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

by Miller, Alan S.

  Campbell goes on to point out, however, that females do occasionally need to compete for resources and mates, especially when these are scarce. This is why women sometimes compete for “a few good men,” and occasionally resort to violence and theft to achieve their goals, even though, consistent with their primary goal to stay alive, their tactics of competition are usually low-risk (larceny rather than robbery) and indirect (spreading negative gossip and rumors about a rival behind her back rather than direct physical confrontation with her).

  In her most recent work, Campbell13 goes even further toward theoretical integration of male and female criminality. She argues that men and women do not differ in the benefits of aggression: high-status men who are winners of male competition may get access to mates and thus more opportunities for sex, but high-status women who are winners of female competition may get priority access to resources and greater protection afforded by high-status males. In other words, Campbell argues, women must compete for high-quality mates just as much as men do. It is therefore only the costs of aggression, Campbell argues, that distinguish men and women, and explain the far lower incidence of aggression among women.

  Campbell points out that “theft by women is usually tied to economic need and occurs as part of their domestic responsibilities for their children,” whereas “robbery is the quintessential male crime, in which violence is used both to extract resources and to gain status.”14 Apart from their tendency and inclination to avoid physical risks and danger altogether, this is another reason that women commit fewer crimes than men. Women only steal what they need for them and their children to survive, whereas men steal to show off and gain status as well as resources. In other words, women steal less than men for exactly the same reason as they earn less than men.15 (See “Why Do Men Earn More Money and Attain Higher Status Than Women?” in chapter 7.) Women generally earn less than men do because they tend to make only what they need and usually have better things to do than earn money, whereas men are motivated to earn far more than they need to survive in order to use it to attract women. Similarly, women steal less than men do because they tend to steal what they need to survive and do not use crime for other purposes, like showing off and gaining status.

  The work of evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Anne Campbell thus explains why men are so much more violent and criminal than women are, and why this sex difference is culturally universal. We should point out, however, that according to the Interpol data, there is one exception to this rule in the world. A significant minority or even majority of offenders of all serious felonies in Syria year after year are women. We are frankly baffled by these statistics; however, it is very difficult for us (or any evolutionary psychologist) to believe that Syrian women, alone in the whole world, are genuinely more criminal than women elsewhere. We strongly suspect that either these statistics reflect some clerical error (for example, “male” and “female” were wrongly labeled when the Interpol form was first translated into Arabic many years ago, and the same mislabeled forms are photocopied and used every year) or there are some cultural or institutional reasons (for example, women may routinely take the fall for crimes committed by their husbands, brothers, or fathers). We have asked several Syrian experts for a possible explanation since we first noticed this statistical anomaly nearly a decade ago. We have not found one; however, we suspect that Syrian women do not commit the majority of serious crimes in their country.

  Q. What Do Bill Gates and Paul McCartney Have in Common with Criminals?

  For nearly a quarter of a century, criminologists have known about a persistent empirical phenomenon called the “age-crime curve.” In their highly influential 1983 article “Age and Explanation of Crime,” two leading criminologists, Travis Hirschi and Michael R. Gottfredson, claim that the relationship between age and crime is the same across all social and cultural conditions at all times. In every society, for all social groups, for all races and both sexes, at all historical times, the tendency to commit crime and other analogous, risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off during middle age. Although there have been minor variations observed around the “invariant” age-crime curve,16 the essential shape of the curve for serious interpersonal crimes is widely accepted by criminologists.17

  Everyone Wants a Piece of the Action

  One of the striking features of the age-crime curve is that it is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes “every quantifiable human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors).”18 The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists, which might be called the “age-genius curve,”19 is essentially the same as the age-crime curve.20 Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then just as quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced and flatter; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

  It is not difficult to find personifications of the age-genius curve. Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years, and now spends much of his time painting. Bill Gates is now a respectable businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer the computer whiz kid of his earlier years. J. D. Salinger now lives as a total recluse and has not published anything in more than three decades. Orson Welles was mere 26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane, which many consider to be the greatest movie ever made. There are some exceptions. Many artists, writers, and scientists remain productive into their middle and old ages, just like there are a few career criminals who commit crimes all their lives. But, in general, the pattern of youthful productivity holds for most.

