Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do (16 page)

The work of evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Anne Campbell thus explains why men are so much more violent and criminal than women are, and why this sex difference is culturally universal. We should point out, however, that according to the Interpol data, there is one exception to this rule in the world. A significant minority or even majority of offenders of
all
serious felonies in Syria
year after year
are women. We are frankly baffled by these statistics; however, it is very difficult for us (or any evolutionary psychologist) to believe that Syrian women, alone in the whole world, are genuinely more criminal than women elsewhere. We strongly suspect that either these statistics reflect some clerical error (for example, “male” and “female” were wrongly labeled when the Interpol form was first translated into Arabic many years ago, and the same mislabeled forms are photocopied and used every year) or there are some cultural or institutional reasons (for example, women may routinely take the fall for crimes committed by their husbands, brothers, or fathers). We have asked several Syrian experts for a possible explanation since we first noticed this statistical anomaly nearly a decade ago. We have not found one; however, we suspect that Syrian women do
not
commit the majority of serious crimes in their country.

Q. What Do Bill Gates and Paul McCartney Have in Common with Criminals?

For nearly a quarter of a century, criminologists have known about a persistent empirical phenomenon called the “age-crime curve.” In their highly influential 1983 article “Age and Explanation of Crime,” two leading criminologists, Travis Hirschi and Michael R. Gottfredson, claim that the relationship between age and crime is the same across all social and cultural conditions at all times. In every society, for all social groups, for all races and both sexes, at all historical times, the tendency to commit crime and other analogous, risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off during middle age. Although there have been minor variations observed around the “invariant” age-crime curve,
¹⁶
the essential shape of the curve for serious interpersonal crimes is widely accepted by criminologists.
¹⁷

Everyone Wants a Piece of the Action

One of the striking features of the age-crime curve is that it is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes “every
quantifiable
human behavior that is
public
(i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and
costly
(i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors).”
¹⁸
The relationship between age and productivity among
male
jazz musicians,
male
painters,
male
writers, and
male
scientists, which might be called the “age-genius curve,”
¹⁹
is essentially the same as the age-crime curve.
²⁰
Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then just as quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced and flatter; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

It is not difficult to find personifications of the age-genius curve. Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years, and now spends much of his time painting. Bill Gates is now a respectable businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer the computer whiz kid of his earlier years. J. D. Salinger now lives as a total recluse and has not published anything in more than three decades. Orson Welles was mere 26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in
Citizen Kane
, which many consider to be the greatest movie ever made. There are some exceptions. Many artists, writers, and scientists remain productive into their middle and old ages, just like there are a few career criminals who commit crimes all their lives. But, in general, the pattern of youthful productivity holds for most.

What is the reason behind all this? Why do criminals usually desist from committing crimes as they age? Why does the productivity of creative geniuses also often fade with age? A single evolutionary psychological theory can explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course.
²¹
According to this theory,
both crime and genius are expressions of young men's competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success
.

What Explains the Crime and Genius Curves?

As we've discussed, there are reproductive benefits of intense competitiveness to men. In the physical competition for mates, those who are competitive may act violently toward their male rivals. Their violence serves the dual function of protecting their status and honor, and discouraging or altogether eliminating their rivals from future competition for mates. Their competitiveness also inclines them to accumulate resources to attract mates by stealing from others, and the same psychological mechanism can probably induce men who cannot gain legitimate access to women to do so illegitimately through forcible rape. Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities in order to attract mates.
²²

There are no reproductive benefits from competition before puberty because prepubescent males are not able to translate their competitive edge into reproductive success. With puberty, however, the benefits of competition rapidly increase. Once the men are reproductively capable, every act of competition (be it through violence, theft, or creative genius) can potentially augment their reproductive success. The benefits of competition stay high after puberty for the remainder of their lives because human males are reproductively capable for most of their adult lives.

