HAREMS AND WEALTH
In the chess game of sex, each gender must respond to the other' s moves: The resulting pattern, whether polygamous or monogamous, is a stalemate rather than a draw or a victory: In elephant seals and sage grouse, the game reaches the point where males care only about the quantity of mates and females only about the quality. Each pays a heavy price, the males battling and exhausting themselves and dying in the often vain attempt to be the senior bull or master cock, the females entirely forgoing any practical help from the fathers in rearing their children.
The chess game reaches a very different stalemate in the case of the albatross. Every female gets her model husband; courtship is a mutual affair, and they share equally the chores of raising the chick: Neither gender seeks quantity of mates, but both are after quality: the hatching and rearing of one solitary chick that is pampered and fed for many months. Given that male albatrosses have the same genetic incentives as male elephant seals, why do they behave so differently?
The answer, as John Maynard Smith was the first to see, can be supplied by game theory, a technique borrowed from economics: Game theory is different from other forms of theorizing because it recognizes that the outcome of a transaction often depends on what other people are doing. Maynard Smith tried pitting different genetic strategies against each other in the same way that economists do with different economic strategies: Among the problems that were suddenly rendered soluble by this technique was the question of why different animals have such different mating systems:'
Imagine a population of ancestral albatrosses in which the males were highly polygamous and spared no time to help rear the young: Imagine that you were a junior male with no prospect of becoming a harem master: Suppose that instead of striving to be a polygamist, you married one female and helped rear her offspring: You would not have hit the jackpot, but at least you would have done better than most of your more ambitious brothers: Suppose, too, that by helping your wife to feed the baby, you greatly increased the chance that the baby survived: Suddenly, females in the population have two options: to seek a faithful mate like yourself or to seek a polygamist: Those that seek a faithful mate leave behind more young, so in each generation the number willing to join harems declines, and the rewards of becoming a polygamist fall with it: The species is 'taken over' by monogamy:'
It works in reverse as well: The male lark bunting of Canada sets up a territory in a field and tries to attract several females to breed with him: By joining a male that already has a mate, a female forfeits the chance to make use of his skills as a father. But if his territory is sufficiently richer in food than his neighbor 's,
Both of these models could apply easily to humans: We became monogamous because the advantage that a junior father POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
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could supply in feeding the family outweighed the disadvantage in not being mated to the chief. Or we became polygamous because of the discrepancies in wealth between males. 'Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy 's third wife than Bozo the Clown's first?' said one (female) evolutionist:'
There is some evidence that the polygyny threshold does apply to human beings: Among the Kipsigis of Kenya, rich men have more cattle and more wives: Each wife of a rich man is at least as well off as the single wife of a poor man, and she knows it.
According to Monique Borgehoff Mulder of the University of California at Davis, who has studied the Kipsigis, polygamy is willingly chosen by the women: A Kipsigis woman is consulted by her father when her marriage is arranged, and she is only too aware that being the second wife of a man with plenty of cattle is a better fate than being the first wife of a poor man. There is companionship and a sharing of the burden between co-wives. The polygyny threshold model holds for Kipsigis fairly well. 1e
There are two difficulties with this theory, however. The first is that it says nothing about the first wife ' s views: There is little advantage to a first wife in sharing her husband and his wealth with others: Among the Mormons of Utah it is well known that first wives resent the arrival of second wives: The Mormon church officially abandoned polygamy more than a century ago, but in recent years a few fundamentalists have resumed the practice and have even begun to campaign openly for its acceptance. In Big Water, Utah, the mayor, Alex Joseph, had nine wives and twenty children in 1991. Most of the wives were career women who were happy with their lot, but they do not all see eye to eye. ' The first wife does not like it when the second wife comes along, ' said the third Mrs: Joseph, 'and the second wife doesn 't care for the wife who came first: So you can get some fighting and bad feeling. '19
Supposing that first wives usually object to sharing their husbands, what can the husband do about it? He can force her to accept the arrangement, as presumably many despots did in times past, or he can bribe her to accept it: The legitimacy a first wife 's children usually has compared with those from a second wife is a
bonus that must go some way toward mollifying the former. In parts of Africa it is written into the law that the first wife inherits 70 percent of the husband 's wealth.
Incidentally, the polygyny threshold leads me to ask the question In whose interest is it that polygamy be outlawed in our society? We automatically assume it is in the interest of women.
But consider; it would presumably be illegal, as it is now, for people to be forced to marry against their will, so second wives would be choosing their lot voluntarily. A woman who wants a career would surely find a menage a trois more, not less, convenient; she would have two partners to'help share the chores of child care. As a Mormon lawyer put it recently, there are 'compelling social reasons '
that make polygamy 'attractive to the modern career woman. '20 But think of the effect on men: If many women chose to be second wives of rich men rather than first wives of poor men, there would be a shortage of unmarried women, and many men would be: forced to remain unhappily celibate. Far from being laws to protect women, antipolygamy statutes may really do more to protect men.'
Let us erect the four commandments of mating system theory. First, if females do better by choosing monogamous and faithful males, monogamy will result—unless, second, men can coerce them. Third, if females do no worse by choosing already-mated males, polygamy will result—unless fourth already-mated females can prevent their males from mating again, in which case monogamy will result: The surprising conclusion of game theory is therefore that males, despite their active role in seduction, may be largely passive spectators at their marital
