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 (22 page)

Whitmeyer's insight is that while it is
economically
irrational to contribute toward ethnic and nationalist movements, as the rational choice theorists point out, because the benefits of successful ethnic collective action cannot be excluded from freeriders, it is nonetheless
evolutionarily
and
biologically
rational. It is irrational from the individual's perspective; it is rational from the genes' perspective.
⁴⁴

Whitmeyer's solution to the problem of ethnic and nationalist conflict contains both good and bad news. The bad news is that our tendency toward ethnocentrism—our desire to help and promote others of “our own kind”—is probably innate. Because they assume that humans are born blank slates, social scientists have always argued that individuals are born entirely free of prejudice, but learn to be racist and ethnocentric through childhood socialization, usually by racist parents. Evolutionary psychology in general and Whitmeyer's work in particular suggest that this is unlikely to be the case.
⁴⁵
Humans are instead born racist and ethnocentric, and learn through socialization and education not to act on such innate tendencies. Humans are innately ethnocentric because ethnocentrism—helping others of one's group members at the cost of all others—was adaptive in the ancestral environment.

The good news is that we can easily overcome our innate ethnocentric tendencies. A recent experiment with an incredibly ingenious design—conducted by Robert O. Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides—demonstrates that while we are born with fixed categories for sex and age, we are not born with fixed categories of what constitutes a race or ethnic group, or what defines “us” versus “them.”
⁴⁶
We will never be able to eliminate our innate ethnocentric tendencies, but we can lessen hostility and conflict between any particular set of ethnic, religious, national, or cultural groups. How? Whitmeyer's mathematical model provides the answer: intermarriage. Our brain is designed to perceive anybody within an “extended family” of intermarrying individuals as “us,” and anybody outside of it as “them.” If members of hostile groups began intermarrying, we could eventually eliminate the hostility itself.

Of course, this is far easier said than done. It would be very difficult to convince members from different ethnic and national groups in conflict to marry each other. But at least there is hope. Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides' experiment shows that humans will never be able to stop treating men and women differently, or the young and the old differently, but they will be able to stop treating Catholics and Protestants differently in Northern Ireland; Muslims and Jews differently in Israel; or Serbs, Croats, and Muslims differently in Bosnia. While some may think there is a chicken-and-egg problem here—does ethnic conflict lead to a lack of intermarriage, or does a lack of intermarriage lead to ethnic conflict?—Whitmeyer's mathematical model points to the latter answer and suggests that it is possible to reduce ethnic and nationalist conflict via increased intermarriage.

Q. Why Are Single Women More Likely to Travel Abroad—and Why Are Young Single Men More Likely to Be Xenophobic?

Ask a group of friends what their hobbies are. If you have many young, unmarried friends of both sexes, chances are that many of your female friends would mention traveling as one of their hobbies, while very few of your young unmarried male friends would. Alternatively, you may find that many of your young single female friends have recently been to a foreign country on a vacation, but few of your young single male friends have. Why is this?

Make a completely different observation. Pay close attention to the news coverage of the most recent Ku Klux Klan rally in the United States or the convention of the British National Party or any other gathering of an expressly xenophobic organization. You will notice that most participants in such xenophobic organizations are young, unmarried men; there are comparatively few women or older men in the membership of such organizations. Why? It turns out that the reason why more young single women vacation abroad may be the same as why most neo-Nazis are young single men. It may have to do with a zoological phenomenon called
lekking
.

Lek
is a Swedish word for “play” and refers in zoology to a complex of behavior whereby members of one sex, almost always male, strut and display their genetic quality in a contest, in front of an audience consisting of members of the other sex, almost always female. At the end of the lek, the females choose the winner and exclusively mate with him. The winner of lekking monopolizes all of the mating opportunities, and none of the others get any.

At first sight, humans appear to be an exception in nature. Among most species, males are gaudy, colorful, decorated, and ornamented, while females are drab in appearance. (Compare peacocks with peahens.) Males of lekking species display their physical features in order to attract mates, and females choose their mates on the basis of the males' physical appearance; the gaudier and more colorful, the better. In contrast, among humans, it is women for whom physical appearance is more important for their mate value, and it is men who choose their mates mostly for their physical appearance. (See “Why Do Men Like Blonde Bombshells [and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Them]?” in chapter 3.) And, at least in industrial societies, women tend to be more decorated and ornamented than men, although men in many preindustrial societies often wear more elaborate ornamentation than do women.

The female of most species in nature does not receive any material benefit from her mates; the male does not make any parental investment beyond the sperm deposited inside the female body during copulation. This is why the male's genetic quality is especially important for the female; in fact, nothing else matters. So among these species, males display their genetic quality in lekking, and the females choose their mates solely on the basis of their genetic quality. Human males are exceptional in nature in this regard; they make a large amount of material investment in their offspring, even though they don't make as much parental investment as women do (see “Why Are There So Many Deadbeat Dads but So Few Deadbeat Moms?” in chapter 5). This does not mean, however, that their genetic quality is not important to women; men's genetic quality can predict their future ability to acquire resources and attain status, hence their ability to make parental investment.
⁴⁷
For humans, because of high male parental investment, what is important is not the male's genetic quality per se but earning potential. His genetic quality is important only to the extent that it predicts or correlates with his potential to earn and accumulate material resources.

