point: We are instinctive brutes, and some of our instincts are unsavory: Of course some instincts are very much more moral, and the vast human capacity for altruism and generosity—the glue that has always held society together—is just as natural as any selfishness.

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Yet selfish instincts are there, too. Men are much more instinctively capable of murder and of sexual promiscuity than women, for example. But Hobbes 's vindication means nothing because instincts combine with learning. None of our instincts is inevitable; none is insuperable. Morality is never based upon nature. It never assumes that people are angels or that the things it asks human beings to do come naturally. "Thou shalt not kill " is not a gentle reminder but a fierce injunction to men to overcome any instincts they may have or face punishment.

NURTURE 1S NOT NECESSARILY THE OPPOSITE

OF NATURE

The Jamesian notion that man has instincts to learn things at a stroke demolishes the whole dichotomy of learning versus instinct, nature versus nurture, genes versus environment, human nature versus human culture, innate versus acquired, and all the dualisms that have plagued the study of the mind ever since Rene Descartes: For if the brain consists of evolved mechanisms highly specific and intricately designed but flexible in content, then it is impossible to use the fact that a behavior is flexible as an indication that it is

" cultural: " The ability to use language is "genetic" in the sense that it is inherent in the genes ' instructions for putting together a human body to include a detailed language-acquisition device: It is also "cultural " in the sense that the vocabulary and syntax of the language are arbitrary and learned: It is also developmental in the sense that the language acquisition device grows after birth and feeds off the examples it sees around it: Just because language is acquired after birth does not means that it is cultural. Teeth are also acquired after birth.

" There is no more a gene for aggression than there is for wisdom teeth, " wrote Stephen Jay Gould, implying that behavior must be cultural and not "biological."' His facts are right, of course, but that is exactly why his implication is wrong. Wisdom teeth are not cultural artifacts; they are genetically determined even THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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though they develop in late adolescence and even though there is not a single gene that says "grow wisdom teeth. " By the term "a gene for aggression, " Gould means that the difference between the aggressiveness of person A and person B would be due to a difference in gene X: But just as all sorts of environmental differences (such as nutrition and dentists) can cause A to have bigger wisdom teeth than B, so all sorts of genetic differences (affecting how the face grows, how the body absorbs calcium, how the sequence of teeth are ordered) can cause person A to have bigger wisdom teeth than person B: Exactly the same applies to aggression.

Somewhere in our education we unthinkingly absorb the idea that nature (genes) and nurture (environment) are opposites and that we must make a choice between them: If we choose environmentalism, then we are espousing a universal human nature that is as blank as a sheet of paper awaiting culture 's pen, that humans are therefore perfectible and born equal: If we choose genes, then we espouse irreversible genetic differences between races and between individuals. We are fatalists and elitists. Who would not hope with all her heart that the geneticists were wrong?

Robin Fox, an anthropologist who has called this dilemma a quarrel between original sin and the perfectibility of man, portrayed the dogma of environmentalism thus:

This Rousseauist tradition has a remarkably strong grip on the post-Renaissance occidental imagination: 1t is feared that without it we shall be prey to reactionary persuasion by assorted villains, from social Darwinists to eugenicists, fascists and new-right conservatives: To fend off this villainy, the argument goes, we must assert that man is either innately neutral (tabula rasa) or innately good and that bad circumstances are what make him behave wickedly:'

Although the notion of a tabula rasa goes back to John Locke, it was in this century that it reached the zenith of its intellectual hegemony: Reacting to the idiocies of social Darwinists and

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eugenicists, a series of thinkers first in sociology, then anthropology, and finally psychology shifted the burden of proof firmly away from nurture and onto nature. Until proved otherwise, man must be considered a creature of his culture, rather than culture a product of man 's nature.

Emil Durkheim, the founder of sociology, set out in 1895

his assertion that social science must assume people are blank slates on which culture writes. Since then, if anything, this idea has hardened into three cast-iron assumptions: First, anything that varies between cultures must be culturally rather than biologically acquired; second, anything that develops rather than appears fully formed at birth must also be learned; third, anything genetically determined must be inflexible. No wonder social science is irredeemably wedded to the notion that nothing in human behavior is "innate, " for things do vary greatly between cultures, do develop after birth, and are plainly flexible. Therefore, the mechanisms of the human mind cannot be innate. Everything must be cultural.

The reason men find young women more sexually attractive than old women must be that their culture teaches them subtly to favor youth, not because their ancestors left more descendants if they had an innate preference for youth:'

Anthropology 's turn was next. With the publication of Margaret Mead 's Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, the discipline was transformed. Mead asserted that sexual and cultural variety was effectively infinite and was therefore the product of nurture: She did little to prove nurture's predominance—indeed, what empirical evidence Mead did adduce was largely, it now seems, wishful thinking'—but she shifted the burden of proof: Mainstream anthropology remains to this day committed to the view that there is only a blank human nature.'

Psychology 's conversion was more gradual. Freud believed in universal human mental attributes—such as the Oedipal complex: But his followers became obsessed with trying to explain everything according to individual early childhood influences, and Freudianism came to mean blaming one ' s early nurture for one 's nature: Soon psychologists came to believe that even the mind of an adult was a general-purpose learning device. This approach THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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reached its apogee in the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. He argued that brains are simply devices for associating any cause with any effect.

By the 1950s, looking back at what Nazism had done in the name of nature, few biologists felt inclined to challenge what their human-science colleagues asserted: Yet uncomfortable facts were already appearing. Anthropologists had failed to find the diversity Mead had promised. Freudians had explained very little and altered even less by their appeals to early influences. Behaviorism could not account for the innate preferences of different species of animal to learn different things: Rats are better at running mazes than pigeons. Sociology 's inability to explain or rectify the causes of delinquency was an embarrassment. In the 1970s a few brave

" sociobiologists " began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, humans would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching: Yet the question they had asked has not gone away.'°

The principal reason for the hostility, to sociobiology was that it seemed to justify prejudice. Yet this was simply a confusion.

Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of ism, have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed because one believes in universals and the other in racial or class particulars.

Genetic differences have been assumed just because genes are involved. Why should that be the case? Is it not possible that the genes of two individuals are identical? The logos painted on the tails of two Boeing 747s depend on the airlines that own them, but the tails beneath are essentially the same: They were made in the same factory of the same metal: You do not assume because they are owned by different airlines that they were made in different factories. Why, then, must we assume because there are differences between the speech of the French and the English that they must have brains that are not influenced by genes at all? Their brains are the products of genes—not different genes, the same genes. There is a universal human language-acquisition device, just as there is a universal human kidney and a universal 747 tail structure.

Think, too, of the totalitarian implications of pure environ-

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mentalism: Stephen Jay Gould once caricatured the views of genetic determinists in this way: " If we are programmed to be what we are, then these traits are ineluctable: We may, at best, channel them, but we cannot change them:' He meant genetically programmed, but the same logic applies with even more force to environmental programming. Some years later Gould wrote: "Cultural determinism can be just as cruel in attributing severe congenital diseases—

autism, for example—to psychobabble about too much parental love, or too little:'

If, indeed, we are the product of our nurture (and who can deny that many childhood influences are ineluctable—witness accent?), then we have been programmed by our various upbring-ings to be what we are and we cannot change it—rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief. Environmental determinism of the sort most sociologists espouse is as cruel and horrific a creed as the biological determinism they attack. The truth is, fortunately, that we are an inextricable and flexible mixture of the two: To the extent that we are the product of the genes, they are all and always will be genes that develop and are calibrated by experience, as the eye learns to find edges or the mind learns its vocabulary. To the extent that we are products of the environment, it is an environment that our designed brains choose to learn from. We do not respond to the " royal jelly " that worker bees feed to certain grubs to turn them into queens: Nor does a bee learn that a mother 's smile is a cause for happiness.

THE MENTAL PROGRAM

When, in the 1980s, artificial intelligence researchers joined the ranks of those searching for the mechanism of mind, they, too, began with behaviorist assumptions: that the human brain, like a computer, was an association device. They quickly discovered that a computer was only as good as its programs. You would not dream of trying to use a computer as a word processor unless you had a word-processing program. In the same way, to make a computer THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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capable of object recognition or motion perception or medical diagnosis or chess, you had to program it with " knowledge: " Even the " neural network " enthusiasts of the late 1980s quickly admitted that their claim to have found a general learning-by-association device was false: Neural networks depend crucially on being told what answer to reach or what pattern to find, or on being designed for a particular task, or on being given straightforward examples to learn from: The "connectionists, " who placed such high hopes in neural networks, had stumbled straight into the traps that had caught the behaviorists a generation earlier: Untrained connection-4st networks proved incapable even of learning the past tense in English."

The alternative to connectionism, and to behaviorism before it, was the "cognitive" approach, which set out to discover the mind's internal mechanisms. This first flowered with Noam Chomsky 's assertions in Syntactic Structures, a book published in 1957, that general-purpose association-learning devices simply could not solve the problem of inferring the rules of grammar from speech:" It needed a mechanism equipped with knowledge about what to look for: Linguists gradually came to accept Chomsky 's argument: Those studying human vision, meanwhile, found it fruit-ful to pursue the "computational " approach advocated by David Marr, a young British scientist at MIT: Marr and Tomaso Poggio systematically laid bare the mathematical tricks that the brain was using to recognize solid objects in the image formed in the eye. For example, the retina of the eye is wired in such a way as to be especially sensitive to edges between contrasting dark and light parts of an image; optical illusions prove that people use such edges to delineate the boundaries of objects: These and other mechanisms in the brain are "innate " and highly specific to their task, but they are probably perfected by exposure to examples: No general-purpose induction here:"

Almost every scientist who studies language or perception now admits that the brain is equipped with mechanisms, which it did not "learn" from the culture but developed with exposure to the world; these mechanisms specialize in interpreting the signals

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that are perceived: Tooby and Cosmides argue that "higher " mental mechanisms are the same. There are specialized mechanisms in the mind that are "designed " by evolution to recognize faces, read emotions, be generous to one 's children, fear snakes, be attracted, to certain members of the opposite sex, infer mood, infer semantic meaning, acquire grammar, interpret social situations, perceive a suitable design of tool for a certain job, calculate social obliga-tions, and so on: Each of these " modules " is equipped with some knowledge of the world necessary for doing such tasks, just as the human kidney is designed to filter the blood.

We have modules for learning to interpret facial expressions—parts of our brain learn that and nothing else. At ten weeks we assume that objects are solid, and therefore two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time—an assumption that no amount of exposure to cartoon films will later undo. Babies express surprise when shown tricks that imply two objects can occupy the same place. At eighteen months babies assume there is no such thing as action at a distance—that object A cannot be moved by object B unless they touch. At the same age we show more interest in sorting tools according to their function than according to their color. And experiments show that, like cats, we assume any object capable of self-generated motion is an animal, which is something we only partially unlearn in our machine-infested world: 16

That last is an example of how many of the instincts in our heads develop on . the assumption that the world is that of the Pleistocene period, before cars: Infant New Yorkers find it far easier to acquire a fear of snakes than of cars, despite the far greater danger posed by the latter. Their brains are simply predisposed to fear snakes:

Fearing snakes and assuming that self-propelled motion is a sign of an animal are instincts that are probably as well developed in monkeys as in people: Nor is the unwillingness of adults to have sex with people with whom they have lived as children—the incest-avoidance instinct—peculiarly human. Lucy did not need a bigger brain for these things any more than a dog did.

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scratch and learn the world afresh every generation. Culture could not teach her to detect edges in the visual field; it did not teach her the rules of grammar: It could have taught her to fear snakes, but why bother? Why not let her be born with a fear of snakes? It is not obvious to somebody with an evolutionary perspective quite why we must consider learning so valuable. If learning really did replace instincts rather than enhance and train them, then we would spend half our lives relearning things that monkeys know automatically, such as the fact that unfaithful mates can cuckold you: Why bother to learn them? Why not allow the Baldwin effect to turn them into instincts and spend slightly less time going through the laborious business of adolescence? If a bat had to learn to use its sonar navigation from its parents, rather than simply developing the ability as it grew, or a cuckoo had to learn the way to Africa in winter, rather than " knowing " before setting off, then there would be a lot more dead bats and lost cuckoos every generation. Nature chooses to equip bats with echo-location instincts and cuckoos with migration instincts because it is more efficient than making them learn. True, we learn a lot more than bats and cuckoos do. We learn mathematics and a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words and what people 's characters are like: But this is because we have instincts to learn these things (with the possible exception of mathematics), not because we have fewer instincts than bats or cuckoos.

THE TOOLMAKER MYTH

Until the mid 1970s the question of why people needed big brains when other animals did not had only really been posed by the anthropologists and archaeologists who study the bones and tools of ancient human beings. Their answer, persuasively summarized by Kenneth Oakley in 1949 in a book called Man the Toolmaker, was that man was a tool user and toolmaker par excellence and that he developed a big brain for that purpose: Given the increasing sophistica-tion of man's tools throughout his history, and the sudden leaps of

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technical skill that seemed to accompany each change in skull size—from habilis to erectus, from erectus to sapiens, from Neanderthal to modern—this made some sense: But there were two problems with it. First, during the 1960s the ability of animals, especially chimps, to make and use tools was discovered, which rather took the shine off Homo habilis's somewhat basic tool kit. Second, there was a suspicious bias about the argument. Archaeologists study stone tools because that is what they find preserved. An archaeologist of a million years in the future would call ours the concrete age, with some justice, but he might never even know about books, newspapers, television broadcasts, the clothes industry, the oil business, even the car industry—all traces of which would have rusted away. He might assume that our civilization was characterized by hand-to-hand combat by naked people over concrete citadels. Perhaps, in like fashion, the Neolithic age was distinguished from the Paleolithic not by its tool kit but by the invention of language or marriage or nepotism or some such unfossilizable signature: Wood probably loomed larger than stone in people 's lives, yet no wooden tools survive."

