High Tide in Tucson (7 page)

Maybe this has happened to you: You are curled up on the sofa, with an afghan maybe, and the person you love is there too. You are female, because, I'm sorry, but I have the typewriter and you have to be what I say. And he is male. He is watching a contest of an athletic nature on TV, and you, well, you are present and accounted for. The contest is basketball, say, UCLA against Duke, in the NCAA playoffs. He's rooting for UCLA. You are confused. You were under the impression that he despised UCLA with a purple passion.

“Two weeks ago,” you point out carefully, in the interest of scientific inquiry, “you were calling UCLA a bunch of galoots. You said they couldn't hit the side of a barn.”

“Two weeks ago they were playing
us
. But now Arizona's out of the tournament,” he explains, in that masculine sort of
voice that can make any wild thing sound reasonable.

“But it's the same players,” you persist, not wanting to make a fuss, but really. Once a galoot, always a galoot, it would seem to you. Nobody changes
that
much in two weeks, barring a religious experience, or steroids.

He sighs then, and patiently explains the hierarchy of loyalties: First you root for your home team. Then, if they're out of the picture, you root for other members of your conference.

“Even the
Sun Devils
?” you ask, dismayed. The Devils are your hometown team's nearest and bitterest rivals. The peak experience for a Devils fan is to sneak into Tucson and paint some important civic landmark such as the mayor in their school's colors.

“If the Devils were the only PAC 10 team left in the tournament, then sure, I'd want them to win.” In an entirely even tone he says this perfectly preposterous thing, as if he is a chemistry professor announcing to an earnest, note-taking classroom that a new element in the periodic table of elements has been named after Donald Duck.

I've heard it many times. Not lately—it's been years, in fact, since Devils or Wildcats or Buffalo Bills or anything in tight pants and a helmet came into my house, because no one here is that interested. We tend to hold with Lorena Hickok, a columnist in the 1920s for the
Minneapolis Morning Tribune
, who observed of college football that “you might just as well put in your time watching a lot of ants running in and out of their hole. That is, if there isn't anything else you'd rather be doing right then.” I'm sorry if I'm tipping sacred cows here. I don't mean to say I'm
above
watching organized sports. Possibly
below
it, for the fact is I'd rather watch ants. Draw your own conclusions.

But I am interested in sports as a concept, especially where it
serves, like religion, as a touchstone for essential human longings. The entitlement to root for a different team each week is a little baffling, when held against other things we're supposed to take as self-evident. Love is eternal, isn't it? What is this slippery business, this hierarchy of shifting loyalties that glide in and out of place as methodically as the gears on a racing bike taking a hill? At first I suspected this creative fudge of allegiance had something to do with gender. I figured it was just one more, of those mysteries withheld from women but revealed to men in their tender boyhoods, along with oil level vs. oil pressure, and how to believe you still look fine in a swimsuit once you've acquired love handles.

Determined to get to the bottom of it, I phoned a friend who has season tickets and wouldn't for love nor money miss an Arizona Wildcats game. And who is female. “Oh, no, I'd never root for the Sun Devils,” she said without hesitation. “As far as I'm concerned it's Arizona or nobody.”

Why? It's personal, she explained. After watching those six-foot-ten-and-still-growing boys play ball every Thursday night, you feel you know them. It's like they're your kids.

My friend paused; her tone was not all that maternal. “And let's face it,” she added, “they've got great buns.”

She allowed that her husband didn't share this outlook. “Oh, sure, he roots for other PAC 10 teams when they're not playing the Wildcats,” she told me with a hint of scorn. “He'll root for anybody.”

What is loyalty worth, if it's situational? This trend I was uncovering among certain sports fans reminded me of the song that suggests, if you can't be with your sweetie, you should love the sweetie who's handy. Whatever happened to “I'd rather be blue over you than happy with somebody new?”

