236 Catherine Wilson
ests. Or, under modern conditions, women’s evolutionarily-developed preferences
may no longer correspond to their all things considered interests, their actual com-
petencies, or the benefit their greater participation would in fact bring in terms of
the peacefulness, health, political stability, and aesthetics of the common world.
While Evolutionary Ethicists tend to regard convergence towards a single norm
as an example of the attempted override of a natural system that is bound to pro-
voke confusion and resentment, defenders of the single norm insist that the high
degree of polarization of modern societies is itself an example of override by non-
biological replicating memes. For it is a feature of the human phenotype that it is
capable of generating and maintaining institutions, elements of the extended phe-
notype, that serve some interests at the expense of others. A better understanding
of human nature promises, in Pinker’s very appropriate terms, “a naturalness in
human relationships, encouraging us to treat people in terms of how they do feel
rather than how some theory says they ought to feel”. Certainly, additional incre-
ments of effort would be required to e.g., teach or acculturate women to smile only
as much as men do, and additional increments of effort (or perhaps just large doses
of drugs) would be required to e.g., teach or acculturate men to care for infants
with the same success rate in keeping them alive as women. But the notion that
the costs of greater equality require these sorts of adjustments, and that the costs
of more relevant adjustments are unpayable, is untenable.
It is useful to remember that psychological dimorphism is constrained by the
same features as physical dimorphism and that, embryologically, males are modi-
fications of the underlying female type. The remarkable shift of attitudes within
a single generation in Europe and North America with respect to direct paternal
care is significant in this connection, in showing that Barash’s casual view that
males “rely largely on the females to take it from there” ignores certain latent
potentials that the naturalist R ́eamur noticed in the 18thcentury and that Dar-
win commented upon in 1875. “A cock, by being long confined in solitude and
darkness, can be taught to take charge of young chickens; he then utters a pecu-
liar cry, and retains during his whole life this newly acquired maternal instinct.”
[Darwin, 1875, II: 26–7] That such drastic priming measures are not needed in
human beings [Hrdy, 1999, 205ff.] is indicated by the fact that this shift, though
triggered by abstract philosophical considerations of equality, seems in many cases
to reflect the revealed preferences of men, preferences that could not be expressed
without shame in earlier two norms systems.
To summarize, the study of reproductive strategies has the potential to shed
a great deal of light on moral and social issues, ranging from childcare and the
division of labour, to divorce and inheritance laws, and the function of education
in both enhancing existing competencies and in compensating for or controlling
deficiencies and imprudent tendencies. Yet it is the sector of evolutionary theory
most liable to confusion and distortion. It resembles in this respect earlier dis-
courses on sexuality [Foucault, 1988, 54 et passim; Kitcher, 1985]. It is striking,
for example, how little effort is often made to think through the consequences of
the limited and obscurely signaled fertility of human females by contrast with that