Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (6 page)

Just as the Flintstones were “the modern stone-age family,” contemporary scientific speculation concerning prehistoric human life is often distorted by assumptions that
seem
to make perfect sense. But these assumptions can lead us far from the path to truth.

Flintstonization has two parents: a lack of solid data and the psychological need to explain, justify, and celebrate one’s own life and times. But for our purposes, Flintstonization has at least three intellectual grandfathers: Hobbes, Rousseau, and Malthus.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), a lonely, frightened war refugee in Paris, was Flintstoned when he looked into the mists of prehistory and conjured miserable human lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” He conjured a prehistory very much like the world he saw around him in seventeenth-century Europe, yet gratifyingly worse in every respect. Propelled by a very different psychological agenda, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) looked at the suffering and filth of European societies and thought he saw the corruption of a pristine human nature. Travelers’ tales of simple savages in the Americas fueled his romantic fantasies.

The intellectual pendulum swung back toward the Hobbesian view a few decades later when Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) claimed to mathematically demonstrate that extreme poverty and its attendant desperation typify the eternal human condition. Destitution, he argued, is intrinsic to the calculus of mammalian reproduction. As long as population increases geometrically, doubling each generation (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), and farmers can increase the food supply only by adding acreage arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), there will never—
can
never
—be enough for everyone. Thus, Malthus concluded that poverty is as inescapable as the wind and the rain.

Nobody’s fault. Just the way it is. This conclusion was very popular with the wealthy and powerful, who were understandably eager to make sense of their good fortune and justify the suffering of the poor as an unavoidable fact of life.

Darwin’s
eureka
moment was a gift from two terrible Thomases and one friendly Fred: Hobbes, Malthus, and Flintstone, respectively. By articulating a detailed (albeit erroneous) description of human nature and the sorts of lives humans lived in prehistory, Hobbes and Malthus provided the intellectual context for Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Unfortunately, their thoroughly Flintstoned assumptions are fully integrated into Darwin’s thinking and persist to the present day.

The sober tones of serious science often mask the mythical nature of what we’re told about prehistory. And far too often, the myth is dysfunctional, inaccurate, and self-justifying.

Our central ambition for this book is to distinguish some of the stars from the constellations. We believe that the generally accepted myth of the origins and nature of human sexuality is not merely factually flawed, but destructive, sustaining a false sense of what it means to be a human being. This false narrative distorts our sense of our capacities and needs. It amounts to false advertising for a garment that fits almost no one. But we’re all supposed to buy and wear it anyway.

Like all myths, this one seeks to define who and what we are and thus what we can expect and demand from one another.

For centuries, religious authorities disseminated this defining narrative, warning of chatty serpents, deceitful women, forbidden knowledge, and eternal agony. But more recently, it’s been marketed to secular society as hard science.

Examples abound. Writing in the prestigious journal
Science,
anthropologist Owen Lovejoy suggested, “The nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene [1.8 million years ago].”14 Well-known anthropologist Helen Fisher concurs, writing, “Is monogamy natural?” She gives a one-word answer: “Yes.” She then continues, “Among human beings …

monogamy is the rule.”15

Many different elements of human prehistory seem to nest neatly into each other in the standard narrative of human sexual evolution. But remember, that Indian
seemed
to answer Cortés’s question, and it
seemed
indisputable to Pope Urban VIII and just about everyone else that the Earth remained solidly at the center of the solar system. With a focus on the presumed nutritional benefits of pair-bonding, zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley demonstrates the seduction in this apparent unity: “Big brains needed meat … [and] food sharing allowed a meaty diet (because it freed men to risk failure in pursuit of game) … [and] food sharing demanded big brains (without detailed calculating memories, you could easily be cheated by a free-loader).” So far, so good. But now Ridley inserts the sexual steps in his dance: “The sexual division of labor promoted monogamy (a pair bond now being an economic unit); monogamy led to neotenous sexual selection (by putting a premium on youthfulness in mates).” It’s a waltz, with one assumption spinning into the next, circling round and round in “a spiral of comforting justification, proving how we came to be as we are.”16

Note how each element anticipates the next, all coming together in a tidy constellation that seems to explain human sexual evolution.

The distant stars fixed in the standard constellation include:

• what motivated prehuman males to “invest” in a particular female and her children;

• male sexual jealousy and the double standard concerning male versus female sexual autonomy;

• the oft-repeated “fact” that the timing of women’s ovulation is “hidden”;

• the inexplicably compelling breasts of the human female;

• her notorious deceptiveness and treachery, source of many country and blues classics;

• and of course, the human male’s renowned eagerness to screw anything with legs—an equally rich source of musical material.

This is what we’re up against. It’s a song that is powerful, concise, self-reinforcing, and playing on the radio all day and all night … but still wrong, baby, oh so wrong.

The standard narrative is about as scientifically valid as the story of Adam and Eve. In many ways, in fact, it is a scientific retelling of the Fall into original sin as depicted in
Genesis
—complete with sexual deceit, prohibited knowledge, and guilt. It hides the truth of human sexuality behind a fig leaf of anachronistic Victorian discretion repackaged as science. But actual—as opposed to mythical—science has a way of peeking out from behind the fig leaf.

