What Evolution and History Teach About Marriage

Note: This talk was given at a secular school where mentioning the Bible was forbidden. The school was so committed to the idea of evolution that no other ideas could be discussed. This paper discusses marriage from an evolutionary point of view, but the answers come out the same.

Consider bridges: Most bridges along the interstates are built pretty much the same way. There’s a steel beam across the road. Concrete pillars hold the ends of the beam up and maybe the middle, the steel beam crosses the span, and presses down on the concrete pillars.

Steel and concrete are not equal. Steel has great strength in tension, that is, you can pull on it, and it won’t break, but if you push on a steel beam, it tends to bend and buckle. The beam across the road is carefully shaped so that most of the force on the bridge is expressed as tension in the lower half of the beam. Concrete comes apart if you pull on it, but it has compression strength, you can push on concrete and it holds a lot. If you build your bridge on the wrong ideas about steel and concrete, your bridge will fall.

It doesn’t matter what’s politically correct, it doesn’t matter how you’d like marriage to be, you have to base your marriage on facts about the nature of men and women or your marriage will fall. I’m going to give you some facts.

• Humans operate on will, mind, and reason mixed with emotions, instinct, and reflex.
• A woman wants babies. I don’t know whether this is emotion or instinct, but men should note that that’s what she wants to do. It doesn’t matter what she says, her basic nature usually comes out in the end. If women didn’t want babies, there wouldn’t be any now that we have birth control.
• A man wants to throw a woman on his horse and ride off into sunset, I don’t care if that’s emotion or instinct, it’s a good idea for a woman to note that that’s what he wants to do. He may try to hide his possessiveness, but his basic nature generally comes out in the end, particularly after they’re married and it’s a done deal.

Gender and biology are NOT destiny; some of what I say will sound that way. Gender isn’t quite the same as destiny but it rules in certain matters:

• There are very few women in the NFL
• Very few men give birth
• Women make better mothers than men

We’re NOT animals, we have free will, we can choose. When adults say of kids, "They’ll do it anyway," that’s a real insult, it equates young people with animals who can’t resist their desires, who can’t control themselves, who can’t make rational choices.

Why do adults say such insulting things about young people? Follow the money! There’s no money in kids who don’t fool around, there’s some money selling condoms to schools, there are huge dollars in providing abortions. Planned Parenthood has a financial interest in young people needing abortions. Need we say more?

All of us are capable of making choices.

• We CAN use our minds and wills to act contrary to our nature, either for good or for ill. We can rise above ourselves or go below, but it’s hard to be what we’re not over a long period of time. An athlete may have 2 or 3 great games or a slump, but performs to his average over time. A couple may have great times and bad times, but marriage averages out to its basic level over time.
• Before you marry, keep both eyes open, after you marry, shut one.
• You have will, you don’t always have to go with the flow, you don’t have to be subject to your basic nature, but it’s easier than swimming upstream. Most people revert to their natures over the long haul.

Some people remember the old TV slogan for a butter substitute - "It’s not nice to fool mother nature." In point of fact, you can’t fool mother nature over a long period of time. To make a success of marriage, you have to understand the facts and tendencies which influence how men and women behave.

Most facts about women and men are politically incorrect, one of the current cultural fictions is that men and women are the same. It’s risky to point out unpopular facts, and I can’t tell you the reason the truth is attacked, that’s even more verboten. We live in an age when certain thoughts may not be expressed and telling you why they can’t be expressed is even worse. Today’s thought control is worse than the middle ages when people were punished for saying that the earth might be round.

Truth is forbidden so I have to use fiction in discussing marriage with you. Teaching falsely is common in academia:

• Newton’s laws aren’t true, but they are a useful illustration of simple physics so we teach them.
• Similarly, the theory of evolution isn’t true, honest textbooks point out that there’s no evidence for the biological explanations for love, that is, for the evolutionary basis for reproductive behavior, but it was made up to be plausible. I’m not allowed to tell you the real truth, there are too many vested interests, too much money, and too many jobs depend on vigilant support for the theory of evolution. It’s DANGEROUS to go against prevailing dogma. So I’m using evolution as a defining falsehood to help you remember what we discuss today even though it’s not true and textbooks say there’s no evidence for it.

