Nature via Nurture: Genes, experience and what makes us human. Matt Ridley
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">24 But it did not need science to prove the inheritance of behaviour in dogs: that was old news to dog-breeders. The point of dogs is that they come in different behavioural types: retrievers, pointers, setters, shepherds, terriers, poodles, bulldogs, wolfhounds – their very names denote the fact that they have instincts bred into them. And those instincts are innate. A retriever cannot be trained to guard livestock and a guard dog cannot be trained to herd sheep. It’s been tried. In the process of domestication, dogs have kept incomplete or exaggerated elements of wolf behaviour development. A wolf will stalk, chase, pounce, grab, kill, dissect, and carry food, and a wolf pup will practise each of these activities in turn as it grows up. Dogs are wolf pups frozen in the practising stage. Collies and pointers are stuck in the stalking stage; retrievers are stuck with carrying and pit bulls with biting: each is a frozen mixture of different wolf-pup themes. Is it in their genes? You bet: ‘Breed-specific behaviours are irrefutable,’ says dog chronicler Stephen Budiansky firmly.25
Or go ask the cattle-breeders. I have in front of me a catalogue of dairy bulls designed to entice me into ordering some semen by mail. In enormous detail it describes the quality and shape of the bull’s udder and teats, its milk-producing ability, its milking speed and even its temperament. But surely, you point out, bulls don’t have udders? On every page there is a picture of a cow, not a bull. What the catalogue is referring to is not the bull himself but his daughters. ‘Zidane, the Italian No 1,’ it boasts, ‘improves frame traits and fixes on tremendous rumps with ideal slope. He is particularly impressive in his feet and leg composites with excellent set and terrific depth of heel. He leaves faultless udders, which are snugly attached with deep clefts.’ The characters are all female, but the attribution is to the sire. Perhaps I would prefer to buy a straw of semen from Terminator, whose daughters have ‘great teat placement’, or Igniter, a bull that is a ‘milking speed specialist’ whose daughters ‘display great dairy character’. I might wish to avoid Moet Flirt Freeman, because although his daughters have ‘tremendous width across the chest’ and give more milk than their mothers did, the small print admits they are also slightly ‘below average’ in temperament – which probably means that they tend to kick out when being milked. They are also slow milkers.26
The point is that cattle-breeders have no qualms about attributing behaviour to genes, just as they attribute anatomy to genes. Minute differences in the behaviour of cows they confidently ascribe to the semen that arrived through the mail. Human beings are not cows. Admitting instinct in cows does not prove that human beings are also ruled by instinct, of course. But it demolishes the assumption that because behaviour is complex or subtle, it cannot be instinctive. Such a comforting illusion is still rife within the social sciences; yet no zoologist who has studied animal behaviour could believe that complex behaviour cannot be innate.
MARTIANS AND VENUSIANS
Defining ‘instinct’ has baffled so many scientists that some refuse to use the word altogether. It need not be present from birth: some instincts only develop in adult animals (as wisdom teeth do). It need not be inflexible: digger wasps will alter their behaviour according to how many caterpillars they find already in the burrow they are provisioning. It need not be automatic: unless it meets a red-bellied fish, the stickleback male will not fight. And the boundaries between instinctive and learned behaviour are blurred.
But imprecision does not necessarily render a word useless. The boundaries of Europe are uncertain – how far east does it stretch? Are Turkey and Ukraine in it? – and there are many different meanings of the word ‘European’, but it is still a useful word. The word ‘learn’ covers a multitude of virtues, but it is still a useful word. Likewise, I believe that to call behaviour instinctive can still be useful. It implies that the behaviour is at least partially inherited, hard-wired and automatic, given the expected environment. A characteristic feature of an instinct is that it is universal. That is, if something is primarily instinctive, then it must be approximately the same in all people. Anthropology has always been torn between an interest in human similarities and human differences, with the advocates of nature emphasising the former and the advocates of nurture stressing the latter. The fact that people smile, frown, grimace and laugh in much the same way all over the world struck Darwin and would later strike the ethologists Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Paul Ekman as astonishing. Even among those inhabitants of New Guinea and the Amazon till then uncontacted by ‘civilisation’, these emotional expressions have the same form and the same meaning.27 At the same time, the astonishing variety of rituals and habits expressed by the human race testifies to its capacity for difference. As usual in science, each side of the argument pushed the other to extreme positions.
Perhaps it would satisfy both (or neither) to focus on the paradox of human differences that are universally similar all over the world. After all, similarity is the shadow of difference. The prime candidate is sex and gender difference. Nobody now denies that men and women are different not just in anatomy but also in behaviour. From best-selling books about them being from different planets to the increasing polarisation of films into those that appeal to men (action) or to women (relationships), it is surely no longer controversial to assert that – despite exceptions – there are consistent mental as well as physical differences between the sexes. As the comedian Dave Barry puts it, ‘If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there are men on base.’ Are such differences nature, nurture, or both?
Of all the sex differences, the best studied are the ones to do with mating. In the 1930s, psychologists first started asking men and women what they sought in a mate, and they have been asking them ever since. The answer seems so obvious that only a laboratory nerd or a Martian would bother to ask the question. But sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that most need demonstrating.
They found many similarities. Both sexes wanted intelligent, dependable, cooperative, trustworthy and loyal partners. But they also found differences. Women rated good financial prospects in their partners twice as highly as men. Hardly surprising, since men were breadwinners in the 1930s. Come back in the 1980s and you would surely find such a patently cultural difference vanishing. No: in every survey conducted since then, right up to the present day, the same preference emerges just as strongly. To this day, American women rate financial prospects twice as highly as men do when seeking mates. In personal advertisements, women mention wealth as a desirable feature of a partner 11 times as often as men do. The psychology establishment dismissed this result: it merely reflected the importance of money in American culture, not a universal sex difference. So the psychologist David Buss went and asked foreigners, and got the same answer from Dutch and German men and women. Don’t be absurd, he was told, Western Europeans are just like Americans. So Buss asked 10,047 people from 37 different cultures on six continents and five islands, ranging from Alaska to Zululand. In every culture, bar none, women rated financial prospects more highly than men. The difference was highest in Japan and lowest in Holland but it was always there.28
This was not the only difference he found. In all 37 cultures, women wanted men older than them. In nearly all cultures, social status, ambition and industriousness in a mate mattered more to women than to men. Men by contrast placed more emphasis on youth (in all cultures, men wanted younger women) and physical appearance (in all cultures, men wanted beautiful women more than women wanted beautiful men). In most cultures, men also placed slightly more emphasis on chastity and fidelity in their partners, while (of course) being much more likely to seek extramarital sex themselves.29
Well, what a surprise! Men like pretty, young, faithful women, while women like rich, ambitious, older men. A casual glance through films, novels or the newspaper could have revealed this to Buss, or any passing Martian. Yet the fact remains that many psychologists had firmly told Buss he would not be able to find such trends repeated outside the countries of the West, let alone all over the world. Buss proved something which was –