The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Penguin Press Science) by Matt Ridley

Author:Matt Ridley [Ridley, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historical Study & Educational Resources, Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Sociology, Science & Math, Biological Sciences, Biology, Evolution, Self-Help, Personal Transformation
ISBN: 0140167722
Amazon: B00433T3RQ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1994-10-05T18:30:00+00:00

The Rewards of Violence

If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause, and reward, of violence.45

Consider the case of the Pitcairn Islanders. In 1790, nine mutineers from HMS Bounty landed on Pitcairn along with six male and thirteen female Polynesians. Thousands of miles from the nearest habitation, unknown to the world, they set about building a life on the little island. Notice the imbalance: fifteen men and thirteen women. When the colony was discovered eighteen years later, ten of the women had survived and only one of the men. Of the other men, one had committed suicide, one had died and twelve had been murdered. The survivor was simply the last man left standing in an orgy of violence motivated entirely by sexual competition. He promptly underwent a conversion to Christianity and prescribed monogamy for Pitcairn society. Until the 1930s the colony prospered and good genealogical records were kept. Studies of these show that the prescription worked. Apart from rare and occasional adultery, the Pitcairners were and remain monogamous.46

Monogamy, enforced by law, religion or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men. According to Tacitus, the Germanic tribes that so frustrated several Roman emperors attributed their success partly to the fact that they were a monogamous society and therefore able to direct their aggression outwards (though no such explanation applied to the polygamous and successful Romans). No man was allowed more than one wife, so no man had an incentive to kill a fellow tribesman to take his wife. Not that socially imposed monogamy need extend to captive slaves. In the nineteenth century in Borneo, one tribe, the Iban, dominated the tribal wars of the island. Unlike their neighbours, the Iban were monogamous, which both prevented the accumulation of sullen bachelors in their ranks and motivated them to feats of great daring with the prize of foreign girl slaves as reward.47

One of the legacies of being an ape is intergroup violence. Until the 1970s, primatologists were busy confirming our prejudices about peaceable apes living in non-violent societies. Then they began to observe the rare but more sinister side of chimpanzee life. The males of a chimpanzee ‘tribe’ sometimes conduct violent campaigns against the males of another tribe, seeking out and killing their enemies. This habit is very different from the territoriality of many animals, who are content to expel intruders. The prize may be to seize the enemy territory, but that is a small reward for so dangerous a business. A far richer reward awaits the successful male alliance: young females of the defeated group join the victors.48

If war is something we inherited directly from the hostility between groups of male apes over female apes, with territory as merely a means to the end of sex, then it follows that tribal people must be going to war over women rather than territory. Anthropologists for a long time insisted that war was fought over scarce material resources, in particular protein, which was often in short supply.

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