Decoding Love (5 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
Accepting this premise will be more difficult than you might imagine. When confronted with evolutionary explanations for their actions, most people deny that those explanations have anything to do with their behavior. For example, if a man sleeps with a lot of women, and you suggest that he is doing that in order to increase the number of his offspring, he will point to the fact that he uses condoms and has no intention of impregnating any of the women. On a conscious level, he will be right. Only it doesn’t explain why he feels driven to sleep with so many women or why he is willing to expend so much time and energy and money to do that. Below the level of conscious thought lies a deep and instinctual desire in men for a variety of female sexual partners. There is a very good evolutionary reason for that desire—the more women he has sex with, the more opportunities he has to pass along his genes to future generations. And it is this unconscious level that we are interested in.
When you start to look at things from an evolutionary point of view, this kind of disconnect between conscious and unconscious explanations is common. Our culture evolves at a much faster rate than our biology. We are perpetually caught in what you might call an evolutionary time lag. Much of what constitutes our most fundamental drives and instincts developed hundreds of thousands of years ago to deal with the challenges of living in the grassy savanna of Africa. But the fact that our lives no longer resemble those of our prehistoric ancestors doesn’t mean that we have also discarded that evolutionary heritage. So, for now, we need to explore the law of the jungle to get a better understanding of just what goes on between men and women.
First, a little background on Charles Darwin, who has had a rough go of it in this country. A substantial portion of Americans still don’t believe in evolution, but that’s nothing new for Darwin, who has been fighting an uphill battle for quite some time. He first made the case for evolution in
Origin of the Species
—his most famous work—in 1859. But we’re interested in a later work of Darwin’s, his 1871 book
Descent of Man
, which explains one aspect of evolution: sexual selection.
Origin of the Species
—his most famous work—in 1859. But we’re interested in a later work of Darwin’s, his 1871 book
Descent of Man
, which explains one aspect of evolution: sexual selection.
When we think of Darwin, most of us remember the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” or what is known as natural selection. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is a subset of that, what you might call “reproduction of the fittest.” To put it in the most basic terms, natural selection has to do with the ability to adapt to the environment, while sexual selection is concerned with how to acquire mates. And it turns out that sexual selection is really the essential element because the key to any animal’s success is not simply his or her ability to survive but also his or her ability to pass along genes to future generations. In other words, you can be the fastest male Kudu around, but if you don’t know how to make it with a female Kudu, you won’t matter from an evolutionary standpoint. If Darwin’s original ideas about evolution were slow to gain acceptance, the speed at which sexual selection gained adherents was glacial.
If you are willing to take the Darwinian view seriously, I have some good news, some bad news, and one disappointing truth. First, the good news. You are a spectacular evolutionary success story, representing an unbroken chain of thousands of ancestors who managed not just to survive but to attract a sexual partner and successfully rear a child. So, let me be the first to say, kudos to you!
Now, for the bad news. You are surrounded by people who are every bit as much of an evolutionary success as you are. In fact, you are caught in what biologists have called a Red Queen situation, named for the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass
, who says to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.” And that’s the situation all of us find ourselves in now. You see, no matter how well we adapt to our current environment, our competition and our enemies keep adapting as well. We don’t have to worry too much about our enemies anymore. Very few of us are likely to be eaten by a lion after all, but we have to worry a great deal about our competition, i.e., other humans, billions strong and growing more numerous every day.
Through the Looking Glass
, who says to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.” And that’s the situation all of us find ourselves in now. You see, no matter how well we adapt to our current environment, our competition and our enemies keep adapting as well. We don’t have to worry too much about our enemies anymore. Very few of us are likely to be eaten by a lion after all, but we have to worry a great deal about our competition, i.e., other humans, billions strong and growing more numerous every day.
