Woman

by Natalie Angier

  There's so much gorgeous material left to be mined. Women are said to need an investing male (or more than one, if they can get it). We think we know the reason why. Human babies are difficult and time-consuming to raise. Chimpanzee females may be able to provision their offspring on their own, but women cannot. Stone Age mothers needed husbands to bring home the bison. Yet as we've already seen in the discussion of the organic grandmother, the age-old assumption that male parental investment lies at the heart of human evolution is now open to serious question. Men in traditional foraging cultures do not necessarily invest resources in their offspring. Hadza men hunt, but they share the bounty of that hunting widely, politically, strategically. They don't deliver it straight to the mouths of their progeny. Women rely on their senior female kin to help get their children fed. The men are often away hunting, in quest of big game. The women gather. There is a division of labor by sex. But in hunting, the men are not engaging in the most calorically productive enterprise. In many cases, they would be better off gathering, or combining an occasional hunt with the trapping of small prey. The big hunt, though, is a big opportunity, to win status and allies. The women and their children in a gathering-hunting society clearly benefit from the meat that hunters bring back to the group. But they benefit as a group, not as a collection of nuclear family units, each beholden to the father's personal pound of wildeburger.

  This is a startling revelation, which upends many of our presumptions about the origins of marriage and what women want from men and what men want from women. If the environment of evolutionary adaptation was not defined primarily by male parental investment, the bedrock of so much of evolutionary psychology's theorizing, then we can throw the door wide open and breathe again, and ask new questions, rather than endlessly repeating ditties and calling the female coy long after she has run her petticoats through the presidential paper shredder.

  For example: Nicholas Blurton Jones, of the University of California at Los Angeles, and others have proposed that marriage developed as an extension of men's efforts at mate-guarding. Just as male baboons demand exclusivity during peak estrus, so a man might attempt to claim access to a woman and keep other men away from her. The invention of lethal weapons of war very likely upped the ante for male-male competition relatively early in human evolution. When armed men fight, they can kill with far greater ease than the males of other species can. If fighting for access to females resulted in too high a cost too often, then the average archaic male wouldn't have wanted to get into such contests terribly often. In other words, the bedhopper, who tried to spread his seed quantitatively, might not have survived long enough to have many successful hits, for each effort at wooing a fertile female would have pushed him smack up against a thicket of other suitors' spear tips. The cost of philandering becomes ludicrously high. The man might be better off trying to claim rights to one woman at a time. Regular sex with a fertile woman is at least likely to yield offspring at comparatively little risk to his life, particularly if sexual access to the woman is formalized through a public ceremony—a wedding. Looked at from this perspective, we must wonder why an ancestral woman bothered to get married, particularly if she and her female relatives did most of the work of keeping the family fed from year to year. Perhaps, Blurton Jones suggests, to limit the degree to which she was harassed. Chronic male harassment can be a terrible problem for a female, he said, and if a woman has to forage to feed herself and her dependent young, the cost of harassment to her efficiency may be too high to bear. Better to agree to a ritualized bond with a male, and to benefit from whatever hands-off policy that marriage may bring, than to spend all of her time locked in one sexual dialectic or another.

  Thus marriage may have arisen as a multifaceted social pact: between man and woman, between male and male, and between the couple and the tribe. It is a reasonable solution to a series of cultural challenges that arose in concert with the expansion of the human neocortex. But its roots may not be what we think they are, nor may our contemporary mating behaviors stem from the pressures of an ancestral environment as it is commonly portrayed, in which a woman needed a mate to help feed and clothe her young. Instead, our "deep" feelings about marriage may be more pragmatic, more contextual, and, dare I say it, more egalitarian than we give them credit for being. If marriage is a social compact, a mutual bid between man and woman to contrive a reasonably stable and agreeable microhabitat in a community of shrewd and well-armed cohorts, then we can understand why, despite rhetoric to the contrary, men are as eager to marry as women are—sometimes, it seems, even more so. Are not men the ones who gain most in health and happiness from being married? A raft of epidemiological studies have shown that marriage adds more years to the life of a man than it does to that of a woman. Why should that be, if men are so "naturally" ill-suited to matrimony?

