Some male pied flycatchers in the forests of Scandinavia manage to be polygamous by holding two territories, each with a female in it, like the owls or like Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe 's Bonfire of the Vanities who keeps an expensive wife on Park Avenue and a beautiful mistress in a rent-controlled apartment across town: Two teams of researchers have studied the birds and come to different conclusions about what is going on. The Finns and Swedes say that the mistress is deceived into believing the male is unmarried: The Norwegians say that since the wife sometimes visits the mistress 's nest and may try to drive her away, the mistress can be under no illusions. She accepts the fact that her mate may desert her for his wife but hopes that if things go wrong at the wife 's nest—they often do—he will come back to help her raise her young: He gets away with it only when the two territories are so far apart that the wife cannot visit the mistress ' s territory often enough to persecute her: In other words, according to the Norwegians, men deceive their wives about their affairs, not their mistresses. 37
It is not clear, therefore, whether the wife or the mistress is the victim of treachery, but one thing is certain: The bigamous male pied flycatcher has pulled off a minor triumph, fathering two broods in one season. The male has fulfilled his ambition of bigamy at the expense of a female: The wife and the mistress would both have done better had each monopolized a male rather than shared him.
To test the suggestion that it is better to cuckold a faithful husband than leave him to become the second wife of a biga-
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mist, Jose Veiga studied house sparrows breeding in a colony in Madrid: Only about 10 percent of the males in the colony were polygamous: By selectively removing certain males and females he tested various theories about why more males did not have multiple wives: First, he rejected the notion that males were indispens-able to the rearing of young. Females in bigamous marriages reared as many young as those in monogamous ones, though they had to work harder. Second, by removing some males and observing which males the widows chose to remarry, he rejected the idea that females preferred to mate with unmated males; they were happy to choose already mated males and to reject bachelors.
Third, he rejected the idea that males could not find spare females; 28 percent of males remated with a female who had not bred in the previous year: Then he tried putting nest boxes closer together to make it easier for the male to guard two at once; he found that it entirely failed to increase the amount of polygamy.
That left him with one explanation for the rarity of polygamy in sparrows: The senior wives do not stand for it. Just as male birds guard their mates, so female birds chase away and harass their husbands ' chosen second fiancees. Caged females are attacked by mated female sparrows: They do so presumably because even though they could rear the chicks on their own, it is a great deal easier with the husband 's undivided help. 38
It is my contention that man is just like an ibis or a swallow or a sparrow in several key respects. He lives in large colonies.
Males compete with one another for places in a pecking order.
Most males are monogamous. Polygamy is prevented by wives who resent sharing their husbands lest they also share his contributions to child rearing. Even though they could bring up the children unaided, the husband 's paycheck is invaluable. But the ban on polygamous marriage does not prevent the males from seeking polygamous matings. Adultery is common. It is most common between high-ranking males and females of all ranks. To prevent it males try to guard their wives, are extremely violent toward their wives ' lovers, and copulate with their wives frequently, not just when they are fertile.
MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN
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That is the life of the sparrow anthropomorphized. The life of man sparrowmorphized might read like this: The birds live and breed in colonies called tribes or towns: Cocks compete with one another to amass resources and gain status within the colony; it is known as " business " and "politics. " Cocks eagerly court hens, who resent sharing their males with other hens, but many cocks, especially senior ones, trade in their hens for younger ones or cuckold other cocks by having sex with their (willing) wives in private: The point does not lie in the details of the sparrow 's life.
There are significant differences, including the fact that human beings tend to have a much more uneven distribution of dominance, power, and resources within the colony: But they still share the principal feature of alclass="underline" colonial birds: monogamy, or at least pair bonds, plus rife adultery rather than polygamy. The noble savage, far from living in contented sexual equanimity, was paranoid about becoming, and intent on making his neighbor into, a cuckold. Little wonder that human sex is first and foremost in all societies a private thing to be indulged in only in secret. The same is not true of bonobos, but it is true of many monogamous birds.
One reason the high bastard rates of birds came as such a shock was that few naturalists had ever witnessed an adulterous affair between two birds—they do it in private: 39
THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER
Cuckoldry paranoia is deep-seated in men. The use of veils, chaper-ones, purdah, female circumcision, and chastity belts all bear witness to a widespread male fear of being cuckolded and a widespread suspicion that wives, as well as their potential lovers, are the ones to distrust: (Why else circumcise them?) Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University in Canada have studied the phenomenon of human jealousy and come to the conclusion that the facts fit an evolutionary interpretation. Jealousy is a "human universal, " and no culture lacks it: Despite the best efforts of anthropologists to find a society with no jealousy and so prove that it is an emotion
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introduced by pernicious social pressure or pathology, sexual jealousy seems to be an unavoidable part of being a human being.
The Demon, Jealousy, with Gorgon frown
Blasts the sweet flowers of pleasure not his own, Rolls his wild eyes, and through the shuddering grove Pursues the steps of unsuspecting Love:'°
Wilson and Daly believe that a study of human society reveals a mindset whose manifestations are diverse in detail but
" monotonously alike in the abstract. " They are "socially recognized marriage, the concept of adultery as a property violation, the valua-tion of female chastity, the equation of 'protection' of women with protection from sexual contact, and the special potency of infidelity as a provocation to violence: " In short, in every age and in every place, men behave as if they owned their wives ' vaginas:"
Wilson and Daly reflect on the fact that love is an admired emotion, whereas jealousy is a despised one, but they are plainly two sides of the same coin—as anybody who has been in love can testify: They are both part of a sexual proprietary claim: As many a modern couple knows, the absence of jealousy, far from calming a relationship, is itself a cause of insecurity. If he or she is not jealous when I pay attention to another man or woman, then he or she no longer cares whether our relationship survives: Psychologists have found that couples who lack moments of jealousy are less likely to stay together than jealous ones:
As Othello learned, even the suspicion of infidelity is enough to drive a man to such rage that he may kill his wife. Othello was fictional, but many a modern Desdemona has paid with her life for her husband's jealousy. As Wilson and Daly said: " The major source of conflict in the great majority of spouse killings is the husband 's knowledge or suspicion that his wife is either unfaithful or intending to leave him. " A man who kills his wife in a fit of jealousy can rarely plead insanity in court because of the legal tradition in Anglo-American common law that such an act is "the act of a reasonable man: "'