Killer Dads (9 page)

Hrdy acknowledged in later books the important parenting role that fathers play, not only in helping to begin life, but also in raising their children. Human males are loving, attentive parents usually in for the long haul. Fathers have powerful biological drives to nurture their young, much like mothers, and react similarly to women in responding to cues like the crying of their babies much like their wives. Yet men tend to respond less frequently at a lower threshold of crying. Hrdy argues that tiny differences in parental responsiveness during infancy tend to lead to a significant difference in parent-child relationships over time as a deeper bond develops between a child and the more responsive parent, typically the mother. Still, a man's continuing presence in a family as his child grows is vitally important to the well-being of a child, from modern America to the Brazilian Ache tribes, where an infant who loses his father is four times more likely to die before the age of two than a cohort with a dad, Hrdy noted in
Mother Nature
.
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If Hrdy's early discovery about parenting among the langurs and their infanticide shocked many, her later findings reassured. Her work underscored how deep the Pleistocene legacy of shared care and provisioning of the young—our evolved parenting as “cooperative breeders”—has shaped our better natures, she has argued in
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origin of Mutual Understanding
. It is parenting, not gathering together for warfare, that is the elemental force behind our more “other-regarding” and cooperative selves, she maintains. Langurs may murder an infant, but evolutionary eons later, a human infant can melt a man's heart. Human babies are so dependent for so long that it takes a village to raise them. They could not have survived without a cooperative community of parents along with what she calls “allo mothers” or “allo parents,” people of either sex who help care for the young. Our relative pacifism, our ability to empathize, our capacities to read one another's intentions, and our eagerness to help and please others were forged while infants were developing to elicit care not just from mothers, but from others as well, Hrdy argues. It's a life-saving evolutionary legacy that sets humans well apart from other apes. Chimpanzees may be pretty smart, she notes in her chapter “Apes on a Plane,” but if we flew with a planeload of them from New York to Los Angeles, we'd be “lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached.”
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Even among “famously peaceful bonobos, a type of chimpanzee so rare and difficult to access in the wild that most observations come from zoos, veterinarians sometimes have to be called in following altercations to stitch back on a scrotum or a penis,” she notes.

Paleontologist Richard Leakey emphasized the “profound homologies between us and other apes,” while a psychiatrist like Peter Hobson “is more struck by differences between closely related species,” Hrdy noted in
Mothers and Others
.
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“Both are right.” But from a “tender age and without special training, modern humans identify with the plights of others and, without being asked, volunteer to help and share, even with strangers. In these respects, our line of apes is in a class by itself,” writes Hrdy.
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It was a far different view of interaction among members of a community from what Hrdy had first encountered on Mount Abu. But researchers weren't done yet exploring darker aspects of our kind of primate.

Canadian research partners Martin Daly and Margo Wilson talked excitedly of Hrdy's work at a 1976 California seminar while Daly was teaching psychology at the University of California in Riverside. The seminar featured Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson's provocative book,
Sociobiology
, a tome on the field of study that links social interaction to evolutionary development. Hrdy's name came up because Wilson cited her langur studies in his book, pointing it out as an example of “routine” infanticide by usurping male animals that served an evolutionary goal. His perspectives and Hrdy's theory fascinated the academics. They found E. O. Wilson's and Hrdy's behavioral interpretations far more convincing than the then-trendy view of what they labeled as social scientists' “greater good-ism” view of animal societies as designed to preserve and “reproduce the species” rather than a recognition of the powerfully competitive drive within each individual to mate and procreate. Like Hrdy, Daly and Margo Wilson believed animal studies were often contaminated by researcher bias; scientists tended to see what they unconsciously hoped to discover: an altruistic society. Such a society didn't ring true for them. They were convinced by Hrdy's theory behind langur infanticide. In light of her analysis, as “horrifying” as animal infanticide appears to the human observer, it is “clearly not pathological,” they would write later in
The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love
.
1
In fact, Hrdy's insight that langur infanticide served an evolutionary goal “is so compelling that the interesting question is why it was not investigated and understood sooner,” they noted. Hrdy's proposition that evolutionary “selection will favor infanticidal males over non-infanticidal males” is almost “inescapable,” they concluded.
2

