AT HIS blog, Bruce Charlton ponders the relatively low fertility of intelligent women from an evolutionary perspective. If maximizing reproductive success is a driver of human behavior, why do many women pursue childlessness or near-childlessness?

The second of his two answers, in which he discusses the social orientation of women, seems closer to the truth. However, I would rephrase it this way. Women are not loners, for obvious biological reasons. Women prepare for child-rearing by forming communities. In modern life, community revolves around institutions. In contrast, the actual physical community – the neighborhood or town – is a non-hierarchical place into which the more intelligent woman cannot find a place or a natural role. She spends years working to find a stable network in an institutional society. This paradoxically leaves little time for actual investment in child-rearing. Evolutionary behavior is for her non-evolutionary.

                                                    — Comments —

A reader writes:

Having a child is laying down one’s life for another person; the involvement required is close to actually dying for someone else, and in some cases it requires that as well. Rearing a child detracts from investment in self.

Eric writes:

I am struck by the ways children react to institutional environments (i.e. schools) by trying to create a web of friends around themselves to replace lost families. The same can be seen in prisons. The inmates form gangs because they have no other social context.

Jesse Powell writes:

The below paragraph is excerpted from the article in The American Naturalist linked to in Bruce Charlton’s musings about why higher income men have more children while higher income women have fewer children: 

“The pattern for women is very different from that for men. There is a strong negative relationship between education and reproductive success and also a negative relationship between income and reproductive success. It is likely that the male and female patterns arise in different ways. The negative effects for women can mainly be interpreted as the results of trade-offs that women have to face if they desire children—for example, ceasing their education or working part-time to allow for motherhood (Marini 1984). For men, by contrast, a possible explanation of the income effect is female choice. A large portion of the literature that analyzes across many cultures has documented female preferences for men with resources (Buss 1989; Borgerhoff Mulder 1990; Pollet and Nettle 2008), and the increased probability of never being married or of having no cohabitations among men with low incomes in the NCDS is consistent with poorer men having difficulty attracting mates. Thus, the causal pathways to childlessness do indeed seem to be rather different for the two sexes (Keizer et al. 2007).” 

The paragraph above explains this phenomenon very clearly and very well; for women, being career-oriented and seeking to make lots of money competes with the goal of being a good mother and having lots of children; for men, being career oriented and seeking to make lots of money is complementary with the goal of providing for a woman who will then be free to focus her efforts on being a good mother and having lots of children. There is no mystery as to why high-earning men have more children while high earning women have fewer children, it is simply because for a man pursuing money is a part of his family responsibility while for a woman pursuing money is a contradiction of her family responsibilities. This is precisely why married men should work while married women should not work.

 If one understands the reasons why men and women should have different roles within the family and in society overall it is very easy to explain why a man acting as a man is good while a woman acting as a man is bad; only if one is wedded to the feminist notion that men and women are the same does it become mysterious why the same behavior when practiced by a woman instead of a man produces a different result.

Vishal Mehra writes:

Bruce Charlton’s post is filled with illogic and false assumptions. Just a tiny example, Charlton writes that, “In historical societies, reproduction just happened as a by product of instinct: people sought ‘happiness’ and the children just came along (and there was no way of stopping them).”

This is utterly false. Barrenness was felt to be a curse. Even now, in India, people bless newlyweds in these words: putaon fallon, meaning “Be fruitful with sons.”

This sort of reductive non-thinking seems very common in England, even among conservatives and Christians. English people, even well-meaning, can’t seem to avoid making these horrid modern reductive blunders.

Again, he writes, “Each man is, in a biological sense, a loner who seeks status, seeks to become the dominant male and get the lion’s share of reproduction. Each man is against other men – except that self-interest dictates that one way to pursue self interest is via alliances.”

A prime example of non-thinking. A man is both loner and forms alliances. And, ‘status’ has no meaning within biology.

These examples can be continued. And I would bet even the study he refers would be a mass of such confused non-thinking (that study is also from England).

Laura writes:

The statement, “In historical societies, reproduction just happened as a by product of instinct” is pure speculation. It is not scientific because it cannot be proven, and has not been proven.

If the traditional, patriarchal family was just an expression of biological drives, as Charlton states, how could it have embodied abstract goals such as lifelong fidelity, which is at the very least problematic in terms of the biological imperative of maximizing reproductivity.

Charlton says that the behavior of modern women makes no sense in terms of evolutionary theory. Isn’t that a reason to be skeptical of evolutionary thinking? Low fertility is of epidemic proportions. Evolutionary psychology can’t make any sense in the end of cultural suicide.

Please follow and like us: