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actually rather proud of the theory ' s circularity because he believes we have learned from computer simulation that evolution is a process which pulls itself up by its bootstraps: There is no single cause and effect because effects can reinforce causes: If a bird finds itself to be good at cracking seeds, then it specializes in ,cracking seeds, which puts further pressure on its seed-cracking ability to evolve. Evolution is circular:
STALE MATE
It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock 's tail—an ornament designed for sexual display whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side effect of the ability to charm. Disquieting and yet not altogether convincing. The sexual selection of the human mind is the most speculative and fragile of the many evolutionary theories discussed in this book, but it is also very much in the same vein as the others: I began this book by asking why all human beings were so similar and yet so different, suggesting that the answer lay in the unique alchemy of sex: An individual is unique because of the genetic variety that sexual reproduction generates in its perpetual chess tournament with disease. An individual is a member of a homogeneous species because of the incessant mixing of that variety in the pool of fellow human beings ' genes. And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different.
Epilogue
THE
SELF-DOMESTICATED APE
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man:
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A bring darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
—Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man "
The study of human nature is at about the same stage as the study of the human genome, which is at about the same stage as the map-ping of the world in the time of Herodotus. We know a few frag-ments in detail and some large parts in outline, but huge surprises still await us and errors abound. If we can free ourselves from the sterile dogmatic dispute about nature and nurture, we can gradually uncover the rest.
But just as Mercator could not get the relative sizes of Europe and Africa correct until he had the perspective that longi-tude and latitude provided, so the perspective of other animals is vital to the study of human nature. It is impossible to understand the social life of a phalarope or a sage grouse or an elephant seal or a chimpanzee in isolation. You can describe each in glorious detail, of course: They are respectively polyandrous, lekking,' harem-defending, fission-fusion. But only with the perspective of evolution can you truly understand why. Only then can you see the part that different opportunities for parental investment, different habitats, different diets, and different historical baggage have played in determining their natures. It is the purest nonsense to abandon the perspective of comparisons with other animals just because of our hubristic belief that humans alone are learning creatures that reinvent themselves at whim. So I make no apologies for mixing animals and human beings together in this book: Nor is the fact of civilization sufficient to rescue our parochial egotism: We are, it is true, as domesticated as any dog or cow, perhaps more so. We have bred out of ouselves all sorts of
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instincts that were probably features of our Pleistocene nature, in the same way that human beings have bred out of the cow many of the characteristics of the Pleistocene aurochs. But scratch a cow and you still find an aurochs underneath. A herd of dairy calves released into a forest would soon reinvent the polygamous herd in which males competed for status. Dogs left to their own devices still become territorial pack animals in which the senior animals monopolize breeding. Turned loose on an African savanna, a group of young Americans would not re-create the exact existence of their ancestors; indeed, they would probably starve, so dependent have we been for millennia on cultural traditions of where to find food and how to live: But nor would such people invent an entirely inhu-man social arrangement. As every experiment in free-wheeling communities up to and including Rajneeshpuram in Oregon has proved, human communities always invent a hierarchy and always atomize into possessive sexual bonds.
Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively egalitarian; an ape in which males contribute unusually large amounts of investment in the upbringing of their offspring by provisioning their mates and their children with food, protection, and company; an ape in which monogamous pair bonds are the rule but many males have affairs and occasional males achieve polygamy; an ape in which females mated to low-ranking males often cuckold their husbands in order to gain access to the genes of higher-ranking males; an ape that has been subject to unusually intense mutual sexual selection so that many of the features of the female body (lips, breasts, waists) and the mind of both sexes (songs, competitive ambition, status seeking) are designed for use in competition for mates; an ape that has developed an extraordinary range of new instincts to learn by association, to communicate by speech, and to pass on traditions: But still an ape:
Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong. The history THE SELF-DOMESTICATED APE
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of human science is not encouraging. Galton 's eugenics, Freud 's unconscious, Durkheim 's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinner 's behaviorism, Piaget 's early learning, and Wilson 's sociobiology all appear in retrospect to be riddled with errors and false perspectives. No doubt the Red Queen's approach is just another chapter in this marred tale. No doubt its politicization and the vested interests ranged against it will do as much damage as was done to previous attempts to understand human nature. The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious. "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my: Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the Press, " said David Hume: But then I remember how much progress we have made since Hume and how much nearer to the goal of a complete understanding of human nature we are than ever before: We will never quite reach that goal, and it would perhaps be better if we never did. But as long as we can keep asking why, we have a noble purpose.