James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who rampaged through the city’s underworld for decades before slipping away from authorities and eluding a worldwide manhunt for more than 16 years, was convicted today in federal court of charges that will likely keep him in prison for the rest of his life.

Don’t count on that. Whitey has slipped from the clutches of justice several times before. He’ll probably make a break for it between the court house and the jail, and if not, he’ll break out by pretending to be laundry or something in a few weeks.

Anyway, I started making references to Whitey Bulger back when he was just … retiring … and I live in the Boston Area, because he provided me with a good analogy in teaching about behavioral biology. So, whenever Uncle Whitey gets in the news I like to repost that. So …. from an earlier post (which still refers to him as a fugitive) we have this ….

This may or may not be a recent photograph of fugitive Whitey (James) Bulger of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang. Most of you won’t know who Whitey Bulger is. He is actually on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. He may have been spotted in Italy last Spring, and the FBI is just now asking for assistance from anyone who knows where he might be. (That’s not gonna work.)

Whitey was top dog in Boston’s Winter Hill gang. His brother was a Senator for the Commwealth of Massachusetts, and served as Senate President for several years.

It is said that Whitey was an FBI informant, and that his handler, FBI Special Agent John Connolly, tipped Whitey off that he was about to be indicted on racketeering charges. No problem. Whitey had left stashes of cash in safe deposit boxes all around the world, in preparation for the day he had to go on the lam. So he took off in 1995, and the FBI has not been able to catch up. Special Agent Connolly is pulling a ten year vacation in the stir.

I remember when Whitey disappeared, and ever since then, I’ve used him almost annually in lecture material describing the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. It goes like this:

This may or may not be a recent photograph of Robert Trivers, of the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis. The Trivers-Willard model (I prefer to call it a “model” rather than a “hypothesis” because it is not specific enough to really be a hypothesis … it’s a model that generates lots of hypotheses) states that selection should favor the ability to differentially bias investment in offspring by sex if the two sexes have differential variances in reproductive success, and if there is any way to predict offspring rank. That’s a bit thick, so it requires some examples and further explanation. Maybe a story about a mobster would help..

OK, so an example: Red deer (also known as Elk) give birth to one offspring (max) per year. Males compete for access to or to be chosen by females. So, only a small percentage of male red deer mate in a given year, a significant percentage may never mate at all, and a very small percentage sire many many little red deer. Male red deer have a high variance in reproductive success. If you tried to predict how many offspring a given randomly chosen male would have, knowing nothing at all, your best guess would be the average number of offspring red deer have in an average lifetime. But you would be wrong almost every time because the actual number is highly variable. Male red deer have high variance in RS.

Females, on the other hand, have a pretty standard number of offspring. There is not much competition among them, they can always find a male to mate with, etc. If you needed to guess how many offspring a particular randomly chosen female red deer would have in a life time, you could guess the average, and you would be right on or very close. Female red deer have low variance in RS.

So, male and female red deer have differential variance in RS. Males high, females low.

If a female red deer could somehow “predict” the likelihood of her offspring getting to mate, i.e., if she could tell if any offspring she had in the present year (male or female) would be average vs. high ranking, then selection should favor the evolution of a mechanism to actually give birth to the appropriate sex offspring (thus biasing investment in one sex or the other). It turns out that she can. A female red deer that is herself average or lower-quality (thin, ill, injured) is likely to give birth to an offspring that will be either low ranking or average. But if the mother-to-be red deer is high ranking, she is likely to give birth to an individual who will grow up to be high ranking.

Under these conditions, she should have a female offspring if she’s average or low ranking, but a male if she’s high ranking. And that, it turns out, is what red deer actually do.

That should be clear. But in case it isn’t, let’s take it down do real life, and bring in the gangsters.

You check the mail this afternoon, and there is a letter from a law firm you have never heard of. It says that your Great Aunt Tillie (whom you’ve also never heard of) just died, and left you with $1,000 in her will. The check is enclosed.

This may or may not be a recent photograph of a male red deer. Holy crap. Found money! What are you going to do with it? So you and your close advisors (your roommates, your cat, etc.) discuss it and you narrow it down to two choices. Choice A and Choice B.

Choice A is to go to your broker and buy $1000 worth of a nice, relatively safe mutual fund. The fund will buy and sell reliable blue chip stocks, thus spreading the risk over several companies, and over time you can expect to get a return of 50 bucks a years, easy.

Choice B is to buy 1000 one dollar lottery tickets. Your chances of winning are slim, but if you do, you will win 87 million dollars.

So, what do you do? The obvious sane choice is to buy the mutual fund.

But what if your cousin is Whitey Bulger? Whitey Bulger, as head of the Winter Hill Gang, is said to have owned the director of the Commonwealth Lottery agency.The connection between Whitey Bulger and the Lottery has never been proven. They don’t have a shred of evidence. He was, however, indicted for 21 counts of RICO-Murder. It is said that one of the things that tipped off authorities about this is that some of his relatives were winning the lottery a little more often than they should have. So, say your cousin is Whitey Bulger, and last time you saw him (at a family wedding) he told you … “hey, if you ever want to take a “chance” on the lottery, let me know … I can make that work for you…”

So now, you have two choices.

Choice A: Invest in a mutual fund and gain a return of 50 bucks a year (that’s dollars, not elk); and

Choice B: Buy 1000 PowerBall tickets and have a great deal of certainty of winning 87 million dollars.

What would you do?

In case it isn’t already clear. the baby male elk is a lottery ticket, the baby female elk is a mutual fund, but the female can guess pretty accurately if the lotter ticket (male offspring) will pay off. Because the elk’s cousin is Whitey Bulger. See?

