Politically Correct Darwin

At least since the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, the American left has had an ambivalent reaction to Darwinian biology.  The left likes Darwinism in so far and because religious conservatives don’t like it.  When it is a question of the Bible vs. The Origin of the Species, the left thinks that anyone who questions Darwinism is a retrograde fool.  The left hates Darwinism when it is applied to human social and political behavior, for they think that any conception of human nature is a threat to the promise of social reform. 

These days the issues are rather more complicated than they were when Wilson was denounced in The New York Review of Books.  The ambivalence remains, however.  The New York Times recently published a defense of homosexuality from a biological point of view by David George Haskell.  Here is a taste:

The facts of biology plainly falsify the oft-repeated notion that homosexuality is unnatural. Every species has evolved its own sexual ecology, and so nature resists generalizations. Does humanity’s natural inheritance include homosexual bonds and behaviors? Certainly. This conclusion is reinforced by the growing evidence that our sexual orientation is influenced by both our genes and the environment that we experience in the womb.

This strikes me as plausible but very provisional.  We hardly have a good understanding of the natural causes underlying homosexual orientation.  It is far from clear whether homosexual behavior is in some way biologically functional, let alone whether gay marriage is a good idea.  Haskell’s piece doesn’t bother with the ambiguities. 

On the other hand, the Times doesn’t much like evolutionary psychology.  If the latter tells us anything, it is that male and female sexual behavior and instincts are robustly dimorphic.  What it tells us is wrong, according to journalist Dan Slater.  In “Darwin was wrong about Dating,” he explains that:

Lately a new cohort of scientists have been challenging the very existence of the gender differences in sexual behavior that Darwinians have spent the past 40 years trying to explain and justify on evolutionary grounds.

Wow.  Maybe all those gender differences that evolutionary psychology has painstakingly documented don’t really exist.  Slater offers us a small selection of studies that seem to deny gender differences.  Voilà! 

The only problem with this is that it flies in the face of the most obvious facts.  Consider pornography, for example.  Walk into an adult bookstore (purely for research purposes, of course) and ask yourself: to whom is all this stuff being marketed?  I predict (having done my own research) that virtually all of it is marketed to heterosexual or homosexual males.  Unless someone can show me that I am wrong (I am intrigued by the possibility), I submit this as a very robust fact. 

Consider also prostitution.  Allow me to suggest that virtually all prostitutes, both male and female, service males exclusively.  That men frequently pay for sex while woman almost never do strikes me as another robust fact.  There are solid Darwinian explanations for why these differences are so pronounced and so universal.  These explanations ground human behavior in the general biology of animals.  Across a very wide range of organisms, males produce more offspring when they obtain access to more mates.  Females do not. 

The New York Times likes Darwin when he is politically correct.  When he is not, they usher in someone to usher him off the stage.  It is a quixotic charge.  As long as science is allowed to progress, nature, as Anthony Hopkins says in The Wolfman, will out.  If the Church could not prevail against Darwin, neither will the church of The New York Times. 

Women in Combat

The Pentagon has announced that it is lifting the ban on women in combat roles.  The New York Times is elated. 

The Pentagon’s decision to end its ban on women in combat is a triumph for equality and common sense. By opening infantry, artillery and other battlefield jobs to all qualified service members regardless of sex, the military is showing that categorical discrimination has no place in a society that honors fairness and equal opportunity.

It is typical of the Times specifically and liberal opinion in general that it leads with the political angle and adjusts any strategic questions accordingly.  The Times views the military as one more goody to be distributed and is not much interested in the question of whether putting women in combat roles will actually make the armed forces weaker or stronger. 

As it happens, I delivered a paper this summer on this very topic.  I began with a general analysis of military virtue.  Here is a bit of my paper. 

Courage, understood both as steadfastness in defense in the face of great peril and a readiness to exploit opportunities by going on the offensive, is for good reason recognized as the key military virtue.  This implies, of course, that one can recognize when it is the right time to retreat, or make a stand, or attack; accordingly, prudence is a military virtue in generals and, to a lesser degree, in all military officers.  Prudence is not obviously a virtue of the soldier in the line, as the integrity of the army requires that the soldiers act as units in a larger whole rather than as individuals.  Thus moderation and justice, as Plato’s Socrates understood them, may be seen as key military virtues.  Moderation exists where authority is obeyed.  Justice exists when each part of the whole does its own specific work. 

That, it seems to me, is how to begin thinking about the question.  What capacities do we need in our persons at arms?  The above focuses on psychological virtues but there are also physical virtues to consider, reading virtue here in the larger Greek sense. 

In human populations, as in other species of apes and a wide range of other mammals, males are larger and stronger than females.  Males have an advantage in stamina and are more resistant to injury.  The explanation for this is uncontroversial among theorists who rely on Darwinian mechanics.  For human males as for chimpanzees, the frequency of successful mating is generally proportional to reproductive success.  The more females to which a male gains access, the more offspring he is likely to sire.  The reverse is not true for females.  As a result, males directly compete with one another for mates and the competition is often violent.  Certain elements of physique that enhance military virtue are thus selected for over very long periods of time. 