Parenthetically, truth does not need to be defended by forbidding other views, anything taught as shrilly and as intolerantly as the current dogma is most likely false. You have to watch HOW things are said, not just what’s said.

This doesn’t matter in the long run, bridges built on falsehood fall, marriages build on falsehood fall, societies built on falsehood fall, hippies, communes, utopias, and free love are no longer with us. A historian named FD Unwin wrote that 80 sexually permissive civilizations fell. Confucius pointed out that society works when wives obey their husbands, children obey their parents, and men obey the government, but he also noted that government must embody virtue by working for the good of the people, he called this the "mandate of heaven." When government loses the mandate of heaven, Confucius said, you might as well rebel because the government’s going to collapse anyway. The sooner you get it started falling, the sooner a newer, better one can emerge. These wise men wrote that we can’t fool nature, at least not in the long term.

For example, our social security system was designed specifically to break the bonds between generations because the planners were worried about population growth and wanted smaller families. Once their old age was assured, people did indeed have smaller families which resulted in smaller population growth. With fewer children, however, parents pay less attention to them, so our education system is failing. Civilization fails when people lose interest in the next generation, an unintended consequence of the design of our social security system.

Time to get back to marriage, but first a few terms.

Evolutionary theory is based on the idea of a "selfish gene." A gene wants as many copies of itself as possible without regard to anything else; a chicken is an egg’s way of getting more eggs. The Darwinian view is that all characteristics of all living beings such as instinct, intelligence, eyes, kidneys, muscles, reproductive systems, skin, bones, whatever, is designed through trial and error to spread genes as far as possible.

Statistics I plan to make some broad, sweeping statements which are based on the "normal distribution." What I mean when I say, "women are physically weaker than men" or "men are taller than women" is based on averages AND the observation that for most characteristics, couples usually pair up that way. In most couples, for example, the man is taller, larger, older, stronger, and earns more money than the woman, but the woman talks more than the man. What I tell you will be generalizations, NO woman or man is exactly as I say, but all of us share some of these tendencies.

Axioms: We’re going to try to use reason, but we always reason from "axioms" which are self-evident facts which we accept without discussion and reason from them. Let’s start with some relatively non-controversial, albeit politically incorrect, facts:

• Since the ‘60’s, divorce, crime, child abuse, juvenile delinquency, and other social pathologies have increased HUGELY. If social welfare theory is as highly developed as our academics say, how come actual welfare is in such a precipitous decline?
• Poverty has declined in the material sense. The American poor have more dishwashers, cars, TVs, VCRs, etc, per capita than the entire population of Europe. The "Root cause" idea about crime rates are nonsense, material poverty used to be much worse.
• About as many boy reach puberty as girls. There are slightly more boys born, but boys die more often, either because they play more dangerously or because they’re more fragile. There’s survival value in having about as many women as men, we’ll go into the reason for later.
• Except for China which births about 60% boys. More Chinese girls are aborted because parents prefer sons to daughters. This is a result of the Chinese government being pro-choice. People don’t always choose the way the elite expect, many "pro-choice" folks find Chinese choices unacceptable.
• Women are physically smaller and weaker than men. The Japanese character for "man" combines the character for "field" with the character for "strength" to show that a man provides strength in the field. The Japanese meaning of "strength" is to "press down and control, to get the upper hand." This has an evolutionary effect: if men are strong enough to feed and defend them, women don’t have to be as large or as strong. Women can stay home and don’t have to spend energy running around hunting. Women use less food to feed their muscles, this leaves more energy left over to make and feed babies, which has survival value.
• Pregnancy makes women quite awkward, they’re weaker than normal while pregnant.
• Girls dream of weddings from the day they learn what weddings are, do boys think about weddings at all? Ever?
• Who worries about the relationship, the "R" word, men or women? Which gender worries about commitment?
• Men are physically possessive, women are emotionally possessive.
• Married men live longer than unmarried men despite the stresses of fatherhood.
• Married women live shorter lives than unmarried women, but if you subtract childbirth deaths, it’s about even.
• Widows live MUCH longer than widowers.
• The stress of divorce shortens lifespan of both men and women and is now known to mess up the children pretty badly.
• Men bond though shared wars, veterans talk about being shot at together. To a man, a relationship means knowing that the other guy won’t run away when the shooting starts, this is how hunting parties operate going back to the dawn of time. Male games don’t teach cooperation, they teach following a leader and doing the plays he calls.
• Women bond through shared intimacies, they build rapport through shared experience. To a woman, relationship doesn’t mean knowing what the man did but why he did it and how he felt about it, a report of being shot at doesn’t bond a woman, she wants to know how he felt about it. The man doesn’t care how he felt about it, he cares who ran and who stuck, he needs to know who can be trusted and who can’t, he needs to know who’s a clutch player. In the movie "High Noon," the hero’s concern was "Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’" Why?

