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LOVE
SEX
&
NATURAL
SELECTION...
Here's a chance to know your species!Give it a careful read, it could really change the way you see yourself and others!
WHAT IS ANSWERED HERE
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Human Behaviour
YOU CAN'T HAVE FUN
LOVING ONLY ONE
YOU CAN'T BE TRUE
TO YOUR HEART
LOVING TWO!
New River Train
-Merle Watson
Devotion and betrayal, marriage and divorce: how evolution shaped human love
It is to the male's advantage to sow his seeds far and wide, however women seek mates with the best genes and the most to invest in offspring. These proliferation strategies put the sexes in conflict and undermine equality, love, trust and understanding.
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This picture has recently acquired some significant blemishes. Based on the results of genetic testing we now know birds aren't such uplifting role models for monogamy.
Using DNA fingerprinting, ornithologists can now check to see if a mother bird's mate really is the father of her offspring. It turns out that some female chickadees indulge in extramarital trysts with males that outrank their mates in the social hierarchy. For female barn swallows, it's a male with a long tail that makes an extracurricular irresistible. The innocent looking indigo bunting has a cuckoldry rate of over 40%. Recent tests on the hatchlings of various species of North American Bluebirds found a female infidelity rate of over 50% even though these birds mate for life (they have less than 6% "divorce" rate) and the male is an essential care-giver. An older male Bluebird appears to be pretty much irrestable to the young female birds based perhaps on the logic that the ability to survive into a ripe old age will be passed on to offspring.
The idea that bird species are truly monogamous has gone from conventional wisdom to punctured myth in only a few years. As a result, the fidelity of other so-called pair-bonding species has fallen under suspicion.
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Another big problem
with the notion that humans
are by nature enduringly monogamous
fairly is obvious:
...human behavior.
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A field known as evolutionary psychology can put a finer point on the issues. By studying how the process of natural selection shaped the mind, evolutionary psychologists are painting a fresh portrait of human nature and revealing important facts about how feelings and thoughts draw us into marriage and push us out.
The good news is that human beings are designed to fall in love. The bad news is that they aren't designed to stay there. According to evolutionary psychology, it is "natural" for both men and women at some times, under some circumstances to commit adultery or to sour on a mate, to suddenly find a spouse unattractive, irritating, wholly unreasonable. (It may even be natural to become irritating and wholly unreasonable, and thus hasten the departure of a mate you've soured on.) It is similarly natural to find some attractive colleague superior on all counts to the sorry wreck of a spouse you're saddled with. When we see a couple celebrate a golden anniversary, an apt reaction is the famous remark about a dog walking on two legs: the point is not that the feat was done well but that it was done at all.
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All of this may sound like cause for grim resignation to the decline of the family. But what's "natural" isn't necessarily unchangeable. Evolutionary psychology, unlike past gene-centered views of human nature, illuminates the tremendous flexibility of the human mind and the powerful role of environment in shaping behaviour. In particular, evolutionary psychology shows how inhospitable the current social environment is to monogamy. And while the science offers no easy cures, it does suggest avenues for change.
The premise of evolutionary psychology is really VERY simple! The human mind like any other organ, was designed for the purpose of transmitting genes to the next generation; the feelings and thoughts it creates are best understood in these terms. Thus the feeling of hunger, no less than the stomach, is here because it helped keep our ancestors alive long enough to reproduce and rear their young. Feelings of lust, no less than the sex organs, are here because they aided reproduction directly. Any ancestors who lacked stomachs or hunger or sex organs or lust well, they wouldn't have become ancestors, would they? Their traits would have been discarded by natural selection.
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This logic goes far beyond such obviously Darwinian feelings as hunger and lust. According to evolutionary psychologists, our everyday, earlier shifting attitudes toward a mate or prospective mate: trust, suspicion, rhapsody, revulsion, warmth, iciness, etc., are the handiwork of natural selection that remain with us today because in the past they led to behaviours that helped spread genes.
How can evolutionary psychologists be so sure? In part, their faith rests on the whole data base of evolutionary biology. In all sorts of species, and in organs ranging from brains to bladders, nature's attention to the subtlest aspects of genetic transmission is evident. Consider the crafting of primate testicles specifically, their custom tailoring to the monogamy, or lack thereof by the female. If you take a series of male apes and weigh their testicles (a procedure not actually recommended ), you will find a pattern. 