Besides, the evidence from the tools, far from suggesting continuous human ingenuity, speaks of monumental and tedious conservatism. The first stone tools, the Oldowan technology of Homo habilis, which appeared about 2.5 million years ago in Ethiopia, were very simple indeed: roughly chipped rocks: They barely improved at all over the next million years, and far from experimenting, they became gradually more standardized: They were then replaced by the Acheulian technology of Homo erectus, which consisted of hand axes and teardrop-shaped stone devices.

Again, nothing happened for a million years and more, until about 200,000 years ago when there was a sudden and dramatic expansion in the variety and virtuosity of tools at about the time that Homo sapiens appeared: From then on there was no looking back: Tools grew ever more varied and accomplished until the invention of metal: But it comes too late to explain big heads; heads had been swelling ever since 3 million years ago. 1e Making the tools that erectus used is not especially hard.

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Everybody could do it, presumably, which is why it was done all over Africa. There was no inventiveness or creativity going on: For a million years these people made the same dull hand axes, yet their brains were already grossly large by ape standards: Plainly, the instincts of manual dexterity, perception of shape, and reverse engineering from function to form were useful to these people, but it is highly implausible to account for the enlargement of the brain as driven entirely by an enlargement of these instincts: The first rival to the toolmaking theory was "man the hunter. " In the 1960s, starting with the work of Raymond Dart, there was much interest in the notion that man was the only ape to have taken up a meat diet and hunting as a way of life: Hunting, went the logic, required forethought, cunning, coordination, and the ability to learn skills such as where to find game and how to get close to it. All true, all utterly banal: Anybody who has ever seen a film of lions hunting zebra on the Serengeti will know how skillful lions are at each of the tasks mentioned above: They stalk, ambush, cooperate, and deceive their prey as carefully as any group of humans ever could. Lions do not need vast brains, so why should we? The fashion for man the hunter gave way to woman the gatherer, but similar arguments applied. It is simply unnecessary to be capable of philosophy and language to be able CO dig tubers from the ground. Baboons do it just as well as women. 19

Nonetheless, one of the most startling things to come out of the great studies of the !Kung San people of the Namib desert in the 1960s was the enormous accumulation of local lore that hunter-gatherer people possess—when and where to hunt for each kind of animal, how to read a spoor, where to find each kind of plant food, which kind of food is available after rain, which things are poisonous and which medicinal. Of the !Kung, Melvin Konner wrote, " Their knowledge of wild plants and animals is deep and thorough enough to astonish and inform professional botanists and zoologists: "zo Without this accumulated knowledge it would not have been possible for mankind to develop so rich and varied a diet, for the results of trial-and-error experiments would not have been cumulative but would have had to be relearned every genera-

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Lion. We would have been limited to fruit and antelope meat, not daring to try tubers, mushrooms, and the like. The astonishing symbiotic relationship between the African honey guide bird and people, in which the bird leads a man to a bees ' nest and then eats what remains of the honey when he leaves, depends on the fact that people know because they have been told that honey guides lead them to honey. To accumulate and pass on this store of knowledge required a large memory and a large capacity for language. Hence the need for a large brain.

The argument is sound enough, but once more it applies with equal force to every omnivore on the African plains. Baboons must know where to forage at what time and whether to eat cen-tipedes and snakes. Chimpanzees actually seek out a special plant whose leaves can cure them of worm infections, and they have cultural traditions about how to crack nuts: Any animal whose generations overlap and which lives in groups can accumulate a store of knowledge of natural history that is passed on merely by imitation: The explanation fails the test of applying only to humans. 21

THE BABY APE

The humanist might be feeling a little frustrated by this line of argument. After all, we have big brains and we use them: The fact that lions and baboons have small ones and get by does not mean that we are not helped by our brains. We get by rather better than lions and baboons. We have built cities, and they have not: We invented agriculture, and they did not. We colonized ice-age Europe, and they did not. We can live in the desert and the rain

'forest; they are stuck on the savanna. Yet the argument still has considerable force because big brains do not come free. In human beings, 18 percent of the energy that we consume every day is spent in running the brain. That is a mighty costly ornament to stick on top of the body just in case it helps you invent agriculture, just as sex was a mighty costly habit to indulge in merely in case it led to innovation (chapter 2). The human brain is almost as costly an THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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invention as sex, which implies that its advantage must be as immediate and as large as sex 's was.

For this reason it is easy to reject the so-called neutral theory of the evolution of intelligence, which has been popularized in 22

recent years mainly by Stephen Jay Gould:

The key to his argu-

ment is the concept of "neoteny "—the retention of juvenile features into adult life: It is a commonplace of human evolution that the transition from Australopithecus to Homo and from Homo habilis to Homo erectus and thence to Homo sapiens all involved prolonging and slowing the development of the body so that it still looked like a baby when it was already mature. The relatively large brain case and small jaw, the slender limbs, the hairless skin, the unrotated big toe, the thin bones, even the external female genitalia—we look like baby apes.2"

The skull of a baby chimpanzee looks much more like the skull of an adult human being than either the skull of an adult chimpanzee or the skull of a baby human being. Turning an ape-man into a man was a simple matter of changing the genes that affect the rate of development of adult characters, so that by the time we stop growing and start breeding, we still look rather like a baby: "Man is born and remains more immature and for a longer period than any other animal, " wrote Ashley Montagu in 1961. 24

The evidence for neoteny is extensive. Human teeth erupt through the jaw in a set order: the first molar at the age of six, compared with three for a chimp. This pattern is a good indication of all sorts of other things because the teeth must come at just the right moment relative to the growth of the jaw. Holly Smith, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, found in twenty-one species of primate a close correlation between the age at which the first molar erupted and body weight, length of gestation, age at weaning, birth interval, sexual maturity, life span, and especially brain size: Because she knew the brain size of fossil hominids, she was able to predict that Lucy would have erupted her first molar at three and lived to forty, much like chimpanzees, whereas the average Homo erectus would have erupted his at nearly five and lived to fifty-two: 2'

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Neoteny is not confined to man. It is also a characteristic of several kinds of domestic animals, especially dogs: Some dogs are sexually mature when they are still stuck in an early phase of wolf development: They have short snouts, floppy ears, and the sort of behavior that wolf pups show—retrieving for example: Other, such as sheepdogs, are stuck at a different phase: longer snouts, half-cocked ears, and chasing: Still others, such as German shep-herds, have the full range of wolf hunting and attacking behaviors plus long snouts and cocked ears:'

But whereas dogs are truly neotenic, breeding at a young age and looking like wolf puppies, humans are peculiar: They look like infant apes, true, but they breed at an advanced age. The combination of a slow change in the shape of their head and a long period of youthfulness means that as adults they have astonishingly large brains for an ape: Indeed, the mechanism by which ape-men turned into men was clearly a genetic switch that simply slowed the developmental clock: Stephen Jay Gould argues that rather than seek an adaptive explanation of features like language, perhaps we should simply regard them as "accidental, " though useful, by-products of neoteny 's achievement of large brain size: If something as spectacular as language can be the product of simply a large brain plus culture, then there need be no specific explanation of why larger brains are required because their advantages are obvious!'

The argument is based on a false premise. As Chomsky and others have amply demonstrated, language is one of the most highly designed capabilities imaginable, and far from being a by-product of a big brain, it is a mechanism with a very specific pattern that develops in children without instruction: It also has obvious evolutionary advantages, as a moment 's reflection will reveal: Without, for example, the trick of recursion (subordinate phrases) it becomes impossible to tell even the simplest story. In the words of Steve Pinker and Paul Bloom, "It makes a big difference whether a far-off region is reached by taking the trail that is in front of the large tree or the trail that the large tree is in front of: It makes a difference whether that region has animals that you can eat or animals that can eat you: " Recursion could easily have helped a Pleis-THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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tocene man survive or breed: Language, conclude Pinker and Bloom,

" is a design imposed on neural circuitry as a response to evolutionary pressure: "28 It is not the whirring by-product of the mental machine:

The neoteny argument does have one advantage: It shows a possible reason why apes and baboons did not follow man down the path to ever bigger brains: It is possible that the neoteny mutation simply never arose in our primate cousins: Or, more intriguingly, as I shall explain later, the mutation may have arisen but never had a reason to spread.

GOSSIP'S GRIP

Those outside anthropology had never paid much obeisance to man the toolmaker or any other explanation for intelligence. For most people, the advantages of intelligence were obvious: It led to more learning and less instinct, which meant that behavior could be more flexible, which was rewarded by evolution: We have already seen how shot full of holes this argument is. Learning is a burden on the individual, in place of flexible instincts, and the two are not opposites in any case. Mankind is not the learning ape, he is the clever ape with more instincts and more open to experience. Not having seen this flaw in the logic, the disciplines that considered such matters, especially philosophy, always showed a strange lack of curiosity in the whole question of intelligence: Philosophers assume that intelligence and consciousness have obvious advantages and get on with the serious debate about what consciousness is: Before the 1970s there was very little evidence that any of them had even posed the obvious evolutionary question: Why is intelligence a good thing?

So the force with which the question was suddenly put in 1975 by two zoologists working independently had an enormous impact. Richard Alexander of the University of Michigan was one: In the tradition of the Red Queen, he expressed skepticism about whether what Charles Darwin had called " the hostile forces of

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nature" were a sufficiently challenging adversary for an intelligent mind. The point is that the challenges presented by stone tools or tubers are mostly predictable ones. Generation after generation of chipping a tool off a block of stone or knowing where to look for tubers calls for the same level of skill each time: With experience each gets easier. It is rather like learning to ride a bicycle; once you know how to do it, it comes naturally: Indeed, it becomes " unconscious, " as if conscious effort were simply not needed every time.

Likewise, Homo erectus did not need consciousness to know that you should stalk zebras upwind every time lest they scent you or that tubers grow beneath certain trees: It came as naturally to him as riding a bike does to us. Imagine playing chess against a computer that has only one opening gambit. It might be a good opening gambit, but once you know how to beat it, you can play the same response yourself, game after game. Of course, the whole point of chess is that your opponent can select one of many different ways to respond to each move you make.

It was logic like this that led Alexander to propose that the key feature of the human environment that rewarded intelligence was the presence of other human beings: Generation after generation, if your lineage is getting more intelligent, so is theirs. However fast you run, you stay in the same place relative to them.

Humans became ecologically dominant by virtue of their technical skills, and that made humans the only enemy of humans (apart from parasites). "Only humans themselves could provide the necessary challenge to explain their own evolution, " wrote Alexander:"

True enough, but Scottish midges and African elephants are

" ecologically dominant" in the sense that they outnumber or out-rank all potential enemies, yet neither has seen the need to develop the ability to understand the theory of relativity: In any case, where is the evidence that Lucy was ecologically dominant? By all accounts her species was an insignificant part of the fauna of the dry, wooded savanna where she lived.'°

Independently, Nicholas Humphrey, a young Cambridge zoologist, came to a conclusion similar to Alexander 's. Humphrey began an essay on the topic with the story of how Henry Ford once THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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asked his representatives to find out which parts of the Model-T

never went wrong. They came back with the answer that the kingpin had never gone wrong; so Ford ordered it made to an inferior specification to save money. " Nature, " wrote Humphrey, " is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford:'

Intelligence must therefore have a purpose; it cannot be an expensive luxury. Defining intelligence as the ability to " modify behavior on the basis of valid inference from evidence, " Humphrey argued that the use of intelligence for practical invention was an easily demolished straw man: " Paradoxically, subsistence technology, rather than requiring intelligence, may actually become a substi-tute for it: " The gorilla, Humphrey noted, is intelligent as animals go, yet it leads the most technically undemanding life imaginable.

It eats the leaves that grow abundantly all around it. But the gorilla 's life is dominated by social problems: The vast majority of its intellectual effort is expended on dominating, submitting to, reading the mood of, and affecting the lives of other gorillas: Likewise, Robinson Crusoe 's life on the desert island was technically fairly straightforward, says Humphrey. " It was the arrival of Man Friday on the scene that really made things difficult for Crusoe. " Humphrey suggested that mankind uses his intellect mainly in social situations. "The game of social plot and counter-plot cannot be played merely on the basis of accumulated knowledge, any more than a game of chess can. " A person must calculate the consequences of his own behavior and calculate the likely behavior of others: For that he needs at least a glimpse of his own motives in order to guess the things that are going through others '

minds in similar situations, and it was this need for self-knowledge that drove the increase in conscious awareness.'

As Horace Barlow of Cambridge University has pointed out, the things of which we are conscious are mostly the mental events that concern social actions: We remain unconscious of how we see, walk, hit a tennis ball, or write a word: Like a military hierarchy, consciousness operates on a " need to know " policy: "I can think of no exception to the rule that one is conscious of what it is possible to report to others and not conscious of what it is not 332 :::

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possible to report." John Crook, a psychologist with a special interest in Eastern philosophy, has made much the same point:

"Attention therefore moves cognition into awareness, where it becomes subject to verbal formulation and reporting to others."

