At the end of the tour, after a few polite questions, tips, and halfhearted “thank yous,” we returned to our overstuffed Subaru. Natalie and Serafina sat in their car seats, solemn and quiet. I could feel them trying to map words their parents had used just prior to this misadventure (“family,” “kind of like husbands and wives,” “new babies,” “love”) onto the raw spectacle of elephant seal reproduction. What a flawed endeavor it is to map a concept in the English language (“love,” “family,” “husbands and wives”) onto the immense variety of reproductive arrangements in nature or, for that matter, the complexities and nuances of love.
Had I had the right words and temerity (and had they been several years older), I would have reassured my daughters with new studies from the evolutionary biology of reproduction, so sharply summarized in The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and The Ant and the Peacock by Helena Cronin. Elephant seals are a tournament species, where males devote much of their energy and psyche to violent, winner-take-all competitions for large harems. Humans are more on the pair-bonding end of the continuum, closer to the gibbon, the delicate sea horse, certain voles, and many bird species. In the 8,000 pair-bonding species, like humans, the male is less differentiated than the female in terms of size or florid color, and there is less radical variability in the reproductive outcomes of males (in elephant seals such as those that we observed, almost all offspring are sired by the alpha male). Their future boyfriends, still many years away, would not hoard dozens of girlfriends in the lunchroom and fill entire daycares with their offspring. Instead, they would be theirs and only theirs, at least for awhile.
There is more. In humans, the default is for monogamy, and not the harem tendencies of the elephant seals (no need to unsettle their trust in my marriage with a discussion of the universality of serial monogamy). Sure, one can find elephant seal-like arrangements in human history, in particular in the early emergence of civilizations around the world, when powerful kings started to hoard resources and claim harems in the thousands. The Inca sun king Atahualpa kept 1,500 women in “houses of virgins” located throughout his kingdom, chosen for their pristine beauty most typically before the age of eight. The Indian emperor Udayama kept 16,000 consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guarded by eunuchs. But in early hunter-gatherer culture and in contemporary industrialized cultures, the robust tendency is toward serial monogamy and the intricate challenges of one woman and one man conducting a life together.
Unlike those elephant seals, I would have continued, human males actively contribute to the raising of the offspring. In over 90 percent of mammals, the female is the sole provider of care to offspring; the male doesn’t lift a hand or change a metaphorical diaper. We are different. Human males have the capacity for levels of care for offspring reminiscent of the devotion of the sea horse, the gibbon, and many birds. Tens of thousands of fathers in the United States are primary caretakers, changing diapers, pushing swings, reading Babar and the tongue-twisting wisdom of Dr. Seuss, negotiating sibling conflicts, playing rough-and-tumble, speaking “motherese.”
I would have reminded my daughters that we make friendships. Humans in nonreproductive relations do not flop around like those elephant seals, little cognizant of one another, except in confrontations over mating opportunities. Humans feel deep love for nonkin, in particular for friends. This they would have readily grasped, for they already had folded into devoted friendships. We even feel elevating love for our own kind, humanity, and other species.
Had I had the words or notion, I would have told my daughters that outside of the love they feel for each other (and other kin), there are four great loves in life. There is the love between parent and child, the passion for sexual partners, the enduring devotion for long-term pair-bonders, and the softer but rock-solid love for nonkin, most typically friends and fellow humans.
THE NOT-SO-INVISIBLE HAND
On a chilly January morning in 1800, a dirty, naked twelve-year-old boy, scampering around on hands and feet, was spotted digging for potatoes in the fields of the French village of Saint-Sernin. He was an abandoned child, not uncommon during the era. He had survived for years on his own in the forest, scavenging for acorns and hunting small animals, deprived of the warm care of parents.
The owner of the field captured the wild-eyed boy and took him home. The boy, soon to be named Victor, prowled restlessly on all fours. He refused to wear clothes. He defecated in public and rejected all food except acorns and potatoes. His communication was restricted to grunts, howls, and cackles. He was unresponsive to the human voice and language but would turn quickly at the sounds of nuts being cracked. He never smiled, cried, touched, or met the gaze of other humans.
Eventually, Jean Itard, a twenty-six-year-old doctor from the Paris Deaf-Mute Institute, took Victor—the “Wild Boy of Aveyron”—into his custody, and devoted five years to teaching Victor language and the intricacies of human ways. There were telling successes: Victor did learn to wear clothes, sleep in beds, eat at a table, and take baths. Most notably, he came to feel affection for Jean Itard.
There were telling failures. In spite of the intensive instruction, Victor only learned a few words. He never learned to get along with others (at a dinner party at a wealthy socialite’s home, designed to show off his progress, he wolfed down his food, stuffed desserts into his pockets, stripped to his underwear, and leaped through the trees like a monkey). Victor resembled the other thirty-five documented cases of feral children: They do not develop language, morals, or manners; they remain largely unresponsive to humans; they fail to fold into cooperative relations with other people; they show no sexual interest; and they lack self-awareness. The first great love is what Victor never felt, that between parent or caretaker and child. This love enables what it means to be human; it turns on our tendency toward jen.
Philosophers (to some extent), poets (to a greater extent), and novelists (to an even greater extent) have long recognized that the love between parent and child is the foundation of human mind, character, and culture. It would take a maverick intellectual, John Bowlby, integrating the latest in evolutionist thinking and the musings of Freud, to spur the scientific study of parent-child love. Given the profound vulnerability of human offspring, Bowlby theorized, evolution has designed an “attachment system”: biologically based patterns of behavior and feeling that bind caretaker and vulnerable infant to one another, in devoted, skin-to-skin, voice-to-voice, eye-to-eye contact. When Bowlby’s collaborator Mary Ainsworth did early observational research in Uganda on the attachment behaviors of young infants there, she documented familial universals: only in the presence of their mothers, Ugandan infants showed specific kinds of crying, smiling, and endearing vocalizations, clapping and lifting the arms when the mother approached, burying the face in the mother’s lap, hugging, kissing, and clinging to the mother, and distress vocalizations when the mother moved away. Just as reliable are the attachment behaviors of caretakers: skin-to-skin, chest-to-chest contact, cradling, massaging touch, playful coos and sighs, eye contact, “motherese,” soft-toned songs at night, joint smiling and antiphonal laughter.
Mammals just aren’t mammals when deprived of the love between caretaker and offspring. In Harry Harlow’s well-known research, rhesus monkeys raised in isolation, deprived of contact with parents (and peers), grew up to be the wild boys of Aveyron of their group: profoundly fearful, inept in forming relationships with peers, as likely to attack potential sexual partners as court them; attempting to copulate with same-sex peers. Elephants in some areas of Africa develop without their loving parents, who have been slaughtered for the ivory in their tusks. These adolescent elephants show pathological forms of aggression, looking like the worst of our sociopaths, killing rhinoceroses for sport, for example.