Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution:

A Paleo-Anthropological Speculation on the Origins of Secondary-Sexual Traits, Male Nurturing and the Child as a Sexual Image

an article by David Brin, Ph.D.

Copyright David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

One could be bloody-minded and suggest the present quandary will take care of itself, since presumably the children of "reindeer" men will be less successful than those whose fathers help nurture them. It has been said that the archaic term, illegitimacy, could be applied to a deadly plague sweeping the United States in the late Twentieth Century -- one that correlates more closely with childhood poverty, death and disability than any other group of causes, including accidents and infectious agents. If failure of men to assist in the raising of their children has such consequences, it might eventually result in the genetic rewarding of male nurturance, so that men equilibrate about a new "best" strategy, centered closer to shared child care.¹⁸ Alas, in the context of a modern and compassionate society, this laissez-faire approach is callous, slow, and no solution at all.

Certainly we should put even greater effort into social conditioning, to try altering the ratio of "storks" to "reindeer" among human males. No doubt education can change the proportionate distribution of types. Unfortunately, those who expect a complete panacea out of socialization are likely to be disappointed. What good will it do to exhort boys not to act like elk, if they see elk-style men having success?

A better remedy might be to help women and girls learn to judge better -- to tell apart the various types of men -- and to distinguish a sincere promise from mere words aimed at an immediate end. In other words, use the tools of science to help young female Homo sapiens do what most females of other species do -- choose as well as they can, despite the complexities of modern context. For many, this could make the difference between a successful, happy life and eventual abandonment in poverty. Indeed, the pages of most womens' magazines seem obsessed with exactly this effort -- floundering chaotically toward alchemical prescriptions for choice-directed happiness. This effort currently receives virtually no support from feminist intellectuals, who consider the approach ideologically anathema, holding that woman should not base her happiness on marriage or successful mate-choice, even though such success, when achieved, demonstrably leverages improved lives for women and children in all contexts and at all social levels, and furthermore that same success can be perfectly compatible with actualization in career and other areas of life. In other words, a woman who chooses a mate well is also more likely to succeed in areas beyond home and marriage.

Even if a program teaching girls to make wise choices were implemented and highly effective, there would still be a rub; for so long as the goal is "one man for each woman" the rules of a zero-sum game continue to apply. There will be winners and losers, and the spectacle of females fiercely competing for quality mates will continue.

Finally, humanity may soon have the power to plan and execute alterations to its own genetic heritage. It's conceivable that a few prunings of DNA might excise the worst ancient reproductive behaviors, while retaining desirable protective drives. Brin (1992) describes how amazonogenesis might be added to the suite of impressive capabilities of the human womb, effectively ending male social dominance. Such programs would demand careful thought, and the wisdom to put them into effect only by consensus... a task almost as daunting politically as scientifically.

None of this implies the situation for human beings is hopeless. Through a combination of methods we might improve matters to the point where we are merely uncomfortable, instead of painfully confused. But one realization clearly emerges out of this discussion -- there is no design possible for a human utopia. Whatever society we put together will at best be a network of compromises.

It happens all too often that this sort of speculative essay is taken too seriously, by both authors and all-too-easily persuaded (or outraged) readers. Evolutionary paleo-sociobiology is a subject which, for lack of solid facts, is all too prone to emotional, egotistical or wishful posturing. It is well to recall that one can only go so far by spinning reasonable-sounding scenarios. Those I have presented here are mere conjectures. I claim nothing more.

Secondly, open discussion can only do good here. Once people of good will, both men and women, are better aware of the hand dealt them by evolution, they must almost certainly grow better at playing it.

And there is an up side in this odd tale of runaway selection, as expressed movingly by Sarah Hrdy (1981, p.14):

... it will be well to keep in mind a central paradox of the human condition -- that our species possesses the capacity to carry sexual inequality to its greatest known extremes, but we also possess the potential to realize an unusual social equality between the sexes...

For all its tragic implications, this cycle of mutual selection has meant that both genders experience much the same range of emotions during their lifetimes. True, men and women seem at times to concentrate on different priorities, which come into sad conflict in our present culture. But standing back, one can say without any doubt that both girls and boys grow up knowing what it's like to feel the fear and excitement of initiating an encounter, as well as being the one to evaluate or choose, to accept or refuse. In most species these activities are strictly reserved for one sex or the other, but men and women both experience rejection, and each knows all the happy and aggravating phases of bonding. This may help women and men empathize with each other to a degree I would suspect is unprecedented between the sexes in nature, where males and females have little experience of each others' ways. Those who perceive only the gulf between men and women should take note.

Finally, although we may have stumbled about blindly in our million years of feverish adaptation, and while we now find ourselves boxed in, with little hope for anything like utopia, there is no cause for shame. If we are awkward and uneven in our adaptations, it is because we are a people still in rapid flux. One cannot hope or expect that a species will be perfectly at peace with itself when it is still in furious transition from what it once was, toward what it eventually may become. The first species ever to have some control or choice about that destiny.

Compassion is the trait we may be most proud of. Ironically, it can have come from nowhere else than the bizarre story of our ancestors' competition for reproductive success.

¹⁸ Almost no human society is known that did not exhibit the practice of polygyny, in one form or another. But natural hunter gatherer societies appear to have varied widely in the criteria used for selecting "chiefs" -- (defined as those males invested with both tribal authority and accompanying reproductive advantages). In some clans, protector types seem to have been chosen, with active participation in this selection by female councils. In others, more brutal types prevailed simply on the basis of fighting ability, and females lacked any voice in determining who would become a chief and have multiple wives. Note that the difference among native tribes was not whether there was polygyny by alpha males, but who set the criteria for its implementation. (Among the Cherokee, a chief could not choose his second wife. When the first wife felt ready, she would select someone she could get along with, and he had at best a veto. Also, family-abandonment was a major crime.) These two archetypal patterns appear to have rewarded profoundly different male personality traits, both of which persist today. If we call serial-monogamy a sequential form of polygyny, the rate in supposedly monogamous contemporary America is clearly much higher than it was in most aboriginal tribes. It is left to the reader to decide which category of male is having the most reproductive success today--the "user" type, or faithful "dad" types. Despite greater death rates associated with the "inseminate-and-leave" strategy, it clearly produces a lot of offspring... and will continue doing so until our "tribe" changes its partly-polygamous mating practices, or at least re-defines its implied criteria for choosing "chiefs." (back to where you left off)

For their assistance, conversations and criticism, the author would like to thank: Dr. Joe Miller, Dr. James Moore, Dr. Gregory Benford, Dr. Paul Levinson, Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Dr. David Buss and Dr. Cheryl Brigham.

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