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 (6 page)

Exception That Proves the Rule

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that anisogamy, the internal gestation, and the consequent greater fitness variance among men than among women lead to the sex differences in behavior comes from the proverbial “exception that proves the rule.” While males have a greater fitness ceiling than females in most species, there are a few exceptional species for which this is not true. Among some fish, frog, and bird species, the males carry the fertilized eggs during gestation, and as a result, the females have a higher fitness ceiling than males do. Females of these species can continue reproducing while the males are “pregnant” with the young. As predicted by evolutionary biology, among these species, females are more aggressive, competitive, and violent than males.
¹⁰
Among these species, the females compete fiercely with each other for sexual access to the coy males. These exceptions therefore prove the rule that it is the fitness variance that determines which sex is more competitive and aggressive.
¹¹

What about Culture? Is Anything Cultural?

Having read so far about how evolutionary psychology explains human behavior in terms of the interaction between evolved psychological mechanisms and the environment, you might be wondering, “Okay, that's fine and dandy. Our evolved mind does influence our behavior, as evolutionary psychologists say. But what about culture? Surely culture influences and molds human behavior through cultural socialization, as traditional sociologists say, even to a greater extent than our innate tendencies do.”

Yes, culture and socialization do matter, to a certain extent. But the grave error of traditional sociologists and others under the influence of the Standard Social Science Model is to believe that human behavior is
infinitely
malleable, capable of being molded and shaped limitlessly in any way by cultural practices and socialization. Available evidence now shows that this view is false. Human behavior, while malleable, is not
infinitely
malleable by culture, because culture is not infinitely variable. In fact, despite all the surface and minor differences, evolutionary psychologists have shown all human cultures to be more or less the same.

There Is Only One Human Culture

People—social scientists and laypersons alike—often speak of culture in the plural (“cultures”) because they believe that there are many different cultures in the world. At one level, this is of course true; the American culture is different from the Chinese culture, both of which are different from the Egyptian culture, and so on. However, all the cultural differences are on the surface; deep down, at the most fundamental level, all human cultures are essentially the same.

To use a famous metaphor, coined by the cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris,
¹²
it is true that, at the surface level, people in some societies consume beef as food and worship pigs as sacred religious objects, while those in others consume pork as food and worship cows as sacred religious objects. So there is cultural variety at this concrete level. However, both beef and pork are animal proteins (as are dogs, whales, and monkeys), and both pigs and cows are animate objects (as are Buddha, Allah, and Jesus). And people in every human society consume animal proteins and worship animate objects. At this abstract level, there are no exceptions, and all human cultures are the same. There is no infinite variability in human culture, in the sense that there are no cultures in which people do not consume animal protein or worship animate objects.

To use another example, it is true that languages spoken in different cultures appear completely different, as anyone who ever tried to learn a foreign language knows. English is completely different from Chinese, neither of which is anything like Arabic. Despite these “surface” differences, however, all natural human languages share what the linguist Noam Chomsky calls the “deep structure” of grammar.
¹³
In this sense, English and Chinese are essentially the same, in the sense that beef and pork are essentially the same.

You need proof? Any developmentally normal child can grow up to speak any natural human language. Regardless of what language their genetic parents spoke, all developmentally normal children are capable of growing up to be native speakers of English, Chinese, Arabic, or any natural human language. In fact, when a group of children grow up together with no adults to teach them a language, they will invent their own natural human language with complete grammar. This does not mean, however, that the human capacity for language is infinitely malleable. Human children cannot grow up to speak non-natural languages like FORTRAN or symbolic logic, despite the fact that these are far more logical and easier to learn than any natural language (no irregular verbs, no exceptions to rules). Yes, a developmentally normal human child can grow up to speak any language,
as long as
the language is a product of human evolution, not a recent invention of computer scientists or logicians.
¹⁴

Pierre van den Berghe, whom we encountered in the last chapter, again puts it best when he says, “Culture is the uniquely human way of adapting, but culture, too, evolved biologically.”
¹⁵
Despite all the surface differences, there is only one human culture, because culture, like our body, is an adaptive product of human evolution. The human culture is a product of our genes, just like our hands and pancreas are.

Biologically, human beings are very weak and fragile; we do not have fangs to fight predators and catch prey or fur to protect us from extreme cold. Culture is the defense mechanism with which evolution equipped us to protect ourselves, so that we can inherit and then pass on our knowledge of manufacturing weapons (to fight predators and catch prey) or clothing and shelter (to protect us from extreme cold).
We don't need fangs or fur, because we have culture.
And just like—despite some minor individual differences—all tigers have more or less the same fangs and all polar bears have more or less the same fur, all human societies have more or less the same culture. Fangs are a universal trait of all tigers; fur is a universal trait of all polar bears; so culture is a universal trait of all human societies. Yes, culture is a cultural universal.

Three Examples of Exotic Culture That Never Was

The recent (and somewhat shameful) history of the social sciences is very instructive in this respect. It shows that every time there was news of a discovery of a new, exotic culture in a remote region of the world, completely different from the Western European culture, it turns out that the discovery was a hoax. Every time, it turns out that there are no human cultures that are radically and completely different from other cultures. We'll share three such examples.

