Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History

by Laura Betzig (Editor)

"Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," thus ended Darwin's Origin of Species . For many years, the book provoked a flood of argument, but yielded little evidence. In the first century after the book's publication, virtually no one tested Darwin's theory against the evidence of human history. Now that tide has changed. Laura Betzig challenges the proposition that the evolved end of human life is its reproduction by presenting the literature on conflict resolution from over a hundred societies. The research results presented in Despotism and Differential Reproduction convincingly uphold Darwin's prophecy. A basic premise behind research has always been that understanding the way things are should contribute to our ability to change them to the way we would like them to be. This idea forms the basis for Betzig's research--she sets out to explain how things really are by leading the reader through the historical and natural conditions that have promoted despotism in the hopes that this might eventually eradicate it. She begins with the idea that reproduction is the end of human life, and that all forms of power and strength are exploited in reaching this end. In this way, Betzig shows with startling clarity how power corrupts and how despotic governments continue to exist in the world today. Engaging--even at times railing against--existing literature on human and social evolution, such as that of Rousseau and Marx, Betzig asserts herself as a formidable and undeniable voice in this debate. Since Darwin's monumental work, more has been said about why questions regarding how human history has been shaped by natural history should not even be asked, than has been said in an effort to answer them. This work puts a stop to that by testing the Darwinian hypothesis and finding that he was light has in fact been shed on human political and reproductive history. Controversial and creative, this book makes no apologies for its bold messages and interdisciplinary boundary blending and addresses a topic of continuing interest and importance.

Genres: Nonfiction, Evolution, Science, History, Biology

190 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1986

About the author

Laura Betzig studies despotism and democracy in history. She's looked at the comparative record; done fieldwork in the Western Pacific; and read ancient, medieval and modern history. She's published roughly 100 articles--on subjects ranging from sex in the Old Testament, to the Oedipus Complex of British kings--and she's finished 3 books: Despotism and Differential Reproduction, a Darwinian View of History; Human Reproductive Behavior, a Darwinian Perspective; and Human Nature, a Critical Reader. She's spent the last couple of decades working on a history of the West.

Betzig got a PhD in anthropology as a student of Napoleon Chagnon at Northwestern, and has taught at the University of California and the University of Michigan. She's done TV in the US and Canada, the Netherlands and the UK; and her work has been featured in print sources like Time, the Economist, New Scientist, Discover, the Atlantic and US News & World Report. She's been a contributor to the Annual Question at Edge, and blogs on the The Political Animal for Psychology Today.

Laura lives with her husband, Paul Turke, near their children and grandchildren, on Strawberry Lake.

Reviews

[VEL – The Contemporary Heretic · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Purpose of Political Power
Ismail the Bloodthirsty, an early modern Emperor of Morocco, is, in a Darwinian sense, probably the most successful human ever to live. Said to have fathered 888 offspring, his Darwinian fitness exceeded that of any other known person.

Laura Betzig, using a random sample of cultures across the world, shows that Ismail is exceptional only in degree. Wherever men acquire power, they also acquire large harems.

In doing so, they convert their power into the ultimate currency of natural selection—reproductive success.

Indeed, from a Darwinian perspective, multiple wives are not merely a perk of power—they are the very purpose of power:

“Political power in itself may be explained… as providing a position from which to gain reproductively” (p85).

Harems
Matt Ridley reports

“The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave ‘wives’… The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten procured three hundred and seventeen concubines and ‘droves’ of consorts. The Aztec ruler Montezuma enjoyed four thousand concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved sixteen thousand consorts… The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten thousand women in his harem” (The Red Queen: p191-2; Betzig 1993a).

Betzig concedes:

“The number of women in such a harem may easily have prohibited the successful impregnation of each, but their being kept from bearing children to others increased the monarch’s relative reproductive accomplishment” (p70).

If he couldn’t impregnate them all himself, he at least prevented other males from doing so.

Efforts were also made to ensure their chastity.

“Evidence of claustration, in the form of a walled interior courtyard, exists [as early as] Babylonian Mai and claustration in second story rooms with latticed, narrow windows is mentioned in the Old Testament”

Often wives were guarded by eunuchs employed—and castrated—specifically for this role.

Betzig even suggests that early evidence of forifications, in addition to their military role,“may have served the dual (identical?) function of protecting the chastity of women of the harem” (p79).

