If you want to understand the emotional spigots that turn on theattractions, passions, and infatuations that course through you, it helps to think of yourself as a gene machine with a single-minded evolutionary past. But this common goal implies different tendencies for men and women. Men, at heart, are quantity creatures; women go for quality.
In recent years a small but growing group of scholars has taken the work of darwin and his successors and carried it into the social sciences with the aim of overhauling them. These evolutionary psychologists are trying, in a sense, to discern human nature, a deep unity within members of our species. In culture after culture, we see a thirst for social approval, a capacity for guilt. You might call these, and many other human universals, "the knobs of human nature." The exact tunings of these knobs differ from person to person; one person's guilt knob is set low and another person's is painfully high.
How do these knobs get set? Genetic differences among individuals sure play a role, but perhaps a larger role is played by a species-wide developmental program that absorbs information from the social environment and adjusts the maturing mind accordingly. Oddly, future progress in grasping the importance of the environment will probably come from thinking about genes.
The questions addressed by evolutionary psychologists range from the mundane to the spiritual and touch on just about everything that matters: racism, friendship, neurosis, sibling rivalry, war, altruism, guilt, the unconscious mind, even social climbing. No human behavior, however, affects the transmission of genes more obviously than sex. So no parts of human psychology are clearer candidates for evolutionary explanation than the states of mind that lead to sex: raw lust, dreamy infatuation, sturdy love, and so on--the basic forces amid which people all over the world have come of age.
The recently popular premise that men and women are basically identical in nature seems to have fewer and fewer defenders. A whole school of feminists--the "difference feminists"--now accept that men and women are deeply different.
The first step toward understanding the basic imbalance of the sexes is to assume hypothetically the role natural selection plays in designing a species. Suppose you're in charge of instilling, in the minds of human beings, rules of behavior that will guide them through life, the object of the game being to make each person behave in such a way that he or she is likely to have lots of offspring--offspring, moreover, who themselves have lots of offspring.
When playing the Administrator of Evolution, and trying to maximize genetic legacy, you may quickly discover that this goal implies different tendencies for men and women. Men can reproduce hundreds of times a year, assuming they can persuade enough women to cooperate, and assuming there aren't any laws against polygamy--which there assuredly weren't in the ancestral environment where much of our evolution took place.
Women, on the other hand, can't reproduce more than once a year. The asymmetry lies partly in the high price of eggs; in all species they're bigger and rarer than minuscule, mass-produced sperm. But the asymmetry is exaggerated by the details of mammalian reproduction: the egg's lengthy conversion into an organism happens inside the female, and she can't handle many projects at once.
So while there are various reasons why it could make Darwinian sense for a woman to mate with more than one man, there comes a time when having more sex just isn't worth the trouble. Better to get some rest and grab a bite to eat. For a man, unless he's really on the brink of collapse or starvation, that time never comes. Each new partner offers a very real chance to get more genes into the next generation--a much more valuable prospect, in the Darwinian calculus, than a nap or a meal. As the evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have put it, for males "there is always the possibility of doing better."
There's a sense in which a female can do better, too, but it has to do with quality, not quantity. Giving birth involves a huge commitment of time and energy, and nature has put a low ceiling on how many such enterprises she can undertake. So each child, from her (genetic) point of view, is an extremely precious gene machine. Its ability to survive is of mammoth importance. It makes Darwinian sense, then, for a woman to be selective about the man who is going to help her build each gene machine. She should size up an aspiring partner before letting him in on the investment, asking herself what he'll bring to the project.
The reason: At some point, extensive male parental investment entered our evolutionary lineage. Fathers everywhere help feed, teach, support, and defend their children. Throw this into the equation, and suddenly the female is concerned not only with the male's genetic investment, but with what resources he'll bring to the offspring after it materializes.
Tags:
common goal,
evolution,
evolutionary explanation,
genetic differences,
human psychology,
infatuation,
infatuations,
knobs,
love,
lust,
passions,
raw lust,
sibling rivalry,
social environment,
states of mind,
unconscious mind
