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 (2 page)

This book has been a long time in the making. Due to the controversial and often politically incorrect nature of its subject matter, we have encountered obstacles and resistance from many corners in our effort to publish this book.

For bringing this project to long-delayed fruition, I must first of all thank my editor at Perigee, Marian Lizzi, for believing in me and in this project as no other editors have. Until I met Marian, I had not known that editors could be so supportive and encouraging; I had never had an editor who I felt was completely “on my side” and had my interests at heart. I could not have found Marian without my able literary agent, Andrew Stuart, who, through his worldwide network of subagents, also found several foreign publishers who wanted to translate and publish this book on three other continents.

I thank Laura L. Betzig, Martie G. Haselton, and Kaja Perina for commenting on parts of the book in earlier forms, and Sarah E. Hill, Bobbi S. Low, Frank J. Sulloway, and Robert L. Trivers for providing me with various pieces of information. I must apologize to David M. Buss because, even though he has been supportive of me and this book project, I know he will not like its title. (But it was Marian's idea!)

Two editors in chief of
Psychology Today
have played significant roles in the course of both my career and the development of this book project. Hara Estroff Marano, former editor in chief of
PT
and current editor at large, was the very first journalist ever to interview me and feature my scientific work in the media. We have since become friends, and she has been very supportive of me throughout the years, offering me sage advice, warm support, and delicious ginger-poached pears. Most importantly, she introduced me to her agent, Andrew Stuart; and to her colleague Kaja Perina.

My dear friend Kaja Perina, current editor in chief of
PT
, has been a truly unfailing supporter of me, my career, and this book project. Kaja is the most frighteningly intelligent, cultured, sophisticated, and beautiful woman that I know. She became editor in chief of
PT
at the astonishingly young age of 27. At the current pace, Kaja can become President of the United States on her 35th birthday, except that it would be far beneath her to take on such a job. Despite her enormously important and demanding job, Kaja is always available to talk whenever I make trans-Atlantic phone calls to her desk in New York, ready with brilliant insight and judicious advice. Kaja has been the wisdom and maturity behind this book, since I have neither.

While working on this book, I made the transition from untenured Assistant Professor on an annual contract at a small college in Western Pennsylvania, to tenured Reader on a lifetime contract at the London School of Economics and Political Science, among other things. For never losing faith in me during the years I was in academic exile, I thank Denise L. Anthony, Paula En gland, Roberto Franzosi, Debra Friedman, Michael Hechter, Christine Horne, Lisa A. Keister, Michael W. Macy, Toshio Yamagishi, Lawrence A. Young, and—above all and always—Mary C. Still. Thanks and unbounded love to Cary Lee Coryell and Abigail Iris Coryell for being the greatest daughters that a delusional man can pretend to have. I am grateful to Bruce J. Ellis, Diane J. Reyniers, and David de Meza for rescuing me.

—Satoshi Kanazawa

Human Nature “R” Us

This book is about human nature. “Human nature” is one of those things that everybody knows and uses in their daily conversation, but that is difficult to define precisely. What
is
human nature?

The answer is both complex and remarkably simple. Every time we fall in love, every time we fight with our spouse, every time we enjoy watching our favorite TV show, every time we get scared walking at night in bad neighborhoods where tough young men loiter, every time we are upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, every time we go to church, we are—
in part
—behaving as a human animal with its own unique evolved nature—human nature.

This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime, but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Our human nature is the cumulative product of the experiences of our ancestors in the past, and it affects how we think, feel, and behave today.

Second, because human nature is universal—sometimes shared by all humans, sometimes only shared by members of our own sex—our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all other humans on earth (or all other men or women). Despite the seemingly large cultural differences in various societies, our daily experiences are essentially the same as those of people from Aberdeen, Bombay, and Cairo, to Xian, Yukon, and Zanzibar.

Human behavior is a product
both
of our innate human nature
and
of our unique individual experiences and environment. Both are important influences on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In this book, we emphasize human nature to the near exclusion of experience and environment. But there is a very good reason for that.

The Forgotten Half of the Equation

Everyone agrees that experience and environment are both important influences on human behavior. Despite critics' claims to the contrary, there are no serious biological or genetic determinists in science.
¹
There are a few genetic diseases, such as Hunting-ton's disease, which are 100 percent determined by genes; if someone carries the affected gene, they will develop the disease no matter what their experiences or environment.
²
An individual's eye color and blood type are also 100 percent determined by genes. So these (and a few other) traits are entirely genetically determined. Otherwise, there are no human traits that are 100 percent determined by genes. Nor are there any serious scientists who think there are.