It seems clear that women on average will be less fit than men for the physical rigors of combat.  However, less fit doesn’t mean unfit.  Modern weapons do not, for the most part, depend on upper body strength as previous military technologies did.  Whether women in general are capable of the demands of combat service can only be determined by testing them. 

Unfortunately, testing requires honesty and here I see a problem.  Commentators on Fox News took the President at his word.  Let women compete in military training and let those who demonstrate fitness serve accordingly.  That strikes me as the obviously sensible approach.  It is not the approach we will take. 

The question of rights and equality will trump any concern for military effectiveness.  If too many women fail to meet reasonable standards for combat fitness, then the standards will be lowered.  This is what has always happened in the past and it will not change.  Women are going to be integrated into combat units in numbers that please the President and Congress, regardless of who demonstrates fitness for what. 

Plato’s Socrates was in favor of military training for women and so am I.  I think that any woman willing and able to serve in combat should be allowed to do so.  I think, however, that women should be held to the same standards as men.  I think there is very little chance that that will happen so long as we put rights talk above a concern for an effective military. 

Four Observations About Mating

I have been too busy to do much reading recently, so here is something from my Human Nature course.  I offer four observations that lay out one of the general theories of sociobiology. 

Observation 1: Males are larger, stronger, better armed, and more aggressive, across a wide range of species. 

This is not universally true.  Spiders are a conspicuous exception.  There the reproductive machinery resists reduction in size.  Ask a black widow male what he thinks about this.  It is however true of a vast number of species including elk, gorillas, walruses, and human beings.  Why? 

Observation 2: Males compete with other males for reproductive opportunities. 

In most species that I am aware of, almost all of the females can successfully mate.  They may compete with other females for access to the most competitive males, but they get to mate with someone.  By contrast, males will often go without mating opportunities at all.  This is especially true in harem species, where males enjoy access to a considerable number of mates so long as they can defend their position against other males. 

In harem species the sexual dimorphism is rather large.  In promiscuous species, larger males may not enjoy exclusive access but they often enjoy the first opportunity to mate with a fertile female.  In some monkey species, the males compete not with size and offensive weapons like antlers, but with large testes, the better to flush out the work of the last suitor.  In yet another strategy, males compete by features that attract females, such as color or flamboyant tail features. 

In the case of harem species, female choice is limited but not extinguished.  A female may cry out to arouse the dominate male if an interloper appears.  She doesn’t want to mate with the Johnny-come-lately unless he can stand his ground.  Where females can easily flee, female choice is accordingly increased.  Hence the colorful male birds. 

In all such cases, males with weapons leave more offspring than males without or with lower caliber weapons.  Accordingly, they sire sons with the same weapons. 

Observation 3: females are choosy but males are eager. 

Across a wide range of species, males will take any opportunity to mate that they can get, whereas females will resist any suitor that they regard as unsuitable.  While female choice will be more or less constrained depending on the mating system, they will exercise as much choice as possible.  Males will mate with anything that looks vaguely female.  Mount a female turkey’s head at the appropriate level and a male turkey will move behind it and try to mate. 

Observation 4: sperm is cheap; eggs are expensive.  

 The male’s minimal investment in a single reproductive act is often very minimal.  For most males, each mating is chance to sire more offspring.  Hence eagerness to mate is selected for.  For females of many species, the minimal investment in a single reproductive act is very large.  Indeed, the universal definition of female in biology is the sex with the largest sex cell. 

We can see this spread across a number of mating systems.  Where the female lays eggs to be fertilized externally by the male, her investment is relatively small for a female.  However, it is still larger than the males.  In hermaphrodite fish, where each individual produces both eggs and sperm, the eggs are more precious.  This fact results in a social contract called parceling.  When two such fish meet, each lays a parcel of eggs for the other to fertilize and then they repeat the exchange.  A fish that managed to fertilize all the eggs of another without giving up any of its own eggs would be able to cheat many other fish before he/she finally released his/her own cache of eggs. 

Females that develop an egg within their own bodies must devote a lot of time and resources to each reproductive opportunity.  Those that allow the young to develop to live birth must devote even more. 

The result is that the minimal cost of each reproductive act for females is much larger than it is or can be for the male.  More coupling does not result in more offspring.  Accordingly, the female is inclined to make sure that each coupling counts and that means being choosy (when she can) about whom to mate with. 

Thus the four basic observations can be arranged so that each one helps to explain the previous one.  Males are better armed because they compete with other males; they compete because males are choosier than females; males are choosier because their minimal investment is less.  Given Darwinian theory, we can now understand a lot about the sexual behavior of elk and the guys down at the Elks Lodge.