The Downside of the Curve

This is not the whole story, however. There are also costs associated with competition. Acts of violence can easily result in the man's own death or injury, and acts of resource appropriation can trigger retaliation from the rightful owners of the resources. A man's reproductive success is obviously compromised if the competitive acts result in his death or even injury. Before men start reproducing (before their first child), there are few costs of competition. True, being competitive might result in their death or injury, and they might therefore lose in the reproductive game if they are too competitive. However, they also lose by
not
competing. If they do not compete for mates in a polygynous society, which all human societies are (see “Why [and How] Are Contemporary Westerners
Polygynous
?” in chapter 4), they will be left out of the game and end up losing as a result. In other words, young men
might
lose if they are competitive, but given polygyny, they will
definitely
lose if they are not. So there is little cost to being competitive, even at the risk of death and injury; the alternative is worse in reproductive terms, which once again is the reason the death penalty cannot deter young men.

The cost of competition, however, rises dramatically with the birth of the first child and subsequent children. True, men still benefit from competition because such acts of competition might attract additional mates even after their initial reproduction. However, a man's energies and resources are put to better use by protecting and investing in his existing children. In other words, with the birth of children, men should shift their reproductive effort away from mating and toward parenting. If the men die or get injured in their acts of competition, their existing children will suffer; they might starve without their father's parental investment or fall victim to predation by others without their father's protection. The costs of competition therefore rapidly increase after the birth of the first child, which usually happens several years after puberty because men need some time to accumulate enough resources and attain sufficient status to attract their first mate. Nevertheless, in the absence of artificial contraception, reproduction probably began at a much earlier age in the ancestral environment than it does today. There is therefore a gap of several years between the rapid rise in the benefits of competition and the similarly rapid rise in its costs.

Both the age-crime curve and the age-genius curve can be explained as the mathematical difference between the benefits and costs of competition. Young men rapidly become more violent, more criminal, and creatively more expressive in late adolescence and early adulthood as the benefits of competition rise, but then their productivity just as rapidly declines in late adulthood as the costs of competition rise and cancel its benefits. Criminality, genius, and productivity in virtually everything else men do vary as they do over the life course because they represent the difference between the benefits and costs of competition.

These calculations have been performed by natural and sexual selection, so to speak, which then equips male brains with a psychological mechanism to incline them to be increasingly competitive immediately after puberty and to make them less competitive right after the birth of the first child. Men simply do not
feel like
acting violently, stealing, or conducting additional scientific experiments, or they just
want to
settle down after the birth of the child, but they do not exactly know why. The intriguing suggestion here is that a single psychological mechanism may be responsible for much of what men do, whether they are criminals or scientists.
²³

We All Have the Winners' Genes

Now, given that human society has always been mildly polygynous, there were many men who did not succeed at securing mates and reproducing. These men had everything to gain and nothing to lose by remaining competitive and violent for their entire lives. However,
we are not descended from these men
. By definition, we are all exclusively descended from men (and women) who attained some reproductive success—none of us are descended from total reproductive losers who left no offspring—and we are
disproportionately
descended from those who attained great reproductive success. (Twelve children carry the genes of a man who had twelve children, but only one child carries the genes of a man who had only one child. And, of course, no children carry the genes of a man who had no children. Yes, childlessness is perfectly heritable!) Contemporary men, therefore, did not inherit from reproductive losers psychological mechanisms that force them to stay competitive and keep trying to secure mates for their entire lives.

Female Choice

The similarity between Bill Gates, Paul McCartney, and the criminals (in fact,
all
men) in evolutionary history points to a very important concept in evolutionary biology: female choice. In all species in which the female makes greater parental investment than the male (such as humans and all other mammals), mating is a female choice; it happens when the female wants it to happen, and with whom she wants it to happen, not when the male wants it to happen.
²⁴

The power of female choice becomes quite apparent in a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a society where sex and mating were entirely a male choice; individuals have sex whenever and with whomever men want, not whenever and with whomever women want. What would happen in such a society?
Absolutely nothing
, because people would never stop having sex! There would be no civilization in such a society, because people would not do anything besides have sex. This, incidentally, is the evolutionary explanation for why gay men tend to have significantly more sex partners and have sex significantly more frequently than straight men do: because there are no women in their relationship to say no.
²⁵
Sexually active straight men on average have had 16.5 sex partners since age 18; gay men have had 42.8.

In reality, however, women do often say no to men. This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.
²⁶
There would be no civilizations no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice. Men have built (and destroyed) civilizations in order to impress women so that they might say yes. Women are the reason men do everything.