Recent evidence has confirmed the exceptional fecundity of one famous ruler (or lineage)—a Y chromosome marker found in 0.5% of males worldwide which is consistent with its having originated with Genghis Khan and his male siblings and descendants (Zerjal 2003).

Women Rulers
Limited to one pregnancy every nine months, a woman can bear fewer children, even with the aid of wet nurses, bottle milk and IVF.

Feminists contend the overrepresentation of males in positions of power is a consequence of such mysterious phenomena as ‘patriarchy’ or the ‘oppression of women’.

The better view is that, for women, power and wealth simply doesn’t have the same reproductive payoff.

This then explains both the cross-cultural universality of male rule and the pay-gap.

Darwin v Marx
Superficially, Marx appears as cynical as Darwinism. Marxists regard most societies as exploitative—designed to serve the interests, not of the society as a whole, but only of the dominant class.

Yet Marxists envisage that exploitation will be absent under communism—and also was absent among hunter-gatherers.

Thus, Marx, so cynical regarding capitalism, turns naïve and innocent when it comes to communist utopias, and ‘Noble Savages’ in their ‘Eden Before the Fall’.

Betzig dismisses ‘primitive communism’ as a Marxist myth.

“Unequal access to the basic resource which perpetuates life, members of the opposite sex, is a condition in the simplest societies” (p32).

“Some form of exploitation has been in evidence in even the smallest societies… Conflicts of interest in all societies are resolved with a consistent bias in favor of men with greater power” (p67).

However, Betzig insists:

“Darwinism… [does not] preclude the possibility of future conditions under which individual interests might become common interests: under which individual welfare might best be served by serving the welfare of society… [nor] preclude… the possibility of the evolution of socialism” (p68).

However, as Donald Symons emphasizes in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (reviewed here), reproductive competition is inevitable—because, while there is often enough food that everyone is satiated and competition for food is unnecessary, reproductive success is always relative, and therefore competition over women is universal.

The Means of Reproduction
The third difference between the Darwin and Marx is “the relative emphasis on production and reproduction” (p67).

Whereas Marxists regard control of the ‘The Means of Production’ as the ultimate cause of societal conflict, for Darwinians conflict instead focuses on control over ‘The Means of Reproduction’—i.e. fertile females.

Production is, from a biologic perspective, just a means of gaining the resources necessary for reproduction. Reproduction is the ultimate purpose of life.

Thus, Marx, for all his radicalism, was in his emphasis on economics rather than sex, just another nineteenth-century Victorian prude!

The Modern West
There is one glaring exception to this general pattern—the contemporary West.

Here, polygyny is unlawful, bigamy a crime and the people who have the most offspring and the highest Darwinian fitness are, at least according to popular stereotype, single mothers on government welfare.

What is exceptional about western societies is not monogamy itself.

What is exceptional is the combination of:

1) Large differentials of resource-holdings between males; and
2) Prescriptive monogamy (Kanazawa and Still 1999)

Under the ‘polygyny threshold model’, formulated by Orians to model the mating systems of passerine birds, if one male’s territory is twice as resource-abundant as another’s, then he attracts twice as many mates (Orians 1969).

Applying this to humans, one might predict that, if Jeff Bezos is a 100,000 times richer than Joe Schmo, then, if Joe has one wife, Jeff should have around 100,000.

However, contrary to this theory, Jeff Bezos does not have 100,000 wives, nor even 100,000 concubines, but only one wife, and, to the best of my knowledge, she was not guarded by any eunuchs—though perhaps she should have been, since this might have prevented her divorcing him and taking a large share of his wealth with her.

Likewise, if any contemporary politician is caught mating polygynously, scandal usually ensues.

Yet the marital infidelities of Bill Clinton, though they may have outraged the mass of monogamously-married Middle American morons, positively pale into insignificance besides the reproductive achievements of, say, Ismail the Bloodthirsty.

They don’t even compare to those of a politician just a generation removed, namely JFK—whose achievements in the political sphere are overrated on account of his early death, but whose achievements in the bedroom, while scarcely matching Ismail the Bloodthirsty, certainly put the current generation of American politicians to shame.

What then has become of the henpecked geldings who pass for politicians in the contemporary era?

According to Betzig, the public outrage provoked by the sexual indiscretions of politicians is no accident.

According to her, ‘socially-imposed monogamy’ represents a compromise between low and high-status males, whereby the latter agree to forgo polygyny in exchange for the necessary participation of the former in the complexly-cooperative economic life of modern polities (p105)—or, in Alexander’s alternative version, in exchange for serving as cannon-fodder in war (p104).