What Humphrey and Alexander described was essentially a Red Queen chess game: The faster mankind ran—the more intelligent he became—the more he stayed in the same place because the people over whom he sought psychological dominion were his own relatives, the descendants of the more intelligent people from previous generations: As Pinker and Bloom put it, "Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright [sic] malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition: "13 If Tooby and Cosmides are right about mental modules, among the modules that were selected to increase in size by this intellectual chess tournament was the " theory of mind " module,, the one that enables us to form an opinion about one another 's thoughts, together with the means to express our own thoughts through the language modules." There is plenty of good evidence for this idea when you look about you: Gossip is one of the most universal of human habits. No conversation between people who know each other well—fellow employees, fellow family members, old friends—ever lingers for long on any topic other than the behavior, ambitions, motives, frailties, and affairs of other absent—or present—members of the group: That is the reason the soap opera is the quintessentially effective way to entertain people:" Nor is this a Western habit: Konner wrote of his experience with !Kung San tribesmen:

After two years with the San, I came to think of the Pleistocene epoch of human history (the 3 million years during which we evolved) as one interminable marathon encounter group: When we slept in a grass hut in one of their villages, there were many nights when its flimsy walls leaked charged exchanges from the circle around the fire, frank expressions of feeling and contention beginning when the dusk fires were lit and running on until dawn: 1e

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Virtually all novels and plays are about the same subject, even when disguised as history or adventure. If you want to understand human motives, read Proust or Trollope or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. We are obsessed with one another 's minds: "Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy, " wrote Don Symons.'9

Horace Barlow points out that great literary minds are, almost by definition, great mind-reading minds: Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim: We are clever because we are—and to the extent that we are—natural psychologists:`°

Indeed, novelists themselves saw this first. In George Eliot 's Felix Holt, the Radical, she gives a concise summary of the Alexander-Humphrey theory:

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chess-men had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little.uncertain also about your own:.:: You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with con-tempt: Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellowmen with other fellowmen for instruments:

The Alexander-Humphrey theory, which is widely known as the Machiavellian hypothesis," sounds rather obvious, but it could never have been proposed in the 1960s before the "selfish " revolution in the study of behavior or by anybody steeped in the ways of social science, for it requires a cynical view of animal communication. Until the mid 1970s zoologists thought of communication in terms of information transfer: It was in the interests of both the communicator and the recipient that the message be clear, honest, and informative. But as Lord Macaulay put it,'Z "The object of oratory alone is not truth but persuasion: " In 1978, Richard Dawkins and John Krebs pointed out that animals use communication prin-

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cipally to manipulate one another rather than to transfer information: A bird sings long and eloquently to persuade a female to mate with him or a rival to keep clear of his territory: If he were merely passing on information, he need not make the song so elaborate: Animal communication, said Dawkins and Krebs, is more like human advertising than like airline timetables: Even the most mutually beneficial communication, like that between a mother and a baby, is pure manipulation, as every mother who has been woken in the night by a desperate-sounding infant who merely wants company knows: Once scientists had begun thinking in this way, they looked at animal social life in an entirely new light."

One of the most striking pieces of evidence for deception 's role in communication comes from experiments that Leda Cosmides did when at Stanford University and that Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues did at Salzburg University: There is a simple logical puzzle called the Wason test, which people are bafflingly bad at: It consists of four cards placed on the table: Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. At present the cards read as follows: D, F, 3, 7. Your task is to turn over only those cards that you need to in order to prove the following rule to be true or false: get card has a D on one side, then it has a 3 on the other.

When presented with this test, less than one-quarter of Stanford students got it right, an average performance. (The right answer, by the way, is D and 7.) But it has been known for years that people are much better at the Wason test if it is presented differently. For example, the problem can be set as follows: "You are a bouncer in a Boston bar, and you will lose your job unless you enforce the following law: If a person is drinking beer, then he must be over twenty years old: " The cards now read: "drinking beer, drinking Coke, twenty-five years old, sixteen years old: " Now three-quarters of the students get the right answer: Turn over the cards marked "drinking beer " and "sixteen years old. " But the problem is logically identical to the first one: Perhaps the more familiar context of the Boston bar is what helps people do better, but other equally familiar examples elicit poor performance: The secret of why some Wason tests are easier than others has proved to be one of psychology 's enduring enigmas.

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Cosmides and Gigerenzer have solved the enigma. If the law to be enforced is not a social contract, the problem is difficult—

however simple its logic; but if it is a social contract, like the beer-drinking example, then it is easy. In one of Gigerenzer ' s experiments, people were good at enforcing the rule "If you take a pension, then you must have worked here ten years " by wanting to know what was on the back of the cards " worked here eight years" and "got a pension"—so long as they were told they were the employer. But if told they were an employee and still set the same rule, they turned over the cards " worked here for twelve years " and "did not get a pension, "

as if looking for cheating employers—even though the logic clearly implies that cheating employers are not infringing the rule.

Through a long series of experiments Cosmides and Gigerenzer proved that people are simply not treating the puzzles as pieces of logic at all: They are treating them as social contracts and looking for cheats: The human mind may not be much suited to logic at all, they conclude, but is well suited to judging the fair-ness of social bargains and the sincerity of social offers: It is a mistrustful Machiavellian world:"

Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten of the University of St: Andrews studied baboons in East Africa and witnessed an incident in which Paul, a young baboon, saw an adult female, Mel, find a large root: He looked around and then gave a sharp cry. The call summoned the baboon 's mother, who "assumed " that Mel had just stolen the food from her young or threatened him in some way, and chased Mel away: Paul ate the root: This piece of social manipulation by the young baboon required some intelligence: a knowledge that its call would bring its mother, a guess at what the mother would "assume" had happened, and a prediction that it would lead to Paul's getting the food: It was also using intelligence to deceive.

Byrne and Whiten went on to suggest that the habit of calculated deception is common in humans, occasional in chimpanzees, rare in baboons, and virtually unknown in other animals. Deceiving and detecting deception would then be the primary reason for intelligence. They suggest that the great apes acquired a unique ability to imagine alternative possible worlds as a means to deception.°

Robert Trivers has argued that to deceive others well, an

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animal must deceive itself, and that self-deception 's hallmark is a biased system of transfer from the conscious to the unconscious mind: Deception is therefore the reason for the invention of the subconscious."

Yet Byrne's and Whiten ' s account of the baboon incident goes right to the heart of what is wrong with the Machiavellian theory: It applies to every social species: For example, if you read any stories of life in a chimpanzee troop, the "plot " has a painful predictability about it to human ears. In Jane Goodall 's account of the career of the successful male Goblin, we watch Goblin's precocious and confident rise in the hierarchy as he challenges and defeats first each of the females in the troop and then, one by one, the males: Humphrey, Jomeo, Sherry, Satan, and Evered: Only Figan [the alpha male] was exempt: Indeed, it was his relationship with Figan that enabled him to challenge these older and more experienced males: He almost never did so unless Figan was nearby.

[To the human reader what comes next is startlingly obvious:]

For some time we had been expecting Goblin to turn on Figan: 1ndeed, I am still puzzled as to why Figan, so socially adroit in all other ways, had not been able to predict the inevitable outcome of his sponsorship of Goblin:"

The plot has a few twists, but we are not surprised; Figan is soon toppled: Machiavelli at least warned his Prince to watch his back: Brutus and Cassius took great care to conceal their plot from Julius Caesar; they could never have pulled off the assassination if their open ambition had been so obvious: Not even the most power-blinded human dictator is taken by surprise as Figan was: Of course that only proves that people are cleverer than chimpanzees, which is no great surprise, but it starkly poses the question why? If Figan had had a bigger brain, he might have seen what was coming: So the evolutionary pressure that Nick Humphrey identified—to get better and better at solving social puzzles, reading minds, and THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

::: 337:::

predicting reactions—is all there in the chimps and baboons, too.

As Geoffrey Miller, a psychologist at the University of Stanford, has put it, 'All apes and monkeys show complex behavior replete with communication, manipulation, deception, and long-term relationships; selection for Machiavellian intelligence based on such social complexities should again predict much larger brains in other apes and monkeys than we observe: "48

There have been several answers to this puzzle, none of which is entirely convincing. The first is Humphrey 's own answer, which is that human society is more complex than ape society because it needs a "polytechnic school " in which young people can learn the practical skills of their species. This seems to me merely a retreat to the toolmaker theory: The second is the suggestion that alliance building among unrelated individuals is a key to success in human beings and that this complication vastly increases the rewards of intellect: To which comes the response: What about dolphins? There is growing evidence that dolphin society is based on shifting alliances of males and of females so that, for example, Richard Connor observed a pair of males that came across a small group of other males that had kidnapped a fertile female from her group. Instead of fighting them for the female, the pair went away and found some allies, came back, and with superior numbers stole the female from the first group: 49 Even in chimps the rise of a male to the alpha position and his tenure there is determined by his ability to command the loyalty of allies.'° So the alliance theory once more seems too general to explain the sudden increase in human intelligence. Moreover, like most of these theories, it explains language, tactical thinking, social exchange, and the like, but it does not explain some of the things to which human beings devote much of their mental energy: music and humor, for example: WITTINESS AND SEXINESS

At least the Machiavelli theory proposes an adversary for the human brain that is its equal, however clever it gets: Few of my readers will need reminding of the ruthlessness that human beings

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The Red Queen

can show when in pursuit of self-interest: There is no such thing as being clever enough just as there is no such thing as being good enough at chess. Either you win or you do not: If winning pits you against a better opponent, as it does in the evolutionary tournament generation after generation, then the pressure to get better and better never lets up. The way the brains of human beings have gotten bigger at an accelerating pace implies that some such within-species arms race is at work:

So argues Geoffrey Miller: After laying bare the inadequa-cies of the conventional theories about intelligence, he takes a surprising turn.

I suggest that the neocortex is not primarily or exclu-sively a device for toolmaking, bipedal walking, fire-using, warfare, hunting, gathering, or avoiding savanna predators: None of these postulated functions alone can explain its explosive development in our lineage and not in other closely related species.:.. The neocortex is largely a courtship device to attract and retain sexual mates: Its specific evolutionary function is to stimulate and entertain other people, and to assess the stimula-tion attempts of others:"

The only way, he suggests, that sufficient evolutionary pressure could suddenly and capriciously be sustained in one species to enlarge an organ far beyond its normal size is sexual selection. "Just as the peahen is satisfied with nothing less than a visually brilliant display of peacock plumage, I postulate that hominid males and females became satisfied with nothing less than psychologically brilliant, fascinating, articulate, entertaining companions." Miller 's use of the peacock is deliberate: Wherever else in the animal kingdom we find greatly exaggerated and enlarged ornaments, we have been able to explain them by the runaway, sexy-son, Fisher effect of intense sexual selection (or the equally powerful Good-genes effect, as described in chapter 5): Sexual selection, as we have seen, is very different from natural selection in its effects, THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

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for it does no? solve survival problems, it makes them worse: Female choice causes peacocks ' tails to grow longer until they become a burden—then demands that they grow longer still: Miller used the wrong word: Peahens are never satisfied: And so, having found a force that produces exponential change in ornaments, it seems perverse not to consider it when trying to explain the exponential expansion of the brain:

Miller adduces some circumstantial evidence for his view: Surveys consistently place intelligence, sense of humor, creativity, and interesting personality above even such things as wealth and beauty in lists of desirable characteristics in both sexes." Yet these characteristics fail entirely to predict youth, status, fertility, or parental ability, so evolutionists tend to ignore them—but there they are, right at the top of the list: Just as a peacock 's tail is no guide to his ability as a father but despotic fashion punishes those who cease to respect it, so Miller suggests that men and women dare not step off the treadmill of selecting the wittiest, most creative and articulate person available with whom to mate. (Note that conventional "intelligence " as measured by examinations is not what he is talking about.)

Likewise, the manner in which sexual selection capriciously seizes upon preexisting perceptual biases fits with the fact that apes are by nature naturally "curious, playful, easily bored, and appreciative of simulation. " Miller suggests that to keep a husband around long enough to help in raising children, women would have needed to be as varied and creative in their behavior as possible, which he calls the Scheherazade effect after the Arabian storyteller who entranced the Sultan with I,001 tales so that he did not abandon her (and execute her) for another courtesan. The same would have applied to males who wanted to attract females, which Miller calls the Dionysus effect after the Greek god of dance, music, intoxication, and seduction: He might also have called it the Mick Jagger effect; he admitted to me one day that he could not understand what made strutting, middle-aged rock stars so attractive to women. In this respect Don Symons noted that tribal chiefs are both gifted orators and highly polygamous men. 53

340 :::

The Red Queen

Miller notes that the bigger the brain became, the more necessary long-term pair bonds were. A human infant is born helpless and premature. If it were as advanced at birth as an ape, it would be twenty-one months in the womb." But the human pelvis is simply incapable of bearing a child with a head that big, so it is born at nine months and treated like a helpless, external fetus for the next year, not even beginning to walk until it is at the age when it would expect to enter the world. This helplessness further enhances the pressure on women to keep men around to help feed them when encumbered with a child—the Scheherazade effect.

Miller finds that the most commonly voiced objection to the Scheherazade effect is that most people are not witty and creative but are dull and predictable. True enough, but compared to what? Our standards for what is considered entertaining have, if Miller is right, evolved as fast as our wit: "I think male readers may find it hard to imagine some four-foot-tall, half-hairy, flat-chested, hominid females being sexier than similar hominids, " wrote Miller in a letter to me (referring to "Lucy "). "We 're spoiled because sexual selection has already driven us so far that it 's hard to appreciate how any point we 've passed could have been considered an improvement: We are positively turned off by traits that half a million years ago would have been considered irresistibly sexy.'

Miller 's theory draws attention to several facts that have remained unexplained in other theories, namely that dance, music, humor, and sexual foreplay are all features unique to human beings: Following the Tooby-Cosmides logic, we cannot argue that these are mere cultural habits foisted on us by " society. " Plainly a desire to hear rhythmic tunes or to be made to laugh by wit develops innately: Following Miller we note that they are characterized by obsessions with novelty and virtuosity and much practiced by the young: From Beatlemania to Madonna (and back again to Orpheus), the sexual fascination of youth with musical creativity has been obvious. It is a human universal.