Chimpanzees and other species with high "relative testes weight" (testes weight in comparison to body weight) feature quite promiscuous females. Species with low relative testes weight are either fairly monogamous (gibbons, for example) or systematically polygynous (gorillas), with one male monopolizing a harem of females. The explanation is simple.
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Which male succeeds in getting his genes into a given egg may be a question of sheer volume, as competing hordes of sperm do battle. It has also recently been discovered that each man's sperm is spermocidal to another's. Even on an individual level British researchers have documented a direct correlation between testicle size and individual behaviour. Working with about 100 subjects, scientists found that males with larger testicles reported higher rates of promiscuity.
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Via men's testicles, we can peer through the mists of prehistory and see how women behaved in the social environment of our evolution free from the influence of modern culture; we can glimpse part of a pristine female mind.
The relative testes weight of humans falls between that of the chimpanzee and the gorilla. This suggests that women, while not nearly so wild as chimpanzee females (who can be veritable sex machines), are by nature somewhat adventurous. If they were not why would natural selection divert precious resources to the construction and maintenance of weighty testicles?
There is finer evidence, as well, of natural female infidelity. You might think that the number of sperm cells in a husband's ejaculate would depend only on how long it has been since he last had sex. This would be WRONG! What matters more, according to a recent study, is how long his mate has been out of sight. A man who hasn't had sex for, say, a week will have a higher sperm count if his wife was away on a business trip than if she's been home with the flu. In short, what really counts is whether the woman has had the opportunity to stray. The more chances she has had to collect sperm from other males, the more profusely her mate sends in his own troops. That natural selection designed such an elaborate weapon is evidence of something for the weapon to combat: female faithlessness!
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- If when making love a woman has no orgasm, or has one more than a minute before the man ejaculates, then very little of his sperm remains in her vagina.
- If her orgasm was less than one minute before or up to 45 minutes later than his ejaculation, then most of his sperm stays in
- In addition, the longer it was since she had previously had an orgasm, then the more sperm she retains.
- Finally, the amount the man ejaculated related to whether the couple had been together during the day or apart. If they had been together, the amount was less than if they had been apart - consistent with the sending in the troops hypothesis.
Baker and Bellis also asked the couples in their study about their extramarital affairs. In faithful women, about 55% of orgasms were high retention. In unfaithful women, 40% were, with their regular partner, but 70% were with their outside lover. In addition, the extramarital intercourse generally occured at the woman's most fertile period. The result is that a woman in their study could have intercourse twice as often with her partner, but still be more likely to conceive a child by her lover. Even though the women did not have access to this information, these are the consequences of their actions. They subsequently found, via genetic testing, that for two populations in northern and southern England, less than 4 out of 5 people were the offspring of their ostensible fathers.
So here's problem:
- With the pair-bond thesis women are not by nature paragons of fidelity.
- Wanderlust is an innate part of their minds, ready to surface under propitious circumstances.
- If you think women are "bad", you should see men!!!
Clues from physiology help reveil the mind: consider "sexual dimorphism" the difference between average male and female body size. This will naturally occur wherever battles are fought for mating rights. The gender that does the most fighting tends to become the BIGGEST.
Extreme sexual dimorphism is typical of a polygynous species in which one male may impregnate several females, leaving other males without offspring.Since the winning males usually secure their trophies by fighting or intimidating other males, the genes of brawny, aggressive males get passed on while the genes of less formidable males are deposited in the scrap heap of history. Male gorillas, who get a whole armful of mates if they win lots of fights and no mates what-so-ever if they win none, are twice as big as female gorillas. Human males are about 15% bigger sufficient to suggest that male departures from monogamy, like female departures, are not just a recent cultural invention.
Anthropology offers further evidence. Nearly 1,000 of the 1,154 past or present human societies ever studied and these include most of the world's "hunter-gatherer" societies, have permitted a man to have more than 
one wife. These are the closest examples of the actual "ancestral environment". In the social context of human evolution, these are the settings for which the mind was designed. The presumption is that people reared in such societies the Kung San of Southern Africa, the Ache of Paraguay the l9th century Eskimo behave fairly "naturally." More so, at least, than people reared amid influences that weren't part of the ancestral environment: TVs, cars, colleges, jail time for bigamy.
