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So in this society you've got a lot of lower-class men, who have very few reproductive opportunities, who want to control women, and then you introduce them to this westernization that says, "Women, we will educate you, we will free you from the burkha, we will give you opportunities to be mobile, to travel, to flirt, to make your own romantic alliances." That is a very strong threat to the men who are already up against it and whose reproductive future depends on making alliances with other men who are in complete control of their own daughters. So westernization undermines reproductive strategies of men who are already desperate. This means that in order to develop long-term strategies for reducing the degree of resentment that globalization and westernization are inducing in those countries, we should think about what we can do to reduce polygany. The countries where Al Qaeda gets the most support are the most polyganous countries: the Afghanistans, the Pakistans, the Saudi Arabias, and so on. But if you take a country like Turkey, which banned polygany in the 1920s, you see very little support. Single men are dangerous when they face a difficult reproductive future, and when they are presented with a series of economic changes that further reduce their economic futures by liberating women from their own control, then those men become peculiarly open to those wild schemes that Osama bin Laden presents. And those sorts of dangers are liable simply to continue for as long as the reproductive inequities continue in the Middle East. EDGE: What accounts for the controversy surrounding the publication of your book Demonic Males? WRANGHAM: Once you use biology to analyze human behavior, it's a bit like going to a psychiatrist and having somebody help you understand where your behavior is coming from. It means that you're in a little bit less internal conflict, that you can understand what you're doing, and you can shape your own behavior better. But the reaction is not always like that. A lot of people find it difficult to live with the idea that we've had a natural history of violence. We've had natural selection in favor of emotions in men that predispose us to enjoy competition, to enjoy subordinating other men, to enjoy even killing other men. These are nasty things to accept, and there are people who have written subsequently to say that it's just inappropriate to write like this, and so they look for ways to undermine the evidence of sex differences or the uniqueness of the human species. I think it's because people are very nervous about the idea that once you see a biological component to our violent behavior, then it may mean that it is inevitable. One of the great thrusts of behavioral biology for the last three or four decades has been that if you change the conditions that an animal is in, then you change the kind of behavior that is elicited. What the genetic control of behavior means is not that instincts inevitably pop out regardless of circumstances; instead, it is that we are created with a series of emotions that are appropriate for a range of circumstances. The particular set of emotions that pop out will vary within species, but they will also vary with context, and once you know them better, then you can arrange the context. Once you understand and admit that human males in particular have got these hideous propensities to get carried away with enthusiasm, to have war, rape, or killing sprees, or to get excited about opportunities to be engaged in violent interactions, then you can start recognizing it and doing something about it. It's much better not to have to wait for experience to tell you that it's a good idea to have a standing army to protect yourself against the neighbors, or that you need to make sure that women are not exposed to potential rapists. It's much better to anticipate these things, recognize the problem, and design in advance to protect. There's still a huge tendency to downplay or just simplify sex differences in behavior and emotions. As we start getting a more realistic sense about the way natural selection has shaped our behavior, we're going to be increasingly aware of the fact that the ways that men and women respond emotionally to different contexts can be very different. One of the dramatic examples is the extent to which men and women get positive illusions. In general, women tend to have negative illusions about themselves, meaning that they regard themselves as slightly less skilled or competent than they really are. On the other hand, men tend to have positive illusions, meaning they exaggerate their own abilities, compared to the way either others see them or they perform in tests. These things are certainly changeable. They depend a lot on power relations. If you put a woman in a dominant power relation, she tends to get a positive illusion; if you put a man in a subordinate relationship he tends to get a negative illusion. Nevertheless these things emerge very predictably — and they're dangerous. If you have positive illusions then it means that you think you can fight better than you really can. It looks to me as though natural selection has favored positive illusions in men, because rather like the long canines on a male baboon they enable men to fight better against other men who really believe in themselves. You have to believe in yourself to be able to fight effectively, because if you don't believe in yourself really well, then others will take advantage of your lack of confidence and your nervousness. If you understand something about positive illusions, you can look at an engagement in which everybody believes they're going to win, and be a little more cynical about it. You can be a bit more like a lawyer looking at two clients and saying, wait a minute, neither of you has got a case just quite as good as you think you have. In the future a more sensitive appreciation for these sorts of emotional predispositions can help us generate a more refined approach to violence prevention. |