  Many critics have pointed out that the international mate preference surveys on which David Buss and other hardcores base their presumptions of the nativist male and female differences show striking similarities between the sexes. When asked what qualities are most important in a prospective mate, men and women alike rate love, dependability, emotional stability, and a pleasant personality as the top four traits, whatever the country, whatever the creed. Only when we descend to the fifth tier do we find the familiar dialectic, men requesting physical attractiveness, women financial endowment. If we see as the archaic cradle of marriage a social compact between independent agents rather than a plea by a needy female for a male provider, then the consanguinity of responses becomes easy to comprehend. Whom do we want to love and live with? A lovable person. A kind person. A trustworthy person who doesn't skitter all over the place and pull a Houdini on you. A person who doesn't stand on the streetcorner shouting obscenities. And though evolutionary psychologists like to toss up stock footage of the wealthy older man with the radiant young model draped on his arm as evidence of some sort of subliminal truth in motion, the more prevalent truth is that most men and most women marry people with whom they have a great deal in common. They marry people who are close to them in looks, education, wealth, religious belief, politics, age. They marry people they like and feel comfortable with. Marriages often fail, of course, and where divorce is an option, divorce is common. Traditional foraging people like the Hadza and the !Kung get divorced at rates similar to those seen in Western countries. When asked the reason for the divorce, the commonest answer is, We didn't get along.

  What do women want? None of us can speak for all women, or for more than one woman, really, but we can hazard a mad guess that a desire for emotional parity is widespread and profound. It doesn't go away, although it often hibernates under duress, and it may be perverted by the restrictions of habitat or culture into something that looks like its opposite. The impulse for liberty is congenital. It is the ultimate manifestation of selfishness, which is why we can count on its endurance.

  When intelligent and articulate women have created the men of their dreams, as the great female novelists of history have done, the men read like the men of many women's dreams, for they are men who love women of strength and intelligence, who do not want their women emotionally and intellectually spayed and chastened. Charlotte Bronte gave us Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester, two well-matched blades of fire, tit for tat down the checklist of debits and credits. She is plain, thin, and pale. He is ugly, "a Vulcan—a real blacksmith, brown, broad-shouldered." He is rich, self-possessed, and worldly but bordering on middle-aged. She is poor, provincial, and alone but has youth in her favor and, more to the point, a rich inner life. Rochester's love for her is stirred when he sees her watercolors of fabulous Blakean landscapes. "And who taught you to paint wind?" he demands. "Where did you see Latmos? For this is Latmos." Each lover is scorchingly bright, and glad of the other's depth and quickness. Charlotte Bronte wants her heroine to come to her mate in full strength, in the purity of desire and self-invention. She even throws in an inheritance for Jane three quarters of the way through the novel, to liberat
e her from any need of Rochester beyond the man of him. Oh, they are equals all right, for though Rochester towers over Jane physically, he is perpetually getting himself injured and calling on her small, pale frame to help prop him up.

  Jane Eyre is fiction, Mack the Knife the archetypal smoldering poster puff. The throngs of us who have loved her and lusted onanistically after him, though, are flesh-and-bloody phenotypes. We and our fantasies are the fruit of evolution, and we are waiting to be known. It all begins with the first small, sly bite. You will come back for more.

  19. A SKEPTIC IN PARADISE

  A CALL FOR REVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

  WHEN FRANS DE WAAL talks about love, he tells a tale of two monkeys: rhesus monkeys and stump-tailed macaques. The species are in the same genus, Macaca, and they look fairly similar, but they are dramatically different in disposition. Rhesus monkeys are nasty and edgy, quick to fight and slow to reunite. Stump-tails are much less inflammatory, and when they do quarrel, they seek to make amends within ten minutes, through grooming and unmistakable gestures of rapprochement like holding on to one another's hips. "Rhesus monkeys are despotic species, while stumpies are egalitarian," de Waal says. "Presumably a cohesive group life is comparatively more important for stumpies, and so they have become experts at compromise and apology. But is it genetic? Are the stumpies simply nicer by nature? I would argue otherwise. I would argue that reconciliation behavior is a learned social skill."

