Worthless men - part 5
Socialization and evolution
We have already gone through the various challenges for the boys, with masculinity, competition, physics and finances. But as I write in "Worthless men part 3", a man can acquire more offspring in one hectic week than a woman can in a lifetime of twin births. A fascinating example of that is the bison bull on the American prairie. During an intense period of two to three weeks in July, in a testosterone-filled "dream life", the bull spend every day mating and fighting. The alpha bull has a season in which he must secure his genes! When the season is over, he is usually done. He often does not survive the winter. He is at least so reduced that his role as a leader is over. It is uncertain whether he will ever mate again. But during the mating season he has probably produced more offspring than any of the individual cows will in their lifetime. The other bulls must wait until the alpha is finished. During the first three weeks of the mating season, the alpha bull is finished. He has mated with every available cow. In the next few weeks of the season, it is the turn of the other bulls to try themselves. Maybe they can also spread their genes, maybe not. And next year they may have grown.
We humans have not organized ourselves in exactly the same way, but we are not completely different! The most intense males can produce many offspring, even the most fertile females can have only a few. However, far more women than men have offspring. In "Worthless men part 1", I refer to statistics from Statistics Norway which show that only 75 per cent of men become fathers, while a whopping 86 per cent of all women become mothers. There are still high numbers for both sexes, reflecting an egalitarian society with a culture and history of monogamy. The historical figures show an even greater bias. Around 80% of all women had children, while only 40% of all men became fathers.
Given that the meaning of life in an evolutionary context is to acquire offspring, and to ensure that this offspring has offspring - have children who have children - it imposes a number of guidelines on society and culture. And not least on gender roles, both those "innate" and those imposed by society. Through generations, these guidelines will be able to evolve, develop certain characteristics between the sexes.
Girls and boys have different social behavior! That there are actual differences in the behavior of the sexes has been documented through more than 100 years of research. Studies in recent years have further revealed that the differences are found in all the cultures that have been examined, and that the differences may not only be due to socialization but could also be related to the evolutionary history of man. (Of course, hormonal influence will also have to be recognized as a factor for different social behavior!)
To the extent that gender differences in social behavior have been studied, girls and women's "ability" for care and intimacy has often been emphasized, and boys' more aggressive behavior and the formation of dominance hierarchies between and in groups of boys and men have been problematized. It has often been concluded that boys' social behavior is too aggressive or selfishly dominant.
Boys benefit from being aggressive and dominant, but not always, and rarely for long at a time! The most aggressive alpha males in the chimpanzee pack often end up with torn off testicles, killed, or severely injured. Dominant and aggressive behavior over time can be unproductive for individual males in systems where there will be several opportunities to mate over several years. As I show below, such behavior will mainly only appear before the dominance hierarchies and coalitions are established. After these have been set, the behavior within the group will appear balanced and harmonious, or at least as balanced and harmonious as can be expected in a group of chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees can live to be close to 60 years old, and have children from the age of 13-14. Females tend to have children every 6 years! In that perspective, it is not smart to burn all the powder in a hectic week, but rather to be more tactical. The alpha males who manage to create alliances and cohesion in the group live longer, usually have more offspring and can often get a new role in the herd even when a younger male has taken over the role of alpha male.
In addition to competing for partners within the group, there will also be competition between groups. Very simply, we say that the gender that invests the most in the parenting role is also the gender that is the more choosy in choosing a partner, while the gender that invests the least is more involved in competition (battle) for access to partners. Human males invest much more in parenting than most other male mammals (more on that later). Usually, and as I have written before, it results in male competition, female choice, but for humans in particular it will have some degree of the opposite effect, that women compete for the best fathers, while the most valuable men can to some extent choose from several women. This has many exciting consequences in society.
Before we go so far as to describe what consequences this competition has for women, and what choices it gives some men, we shall finish the conversation about social behavior.
Then some caveats must also be entered. When I describe "patrilocal" and "matrilocal", monogamous and polygamous social structures, we are not talking about absolutes. In polygamous structures there will be individuals who want to be monogamous, and in patrilocal societies there will be examples of women who stay and men who move, and vice versa in monogamous and or matrilocal societies.
About eighty percent of traditional societies are so-called patrilocal, which means that the women move into the man's family when they marry. Very simply, we can say that a father shares 50% of the genetic material with his sons, brothers share 50% and cousins share 25% of the same genetic material. As women can always, and with 100% certainty, know that it is their own child they are carrying, they can safely invest all their parenting skills and all their resources in this child.
A man could not then, and cannot today, unless the child is genetically tested, know for sure that it is his child and his genes to which he is allocating resources. There will be different results in social behavior between men and between different cultures. Everything from f*ckboys who sleep with everyone they come across, and who give a complete F in any offspring, to extremely jealous types, who almost follow their lady everywhere and "watch" over her, or even “lock her up” in clothing or in the house.