Speaking of time, this was one of those days when it got to 3:30 in the afternoon when I decided I should get a second cup of coffee and have some breakfast. In the end, combining breakfast with dinner is more efficient, but I probably would have been less edgy, oversensitive and easily traumatized earlier in the day had I eaten properly in the morning. (For which I apologize. To “you know who you are.” Not that you read my blog or anything, but in case you do… 🙂

There are several items I do wish to point out to you today. First, don’t forget to listen in to the upcoming podcast of Skeptically Speaking, which features the insectiphilia of Bug Girl herself as well as a side trip through the anthropology of Arthropodiphagia by yours truly. And while we are on the subject of me, if you’ve not see them yet, please check out this blog post about birds — What happened with Archaeopteryx? as well as this blog post also about birds — The Dove of Peace Has Not Always Been Safe. Also, although I have a long list of birdy topics I plan to address at 10,000 Birds, I’d be happy to take your suggestions as well. Are there topics concerning bird evolutionary biology that you’d like to see addressed? Let me know in the comments or via email.

Enough about me. There are also some things I’d like to point out happening out there on the intertubes. Speaking of Trauma, please have a look at This Blog Post at Traumatized By Truth, in which DuWayne Brayton makes a small request for help. I sent a chemistry book. If you are a FOD, please go help him out.

And I want to spend a moment discussing This Post about scientific literacy and sex by Sheril Kirshenbaum over at her new blog (which is great fun, add it to your RSS reader). Sheril shows a bunch of graphs from a study comparing males and females in the degree to which they are smart about science. Or not.

55% of males know that it takes one year for the Earth to go around the Sun, while a mere 42 percent of females know this. A similar result is found for knowing the relative size of atoms and electrons. A sex reversed result obtains regarding the idea that it is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl: More females get that right than males.

Interestingly, all three assumptions can be questioned. The Earth does not go around the sun in one year. It takes longer (thus leap year and the occasionally leap second). Electrons might be small, but they take up more space than the nuclei of atoms. It is not universally true in mammals that the male’s “gene” determines sex of offspring. Yes, sex of zygote, but to get an offspring you must not selectively abort it. In Red Deer, females determine the sex of their offspring using some sort of biological magic, and this is true in many other mammals. Prolly not in humans, though.

But seriously, these data obviously reflect two things: 1) Everybody is poorly educated in science but to varying degrees and 2) how bad this is may be sex-biased in the expected ways, with males being less misinformed about the physical sciences and females being less misinformed about the life sciences. Why that sex bias exists is, of course interesting and important.

Which brings us full circle (back to me!) When I was working as an administrative assistant (putting myself through graduate school) at the Kennedy School of government, this thing went around that was rather annoying and related to this. This was male economists (faculty and graduate students, and yes, if I listed the names you’d have heard of some of them). It’s a small experiment you can carry out on your own. You ask a person a question and see what the answer is, and each of the economists claimed that when they asked their female significant other, she did not know the answer, but if they asked a randomly chosen male, he did.

Here’s the question. The speed of light is 186 thousand miles a second, and the speed of sound is a slow 700 feet a second. When I sit in my home in Cambridge and turn on WGBH, and that tower is across the Charles River, I get the sound and video at the same time, synced. If I drive north several hundred miles to Concord New Hampshire, and turn on WGBH I get the same thing… sound and light are synced. If sound and light travel at different speeds, how can this be????

So, I took this question and asked my female wife. Then I asked five or six female colleagues over in the Anthro department. They all knew the answer. (“The question is absurd. The signal for both video and sound that is decoded in your TV is a radio signal, essentially light, and the sound is not transmitted from the tower to your house, duh.” … or words to that effect.)

So, while high profile economists who write books about human behavior, race, and sometimes get jobs in the White House were convincing themselves that males are smarter than females, I was busy discovering that high profile economists that write books about human behavior, race, and sometimes get jobs in the White House choose compliant girlfriends and spouses who tell them what they want to hear. Apparently.

I was unfazed by the big maneno over the car crash. Again, “first world problems” of the rich and famous, especially golfers, do not impress me. It is a bit more annoying that he has golfed like a Third Rate Hack for the entire golf season, as well as the pre-season and post season.¹ But since I could care less (or not) about golf, then, well, I couldn’t care less about that.

But now, Tiger Woods has gone to far. He spit on the green.

Watch:

Unbefuckingleivable, Tiger. Do you not know? Athletes can have sex with as many women as they want. Athletes can treat their wives like the subjects of country western songs (“Your wandering ways have gone too far; For every girl you’ve had, I’ll put a dent in your car”). Athletes can even have a really really bad season. But …

… Athletes. Do. Not. Spit.

Well, I guess I don’t really care that much, golf season is almost over.¹ And, Baseball season is about to start! Yay!

¹Does golf even have a “pre” and “post” season? A season? These are unknowable things.

Let’s use the term “naturalistic” to mean the assumption that what we observe in nature is the optimal, correct, or “best” approach to doing something. That which we observe in nature is the best guide to how things should be. We can see that in mammals mothers nurse their young. Departures from this (bottle feeding, early weening, feeding young something other than mother’s milk, etc.) are risky and typically have negative consequences. Humans in a “state of nature” (such as hunter gatherers) get a moderate but regular amount of exercise in carrying out their day to day business compared to humans in a “state of suburbia” who can get their stuff done with almost no physical movement. Human foragers are trim and fit, human suburbanites tend towards heart disease. This suggests that regular moderate exercise is good, and both scientific research and experience seem to support this.

So far so good. A “naturalistic assumption” seems the way to go.

