by Robin Baker
One by one, the old man located their five children. As he named each one he saw, she nodded. They were all there. She had had eight children but two had died in early childhood and a third, after having a family of his own, had died a few years ago in his fifties. Now the grandchildren, she urged him. He knew there should be twenty-three but couldn’t remember all their names. He picked out the dozen he knew best, all in their forties, then had to rely on his partner to supply the names of the younger grandchildren, some of them still teenagers or younger. She remembered their names clearly, but that didn’t always help as he couldn’t even begin to remember what some of the younger ones looked like. Even so, when she told him a name, he said they were present.
When the list was complete, she sat back in satisfaction. Twenty-three surviving grandchildren. That was three more than her lifetime friend and rival who, after a complicated and colourful life of great sexual activity, had died ten years ago. Now, she missed their camaraderie. They had been lucky. Most of their generation had either died young from disease or accident or had been infertile, or had lost many of their children before they reached adulthood. Between them, she and her friend had populated a large proportion of the village.
The old man said he hoped that she wasn’t going to ask him to count their great-grandchildren. She shook her head and laughed. He could see the oldest, now nearly thirty, with her new-born, their most recent great-great-grandchild. Last night, the old woman said, she and their daughter had worked out that there ought to be fifty-two of them and four more on the way, and already there were sixteen great-great-grandchildren. He sat back and relaxed, freed from his task of child-counting.
‘Just look what we have done,’ he remarked with satisfaction, not for the first time forgetting her blindness. She squeezed his hand again, then let him go, concentrating on the noise and conversation around her.
Suddenly, there was a commotion. A gang of naked children ran across the clearing as a group of young men, naked apart from a belt around their waists, emerged from the forest. On their shoulders the leaders were carrying the first of three large animals, already skewered on a wooden spit. The food for their feast had arrived.
In the course of this book, scene after scene has documented incidents of infidelity; moments and situations in which successive characters have snatched the opportunity to try to increase their reproductive success just that little bit more than their contemporaries. This final scene is a reminder that with the right person in the right situation, the best way to achieve the greatest reproductive success can sometimes be within a monogamous relationship.
The scene is also a reminder that long-term relationships, including monogamous ones, are estimated to have been a feature of human sexuality for around three million years. Our huntergatherer ancestors (Scene 16), from the savanna of Africa to the forests of South America and South-East Asia, from the aboriginal outback of Australia to the Eskimo heartland of Canada, almost always formed long-term male-female partnerships, most of which were monogamous. Unlike the relationship in Scene 37, these partnerships did not necessarily last a lifetime. Often a person had two, or even three, successive involvements. But each one was monogamous (give or take an occasional infidelity) while it lasted, involved deep personal ties, and lasted for several years - very similar to what happens in modern industrial societies.
Only during the fifteen thousand or so years of dependence on agriculture did many human cultures switch to polygamy. Women clustered around the men of greatest wealth – those with the largest areas of cultivated land and those with most livestock. Even polygamous relationships, however, are long-term and involve deep ties between the male and each of his females. The women are expected to be faithful to the man and he is expected to be faithful to his designated collection of women.
Not until the advent of urbanisation and industrialisation over the last few hundred years has there been a wholesale swing back towards monogamy, or serial monogamy. But even now women still cluster around the men of greatest wealth and status (Scene 18).
The woman in Scene 37 made a good decision, not to be unfaithful. If, as it seems, her partner was the best provider around and had the best genes available, she had nothing to gain reproductively from infidelity (Scene 18), and everything to lose (Scenes 9 and 11). She had only done a little better, however, than her close friend who had had a much more varied sex life. Presumably, this friend did not start with the advantage of such a good partner. Had she opted to be faithful, she might have been less successful – again, reproductively – than she was. How successful the two women were may have had more to do with their ability to attract a good mate than with their strategy of fidelity or infidelity. They each pursued the best strategy for their circumstances.
The man in the last scene also made a good decision in avoiding infidelity. He did have much to gain (Scene 13), but he also had much to lose (Scenes 9 and 11). In particular, in his community there was always a real risk of contracting a life-threatening disease, as well as the cost of losing his ‘princess’. She was fertile, faithful and a good mother and grandmother. Any gains from infidelity might not have balanced the costs.
Although the majority of people do not pursue a lifetime of pure monogamy, most (with few exceptions – Scenes 19 and 30) achieve the greater part of their reproductive success within long-term relationships. Then, as long as the individual judges the moment and the situation accurately, infidelity, rape, group sex, prostitution, partner swapping and so on are all strategies that provide the opportunity to be just that little bit more successful, reproductively, than would be possible solely within a single relationship. But all carry risks if badly executed or if the individual does not have the weaponry of physique or character to carry them through.
Maybe the couple in the last scene, particularly the man, could each have achieved greater reproductive success through infidelity and sperm warfare – but in all probability, because of their circumstances, they would not have done. Their reproductive strategy of faithful monogamy had, for them, been a total success.
Even though the couple in Scene 37 were monogamous and faithful, they still could not escape the shadow of sperm warfare. It is irrelevant that neither of them actually engaged in sperm warfare. Their bodies will still have spent a lifetime ‘on alert’ for a war that never came.
Everyone’s body – with no exception – is similarly alert. Continuously throughout reproductive life, the body both assesses the likelihood of sperm warfare and makes the appropriate preparations. When the likelihood is low, some preparations are made but they are minimal (Scenes 12 and 22). From time to time, however, absolutely every body contemplates behaviour that could lead to sperm warfare – and when it does, such contemplation triggers an escalation in preparation (Scenes 13 and 26). More often than not, the contemplation is mere fantasy and the preparations unnecessary – no war ensues. But even in our own generation, the majority of men at least once in their lives act on their fantasies and enter their sperm into battle - and, at least once in their lives, the majority of women do likewise and promote sperm warfare. When war does break out, each person’s body will have done its best to make sure that it is well prepared and that there is a chance the war will work to its reproductive advantage.