There are vanishingly few anthropological examples of systematic female polygamy, or polyandry - women monopolizing sexual access to more than one man at once. So, while both sexes are prone under the right circumstances to infidelity, men seem much more deeply inclined to actually acquire a second or third mate to keep a harem as it were.
They are also more inclined toward the casual fling.
Men are less finicky about sex partners prostitution sex with someone you don't know and don't care to know is a service sought overwhelmingly by males the world round. And almost all pornography that relies sheerly on
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Hummmmmmmm spiritless flesh...
One might suspect that sex acts were once something of a spectator sport of mankind, if not woman-kind. The stimulation of observing sex acts being very marketable in all of its subtle forms throughout present-day media and entertainment.
Scientific studies confirm the more discriminating nature of women. In one study men and women were asked about the minimal level of intelligence they would accept in a person they were "dating." The average response for both male and female was as one might expect "average intelligence". Asked how smart a potential date have to be before they would consent to sex, women said markedly above average. The men said: Oh, well then below average would be fine.
There is no dispute among evolutionary psychologists over the basic source of this male broad-mindedness. A woman regardless of how many sex partners she has, can generally have just one offspring per year. For a man, each new mate offers an excellent opportunity to place genes into the future. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the most prolific human parent in world history was Moulay ("The Bloodthirsty") Ismail, the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, who died in 1727. He fathered more than 1,000 children.
The logic behind undiscerning male lust seems obvious now, but it wasn't always. Darwin had noted that in species after species the female is "less eager than the male," but he never figured out why. Only in the late 1960s and early 1970s did biologist George Williams and Robert Trivers attribute the raging libido of males to their nearly infinite potential rate of reproduction.
WHY DO WOMEN 'CHEAT'?
Even then the female capacity for promiscuity remained puzzling. For women, more sex doesn't mean more offspring. Shouldn't they focus on quality rather than quantity look for a robust, clever mate whose genes may bode well for the offspring's robustness and cleverness? There's ample evidence that women are drawn to such traits, but in our species genes are not all a male has to offer. Unlike our nearest ape relatives, we are a species of "high male parental investment." In every known hunter-gatherer culture, marriage is the norm not necessarily monogamous marriage, and not always lasting marriage, but marriage of some sort; and via this institution, fathers help provide for their children.
In our species, then, a female's genetic legacy is best amplified by a mate with two things: good genes and much to invest. But what if she can't find one man who has both? One solution would be to trick a devoted, generous and perhaps wealthy but not especially brawny or brainy mate into raising the offspring of another male. The woman need not be aware of this strategy, but at some level, conscious or unconscious, deft timing is in order. One study found that women who cheat on mates tend to do so around ovulation, when they are most likely to get pregnant.
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For that matter. cheating during the infertile part of the monthly cycle might have its own logic, as a way (unconsciously) to turn the paramour into a dupe; the woman extracts goods or services from him in exchange for his fruitless conquest. Of course the flowers he buys may not help her genes, but in the ancestral environment, less frivolous gifts notably food would have. Nisa, a woman in a !Kung San hunter-gatherer village, told an anthropologist that "when you have lovers, one brings you something and another brings you something else. One comes at night with meat, another with money, another with beads. Your husband also does things and gives them to you."
Multiple lovers have other uses too. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hardy has theorized that women copulate with more than one man to leave several men under the impression that they might be the father of particular offspring. Then, presumably, they will treat the offspring kindly. Her theory was inspired by langur monkeys. Male langurs sometimes kill infants sired by others as a kind of sexual icebreaker, a prelude to pairing up with the (former) mother. What better way to return her to ovulation by putting an emphatic end to her breast-feeding and focus her energies on the offspring to come?
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Anyone tempted to launch into a high and mighty moral indictment of langur monkey's morality should note that infanticide on grounds of infidelity has been acceptable in a number of human societies.