Whereas under polygyny there are never enough women to go around, under monogamy all men can attract a wife and each therefore has a reproductive stake in society, providing them with an incentive to participate in the economy, and to defend these institutions in war.

The institution of monogamy was therefore key to the economic and military success of the West.

Thus, the hysteria that accompanies sexual infidelities by elected politicians reflects outrage that the terms of this implicit agreement have been breached.

George Bernard Shaw anticipated this theory, writing:

“Polygyny, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it” (Shaw 1903).

Consistent with this theory, in all Western democracies, polygyny is unlawful.

Yet these laws are seemingly in conflict with liberal principles of tolerance and inclusivity for alternative lifestyles and non-traditional relationships.

Thus, while gay marriage has recently been legalized, polygyny remains anathema.

Indeed, whereas gay marriage is perceived as a ‘progressive’ cause, polygyny is associated with conservative groups like Mormons and Muslims, and the oppression of women.

Yet, as economists like Becker recognise, most women actually do better, in pure economic terms, under polygyny.

Thus, if Jeff Bozos is 100,000 times richer than Joe Schmo, then a woman is financially better off becoming the tenth wife, or even the 99,999th wife, of Jeff rather than the first wife of poor Joe.

Yet women also have another incentive to prefer Jeff to Joe.

If impregnated by a polygynous male, then her male descendants may inherit the traits that enabled the father’s polygyny, and hence become similarly prolific themselves, aiding the spread of the woman’s own genes.

Biologists call this ‘good genes sexual selection’ or the ‘sexy son hypothesis’.

Again, Shaw got there first:

“Maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one” (Shaw 1903).

Thus, women should welcome polygyny, while the only people opposed to polygyny should be, first, women currently married to men like Jeff Bezos and unwilling to share their resource-abundant alpha-male providers with a whole hundred-fold harem of co-wives and concubines; and, second, a glut of horny sexually-frustrated bachelor incels terminally condemned to celibacy and inceldom by lotharios like Jeff Bezos and Ismail the Bloodthirsty hogging all the women.

But, in my experience, the people who object most strongly to philandering male politicians are not men, but women, and such women typically affect concern on behalf, not of the male bachelors condemned to celibacy, but rather the wives of the politicians—though the latter are the chief beneficiaries of monogamy, while these other women, prevented from signing up as second or third-wives to alpha-male providers, are the main losers.

This suggests that the male compromise theory of socially-imposed monogamy is not the whole story.

Perhaps, although women benefit in purely financial terms under polygyny, they do not do so well in fitness terms.

Thus, one study found, whereas polygynous males had more offspring than monogamously-mated males, they had fewer offspring per wife, suggesting that males benefit from polygyny, but wives incur a fitness penalty (Strassman 2000).

Indeed, contrary to the polygyny threshold model, polygyny is rarely a matter of female choice (Sanderson 2001). The women recruited into the harem of Ismail the Bloodthirsty likely had little say.

De Facto Polygyny
Or perhaps western society is not really monogamous at all.

Betzig herself speculates that wealthy males may sire additional offspring, whose paternity is misassigned, via extra-marital liaisons (Betzig 1993b).

However, the best evidence suggests that rates of misassigned paternity are quite low (Gilding 2005; Bellis et al 2005).

More plausible is Robert Wright’s claim that:

“The United States is no longer a nation of institutionalized monogamy. It is a nation of serial monogamy. And serial monogamy in some ways amounts to polygyny.” (The Moral Animal: p101).

Thus, wealthy men often divorce first wives to marry much younger second- and sometimes third-wives, thereby monopolizing the peak reproductive years of successive women.

This then is not so much serial monogamy as sequential/non-concurrent polygyny.

Contraception
Alternatively, evolutionary novelties may disrupt the usual association between social status and reproductive success.

Since natural selection takes many generations, our behaviour is adapted, not to modern western societies, but to the environments in which our ancestors lived during the period of our evolution – i.e. what evolutionary psychologists call the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness’ or ‘EEA’.

Effective contraceptive technologies became widely available only recently and our evolved psychologies have not had sufficient time to catch up.

One study found that that, while wealthy males may not father more offspring, they do have more sex with more partners—i.e. behaviors that would have resulted in more offspring in ancestral environments (Pérusse 1993).

This implies that high-status males (or their partners) use contraception either more often, or more effectively, than low-status males, perhaps because of greater intelligence and self-control (Kanazawa 2005).

