Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (43 page)

Many women today can now have their cake and eat it too. A woman’s chief source of self-esteem and identity—her ability to have a family—will never go away. At the same time, she can pursue an occupation in ways that were unimaginable just a generation ago. Her problems are the mirror image of the man’s. She will find it harder to find a suitable man and when she does, her relationship with him will be bedeviled by his crises of esteem and identity. If indeed she pursues a high-powered, all-consuming career at the expense of developing a family life, she might find that the harvest is bitter.

Genes never let the majority of women ignore their true priority: family and quality of life. This translates through to the money-earning scores of women. If there is a sex-gap in pay, it is because women make a clear trade-off between career and family. Social economist Satoshi Kanazawa, who has carried out pioneering and detailed scientific analyses in this field, states, “My conclusion is that the sex gap in pay exists because women have better things to do than to earn money, reproductively speaking.”
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He makes the point that money-earning for men is the route to getting more genes into the next generation. This is not the case for women—their route is through nurturing their offspring.

TRIBAL RELATIONSHIPS

Within the band, everyone had a basic understanding that they must all pull together to survive. That is to say, the balance was tipped in favor of cooperation with other members of the band. Conflict and rivalry, while always present under the surface, were kept within tight limits.

The forager band had a body of unspoken laws, some of them human universal values and others particular to their culture. The band members constantly juggled self-interest, gift-giving, obligation, jealous watchfulness, and anger with a fear of hostility and rejection. In modern foragers, the San have not been observed to show much altruism, gratuitous kindness, sympathy, or genuine generosity.
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The San band members give, receive, and exchange gifts in a way that has strict unspoken rules: a gift must never be refused, even if the recipient doesn’t want to be beholden to the donor; and a gift must always be reciprocated, not the same object but one of equal value. The reciprocal gift should be made only after a “decent” interval, which can be from a couple of weeks up to several years.

Suckers, Cheats, and Grudgers

Evolutionary biologists have found that almost any population, whether pigeons, puffer fish, or chimpanzees, is composed of three main personalities. There are those that abide by the rules, but have no instinct to protect themselves against rule-breakers. Evolutionary biologists call these “sucker” populations. There are those who find it easier to scrounge off the suckers—these are known as “cheats.” This type of asymmetric situation is neatly summed up by the American writer of humorous poetry, Ogden Nash:

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,

But Roaring Bill—who killed him— thought it right!

There is also a third category dubbed “grudgers.” These are the ones who see the cheating, or have been cheated once, but refuse to be cheated a second time. They still have the other qualities of the suckers, but this time they learn to resist the cheats and carry a grudge against them for having been cheated.

The proportions of grudgers, cheats, and suckers is constantly changing. Professor Richard Dawkins had this to say about it:

“The first thing that happens is a dramatic crash in the population of suckers as the cheats ruthlessly exploit them. The cheats enjoy a soaring population explosion, reaching their peak just as the last sucker perishes. But the cheats still have the grudgers to reckon with. During the precipitous decline of the suckers, the grudgers have been slowly decreasing in numbers, taking a battering from the prospering cheats, but just managing to hold their own. After the last sucker has gone and the cheats can no longer get away with selfish exploitation so easily, the grudgers slowly begin to increase at the cheats’ expense. In due course, the proportion of Suckers increases and the cycle starts all over again.”

This is a lurid analysis of the social dynamics in many species, including humans. Forager society was organized with checks and balances such that the tendency to cheating was swiftly recognized and then punished.

Wrongdoing to the San is not always what might be expected. They don’t think lying is particularly bad and stealing is so certain of discovery that it rarely happened (“it would only lead to trouble”).
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On the other hand, breaking of respect for ownership of a resource is severely sanctioned. The furious “owner” killed the man who took honey from the tree where he, as “finder,” had made his mark. Other disputes arise over the share of a major kill. There are no formal institutions for enforcing rules, contracts, or obligations, so individuals or little groups have to take matters into their own hands. Squabbles break out for all kinds of reasons but, unlike those with neighboring tribes, they have to find ways to resolve them internally.

We now understand that human society (and even chimpanzee society) operates on a transactional basis. Favors are given and received, deals are done—society can only function if these understandings operate properly. In this way, humans (and chimpanzees) are programmed with social feelings: of obligation to someone for a favor received, of rightful dues for favors given, of outrage against cheating and injustice, of revenge against cheaters, and of retribution to redress a wrong. People who are emotionally driven to retaliate against those who cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more credible adversaries and less likely to be exploited.

One of the most powerful drives is the feeling of loyalty to the band and to its members. The feeling of “us” and “them” is a deeply programmed emotion. One of the worst fates that can befall an individual is to lose the support of other members of the band, so it is normal to be sensitive to the feeling of rejection and want to do whatever is necessary to avoid it. Today, we live in a world where each of us is a member of a number of in-groups: our family, our world of work, and our co-adherents in a belief-system. Overarching all these are our countrymen and our country, the final conditioner of our lives.