Among the Yanomamφ of South America and the Tikopia of the Solomon Islands, men have been known to demand, upon marrying women with a past, that their babies be killed. And Ache men sometimes collectively decide to kill a newly fatherless child. For a woman in the ancestral environment, then, the benefits of multiple sex partners could have ranged from their sparing her child's life to their defending or otherwise investing in her youngster.
Again, this logic does not depend on a conscious understanding of it. Male langars presumably do not grasp the concept of paternity. Still, genes that make males sensitive to clues that certain infants may or may not carry their genes have survived. A gene that says, "Be nice to children if you've had lots of sex with their mothers," will prosper over the long haul.
ROMANCING THE DNA LOVE
Genes don't talk, but they affect behavior by creating feelings, emotions, desires and thoughts - by building and maintaining the brain and altering the cerbral spinal fluid (the chemical soup) with which it functions. Whenever evolutionary psychologists talk about some evolved behavioral tendency: for example a polygamous or monogamous inclination, or male parental investment - they are also talking about an underlying mental infrastructure.The development of male parental investment, for example, required the construction of a compelling emotion: paternal love.
At some point the behaviour of love for offspring began to flourish at the expense of genes that promoted remoteness. The reason, presumably, is that changes in circumstance an upsurge in predators, say made it more likely that the offspring of undevoted, unprotective fathers would simply perish.
Crossing this threshold meant love not only for the child; the first step toward becoming devoted parents consists of the man and woman developing a mutual attraction. The genetic payoff of having two parents committed to a child's welfare seems to be the central reason men and women can fall into swoons over one another.
Until recently, this claim was heresy. "Romantic love" was thought to be a relatively recent and unnatural invention of western culture. The Mangaians of Polynesia, for instance, were said to be "puzzled" by references to marital affection. But lately anthropologists have taken a second look at purportedly loveless cultures, including the Mangaians, and have discovered what non-anthropologists already knew: love between man and woman is a human universal.
In this sense the pair-bonding label is apt. Still, that term and for that matter the term 'marriage' convey a sense of permanence and symmetry that is wildly misleading. Evolution not only forced the creation of romantic love but from its beginning corrupted it. The corruption lies in conflicts of interest inherent in male parental investment. It is the goal of maximizing male investment, remember, that sometimes leads a woman to infidelity. Yet it is the preciousness of this investment that makes her infidelity lethal to her mate's interests. Not long for this world are the genes of a man who showers time and energy on children who are not his.
Meanwhile, male parental investment also makes the man's naturally polygynous bent inimical to his wife's reproductive interests. His quest for a new wife could lead him to withdraw, or at least dilute, investment in his first wife's children. This reallocation of resources may on balance help his genes but certainly not hers.
The living legacy of these long-running genetic conflicts is human jealousy or, rather, human jealousies.
In theory, there should be two very distinct kinds of jealousy one male and one female. Statistics do seem to support this.
 ABOVE: % by gender and generation willing |
David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan, has confirmed this prediction vividly. He placed electrodes on men and on women and had them envision their mates doing various disturbing things. When men imagined sexual infidelity, their heart rates took leaps of a magnitude typically induced by three cups of coffee. They sweated. Their brows wrinkled. When they imagined a budding emotional attachment, they calmed down, though not quite to their normal level. For women, things were exactly reversed: envisioning emotional infidelity redirected love, not supplementary sex - brought the deeper distress.
That jealousy is so finely tuned to these forms of treachery is yet more evidence that they have a long evolutionary history. Still, the modern environment has carried them to new heights, making marriage dicier than ever. Men and women have always, in a sense, been designed to make each other miserable, but these days they are especially good at it.
MODERN OBSTACLES TO MONOGAMY
To begin with, infidelity is easier in an anonymous city than in a small hunter-gatherer village. Whereas paternity studies show that two percent of the children in a Kung San village result from cuckoldry, the rate runs higher than twenty percent in most modern neighborhoods. Contraceptive technology may also complicate marriage. During human evolution, there were no condoms or birth control pills. Thirty years ago effective contraception and abortion were uncommon, illegal or virtually unavailable.
In earlier times if an adult couple slept together for a year or so and produced no baby, the chances were good that one of them was not fertile. No way of telling which one, but from their genes' point of view, there was little to lose and much to gain by ending the partnership and finding a new mate. Some have speculated, natural selection favored genes inclining men and women to sour on a mate after extended periods of sex without issue. This would explain why low birth rates and small families would produce the highest divorce rates. It is also true that barren marriages are especially likely to break up.
