Philosophy of Biology

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Evolutionary Ethics 231

higher than men’s [Kenricket al., 1990]; further, there are good evolutionary
reasons for this: namely that, as Trivers remarks, “errors in mate selection are
generally more expensive to females than to males” [Trivers, 1972]. However, the
role of aggression in the formation of human relationships is not distinguished in
Ridley’s comment from its often futile or tragic role in attempts at relationship
maintenance, nor is the vernacular sense of the term competition effectively dis-
tinguished from the technical sense, rendering his remarks somewhat misleading.
Aggression plays at best a ritualistic role in human mate-selection (tournaments,
etc.), and while men initiate, or decline to initiate socio-legal marriage propos-
als in most societies, the preferences of women are decisive at very early stages
of courtship, rendering aggression somewhat beside the point. Women appear to
have an innate or easily learned mastery of “courtship de-escalation strategies”
[Moore, 1998], and female dominance in this realm has been observed in elephant
seal, mice, fish, rats, gorillas, monkeys and birds [ibid.].


Women’s capacity for attachment meanwhile is a salient feature of the pheno-
type, evidently distinguishing women from peahens. Its adaptive significance is
unclear. Love has been hypothesized as a form of stop! command that “may
facilitate rapid decision by putting strong limits on the search for information or
alternatives,” insofar as checking out many potential partners wastes time and
the best discarded candidates are unlikely to remain available [Gigerenzeret al.,
1999, 292, 363]. But it may also be the case that, as with birdsong, nature has
invented the keys needed to unlock certain locks. Dawkins’s suggestion that the
effects animals exert over each other serve their own interests, not that of their
helplessly mesmerized targets, is worth considering in this connection.


“In principle”, as many evolutionary theorists never tire of pointing out, a man
can father thousands of children — and neglect them too. A man can have —
and some men with extraordinary coercive powers, economic leverage, or a flair
for deception do have — two or more full-term children whose birthdays are nine
months apart or less, whereas a woman cannot and no women do. An average
man is, however, statistically no more likely to father a child every time he takes a
different woman to bed than every time he takes the same woman. Since he is in
competition with other men, many of his attempted seductions will not succeed,
and most of his successful seductions will not result in a child. As astonishing as
it might seem, the average number of offspring an average man can expect to fa-
ther is exactly the same as the average number of offspring an average woman can
expect to bear! Under conditions probably obtaining in the Early Adaptive Envi-
ronment — a low fat diet, consumption of fertility-depressing phytoestrogens, and
prolonged lactation — this number was probably 4-5. The variance between men
in this respect may have been considerable, but we do not know how great it was in
earlier environments. Nor do we know how much of this variance depended onbe-
haviouralstrategies, including promiscuous or nonpromiscuous sexual behaviour,
paternal and spousal care, the provision of food, or status-seeking, as opposed to
nonbehaviouralbut potentially equally effective biological strategies such as pos-
sessing good looks, or a good immune system, or other such characteristics. In

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