It is crucial for Miller 's theory that human beings are especially selective about their mates: Indeed, among apes, people are unique in that both sexes are extremely choosy: A gorilla female is THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

::: 341 :::

happy to be mated with whoever "owns" her harem: A gorilla male will mate with any estral female he can find: A chimp female is keen to mate with many different males in the troop. A chimp male will mate with any female in season: But women are highly selective about the men with whom they, mate: So indeed are men: True, they are easily persuaded to go to bed with beautiful young women—

but that is exactly the point: Most women are neither young nor beautiful, nor are they trying to seduce strange men: It is hard to overemphasize how unusual humans are in this respect: Males in some monogamous bird species such as pigeons and doves" do take care to select a female carefully, but in many other birds, the males are happy to have a fling with any passing female, as the evidence of sperm competition theory has demonstrated (chapter 7). Although he may prefer variety more than females do, man is a highly sexually selective male as males go:

Selectivity by one or the other sex is the prerequisite of sexual selection. And as I have argued in previous chapters, it is more than that. It is the almost invariant predictor of sexual selection: Fisher ' s runaway process for sexy sons and Zahavi-Hamilton 's Good-genes effect simply cannot be avoided once one or the other sex is being selective. So we should actually expect some exaggeration of some feature or other in :man as a simple consequence of sexual selection."

Incidentally, Miller 's argument draws attention to a little-appreciated aspect of sexual selection: It can affect both the selected sex and the selector: For example, among American blackbirds those species in which the female is large are also the species in which the male is much larger. The same is true of many mammals and birds: Among grouse, pheasants, seals, and deer, a greater ratio between male and female size occurs in the larger species: A recent analysis of this effect concludes that it is caused by sexual selection: The more polygamous the species, the more premium there is on large size in males; the more males are selected for large size, the more they inevitably leave large-size genes to their daughters as well as their sons. Genes can be "sex-linked" but usually only imperfectly or when there is a strong disadvantage to a daughter 's

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The Red Queen

inheriting the effect—as in the case of female birds and gaudy colors. Thus, sexual selection by males of females for large brains would result in larger brains for both sexes. fe OBSESSED WITH YOUTH

I believe that Miller 's tale deserves a special twist from the neoteny theory (although he is not convinced). The neoteny theory is well established among anthropologists.: And the notion of human monogamous child rearing is well established among sociobiologists: Nobody has yet put the two together: If men began selecting mates that appeared youthful, then any gene that slowed the rate of development of adult characteristics in a woman would make her more attractive at a given age than a rival: Consequently, she would leave more descendants, who would inherit the same gene. Any neoteny gene would give the appearance of youthfulness. Neoteny, in other words, could be a consequence of sexual selection, and since neoteny is credited with increasing our intelligence (by enlarging the brain size at adulthood), it is to sexual selection that we should attribute our great intelligence.

The idea is hard to grasp at first, so a thought experiment may help: Imagine two primeval women: One develops at the normal rate, and the other has an extra neoteny gene so that she is hairless of body, large-brained, small-jawed, late maturing, and long-lived: At the age of twenty-five, both are widowed; each has had one child by her first husband: The men in the tribe have a preference for young women and twenty-five is not young, so neither stands much chance of getting a second husband. But there is one man who cannot find a wife: Given the alternatives, he chooses the younger-looking woman. She goes on to have three more children while her rival barely manages to rear the one she already had: The details of the story do not matter. The point is that once males prefer youth, a gene for delaying the signs of aging would generally prosper at the expense of a normal gene, and a neoteny gene does exactly that. The gene would probably make the THE I NTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME

::: 343 :::

woman 's sons appear neotenized as well as her daughters, for there is no reason that it should be specific to the female sex in its effects. The whole species would be driven into neoteny.

Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who unusually combines an interest in evolution and an interest in Freud, has proposed a similar idea. He suggested that neotenic (or, as he calls it, "paedomorphic ") traits were favored by female choice rather than male choice. Younger males, he suggests, made more cooperative hunters, and therefore females who wanted meat picked younger-looking men. The principle is the same: Neotenic development is a consequence of a preference for it in one sex. 59

This is not to deny that bigger brains themselves brought advantages in Machiavellian intelligence or language or seductive-ness. Indeed, once these advantages became clear, men who were especially fussy about picking youthful-looking women would be most successful because they sometimes picked neotenic, big-brained women and therefore had more intelligent children. But it does suggest an escape from the question Why did it not happen to baboons?

However, Miller 's sexual selection idea suffers from a near fatal flaw. Remember that it presupposes sexual choosiness by one or other sex. But what caused that choosiness? Presumably the cause was the fact that men took part in parental care, which gave women an incentive to confine probable paternity to one man and gave men an incentive to enter into a long-term relationship as long as he could be certain of paternity. Why then did men take part in parental care? Because by doing so they could increase the chances of rearing a child more than by trying to seek new partners.

The reason for this was that children, unusual for ape infants, took a long time to mature, and men could help their wives during child rearing by hunting meat for them. Why did they take a long time to mature? Because they had big heads! The argument is circular.

That may not be fatal to it. Some of the best arguments, such as Fisher 's theory of runaway sexual selection, are circular.

The relationship between chickens and eggs is circular. Miller is

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The Red Queen

actually rather proud of the theory ' s circularity because he believes we have learned from computer simulation that evolution is a process which pulls itself up by its bootstraps: There is no single cause and effect because effects can reinforce causes: If a bird finds itself to be good at cracking seeds, then it specializes in ,cracking seeds, which puts further pressure on its seed-cracking ability to evolve. Evolution is circular:

STALE MATE

It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock 's tail—an ornament designed for sexual display whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side effect of the ability to charm. Disquieting and yet not altogether convincing. The sexual selection of the human mind is the most speculative and fragile of the many evolutionary theories discussed in this book, but it is also very much in the same vein as the others: I began this book by asking why all human beings were so similar and yet so different, suggesting that the answer lay in the unique alchemy of sex: An individual is unique because of the genetic variety that sexual reproduction generates in its perpetual chess tournament with disease. An individual is a member of a homogeneous species because of the incessant mixing of that variety in the pool of fellow human beings ' genes. And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different.

Epilogue

THE

SELF-DOMESTICATED APE

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man:

Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A bring darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,

He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little or too much:

—Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man "

The study of human nature is at about the same stage as the study of the human genome, which is at about the same stage as the map-ping of the world in the time of Herodotus. We know a few frag-ments in detail and some large parts in outline, but huge surprises still await us and errors abound. If we can free ourselves from the sterile dogmatic dispute about nature and nurture, we can gradually uncover the rest.

But just as Mercator could not get the relative sizes of Europe and Africa correct until he had the perspective that longi-tude and latitude provided, so the perspective of other animals is vital to the study of human nature. It is impossible to understand the social life of a phalarope or a sage grouse or an elephant seal or a chimpanzee in isolation. You can describe each in glorious detail, of course: They are respectively polyandrous, lekking,' harem-defending, fission-fusion. But only with the perspective of evolution can you truly understand why. Only then can you see the part that different opportunities for parental investment, different habitats, different diets, and different historical baggage have played in determining their natures. It is the purest nonsense to abandon the perspective of comparisons with other animals just because of our hubristic belief that humans alone are learning creatures that reinvent themselves at whim. So I make no apologies for mixing animals and human beings together in this book: Nor is the fact of civilization sufficient to rescue our parochial egotism: We are, it is true, as domesticated as any dog or cow, perhaps more so. We have bred out of ouselves all sorts of

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The Red Queen

instincts that were probably features of our Pleistocene nature, in the same way that human beings have bred out of the cow many of the characteristics of the Pleistocene aurochs. But scratch a cow and you still find an aurochs underneath. A herd of dairy calves released into a forest would soon reinvent the polygamous herd in which males competed for status. Dogs left to their own devices still become territorial pack animals in which the senior animals monopolize breeding. Turned loose on an African savanna, a group of young Americans would not re-create the exact existence of their ancestors; indeed, they would probably starve, so dependent have we been for millennia on cultural traditions of where to find food and how to live: But nor would such people invent an entirely inhu-man social arrangement. As every experiment in free-wheeling communities up to and including Rajneeshpuram in Oregon has proved, human communities always invent a hierarchy and always atomize into possessive sexual bonds.

Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively egalitarian; an ape in which males contribute unusually large amounts of investment in the upbringing of their offspring by provisioning their mates and their children with food, protection, and company; an ape in which monogamous pair bonds are the rule but many males have affairs and occasional males achieve polygamy; an ape in which females mated to low-ranking males often cuckold their husbands in order to gain access to the genes of higher-ranking males; an ape that has been subject to unusually intense mutual sexual selection so that many of the features of the female body (lips, breasts, waists) and the mind of both sexes (songs, competitive ambition, status seeking) are designed for use in competition for mates; an ape that has developed an extraordinary range of new instincts to learn by association, to communicate by speech, and to pass on traditions: But still an ape:

Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong. The history THE SELF-DOMESTICATED APE

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of human science is not encouraging. Galton 's eugenics, Freud 's unconscious, Durkheim 's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinner 's behaviorism, Piaget 's early learning, and Wilson 's sociobiology all appear in retrospect to be riddled with errors and false perspectives. No doubt the Red Queen's approach is just another chapter in this marred tale. No doubt its politicization and the vested interests ranged against it will do as much damage as was done to previous attempts to understand human nature. The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious. "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my: Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the Press, " said David Hume: But then I remember how much progress we have made since Hume and how much nearer to the goal of a complete understanding of human nature we are than ever before: We will never quite reach that goal, and it would perhaps be better if we never did. But as long as we can keep asking why, we have a noble purpose.

NOTES

Chapter 1. Human Nature

I. Dawkins 1991:

2. Weismann 1889:

3. Weismann 1889:

4. A few scientists argue that Chinese people are indeed descended from "Peking man," the local version of Homo crectus, but the evidence is now heavily against them:

5. Karl Marx, in Criticism of the Gotha Program (1875), was paraphrasing Michael Bakunin, who declared, when on trial after the failure of an anarchist rising at Lyons (1870): "From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs:"

6. Not all anthropologists would agree that all modern people are descendants of a race that was confined to Africa until 100,000 years ago, but most do: 7. Tooby and Cosmides 1990:

8. Mayr 1983; Dawkins 1986:

9. Hunter, Nur, and Werren 1993:

10. Dawkins 1991:

I I: Dawkins 1986:

12. Tiger 1991:

13. See Edward Tenner ' s article " Revenge Theory " in Harvard Maga&ine, March—April 1991, for why this is so:

14. Wilson 1975:

Chapter 2. The Enigma

1. Bell 1982:

2. Weismann 1889:

3. Brooks 1988:

::: 3 52 :::

NOTES

4. J: Maynard Smith, interview:

5. Levin 1988:

6. Weismann 1889:

7. Bell 1982:

8. Fisher 1930:

9. Muller 1932.

10. Crow and Kimura 1965:

I I: Wynne Edwards 1962:

12: Darwin 1859:

13. Humphrey 1983:

14. Williams 1966:

15. Fisher 1930; Wright 1931; Haldane 1932: 16. Huxley 1942:

17. Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1971:

18. Ghiselin 1974, 1988:

19. Maynard Smith 1971:

20. Stebbins 1950; Maynard Smith 1978:

21. Jaenike 1978:

22. Gould and Lewontin 1979:

23. Williams 1975; Maynard Smith 1978:

24. Maynard Smith 1971:

25. Ghiselin 1988:

26. Bernstein, Hopf, and Michod 1988:

27. Bernstein 1983; Bernstein, Byerly, Hopf, and Michod 1985: 28. Maynard Smith 1988:

29. Tiersch, Beck, and Douglas 1991:

30. Bull and Charnov 1985; Bierzychudek 19876; Kondrashov and Crow 1991; Perrod, Richerd, and Valero 1991.

31. Bernstein, Hopf, and Michod 1988:

32. Kondrashov 1988:

33. Flegg, Spencer, and Wood 1985:

34. Stearns 1978; Michod and Levin 1988:

35. Kirkpatrick and Jenkins 1989; Wiener, Feldman, and Otto 1992: 36. Muller 1964:

37. Bell 1988:

38. Muller's ratchet has recently been found at work in viruses; see Chao 1992; Chao, Tran, and Matthews 1992:

39. Crow 1988:

40. Kondrashov 1982:

41. M: Meselson, interview:

42. Kondrashov 1988:

NOTES

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43. Hamilton 1990:

44. C: Lively, interview:

Chapter 3: The Power of Parasites

I: Hurst, Hamilton, and Ladle 1992:

2. M: Meselson, interview:

3. Maynard Smith 1986:

4. Williams 1966, Williams 1975:

5. Maynard Smith 1971:

6. Williams and Mitton 1973:

7. Williams 1975:

8. Bell 1982:

9. Bell 1982:

10. Ghiselin 1974:

II: Darwin 1859:

12: Bell 1982:

I 3: Schmitt and Antonovics 1986; Ladle 1992: 14. Williams 1966:

15. Bierzychudek 1987:

16. Harvey 1978:

17. Burt and Bell 1987:

18. Eldredge and Gould 1972:

19. Williams 1975:

20. Carroll 1871:

21: Van Valen 1973; L: Van Valen, interview.

22. Zinsser 1934; McNeill 1976:

23. Washington Post, December 16, 1991: 24. Krause 1992:

25. Dawkins 1990:

26. Assuming thirty minutes per bacterial generation, there are 1,226,400 bacterial generations in a human lifetime of seventy years: In the 7 million years since we shared an ancestor with chimpanzees, there have been just over 200,000

"human" generations of thirty years each: 2,7. O'Connell 1989:

28. Dawkins and Krebs 1979:

29. Schall 1990; May and Anderson 1990:

30. Levy 1992.

31. Ray 1992:

32. Ray 1992; T: Ray, interview:

::: 3 54

NOTES

3 3: L: Hurst, interview.