Other Environmental Novelties
Another evolutionary novelty that may disrupt the usual association between social status and number of surviving offspring is the welfare system.

Welfare payments to single mothers undoubtedly help women raise to adulthood offspring who would otherwise perish in infancy.

Moreover, by reducing the financial disincentives associated with raising additional offspring, they likely increase the number of offspring women choose to bear in the first place.

Feminist ideology also encourages educated women in particular to postpone childbearing in favour of careers. In contrast, less educated women are less exposed to feminist ideology (e.g. in universities), less able to control their impulses, and have fewer attractive careers available to them.

Indeed, even laws against bigamy and polygyny might be conceptualized as an evolutionary novelty, that disrupts the usual association between status and fertility.

But, whereas technological innovations such as contraception were certainly not available until recent times, ideological constructs—including ideas like feminism, prohibitions on polygyny, and the socialism that motivated the creation of the welfare state—have surely existed ever since we evolved the capacity to create such constructs.

Therefore, one would expect that humans would have evolved resistance to ideological teachings that go against their genetic interest. Otherwise, we would be vulnerable to indoctrination and exploitation by third-parties.

Dysgenics?
Finally, it must be observed that the anomalous fertility patterns in evidence in modern Western societies are not of purely academic interest.

On the contrary, since socioeconomic status correlates with both intelligence and personality traits such as conscientiousness, which are substantially heritable, contemporary patterns of ‘Dysgenic’ fertility may have long-term and potentially catastrophic consequences for the genetic posterity we bequeath future generations.

Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review here.

References
Bellis et al (2005) Measuring Paternal Discrepancy and its Public Health Consequences. Journal of Epidemiology 59(9):749
Betzig 1993a. Sex, succession, and stratification in the first six civilizations: How powerful men reproduced, passed power on to their sons, and used power to defend their wealth, women and children. In Lee Ellis, ed. Social Stratification And Socioeconomic Inequality, pp. 37-74. New York: Praeger.
Betzig 1993b. Where are the b*stards’ daddies? Comment on Daniel Pérusse’s ‘Cultural and reproductive success in industrial societies’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16: 284-85
Michael Gilding (2005) Rampant Misattributed Paternity: The Creation of an Urban Myth. People and Place 13(2): 1
Kanazawa, Satoshi (2005) An Empirical Test of a Possible Solution to the Central Theoretical Problem of Human Sociobiology. Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology. 3: 255–266
Kanazawa & Still (1999) Why Monogamy? Social Forces 78(1):25-50
Pérusse, Daniel. 1993. Cultural and Reproductive Success in Industrial Societies: Testing the Relationship at the Proximate and Ultimate Levels. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16:267–322
Sanderson (2001) Explaining Monogamy and Polygyny in Human Societies. Social Forces 80(1):329-335
Shaw GB (1903)Man and Superman, Maxims for Revolutionists
Strassman B (2000) Polygyny, Family Structure and Infant Mortality: A Prospective Study Among the Dogon of Mali. In Cronk, Chagnon & Irons (Ed.), Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (pp.49-68). New York: Aldine de Gruyter
Zerjal et al. (2003) The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols, American Journal of Human Genetics, 72(3): 717–721

[Rinstinkt · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to “Despotism and Differential Reproduction” by Laura L. Betzig (first published 1986), human history can be explained by the Darwinian logic of natural selection, which posits that individuals will use their power and resources to maximize their reproductive success. Despotism, or the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few, is a common and adaptive strategy for achieving this goal. This argument is supported by cross-cultural data on hierarchy, conflict resolution, polygyny, and differential reproduction in various societies, ranging from hunter-gatherers to ancient empires to modern democracies.
I consider myself well-read in evolutionary topics, but this was a slow read, because the book is like a 100 pg. scientific paper. What follows are some short quotes from the book, and a few notes for myself:

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Lord Acton once pointed out that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, surprising hardly anyone. The perhaps naive question asked here is, why? The answer investigated follows from Darwin. If men and women are products of natural selection, then the evolved end of their existence should be essentially, very simply, the production of children, grandchildren, and other nondescendant kinsmen.

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Trivers (1971) specifically formulated the idea of what he called "reciprocal altruism." [...] He pointed out that reciprocal altruism would most likely occur when individuals involved interacted repeatedly, were afforded many opportunities to benefit y being recipients of altruistic acts, and were able to render roughly equivalent benefits to each other at roughly equivalent costs.
...
To sum up, Darwinian theory makes the simple prediction that men and women will cooperate when it is in their reproductive interests to do so.