  What is the reason behind all this? Why do criminals usually desist from committing crimes as they age? Why does the productivity of creative geniuses also often fade with age? A single evolutionary psychological theory can explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course.21 According to this theory, both crime and genius are expressions of young men’s competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.

  What Explains the Crime and Genius Curves?

  As we’ve discussed, there are reproductive benefits of intense competitiveness to men. In the physical competition for mates, those who are competitive may act violently toward their male rivals. Their violence serves the dual function of protecting their status and honor, and discouraging or altogether eliminating their rivals from future competition for mates. Their competitiveness also inclines them to accumulate resources to attract mates by stealing from others, and the same psychological mechanism can probably induce men who cannot gain legitimate access to women to do so illegitimately through forcible rape. Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities in order to attract mates.22

  There are no reproductive benefits from competition before puberty because prepubescent males are not able to translate their competitive edge into reproductive success. With puberty, however, the benefits of competition rapidly increase. Once the men are reproductively capable, every act of competition (be it through violence, theft, or creative genius) can potentially augment their reproductive success. The benefits of competition stay high after puberty for the remainder of their lives because human males are reproductively capable for most of their adult lives.

  The Downside of the Curve

  This is not the whole story, however. There are also costs associated with competition. Acts of violence can easily result in the man’s own death or injury, and acts of resource appropriation can trigger retaliation from the rightful owners of the resources. A man’s reproductive success is obviously compromised if the c
ompetitive acts result in his death or even injury. Before men start reproducing (before their first child), there are few costs of competition. True, being competitive might result in their death or injury, and they might therefore lose in the reproductive game if they are too competitive. However, they also lose by not competing. If they do not compete for mates in a polygynous society, which all human societies are (see “Why [and How] Are Contemporary Westerners Polygynous?” in chapter 4), they will be left out of the game and end up losing as a result. In other words, young men might lose if they are competitive, but given polygyny, they will definitely lose if they are not. So there is little cost to being competitive, even at the risk of death and injury; the alternative is worse in reproductive terms, which once again is the reason the death penalty cannot deter young men.

  The cost of competition, however, rises dramatically with the birth of the first child and subsequent children. True, men still benefit from competition because such acts of competition might attract additional mates even after their initial reproduction. However, a man’s energies and resources are put to better use by protecting and investing in his existing children. In other words, with the birth of children, men should shift their reproductive effort away from mating and toward parenting. If the men die or get injured in their acts of competition, their existing children will suffer; they might starve without their father’s parental investment or fall victim to predation by others without their father’s protection. The costs of competition therefore rapidly increase after the birth of the first child, which usually happens several years after puberty because men need some time to accumulate enough resources and attain sufficient status to attract their first mate. Nevertheless, in the absence of artificial contraception, reproduction probably began at a much earlier age in the ancestral environment than it does today. There is therefore a gap of several years between the rapid rise in the benefits of competition and the similarly rapid rise in its costs.

  Both the age-crime curve and the age-genius curve can be explained as the mathematical difference between the benefits and costs of competition. Young men rapidly become more violent, more criminal, and creatively more expressive in late adolescence and early adulthood as the benefits of competition rise, but then their productivity just as rapidly declines in late adulthood as the costs of competition rise and cancel its benefits. Criminality, genius, and productivity in virtually everything else men do vary as they do over the life course because they represent the difference between the benefits and costs of competition.

  These calculations have been performed by natural and sexual selection, so to speak, which then equips male brains with a psychological mechanism to incline them to be increasingly competitive immediately after puberty and to make them less competitive right after the birth of the first child. Men simply do not feel like acting violently, stealing, or conducting additional scientific experiments, or they just want to settle down after the birth of the child, but they do not exactly know why. The intriguing suggestion here is that a single psychological mechanism may be responsible for much of what men do, whether they are criminals or scientists.23

  We All Have the Winners’ Genes

  Now, given that human society has always been mildly polygynous, there were many men who did not succeed at securing mates and reproducing. These men had everything to gain and nothing to lose by remaining competitive and violent for their entire lives. However, we are not descended from these men. By definition, we are all exclusively descended from men (and women) who attained some reproductive success—none of us are descended from total reproductive losers who left no offspring—and we are disproportionately descended from those who attained great reproductive success. (Twelve children carry the genes of a man who had twelve children, but only one child carries the genes of a man who had only one child. And, of course, no children carry the genes of a man who had no children. Yes, childlessness is perfectly heritable!) Contemporary men, therefore, did not inherit from reproductive losers psychological mechanisms that force them to stay competitive and keep trying to secure mates for their entire lives.

