|
(The following is excerpted from Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace.1 Interested readers will find an extended discussion of the differences between men and women with respect to aggression in the full text. A free download is available at www.jhand.com)
Evolutionary biologists have for years been exploring what they call male and female reproductive strategies. Sara Blaffer Hrdy, for example, is an anthropologist whose specialty is primate social behavior. She has written several impressive survey books, a particularly relevant one being Mother Nature.2 Mother Nature presents in detail a list of references as well as the kind of evidence that forms the backbone of the following steps of biological logic. Another excellent and brief discussion of most of these biological points is Deborah Blum 's introduction to her book, Sex on the Brain.3
The Biological Logic
Keep in mind two biological facts: first, we are mammals and, like all female mammals, our females produce milk to feed their offspring. And second, we're primates, related to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and more distantly to baboons and monkeys. Keeping these biological facts in mind, the biological logic goes like this:
- For all living things, the basic biological bottom line is to reproduce and have offspring that in turn have offspring. Genes of individuals that fail to reproduce are eliminated from the evolutionary game of life. This means that the behavioral inclinations coded in those genes are not passed to subsequent generations. There are some subtleties here - for example, highly social animals (bees, humans) can often contribute some genes to the future by aiding close relatives who possess the same genes rather than reproducing themselves - but such subtleties don't alter the basic biological reality.
- For female mammals, and certainly for female primates , reproducing successfully is a very expensive proposition. Female primates carry an offspring to term, protecting and nourishing it within their body, often for many months. Then they provide milk to nourish it for weeks if not months or even years more. They must protect it, care for it, and support it sometimes for many additional years before it is old enough to reproduce. For every parent raising children, whether in the United States, Brazil, Thailand, or Ghana, the extensive costs involved (in time, energy, risk, and resources) resonate deeply. And then, in most cultures, once a child is raised, females remain involved in ensuring that the offspring of their offspring—their grandchildren—also survive. This is, beyond doubt or argument, an extraordinarily expensive process.
- As a consequence of the above, the ideal condition for female primates to carry out this difficult and expensive feat is social stability for long periods. Serious social turmoil or anything that threatens the life of these expensive offspring before they can reproduce—and certainly war that results in their death or the death or loss of their primary caregiver, their mother—is hugely counterproductive.
- For male mammals, including male primates, the biological game is usually quite different, because they do not invest as heavily in the survival of their children as females do. In some primates, fathers contribute little or nothing beyond their sperm. While human males often become involved in support and protection of their young, this isn't the case in all cultures (see, for example, the Mosuo described by Hua where technically there isn't even an institution of marriage),4 and in few cultures does a father's investment approach that of a mother. There are some notable primate exceptions, tamarins for example, but compared to females, male mammals including male primates are generally more involved in spreading their seed widely than investing heavily in any given offspring.
- Consequently, for male primates, social stability is not as high a priority as it is for females. For example, in her first major book, Infanticide,5 written with colleague Glenn Hausfater, Hrdy documents a number of cases where males form a group or team and move into an established troop, drive out or kill the resident males, and then kill the young—that is, these males invade and subsequently commit infanticide. Even males of other mammalian species, like lions, behave similarly.
Killing the young means that their mothers stop suckling and begin their estrous (menstrual) cycles again so that they are fertile. For the invading males this means they can breed sooner than if they had tolerated the offspring of the vanquished males. By cooperating in this group action, an invading male increases his chances of gaining access to the premier biological resource for a male: a female or females he can impregnate.
At the same time, this male aggression is likely to give invading males access to other critical resources on the captured territory: food, water, new places to shelter. The benefits of such male cooperative aggression are multiple and great. There is no mystery at all that evolution has favored this type of male aggression in a variety of primates, including humans.
From Mother Nature and Infanticide and similar works you can form your own assessment of the power of competition for resources such as food, territory, or access to females, to shape the evolution in many mammals, including many primates, of a male tendency to band together for invasion. This book proposes that while human males may have evolved often under an imperative to invade and conquer, a basic reproductive imperative for females has been to do whatever they can to foster social stability. Also that a female inclination to facilitate social stability is as deeply evolved in humans as the well-known and frequently discussed male inclination for group aggression.
This is why a world with fully empowered women sharing with men in decisions regarding war would be more socially stable: because of a female's unavoidable and costly commitment to her offspring, the future of the species, basic human female biological priorities are different from those of males.
These differences are not cultural. Their origins are deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. We inherit them from our pre-human primate ancestors. Given free rein and uncurbed by social or ecological forces, these opposed tendencies—with males ready to bond together in acts of aggression and females more inclined to seek social stability—will play themselves out in our group behavior. Not to take them into consideration when discussing the question of war and how to make a lasting peace is a profound error.
Back to top
|