Women share information about raising children and keeping husbands happy, women seek out other women who can help with these issues. Men, on the other hand, seek other men who won’t run away when the buffalo, or the fire, or the war gets dangerous. A man can die if another man chickens out. A woman’s child can die if another woman gives her bad advice, but she herself usually won’t die. That’s why male bonding is so different from female bonding. To stay married, a man must be willing to bond to his wife in her way, that is, though talk, and she must be willing to bond to him in his way, that is, through shared experiences.

A man would rather do it than talk about it, women are the reverse.

Key fact:

• A man can get a woman pregnant in a day, a woman makes one baby per year, and three years is better if she doesn’t want to die from vitamin deficiencies. Where does the calcium in baby’s skeleton come from? Either from her food or from her skeleton. New England women used to lose one tooth per child.

If you look at a globe, you’ll note that within 5 or even 10 degrees of the equator, the climate is so warm that a woman can find enough food to take care of herself and a few children. It’s helpful if a man occasionally supplies some protein by killing an animal and sharing the meat, but a woman can survive pregnancy and raise children by cooperating with other women, she doesn’t really need a husband. Sure enough, marriage bonds have always been weaker in tropical climates than in harsher areas and marriage bonds are weakening in Europe and America as the welfare system makes it possible for women to survive pregnancy without a man’s help. She can’t socialize her sons without help from a man which is why there’s so much violence in our inner cities, but she can get them old enough to reproduce. That’s all that matters to the genes.

Women’s instincts haven’t caught up with birth control and welfare. When a woman has sex, her instincts recognize that she might get pregnant and end up depending on a man to feed her, so her emotions urge her to cling to the man who took her.

More facts:

• From a tribal point of view, men are expendable, women aren’t, there’s plenty of sperm but you can’t afford to waste uteruses. In warfare, amazons are merely a legend, this is BAD for survival. It’s been said, "Any society that sends women into combat isn’t worth defending," what this means is that it won’t survive so why try to defend it? In primitive warfare, the goal was to kill the men while keeping the women to increase the tribe. Modern "ethnic cleansing" is different because slavery has gone out of style. The conquerors aren’t allowed to keep the women, so they kill the women and children along with the men to keep the enemy population from recovering.
• Lions know that lactation prevents conception. When an old lion dies and a new male takes over, he kills all the cubs so that the females stop lactating and can get pregnant which his genes. What’s the leading cause of violent child abuse? After a divorce, the woman usually keeps the kids. She gets lonely so she finds a boyfriend. He is likely to abuse the children because they aren’t his. The dirty little secret of child protection is that the mother’s boyfriend is the most likely perpetrator, but most social workers would rather not admit this.
• Women are valuable in a survival sense, BUT it’s a very short step from being precious to being a prisoner. Consider the logic: "women shouldn’t leave the cave" leads to "women may not leave the cave" leads to caging them so they can’t leave the cave. This is what a harem is all about. Being pregnant in a rich man’s harem is safe so long as the king is alive. When the king or boss dies and a new leader takes over, the new guy generally has his brothers and half-brothers killed, but all the girls survive. Sisters are useful for forging diplomatic alliances, he can marry them off to business contacts. Unless her son is sure to be the next king, a harem woman is better off having daughters.

What, therefore, are the optimal strategies and behaviors, for spreading human genes?