Charles Darwin proposed two basic mechanisms through which evolutionary change occurs. The first, and better known, is
natural selection.
Economic philosopher Herbert Spencer later coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe this mechanism, though most biologists still prefer

“natural selection.” It’s important to understand that evolution is
not
a process of improvement. Natural selection simply asserts that species change as they adapt to ever-changing environments. One of the chronic mistakes made by would-be social Darwinists is to assume that evolution is a process by which human beings or societies become
better.17
It is not.

Those organisms best able to survive in a challenging, shifting environment live to reproduce. As survivors, their genetic code likely contains information advantageous to their offspring in
that particular environment.
But the environment can change at any moment, thus neutralizing the advantage.

Charles Darwin was far from the first to propose that some sort of evolution was taking place in the natural world.

Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had noted the process of differentiation evident in both plants and animals. The big question was
how
it happened: What was the mechanism by which species differentiated from each other? Darwin was particularly struck by the subtle differences in the finches he’d seen on various islands in the Galápagos. This insight suggested that environment was crucial to the process, but until later, he had no way to explain
how
the environment shapes organisms over generations.

What Is Evolutionary Psychology and

Why Should You Care?

Evolutionary theory has been applied to the body pretty much since Darwin published
On the Origin of Species.
He’d been sitting on his theory for decades, fearing the controversy sure to follow its publication. If you want to know why human beings have ears on the sides of their heads and eyes up front, evolutionary theory can tell you, just as it can tell you why birds have their eyes on the sides of their heads and no visible ears at all. Evolutionary theory, in other words, offers explanations of how
bodies
came to be as they are.

In 1975, E. O. Wilson made a radical proposal. In a short, explosive book called
Sociobiology,
Wilson argued that evolutionary theory could be, indeed
must
be, applied to behavior—not

just

bodies.

Later,

to

avoid

rapidly

accumulating negative connotations—some associated with eugenics (founded by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton)—the approach was renamed “evolutionary psychology” (EP).

Wilson proposed to bring evolutionary theory to bear on a few “central questions … of unspeakable importance: How does the mind work, and beyond that why does it work in such a way and not another, and from these two considerations together, what is man’s ultimate nature?” He argued that evolutionary theory is “the essential first hypothesis for any serious consideration of the human condition,” and that “without it the humanities and social sciences are the limited descriptors of surface phenomena, like astronomy without physics, biology without chemistry, and mathematics without algebra.”18

Beginning with
Sociobiology,
and
On Human Nature,
a follow-up volume Wilson published three years later, evolutionary theorists began to shift their focus from eyes, ears, feathers, and fur to less tangible, far more contentious issues such as love, jealousy, mate choice, war, murder, rape, and altruism. Juicy subject matter lifted from epics and soap operas became fodder for study and debate in respectable American universities. Evolutionary psychology was born.

It was a difficult birth. Many resented the implication that our thoughts and feelings are as hard-wired in our genetic code as the shape of our heads or the length of our fingers—and thus presumably as inescapable and unchangeable. Research in EP

quickly became focused on differences between men and women, shaped by their supposedly conflicting reproductive agendas. Critics heard overtones of racial determinism and the smug sexism that had justified centuries of conquest, slavery, and discrimination.

Although Wilson never argued that genetic inheritance
alone
creates psychological phenomena, merely that evolved tendencies
influence
cognition and behavior, his moderate insights were quickly obscured by the immoderate disputes they sparked. Many social scientists at the time believed humans to be nearly completely cultural creatures, blank slates to be marked by society.19 But Wilson’s perspective was highly attractive to other academics eager to introduce a more rigorous scientific methodology into fields they considered overly subjective and distorted by liberal political views and wishful thinking. Decades later, the two sides of the debate remain largely entrenched in their extreme positions: human behavior as genetically determined versus human behavior as socially determined. As you might expect, the truth—and the most valuable science being done in the field—lies somewhere in between these two extremes.

Today, self-proclaimed EP “realists” argue that it’s ancient human nature that leads us to wage war on our neighbors, deceive our spouses, and abuse our stepchildren. They argue that rape is an unfortunate, but largely successful reproductive strategy and that marriage amounts to a no-win struggle of mutually assured disappointment. Romantic love is reduced to a chemical reaction luring us into reproductive entanglements parental love keeps us from escaping. Theirs is an all-encompassing narrative claiming to explain it all by reducing every human interaction to the reptilian pursuit of self-interest.20

Of course, there are many scientists working in evolutionary psychology, primatology, evolutionary biology, and other fields who don’t sign on to the narrative we’re critiquing in these pages, or whose paradigms overlap at some points but differ at others. We hope they’ll forgive us if it sometimes seems we oversimplify in order to more clearly illustrate the broad outlines of the various paradigms without getting lost in the weeds of subtle differences. (Readers seeking more detailed information are encouraged to consult the endnotes.) Evolutionary psychology’s standard narrative contains several clanging contradictions, but one of the most discordant involves female libido. Females, we’re told again and again, are the choosy, reserved sex. Men spend their energies trying to impress women—flaunting expensive watches, packaging themselves in shiny new sports cars, clawing their way to positions of fame, status, and power—all to convince coy females to part with their closely guarded sexual favors. For