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 (18 page)

The Myth of the Midlife Crisis

This is an excellent opportunity for us to shed evolutionary psychological light on a common misunderstanding, since it allows us to shift our attention from a dark topic like domestic violence and apply the same logic to a much lighter topic: the midlife crisis. Many believe that men go through a midlife crisis when they are in midlife (in middle age). Not quite. Many middle-aged men
do
go through midlife crisis, but it's not because
they
are middle-aged but because their wives are. Just as it is the wife's age, not the husband's, that determines the risk of spousal abuse and murder, it is the wife's age, not the husband's, that prompts the constellation of behavior commonly known as a “midlife crisis.” From the evolutionary psychological perspective, a man's midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife's imminent menopause and the end of her reproductive career, and thus his renewed need to attract younger, reproductive women. Accordingly, a 50-year-old man married to a 25-year-old women would not go through a midlife crisis, while a 25-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman would, just like a more typical 50-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman would. It is not his midlife that matters; it is hers. So when he buys a shiny red sportscar, he's not trying to regain his youth; he's trying to attract young women to replace his menopausal wife by trumpeting his flash and cash.

THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES

The topics covered in the final two chapters of this book (chapters 7 and 8) are the least explored areas of application for evolutionary psychology. Because of its origin in the field of psychology and its emphasis on sex and mating, most of the scientific progress and discoveries in evolutionary psychology have been on individual behavior and cognitions—how men and women behave differently, how the human brain perceives the world, the biases and tendencies in our thinking, and so on. Most of the applications of evolutionary psychology in the social sciences have therefore been “micro”—on the small scale of individuals.

There have not been many “macro” applications of evolutionary psychology—to the issues of economy, politics, and society at large. However, there have been some very intriguing studies in this area as well. Because both of us were originally sociologists, concerned more with macro issues than micro issues, this is where our training in sociology meets our current interest in evolutionary psychology.

One fascinating discovery from the application of evolutionary psychology to macro issues is that what we often regard as “beyond” individuals—because they are so much bigger than them—such as issues related to social institutions, economic and political inequalities, social problems, wars, religion, and even culture itself, have the same origins as individual behavior and cognitions. They all stem from our evolved psychological mechanisms in our brains. They are all macro manifestations of our human nature and biology.

Q. Why Do Politicians Risk Everything by Having an Affair (but Only If They Are Male)?

On the morning of Wednesday, January 21, 1998, Americans woke up to breaking news. The
Washington Post
, one of the nation's leading newspapers, reported the allegation that President Bill Clinton had an affair with a 24-year-old White House intern. On that January morning, as the story unfolded in front of the stunned nation, America and the rest of the world had not yet had an inkling of what was in store: a yearlong political scandal that consumed the nation (and the world) and culminated on December 19, with Clinton being impeached by the House of Representatives—the first elected President ever to be impeached in American history.
^[1]

While the whole nation was in shock, one woman in Michigan woke up to the news on the morning of January 21, 1998, sipped her coffee while watching the events unfold on TV, smiled to herself, and said, “I told you so.” She is the Darwinian historian Laura L. Betzig. For more than twenty years, Betzig has written on the mating behavior and reproductive success of politicians and other political leaders in history.
²
She points out that while powerful men throughout Western history have
married
monogamously (they had only one legal wife at a time), they have always
mated
polygynously (they had lovers, concubines, and female slaves).
³
Many had harems, consisting of hundreds and even thousands of virgins. With their wives they produced legitimate heirs; with the others they produced bastards (Betzig's term). Genes and inclusive fitness make no distinction between the two categories of children. While the legitimate heirs, unlike the bastards, inherited their fathers' power and status and often went on to have their own harems, powerful men sometimes invested in their bastards as well.

As a result, powerful men of high status throughout human history attained very high reproductive success, leaving a large number of offspring (legitimate or otherwise), while countless poor men in the countryside died mateless and childless. Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, whom we encountered in chapter 2, stands out
quantitatively
, having left more offspring than anyone else on record, but he was by no means
qualitatively
different from other powerful men, like Bill Clinton.

Why Not?

From Betzig's Darwinian historical perspective, the question that many Americans and others throughout the world asked in 1998, “Why on earth would the most powerful man in the world jeopardize his job for an affair with a young woman?” is a silly question. Betzig's answer would be: Why not?

Recall from chapter 1 (“What Is Evolutionary Psychology?”) that the underlying motive of all human behavior is reproductive; reproductive success is the purpose of all biological existence, including humans.
⁴
Humans do much of what they do, directly or indirectly, knowingly or (usually) unknowingly, to achieve reproductive success. Attaining political office is no exception. From this perspective, men strive to attain political power (as Bill Clinton did all his life, since his fateful encounter with John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1963), consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. In other words, reproductive access to women is the
goal
, political office is but one
means
. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it. The purpose of earning money is to spend it. The purpose of becoming the President (or anything else men do) is to have a larger number of women with whom to mate.