34. Burt and Bell 1987:

35. Bell and Burt 1990:

36. Kelley 1985; Schmitt and Antonovics 1986; Bierzychudek 1987a: 37. Haldane 1949; Hamilton 1990:

38. Hamilton, Axelrod, and Tanese 1990; W: D: Hamilton, interview: 39. Haldane 1949; Clarke 1979:

40. Clay 1991:

41. Bremermann 1987:

42. Nowak 1992; Nowak and May 1992:

43. Hill, Allsopp, Kwiatkowski, Anscey, Twumasi, Rowe, Bennett, Brewster, McMichael, and Greenwood 1991:

44. Potts, Manning, and Wakeland 1991:

45. Haldane 1949.

46. Jayakar 1970; Hamilton 1990:

47. Jaenike 1978; Bell 1982; Bremermann 1980; Tooby 1982; Hamilton 1980: 48. Hamilton 1964; Hamilton 1967; Hamilton 1971.

49. Hamilton, Axelrod, and Tanese 1990:

50. Hamilton, Axelrod, and Tanese 1990:

51. W: D: Hamilton, interviews:

52. W: D. Hamilton, interview; A: Pomiankowski, interview.

53. Glesner and Tilman 1978; Bierzychudek 1987: 54. Daly and Wilson 1983:

55. Edmunds and Alstad 1978, 1981; Seger and Hamilton 1988: 56. Harvey, 1 978.

57. Gould 1978:

58. C: Lively, interview:

59. Lively 1987:

60. C: Lively, interview:

61. Lively, Craddock, and Vrijenhoek 1990:

62. Tooby 1982:

63. Bell 1987:

64. Hamilton 1990:

65. Hamilton 1990:

66. Bell and Maynard Smith 1987:

67. W: D: Hamilton, interview:

68. M: Meselson, interview:

69. R: Ladle, interview:

70. G: Bell, interview; A: Burt, interview; Felsentein 1988; W. Hamilton, interview; J: Maynard Smith, interview; G: Williams, interview: 71. Metzenberg 1990:

NOTES

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Chapter 4. Genetic Mutiny and Gender

1. Hardin 1968:

2. I make no apology for using the word gender when I mean sex (male or female); I know it is a word that originally referred only to grammatical categories, but meanings change and it is usefully unambiguous to have a word other than sex for males and females:

3. Cosmides and Tooby 1981:

4. Leigh 1990:

5. See Dawkins 1976, 1982, for the clearest exposition of this case: 6. Hickey 1982; Hickey and Rose 1988:

7. Doolittle and Sapienza 1980; Orgel and Crick 1980: 8. Dawkins 1986:

9. Nee and Maynard Smith 1990:

10. Mereschkovsky 1905; Margulis 1981; Margulis and Sagan 1986: II: Beeman, Friesen, and Denell 1992:

12. Hewitt 1972; Hewitt 1976; Hewitt and East 1978; Shaw, Hewitt, and Anderson 1985; Bell and Burt 1990; Jones 1991:

13. D: Haig, interview:

14. Haig and Grafen 1991:

15. Charlesworth and Hartl 1978:

16. For a comprehensive review of meiotic drive see American Naturalist, vol: 137, pp: 281-456, "The Genetics and Evolutionary Biology of Meiotic Drive," a symposium organized by T: W: Lyttle, L: M: Sandler, T: Prout, and D: D: Perkins, 1991:

17. Haig and Grafen 1991:

18. D: Haig, interview; see also S: Spandrel (unpublished).

19. Hamilton 1967; Dawkins 1982; Bull 1983; Hurst 1992a; L: Hurst, interview: 20. Leigh 1977:

21. Cosmides and Tooby 1981:

22. Margulis 1981:

23. Cosmides and Tooby 1981; Hurst and Hamilton 1992: 24. Anderson 1992; Hurst 1991b; Hurst 1992b: 25. Werren, Skinner, and Huger 1986; Werren Hurst 1990; Hurst 1991c:

1987;

26. Mitchison 1990:

27. L: Hurst, interview; see also Parker, Baker, and Smith 1972 and Hoekstra 1987 for additional, but not rival, features of the evolution of anisogamy and two genders:

28. Frank 1989:

29. Gouyon and Couvet 1987; Frank 1989; Frank 1991; Hurst and Pomiankowski 1991:

::: 356 :::

NOTES

30. Hurst 1991a:

31. Hurst and Hamilton 1992:

32. Hurst, Godfray, and Harvey 1990:

33. Hurst, Godfray, and Harvey 1990.

34. Olsen and Marsden 1954; Olsen 1956; Olsen and Buss 1967: 35. Lienhart and Vermelin 1946:

36. Hamilton 1967:

37. Cosmides and Tooby 1981:

38. Bull and Bulmer 1981; Frank 1990:

39. Bull and Bulmer 1981; J: J: Bull, interview: 40. Frank and Swingland 1988; Charnov 1982; Bull 1983; J: J: Bull, interview: 41. Warner, Robertson, and Leigh 1975:

42. Bull 1983; Bull 1987; Conover and Kynard 1981: 43. Dunn, Adams, and Smith 1990; Adams, Greenwood, and Naylor 1987: 44. Head, May, and Pendleton 1987:

45. J: J: Bull, interview.

46. Bull 1983; Werren 1991; Hunter, Nur, and Werren 1993.

47. Trivers and Willard 1973:

48. Trivers and Willard 1973:

49. The sex ratio of presidential children was first noticed by Laura Betzig and Samantha Weber of the University of Michigan: 50. Trivers and Willard 1973:

51. Austad and Sunquist 1986:

52. Clutton-Brock and 1ason 1986; Clutton-Brock 1991; Huck, Labov, and Lisk 1986:

53. T: H: Clutton-Brock, interview:

54. Clutton-Brock, Albon, and Guinness 1984: 55. Symington 1987:

56. For baboons, see Altmann 1980; for macaques, see Silk 1983, Simpson and Simpson 1982, and Small and Hrdy 1986; for a general summary, see Van Schaik and Hrdy 1991; for howler monkeys, I rely on K: Glander, interview; for a skeptical view of this data, T: Hasegawa, correspondence: 57. Hrdy 1987:

58. Van Schaik and Hrdy 1991:

59. Goodall 1986:

60. Grant 1990; Betzig and Weber 1992.

61. Grant 1990; V: J: Grant, correspondence.

62. Bromwich 1989:

63. K: McWhirter: "The gender vendors: " Independent newspaper, London 27

October 1991, pages 54-55:

64. B: Gledhill, interview:

NOTES

::: 357:::

65. For zebra finches, see Burley 1981; for red-cockaded woodpeckers, see Gowaty and Lennartz 1985; for bald eagles, see Bortolotti 1986; for other hawks, see Olsen and Cockburn 1991:

66. N: D: Kristof: "Asia, Vanishing Point for As Many As 100 Million Women: "

International Herald Tribune, 6 November 1991, page 1: 67. Rao 1986; Hrdy 1990:

68. M: Nordborg, interview:

69. Bromwich 1989:

70. James 1986; James 1989; W: H: James, interview: 71. Unterberger and Kirsch 1932:

72. Dawkins 1982:

73. A: C: Hurlbert, personal communication: 74. Fisher 1930; R: L: Trivers, interview:

75. Betzig 1992a:

76. Dickemann 1979; Boone 1988; Voland 1988; Judge and Hrdy 1988: 77. Hrdy 1987; Cronk 1989; Hrdy 1990:

78. Dickemann 1979:

79. Dickemann 1979; Kitcher 1985; Alexander 1988; Hrdy 1990: 80. S: B: Hrdy, interview:

81. Dickemann 1979:

Chapters: The Peacock's Talc

1. Troy and Elgar 1991:

2. Trivers 1972; see also Dawkins 1976:

3. Atmar 1991:

4. Darwin 1871:

5. Diamond 1991b:

6. Cronin 1992:

7. Marden 1992:

8. Baker 1985; Gotmark 1992:

9. Ridley, Rands, and Lelliott 1984:

10. Halliday 1983:

11. Hoglund and Robertson 1990:

12. Moller 1988:

13. Hoglund, Eriksson, and Lindell 1990:

14. Andersson 1982:

15. Cherry 1990:

16. Houde and Endler 1990:

17. Evans and Thomas 1992:

::: 358 :::

NOTES

18. Fisher 1930:

19. Jones and Hunter 1993:

20. Ridley and Hill 1987:

21. Taylor and Williams 1982:

22. Boyce 1990:

23. Cronin 1992:

24. The best volumes on the two factions of sexual selection are Bradbury and Andersson 1987 and Cronin 1992:

25. O ' Donald 1980; Lande 1981; Kirkpatrick 1982; see Arnold 1983: 26. Weatherhead and Robertson 1979:

27. Pomiankowski, Iwasa, and Nee 1991

28. Pomiankowski 1990.

29. Dugatkin 1992; Gibson and Hoglund 1992. Copying has also been proven in fallow deer: Balmford 1991:

30. Pomiankowski 1990; see also Trail 1990 for why capuchin birds and other monomorphic lekking species experience female-female competition: 31. Partridge 1980:

32. Balmford 1991:

33. Alatalo, Hoglund, and Lundberg 1991:

34. Hill 1990:

35. Diamond 1991a:

36. Zahavi 1975:

37. Dawkins 1976; Cronin 1992:

38. Andersson 1986; Pomiankowski 1987; Grafen 1990; Iwasa, Pomiankowski and Nee 1991:

39. Moller 1991.

40. Hamilton and Zuk 1982:

41. Ward 1988; Pruett-Jones, Pruett-Jones, and Jones 1990; Zuk 1991; Zuk 1992:

42. Low 1990:

43. Cronin 1992:

44. Moller 1990:

45. Hillgarth 1990; N: Hillgarth and M: Zuk, interview: 46. Kirkpatrick and Ryan 1991:

47. Boyce 1990; Spurrier, Boyce, and Manly 1991.

48. Thornhill and Sauer 1992:

49. Moller 1992.

50. Moller and Pomiankowski (in press); see also Balmford, Thomas, and Jones 1993; A: Pomiankowski, interview:

51. Maynard Smith 1991; see Cronin 1992 for a history of how people have repeatedly made the mistake of thinking choice must be conscious and active, NOTES

::: 359 :::

and that therefore it was unreasonable to expect female animals to choose their mates using " rational" criteria: 52. Zuk 1992:

53. Zuk, in press:

54. Zuk, Thornhill, Ligon, and Johnson 1990; Ligon, Thornhill, Zuk, and Johnson 1990:

55. Flinn 1992:

56. Daly and Wilson 1983:

57. Folstad and Karter 1992; Zuk 1992:

58. Zuk, in press:

59. Wederkind 1992:

60. Hamilton 1990b:

61. Kodric-Brown and Brown 1984:

62. Dawkins and Krebs 1978:

63. Dawkins and Guilford 1991:

64. Low, Alexander, and Noonan 1987:

65. T: Guilford, interview; B: Low, interview: 66. Ryan 1991; M: Ryan, interview:

67. Basolo 1990.

68. Green 1987:

69. Eberhard 1985:

70. Kramer 1990:

71. Enquist and Arak 1993.

72. Gilliard 1963:

73. Houde and Endler 1990; J: Endler, interview: 74. Kirkpatrick 1989:

75. Searcy 1992:

76. Burley 1981:

77. The hypnosis idea is my own: see Ridley 1981: But it receives some indirect support from later experiments on peacocks and other pheasants: See Rands, Ridley, and Lelliott 1984; Davison 1983; Ridley, Rands, and Lelliott 1984; Petrie, Halliday, and Sanders 1991.

78. Gould and Gould 1989:

79. Pomiankowski and Guilford 1990.

80. A: Pomiankowski, interview:

Chapter 6: Polygamy and the Nature of Men

I: Betzig 1986:

2: Brown 1991; Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992:

::: 360 :::

NOTES

3. Crook and Crook 1988:

4. Betzig and Weber 1992:

5. Trivers 1972:

6. Bateman 1948:

7. Alexander 1974, 1979; Irons 1979:

8. Clutton-Brock and Vincent 1991; Gwynne 1991: 9. For a clear summary of the argument that paternal care leads to the female initiative in courtship, and the evidence for it, see my namesake ' s paper: Ridley (Mark) 1978:

10. Symons 1979; D: Symons, interview:

I 1. Symons 1979:

12. Symons 1979:

13. Tripp 1975; Symons 1979:

14. Maynard Smith and Price 1973:

15. Trivers 1971; Maynard Smith 1977; Emlen and Oring 1977: 16. Pleszczynska and Hansell 1980; Garson, Pleszczynska and Holm 1981: 1nci-dentally, polygamy can mean having many mates of either sex; polygyny means specifically males having many female mates: Although polygyny is more precise, I have stuck with the more familiar words throughout this book: polygamy for males, polyandry for females:

17. L: Betzig, interview:

18. Borgehoff Mulder 1988, 1992; M: Borgehoff Mulder, interview: 19. " Polygamists emerge from secrecy seeking not just peace but respect " by Dirk Johnson: New York Times, 9 April 1991, page A22: 20. Green 1993:

21. Symons 1979 put it this way: "Heterosexual relations are structured to a substantial degree by the nature and interests of the human female:"

22. Crook and Gartlan 1966; Jarman 1974; Clutton-Brock and Harvey 1977: 23. Avery and Ridley 1988; Vos 1979:

24. Smith 1984:

25. Foley and Lee 1989:

26. Foley 1987; Foley and Lee 1989; Leakey and Lewin 1992; Kingdon 1993: 27. Symons 1987; K: Hill, interview:

28. Alexander 1988; R: D: Alexander, interview: 29. Kaplan and Hill 1985b; Hewlett 1988:

30. Kaplan and Hill 1985a; Hill and Kaplan 1988; Hawkes 1992; Cosmides and Tooby 1992; K: Hawkes, interview:

31. Cashdan 1980; Cosmides and Tooby 1992:

32. N: Chagnon, interview; Cronk 1991:

33. Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986:

34. Goodall 1990:

NOTES

::: 361 :::