[How would this work in the modern environment where communities don't exist anymore and altruistic acts aren't reciprocated? What type of human behavior is advantageous and is being selected in a metropolitan environment?]

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In fact, of course, biology is always prerequisite to behavior; in some sense, the actions of every organism, including men and women, must be genetically “determined”.
[...] These “proximate”, in this case psychological, mechanisms, might have been designed by natural selection, to be produced by the interaction of genes with predictable environments. They may be the most important affecting a number of simple and complex behaviors contributing to successful reproduction.

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The group in which neither exclusive reproductive rights in wives nor productive rights in property exists has never turned up.

[Criticises Marxian wishful thinking]

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When fights do break out, what determines the outcomes? The answers are consistently three: kinship, wealth, and strength.

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Failure to retaliate against an offender was, to the Comanche, a social disgrace. “A man so acting was stamped not as magnanimous, but as lily-livered”.

[There are countless studies on how bullies, compared to their victims, have more sexual and reproductive success and are happier. Another phenomenon that demonstrates this being ingrained in our psychology is the fact that in US politics, I bet elsewhere too, voters consistently vote for the candidate that is taller, has the deeper voice and appears as dominant on stage. Also see Nixon vs Kennedy; radio vs TV.]

[…] amassed strength determines the outcomes of conflicts, and strength is almost invariably determined by one’s own physical prowess, and that represented by the aggregated force of one’s kinship and alliance network.

[This is indeed true in Albania, where the party or strongman who has a position of power, will inevitably give public administrative paid positions to family and friends. In western countries, the same is true, although concealed to the public behind 1 or 2 more steps].

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In the words of Confucius, “Disorder does not come from heaven, but is brought about by women”.

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Contrary, again, to prior expectation (Morgan, 1877; Engels, 1884), communal rights in reproduction have yet to be evidenced. True to Darwinian prediction, the evidence suggests that in virtually all societies, women are a significant cause of male conflicts of interest.

[Again, Criticises Marxian wishful thinking]

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[…] evidence from a number of primate societies indicates that male dominance is largely a function of polygyny or promiscuity[…]

[…] cross culturally, men often exercise their additional height, weight, and strength to intimidate spouses against infidelity, and to punish them, often severely, for transgressions. Broude and Greene (1976) have shown that in standard sample societies a consistent male-biased double standard in extramarital sex exists. Women may be least likely to tolerate such asymmetry where they have the least to gain from consorts in the form of support, including heritable support, for themselves and their descendants, and where they have the greatest number of supportive kin.

[This perfectly explains the huge increase in the divorce rate in the last century.]

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[…] primates in general, and the human primate in particular, the extent to which male body length exceeds that of females is directly related to the size of the harem of a successful male. Humans again, may be generally be considered somewhat polygynous; cross culturally, men tend to be taller than women by about 5 to 12%.

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Sir Henry Maine long ago supposed that ancient “law” was not a product of social contract, “a theory which, though nursed into importance by political passions, derived all its sap from speculations of lawyers” (1864:299). Rather, he thought, rights and obligations have always coincided with relative status.
As imbalances in power grow, inequities do in fact become increasingly striking.

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Where it does occur, polyandry is probably most often among brothers. This, of course, is consistent with the Darwinian theory of nepotism; investment in niece or nephew is better in the reproductive sense than investment in a nonrelative. Ethnographic examples indicate that only in return for rendering essential economic assistance to the household would a brother be given reproductive rights in a wife.

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Most broadly, this form of bias, a differential tolerance of a wife’s infidelity according to a husband’s ability to provide, is frequently alluded to in ethnographies (see Dickerman, 1981)

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Well to do parents might have lad more descendants by investing preferentially in sons over daughters, and low-status parents by favoring daughters over sons.

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That women were actually valued for their ability to produce children is attested to in part by the fact that, cross culturally, couples without children divorce more often. [10 different studies/authors are cited]

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[…] found a significant correlation between a woman’s contribution to subsistence activities and the proportion of men married polygynously in a society. It is consistent with a Darwinian hypothesis that where women contribute most to the household, polygyny may be a feasibility for a larger group of men.

[This must be true in this decade too. But how does it manifest? :) ]

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Even the least skilled laborers might become more valuable as their numbers decline, and/or as need for their services goes up, although immigration may often afford an alternative to men in power.