What distinguishes Bill Clinton is not that he had extramarital affairs while in office; others have, and more will in the future. It would be a Darwinian puzzle if they did not. What distinguishes Clinton instead is that he got caught and that his affair became a spectacular political scandal. What Clinton's genes did not know is that he was not permitted by others to have sex with a large number of women and that he could not get away with it when most of his predecessors have, like all the kings, emperors, sultans, and democratically elected presidents whose reproductive lives Betzig's work describes in great detail. Clinton's genes didn't know about the DNA fingerprinting technology that ultimately exposed the affair and forced him to admit it publicly, because no such thing existed in the ancestral environment.

Q. Why Do Men So Often Earn More Money and Attain Higher Status Than Women?

In all industrialized nations, women earn less money and attain lower occupational status than men do.
⁵
This is true across the board, among blue-collar and white-collar workers and professionals, and in capitalist, socialist, and communist economies. Why?

The Traditional Social Science View

The sex difference in earnings is one of the central concerns of economics
⁶
and sociology.
⁷
Economists and sociologists identify three different parts to the total difference in earnings between men and women. First, there is the difference in what they call “human capital”—education, job skills, training, and other individual traits that affect productivity and job performance. Second, sex difference in earnings can be due to occupational segregation by sex—the fact that men and women tend to occupy different jobs. Men tend to occupy “blue-collar” jobs (manufacturing, construction, truck driving), while women tend to occupy “pink-collar” jobs (secretarial, nursing, teaching). Third, the sex difference in earnings can be due to sex discrimination, where employers pay equally qualified men and women doing the same job differently.

To the extent that the sex gap in pay is due to differences in human capital and productivity, it is considered to be fair by most social scientists. To the extent that the sex gap in pay results from the existence of blue-and pink-collar jobs, then paying all workers in a given occupation equally will not close the total sex difference in earnings. Paying the same wages to male and female truck drivers and to male and female secretaries will not close the sex gap in pay if truck drivers make more than secretaries and most truck drivers are male and most secretaries are female. The existence of occupational sex segregation thus requires consideration of “comparable worth.”
⁸

Because they are deeply wedded to the Standard Social Science Model, most economists and sociologists assume that men and women are on the whole identical in their preferences, values, and desires. They therefore assume that any remaining sex difference in earnings that is not due to sex differences in human capital or sex segregation on the job must be due to employer discrimination. The existence of discrimination, however, must always be inferred from statistical evidence and cannot be observed directly. Social scientists are not likely to witness an employer telling the employees, “I'm paying you more because you are a man, and I'm paying you less because you are a woman.” Nor are employers likely to admit to such a practice if they indeed engaged in it.

But Men and Women Are Different

The conclusion that there is sex discrimination by employers crucially depends on the assumption that men and women are on average identical, except in their amount of human capital (education, job experience, skills) and the jobs they hold. If, on the other hand, men and women with the same amount of human capital and in the same jobs are nonetheless
inherently
and
fundamentally
different in ways that affect their earnings, for instance in their preference and desire for earning money, then discrimination becomes unnecessary to explain the sex gaps in pay. If men and women are different in
internal
preferences and dispositions, such as their desire and drive to earn money, then no
external
factors, such as employer discrimination or a “glass ceiling,” becomes necessary to explain the sex difference in earnings.

The legal scholar Kingsley R. Browne has pioneered evolutionary psychological work on the sex differences in the workplace, such as earnings and occupational sex segregation.
⁹
(We encounter his work on sexual harassment later in this chapter, “Why Is Sexual Harassment So Persistent?”) Browne points out that because of differential selective pressures that men and women faced throughout evolutionary history, men and women have evolved to possess different temperaments. Throughout evolutionary history, material resources and higher status were a man's essential means to reproductive success, because women preferred to mate with resourceful men of high status who could protect and invest heavily in their children. In contrast, physically taking care of children was a woman's means. As a result, women today, who inherited their psychological mechanisms from their female ancestors, are far less risk-taking (because if their ancestors engaged in risky behavior and got injured or killed as a result, their children most likely died),
¹⁰
less status-seeking (because status did not enhance women's reproductive success), and less aggressive and competitive (because throughout evolutionary history, men competed to gain access to women, not the other way around).

Browne suggests that men are much more single-mindedly devoted to earning money and achieving higher status than women are. In a study of an American sample, men are significantly more likely to rank income as an important criterion for selecting a job than women are. The absolute sex difference is greater among teenagers than among older workers, so it is not a realistic response to a lifetime's experience of earning less than men, as feminists and other conventional social scientists might contend.
¹¹
In contrast, women place significantly greater emphasis on the criterion “the work is important and gives me a feeling of accomplishment” for selecting a job.
¹²
As Anne Moir and David Jessel, authors of
Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women
, state: “In the end, the secret of male achievement in the world of work probably lies in the relative male insensitivity to the world of everything—and everybody—else.”
¹³