BATESON: As a start, we need to pinpoint regularities. For instance, what are the particular events that influence individuals at a particular stage in development with long-term effects on their behavior. An example is the way in which human sexual preferences can be influenced by experience starting early in life. If we grow up with a particular member of the opposite sex, we are not interested sexually in that person when we grow up. We are interested in somebody who is a little bit different from him or her but not too different. I've just come back from a conference in Stanford where we were discussing the work of Arthur Wolf who is an anthropologist. Wolf has done a long-term study of Taiwanese marriage systems during a period in history when the Japanese ruled Taiwan and kept very detailed records of each household. There were two kinds of arranged marriage. In the most common type the wife-to-be and the husband-to-be met when they were adolescents. These marriages led to stable, long-term relationships and many children.

In the other type of arranged marriage, the wife-to-be and the husband-to-be met when they themselves were children. The future daughter-in-law was adopted into the family of the husband, and the children were adolescents when the marriage was made formal. What emerges from analyzing the Japanese records is that these marriages were remarkably unsuccessful with few children and high divorce rates. When Wolf was able to talk to some of the people who had experienced these marriages, they simply said that they found their partners very uninteresting.

What is particularly nice about his study is that he was able to get information on ages when the wife-to-be met the husband-to-be. Up to the age of about five, the subsequent marriages were severely affected. After the age of five, the subsequent marriages were just as successful as other arranged marriages. So something happens in those early years which has a long term influence on sexual preferences. It is not necessarily determined rigidly in the nervous system. The process may be much more dynamic and may have much to do with the relationship which the future marriage partners have through the rest of their childhood. If they meet very early, they play with each other more as they develop and may have a close relationship which continues right the way through until they are adolescents. Whatever the mediating chain of events, this study provides a remarkable example of where a natural experiment with a human population has produced evidence which is very similar to the results of laboratory experiments with animals.

JB: So we're not talking about hard-wiring here?