  Female Choice

  The similarity between Bill Gates, Paul McCartney, and the criminals (in fact, all men) in evolutionary history points to a very important concept in evolutionary biology: female choice. In all species in which the female makes greater parental investment than the male (such as humans and all other mammals), mating is a female choice; it happens when the female wants it to happen, and with whom she wants it to happen, not when the male wants it to happen.24

  The power of female choice becomes quite apparent in a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a society where sex and mating were entirely a male choice; individuals have sex whenever and with whomever men want, not whenever and with whomever women want. What would happen in such a society? Absolutely nothing, because people would never stop having sex! There would be no civilization in such a society, because people would not do anything besides have sex. This, incidentally, is the evolutionary explanation for why gay men tend to have significantly more sex partners and have sex significantly more frequently than straight men do: because there are no women in their relationship to say no.25 Sexually active straight men on average have had 16.5 sex partners since age 18; gay men have had 42.8.

  In reality, however, women do often say no to men. This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.26 There would be no civilizations no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice. Men have built (and destroyed) civilizations in order to impress women so that they might say yes. Women are the reason men do everything.

  The comedian Bill Maher captures the essence of female choice perfectly, when he quips: “For a man to walk into a bar and have his choice of any woman he wants, he would have to be the ruler of the world. For a woman to have the same power over men, she’d have to do her hair.” In other words, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power as does the (male) ruler of the world.

  Q. Why Does Marriage “Settle” Men Down?

  There is something else that crime and genius have in common. (See “What Do Bill Gates and Paul McCartney Have in Common with Criminals?” above.) Just as age does, marriage depresses both tendencies.

  Criminologists have long known that criminals tend to “settle down” and desist (stop committing crime) once they get married, while unmarried criminals continue their criminal careers. But criminologists tend to explain this phenomenon from the social control perspective27 pioneered by the criminologist Travis Hirschi28 (the same Hirschi of the team who first discovered the age-crime curve). Social control theorists argue that marriage creates a bond to the conventional society, and investment in this bond, in the form of a strong marriage, makes it less likely that the criminal would want to remain in the criminal career, which is incompatible with the conventional life. Men must therefore desist from crime when they get married in order to protect their investment in conventional life; in Hirschi’s language, married men develop a “stake in conformity.”29 Marriage also increases the scope and efficiency of social control on the criminal. Now there is someone living in the same house and monitoring the criminal’s behavior at all times. It would be more difficult for the criminal to escape the wife’s watchful eye and engage in illicit activities.

  The social control explanation for the effect of marriage on desistance from crime makes perfect sense, until one realizes that marriage has the same desistance effect on perfectly legal, conventional activities, such as science. A comparison of the “age-genius curve” among scientists who were married at some point in their lives with the same curve among those who never married shows the strong desistance effect of marriage
on scientific productivity. Half as many (50.0 percent) unmarried scientists make their greatest contributions in their late 50s as they do in their late 20s. The corresponding percentage among the married scientists is 4.2 percent. The mean age of peak productivity among the unmarried scientists (39.9) is significantly later than the mean peak age among married scientists (33.9).30

  Given that the Nobel Prize for scientific achievement didn’t exist in the ancestral environment, the evolved psychological mechanisms of men appear to be rather precisely tuned to marriage as a cue to desistance. Nearly a quarter (23.4 percent) of all married scientists make their greatest scientific contribution in their career and then desist within five years after their marriage. The mean delay (the difference between their marriage and their peak productivity) is a mere 2.6 years; the median is 3.0 years. It therefore appears that scientists rather quickly desist after marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to do important scientific work. When you remember that great scientific discoveries usually require many years of cumulative and continued research, the near coincidence of the male scientists’ marriages and their desistance (after which they cease to make any greater scientific discoveries) is remarkable. A study by the sociologists Lowell L. Hargens, James C. McCann, and Barbara F. Reskin also demonstrates that childless research chemists are more productive than those with children.31