Unquestionably, things like loyalty and territorial attachment
are
situational, from Candlestick Park to the Halls of Montezuma and in places far more ordinary. Even a dog, whose species has cornered the loyalty market, will show this weakness. I used to have one like that. She was a shepherd mongrel with a wild hair, half coyote. Her coyote instincts served her well for a good lifetime, steering her clear of what Darwin thought of as “nature red in tooth and claw” (though it was Tennyson who put it that way; Darwin couldn't have been that concise if his life depended on it). Out here in the desert, “tooth and claw” means prickly-pear spine and rattlesnake fang. My dog Jessie would often run congenially with small packs of coyotes, until she came within a stone's throw of the house. Then, brought up short against the sight of which side her bread was buttered on—which is to say, me—she would whirl around and make a big show of chasing her erstwhile friends out of the territory. I watched this happen dozens of times. One could argue conflicting genetic paradigms, or one could argue dog chow. Either way, Fido is an infidel.

It could be worse. Years ago as a graduate student I helped do a study of desert pupfish—a small, unglamorous species whose mating behavior is so opportunistic it would make Lolita blush. Pupfish live in ephemeral streams where populations fluctuate fairly drastically. When females are scarce, the male will hunt down a mate and swim faithfully by her side, for richer or for poorer, monogamous as Bob Cratchit. But when the tide turns and there's a surplus of females, the model-husband pupfish becomes a bantam-weight macho terror. He puffs out his little blue fins and claims a patch of river bottom as his private singles scene, performing all manner of gyrations to lure in the babes, who eventually do meander in to lay their eggs. Possibly they are rolling their eyes, muttering to one another about midlife crisis
and the trophy wife. Darwin was right; nature is no picnic. It's an office party.

But it's not fair to cast this as a bad-boy business; females are no consistent models of fidelity either. Female elk are known to copulate with many males in the same day—and that's hardly the worst that can happen. The hills are alive with black-widow stories. A female praying mantis rewards her husband's conjugal exertions by eating his head; basically, that is their prenuptial agreement. And octopus mating, in its own special way, eclipses the tawdrily famous Bobbitts: the male octopus does not come equipped with a penis so he's obliged to offer his girlfriend a tough little packet of sperm (some valentine, that) by grasping it in a tentacle and shoving it down her breathing siphon. She responds to his overture by attempting to rip him apart. “These matings may be so violent,” writes Robert A. Wallace in a forthright account, “that if the male has managed to insert his arm into the female's siphon, it may be literally torn from his body. After such an encounter, the female can be seen swimming alone, bearing the grisly memento of a previous coupling.”

In a disenchanting revision of some cherished folklore, biologists are discovering that monogamy is rarer than unicorns in the animal world. Many species touted as mating for life—swans, bluebirds, Australian fairy wrens—are turning out to be hardcore sneaks. The tools of molecular genetics, similar to the tests used in human paternity suits, have shown that in the nest of the average fairy wren, one egg in five is sired by another wren's mate. Among all songbirds that have been examined in this way, the count is closer to one in three. It turns out the bluebird of happiness wrote the book on free love.

Our culture counts fidelity as a virtue, but where reproduction is concerned, it's more of a strategy. Monogamy is most
likely to be practiced by creatures who have such pathetically helpless or numerous young it takes two frazzled parents to bring them to the self-supporting stage. Think of it as Darwinian family values: if a mate abandons the family, only to leave behind starved kids and nary a gene passed on, he or she is a biological dead end. So, for species in which the parenting demand is extreme, the biological directive that survives through the generations is the gene that sings out, “Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.”

This trend, predicting less promiscuity among species with a high parenting demand, bears out pretty well. Birds have the daunting egg chore and then a shrieking brood with mouths literally bigger than their bodies, so the parents do at least put up a show of keeping to the straight and narrow. Among mammals, monogamy is almost unknown, but it's adhered to by certain mice, voles, and pigs that have altricial (meaning pink, squirmy, frightfully helpless) young. Virtually all primates are promiscuous except the few species that always bear twins. In reptiles and amphibians, whose parenting style is best described as “hit and run,” mate loyalty is out of the question.