Daly and Wilson, however, weren't as quick as Hrdy was initially in
The Langurs of Abu
to dismiss her theory's possible implications for human behavior. Clearly, human males aren't systematically eliminating their stepchildren as part of a subconscious, instinctive drive toward evolutionary fitness, they acknowledged, but the essence of the evolutionary drive to survive, mate, and successfully raise our own young, who in turn find partners to create families, infuses a significant well of human behavior. Human fathers aren't langurs or lions, intent on killing a rival's offspring, but they have been forged by evolution, like langurs, to reproduce and discriminate in favor of their own offspring, which can have significant consequences for stepchildren. “Indiscriminate allocation of parental benefits without regard to cues of actual parentage would be an evolutionary anomaly,” Daly and Wilson noted.
3
“Although sexually selected infanticide is clearly not a human adaptation, discriminative parental solicitude just as clearly is.” These “child-specific bonds” make it possible for adults to shoulder and enjoy what the two scientists described as the “onerous burden” of parenthood. Because of the nature of relationships forged by evolution, “step-parents do not, on average, feel the same child-specific love and commitment as genetic parents, and therefore do not reap the same emotional rewards from unreciprocated ‘parental' investment,” they added. The upshot is that parents would predictably tend to be more careless with or more likely to express anger against a stepchild. Or a husband might be annoyed, even lash out in anger, when a wife seems to favor her child from a previous relationship over his biological offspring.

Given this perspective, and Hrdy's intriguing findings, Wilson and Daly couldn't help but wonder about rates of violence in families with stepchildren. As they mulled possible effects among humans, they noted the overwhelming number of stories of evil human stepmothers, and stepfathers, in cross-cultural myths and fairy tales. The “abused stepchild is one of the stock characters of folklore,” they pointed out, with “hundreds of variants” of Cinderella's plight in a home ruled by an evil stepparent throughout the world.
4
A dad under pressure from his new wife, Hansel and Gretel's stepmom, abandons them in the dangerous woods to be kidnapped and nearly cooked by a witch (who could also represent the stepmother). In
the Juniper Tree, a woman beheads her stepson and feeds him in a stew to his father, to protect the family's assets for her own biological child. In the Indian fairy tale Murimong and Thanian, a brother and sister flee home, sick of ingesting rotting food fed to them by their evil stepmom. The image of an evil stepmother has even infected language. In Dutch, bad treatment by someone may be referred to as
steifmoederlijke behandling
, or “stepmother treatment.”
5
Wilson and Daly theorized that most of the evil stepparent fables focus on stepmothers because moms tend to be the traditional family storytellers, and the tales passed down through generations served as a warning from mother to child about the dangers of a stepparent coming into their lives in the event of their own mother's death or desertion by a husband. But stepfathers also present as evil doers. A French proverb warns: “The mother of babes who elects to wed has taken their enemy into her bed.”
6
Gruesome tales of stepparents “would not persist where their themes had no resonance” with humans, noted the research couple, concluding that they “must have something to do with the human condition.”

Why, they wondered, was there no research into the risks to children posed by stepparents in modern human society in light of the folklore and especially in the wake of Hrdy's langur research and further studies by other anthropologists? That oversight, as well as the curiosity Hrdy's work triggered, convinced the two to veer from their rodent and primate studies to concentrate instead on violence, particularly family violence, this time among the infinitely intriguing populations of
Homo sapiens
.

