Sex at Dawn полностью

According to E. O. Wilson, “all that we can surmise of humankind’s genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as a means for procreation.”¹⁵ We couldn’t have said it better. But if human sexuality developed primarily as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands where paternity certainty was a nonissue, then the standard narrative of human sexual evolution is toast. The anachronistic presumption that women have always bartered their sexual favors to individual men in return for help with child care, food, protection, and the rest of it collapses upon contact with the many societies where women feel no need to negotiate such deals. Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and then projected upon the distant screen of prehistory, rationalizing the present while obscuring the past. Yabba dabba doo.

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Real science offers one of the few—if not the only—reliable means of seeing beyond such cultural distortions, which makes it vitally important that we be fearless in rooting out cultural bias in research.

A central theme in our argument is that human sexual behavior is a reflection of both evolved tendencies and social context. Thus, a sense of the day-to-day social world in which human sexual tendencies evolved is essential to understanding them. It’s hard to imagine the communal, cooperative social configurations we’ve described surviving long in the kind of world Hobbes envisioned, characterized by “bellum omnium contra omnes” (the war of all against all). But the false view of prehistoric human life summed up in Hobbes’s pithy dictum “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is still almost universally accepted.

Having established that prehistoric human life was highly social and decidedly not solitary, we now briefly address the other elements in Hobbes’s description in the following four chapters, before continuing with a more direct discussion of overtly sexual material. We hope readers primarily interested in sex will bear with us because what might at first seem a detour is in fact a shortcut to a clearer vision of the day-to-day lives of our ancestors, a vision that will help you make better sense of the material that follows, as well as of your own world.

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms ... has marked the upward surge of mankind.

“GORDON GEKKO,” in the film Wall Street

What constitutes misuse of the universe? This question can be answered in one word: greed.... Greed constitutes the most grievous wrong.

LAURENTI MAGESA,

African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life

Economics, “the dismal science,” was dismal right from the start.

On a late autumn afternoon in 1838, what may have been the brightest bolt of illumination ever to flash out of an overcast English sky struck Charles Darwin right upside the head, leaving him stunned by what Richard Dawkins has called “the most powerful idea that has ever occurred to a man.” At the very moment the great insight underlying natural selection came to him, Darwin was reading An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus.¹