This is why when men lek, they display their earning potential and accumulated wealth in addition to their genetic quality. And unlike other lekking species, like the sage grouse or the antelope, men lek mostly by nonphysical means. They drive luxury cars, wear expensive watches and designer suits,
⁴⁸
carry electronic gadgets like cell phones and PDAs, and brag about their achievements in casual conversations.
⁴⁹
Young men also advertise their genetic quality and earning potential by “cultural displays”—excelling in such “quantifiable, public, and costly” activities as music, art, literature, and science.
⁵⁰

In one study, for example, researchers covertly observed patrons of a bar in central Liverpool in the late 1990s, when cell phones were still relatively rare and expensive. The researchers discovered that men's tendency to place their cell phones on the table in clear view of others, unlike women's tendency to do the same, increases with the number of men in their group and its ratio of men to women.
⁵¹
The researchers' interpretation is that men do this, consciously or unconsciously, in order to compete with other men in their group for the attention of the women, and to display their wealth and status and hence their genetic quality and earning potential. So men lek via social and cultural, rather than physical, ornamentation.
⁵²

A Not-So-Universal Language

Such social and cultural ornamentation, however, presents men with one problem that males of other species, who lek via physical ornamentation, do not face: It does not travel well. Social and cultural ornamentation is, by definition, socially and culturally specific. Men cannot brag about their achievements in conversations with women unless they speak the same language. Yanomamö women in the Amazon rain forest would not be able to tell the difference between a BMW and a Hyundai or the difference between an Armani suit and a Burger King uniform, and their status implications; a Grammy or a Nobel Prize will not impress them at all. (Has any Nobel Prize winner ever had massive head scars, indicating their experience in club fights?) Conversely, Western women are unlikely to be impressed by body scars and large penis sheaths. Signs of men's status and mate value are specific to societies and cultures, and they lose meaning outside of them.

This is in clear contrast to women's status and mate value. Standards of youth and physical attractiveness, the two most important determinants of women's status and mate value, are culturally universal
⁵³
because they are innate
⁵⁴
(see chapter 3, “Why Is Beauty
Not
in the Eye of the Beholder or Skin-Deep?”). Men in preliterate and innumerate cultures without any concept of fractions or the decimal point will be able to distinguish between women with 1.0 and 0.7 waist-to-hip ratios. Yanomamö men will see that a Victoria's Secret lingerie model is extremely
moko dude
(a Yanomamö phrase meaning “perfectly ripe”).
⁵⁵

A Sure Sign That Someone Wanted You

If men's status and mate value are specific to their own society and culture, then they should avoid different cultures, where a completely different set of rules, of which they are ignorant, may apply. In contrast, women should not avoid foreign cultures to the same extent that men do, because rules applicable to them are cross-culturally universal.

However, this sex difference should disappear once men marry, for a couple of reasons. First, married men who have achieved reproductive success should have less of an urgent need to attract mates by social and cultural ornamentation than do unmarried men.
⁵⁶
Second, and more important,
mates are probably the only ornamentation or lekking device men can display that is cross-culturally meaningful.
There is evidence that females of species as varied as guppies,
⁵⁷
Japanese medaka,
⁵⁸
black grouse,
⁵⁹
and Japanese quail
⁶⁰
prefer to mate with males who have recently mated. Females use other females' choice of males as evidence of their genetic quality; in other words, they copy each other. And some suggest that human females might do the same.
⁶¹

The idea is simple: If a woman meets a strange man, she has no basis on which to form an opinion of him. He can be a high-quality man, or he can be a low-quality man; she just doesn't know. However, if he has a wife, that means that at least one woman, who presumably closely inspected his quality before marrying him, found him good enough to marry. So he couldn't be
that
bad after all; at least one woman found him desirable. So being married (the presence of a wife) is one cross-culturally transportable ornamentation or lekking device that signifies men's superior mate value, and married men should not avoid foreign cultures.
^[62]

Dislike of foreign cultures can be measured by the likelihood of travel to foreign countries or by the expressions of xenophobic attitudes. One empirical study with a large European sample shows that, controlling for age, education, and income (factors that are expected to, and in most cases do, affect people's ability to travel), unmarried women are significantly more likely to vacation abroad than unmarried men.
⁶³
The same study also demonstrates that, controlling for age and education, unmarried women are significantly less likely to express xenophobic attitudes than unmarried men toward individuals of other nationalities, races, and religions. The pattern is similar among Americans as well.
⁶⁴
In all cases, the sex difference disappears once the respondents are married; married women are no more likely to travel to foreign countries (probably because married couples tend to vacation together) or no less likely to express xenophobic attitudes than married men.