However, there are many social scientists, journalists, and others who believe that human traits and behavior are almost entirely determined by the environment.
³
As we will see in chapters 1 and 2, most social scientists tend to be
environmental determinists
. They believe that individual experiences and social environments
completely
determine human behavior, and there are no roles played by genetic and biological factors.

We emphasize biological influences on human behavior not because they are more important than environmental influences but because they need to be emphasized, for while no human behavior is 100 percent determined by the genes,
neither is any human behavior 100 percent determined by the environment
. The former is not controversial; everybody knows it. The latter is controversial, and not enough people know it. That is why we emphasize it in this book.

Evolutionary psychology is the new science of human nature and, together with behavior genetics, is currently the best theoretical perspective with which to understand the biological and evolutionary influences on human preferences, values, emotions, cognition, and behavior.
⁴
In this book, we try to introduce evolutionary psychology to a wider audience. While evolutionary psychology is sweeping the social and behavioral sciences, there have been relatively few
recent
popular introductions to the field.
^[5]
Because there are a large number of fascinating studies published every year in evolutionary psychology, popular introductions must be updated every so often.

In doing so, we adopt a question-and-answer format. We try to use evolutionary psychology to address and explain typical experiences in our daily lives as well as events and problems in the larger society, because we believe insight from evolutionary psychology can shed new light on and provide novel solutions to some old problems. This is, if you will, an evolutionary psychology question-and-answer book.

We also want to demonstrate in this book that evolutionary psychology is not just about sex and mating. While there have been many fascinating studies in evolutionary psychology about sex and human mating (and we will discuss them in chapter 3), we believe evolutionary psychology can explain much more about human behavior. In fact, we want to show that insight from evolutionary psychology is useful in explaining puzzles in
all
areas of human life. This is the reason we adopt the question-and-answer format and address many areas of human social life in this book.

Two Errors in Thinking That We Must Avoid

In any discussion of evolutionary psychology, it is very important to avoid two serious mistakes in thinking. They are called the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. The
naturalistic fallacy
, which was coined by the English philosopher George Edward Moore in the early twentieth century
⁶
though first identified much earlier by the Scottish philosopher David Hume,
⁷
is the leap from
is
to
ought
—that is, the tendency to believe that what is natural is good; that what is, ought to be. For example, one might commit the error of the naturalistic fallacy and say, “Because people
are
genetically different and endowed with different innate abilities and talents, they
ought
to be treated differently.”

The
moralistic fallacy
, coined by the Harvard microbiologist Bernard Davis in the 1970s,
⁸
is the opposite of the naturalistic fallacy. It refers to the leap from
ought
to
is
, the claim that the way things should be is the way they are. This is the tendency to believe that what is good is natural; that what ought to be, is. For example, one might commit the error of the moralistic fallacy and say, “Because everybody
ought
to be treated equally, there
are
no innate genetic differences between people.” The science writer Matt Ridley calls it
reverse naturalistic fallacy
.
⁹

Both are errors in thinking, and they get in the way of progress in science in general, and in evolutionary psychology in particular. However, as Ridley astutely points out, political conservatives are more likely to commit the naturalistic fallacy (“Nature designed men to be competitive and women to be nurturing, so women ought to stay home to take care of their children and leave politics to men”), while political liberals are equally likely to commit the moralistic fallacy (“The Western liberal democratic principles hold that men and women ought to be treated equally, and therefore men and women are biologically identical and any study that demonstrates otherwise is
a priori
false”). Since academics, and social scientists in particular, are generally left-leaning liberals, the moralistic fallacy has been a much greater problem in academic discussions of evolutionary psychology than the naturalistic fallacy. Most academics are above committing the naturalistic fallacy, but they are not above committing the moralistic fallacy.

We will avoid both errors—both leaps of logic—in this book by never talking about what ought to be at all and only talking about what is. It is not possible to make either mistake if we never talk about
ought
. We will not draw moral conclusions from the empirical observations we describe in subsequent chapters, and we will not be guided in our observations by moral principles.