One of the curses of human nature is the vendetta: a grudge by one group is avenged, which in turn provokes a new revenge. The cycle continues seemingly without end. The 16th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes recognized that to break the cycle an independent law enforcer was needed. In his major work,
Leviathan
, Hobbes proposed that people should be prevented from taking the law into their own hands. Rather, they should entrust the redressing of grievances to a third party, the state, that would impartially decide the case and carry out any retribution. The state acts as intermediary, prevents revenge, and makes punishment a neutral act. In this spirit, states around the world have instituted systems of justice and punishment on which they have the monopoly. This system has proved to be remarkably successful in reducing tit-for-tat punishments and the overall level of violence in society.

MALE-FEMALE RELATIONS

In most mammal species, males are bigger than females. This is true of elephants, reindeer, lions, and elephant seals. Of our close cousins, the gorilla is at one extreme: the male is twice the size of the female. At the other extreme, chimpanzee males are about the same size as females. Biologists have discovered that this difference between male and female (known as “dimorphism”) is a reliable indication of the amount of physical male competition for females. The biggest gorilla (or reindeer stag) is the one that fights off the male opposition to mate with females. In this way, genes that build large males in these species are more likely to multiply into the next generation.

In humans, males are, on average, 20% bigger than females. This is a strong indication that human males have been hardwired over millennia to physically compete with other males for access to females. This competition has a number of consequences. Males who are not up to success in physical combat might use other strategies. They will form alliances with other males who act as their side-kicks. (Chimpanzees, who do not benefit from physical superiority, deploy this strategy frequently.) So, some males get to their objective by being good at doing deals with other males. All males will be careful to avoid revealing their weaknesses. In this way, males that are genetically programmed to avoid showing their emotions, to avoid signs of distress (such as crying), and to not talk about their feelings will all do better in competition with other males. When males do talk, it will be mainly to convey factual information that reveals nothing about their degree of insecurity.

In contrast, the female of our species is generally physically weaker, less violent, and programmed to cooperate with other females in the foraging workplace. However, they were also in competition with others for resources and favors from “their man.” In this regard, human females have developed two strategies: the first is physical and aggressive, but the second is more prevalent and subtle. This is the use of indirect means to obtain their objective—females who are good at reading moods, analyzing motives, and probing for weakness, and who can use these skills to undermine their rivals, will do best. More of their genes will get into the next generation. Girls begin to show these traits as young as three years old.
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There is a fundamental, and decisive, biological difference between the sexes. The female can only have one pregnancy at a time, while males can impregnate many females at a time. This asymmetry applies throughout the animal kingdom. In the numbers game, genes that get their host male to mate with many females rather than just one will spread faster. There is, therefore, a strong selection pressure for males to mate with as many females as possible. In contrast, there is no selection pressure for females to mate with more than one male. She can still have only one pregnancy at a time and the number of partners makes no difference. In humans, a female’s success in child rearing depends on the commitment of a male to protect her, so she will do even better if she can stop the male from diluting his commitment with other females.

We are all descended from males who, on average, impregnated many different women.
Geneticists estimate that an astonishing 8% of the Mongol population is descended from Genghis Khan, who had many concubines.
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In contrast, we are all descended from females who were good at getting male commitment, were clever at stopping the male from committing to other women, and ruthlessly fought other women for a major share of the male’s resources. Herein lies a strong source of male/female conflict—the genetically programmed male agenda is diametrically opposed to the female one.

Sexual Selection

We have seen that women are attracted to mate with high-status men. How is this status perceived? One powerful criterion is the status that the man has with other men. Other men will accord high status on qualities that appeal to them, not what appeals to women. One of these qualities is futile risk-taking: men will admire another man who indulges in reckless or dangerous behavior. Women are not impressed by the exploits in themselves, but in the importance other men give to them.
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A second criterion is choosing a male who will give them sons who, in their turn, will be attractive mates and provide lots of grandchildren. That means mating, if possible, with a male who is attractive to other females right now. In other words, she might only find him attractive because other females do.

Males are in strong competition to attract a woman. Those who are not naturally endowed might try another tactic—bluff. A man might give outward appearances of being strong and with good commitment potential, but how is the female to be sure? How many of his stories about his exploits are really true? Some males might be good at deception on this score, so the female has to develop finely tuned antennae to detect it.

How do truly meritorious males convince a female that they are not bluffers? One interesting evolutionary strategy is handicapping. The peacock trails a long cumbersome tail behind him, which makes him more vulnerable to predators. So, why do cumbersome-tailed peacock genes persist in the gene pool? The probable answer was first formulated by Israeli researcher Amotz Zahavi.
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It is a way for a peacock to show a peahen that he really is strong: he can carry this burden around and still survive. In modern terms, it is like the man who drives a Hummer rather than a sensible car—he is showing to the females that, in spite of the immense burden of monthly payments and gas costs, he is fully functional and a magnificent source of good genes.

Here, we have a powerful mechanism to explain why “keeping up with the Jones’s” is a ubiquitous preoccupation: status is relative. As soon as Hummers become common, males are driven to take on yet more onerous commitments and habits. They must progressively strive for a higher-status job, move to a better neighborhood, eat at expensive restaurants, and wear pricey designer clothes. Even if the man is married, he cannot step off the treadmill: his wife gets her status from her husband and she will be pushing him just the same.

There is a huge irony in all of this. Evolutionarily speaking, the only purpose of a male striving for high status is to get more matings than average and so more genes into the next generation. In modern Western society, the process of acquiring status symbols becomes the end in itself. The reason? The Western concept of marriage.