  De Waal believes this because some years ago he and his colleagues did the following experiment at the Wisconsin Primate Research Center. They reared several young rhesus monkeys together with a group of stump-tailed macaques for five months, a long stretch in the life of a rhesus. Under the influence of the prosocial stumpies, the rhesus monkeys grew into diplomats. They learned reconciliation behaviors. They became great groomers and hip-huggers, every bit the stumpies' equals in pacifism. They became so good at reconciliation that when they were returned to their own kind—a group of despotic rhesus monkeys—they continued to use their civic skills to calm tempers after a rhesus quarrel. "The encouraging lesson is this," says de Waal. "If we can make peacemakers out of rhesus monkeys, we can surely do it with human children."

  Certain habits come more easily than others. It is easier to add a good habit to your life than to eradicate a bad one. It is easier to say yes than to say no. That's why people who try to lose weight succeed better by adding exercise to their lives than by struggling to cut calories. You may still want that occasional bar of Toblerone, and to go against the urge may feel too unnatural, too grim; but if the indulgence is tempered by counterindulgence, then the sin is effectively detoxified. I have a short, snarly temper. Of the four dispositional humors the ancients described—choler (mostly hot), phlegm (mostly cold), black bile (mostly dry), and blood (mostly moist)—I'll claim three parts choler, one part bile. I need my anger. It is my Toblerone, my dope. I can't give it up entirely. So I have adjusted by learning to do the next best thing. I have tapped my inner stump-tail, and I have learned to reconcile, quickly, quickly. Ten minutes or less! Pick a flea, hang my head, beg for mercy, make an offering of chocolate. Call it rhesus peaces.

  The additive strategy reflects the way nature works. She rarely subtracts or clears the deck. Instead she appends and expands. She thumbtacks on and spackles over. We are all little Romes, an amalgam of biocivilizations. Our cells are still yeasty in their basic design. We have perfectly functional genes that have evolved hardly at all in the 600 million years between us and fungus. We are old-fashioned monkeys and futuristic apes. We are sympathetic, canny, crude, and dazzling. We are profoundly aggressive, and we have many loci of control over that aggression. We feel our way to the narthex of love and think our way down its nave. We are like nothing else that has ever appeared on this thrashing blue planet, and we will become, in the next few centuries, like nothing we can fathom now. And we will do it all wearing our same old Stone Age genes.

  Ernst Mayr, one of the grand figures of twentieth-century biology, is now in his nineties, and his eyes have become "a pale boiled blue," as the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald once described a character's eyes; but Mayr is still working, still writing, and still thinking too quickly for comfort. He told me recently that he believes human beings have stopped evolving genetically. We are stuck with ourselves, he insisted. We yam what we yam.

  "There is absolutely no chance of the human species evolving," he said. "We cover every niche, we cover every spot on the earth. There's no system of isolation, and so we can never speciate. You need a system of isolation for the mechanism of natural selection to operate. There's no basis for a real change in our genes, for a physical change. Granted, there have been people like Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, who introduced eugenics and the concept that we can 'improve' the species through controlled breeding. But eugenics is impossible for various reasons, and we don't want to try it. We don't want another Nazi horror on our hands. We don't want to try to evolve a race of supermen. Whatever evolution we see from this point on will have to be cultural evolution rather than genetic evolution. That's unfortunate, because cultural things can be lost so easily. But that's where we are. That's what we have to work with."

  I published Mayr's opinions in an article that appeared in Natural History magazine, and a lot of readers were outraged. They waxed incredulous at Mayr's conviction that humans have stopped evolving genetically. They thought he was shortsighted, behind the times, naive. They talked about biotechnology and advances in gene therapy and the ability to manipulate the human genome. They talked of populations of humans colonizing other planets, being freed from the mother ship, thenceforth isolated well enough to mutate off on a parallel lifeline.