And now for the disappointing truth. Dating—the whole effort to find a lifetime partner with whom to mate—doesn’t just seem hard. It is hard. And it’s supposed to be hard. That’s the necessary outgrowth of a Red Queen situation. Do you ever watch television shows from the 1950s or even the 1980s and find that they seem slow, that the dialogue and plot are crude, the characters shallow and obvious? That’s a cultural example of the kind of Red Queen situation I’m discussing. You’ve come to expect faster pacing and more complex characters. In short, you’ve become a much more sophisticated consumer of television shows than the previous generation. The problem is that everyone else has become more sophisticated as well, so your growth in understanding doesn’t provide a competitive advantage. It only helps you keep pace with the pack. Now, imagine the same scenario for dating. All your hard work in terms of looking good and developing an interesting personality only serves to hold your place. That’s why it seems so difficult. The romantic story line blinds us to that fact by serving up the fantasy that finding the right person is as easy as slipping your foot into a glass slipper.
I have an added piece of good news. If you accept Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection, then the animal kingdom can shed quite a bit of light on the nature of human relationships. Before I turn to the world of animals, though, I want to add one caveat. I will be discussing biological tendencies, but that is not the same thing as offering moral justifications. For example, just because men have an evolutionary tendency to commit adultery, that does not mean adultery is okay. We are not slaves to our biological urges. We are also products of cultures that establish certain moral and legal codes. But we’ll get to cultural explanations in the next chapter.
So, let’s look at man the animal. Our closest relatives are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The first hominid (not yet a homo sapien but of the same genus) diverged from them roughly six to seven million years ago, which is far more recent than the fifteen to twenty million years biologists once thought separated us. This is actually a very short time in evolutionary terms. At the molecular level, there is only about a 1 percent difference between humans and chimpanzees. We are closer to the chimpanzee than the chimpanzee is to the orangutan, and chimps are not only our closest relative—we are their closest relative as well.
Over the years, biologists have claimed any number of differences between us and primates, only to see them fall by the way-side. The latest—and one of the most sophisticated—is the claim that humans are the only ones to have a theory of mind (the ability to imagine what other people are thinking), but recent experiments have revealed even that order of higher-level thinking to be something that chimpanzees exhibit.
Of course, if we accept that chimps and bonobos are our closest relatives, we are left with one absolutely essential question: are we more like chimps or bonobos? The question carries larger implications than you may realize. Just take the matter of sex. With chimpanzees, power is used to resolve questions about sex. With bonobos, though, sex is used to resolve questions of power. Needless to say, this leads to two very different social orders. With chimpanzees, males dominate, and there is a very strict hierarchy. Alliances are constantly forming and re-forming to try to topple the dominant male chimpanzee who has extensive, although not exclusive, control of sexual access to the females. There is a great deal of posturing and even violence, and it is not uncommon for chimpanzees to kill one another. Think of how violent gangs act in prison, and you have a rough human approximation of a chimpanzee society.
But bonobos are like bizarro chimps. Their social order flips everything on its head. In a bonobo troop, the females dominate. Consequently, male aggression is greatly reduced. And because the males do not have to jockey with one another for sexual access, the males spend a lot less time trying to rise in the hierarchy. If there is a dispute, bonobos generally resolve it using sex and engage in an incredibly diverse array of sexual practices. Picture the most freewheeling sexual commune from the late sixties in America, and you probably have the closest approximation to bonobo society in this country’s history. Talk about giving peace a chance! As primatologist Frans de Waal has aptly put it, we are left with a choice between the power hungry and brutal chimp or the peace-loving and erotic bonobo.
This has implications not just for our sex lives but for our political lives as well. According to de Waal, primate evolution suggests that rigid hierarchies came first and that equality only developed much later. Monkeys display a rigid hierarchy, and chimpanzees are somewhere in between monkeys and our own attempts at equality. Lest we think that we Americans have long thrown off any vestiges of a rigidly stratified past, our own voices betray our less egalitarian roots. Below 500 hertz, the voice produces meaningless noise. If you filter out the high-pitched noise, you will hear only a low hum. But it turns out that this noise is a hidden window into the unconscious way we are always monitoring our status within a group. During a conversation between two people, the two voices tend to converge, but the amazing part is that the lower-status person is always the one who makes the largest adjustment toward the pitch of the higher-status person. In a study of guests on
Larry King
, Dan Quayle made the most obvious adjustment of any of King’s guests, which should give us some sympathy for the hapless former vice president. Although we are the most sophisticated animals when it comes to communication, with a vast and complicated language, words blind us to these other levels of communication, so much so that a number of studies have shown that animals can better intuit our moods than we can ourselves.