In the Western industrialized world, we have a widely held concept of what is “natural” and we tend to make a link between “natural” and “good.” We tend to ‘believe’ in a socially constructed balance between natural and non natural choices. However, we also possess other beliefs and priorities that sometimes conflict with the naturalistic assumption. For example, a child that is fatally allergic to mother’s milk would be left to die with a pure naturalistic philosophy. However, the life of such a child is typically valued more highly than one’s philosophical purity, and non-natural intervention (feeding the child soy milk from a bottle) is chosen as the ‘correct’ decision. In truth, day to day, we are utterly arbitrary in adherence to or ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the naturalistic premise. We do what is convenient, what feels good, what provides us some perceived good or benefit (money, status, etc.). Then later we explain our decision rhetorically as necessary, and sometimes the naturalistic premise is invoked.

Naturalistic perspectives are often invoked when considering political or economic decisions. Free market capitalism is natural. Competition is natural.

Let’s look more closely at one of the often cited examples of using a naturalistic premise to justify a social or economic reality which is rather controversial: The well documented fact that women get paid less than men in Western society.

There is plenty of room for clarification here … do women get paid less than men for the same exact job? Do women get paid the same but end up with a lower salary because they take unpaid leave to have babies? Do women get paid the same but end up with lower pay because they take unpaid leave which indirectly contributes to slower (in calendar time) advancement on the pay scale? Are women kept out of jobs, or even entire professions, that tend to be higher paid? Some or all of the above?

I’ve collected a list of phrases that are typical of the naturalistic assumption being applied to the question of salary, paraphrased from comments over a period of time made on my blog. The purpose of this list is to provide an evidence based description of what people are saying about women’s salary.

• Is every difference in how we treat males vs. females insulting? Why stop at lower salary for women? What about holding the door for the weaker sex? What about getting to improve one’s daily look with make-up being the exclusive right of women? Why should men, the stronger sex, always carry all the groceries?
• Is paying women and men the same salary really fair? The two sexes are different, having different strengths and advantages, and are limited in different ways. Those differences justify the fact that salaries are skewed.
• … from an evolutionary point of view it is more important for men than for women to earn money, as money is earned for status, and not for consumption.
• Psychologically, men are more aggressive, more ambitious, and more authoritative. They are more often psychopathic, and generally less caring of others …
• …being more aggressive and ambitious, more authoritative and psychopathic, less caring of others are “qualities” that are sought by corporations seeking high-end CEOs…
• …hiring a woman results in the risk that she will be unable to work if she gets pregnant. The “worth” of that employee is thus reduced.
• …in divorces it is the wife who gets the children. …. it is reasonable to consider the higher salary of men as a compensation for that.
• Clearly, the salary difference has a biological basis. Until it is thoroughly understood why this biological difference exists it is wrong to say that it should be abandoned.

Is there something to these comments? Is there a way to not just explain, but actually justify our social and cultural rules and behaviors from a naturalistic premise?

A naturalistic basis for determining what is proper or justified in human behavior may take into account the fact that we are mammals. Our mammalness, as part of our broader “animalness” encompasses many of the critically important facets of our lives. We have two sexes, a male (producing sperm) and a female (producing ova). Pregnancy lasts a long time relative to the overall life cycle of a given female, so baby-making is a big investment and any risks or costs associated with this endeavor are large. The females nurse the young, adding significant time and energy in the form of child care. In mammals, males typically fight or display for sexual access, and females are either herded or harassed by males or choose males with which to mate, and males provide virtually no offspring care in most species. In some species there is courting and female choice, in others, hormonally mediated sexual arousal and activity, in others, what we might call rape.

That is a pretty wide range of behaviors, but one must use this wide range to describe ‘typical’ mammals, as they do vary. There are key characteristics that do pertain to all mammals, however: Pregnancy and nursing being entirely female, longish period of offspring care, and internal fertilization which results in a certain amount of paternal uncertainty (unclear attribution of fatherhood) for all males.

Given this, we may expect human males to be less choosy (sexually) than females, we may expect males to be promiscuous, we may expect females to be more cautious, we may expect males to be show-offs and often more violent than females, and we may expect males to be bigger and stronger than females. Given this, perhaps we can begin to explain human males’ attention to sports, and shopping behaviors found among females. Perhaps we can even justify certain human behaviors. Violence, for instance. Indeed, there are historically documented legal systems that would punish a woman severely for the murder of her husband’s illicit lover, but punish the man much less severely for killing his wife’s illicit lover.

But wait, there’s more. We are mammals but we are also primates, which is a subset of mammals. Would it not be more appropriate to look to primates, rather than mammals more broadly, for our fundamental naturalistic natures?

Well, most primates are either solitary or monogamous, with males and females not differing very much in size. Mating happens as a matter of female choice more than male-male tournament competition in most primate species. In many primate species, especially the polyandrous ones (where a single female has two or more male mates) there is a certain amount of male care of offspring, while in others, not so much. There is almost no difference in the potential effectiveness of fighting anatomy (such as canines) in males vs. females in most primates.

So, our evolutionary heritage as primates actually looks quite different than if we look more broadly at mammals. We might expect male humans to track females very carefully, be more or less at their service with respect to child care, and we should see very little difference between the sexes in who gets to use force or coercion for personal gain. Males and females would roughly share the job of protecting home and hearth (proverbially or otherwise). Males in many cases would not know if they are the father of a particular female’s offspring, but they would remain devoted to the female and her young because the young are related in some way. The multiple males hooked up to individual females would typically be half brothers, for instance.