When Wilson and Daly began their studies of human violence and homicide, the field was generally dominated by sociologists looking at social impacts, such as poverty, on human actions, or psychologists examining abnormal behavior of perpetrators, noted Daly. The researchers were more concerned with the specific relations between killer and victim, and in possible evolutionary rationales for such violence. Like Hrdy's research, the stepparent studies they launched rattled the orthodoxy on theories about family violence. In their first major examination of child-abuse rates in stepfamilies compared with intact birth families, Wilson and Daly made a stunning discovery: “Enormous differentials in the risk of violence” turned out to be “a particularly dramatic consequence” of the “predictable difference”
in parents' feelings toward stepchildren.
7
In fact, they discovered, having a stepparent turned out to be the single greatest risk factor for severe child maltreatment.
8

The scientists' remarkable findings on violence against stepchildren—revealing rates of abuse of stepkids nearly unimaginably higher than among biological children—sealed their reputations as two of the foremost researchers in evolutionary psychology—a descendant of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology view of behavior. “Ev Psych,” as its students like to refer to it, involves a through-the-looking-glass vision of us as more apelike and driven by evolutionary pasts than we might like to believe. For all of our vast differences from our ape ancestors, we are also, still, surprisingly similar. We are preoccupied with sex, finding a mate, and raising children. We can watch a Shakespeare play and marvel at the sixteenth-century language, but we're captivated by plots that deal with “universal” concerns about chastity, fidelity, jealousy, and paternity molded far earlier in our jungle pasts. It's a convincing vision that, once truly viewed and embraced, is impossible to ever dismiss. It's not the complete explanation for human behavior, but it provides a key piece of the puzzle, and one that can be used to help shape valid approaches to dealing with lethal violence in a continually evolving humanity.

Margo Wilson died in 2009, but Daly continues to explore the evolutionary fuel of human violence (and recently paid homage to Wilson in a presentation of his latest work on motivations behind homicide at a May 2012 conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he's now emeritus professor). He took a break from the Ontario Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution Colloquium—which featured studies on behavior of zebra finches to bees to Atlantic salmon, as well as mink, Pacific coast dune plants, and humans—to talk to me about his work. The rangy, bespectacled Canadian with a shock of white hair and a wry sense of humor seems to constantly view the world around him through a jungle prism. He talks of the violence “risk factors” of a friend's relationship with a threatening young male, and refers to humans as “Homo saps.” He corrects me when I ask about how animals (as opposed to human beings) would react in a certain situation. “You mean
other
animals,” he amends. He recognizes his own
conflicts as a modern human with animal drives, an intellectual who struggles with an evolutionary-selected sense of “male entitlement.”

Viewing men largely as apes in suits (or, in the case of academia, apes in blazers or rolled-up shirt sleeves) is an attitude that can infuriate people, most notably a faction of the American public battling to replace the teaching of evolution in schools with the theory of a God-directed “Intelligent Design.” While working on this book and explaining my examination of “types” of fathers who kill their children to anyone who would listen, the most “understandable” to many was a situation in which a father kills a stepchild. But that wasn't the response Daly and Wilson first received when they published their findings. The scientists were sharply attacked by many researchers, horrified by the view that humans marched to dictates of their brutal inner ape (while, bizarrely, others criticized them for research conclusions that were blindingly obvious). Daly lamented that the findings triggered more than their share of skepticism despite “abundant confirmatory research” that followed. Some of the response seemed colored by the same anti-Darwinist perspective of fundamentalist Christians that man is unique, and could not have evolved from apes. “There is that view that man is somehow special, with a touch of the divine,” Daly explained to me at the conference. “The response to our work initially was vicious.” E. O. Wilson's sociobiology and the subsequent field of evolutionary psychology were also attacked in academia for giving far too much weight to a presumed elemental human nature, versus the potential of familial and cultural nurture, and for being deterministic and ultimately conservative—that humans are destined with little choice to behave a particular way because of evolutionary dictates. “The human brain allows for a wide range of behavior,” argued Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in the early days of the debate.
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“Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.”