There are only two legitimate criteria by which you may evaluate scientific ideas and theories: logic and evidence. Accordingly, you may justifiably criticize evolutionary psychological theories (including those presented in this book) if they are logically inconsistent within themselves or if there is credible scientific evidence against them. As scientists, we will take all such criticisms seriously. However, it would hardly be appropriate to criticize scientific theories simply because their implications are immoral, ugly, contrary to our ideals, or offensive to some. We can tell you right now that the implications of many of the ideas we present in this book (whether ours or someone else's) are indeed immoral, ugly, contrary to our ideals, or offensive to either men or women (or some other groups of people). However, we must state them as they are because, to the best of our scientific judgment, they are true. That does not mean that we endorse all possible consequences and implications of our observations or believe that they are somehow good, right, desirable, or justifiable.

Truth is the guiding principle in science, and it is the most important thing for scientists. We also believe that any solution to a social problem must start with the correct assessment of the problem itself and its possible causes. We can never devise a correct solution to a problem if we don't know what its ultimate causes are. So the true observations are important foundations of both basic science and social policy.

A Note about Stereotypes

It would be tempting to dismiss many of our observations (such as answers to questions like, “Why are there so many deadbeat dads but so few deadbeat moms?” or “Why are almost all violent criminals men?”) as stereo types. We plead guilty to the charge; many of our (and others') observations
are
stereo types. But we suggest that you cannot dismiss an observation by calling it a stereo type, as if that suddenly makes it untrue and thus unworthy of discussion and explanation. In fact, the opposite is the case.
Many stereo types are empirical generalizations with a statistical basis and thus on average tend to be true.
The only problem with stereo types and empirical generalizations is that they are not always true for all individual cases. There are always individual exceptions to stereo types. There are many dedicated fathers and female criminals, even though the generalizations are still true. The danger lies in applying the statistical generalizations to individual cases, which may or may not be exceptions.

Stereo types have a bad name, but many of them may turn out to be true empirical generalizations that someone does not like or that are unkind or offensive to some groups. An observation, if true, becomes an empirical generalization until someone objects to it, and then it becomes a stereo type. For example, the statement “Men are taller than women” is an empirical generalization. It is in general true (and, by the way, there are evolutionary psychological explanations for this phenomenon
¹⁰
), but there are individual exceptions. There are many men who are shorter than the average woman, and there are many women who are taller than the average man, but these exceptions do not make the generalization untrue; in every human society, men on average are taller than women. Everybody knows this, but nobody calls it a stereo type because it is not unkind to anybody. Men in general like being taller than women, and women in general like being shorter than men.
¹¹

However, as soon as one turns this around and makes the slightly different, yet equally true, observation that “Women are fatter than men,” it becomes a stereo type because nobody, least of all women, wants to be considered fat. But it is true nonetheless; women have a higher percentage of body fat than men throughout the life course (and there are evolutionary reasons why this is the case as well
¹²
). Once again, there are numerous individual exceptions, but the generalization still holds at the population level.

In this book, we will attempt to make and then explain observations and phenomena that the available scientific evidence indicates are empirically true, even though there are individual exceptions and
regardless of whether they may seem unkind to some groups
(which they may in many cases). We draw no consequences or conclusions out of such observations; we are simply stating and explaining them. We will not commit either naturalistic or moralistic fallacy. Stereo types and empirical generalizations are neither good nor bad, desirable nor undesirable, moral nor immoral. They just are.

Stereo types also do not tell us how to behave or treat other people (or groups of people). Stereo types are observations about the empirical world, not behavioral prescriptions. One may not infer how to treat people from empirical observations about them. Stereo-types tell us what groups of people tend to be or do in general; they do not tell us how we ought to treat them. Once again, there is no place for “ought” in science.

How to Use This Book

The book is organized so that after the introduction and two introductory chapters, readers may skip around and read whichever chapters and sections are of interest. Each chapter (and section within it) is designed to be self-contained for anyone who has read the introduction and the first two chapters. We introduce fundamental principles of evolutionary psychology in chapters 1 and 2. Chapters 3–8 cover different areas of everyday life (sex and mating, marriage, family, crime and violence, political and economic inequalities, and religion and conflict). In each we pose several questions readers may have wondered about in their own lives, and provide evolutionary psychological answers to them. We look ahead at the questions that still remain unanswered by evolutionary psychology in the conclusion.