But really, while we are in fact primates, we are actually Old World Primates. If we remove the prosimians and the New World Primates from the mix, and look only at Old World ‘higher’ primates, we get a different picture. In this comparison, we actually drop all of the polyandry and most of the monogamy. We now get a pretty large difference, on average, in body size of males vs. females, but male coercion is rarely a means of sexual interaction … rather, females and males both engage in quite a bit of politics (these are smart animals) and these political interactions are mediated by quite a bit of biting and poking (within both males and females, but maybe more so in males). The result is often a parallel (male vs. female) set of hierarchies, and position in these hierarchies determines for males who gets to mate and for females who ends up most successfully raising offspring.

From this perhaps we can still understand such human behaviors as guys getting together to do sports and gals getting together to shop and compete over makeup and shoes, and we get to explain politicians and People Magazine as well! Gossip, politics, personal status, etc. are all expectable pastimes or passions from such an Old World Primate ancestry. When we look at a modern politician, we can often imagine a baboon. When we read a popular culture magazine, we may be reminded of that troop of Japanese macaques we saw last week at the zoo. Now, we’re really getting somewhere!

But wait, the Old World Primates split into diverse evolutionary branches a VERY long time ago. Maybe we should look at the subset of Old World Primates of which we are a part … the apes.

The majority of ape species are monomorphic in body size (the males and females are the same size) and practice life-long pair bonding. Both males and females are physically equipped (strong bodies, big canines) to defend the territory and the young, and both take similar roles in this regard, though the females nurse the young so there is some difference in male vs. female role in offspring care. A considerable effort is put into care of offspring overall, and with setting them up in new territories, etc., and this sort of care involves the males at least as much as the females.

So we might expect humans, as apes, to be highly monogamous and to put huge amounts of efforts into offspring … somewhat different in style but with similar levels of effort for males vs. females.

But hold on a second there… we are apes, yes, and this characterizes the average ape because gibbons and siamangs are all apes and most apes are gibbons or siamangs, if we just count the number of species. But they are so-called “lesser apes” and we are so-called “great apes!” The great apes constitutes a smaller taxonomic group. Maybe we should look at the great apes only and forget the gibbons and siamangs.

OK, when we do that, we are looking at orangs, gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. Orangs have a very high level of sexual dimorphism, are primarily vegetarian, and the most typical form of sexual interaction is either forced copulation (akin to rape) or females swooning over gigantic, and presumably very sexy, but rare, super males. All offspring care is provided by the female. In fact, the largest social group among these apes is the mother and offspring with a random male busy raping the female while the offspring hangs out on a nearby branch eating some wild figs. Gorillas also have a high level of dimorphism in body size, but live in large groups with the key group structure consisting of a silver back male and a harem of females who are totally devoted to and sexually monogamous with the male until a lone silver back shows up and starts to kill the female’s infant offspring now and then. When that happens, the females join the infanticidal male and abandon their devotion to the original silver back.

These two apes provide very different models, but are similar in that females are either raped or have their “children” killed (and they can stop that by joining the killer) and when push comes to shove, the enormously large males get to do all the pushing. This would suggest that humans get comfortable with a very male dominated society and that the females should just get in line. Fast.

But hold on, we are much much more closely related to the chimpanzees. We are equally related to each of the two chimpanzee species, common chimps and bonobos. So let’s look at their lifestyle.

Both groups have the unusual and interesting feature of multiple adult sexually mature males and females living in the same group. When a female is in a state of ovulation, she also enters a state of estrus … the visible display of ovulation. Some of the males may be forced to not mate with this female (forced by dominant males or coalitions of males) but for the most part every male mates with such a female at some point. Over time, all of the females go into estrus one or two at a time. So, over the course of several years, every single male will eventually have potentially baby-making sex with every single female. This is done in the form of giant orgies in which only one female participates.

That is true for common chimps, but it is also true for bonobos, with an added twist. All the chimps have lots of what I will call erotic interaction all the time, including auto erotic. But for bonobos, there is the added feature of almost every possible gender and age combination of non-baby making erotic interaction, and every combination of body part interaction. So a young female may provide oral sex to an older male. An older male may provide oral sex to a young male. Two adult females may engage in genital-genital rubbing. And so on and so forth. Over and over again. OMG.

Young males do not seem to have sex with their mothers. Otherwise, pretty much every combination of erotic interaction can and does happen.

So, given the chimp model, we should all be bisexual and disregard age or gender of our sexual partners. Almost all baby making sex should involve a gang bang lasting several days. We should have strong male hierarchies and female hierarchies that determine, ultimately, who gets to be the father of each child (more or less) not by who has sex with whom, but by regulating exactly when in the ovulatory cycle intromissive sex with male orgasm happens. If we lean towards the common chimp model, all males should be dominant over all females. If we lean towards the bonobo model, all females should be dominant over all males. And somehow, from this, we have to explain human female shopping behavior and sports.

So, that is the sum of our naturalistic models … where they come from and how we might use them … assuming that our evolutionary heritage, our phylogenetic framework, our Darwinian determinism, should provide us with the best naturalistic guidance for day to day behavior.

But hold on one more time: There is another thing we should think about in building our naturalistic model: Birds.

We might be mammals, but we act like birds. Like chimps, we exist in societies with multiple potentially sexually mature males and females. But we tend to pair bond (or nearly so) within this framework. In this sense, we are very different than our closest living mammal relatives (who, by the way, are relatively very distant in relationship compared to many other pairs of species!). We are not that closely related to birds, but if we look at a wide range of human societies known to live off the land (‘preagricultural’ groups, either in the present or ethnohistorically known), we see that human societies are often very close to bird societies. We have some kind of monogamy that occasionally develops into a bit of polyandry (like traditional Tibetan highland groups and the phalarope birds of the arctic) or a bit of polygyny (like many cattle keeping groups or the oft-studied oft-cited red winged blackbirds and many other birds). But even in societies that do allow polygyny, most families are based on monogamy, though it is serial monogamy (like the vast majority of bird species including almost all song birds).