35. Daly and Wilson 1983:

36. " Dolphin Courtship: Brutal, Cunning and Complex " by N: Angier, New York

Times, 18 February 1992, p: CI: 37. Dickemann 1979:

38. Hartung 1982:

39. L: Betzig, interview:

40. Betzig 1986:

41: Betzig 1986:

42. Finley, quoted in Betzig 19926; the Gibbon quote is from The Decline and Fall

of the Roman Empire, volume I, chapter 7: 43. Betzig 1992c:

44. Betzig 1992a:

45. Scruton 1986:

46. Brown and Hotra 1988:

47. D: E: Brown, interview:

48. Goodall 1986: However, old females are killed by the victors: 49. N: Chagnon, interview:

50. Chagnon 1968; Chagnon 1988:

51. I' m indebted to Archie Fraser for pointing out this parallel: 52. Chagnon 1968:

53. Smith 1984:

54. D: E: Brown, interview:

Chapter 7. Monogamy and the Nature of Women 1: Moller 1987; Birkhead and Moller 1992: 2. Murdock and White 1969; Fisher 1992 makes the interesting case that sexism, despotism, polygamy, and male " ownership " of wives were all invented along with the plow, which removed from women all their share in food winning; as women have come back into the work force in recent decades, so their say and status have improved:

3. Hrdy 1981; Hrdy 1986:

4. Bertram 1975; Hrdy 1979; Hausfater and Hrdy 1984: A remarkable experiment by Emlen, Demong, and Emlen 1989 greatly strengthened the contention that infanticide was an adaptive strategy. By removing territorial females, Emlen induced female jacanas—a role-reversed species—to kill the eggs of males with nests in their newly acquired territories: 5. Dunbar 1988:

6. Wrangham 1987; R: W: Wrangham, interview:

::: 362 :::

NOTES

7. Goodall 1986, 1990; Hiraiwa-Hasegawa 1988; Yamamura, Hasegawa, and 1to 1990:

8. Daly and Wilson 1988:

9. Martin and May 1981:

10. Hasegawa and Hiraiwa-Hasegawa 1990; Diamond 1991b: II: White 1992; Small 1992:

12. Short 1979:

13. Eberhard 1985; Hyde and Elgar 1992; Bellis, Baker, and Gage 1990; Baker and Bellis 1992:

14. Harcourt, Harvey, Larson, and Short 1981; Hyde and Elgar 1992: 15. Connor, Smolker, and Richards 1992:

16. Smith 1984: This explanation, that cool testicles are designed to increase the shelf life of stored sperm, fits the facts far better than the old notion that sperm must be manufactured in a cool organ or they will be deformed: 17. Harvey and May 1989:

18. Payne and Payne 1989:

19. Birkhead and Moller 1992:

20. Hamilton 19906:

21. Westneat, Sherman, and Morton 1990; Birkhead and Moller 1992.

22. Potts, Manning, and Wakeland 1991:

23. Burley 1981:

24. Moller 1987.

25. Baker and Bellis 1989, 1992:

26. Birkhead and Moller 1992:

27. Hill and Kaplan 1988; K: Hill, interview: 28. K: Hill, interview:

29. Wilson and Daly 1992; R: W: Wrangham, interview: 30. Cherfas and Gribbin 1984; Flinn 1988:

31. Morris 1967.

32. Birkhead and Moller 1992:

33. Alexander and Noonan 1979:

34. The first authors to see it this way were Cherfas and Gribbin 1984: 35. Hrdy 1979; Symons 1979; Benshoof and Thornhill 1979; Diamond 1991b; Fisher 1992; Sillen-Tullberg and Moller 1993: 36. Korpimaki 1991:

37. Alatalo, Lundberg, and Stahlbrandt 1982: Recent research suggests that the wife, at least, knows what is happening: See Veiga 1992; Slagsvold, Amundsen, Dale, and Lampe 1992:

38. Veiga 1992:

39. Moller and Birkhead 1989:

40. Darwin 1803:

NOTES

::: 363 :::

41. Wilson and Daly 1992:

42. Wilson and Daly 1992:

43. Thornhill and Thornhill 1983, 1989; Posner 1992: 44. Gaulin and Schlegel 1980; Wilson and Daly 1992; Regalski and Gaulin 1992: 45. A. Fraser, personal communication:

46. Malinowski 1927:

47. Wilson and Daly 1992,

48. French revolutionary law, quoted in translation by Wilson and Daly 1992: 49. Alexander 1974; Kurland 1979:

50. Betzig 1992a:

51. Voland 1988, 1992:

52. Boone 1988:

53. Darwin 1803:

54. Betzig 1992a:

55. Betzig 1992a:

56. Betzig 1992a:

57. Thornhill 1990.

58. Thornhill 1990:

59. Kitcher 1985; Vining 1986:

60. Perusse 1992:

61: W: Irons, interview; N: Polioudakis, interview: Chapter 8. Sexing the Mind

1. Gaulin and Fitzgerald 1986; Jacobs, Gaulin, Sherry, and Hoffman 1990: 2. Konner 1982:

3. Darwin 1871:

4. Silverman and Eals 1992:

5. Maccoby and Jacklin 1974; Daly and Wilson 1983; Moir and Jesse( 1991: 6. M: Bailey, interview:

7. Gaulin and Hoffman 1988:

8. Silverman and Eals 1992:

9. Wilson 1975; Kingdon 1993:

1 0: Daly and Wilson 1983:

I I: Symons 1979.

I2: Hudson and Jacot 1991:

13. Tannen 1990:

14. Gaulin and Hoffman 1988:

15. Maccoby and Jacklin 1974; Ehrhardt and Meyer-Bahlburg 1981; Rossi 1985; Moir and Jessel 1991:

::: 364 :::

NOTES

16. Moir and Jesse! 1991:

17. McGuinness 1979:

18. McGuinness 1979:

19. 1 mperato-McGinley, Peterson, Gautier, and Sturla 1979: 20. Daly and Wilson 1983; Moir and Jesse! 1991: 21: Hoyenga and Hoyenga 1980:

22. Tannen 1990:

23. Tiger and Shepher 1977; Daly and Wilson 1983; Moir and Jessel 1991: 24. Fisher 1992:

25. 1nterviewed in the Sunday Times (London), 7 June 1992: 26. DSrner 1985, 1989; M: Bailey, interview; Le Vay 1992: 27. M: Bailey, interview; D: Hamer, interview: 28. Dickemann 1992:

29. Symons 1987:

30. Thornhill 1989a:

31. Buss 1989, 1992:

32. Ellis 1992:

3 3 : Buss 1989, 1992:

34. Kenrick and Keefe 1989:

35. Ellis and Symons 1990:

36. Ellis and Symons 1990:

37. Symons 1987:

38. Mosher and Abramson 1977:

39. Ellis and Symons 1990:

40. Alatalo, Hoglund, and Lundberg 1991:

41. Fisher 1992:

42. Symons 1989:

43. Brown 1991:

44. Wilson 1978:

45. Tooby and Cosmides 1989:

46. Moir and Jesse! 1991:

Chapter 9.

The Uses of Beauty

I: M: Bailey, interview; D: Hamer, interview; F: Whitam, interview. Levay 1993: 2. Freud 1913:

3. Westermarck 1891:

4. Wolf 1966, 1970; Degler 1991:

5. Daly and Wilson 1983:

NOTES

::: 365 :::

6. Shepher 1983:

7. Thornhill 1989b:

8. Thorpe 1954, 1961:

9. Marler and Tamura 1964:

10. Slater 1983:

11: Seid 1989:

12. Washington Post, 28 July 1992: 13. Frisch 1988; Anderson and Crawford 1992: 14: Smuts 1993:

15. Elder 1969; Buss 1992:

16. Ellis 1992:

17. Fisher 1930:

18. D: Singh, interview.

19. Low, Alexander, and Noonan 1987; Leakey and Lewin 1992; D: Singh, interview:

20. Ellis 1905:

21. The same idea—that fair hair is a sexually selected trait—has been put forward by Jonathan Kingdon recently; see Kingdon 1993: 22. Kingdon 1993:

23. This is a further reason that I am not convinced by Helen Fisher's (1992) theory that human pair bonds lasted about four years on average: 24. R: Thornhill, interview:

25. Galton 1883:

26. See "No Better Than Average" by M: Ridley, Science 257:328: 27. Dickemann 1979:

28. Buss 1992; Gould and Gould 1989:

29. Berscheid and Walster 1974; Gillis and Avis 1980; Ellis 1992; Shellberg 1992:

30. Sadalla, Kenrick, and Vershure 1987; Ellis 1992: 31. Daly and Wilson 1983:

32. Daly and Wilson 1983:

33. Ellis 1992: The other facts in this paragraph are from Trivers 1985; Ford and Beach 1951; Pratto, Sidanius, and Stallworth 1992; and Buss 1989: 34. Bell 1976:

35. Symons 1992; R: Alexander, interview:

36. Fallon and Rozin 1985:

37. Ellis 1905:

38. Low 1979:

39. Bell 1976:

40. Darwin 1871:

41. B: Ellis, interview:

::: 366 :::

NOTES

Chapter 1 o: The Intellectual Chess Game I: Connor, Smolker, and Richards (1992) argue that the social complexity of dolphin species roughly correlates with brain size. Bottle-nosed dolphins seem to be the most socially complex and the largest-brained species of all: 2. Johansen and Edey 1981.

3. Tooby and Cosmides 1992:

4. Bloom 1992; Pinker and Bloom 1992:

5. Gould 1981:

6. Fox 1991:

7. Durkheim 1895:

8. Brown 1991:

9. Mead 1928:

10. Wilson 1975:

I I: Gould 1978:

12: Gould 1987:

I 3: Pinker and Bloom 1992:

14. Chomsky 1957:

15. Marr 1982; Hurlbert and Poggio 1988:

16: Tooby and Cosmides 1992:

17. Leakey and Lewin 1992:

18. Lewin 1984:

19. Dart 1954; Ardrey 1966:

20. Konner 1982:

21. R: Wrangham, interview:

22. Gould 1981:

23. Badcock 1991:

24. Montagu 1961:

25. Leakey and Lewin 1992:

26. Budiansky 1992:

27. S: J: Gould, reported in Pinker and Bloom 1992.

28. Pinker and Bloom 1992:

29. Alexander 1974, 1990:

30. Potts 1991:

31. Humphrey 1976:

32. Humphrey 1976, 1983:

33. Barlow, unpublished:

34. Crook 1991:

35. Pinker and Bloom 1992:

36. Tooby and Cosmides 1992:

37. Barlow 1990; Barkow 1992:

NOTES

::: 367 :::

38. Konner 1982:

39. Symons 1987:

40. Barlow 1987:

41: Byrne and Whiten 1985, 1988, 1992:

42. Macaulay's works, vol: I 1, "Essay on the Athenian Orators:"

43. Dawkins and Krebs 1978:

44. Cosmides 1989; Cosmides and Tooby 1992; Gigerenzer and Hug (in press): 45. Byrne and Whiten 1985, 1988, 1992:

46. Trivers 1991:

47. Goodall 1986:

48. Miller 1992:

49. Connor, Smolker, and Richards 1992.

50. De Waal 1982:

51. Miller 1992:

52. Buss 1989:

53. Symons 1979; G: Miller, interview:

54. Leakey and Lewin 1992:

55. G: Miller, correspondence:

56. Erickson and Zenone 1976:

57. Miller 1992; see also Miller and Todd 1990: 58. Webster 1992:

59. Badcock 1991:

I NDEX

Abortion, sex-selective, 122, 127

Andersson, Malte, I 37

Ache people, 191, 228

Antelopes, 187

Acheulian technology, 324

Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), I I

Adaptation and Natural Selection (Williams), Anthropology, 4, 275, 318, 319

35

Antibiotics, 70—71

Adapted Mind, The (Barkow, Cosmides, and Antibodies, 74

Tooby), 313

Antigens, 74, 75

Adrenogenital syndrome, 255

Apes

Adultery, 176, 193, 202, 218—44

exogamy of, 189

among birds, 221—24, 227

gender differences in behavior of, 249

concealed ovulation and, 229—32

mating systems of, 176, 187, 213—17

among hunter-gatherers, 228—29

violence among, 203

inheritance patterns and, 238—43

See also Chimpanzees; Gibbons; Gorillas; jealousy and, 235—38

Orangutans

orgasm effect and, 224—26

Aphids, 57, 59

polygamy and, 232—3 5

Aquinas, Thomas, 6

testicular size and, 219—22

Aristotle, 120

violence and, 204

Arms race analogies, 67—71

Aeschylus, 204

Artificial intelligence, 320—21

Affirmative action, 262—63

Artificial life, 69, 77

African Queen, The (movie), 206

Assorted mating pattern, 305

Aggression, 316—17

Atahualpa, 199

gender differences in, 250, 252

Attractiveness, see Beauty

Agriculture, I94

Augustus, 200

AIDS, 71, 75, I03, 181, 182

Austad, Steven, 116

Aka pygmies, 193

Austen; Jane, 305, 3 3 3

Akhenaten, 198, 281

Australian aborigines, 193, 229

Albatrosses, 183, 184

Australopithecus afarensis, 189—90, 310—11, Alexander, Richard, 329, 330, 3 3 3

327

Alliance theory, 284

Automixis, 38

Altitude, 79—80

Aztecs, I98

Altmann, Jeanne, 118

Altruism, 34—37, 77

Baboons, intelligence of, 3 35—37

reciprocal, 194, 196

Babylon, 198, 206

Anaxagoras, I20

Bacteria, 66, 71, 94—95

Anderson, Roy. 84

antibiotics and, 70—71

I NDEX

::: 396 :::

Bacteria (cont:)