There are advantages to patriarchy, both for women(?) and for men. Take the men first, as it is more obvious what genetic advantages lie there for them. In a patriarch, all men in your immediate vicinity are your male relatives. Regardless of whether your wife was unfaithful, some of the child's genetic material will be yours. In a war, you will be able to trust your companions to a greater extent because you have a common interest in each other's survival. Your brother, your father and your cousin will carry some of your genes if you die, and conversely, you carry some of their genes. Men who are not related will be able to profit from the death of their fellow soldiers (if they themselves survive) because they will then have the opportunity (perhaps) to have children with their wives in addition to their own. The caveat here is of course that they themselves survive. If your fellow soldiers die, the chances are greater that you yourself will also be killed as your squad has become smaller, and thus more vulnerable. (There is one important argument for men sticking together in tribes and fighting groups, even if they do not share genes. But more about male groups below!)
In the family group, it will therefore double up! You both share genes and benefit from each other's survival so that the group retains its impact. Men thus have clear advantages with patrilocality and patriarchy, although these advantages are greatest the closer one is to the patriarch in the hierarchy.
The disadvantage for men is that the further away you are from the patriarch, genetically and in terms of power, the worse the odds are of having children yourself. A young son of a cousin of the patriarch will be in bad shape. The amount of shared genes is small (very simply, approx. 12.5% of the genes are shared with P) and because he is young, he has neither had time to build up his own resources, his own power base or his own strength to any particular extent. In other words, the advantages men have in patriarchy depend on their proximity to the patriarch. If we look at our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, we see that:
"Chimpanzee societies are defined by coalitions of related males that defend a territory. Subgroups of females and their offspring reside in this territory. Within these societies, smaller coalitions of males cooperate to gain social dominance over other coalitions and try to monopolize access to fertile females. Such coalitions even occur between males that are only distant relatives of each other, suggesting that these are behaviors that provide major reproductive benefits to male chimpanzees. […] The coalitions must be large enough to be competitive in the face of other coalitions, but not so large that there are too few females to share. [...] In addition, the males compete among themselves within the coalition. This competition can lead to unstable groups, but as soon as the hierarchy is established, the group is stable and characterized by inner calm between the members." (Evolution and development of boys' social behavior, David C Geary)
We see something of the same in the few studies that have been done of boys and their social behavior in groups. Studies carried out by boys (and girls) at summer camps show that in the boys' camp there was "chaos", laughing, fighting, nosebleeds and gnashing of teeth in the first days, the first week, in the various "houses", presumably while the hierarchy was established. But after a week or so, when the hierarchy had first been established, and the roles in the group had been established, cooperation and cohesion could be seen, among other things, in how the "houses" competed against other houses in play fights, on the sports field, etc. It was also seen that boys who before the hierarchy was established were enemies, now were friends, and that the party that had had to "submit" found itself at home in its new role and had become a loyal member of the coalition.
Consistent with an evolutionary history of inter-coalition competition, boys will organize into larger social groups than girls and engage in inter-group (intra-coalition) competitions with once such groups are arranged. Dominance hierarchies are established internally in the groups, with different roles and special areas when they compete at inter-group level.
Men have advantages from operating in (fairly large) coalitions with clear hierarchies, and because the size of the coalition (group) matters, they are dependent on "forgiving" each other and accepting that they are challenged in the hierarchy without necessarily leading to exclusion from the group.
To prepare for this competition, boys rely on social learning through noisy "havoc play" and play fighting, among other things. Newly established boys' groups will often need some time, and some nosebleeds, to sort out their internal hierarchy, which we see, for example, in new 1st classes at school, or the start of various other activity offers. In other words, boys need time to find out who is the strongest, how they should work together, and what is each individual's role/task in the new coalition.
"Studies of children's social preferences confirm that boys on their own initiative organize themselves into large boys' groups, and 'play' coalition competitions as soon as the groups are formed. Although there are no gender differences in the amount of time girls and boys spend in two-person interactions in the earliest childhood years, it is seen that most boys prefer group activities to two-person activities as early as the age of three, and express antipathy (bias) towards members of other groups/ coalitions already at the age of five. 10- and 11-year-old boys take part in group competitions (football, handball, etc.) three times as often as girls of the same age, they play in larger groups, and there is much greater role specialization/distribution than among girls. Boys maintain coalition alliances through joint activities, and in social contexts where coordinated group behavior is a prerequisite for achieving common goals.
There is a clear pattern, also between different species, that there is a connection between coalition size and competitiveness. Boys and men have an implicit understanding of this relationship and, in line with that, have a low threshold when it comes to forming large alliances with many boys and men, not least in situations with intergroup competitions."
Again, and again and again, the behavior you recognize as a man, and as a woman recognize(?) has a clear, understandable and ancient origin. From chimpanzee herds in documentaries, via cone-wars (probably a Norwegian-only occurrence; you team up, gather spruce-cones, and chuck them at each other, preferably aiming for ties and buttocks) in the kindergarten and football matches to hooligans and "boys-will-be-boys atmosphere" in the armed forces, everything has a natural origin and explanation.
Not everything that is natural is good, and not everything that is good is natural, and when you know where something comes from, you can understand, but also discard what you don't need as a grown man.
But boys' mischief and play-fighting are as natural a part of being a human boy as girls' dyadic friendships and calm and caring play is part of the human girl.