Yet, when certain economic features … like land (nesting sites) and professional or social milieu (territories) are essential to status and wealth, we have very long term monogamous systems in humans such as the immutable Christian Victorian marriage (or in birds the life long bonding of raptors). In all birds, there is a LOT of care invested in offspring, and males and females deliver similar levels … and in some species very similar kinds … of this care. In humans, there is also considerable care in offspring but … alas … we are mammals so females don’t lay eggs (allowing for male investment at an early stage) and males can’t nurse the young. This starts a cascade of male-female differences. Perhaps females care for the young directly while the males busy themselves defending the territory.

Why, it is rather remarkable how birds map human variation in society in so many ways. But not all. Birds rarely live in tightly knit, spatially close groups of sexually active pairs. One example of this is nesting sea birds like gulls and terns. And for gulls and terns, the biggest survival risk in early life is that your neighbor eats you while your parents are distracted. There are certainly human analogs to this (infanticide is a real factor in shaping human society) but the parallel is weak.

Dear reader, if you are still with me (and I would understand if you’ve gotten bored or frustrated and gone away by now) then you can easily see this point: We have a rich supply of models from which we can draw naturalistic conclusions, and these models can be used to ‘justify’ or explain almost anything. This makes them lousy models, unless you are in the business of just making stuff up.

A better approach might be to ask: What is the premise we choose, as a society, to be the basis of our ethical and moral codes, our laws, etc.? For many people, this premise is mutualism. We agree to equality of all individuals (with special exceptions). This equality does not mean individuals are identical. Indeed, there may be categorical differences among groups. Females do have babies, males do not. But equal rights are to be preserved. Then on the basis of this equality, we agree to interact in positive, mutually beneficial ways. One hand washes the other. What goes around comes around. We watch, and occasionally scratch, each other’s backs. Friendship, camaraderie, and civility are valued practices.

This does not mean that the naturalistic consideration goes away. What it should mean is that naturalistic models can not be used to justify systematic social, cultural, legal, economic, philosophical, or political inequalities. But they can be used, if used properly (and that is an academic, not political issue), to explain some things. Even so, most of the explanations we encounter in the popular literature are selective, unjustified, inappropriate and poorly executed. In my opinion, we are very very far from being able to explain much with what we currently know, and certainly not at the pop psychology level seen in the comments cited above.

But I do want to make an attempt at a naturalistic consideration of modern human society with respect to two realities. One, females have the babies and males do not, and two, males tend to be more violent and aggressive than females.

The fundamental reality of these propositions needs to be tested first. Do the females really have the babies, and what does this mean? Well, it is not so simple. For the most part, females do have the babies but with modern approaches it is possible and indeed quite common, and in some cases, necessary, for males to have much more input in offspring care in humans than one might otherwise predict from a purely naturalistic model. For example … and very few people know this about me, and learning this is your reward for sticking with me this far along in this essay … I personally fed my daughter for her entire nursing period. I held her, I gave her the milk, we stared into each other’s eyes and bonded lovingly, the whole nine yards. Not her mother. Me. So, while the female clearly has a major biological commitment to the process, it is not as absolute as one might assume.

With respect to male violence and aggression, remember what Margaret Mead said. Mead claimed that there were societies in which females were more aggressive or violent than males, and thus, the whole male aggression thing was a pure cultural construct. Well, Mead was a great person and a great anthropologist, but she was wrong about that. There are no such societies. On the other hand, and in anthropology there is always another hand, Mead was not totally wrong.

Yes, males are always, without exception, more violent and aggressive, on average (and bigger and stronger too) than the females within a given society. But the absolute level of aggression and violence among both males and females is highly variable. Therefore, there can be females in one society who are more violent and aggressive than the males in another society. Most importantly, the level of difference between males and females in a given society … and especially the level of male control over females … varies greatly. There are societies in which there is very little difference between males and females, and there are societies in which the difference is great. Americans: You live in a society where the difference is considerable, more than the average. That is not how it has to be.

So, with respect to our individual selfish Darwinian reproductive goals, our broader social (territorial, economic, etc.) goals, and our cultural fixations, babies and aggression are both important. Offspring are our Darwinian legacy; sons are guns; little girls grow up and give their parents more Darwins (a unit of fitness) by helping raise more children and by having babies of their own. Sexual access must be ensured and paternity managed. Territory must be held, resources protected. And so on.

The problem is that only the ladies can have the babies, and it mainly falls to the gents to be the tough guys. On top of this, when a woman has a child she may fall short in some other responsibilities such as carrying all the firewood and water and other physically demanding tasks (as occur in most societies where women do the vast majority of hard labor). For their part, this aggressiveness of males comes in handy for defending the group territory, but it often becomes a nuisance and becomes a very serious problem when this aggression turns to beating, raping, murdering, and threatening others, mainly women.

So how do we deal with this? Start out by admitting that we as a society owe women a great deal for being the baby bearers. It is hard, painful, and you can die doing it. But no. In our society, we take away a woman’s rights because she is the baby bearer. She is paid less, and as one of the comments cited above suggests, her value is diminished.

• “…hiring a woman results in the risk that she will be unable to work if she gets pregnant. The “worth” of that employee is thus reduced….”