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Another possible challenge to monogamy in the modern world lies in movies, billboards and magazines. There was no photography in the no-so-long ago world that shaped the human male mind. So at some deep level, that mind may respond to glossy images of pinups and fashion models as if they were viable mates - alluring alternatives to dull, monogamous devotion. Evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kenrick has suggested as much. According to his research, men who are shown pictures of Playboy magazine models later describe themselves as less in love with their wives than do men shown other images. (Women shown pictures from Playgirl magazine felt no such attitude adjustment toward spouses.)
Perhaps the largest modern obstacle to lasting monogamy is economic inequality. To see why, it helps to grasp a subtle point made by Donald Symons, author of the 1979 classic The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Though men who leave their wives may be driven by "natural" impulses, that does not mean men have a natural impulse designed expressly to make them leave their wives. After all, in the ancestral environment, gaining a second wife did NOT mean leaving the first. So why leave her? Why not stay near existing offspring and keep giving some support? Symons believes men are designed less for opportune desertion than for opportune polygyny. It's just that when polygyny is illegal, a polygynous impulse will find other outlets such as divorce.
If Symons is right, the question of what makes a man feel the restlessness that leads to divorce can be rephrased: what circumstances in the ancestral environment would permit the acquisition of a second wife? Answer: possessing markedly more resources, power or social status than the average person.
Even in some "egalitarian' hunter-gatherer societies, men with slightly more status or power than average are slightly more likely to have multiple wives. In less egalitarian pre-industrial societies, the anthropologist Laura Betzig his shown, the pattern is dramatic. In Incan society, the four political offices from petty chief to chief were allotted ceilings of seven, eight, 15 and 30 women. Polygyny reaches its zenith under the most despotic regimes. Among the Zulu, where coughing or sneezing at the king's dinner table was punishable by death, his highness might monopolize more than 100 women. To an evolutionary psychologist, such numbers are just extreme examples of a simple fact: the ultimate purpose of the wealth and power that men seek so ardently is genetic proliferation. It is only natural that the exquisitely flexible human mind should be so designed Thus it is natural that a rising corporate star, upon getting a big promotion, should feel a strong attraction to women other than his wife. Testosterone which expands a male's sexual appetite, has been shown to rise in non-human primates following social triumphs, and there is evidence that it does so in human males too. Certainly the world is full of triumphant men who conform to this model. The most sucessful leader of all time Julius Caesar is an excellent example. It was said that the Roman Colosseums could have been filled with the wives with which he had sexual relations but there are lots of examples: thousands of women ready and willing to sign on as contestants for Who wants to marry a Millionaire, the countless wealthy celebrity types (such as Johnny Carson and Donald Trump) who traded in aging wives for younger, more fertile models. The "multi-wived" tycoon J. Paul Getty once said, "A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure." A man's exalted social status can give his offspring a leg up in life, so it's natural that women should lust after "high-status" men who lust after them. (Presidents Bill [[I DID NOT HAVE SEX] Clinton and John F. Kennedy are some obvious examples of the power/play effect) Among the Ache, the best hunters also have more extramarital affairs and more illegitimate children than lesser hunters. In modern societies, contraception keeps much of this sex appeal from translating into literal offspring. But a 1993 study by Canadian anthropologist Daniel Perusse found that single men of high socio-economic status have sex with more partners than lower-status men. It has been documented for years that the wealthy and powerful men tend to have better health and live longer than the poor men and very recently a large survey confirmed that those having sex at least three times per week are generally healthier and actually live longer. One might think that the appeal of rich or powerful men is losing its strength. After all, as more women enter the work force, they can better afford to premise their marital decisions on something other than a man's income! This type of thinking would be a big mistake. Recent studies point to a disturbing trend: as women move into fields of traditional "male" employment, a large number of men are left without the traditional status provided through work. As one might expect, few men have been flocking to replace women in traditional female dominated fields. With the scarcity of employment opportunity in blue-collar and manufacturing sectors