Larry King
, Dan Quayle made the most obvious adjustment of any of King’s guests, which should give us some sympathy for the hapless former vice president. Although we are the most sophisticated animals when it comes to communication, with a vast and complicated language, words blind us to these other levels of communication, so much so that a number of studies have shown that animals can better intuit our moods than we can ourselves.
Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut answer about whether humans are more like chimps or bonobos, although recent times provide far more examples of societies organized around violence and hierarchy than they do of societies organized around freewheeling sex. But perhaps the most crucial element of comparison is a key difference. Despite all of our similarities, we diverge from chimps and bonobos in one absolutely essential respect—we are the only ones to form long-term pair bonds. And that difference has enormous ramifications.
The question is, why? What force caused this behavior in human beings? The answer is quite simple: children. Our babies are born in an almost absurdly helpless condition and remain that way for a long time. Based on studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies (which roughly approximate our original evolutionary environment), children aren’t able to produce as much food as they eat until they are about fifteen years old. So, pair-bonding was likely a biological necessity. If women were left to raise the children completely on their own with no help from the father, many fewer children would have survived until adulthood—a far more ruthless calculus than what we find in the romantic story line and one that continues to have more relevance today than we care to admit. Have you ever wondered why evil stepparents are so often at the center of children’s fairy tales? It turns out that there is a good reason for this widespread cultural anxiety—a stepchild is
sixty-five times
more likely to be fatally abused than a child living with his or her biological parents.
sixty-five times
more likely to be fatally abused than a child living with his or her biological parents.
But pair-bonding didn’t just happen overnight. Humans had to evolve in a manner that reinforced the pair-bond, which they did in a number ways. Let’s start with sex. The first question is, why even have sex? From a genetic standpoint, it is inefficient, since only 50 percent of your genes are passed to your child. There are plenty of other methods of reproduction—some of them positively mind-boggling—that have evolved in the natural world: multisexual for the swingers out there, female only for the feminists, bisexual for the indecisive, asexual for the squeamish, parthenogenesis (virgin birth) for the Christian, and even a few species in which the sex of an individual animal can change back and forth for the transgendered. We could easily pass along our genes far more effectively if we had gone down the path of asexual reproduction, for example. The problem is that this would have left us vulnerable to parasites, which evolve much faster than we do. How much faster? It took millions of years and roughly 250,000 generations for us to split from chimpanzees and become homo sapiens. For E. coli bacteria to experience a similar number of generations would take only nine years. So, sex was the method humans and other animals evolved to fight back against parasites. Simply put, sex allows for far more genetic variation and helps keep us from succumbing to our various bacterial and viral invaders—another classic Red Queen situation in which our evolving immune systems are working hard, simply not to fall behind the parasites attacking us.
When it comes to sex, men and women can congratulate themselves on being the great endurance athletes of the primate world. No, we can’t match chimpanzees or bonobos or many other species in the frequency of our sexual encounters, but we blow away virtually every other primate when it comes to the duration of our coitus. Pygmy chimps clock in at a lightning-fast fifteen seconds, which seems unbelievably short until you consider the common chimpanzee, which manages to get the job done in only seven seconds (although this does not mean that female chimps aren’t enjoying themselves. According to one study, female chimps can have an orgasm after only twenty or so thrusts). This is roughly on par with baboons, who take about fifteen pelvic thrusts. Gorillas come in at a leisurely one minute. Meanwhile, the average American couple has barely begun, averaging a full four minutes. We are bested only by the orangutan, which averages about fifteen minutes for copulation, but we’ll leave them to one side since they are obviously busy getting it on with one another.
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