We also deal with this by admitting that aggressive male approaches are not necessarily a good thing. Yes, it may be true that men earn money in part for status, and not for consumption, but that would be because men are being assholes. If it is true that being aggressive, ambitious, authoritative, less caring and even psychopathic are ‘qualities’ that are sought in CEOs, then we have to stop doing that. We have to stop seeking and rewarding those qualities.

Compensation works both ways. We must compensate, as a society, for the burden of our evolutionary past as manifest differentially by gender. Our behavior is flexible, and thus it is incumbent on our society to attenuate violent leanings. Childbearing is fundamental and essential but cannot be totally outsourced by the women who do it. Punishing women for having this responsibility is exactly the opposite of what we should do.

A review of our evolutionary context is interesting to me (it is what my professional research life is largely about) and this context is causative. But a realistic look at our evolutionary biology does not give any simple answers, and never, ever does it provide justification for unfairness or violence.

There is a reason they call it the Naturalistic Fallacy.

¹The entire conversation related to the evolutionary context of modern human health and behavior can be researched by beginning with the work of Eaton, Konner and Shostack and working backwards and forwards from there. Here are two of the key references to get your started.

S Eaton (2003). An evolutionary perspective on human physical activity: implications for health Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology – Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology, 136 (1), 153-159 DOI: 10.1016/S1095-6433(03)00208-3

Eaton, S. Boyd, Konner, Melvin (1985). Paleolithic nutrition: A Consideration of its nature and current implications. New England Journal of Medicine, 312 (5), 283-289

I should also mention that in the years between 2009 and 2014 it is possible that the term “mail order brides” has been legitimately problematized. I don’t know that it has, it just seems like it must have been. For example, Wikipedia says “The term “mail-order bride” is both criticized by owners (and customers) of international marriage agencies and used by them as an easily recognizable term.[2] It has been pointed out that there is a discrepancy between how international adoptions are regarded (“saving a child”) and how international marriages are regarded (“buying a wife”).” citing Lilith, Ryiah (2000–2001), Buying a Wife but Saving a Child: A Deconstruction of Popular Rhetoric and Legal Analysis of Mail-Order Brides and Intercountry Adoptions 9, Buff. Women’s L.J., p. 225F Schaeffer-Grabiel (2005), When the mail-order bride industry shifted from using a magazine. If you have any comments on that please leave them below.

Original Post, Mail Order Brides and Hypergyny:

Seymour had a mail order bride and he was very proud. Seymour was a night watchman that I got to know because I was forever lurking around at night, passing through alarmed doors and making a nuisance of myself and, usually, keeping just one step ahead of Seymour, who’s main objective in life was to find a reason to throw me out of the building. The one time he actually had the drop on me, found me without ID, with no instructions that people would be working late in the lab, on a weekend that people were not supposed to be in the building because of work being done on the fire alarm system, he made his move and told me to get out or I’d be arrested.

I had no choice.

I engaged in a conversation with Seymour, which no one had ever done before, and after a half hour he went way forgetting that his main goal in life was to throw me out of the building. But in the mean time, I learned about his mail order bride. From Korea.

I’ve noticed that Scienceblogs.com has been running ads for hot Russian mail order brides. These ads are rather funny on the surface; They seem to be parodies of such things that they represent. But if you click on one (and I certainly did … expecting to end up at The Onion) one learns that this is the real thing. These are real ads for real Russian women who really want to marry you. If you are Seymour.

I’ve told you before that I mostly avoid commenting on the advertisers for Scienceblogs.com. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. One of the most evil corporations on the planet is one of our sponsors, and no one ever seems to notice or complain. My blog is editorially independent (as are all the other scienceblogs.com blogs) and I am free, if I choose, to blog against the big evil corporation, and in fact, have done so to a limited extent.

At first, I found it rather shocking that none of my fellow Sblings seem to be blogging about the mail order bride ads. Then I realized that they must all be using ad blockers.

For my part, as you may have noticed, almost everything I encounter lately seems to remind me of a story from the Congo. (I wonder why that is?) So I can tell you a little about hypergyny in the Congo.

Let’s get two things straight:

1) Mail order brides are participating in hypergyny. Hypergyny is where females (gynos) marry “up” (hyper).

2) You will see the term “hypergamy” used and that is simply incorrect. There can be no such thing as hypergamy as a practice because that means everybody marries up. How would that work? The term is “hypergyny.”¹

Hypergyny can occur in a lot of different cultural systems, and in fact wherever there is a) differential wealth and b) males tend to control big hunks of that wealth and the associated power (and no, it is NOT all about power … wealth and power are historically interchangeable enough that we should be cautious about making such distinctions) there will be hypergyny because there will be women who either choose it or are forced into it. In this form, and exploiting the ongoing conversations about rape, hypergyny can be understood by reference to the sexual interactions between allied forces liberating Europe from the Nazis and the local women. In Italy, Allied men tended to rape the women. In France, the women seemed happy to sleep with the men. For food. The difference? Well, lots of things were different, but to oversimplify somewhat, there was a big difference in how much people were starving at that particular moment between Italy and France.

Hypergyny is sleeping with the man over a longer term. For food and everything.

The most benign form of hypergyny of which I am aware (not counting mail order brides …. I’m not sure where I want to put that phenomenon on any scale of severity) is that found among the Efe Pygmies (and other Pygmies) in Central Africa.

Here, there are two integrated but distinct cultural entities: Villagers and Foragers. The Villagers are not Efe. They may be Bantu or Central Sudanic speakers (where I worked, they were Central Sudanic Lese). Villagers are farmers who often hunt, Efe are both foragers and farm laborers. The fact that there are material overlaps between the cultures does not make these cultures overlapping in all ways, or hard to distinguish, or flexible in membership. They are as solidly different as any caste might be.

