//Gana San people of Namibia, who have given up their !Kung San neighbors ' hunting life for farming, there is less food sharing and more political dominance within each band. Now, by owning the best or biggest fields or by working harder or by having an extra ox or by being a craftsman with a rare skill, a man could grow ten times as rich as his neighbor. Accordingly, he could acquire more wives. Simple agricultural societies often see harems of up to one hundred women per top man."
Pastoral societies are, almost without exception, traditionally polygamous. It is not hard to see why. A herd of cattle or sheep is almost as easy to tend if it contains fifty animals as twenty-five.
POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
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Such scale economies allow a man'to accumulate wealth at an ever-increasing rate. Positive feedback leads to inequalities of wealth, which leads to inequalities of sexual opportunity: The reason some Mukogodo men in Kenya have higher reproductive success than others is that they are richer; being richer enables them to marry early and marry often."
By the time " civilization " had arrived, in six different parts of the globe independently (from Babylon in 1700 B.C. to the Incas in A.D: 1500), emperors had thousands of women in their harems. Hunting and warrior skills had previously earned a man an extra wife or two, then wealth had earned him ten or more. But wealth had another advantage, too. Not only could it buy wives directly, it could also buy " power. " It is noteworthy that it is hard to distinguish between wealth and power before the ti me of the Renaissance. Until then there was no such thing as an economic sector independent of the power structure. A man's livelihood and his allegiance were owed to the same social superior." Power is, roughly speaking, the ability to call upon allies to do your bidding, and that depended strictly on wealth (with a little help from violence):
Power seeking is characteristic of all social mammals. Cape buffalo rise within the hierarchy of the herd to positions of dominance that bring sexual rewards. Chimpanzees, too, strive to become "alpha male" in the troop and in so doing increase the number of matings they perform: But like men, chimps do not rise entirely on brute strength: They use cunning, and above all they form alliances. The tribal warfare between groups of chimps is both a cause and a consequence of the male tendency to build alliances.
In Jane Goodall 's studies the males of one chimp group were well aware when they were outnumbered by the males of another group and deliberately sought opportunities to single out individual males from the enemy. The bigger and more cohesive the male alliance, the more effective it was."
Coalitions of males are found in a number of species. In turkeys, brotherhoods of males display competitively on a lek. If they win, the females will mate with the senior brother: In lions,
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brotherhoods combine to drive out the males from a pride and take it over themselves; they then kill the babies to bring the lionesses back into season, and all the brothers share the reward of mating with all the females. In acorn woodpeckers, groups of brothers live with groups of sisters in a free-love commune that controls one
" granary tree, " into which holes have been drilled that hold up to thirty thousand acorns to see the birds through the winter: The young, who are nieces and nephews of all the birds of whom they are not daughters and sons, must leave the group, form sisterhoods and brotherhoods themselves, and take over some other granary tree, driving out the previous owners."
The alliances of males and females need not be based on relatedness: Brothers tend to help one another because they are related; what 's good for your brother ' s genes is good for yours since you share half your genes with him: But there is another way to ensure that altruism pays: reciprocity. If an animal wants help from another, he could promise to return the favor in the future. As long as his promise is credible—in other words, as long as individuals recognize each other and live together long enough to collect their debts—a male can get other males to help him in a sexual mission. This seems to be what happens in dolphins, whose sex life is only just becoming known: Thanks to the work of Richard Connor, Rachel Smolker, and their colleagues, we now know that groups of male dolphins kidnap single females, bully them and display to them with choreographed acrobatics, then enjoy sexual monopoly over them. Once the female has given birth, the alliances of males lose interest in her, and she is free to return to an all-female group: These male alliances are often temporary and stitched together on a you-help-me-and-I 'll-help-you basis:'6
The more intelligent the species and the more fluid the coalitions, the less an ambitious male need be limited by his strength: Buffalos and lions win power in trials of strength: Dolphins and chimpanzees must not be weak if they are to win power but can rely much more on their ability to form winning coalitions of males: In people there is virtually no connection between strength and power, at least not since the invention of action-at-a-POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
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distance weapons such as the slingshot, as Goliath learned the hard way. Wealth, cunning, political skill, and experience lead to power among men. From Hannibal to Bill Clinton, men gain power by putting together coalitions of allies. In mankind, wealth became a way of putting together such alliances of power. The rewards, for other animals, are largely sexual. For men?
HIGHLY SEXED EMPERORS
In the late 1970s an anthropologist in California, Mildred Dickemann, decided to try to apply some Darwinian ideas to human history and culture: She simply set out to see if the kinds of predictions that evolutionists were making for other animals also applied to human beings: What she found was that in the highly stratified Oriental societies of early history, people seemed to behave exactly as you would expect them to if they knew that their goal on Earth was to leave as many descendants as possible: In other words, men tended to seek polygamy, whereas women strove to marry upward with men of high status: Dickemann added that a lot of cultural customs—dowries, female infanticide, the claustration of women so that their virginity could not be damaged—were consistent with this pattern: For example, in India, high castes practiced more female infanticide than low castes because there were fewer opportunities to export daughters io still higher castes: In other words, mating was a trade: male power and resources for female reproductive potentiaclass="underline" "
About the same time as Dickemann 's studies, John Hartung of Harvard University began to look at patterns of inheritance. He hypothesized that a rich person in a polygamous society would tend to leave his or her money to a son rather than a daughter because a rich son could provide more grandchildren than a Oich daughter: This is because the son can have children by several wives, whereas a daughter cannot increase the number of her children even if she takes many husbands: Therefore, the more polygamous a society, the more likely it will show male-biased inheritance: A sur-
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vey of four hundred societies found overwhelming support for Hartung's hypothesis: 3e
Of course, that proves nothing: It could be a coincidence that evolutionary arguments predict what does happen. There is a cautionary tale that scientists tell one another about a man who cuts the legs off a flea to test his theory that fleas ' ears are on their legs. He then tells the flea to jump and it does not, so he concludes that he was right; fleas ' ears are in their legs: Nonetheless, Darwinians began to think that perhaps human history might be illuminated by a beam of evolutionary light. In the mid 1980s, Laura Betzig set out to test the notion that people are sexually adapted to exploit whatever situation they encounter: She had no great hopes of success, but she believed that the best way to test the conjecture was simply to postulate the simplest prediction she could make: that men would treat power not as an end in itself but as a means to sexual and reproductive success.