Whether or not humans spent their millions of prelegal years being faithful to one true love is anyone's guess. If you look around now, you'll find every arrangement imaginable: wives who routinely take several husbands at once in the Himalayas; the reverse in Africa and Utah; serial monogamy in Polynesia and the contemporary United States. Many societies that aspire to monogamy are blunt about the loopholes, by recognizing a type of lineage anthropologists call avuncular: a child's paternal agent is the mother's brother, since he's the closest adult male who is known, with certainty, to be the child's blood relative.

We are a tough study. It's true our young are born fragile and
witless as they come. But we are long-lived, too, and have so many opportunities to rethink the mate choice. “Rethink” is an important word—maybe we've traveled far enough from our origins so that biology has little to do with our amorous destiny. The wide variety of mating strategies we adopt across different cultures would suggest anything but biological determinism. But the battle of the sexes is such a persistent, bittersweet mystery the popular imagination seems convinced we are hard-wired for
la différence
. One extremely well-plowed argument goes this way: a male can increase his genes in the population by impregnating as many females as humanly possible, but it's to a female's advantage—since childbearing becomes her burden—to choose a mate who appears provident, loyal, thrifty, and inclined to stick around. So, the argument goes, men are predisposed to promiscuity, and women to being picky about their mates. Is it engraved upon us, this thing called adultery? It's an unanswerable question that seems to enthrall us no end. Physical anthropologists and sociobiologists have produced far more reams on the subject than Hugh Hefner ever did.

Sociobiology, which made a big splash in the seventies, threw some valuable light on the field of evolutionary biology, but it also threw some hooey into the kettle, where human behavior is concerned. Edward O. Wilson produced an incendiary book,
On Human Nature
, in which he asserted that there are biological bases for a large number (he implies, all) of the characteristics that are general enough to be called our “nature,” and which we've integrated into our culture, political systems, and economy. I applaud Wilson (one of the world's preeminent biologists) for trying to bring humans back into the fold of nature. But he was roundly and rightly attacked, I think, for presuming that so much of human behavior—everything from armed combat to flirtation—
is directed by our genes. In seeking biological explanations Wilson provided almost no direct evidence for genetic control (as there is almost none to be found). He relied instead on analogy and “just-so” stories, suggesting that if a behavior appears to increase our likelihood of survival in certain contexts it must be biologically programmed. He ignored other levels of pressure—the social, material, and economic contexts—that influence decision making in the enormously flexible human brain.
On Human Nature
tried to draw us out onto the ice-thin proposition of biology as a new code of ethics: We are what we are, not because “God made us that way,” but because four million years of natural selection did. And we'd better pay attention, Wilson warned, citing as a cautionary tale an example of enforced gender equality in an Israeli kibbutz, against which women rebelled and demanded more time with their children. (He neglected to mention that in this great experiment women were encouraged to value and perform men's work, but not the reverse, so women ended up doing both.) If we wish to change society, he wrote, “we can teach and reward and coerce. But in so doing, we must consider the price…measured in time and energy required for training and enforcement and in the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our innate predispositions.” As science-based ethics replace those of religion, Wilson argued, our unconscious motives will drop out, we'll know what we're really capable of, and the truth will set us free.

Oh, but Dr. Wilson, which truth? Never in the deep blue sea will we ever be that conscious of our motives. The problem with identifying the biological roots of such things as sexism, aggression, and racism is that we're looking at our past through spectacles tinted with sexism, aggression, and racism.
On Human Nature
devotes a full chapter to the innateness of gender roles, in which
women are passive and men naturally aggressive. (Not because God made us that way, but allegedly because it helped us survive.) Wilson began developing this line of thinking in an earlier book,
Sociobiology
, in which he wrote, “The populace of an American industrial city, no less than a band of hunter-gatherers in the Australian desert, is organized around [the nuclear family]….During the day the women and children remain in the residential area while the men forage for game or its symbolic equivalent.” He took this to be self-evident, and worked backward to construct a biological rationale for the arrangement. Stunningly, he did this in spite of the fact that in 1975, the year of the book's publication, 47 percent of all U.S. women aged sixteen and over were out working for the “symbolic equivalent,” holding down two out of every five jobs.