Tarzan, Jane and I

A few days ago while flipping through channels on a Sunday afternoon, I came across a show on the mating habits of chimps. Being a red blooded male and finding no one at home i decided to give the program a chance to enlighten me. Once done, the concept about chimps being promiscuous somehow stuck around in my head and i started trying to extrapolate what i had heard to us humans.

In general men being promiscuous is seen as a matter of prestige in society. You call them playboys and Casanovas, but women on the other hand get demeaning terms such as loose or sluts. But isn't there something wrong here? It does take two to tango after all. If men are promiscuous then women are obviously co-operating in some way to make that behavior possible. I would think that by nature women should be promiscuous too at least Page 3 seemed to indicate so.

I am sure there have been hundreds of studies which say that they prove without any doubt that biologically men were destined to be the way they are for the good of the collective human gene pool. But what about the women? I had never read about female promiscuity or the lack there of anywhere, so i decided to read and find out. What i also wanted to find out was if the monogamous perspective of relationships that we hold so dear, is a natural phenomenon or one enforced by society.

I obviously started with some basic knowledge which i had piled up over the years. I knew that the most fundamental of commodities in any mating strategy is time and how it is invested. As far as humans are concerned child-birth is very risky business and that is primarily because of our large heads. Not only that human babies remain dependent for an amazingly long period of time which means large time investments by the parents. I read a book once called the "Pregnant Man: How Nature make Fathers out of Men" by Gordon Churchwell. It really gives new meaning to the word investment, you have to read it to believe it!

Men obviously have a lower investment in children as compared to women and before we had fancy labor rooms and fancier OB/GYNs women frequently died during childbirth. With that said the best strategy for men is to have many offspring but to nurture less and that for women is to have few offspring but to nurture them to maturity so they can breed. This is probably why most societies treat adultery by women as a far greater offense as compared to adultery by a man. In a monogamous society, an unfaithful women is risking much more of a man's reproductive potential as compared to an unfaithful man.

But then if you think carefully this is a bad model isn't it? If this were the case then all men who remain faithful to their mates are under-performing from a genetic stand-point and the evolutionary mechanism should have thrown them out. But this is definitely not the case. Thats probably because if you look at it from a woman's perspective she would choose a mate who would be the best provider for her children. A philandering man will spend valuable time on other mates and if he does this excessively then he will be a bad choice for most women. That keeps the balance in place.

Moreover philandering is also an expensive activity. It is not easy to impress a new mate, every man know that. There was actually a study in a couple of colleges in Cambridge and it generally found the promiscuous students were the ones with the worst grades. They were overly social and the break-ups which were many and painful made them study less than those with monogamous relationships. So like i said before time is a valuable resource and strategies depend upon how it is invested. The optimal strategy for men would be somewhere in between, that seems to be the general consensus.

Most of the articles i read about strategies for women were just plain absurd, looking at the world around me. They seemed to suggest that women tend to pick up the best provider and they did everything possible to keep him faithful. As a trade for her mate's faithfulness she practiced abstinence before marriage and fidelity during it. Like i said before if this was true then what would happen of the day-time soaps and the gossip columns. This can't be true. What i realized was that I was reading really old articles and then I stumbled upon this essay that was just perfect.

What this guy says is that women are promiscuous by nature. The explanation is simple, mutation. For evolution to work, there must be mutation and the fittest among the mutations survives. It actually makes sense for women to have offspring from different men. Our environment is changing and the list of pathogens and parasites just keeps on increasing. That essentially means more the mutations the better chances we have surviving as a race. The original articles i read were right that women do look for the best caregiver and try to keep him faithful but the optimal strategy for her would be to have the maximum mutations in her offspring. Like men, a strategy somewhere in the middle. I love this quote from the essay, it explains the whole concept so perfectly:

"Assume Jane can keep Tarzan around and raise four children. Her best strategy isn't to have all four by Tarzan -- it's to have three by Tarzan and one by some romantic stranger, a bachelor male from another pack. As long as Tarzan doesn't catch them at it, the genes conditioning Jane's sexual strategy get 50% of the reproductive payoff regardless of who the biological father is. If the stranger is a fitter male than the best mate she could keep faithful, so much the better. Her kids will win."

So all in all my conclusion is that in all probability women have an incentive equal to men to be promiscuous at least from an evolutionary point of view. But all said and done that makes me feel queasy right in the pit of my stomach. Imagine your "Jane" sneaking out for a quickie with some guy she considers more handsome, fitter, more intelligent or being higher on the social ladder than you and you will know what i am talking about. Polyamory and swinging are not for me, I am not so liberated, not yet at least! Monogamy for me please! That is the Indian nurture talking not nature!

Thanks to Eric S. Raymond