Birds of paradise, 147—48 ,

descendants of, I00—10I

Birkhead, Tim, 222, 223, 226—27

fusion and, 103, 104

Blind Watchmaker, The (Dawkins), I 5

male-killing genes in, I08

Bloom, Paul, 328—29, 332

Badcock, Christopher, 343

Bodmer, Walter, 84

Badouin, Count, 201

Bogart, Humphrey, 207

Baker, Robin, 224—26

Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 23 3

Baldwin, James Mark, 252

Bonobos, 216—17, 230

Baldwin effect, 323

Borgia, Cesare, 282

Bamboo, 80

Bosnia, 205

Bangladesh, 205

Botticelli, Sandro, 281, 288

Barlow, Horace, 3 31

Bounty (ship), 202

Basolo, Alexandra, 162

Bowerbirds, I47—48, 16 3

Bateman, A: J:, 179

Boyce, Mark, 151—52

B-chromosome, 71, 97

Brain

Bdelloid rotifers, 55—56, 85

critical period and, 285

Beauty, 133—34, 169, 279—306

of dolphins, 309—10

biased sex ratios and, 122

gender differences in, 247

child-rearing participation and, 224

hormones and, 254—58, 264

critical-period learning and, 286—87

mechanisms of, 32I—23

facial features and, 295—97

neoteny and, 327—29

fashion and, 30I—4

progression in size of, 310—13

female preference for, 134—46

toolmaking and, 323—25

genetic quality and, 146—49

Brain Stx (Moir and Jessel), 255

sexual mentality and, 267—68

Bremermann, Hans, 74, 75, 77

symmetry of, 152—5 3

Brooks, Lisa, 28

thinness and, 287—91

Brown, Don, 205

as universal, 281—82

Buddha, 21

waist-to-hip ratio and, 291—93

Budding, 49

youth and, 293—95

Burley, Nancy, 122, 165, 224, 231

Behaviorism, 319—2I

Burt, Austin, 62, 71, 86

Bell, Graham, 30—31, 48—49, 59, 60, 62,

Buss, David, 267—68, 274, 299

71, 86

Butler, Samuel, 131

Bell, Quentin, 300, 303

Byrne, Richard, 3 3 5, 336

Bellis, Mark, 224-26

Benshoof, L:, 232

Caesar, Julius, 200, 336

Bernstein, Harris, 42—45

Caligula, 200, 282

Betzig, Laura, 125, 198—20I, 240

Carotenoids, 155—56, 163

Bilharzia, 75, 80

Carroll, Lewis, I

Birds

Catherine of Aragon, 241

concealed ovulation among, 231

Catholic Church, 202, 230

mating systems of, 217—18, 221—24,

controversies with state, 240—42

227 :

Cattle breeding, 124

parasites of, 150—52

Chaffinches, 285—87

sex chromosomes in, 121—22

Chagnon, Napoleon, 203—4

sexual selection in, 137—42, 163

Chemical defense, 70

See also specific species

Chimpanzees, 7, 214—17, 219—21

I NDEX

::: 397 :::

intelligence of, 3 36, 3 37

Cooperation, 17—19

power seeking among, I95

among genes, 92—94

promiscuity of, 213

individual selection and, 36

toolmaking by, 324

reciprocity as key to, 77

violence of, 203

Corals, 58

China

Cortisol, 156, 255, 264—65

ancient, 198, 199, 206

Cosmides, Leda, I00, III, 275—76, 3I3,

female infanticide in, 122, 127

322, 332—35, 340

harem polygamy in, 193

Cott, Hugh, 13 5

marriage customs in, 283

Courtly love, 240

Chlamydomonas, 101, 102

Courtship, 132, 133, 154, 168, 169

Chloroplasts, I 00—10I

competition and, 136—37

Chomsky, Noam, 314, 321, 328

Cousins, marriage between, 242—43

Chromosomes, 29, 30, 43, 94

Critical period, 285—87

crossovers on, 62

Cronin, Helena, 142

jumping genes and, 96

Crook, John, 332

parasitic, 71

Crossing over, 99, 128

selfish, 97

Crow, James, 32, 49

sex, 99, 110—14, 121—23, 264, 279,

Cytomegalovirus, 103

280

swapping of chunks of, 98—99

Dahomey, 173—74

Claudius, 200

Daly, Martin, 235—36

Clutton-Brock, Tim, 117

Dart, Raymond, 325

Coalitions of males, 195—97

Darwin, Charles, 6, 8, 9, 14, 20, 27, 31—33, Coelacanth, 31, 63

37, 60, 63, 64, 134—36, 138, 139,

Cognitive approach, 321

142, 148, 162, 223, 249, 304, 311,

Cohen, Fred, 69

329—30

Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), 318

Darwin, Erasmus, 23, 240

Commons, tragedy of, 91, 127

Darwinian history, 243—44

Communication, 332—34

Dawkins, Marian, 159, 161

Competition, 64, 65, 93, 94

Dawkins, Richard, 9, 15, 66—68, 96, 124,

diversity and, 60

158, 333—34

female, 232

Deep structure of language, 314

sexual selection and, 133, 136

Deer, 187

within species, 33—34

Democracy, 206—7

testicular size and, 222

Descartes, Renf, 316

violence and, 202

Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex Complexity, 15—16

(Darwin), 134

Computer viruses, 69

Despotism, I98—200, 206—7, 211, 272

Concealed ovulation, 229—32

Determinism, 261—63

Conditioning, 178, 252

Diamond, Jared, 148, 216

Conflict, 17—19

Dickemann, Mildred, I26—27, 197

Conjugation, 95, 102

Dio, 200

Connectionism, 321

Dionysus effect, 339

Connor, Richard, 196, 337

Diploidy, 44, 97

Contingent history, 17

Disease theory, 76—79

Coolidge, Calvin, 299

Dispersal, 56

::: 398 :::

I NDEX

Division of labor, sexual, 250, 251, 259,

Facial features, 295—97

262

Fallon, April, 302

Divorce, 273

Fantasies, sexual, 269—72

DNA, 29, 41—43, 45

Fashion, status and, 300—304

discovery of, 9

Fat distribution, 159—61

insertions of, 50

Fei-ti, 199, 206

parasitic, 96

Felix Holt, the Radical (Eliot), 333

in sex chromosomes, 121

Felsenstein, Joe, 85

Dogs, 328

Feminism, 261—63

Dolphins, 196, 220, 309—10

Finches, 165, 254—55

Dominance

5-alpha-reductase deficiency, 258

beauty and, 304, 305

Fisher, Helen, 273

biased sex ratios and, 117—20, 124—25

Fisher, Ronald, 31—32, 35, 124, 127,

and cultural gender bias, 125—27

138—39, 142—46, 164, 290, 297, 341

inheritance of, 239

Flaubert, Gustave, 224

personality and, 298—99

Flax, 73—74

sexual selection and, I48

Flour beetles, 97

wealth and, 194

Flycatchers, 233

Dorner, Gunter, 264

Foley, Robert, 189—90

Douglas firs, 80

Foragers, see Hunter-gatherers

Dunbar, Robin, 214

Ford, Henry, 330—3I

Durkheim, Emil, 318, 3 3 3, 349

Fossils, 62, 64

of human ancestors, 189, 311, 327

Eals, Marion, 251

Fox, Robin, 317

Ecology, 41—42, 44, 56—63, 65, 79

Frank, Steve, 97

intelligence and, 330

Free will, 4, 5, 7

mating systems and, 187—92

Freud, Sigmund, 282—84, 318, 333, 349

Education, gender differences and,

Frogs, 161—62

257

Fruit flies, 98, 146, 179

Egypt, ancient, I98

Fungi, 71, 86

Eleanor of Aquitaine, 242

bacteria and, 70—71

Eliot, George, 3 3 3

Fusion sex, 102—4

Ellis, Bruce, 268, 269, 271—72, 298,

305

Galton, Francis, 296, 349

Ellis, Havelock, 303

-Game theory, 184, 186, 221

Elm trees, 58

//Gana San people, 194

Endler, John, 163

Gender(s), 13, 91—128

Environment of evolutionary adaptedness

asymmetry between, 178—81

(EEA), 191—93

choosing, 127—28

Ericson, Roland, 121

cultural preference patterns for, 125—28

"Essay on Man, An " (Pope), 345

determination of, 99, 110—14

Estrus, 216

dominance and, 117—20, 124—25

Eugenics, 304, 318

hermaphroditism versus, 105—7

Evolution of Sex ( Maynard Smith), 40

mentality and, 247—76

Exogamy, 118, I19, 189

and organelles, 100—103, I05 —8

Extinction, 64

parasites altering, 109—10

Extra-pair copulation (EPC), 222

selling, I20—25

I NDEX

3 99 :::

Generations, length of, 71

Gorillas, 214, 216, 217, 219, 220

Genes, 9, I6, 3I—3 3

intelligence of, 331

altruism and, 36

Goshawks, 230

asexual, 38

Gosling, Morris, 122

of bacteria, 70–71, 94—95

Gould, Stephen Jay, 39, 316—17, 320, 327,

behavior and, 316—17, 319

328

and competition within species, 34

Grackles, 164—65

cooperation between, 19, 92—99

Gradualism, 62

crossing over of, 99

Grafen, Alan, 97—99

in defense against parasites, 67

Grant, Valerie, 120, 123

definition of, 29

Greece, ancient, 204

gender and, 92, I04

Group selection, 34—36, 71

histocompatibility, 75—76

Grouse, 141, 143, 151—52, 188

homosexuality and, 264, 265, 279—80

Guilford, Tim,

161

159,

hormones and, 254

Guppies, 138, 163

jumping, 85, 96

Gynodioecious plants, 106

kin selection and, 77

meiotic-drive, 98

Haig, David, 97—99, 280

mental differences and, 252

Haldane, J: B: S:, 35, 37, 73, 76, 84

mixing of, 30, 55

Halliday, Tim, 136

mutations and, 45–50

Hamilton, William, 76—79, 83—86, 92, 110,

neoteny, 342–43

115, 150, 151, 154, 157, 223, 341

in organelles, I00–103, 105–8

Hammurabi, I98, 199

for ornamentation, I44

Handedness, 265

parliament of, I00, 128

Haploidy, 44, 97

polymorphism and, 72–73, 84

Hardy, Thomas, 238

racial differences and, I 3

Hart, Gary, 206

repair of, 42—45, 50—51, 63, 85—86

Hartung, John, 197—98

resistance, 77—78, 84

Henry VIII, King of England, 241

selfish, 96—98

Hepburn, Katharine, 206

sex and, 12—14

Hermaphrodites, 16—17, 86, 87, 92, 105—7

sex-linked, 341

Herodotus, 347

for sexual reproduction, 37

Heterozygosity, 72, 76

sexual selection and, 140, I41

Hickey, Donal, 95–96

and tangled bank theory, 61, 62

Hill, Adrian, 76

Genetics, 41–42, 45—51

Hill, Kim, 191, 228

Genome, 29

Histocompatibility, 75—76

"Gentle Echo on Woman, A" (Swift), History, 17, 18

209–10

cooperation and conflict in, 19

Germanic tribes, 202

Darwinian, 243—44

Ghiselin, Michael, 37, 38, 59–60

Hitler, Adolf, 198

Gibbons,

215

HIV, 71, 75, 103

214,

Gibbon, Edward, 200

Hobbes, Thomas, 204, 315—16

Gigerenzer, Gerd, 334—35

Hoglund, Jakob, 137

Goodall, Jane, 119, 195, 215, 336

Homer, 201, 205

Gonadotrophin, 123

Homo ntctus, 10, 190, 192, 311, 324, 327, Gordian, 200

330

::: 400:::

I NDEX

Homo hal,ilis, 311, 324, 327

Infanticide

Homosexuality, 181—83

concealed ovulation and, 231

causes of, 263—65

among primates, 213—15

and gender differences in, mentality,

sex-selective, 122, 126, 197

250

Infidelity, set Adultery

gene for, 279—80

1nheritance, patterns of, 197—98, 238—43

pornography and, 270, 271

Insertions, 85

Hormones

Instability, 83—84

brains and, 254—58

Instinct, 313—16, 322—23

fat distribution and, 292

Intelligence, 276, 309—44

homosexuality and, 264—65

artificial, 320—21

sex ratio and, 123—24

brain size and, 3I0—12

sexual selection and, 156—57

communication and, 332—34

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, I25—27, 2I2—13, 215, competition and, 33 — 34

231

learning and, 313—16, 321—23

Hudson, Liam, 253

Machiavellian theory of, 3 33—37

Hume, David, 21, 349

nurture and nature and, 316

Hummingbirds, 39

sexual selection and, 338—44

Humphrey, Nicholas, 33, 330—33, 336—37

socioecological explanation of, 192

Hunter-gatherers, 188—91, I93—94,

toolmaking and, 323—26

211—12,

228—29,

227,

244

youth and, 342—43

accumulated knowledge of, 325—26

Intragenomic conflict, 92

sexual division of labor among, 250, 251, In-vitro fertilization, 121

259, 262

Irons, William, 244

Hurst, Lawrence, 97, 102—3, 109, 280

Huxley, Julian, 35, 135, 136, 164

Jacot, Bernadine, 253

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 53

Jaenike, John, 76—77

Hyenas, 239, 254

James I, King of England, 314

Hybrid vigor, 106

James, William, 123, 314

Japanese Sex Selection Society, I21

Iban tribe, 203

Jayakar, Suresh, 76

Ibis, 230

Jealousy, 235—38

1liad (Homer), 205

Jenkins, Cheryl, 47

1 mmune system, 70, 74—76

Jessel, David, 255, 276

cross-reactivity of, 104

Johnson, Larry, I21

diseases of, 103

Jollof tribe, 304

hormones and, 156—57

Joseph, Alex, 185

1 mprinting, 285

Judge, Debra, 127

Inbreeding, 44

Jumping genes, 85, 96

1ncas, 173, I98, 199, 243

Jungle fowl, 154—57

1ncest, 242—43, 282—86, 322

Independent (newspaper), 256

Kenrick, Douglas, 268

India

Kibbutzim, 259—60, 283

ancient, 198, 199

Kimura, Motoo, 32

infanticide in, 197

Kingdon, Jonathan, 252

marriage practices in, 126—27

Kin selection, 77

Individual selection, 35—40

Kinsey 1nstitute, 182

I NDEX

::: 401 :::