Few people will have thought deeply about sperm warfare and its consequences before reading this book. Yet, if the phenomenon did not exist, human sexuality would be far less colourful. Without sperm warfare during human evolution, men would have tiny genitals and produce few sperm. Women would not have orgasms, there would be no thrusting during intercourse, no sex dreams or fantasies, no masturbation, and we should each feel like intercourse only a dozen times or so in our entire lives - those few occasions when conception was possible and desirable. Sex and society, art and literature – in fact, the whole of human culture – would be very different.
Over the millennia, sperm warfare has helped to shape society. In contrast, the last few years have seen two dev
elopments – one social and one scientific – which in their turn could change the face of sperm warfare. The social development was the emergence of child support agencies as governments tried to shift financial responsibility for the children of women without partners away from society and on to the absent father. Interestingly, in their attempts to avoid or defer their support, men everywhere have responded by invoking sperm warfare – expressing doubts about their paternity of this or that child. In the past, most such claims of non-paternity would have remained unresolved. However, the scientific development – genetic fingerprinting – has provided a relatively conclusive method of testing such claims (Scenes 16 and 30).
It is interesting to speculate how a world of child support agencies and paternity tests might change sexual strategy and the role of sperm warfare.
The main repercussions are twofold. First, men will find it more difficult to have sex and run (Scenes 13 and 29). No longer will it be as easy to deny paternity and leave child-raising to the woman. Secondly, women will find it much more difficult to trick men into raising children who are not theirs (Scenes 6, 8, 13, 16, 17, 18, 26, 31, 33 and 35). It is not difficult to envisage a future in which men will routinely pay for (or even be entitled to!) a paternity test at the birth of each child they may be legally forced to support.
Although these two ancient strategies will become much less successful, alternative strategies, uncommon today, will become more successful. For example, women will become much freer to have children by several men. Not only might they gain genetically, they might also gain from obtaining long-term financial support from a number of men (Scene 18). In the process of having children by several men, women should still seek to promote sperm warfare so that their male descendants will have competitive ejaculates (Scene 21). But no longer need women risk dependence on meagre support from the state as a result of their strategy. They will, of course, find it more difficult, if not impossible, to hide their actions from any partner, but then they will have less need to do so. In fact, they will have less need for a partner at all. Even if they have a partner, his desertion need not be as crippling as in the past. In their turn, men could exploit this potential earning power of women. No longer need they fear being tricked into raising another man’s child – if they take on such a child it will be knowingly, having judged that they have more to gain than to lose (Scene 15). Often, they may even calculate that the extra income their partner could generate through having other men’s children could actually help them to raise their own children more successfully.
Although such behaviour by men and women could make long-term relationships less common – and will certainly change their nature – such relationships will probably still happen. Men will still try to avoid sperm warfare by guarding a mate (Scene 9) and women will still try to recruit a partner to help with all the other, non-financial, aspects of raising their children (Scene 18). But the financial arrangements for child-raising and the ability to identify paternity could well shorten such relationships, removing as they do two of their main functions. The reproductive life of both men and women will centre on a succession of relationships, each lasting just long enough to produce one or two children.
As far as men are concerned, the balance of reproductive success is likely to swing even more strongly in favour of those of wealth and status than at present (Scene 18) – subconsciously, this may even be why child support legislation appeals to the law-makers! Only wealthy men will be able to afford to have children with a number of women, and hence only such men will be targeted by many women. Poorer men, when they do get a chance to inseminate extra women, will be under pressure to make themselves even more untraceable than at present.
Some things, of course, will never change. Nothing – short of castration, brain surgery or hormone implants – can remove a person’s subconscious urge to have as many grandchildren as they can. So, nothing will remove a man’s subconscious urge to have as many children with as many women as his genes and circumstances will allow. Similarly, nothing will prevent a woman from subconsciously trying to collect the best genes and recruit the best support for her children that her genes and circumstances will allow.
The coercive ‘one-family, one-child’ legislation in China has neatly highlighted how basic reproductive strategies adapt to social change. The legislation has successfully reduced the mean number of children (to 1.6 per woman). But in so doing it has also changed the sex ratio (through selective abortion and infanticide – Scene 16) to 1.6 boys for every girl. Why? Intrinsically, the coercion impinges more on a woman’s potential reproductive success than a man’s. A successful man (such as those who conceived and imposed the legislation?) can still have many children if he can surreptitiously inseminate many women and win sperm warfare. In contrast, the only way a woman can generate more grandchildren than her contemporaries is by having such a successful son. A man also, of course, benefits reproductively from fathering a successful son. Whatever people’s conscious reasons for wanting sons so badly in modern China that they are prepared to kill their daughters, their biological response is precisely what would be expected if they were trying to enhance their reproductive success.
All of the sexual strategies described in this book will adapt to any new environment. Whatever the effect on society of future scientific and social developments, sperm warfare and its associated behaviour seem destined to be an ever-present feature. As such, it will continue to be the major force in the shaping of human sexuality over the generations to come.
Copyright © 1996 by Robin Baker
Preface to 2006 edition © 2006 by Robin Baker
First published in 1996 by Fourth Estate Limited
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145 x5000, or e-mail [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN : 978-0-465-01296-1
10