Go back 200 years. The last 200 years mean NOTHING in terms of evolution, all our instincts, customs, and behaviors were formed long before then. So to explain our instincts, we have to think in terms of the situation up to the last 200 years. What pertained? There was no birth control, there was essentially no machinery, and 80% or more of population farmed with horses or by hand. Let’s start with a few historical observations:

• Men are physically MUCH stronger than women and women are awkward during pregnancy. In most of the world, a woman could not survive at all without the aid of a man, an unmarried woman would starve to death, particularly in New England, even without being pregnant.
• In American Indian custom, woman gathered most of the food but they needed protein to reproduce, women do most of the work in a hunter-gatherer situation but men provide the protein which is needed to support pregnancy. Think about pioneers and wagon trains, could a woman handle a wagon without a man? In general, no.
• With respect to Japanese rice farmers, all of a man’s strength is needed to support one woman and her children, this enforces the 1:1 birth ratio. There were statistically very few harems, most men simply couldn’t feed more than one woman.
• In western agriculture, the traditional tithe of the crop went to the land owner. If the owner took more than that, the farmer’s family would starve and there’d be no income at all.
• In some equatorial areas, the weather is warmer and there are food plants such as cassava which take relatively little effort. In these places, women can and do survive without husbands.
• In the present welfare system, single women with children survive just fine in the physical sense except for being victims of neighborhood violence. This is because single women aren’t strong enough or big enough to socialize men who’re past puberty.

Bearing in mind the key fact 1 man day vs. 1 woman year for pregnancies, what are the optimal strategies, given the situation up to the last 200 years, for spreading genes? Are the strategies the same for women and for men?

• Male: Instincts are based on the 3F’s: Find ‘em, Fondle ‘em, and Forget ‘em. In the musical "The King and I" there’s a song comparing women to flowers. A man is like a butterfly, he wants to gather all he can. Men ask, "Why buy a cow if I can get milk for free, why buy when I can rent, why rent what I can get for free?
• Female: It’s easy to attract a man long enough to get her pregnant, but then what? She needs to keep him around until the kids mature, she needs him for 20 years. Why are women attracted to jocks? They’re usually strong enough to survive the 20 years during which she needs help raising children. Brains can’t fight disease.

The 3F’s are a flawed strategy for gene maximization. In New England, it was impossible for a woman to live alone in the pre-industrial age, it was only when power looms were invented that a woman could earn enough money to live without a man. Without machinery, man could barely farm or hunt well enough to feed one family. If a man left a woman pregnant, she’d starve, no genes for HIM. Going back many generations, every one of your ancestresses persuaded some man to feed her long enough for her children to mature, and every one of your ancestors was willing to do it. Not one failed. How do I know? You’re here.

Problem for a man: If a woman can’t survive, he won’t leave any genes behind unless he takes care of her, but what if she can survive without him? How does he balance sticking around and movin’ on? In welfare communities, woman are better off financially if there’s no man around, so there aren’t any men, but up to 100 years ago, he had to feed her if he wanted his genes to spread.

• In cold climates where women need help, men may have a survival instinct: feel tender, protective, and proprietary toward a woman after taking her. He may want to take charge of her and care for her. Rapists often act tenderly toward their victims afterward, BUT NOT in climates where women can fend for themselves.
• Man’s survival instinct: be POSSESSIVE, keep her for himself so that any kids she bears are his, there’s no point in raising someone else’s genes. Remember the lion pride where the new king kills all the children? Where does child abuse come from?

Problem for woman: The child is hers, she had it last, she has to take care of it, the man simply won’t. There was a Swedish study which showed that kids do best when raised by their biological mother, day care and stay-at-home fathers don’t do as well. There was a significant difference which couldn’t be dismissed. The authors were egalitarian feminists who hated the idea that women made better mothers than men. When the author doesn’t like the results, the study is credible.

• Woman’s survival instinct: babies are fragile and die easily. Women are driven to talk to each other to find out how to keep their babies alive. This is a combination of benchmarking and best practice, women talk about how to raise kids and how to get men to stick around. Parenthetically, while men are subject to peer pressure, women are MUCH more confirming by nature because there’s generally one best way to raise children. Talking and conformity keep babies alive, this has survival value.
• Women’s survival instinct: physical intimacy is frightening, sex gives her the feeling of depending on the man and makes her desire to belong to him. This is an emotional response, fear helps her stop having sex if she realizes that she can’t trust him; clinging helps keep the man around in case she gets pregnant.
• Women pay more attention to attracting men than vice versa. Ads in women’s magazines are for products designed to get men to notice: "The closer he gets, the better you look." A one-night stand is enough for a man, but a woman needs a long-term relationship, she has more to lose. The wedding vows say, "to have and to hold," being held reassures her that she won’t starve.