Kipsigis tribe, 185

Malinowksi, Bronislaw, 237

Kirkpatrick, Mark, 47, 164, 166

Man the Toolmaker (Oakley), 323

Kissinger, Henry, 171

Marler, Peter, 286

Kondrashov, Alexey, 49—51, 79, 85, 86

Marley, Bob, 245

Konner, Melvin, 249, 325, 332

Mari, David, 321

Krebs, John, 67—68, 158, 333—34

Marriage, 175—78, 211—12, 218

!Kung San people, 194, 325, 332

between cousins, 282—84

for life, 273

Ladle, Richard, 85

sex outside, see Adultery

Ladybird beetles, 108

wealth concentration through, 242—43

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 8

Mathematical tasks, 250, 257

Language, 321, 332

Mating systems, 173—207, 211—44

gender differences in, 253, 257

adultery in, 218—44

intelligence and, 309

of apes, 213—17

learning, 313—15

of birds, 217—18

neoteny and, 328—29

ecology and, 187—92

proxy mate-guarding and, 229

violence and, 202—5

Lark buntings, 184

wealth and power and, 194—202, 238—43

Langtry, Lillie, 288

Matrilineal societies, 239

Larson, Gary, 68

Maximin, 200

Learning, 313—16, 329

May, Robert, 84

brain mechanisms for, 321—23

Maynard Smith, John, 29, 37, 38, 40—41,

Lee Kwan Yew, 311

56, 57, 59, 85, 86, 115, 183

Leigh, Egbert, 93—94, 100

Mead, Margaret, 318, 319, 349

Lekking, 141—42, 146, 147, 149, 158, 159,

Meat-eating, 190

167, 195, 222

Medical Research Council (London),

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 284

123

Lesbians, 182

Meiosis, 29—30, 44, 97, 98, 128

pornography and, 271

cost of, 38

Lienhart, R:, 109

Mendel, Gregor, 3 3

Life-dinner principle, 67

Menstrual cycle, 229

Linkage diseyuilibria, 46—47

Mentality, gender differences in, 247—76

Lions, 195—96, 230, 325

feminism and, 261—63

Lively, Curtis, 51, 81—83

hormones and, 254—58

Local-resource competition model, 118

sexual, 265—72

Locke, John, 317

Mercator, 347

Lorenz, Konrad, 285

Meselson, Matthew, 50,

85

55—56,

Lotka, Alfred, 84

Michaelangelo, 281

Lottery theories, 57—59

Miller, Geoffrey, 337—43

Low, Bobbi, 159—61, 291, 300

Miocene era, 189

Luteinizing hormone, 264

Mitochondria, 100—101, 280

Moir, Anne, 255, 276

Maasai tribe, 148, 243

Molecular biology, 41—45, 50

Macaulay, Lord, 3 3 3

Moller, Anders, 137, 152—5 3, 222—24,

McGuiness, Diane, 257

226—27

Machiavellian hypothesis, 3 33—37

Monkeys

Male-killing genes, 105—8

biased sex ratios in, 117—18

::: 402 :::

I NDEX

Monkeys (cont:)

New Guinea tribes, 3—4, 147, 148

concealed ovulation in, 231

Nordborg, Magnus, 122

mating systems of, 187

Nurture and nature, 6-11, 175, 181,

promiscuity of, 213, 215

252—53, 284—85

sexual selection in, 162

homosexuality and, 265, 279—80

Monogamy, 175—78, 206—7

intelligence and, 316

asymmetry and, 179

beauty and, 303, 305

Oakley, Kenneth, 323

among birds, 22I

Oldowan technology, 324

game theory and, 186

Onassis, Aristotle, 171

in history, 200, 20I

On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 7, 3 3, 60, modern, 193

134

personality and, 298

Opossums, 116, 117

sexual selection and, I39—40, 145

Opportunistic infections, 103—4

territoriality and, 187

Organelles, 100—I03, 105—8

violence reduced by, 202—3

Orangutans, 215, 231

Set also Marriage

Orgasm, female, 224—26

Monogonont rotifers, 56, 57, 59, 85

Othello (Shakespeare), 236

Montagu, Ashley, 327

Outcrossing, 30, 43, 44

Montezuma, 198

Ovulation, concealed, 229—32

Morality, 315—16

Owls, 232—33

Mormons, 185—86

Oysters, 58

Morris, Desmond, 230

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 6

Paglia, Camille, 263

Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare),

Paramecium, I04

277

Parasites, 66—87

Mukogodo people, 126, 195

altitude and, 79—80

Mulder, Monique Borgehoff, 185

cross-reactivity to, 104

Muller, Hermann, 31—32, 47-49, 62

gender-altering, I09—10

Mutation, 32, 33, 45-50, 79

genetic, 96, 97

of ornamentation,

150

i mmune system and, 74—76

144—45,

outcrossing and, 44

instability and, 83—84

rate of, 63

sexual selection and, 150—52, 155—57,

167

Nash, Odgen, 89, 245

Parthenogenesis, 38, 40

Natural selection, 5, 6, 15, 243, 280

Pastoral societies, 194—95, 212

beauty and, 134

Paul, St:, 241

and competition within species, 34

Peafowl, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 149—50,

genetic mixing and, 30

153-54, 157, 164, 165, 178—79

parasitic and, 66

Personality, 298—99

sexual selection and, 20

Phalaropes, 180, 254

Nazism, 319

Pheasants, 140, 295

Nefertiti, 281, 288

Piaget, Jean, 333, 349

Nematodes, 85

Pinker, Steve, 328—29, 332

Neoteny, 327—29, 342—43

Pitcairn Islanders, 202

Nero, 200

Plagues, 65—66

Neural networks, 321

Plasmids, 96

I NDEX

::: 403 :::

Platyfish, I62

inheritance and, 239

Playboy, 288, 291

Set also Adultery

Playgirl, 271

Prostitution, 179, 181, 183

Pleistocene period, 193, 207, 251, 252,

war and, 205

254, 262, 266, 273, 288, 300, 322,

Protozoa, 48—49

328—29

Proust, Marcel, 3 3 3

Poggio, Tomaso, 321

Pseudogamy, 38

Polar bears, 18

Psychology, 318—19

Polyandry, 176—77

Puberty, 258, 264

among birds, 222

Polygamy, I I5—16, 119, 173—74, 176,

Race, 13

206, 207, 2I2, 218

sexual selection and, 134

adultery and, 232—35

Racism, 8

ecology and, 192

sexism and, 274—75

gender asymmetry and, 178—81

Rape

in history, 197—202

husbands of victims of, 237

among hunter-gatherers, 228—29

in war, 205

among mammals, 221

Ray, Thomas, 69—70

parasitic and, 151

Reciprocity, 77, 194, I96

serial, 183—86

Recombination, 30, 42—45, 47, 49, 62

sexual selection and, 139

generation length and, 71

size and, 341

Recursion, 328—29

spatial skills and, 247, 250—51

Reptiles, immune system of, 70, 74

variations of, 193

Returning-soldier effect, I22—23

wealth and, I94, 242

Roach fish, 157

Polygamy threshold model, 184—86

Romance novels, 270—72

Polymorphism, 72—73, 76, 84

Rome, ancient, 200—203

Polyploidy, 44

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 101—2, 129, Pomiankowski, Andrew, 97, 152, 153, 166,

I42

I67

Rose, Michael, 95—96

Pope, Alexander, 345

Rotifers, 55—57, 59, 85

Pornography, 266, 270—72

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 315

Potts, Wayne, 76

Royal Society (London), 28

Poultry industry, I24

Rozin, Paul, 302

Power, 173—74, 194—202, 206, 244,

Rubens, Peter Paul, 281, 290

267

Ryan, Michael, 161, 162, 164, 166

inheritance patterns and, 238—43

Predators, 66, 73

Premature death, causes of, 65

San tribe, 10

Primates, set Apes; Monkeys

Scale insects, 80, 97

Primogeniture, 240—42

Scheherazade effect, 3 39—40

Progesterone, 255

Sea horses, 180

Progress

Seals, 18—19

evolution and,

Searcy, William, 165

27, 31, 62—63, 65

relativity of, 18—19

Seduction, 154, 158, 161, 178

Promiscuity, 266

adultery and, 218

homosexual, 181—83

Segregation distorter, 98

::: 404 :::

I NDEX

Segregation theory of sex, 47

Socioecology, 187, 190, 192

Seid, Roberta, 287

Sociology, 318, 319

Self-Made Man and His Undoing (Kingdon), Sparrows, 234—35

252

Spatial skills, 247, 250—5I, 257

Sex chromosomes, 99, 110—14, I21—23,

Species, survival of, 32—3 3

264, 279, 280

Sperm competition theory, 213—26, 230,

Sex and Evolution (Williams), 40

231

Sexism, 248, 258—62

Status, see Dominance

racism and, 274—75

Strawberries, 58

Sex ratios, biased, 108, 115—25

Suetonius, 200

Sexual selection,

20—21, 131—69, 280

Sumeria, 199

14,

beauty and, 294—95, 297, 304—5

Sunquist, Mel, 116

competition and, I 3 3, 136

Survival of the fittest, 33

disease-resistance and, 150—52, 155—56

Swallows, 152—53, 21 I, 223—24, 227

fat distribution and, 159—61

Swift, Jonathan, 209—10

female-choice theory of, I 34—42,

Symington, Meg, 117, 118, 120

161—62, 164—66

Symmetry, 152—53

Fisher' s theory of, 142 —46, 152—5 3,

Symons, Donald, 182—83, 191, 232, 253,

162, 164, 166, 167

269, 271—72, 274, 296, 333, 339

Good-genes theory of, I42—43, 145—50,

Syntactic Structures (Chomsky), 321

152—53, 162, 164, 167

honest signals and, 153—59

Tacitus, 200, 202

intelligence and, 3 38—44

Talmud, 120

pluralistic view of, 166—67

Tang Dynasty, 199

sensory bias and, 161—64, 167, 168

Tangled bank theory, 60—63, 65, 81, 86

symmetry and, 152—53

Tannen, Deborah, 253

Shakespeare, William, 4, 10—I I, 129,-277, Tardigrada, 85

333

Taxonomic assumption, 314

Short, Roger, 219, 220

"Temple of Nature, The" (Darwin), 23

Sickle-cell anemia, 72

Terns, 139—40, I44

Silverman, Irwin, 251

Territoriality, 177, 187, 203

Simpson, Wallis, 287, 290

inheritance and, 239

Singh, Dev, 291—92

Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Hardy), 238

Skinner, B: F:, 319, 333, 349

Testicular size, 219—22

Slime-mold, 102

Testosterone, 20, I23, 156, I57, 254—58,

Small, Meredith, 213

264—65

Smith, Adam, 93

Thai people, 244

Smith, Holly, 327

Thinness, 287—91

Smith, Robert, 23I

Thornhill, Nancy Wilmsen, 242, 243, 267,

Smolker, Rachel, 196

284

Smuts, Robert, 289

Thornhill, Randy, 232

Snails, 81—82

Thorpe, William, 287

Social contracts, 3 35

Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), I, 18, Social Darwinism, 317

64

Social skills, 251, 252

Tiberius, 200

Social status, see Dominance

Tierra, 69

Society, individual in, 11—14

Tiger, Lionel, 17

Sociobiology (Wilson), 21

Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 286

I NDEX

::: 405

Tooby, John, 77, 83, 1 00, III, 275—76,

War, 203—5

313, 322, 332, 340

Wason test, 334

Toolmaking, 323—26

Wasps, 108

Topminnows, 82—83

Water fleas, 39—40, 47—49

Tragedy of the commons, 91, 127

Way Men Think, The (Hudson and Jacot), Transposons, 96

253

206,

' Trivers, Robert, 115—20, I23—27, 133,

Wealth, 194—202,

244

178, 213, 335—36

beauty and, 289—9I

Trobriand 1slanders, 237

incest taboos and, 284

Trojan War, 205

inheritance of, 238—43

Trollope, Anthony, 3 3 3

ornamentation as sign of, 300

Trumai people, 243

sexual mentality and, 267, 268

Trypanosomes, 75

Weill, Kurt, 245

Turkeys, 108—9

Weismann, August, 8—9, 28,.30—32,

brush, 131—32

86

coalition of males among, 195

Welch, David, 55—56

Turner 's syndrome, 255, 257

Westermarck, Edward, 283—86

Twin studies of homosexuality, 279—80

Whales, 220

White cells, 74

Whiten, Andrew, 335, 336

Udayama, 199

Whole object assumption, 314

United States Department of Agriculture,

Willard, Dan, 115—20, 123, 125—27

121

Williams, George, 35—40, 56—59, 61—63,

University of Michigan, 300

86, 92, 115

Wilmot, John, 307

Vaccination, 74

Wilson, Edward, 2I, 275, 349

Van Valen, Leigh, 63—64

Wilson, Margo, 235—36

Veiga, Jose, 234

Wolfe, Tom, 233, 287. 300, 333

Verbal tasks, 250, 251, 257

Woodpeckers, 196, 230

Vermelin, H:, I09

World War II, 264

Vicar of Bray hypothesis, 31, 36, 47, 50,

Wrangham, Richard,

229

214,

63, 81, 86

Wright, Sewall, 3 5

Violence, 202—6

Wynne Edwards, V: C:, 32, 34—36

gender differences in, 249

jealousy and, 236

X chromosomes, 99, 110— 14,421 —23.

Virgin greenflies, 28, 29

264, 279, 280