The rules: Any Villager man and woman can marry. Any Forager man and woman can marry. Any man may have more than one wife.

A Villager woman can never marry a Forager man, but a Forager woman may marry a Villager man.

Often, but by no means always, the Forager woman who marries a Villager man is a second (or maybe even third) wife of that man, in a polygynous marriage.

If a Forager woman marries a Villager man, they live in the village as villagers. The woman takes on the cultural trappings of the village much more than other Forager women do. The children are Villagers. If the woman leaves her husband and goes back to the forest, she can not take the children with her. They remain as villagers.

The women can decide to do this or not. Their decision is usually a matter of personal lifestyle preference. The forest means freedoms not available in the village and you get to go camping all the time, and there are rich cultural traditions that live mainly in the forest, and that is where your family is. In the villages, you get a roof that will hardly ever leak.

One of the effects of this system is that men among the Foragers marry on average quite late owing to the a shortage of women.

In this way, there is a slow and steady gene flow from Forager groups to Villager groups, which led me to propose some years ago the Gene Stealing hypothesis. The relationship I describe here occurs in many different places and times. It seems to occur more often in tropical regions, and it seems to occur virtually all the time where the indigenous group (in this case the Forager) is hypergynous to the invading group (in this case the Villagers, who moved into the area hundreds of years ago).

The invading group is not adapted to local disease to the extent that the indigenous group is. But they can ensure that among their children there will be an elevated rate of such adaptation, by coming up with this pattern. This works much better than just killing off the locals or driving them out. You take their genes but keep them distinct as a locally adapted specialist group.

Indeed, there is evidence that something like this may have happened in the middle east with the Natufian culture, and I’ve wondered about the relationship between Modern Humans and Neanderthals in this regard.

I know, I know, that is a long way from pictures of Hot Russian Babes that may or may not be in the right sidebar.

Or maybe not….

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¹There is a way in which hypergamy, which is widely used much to my annoyance, makes sense: If you have hypergyny and hyperandry, then the two together could be hypergamy, much like polyandry and polygyny are polygamy. But that is not what is going on with these terms.

It turns out that finches control the sex of their offspring, and do so in a way that TW would predict, apparently. There is a paper in Science that I’ll probably eventually get to writing up for you, and in the mean time, here’s a quick news report from Scientific American.

See if you can figure out how Trivers Willard is working here, and why the important theoretical aspect of this research is glossed in this news report.

“In a country with a long history of discrimination against women, the preference for sons over daughters has led to the number of girls under the age of six hitting an all-time low,” said ActionAid in a report.Ratios of boys to girls aged 0-6 in sites in four out of five states it studied in north and northwest India were now lower than at the time of the last nationwide census in 2001 — and the gap was widening, the report said.Both rural and urban areas showed similar declines and the phenomenon cut across class and wealth lines, added the report, which is titled “Disappearing Daughters”.The report called on the Indian government for tougher enforcement of laws banning pre-natal sex detection and sex-selective abortion, describing their efforts to implement the legisation so far as “woefully inadequate”.Attitudes towards girls as financial burdens for families because of dowry pressures also need to be challenged, while the quality of and access to public health care and state-run schools had to improved, it added.”It is clear that without sustained action on many fronts, millions more women will go missing in India,” it said, citing figures from medical journal The Lancet that more than 500,000 female foetuses are being aborted per year.Members of ActionAid and Canada’s International Development Research Centre interviewed families in more than 6,000 households and compared statistics with national census data.The researchers said that normally, there should be about 950 girls born for every 1,000 boys, but found that already low ratios of girls to boys from 2001 in the sites surveyed were now even lower, except for Rajasthan….source

Photograph is of Elle Macpherson.

A new study by Katherine HInde finds that macaques may do this. However, I think this may be counterintuitive.

Hinde uses data from 106 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to show that first time mothers produce richer milk when they have sons compared to when they have daughters. She suggests that “[t]his difference seems to reflect the tradeoffs between the benefits derived from additional investment in sons and the costs of diverting energy from maternal growth and development.”

The reason that I say that this is counterintuitive is this: Previous studies on female bonded primates have shown relatively little bias in investment … Boyd and Silk showed this to be, essentially, a random relationship so while some studies show a bias, others do not, and if you plot out the degree of bias across a range of female bonded primate species you get a cloud of data consistent with the hypothesis that the Trivers Willard “effect” is not strong with these animals. However, the situation with Hinde’s monkeys may be special.

But first, let’s be clear on the Tivers Willard effect itself. It has specific componants, which may be stated more than one way, but that need to be examined else it may be misunderstood.

Stated most compactly, individuals who are likely to produce high ranking offspring will differentially invest more resources in the sex with the highest variance in reproductive success.

Its the variance part that has to be understood to get the beauty of this idea. Consider mammals. In virtually all mammals, the number of offspring a female is likely to have is not very variable, while the number of offspring a male may have can, in some species, vary a great deal from zero to a much larger number than any female will have.

Under these conditions, it would be ideal to know in advance if your offspring is going to be one of the better producers, and if so, go for a male offspring. If not, go for the sure bet, the female.

To be precise, Trivers Willard states that under conditions where the rank of the offspring can be “known” to the mother, perhaps simply because she can assess her own rank (and higher ranking moms have higher ranking kids) then selection should favor individuals with some mechanism for assessing rank and then biasing investment in offspring. This has been demonstrated in several species.