  I'm with Mayr, and happily so. Sure, cultural evolution is shakier than genetic evolution, and more prone to backsliding and amnesia. But the engine of natural selection does not give us better, nobler, or more righteous individuals. Natural selection gives us whimsy and excess. Natural selection advises, Go forth and multiply. Conquer and divide. We've conquered and divided quite enough, thank you very much. We need a little culture here, a little education and deliberation. Cultural evolution works pretty well. Culture has a way of becoming a habit, and habits have a way of getting physical, of feeding back on the loop and transforming the substrate. Think of a simple good habit, such as wearing a seat belt. You get in the car and you automatically reach for the seat belt. If something upsets the routine—say, you're toting a large package into the seat with you—and you fail to fasten the seat belt as soon as you sit down, you'll probably feel a vague sense of discomfiture, as though your body were trying to tell you something, as though a little red light were blinking on your internal dashboard. Warning! Warning! Do not relax! The seat-belt routine is now operating on a subconscious, physicalized plane. You have become habituated. Neurobiologists have shown that habituation occurs through structural changes in brain cells. The cultural practice, the wearing of the seat belt, shapes your synapses as surely as a mutant gene might do. You can't bestow the behavior on your children passively, through cracking open an egg. It is not specified in your genome, of course, and so every generation must learn it anew. But no matter; if you start 'em on the seat-belt habit young enough, they won't be able to escape. Where heredity ends, stump-tailing begins.

  Women are proof that it is easier to add than to overhaul. In recent decades, women have assumed new roles while scarcely abandoning the old. We have become breadwinners, and we still do most of the child care. We have learned to like the taste of acclaim, whether it comes in large drafts of professional eminence or in the extraordinary ordinary appearance of a regular paycheck. At the same time, we have not given up our taste for the old, socially approved female drug, the laudanum of personal intimacy. Power and warmth: they both taste wonderful. And though women are warned that they can't have it all, that they can't be accomplished whatevers and still be loving mothers (and wives!), women can say, Brazzz! We can, we're doing it, we're paddling ou
r little canoes to that fine autarchic shore as fast as we can, and there's no turning back, no matter how many tridents you wag and thunderbolts you throw. Feminism can't take all the credit for opening up economic and educational opportunities for women, as feminism's many foes have been at pains to point out. Feminism has mattered laughably little, they say. The mass entry of women into the workplace over the past thirty to forty years was driven by economic necessity and the shrinking of the economy. The model of the father as the sole support of a family was a socioeconomic aberration, a twentieth-century straw man slapped together by postwar economic expansion. That expansion could not be sustained, so of course women must work. Feminism has nothing to do with it. Women worked before, and they're working now. Women have always worked. Nothing new there.

  True enough. Except that there are some new features in the world of near-tomorrow. Women are doing more than working, as they always have. They are gaining ground, albeit slowly, in the acquisition of genuine wealth. In the postindustrial nations, women account for better than half of all the owners of new small businesses. In America, businesses owned by women employ more people than all the Fortune 500 companies combined. The percentage of women purchasing a home in the United States has risen sharply over the past twenty years, and the claim to territory remains a deep source of hominid might. Of equal importance, women are being educated now as never before. As recently as the early 1960s, only 4 percent of the students in law school and 3 percent of the students in medical school were women; today, the figures are about 50 percent for both. American high school girls are slightly more likely to attend and complete a four-year college than high school boys are. Higher education is becoming a habit, and educated people are scandalously prone to ambitiousness, and to making demands, and to expecting parity and fairness. Whenever and wherever women are educated, they rediscover their core female desires—to gain direct access to resources and to control the means of personal reproduction. As a rule, educated women have smaller families than uneducated women do, not only because getting that education takes time, but because educated women want a good education for their children, and they know that they can't afford to feed, clothe, and credential more than a handful of progeny. Educated women are surprisingly apelike in their family planning practices, for female apes generally have small families; one of the most prolific and successful chimpanzee matriarchs on record, named Fifi, has given birth to only seven young in her long life, two thirds the number of offspring spawned by Darwin's wife. Educated African women, says Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, a Sudanese anthropologist, are more likely than uneducated women to reject the practice of pudendal desecration. They want their clitoris intact. They want to keep learning, with every brain in their bodies.