growing worse and worse each year, career councilors frequently lament that few men seem to be interested in expanding their options by training in areas perceived as traditionally "female" dominated work such as nursing, child care or the clerical sector. The few men who do opt for these lines of work are often labeled as having "sissy" jobs and may be shunned by BOTH men and women alike! (One man from Edmonton Alberta complained recently during a national phone-in program that when he told someone he was employed as a child care worker in a local daycare center the reaction to this was a cold, icy stare and the remark that "I think any man who works with young children is a pervert!" A young man who inquired about taking a training program as a Dental Hygienist was told by the school's representative that: "A man trying to find work in that field wouldn't have a hope in hell of being hired...") A recently published survey found that the number of men entering nursing has in fact fallen and is now below six percent. The pattern has always been for men to abandon occupations which become "female dominated", but with very few expanding roles or opportunities available, men are increasingly squeezed into fewer and fewer opportunities, most with less pay and less prestige. While women can shift to the role of primary caregiver in the home without significant lost of social standing, the majority of men AND women find this same behavior by men as very undesirable, demeaning or downright inappropriate. What we're dealing here is deep romantic attractions, not just conscious calculation, and feelings were forged in a different environment. Evolutionary psychologists have shown that the tendency of women to place even greater emphasis than men on a mate's financial prospects remains strong regardless of the income or expected income of the women in question. The upshot of this is that economic inequality is monogamy's worst enemy. Affluent men are inclined to leave their aging wives, and young women including some wives of less affluent men are inclined to offer themselves as replacements. Objections to this sort of analysis are predictable: "But people leave marriages for emotional reasons. They don't add up their offspring and pull out their calculators." True. But emotions are just evolution's executioners. Beneath the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes cold, hard equations composed of simple variables: social status, age of spouse, number of children, their ages, outside romantic opportunities and so on. Is the wife really duller and more nagging than she was 20 years ago? Maybe, but maybe the husband's tolerance for nagging has dropped now that she is 45 and has no reproductive future. And the promotion he just got, which has already drawn some admiring glances from a young woman at work, has not helped. Similarly, we might ask the young, childless wife who finds her husband intolerably insensitive why the insensitivity wasn't so oppressive a year ago, before he lost his job and she met the kindly, affluent bachelor who seems to be flirting with her. Of course, maybe her husband's abuses are quite real, in which case they signal his disaffection and perhaps his impending departure and merit just the sort of pre-emptive strike the wife is now mustering. As theoretical as this sounds, it cannot help happening. There are only about 25 years of fertility per woman. When some men dominate more than 25 years' worth, some man somewhere must do with less. And when, in addition to all the serial husbands, you count the men who live with a woman for five years before deciding not to marry her, and then do it again (perhaps finally at 35 marrying a 25-year-old), the net effect is not trivial. As some Darwinians have put it, serial monogamy is tantamount to polygyny. Like polygyny, it lets powerful men grab extra sexual resources, leaving less fortunate men without mates or at least without mates young enough to bear children. Thus rampant divorce not only ends the marriages of some men but also prevents the marriage of others. In 1960, when the divorce rate was around 25% in the U.S., the portion of the never married population age 40 or older was about the same for men and women. By 1990, with the divorce rate running at 50%, the portion for men was larger by 20% than for women. Since 1973 the gap between the rich and poor has increased by a ratio of 314 to 1 based on employment income. The middle class has decreased from 60% to 44% of the total population. The richest 10% earned $136,737 in 1996 about one generation earlier, back in 1973, the poorest 10% earned about 1/21 of what the richest ten percent earned. Viewing serial monogamy as polygyny by another name throws a kink into the family-values debate. So far, conservatives have got the most political distance out of decrying divorce. Yet lifelong monogamy one woman per man for rich and poor alike would seem to be a natural rallying cry for socialists and liberals. One other kind of fallout from serial monogamy comes plainly into focus through the lens of evolutionary psychology: the toll taken on children. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University in Ontario, two of the field's seminal thinkers, have written that one of the "most obvious" Darwinian predictions is that stepparents will "tend to care less profoundly for children than natural parents." After all, parental investment is a precious resource, so natural selection should "favor those parental psyches that do not squander it on nonrelatives" and do not carry the parent's genes. Indeed, in combing through 1976 crime data, Daly and Wilson found that an American child living with one or more substitute parents was about 100 times as likely to be fatally abused as a child living with biological parents. In a Canadian city in the 1980s, a child age two or younger was 70 times as likely to be killed by a parent if living with a stepparent and a natural parent than if living with two natural parents. Of course, murdered children are a tiny fraction of all children living with stepparents; divorce and remarriage hardly amount to a child's death warrant. But consider the more common problem of nonfatal abuse. Children under 10 were, depending on their age and the study in question, three to 40 times as likely to suffer parental abuse if living with a stepparent and a biological parent instead of two biological parents. There are ways to fool Mother Nature, to induce parents to love children who are not theirs. (Hence cuckoldry.) After all, people cannot telepathically sense that a child is carrying their genes (although with modern technology can run a conclusive lab test). Instead they rely on cues that in the ancestral environment would have signaled as much. If a woman feeds and cuddles an infant day after day, she may grow to love the child, and so may the woman's mate. This sort of bonding is what makes adopted children lovable (and is one reason relationships between stepparent and child are often harmonious). But the older a child is when first seen, the less profound the attachment will probably be. Most children who acquire stepfathers are past infancy. Polygynous cultures, such as the l9th century Mormons, are routinely dismissed as cruelly sexist. But they do have at least one virtue: they do not submit children to the indifference or hostility of a surrogate father. What we have now serial monogamy, quasi-polygyny is in this sense much, much worse than true polygyny. It massively wastes the most precious evolutionary resource: love. As Laura Betzig has noted, some income redistribution would no doubt help. One standard conservative argument against anti-poverty policies is their cost: taxes burden the affluent and thus, by lowering work incentive, reduce economic output. But if one goal of the policy is to bolster monogamy, then making the affluent less so would help. This has hardly been the trend of late! Monogamy is threatened not just by poverty in an absolute sense but also by the relative wealth of the rich. This is what lures a young woman to a wealthy married or formerly married man. This same mechanism is also what makes the man who attracts her feel too good for just one wife.(Check out any of ten recent feature films for some big-screen definition of cross-generational match-ups). As for the economic consequences, the costs of soaking the rich might well be outweighed by the benefits, financial and otherwise, of more stable marriages, fewer divorces, fewer abused children and less loneliness and depression. There are as well other levers for bolstering monogamy, such as divorce law. In the short run, divorce brings the average man a marked rise in standard of living (unless he retains custody of the children), while his wife, along with her children, suffers the opposite. Maybe one should not lock people into unhappy marriages with financial disincentives to divorce, but it seems illogical to reward men for leaving their wives. Understanding the mechanisms of our evolutionary history could be viewed by many as a demystification of love and humanity or something akin to studing the wiring schematic of an oven in order to learn how to cook a meal, however better understanding and insight could be useful and valuable... Yet, living in our time and within a civilized community, men and women alike might bear in mind that impulses of wanderlust, or marital discontent are not always a sign that you "married the wrong person." They may just signal that you are a member of our species who married another member of our species. Nor, as evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph L. Nesse has noted, should we believe such impulses are a sign of psychopathology. Rather, he writes, they are "expected impulses that must, for the most part, be inhibited for the sake of marriage." The danger is that people will take the opposite tack: react to this new understanding and insight by surrendering to "natural" impulses, as if what's "in our genes" were beyond reach of self-control. They may even conveniently assume that what is "natural" is always good. Earlier in the twentieth century natural selection was thought of almost as a benign deity, constantly "improving" our species moving us forward for the greater good. This mindset continues today in the unrivaled homage paid to economic competition and likewise through the philosophy of survival of the fittest being applied in business, industry and political systems. But evolutionary psychology rests on a quite different world view: recognition that natural selection does not work toward overall social welfare, that much of human nature boils down to ruthless genetic self-interest and that people are naturally oblivious to their ruthlessness. George Williams, whose 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection helped dispel the once popular idea that evolution often works for "the good of the group," has even taken to calling natural selection "evil" and "the enemy." The moral life, in his view, consists largely of battling human nature. Darwin believed the human species to be a moral one in fact, the only moral animal species. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them," he wrote. In this sense, yes, we are moral. We have at least the technical capacity to lead an examined life: self-awareness, memory, foresight and judgment. Still, subjecting ourselves to moral scrutiny and adjusting our behavior accordingly is hardly a reflex, and not even fashionable in many quarters. We are potentially moral animals which is more than any other animal can say but we are not naturally moral animals. Perhaps the first step to being moral is to realize how thoroughly we aren't. The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday life by ROBERT WRIGHT Other Credits: C. Crawford, The Theory of Evolution in the Study of Human Behavior: An Introduction and Overview. H.K. Reeve, Acting for the Good of Others: Kinship and Reciprocity, With Some New Twists. G.F. Miller, A Review of Sexual Selection and Human Evolution: How Mate Choice Shaped Human Nature. B.S. Low, The Evolution of Human Life Histories. M Janicki, D. Krebs, Evolutionary Approaches to Culture. J.M. Bailey, Can Behavior Genetics Contribute to Evolutionary Behavioral Science? A. Wells, Evolutionary Psychology and Theories of Cognitive Architecture. L. Betzig, Not Whether to Count Babies, but Which Babies to Count? C. Crawford, Environments and Adaptations: Then and Now. H. Holcomb III, Testing Evolutionary Hypothesis: Applications. D. Krebs, The Evolution of Moral Behavior. M. Surbey, Developmental Psychology and Modern Darwinism. D. Buss, The Psychology of Human Mate Selection: Exploring the Complexity of the Strategic Repertoire. M. Daly, M. Wilson, Family Violence. C. Badcock, PsychoDarwinism: The New Synthesis of Darwin and Freud. D.T. Kenrick, E.V. Sadalla, R.C. Keefe, Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology: The Missing Heart of Modern Cognitive Science. N.M. Malamuth, M.F. Heilmann, David Farley Hurlbert, A Comparative Study on the Female Orgasm, Evolutionary Psychology and Sexual Aggression. R. Thornhill, Darwinian Aesthetics. Y. Hedrick-Wong, The Global Environmental Crisis and State Behavior: An Evolutionary Perspective. I. Silverman, K. Philips, The Evolutionary Psychology of Spatial Sex Differences. D. Bickerton, The Creation and Re-creation of Language. 
THE FALLOUT FROM MONOGAMYS DEMISE
Not only does male social inequality favor divorce. Divorce can also reinforce male social inequality; it is a tool of class exploitation. Consider U.S. TV talk-show host Johnny Carson. Like many high status males, he spent his career dominating the reproductive years of a series of women. Somewhere out there is a man who wanted a family and a pretty wife and, if it hadn't been for Carson, would have married one of these women. And if this man has managed to find another woman, she was similarly snatched from the clutches of some other man. And so on a domino effect: a scarcity of fertile females trickles down the social scale.CINDERELLA SYNDROME
IS THERE HOPE?
Given the toll of divorce on children, on low-income men, and for that matter on mothers and fathers, it would be nice to come up with a magic social restoration plan. Alas, the importance of this task seems rivaled only by its difficulty. Lifelong monogamous devotion just isn't natural, and the modern environment makes it harder than ever. What to do?
MORALITY AND THE HUMAN ANIMAL
The problem of divorce is by no means one of public policy, exclusively. Progress will also depend on people using the insight of evolutionary psychology in a responsible way. Ideally this insight would lead people to subject their own feelings to more acute scrutiny. Maybe for starters, men and women may understand that their constantly fluctuating perceptions of a mate are in large measure illusions created for the now rather absurd purpose of genetic proliferation as we face a world of some 10,000,000,000 individuals, and that these can do real substantial harm. Men might beware of the restlessness designed by natural selection is to encourage polygyny. Now that it brings divorce, it can inflict very great emotional and even physical damage on their children.
A recent study of happiness and well-being in Great Britain and the US conducted over a 25-year period on 100,000 people by David Blanchflower and his University of Warwick colleague Andrew Oswald found a lasting marriage brings as much happiness as an additional $150,000 in personal income. Primary Credit-
(Pantheon 1994)
SPARE PARTS AND BROKEN HEARTS
KEEP THIS DIRTY WORLD TURNING
AROUND
AROUND
AROUND