Marriage: Father’s goal: fund his daughter’s children so that his genes survive, "Who gives this woman to this man," is essentially a business transaction. The father gives his daughter to the man, but the husband is responsible for feeding the kids. The mother’s goal: keep her daughter from being a wallflower or an old maid so that her genes survive. In the musical "South Pacific," Bloody Mary introduced her daughter to the young marine knowing that in her climate, a woman could survive without a husband. When my wife taught 7th grade, she found that most mothers were very happy when their daughters were popular with the guys. Being popular in 7^th grade may be optimal reproduction strategy, it gets ‘em pregnant early and often. It isn’t good for getting or staying married, but with the welfare system, divorce courts, and child support, most babies can survive long enough to reproduce without a father.

Given the modern welfare system, the 4F strategy works OK for a man, his genes can survive without him so long as the mother doesn’t get an abortion. This doesn’t work as well for the woman. She has to take care of the kids herself which is a strain regardless of child support or welfare payments. Not only that, her sons tend to get into crime as they get older; she can’t slap them around once they’re bigger than she is. That’s why single mothers tend to have enough children to make up for attrition due to crime, less intensive parental care, or abusive boyfriends.

Given the welfare system, non-marriage spreads genes effectively in the short term, but there’s a catch. As Confucius pointed out, when marriages fall apart, civilization collapses. There are a lot of reasons for this, but when parents don’t care enough about their children to insist that the teachers educate them, teachers don’t work as hard, skills decay and civilization can’t be maintained any more. Long-term marriage relationships make parents care more about their kids, which is good for long-term survival of the civilization as a whole.

There’s generally a big die-off when the culture collapses. Horse and buggy agriculture could feed maybe 1/3 of the present population of America. If technology falls apart, which it will if education doesn’t improve, there’ll be massive starvation, which isn’t good for gene spreading. Sensible women prefer marriage to letting men use 4F on them.

To get around the man’s 4F strategy if she decides that she wants a man on a long-term basis, the woman should state firmly, but gently, that she wants to get married and that she doesn’t intend to offer any free samples. She should get this on the table before the man spends any money on her so he can’t accuse her of bait and switch. This isn’t as big a turn-off as women think. Almost every man knows 2 things about women: 1) he wants one and 2) an unhappy woman is a real hardship, "if mamma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy."

If a woman knows her wants and can tell him without being shrill, he feels better about being able to keep her happy. If she tells him that she understands his need to take her 5 times before breakfast and at any other time he can, and then tells him that that it’s OK with her so long as he’s willing to talk to her whenever she is able to talk, a sensible man might think that marrying her would be a good idea.

So how does a couple stay married? Pander to each other’s instincts, fulfill each other’s needs, serve one another:

Men have a built-in drive to fondle and are prone to wander, so a woman shouldn’t let him leave home when he’s in heat BUT making love that often humbles a woman, destroys her independence, and makes her feel that she belongs to him. Why? Clinging to him helps her avoid stand-alone pregnancy. She has a choice, independence or her husband, other women can tempt him if he leaves home soaked in gasoline every day.

Woman wants to talk about the relationship and about her kids, BUT this bores him because he isn’t interested in how she felt, he wants to know what happened. He wants a report, not rapport. He has a choice, boredom or his wife, other men can tempt her if her need for emotional intimacy is frustrated.

Bottom Line: survival theory says that a woman must be worth talking to, a man must be worth being taken by.

Relevant books:

• Darwin on Trial, Reason in the Balance: The case against naturalism in Science, Law, and Education. Philip E Johnson
• Family Questions, Allan C. Carlson, Transition Inc. VERY politically incorrect, explains how social security was specifically designed to weaken family ties.
• Sexual Relations and Cultural Behavior, FD Unwin, Darrow, 1969, explains how sexually permissive societies don’t survive.