Male Parental Investment (MPI)
As mentioned above, underlying each of these theories, as well as evolutionary theory in general, is the notion that life can be conceptualized in terms of economics and game theory. The objective of the game is to send your genetic code into the future by producing the maximum possible number of offspring who survive and reproduce. Whether or not this dispersal leads to happiness is irrelevant. In his best-selling survey of EP, The Moral Animal, Robert Wright puts it succinctly, saying: “We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we’re designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals—sex, status, and so on—often brings happiness, at least for a while.) Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive.”10
This is a curious notion of productivity—at once overtly political and yet presented innocently enough, as if there were only one possible meaning of “productivity.” This perspective on life incorporates the Protestant work ethic (that “productivity” is what makes an animal “effective”) and echoes the Old Testament notion that life must be endured, not enjoyed. These assumptions are embedded throughout the literature of evolutionary psychology. Ethologist/ primatologist Frans de Waal, one of the more open-minded philosophers of human nature, calls this Calvinist sociobiology.
The female interest in quality over quantity is thought to be important in two respects. First, she would clearly be interested in conceiving a child with a healthy man, so as to
maximize the odds that her child would survive and prosper. “Women’s reproductive resources are precious and finite, and ancestral women did not squander them on just any random man,” writes evolutionary psychologist David Buss. “Obviously, women don’t consciously think that sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive,” Buss continues, “but women in the past who failed to exercise acumen before consenting to sex were left in the evolutionary dust; our ancestral mothers used emotional wisdom to screen out losers.”11 Buss doesn’t explain why there are still so many “losers” in the gene pool today if their ancestors were subject to such careful screening for thousands of generations.
While a substantial amount of female parental investment is biologically unavoidable in our species, evolutionary theorists believe that Homo sapiens is uniquely high in male parental investment (MPI) among primates. They argue that our high level of MPI forms the basis for the supposed universality of marriage. As Wright puts it, “In every human culture in the anthropological record, marriage … is the norm, and the family is the atom of social organization. Fathers everywhere feel love for their children…. This love leads fathers to help feed and defend their children, and teach them useful things.”12
Biologist Tim Birkhead agrees, writing, “The issue of paternity is at the core of much of men’s behaviour—and for good evolutionary reasons. In our primeval past, men who invested in children which were not their own would, on average, have left fewer descendents than those who reared only their own genetic offspring. As a consequence men were, and continue to be, preoccupied with paternity….”13
For now, we’ll briefly note a few of the questionable assumptions underlying this argument:
• Every culture is organized around marriage and the nuclear family.
• Human fathers that provided for only their own children would have left far more descendants than those less selective in their material generosity.
• Note how this presumes a discrete genetic basis for something as amorphous as “preoccupation with paternity.”
• In the ancestral environment, a man could know which children were biologically his, which presumes that:
• he understands that one sex act can lead to a child, and
• he has 100 percent certainty of his partner’s fidelity.
• A hunter could refuse to share his catch with other hungry people living in the close-knit band of foragers (including nieces, nephews, and children of lifelong friends) without being shamed, shunned, and banished from the community.
So, according to the standard narrative, as male parental investment translates into advantages for that man’s children (more food, protection, and education—other kids be damned), women would have evolved to choose mates with access to more of these resources and whose behavior indicated that they would share these resources only with her and her children (indications of selective generosity, fidelity, and sincerity).
But, according to this narrative, these two female objectives (good genes and access to a male’s resources) create conflictive situations for men and women—both within their relationship and with their same-sex competitors. Wright summarizes this understanding of the situation: “High male parental investment makes sexual selection work in two directions at once. Not only have males evolved to compete for scarce female eggs; females have evolved to compete for scarce male investment.”14