Here’s what Hinde has to offer:

Milk samples were collected once during peak lactation from subjects of known age and social rank housed in large outdoor enclosures at the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC). Analyses of milk constituents were conducted…

As found in red deer, there was a significant main effect of infant sex on milk [quality] however, an interaction effect between parity and sex revealed that sons born to primiparous mothers … get an additional gain in [milk quality] …

p>Here is a very impressive graph summarizing the results:

The difference is greater with first-time mothers, but in both cases sons receive more nutrition leading to greater body mass. In fact, the effect, while there is a fair amount of variation is rather startling.

I think the reason that you don’t seem to see Trivers Willard in many female-bonded species is because males disperse to new groups and spend a lot of time hanging around before they mate with any females. This may mean that females can’t really do as much for their sons as they can do for their daughters, so they end up not biasing investment very much. This does not, however, mean that biasing investment cannot work. I would like to know if this specific effect — of milk production and body weight — can be measured in other female-bonded primates.

HINDE, K. (2007): First-time macaque mothers bias milk composition in favor of sons. Current Biology, 17(22), R958-R959.

TRIVERS, R. L. & WILLARD, D.E. (1973): Natural selection of parental ability to vary the sex ratio of offspring.. Science, 179, 90-2.

Whitey was top dog in Boston’s Winter Hill gang. His brother was a Senator for the Commwealth of Massachusetts, and served as Senate President for several years.It is said that Whitey was an FBI informant, and that his handler, FBI Special Agent John Connolly, tipped Whitey off that he was about to be indicted on racketeering charges. No problem. Whitey had left stashes of cash in safe deposit boxes all around the world, in preparation for the day he had to go on the lam. So he took off in 1995, and the FBI has not been able to catch up. Special Agent Connolly is pulling a ten year vacation in the stir.I remember when Whitey disappeared, and ever since then, I’ve used him almost annually in lecture material describing the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. It goes like this:

This is a repost with minor modifications from Gregladen.com

The Trivers-Willard model (I prefer to call it a “model” rather than a “hypothesis” because it is not specific enough to really be a hypothesis … it’s a model that generates lots of hypotheses) states that selection should favor the ability to differentially bias investment in offspring by sex if the two sexes have differential variances in reproductive success, and if there is any way to predict offspring rank. That’s a bit thick, so it requires some examples and further explanation. Maybe a story about a mobster would help..OK, so an example: Red deer (also known as Elk) give birth to one offspring (max) per year. Males compete for access to or to be chosen by females. So, only a small percentage of male red deer mate in a given year, a significant percentage may never mate at all, and a very small percentage sire many many little red deer.

Male red deer have a high variance in reproductive success. If you tried to predict how many offspring a given randomly chosen male would have, knowing nothing at all, your best guess would be the average number of offspring red deer have in an average lifetime. But you would be wrong almost every time because the actual number is highly variable. Male red deer have high variance in RS.Females, on the other hand, have a pretty standard number of offspring. There is not much competition among them, they can always find a male to mate with, etc.

If you needed to guess how many offspring a particular randomly chosen female red deer would have in a life time, you could guess the average, and you would be right on or very close. Female red deer have low variance in RS.So, male and female red deer have differential variance in RS. Males high, females low.If a female red deer could somehow “predict” the likelihood of her offspring getting to mate, i.e., if she could tell if any offspring she had in the present year (male or female) would be average vs. high ranking, then selection should favor the evolution of a mechanism to actually give birth to the appropriate sex offspring (thus biasing investment in one sex or the other). It turns out that she can. A female red deer that is herself average or lower-quality (thin, ill, injured) is likely to give birth to an offspring that will be either low ranking or average. But if the mother-to-be red deer is high ranking, she is likely to give birth to an individual who will grow up to be high ranking.Under these conditions, she should have a female offspring if she’s average or low ranking, but a male if she’s high ranking. And that, it turns out, is what red deer actually do.

That should be clear. But in case it isn’t, let’s take it down do real life, and bring in the gangsters.You check the mail this afternoon, and there is a letter from a law firm you have never heard of. It says that your Great Aunt Tillie (whom you’ve also never heard of) just died, and left you with $1,000 in her will. The check is enclosed.Holy crap. Found money! What are you going to do with it? So you and your close advisors (your roommates, your cat, etc.) discuss it and you narrow it down to two choices. Choice A and Choice B.Choice A is to go to your broker and buy $1000 worth of a nice, relatively safe mutual fund. The fund will buy and sell reliable blue chip stocks, thus spreading the risk over several companies, and over time you can expect to get a return of 50 bucks a years, easy.Choice B is to buy 1000 one dollar lottery tickets. Your chances of winning are slim, but if you do, you will win 87 million dollars.So, what do you do? The obvious sane choice is to buy the mutual fund.

But what if your cousin is Whitey Bulger? Whitey Bulger, as head of the Winter Hill Gang, is said to have owned the director of the Commonwealth Lottery agency.The connection between Whitey Bulger and the Lottery has never been proven. They don’t have a shred of evidence. He was, however, indicted for 21 counts of RICO-Murder. It is said that one of the things that tipped off authorities about this is that some of his relatives were winning the lottery a little more often than they should have. So, say your cousin is Whitey Bulger, and last time you saw him (at a family wedding) he told you … “hey, if you ever want to take a “chance” on the lottery, let me know … I can make that work for you…”So now, you have two choices.Choice A: Invest in a mutual fund and gain a return of 50 bucks a year (that’s dollars, not elk); andChoice B: Buy 1000 PowerBall tickets and have a great deal of certainty of winning 87 million dollars.What would you do?In case it isn’t already clear. the baby male elk is a lottery ticket, the baby female elk is a mutual fund, but the female can guess pretty accurately if the lotter ticket (male offspring) will pay off. Because the elk’s cousin is Whitey Bulger. See?