Margaret Mead and the Samoa
¹⁶

In 1923, Margaret Mead (1901–1978), one of the most celebrated anthropologists of all time, was an anthropology graduate student of Franz Boas at Columbia University. Boas was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and was therefore politically and personally motivated to prove wrong the Nazi policy of eugenics. While this is an admirable goal in and of itself, Boas unfortunately chose the wrong tactics to achieve it. He wanted to show that biology had nothing to do with how humans behave, and that environment—culture—determines human behavior entirely. He was a strong proponent of
cultural determinism.

In order to demonstrate that culture and socialization determine human behavior in its entirety, Boas gave his graduate students (including Mead) the impossible task of finding a human culture radically different from the Western culture, where people behave completely differently from Americans and Europeans. Margaret Mead was sent to Samoa with this mandate from Boas.

On August 31, 1925, Mead arrived in American Samoa to conduct her research. She was to spend six months doing her field work. Unbeknownst to Boas, however, Mead was involved in another, secret research project, and spent almost all of her time in Samoa doing this other work. She was to leave Samoa in a month, and she had not done any of the fieldwork for Boas on the topic of cultural and behavioral variability to find evidence that Samoan behavior was completely different from American behavior. She decided to finish this work quickly by interviewing two young local women about the sexual behavior of adolescents in Samoa on March 13, 1926.

Mead knew that in the United States and the rest of the Western world, boys were sexually aggressive and actively pursued girls, while girls were sexually coy and waited to be asked out on dates by boys. “How different are things in Samoa? How are Samoan boys and girls when it comes to sex?” Mead asked her two young female informants, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu and Fofoa Poumele.

Fa'apua'a and Fofoa, just like young women everywhere, were quite embarrassed to talk about sex to a total stranger. So they decided to make a big joke about it out of sheer embarrassment. They told Mead the
opposite
of how things were in Samoa. They told her that boys were quite shy, and girls actively pursued boys sexually. It was a hoax, but in the minds of Fa'apua'a and Fofoa, the story that they were telling Mead was so outrageous and so obviously untrue that they couldn't believe anyone in her right mind would believe them.

Except that Mead did, for this was exactly the type of “evidence” that Boas had sent her to Samoa to gather. Here now was evidence that sexual behavior of adolescents could be completely different from (nay, the
opposite
of) how it is in the United States. So culture does completely determine human behavior after all! Mead was ecstatic. She left Samoa in April 1926 and published her “findings” in Samoa in a book called
Coming of Age in Samoa
in 1928. The book immediately became an international bestseller and later a classic in cultural anthropology, and, among other things, formed the foundation of modern feminism. Feminists pointed to the “evidence” in the book to support their claim that, given different “gender socialization,” Western boys and girls could be completely different. Boys could be more like girls, and girls could be more like boys. So, in a sense, modern feminism was founded on the basis of a hoax.

More than sixty years later, on May 2, 1988, Fa'apua'a, who was then 86 years old, told a Samoan government official (who happened to be the son of Fofoa, who passed away in 1936) that everything she and her friend Fofoa told Margaret Mead about the sexual behavior of Samoan boys and girls on that fateful night of March 13, 1926, was untrue. It was a hoax. As it turns out, overwhelming ethnographic evidence by now shows that Samoan adolescents are no different from adolescents anywhere else in the world. Boys are sexually aggressive and active, and girls are sexually coy and shy.

The Gentle Tasaday

In 1968, biosocial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published the first edition of the anthropology classic
Yanomamö: The Fierce People
.
¹⁷
In the book, Chagnon describes the life of a tribe of South American Indians called the Yanomamö, living in the jungles of Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomamö are so fierce and warlike that a third of adult males (and 7 percent of adult females) die in their constant battle. They are thought to be the fiercest people on earth.

Now that the Yanomamö were known to the world through Chagnon's work, the cultural determinists—the intellectual descendants of Franz Boas—had a task at hand. If human culture and behavior were infinitely variable, then there must exist the opposite of the Yanomamö somewhere on earth. If there were “the fiercest people on earth,” then there must also be “the gentlest people on earth.” Merely three years later, the cultural determinists got their wish.

In 1971, Manuel Elizalde, an official of the Marcos government in the Philippines, discovered an isolated tribe of twenty-six men, women, and children on the island of Mindanao. Called the Tasaday, they were said to lead a Stone Age life, without any knowledge of agriculture or even the existence of any other humans besides themselves. They had been completely cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. They were wearing leaves and living in a cave. Among other things, they were so peaceful (
so opposite of the Yanomamö
) that their language did not even contain any word for violence, conflict, or aggression. Two years later, a book describing their peaceful life was published with the predictable title
The Gentle Tasaday
.
¹⁸

With the help of the Marcos government, Elizalde tightly controlled media and scientific access to the Tasaday for fifteen years. As a result, not much more was known about them, and what was known about them by the rest of the world was officially sanctioned by Elizalde. In 1986, the Marcos government collapsed and Elizalde fled the country to Costa Rica. When two journalists went to the site of original discovery of the Tasaday, they found the cave empty. They found the Tasaday in a nearby village, wearing T-shirts and blue jeans. Upon further questioning, two of the original twenty-six Tasaday admitted to pretending to be Stone Age people upon Elizalde's insistence. It turns out that Marcos had instructed Elizalde to manufacture this band of peaceful Stone Age people in order to attract the world's attention to the Philippines but away from the brutal policies of his oppressive government. When a group of German journalists went to the cave a few days after the two original journalists uncovered the hoax, they discovered the Tasaday once again playing the parts of Stone Age people, pretending to live in a cave and wearing leaves
on top of their T-shirts and blue jeans.