The Science of Love by Robin Dunbar

Author:Robin Dunbar
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

When your choice is not your own

So powerful are the forces that create romantic relationships that they can even come between parents and offspring when the former disapprove of, or fall out with, the person that the latter has chosen to fall in love with. So many honour killings of daughters in Asian families, so many estrangements between parents and offspring, arise from these disputes. They are far from rare occurrences. They arise because parents have a vested genetic interest in the offspring that their children produce, so all through history and prehistory parents have tried to manipulate the marital arrangements of their children to promote those interests. Rightly or wrongly, parents take the view that their greater experience of life and the world gives them a better sense of what is, and what is not, a good match. I’ll finish this chapter with three remarkable examples all drawn from real life.

In the late Middle Ages, the Portuguese nobility manipulated the life opportunities of their children to ensure the succession for the family estates. Previously, they had operated a system of partible inheritance whereby each son inherited an equal share of the family fortune. (Daughters gained a share too, but it was much smaller and mainly in the form of a dowry.) This had been possible because, as the Moors who had ruled the Iberian peninsula for the previous seven centuries were forced out, the Portuguese ducal families had been able to acquire their land for next to nothing. As a result, there was no shortage of land, and each generation of sons could easily make up a full-sized estate from the modest share they started with by taking over nearby Moorish estates. But once the Moors had all been expelled and there were no more of their estates to take over, the Portuguese nobility hit a problem: the size of estates became fixed, and dividing them equally between the children rapidly reduced their size and economic viability with each succeeding generation. A wealthy landed family who produced too many sons would soon end up with descendants owning tiny, uneconomic parcels of land. In short, within a couple of generations, they would have joined the peasantry. So they did the obvious thing: they switched their inheritance rule to primogeniture, and the oldest son inherited the entire estate. This, of course, created a surplus of younger sons with no prospects. Now, boys without prospects are troublesome the world over. And inevitably, that’s exactly what happened: gangs of unruly younger sons rampaged their way around Portugal, behaving like bandits and becoming increasingly disruptive. It may be no coincidence that the era of Portuguese explorations to discover the New World and the sea route to India began at just this moment in history. What better way to be rid of troublesome youth than to encourage them to go and make their fortunes elsewhere at someone else’s expense?

They had a similar problem with excess daughters as well, of course: if each estate is inherited by only one son, he needs only one wife from another landed family.

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