Love, Sex, and Gender in a Hyper-Novel World: A Selection from Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein’s A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the Twenty-First Century (2021)
“The best, most all-encompassing way to describe our world is hyper-novel. . . . Humans are extraordinarily well adapted to, and equipped for, change. But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync. . . .
Today, men and women work side by side in nearly all domains. Both sexes have broken through boundaries once thought impossible to break, to the benefit of individuals and society alike. Some of the population-level differences that have long been attributed to men and women turn out to be mutable—women should not be confined to healing or teaching professions, nor men to ones requiring brute strength or raw ambition.
Recognizing these things does not mean, however, that we are the same at the population level. For instance, ‘Men are taller than women’ is a true statement about averages. An average difference does not imply that all members of population Y (men) are taller than all members of population Z (women). True statements about populations do not manifest in all individuals in those populations; believing otherwise is falling prey to the ‘fallacy of division’ (first described by Aristotle). In populations where the overlap of a trait is significant, it can be difficult to parse population-level patterns from individual experience. If you, as an individual, do not fit a particular pattern, the discrepancy can feel like evidence that the pattern is false, but that feeling does not make it so.
In professions from medicine to sales to soldiering, men and women work together, but are we really doing the same thing? Female doctors are more likely to go into pediatrics; men are more likely to become surgeons. In retail, men are more likely to sell cars, women are more likely to sell flowers. And while retail jobs in the US were split nearly evenly between men and women in 2019, wholesale jobs skewed strongly male. In tasks that require physical strength, men, on average, are simply stronger. An all-female force engaging in hand-to-hand combat would not beat an all-male one, and it would be beyond foolish to pretend otherwise.
We work side by side, and some of us imagine that because we are equal under the law, we are also the same. We are and should be equal under the law. But we are not the same—despite what some activists and politicians, journalists and academics would have us believe. There seems to be comfort, for some, in the idea of sameness, but it is a shallow comfort at best. What if the best surgeon in the world was a woman, but it was also true that, on average, most of the best surgeons were male? What if the top ten pediatricians were women? Neither scenario provides evidence of bias or sexism, although those are possible explanations for the observed patterns. In order to ensure that bias or sexism is not predictive of who does what work, we should remove as many barriers to success as possible. We should also not expect that men and women will make identical choices, or be driven to excel at identical things, or even, perhaps, be motivated by the same goals. To ignore our differences and demand uniformity is a different kind of sexism. Differences between the sexes are a reality, and while they can be cause for concern, they are also very often a strength, and we ignore them at our peril. . . .
All love has a common origin story, although its forms can feel so different—the love for a child, for a spouse, for a cause. All are beautiful, and can be disruptive of normal life. Our persistence as a species has been possible, in part, because of love. This raises the question: What is love?
Love is a state of the emotional mind that causes one to prioritize someone or something external as an extension of self. That’s it. Love, the genuine article, is a matter of intimate inclusion. When it is real, there are few forces more powerful.
Love evolved first between mother and child, but then spread its wings, expanded its scope. Soon enough, adults reliably experienced love between partners, and then other forms of love began to blossom—between fathers and children, grandparents and grandchildren, among siblings. Love then found a place between friends and between soldiers, between those who shared intense experiences, good or bad. Much human mythology is centered on inducing people to extend their concept of self, and to shape the in-group to which the concept applies—the Good Samaritan story reveals the capacity for love even between those who are supposed to be enemies. Eventually, love evolves to include abstractions—love of country and love of God, love of honor and service, truth and justice.
Love as we experience it first evolved nearly two hundred million years ago, when mammals diverged from reptiles. As with the evolution of sex, the egg is foundational to our understanding of the evolution of love. The most recent common ancestor of mammals and reptiles laid eggs. In egg-laying species, the egg must contain sufficient nutrition to feed the embryo through hatching. And in species in which both parents walk away and never meet or care for their young, the hatchling must also be capable of immediately feeding itself. A mother can stack the deck in her brood’s favor: a butterfly can lay her eggs on a plant her caterpillars are equipped to eat; a wasp can lay eggs inside the paralyzed body of a spider, which her young eat their way out of; an octopus can die in contact with her hatching eggs, thereby handing over the nutrition of her own body to her hungry offspring. Without parental care, though, the hatchling is on its own.
The first mammals were egg layers, and eggs do not require love, although in many species they benefit from parental vigilance. But the five extant species of egg-laying mammals—four species of echidnas, and the duck-billed platypus—are substantively different from all other egg-laying species. Mammals, even the ones that lay eggs, make milk. Early on, it was a crude operation: modified sweat glands secreted nutritious fluid that was lapped up off the surface of the mother’s skin. Later, a more elegant solution for delivery evolved: the nipple. In all mammals, nippled or not, milk solves a problem.
A mammal mother can leave her babies in a safe place while she forages, freeing her from having to provide all their food in advance or having to shuttle morsels back to her burrow. Milk also allows the baby’s food to be chemically and nutritionally adjusted in various ways that facilitate development. That’s it, at first. Mother’s milk is just one of many evolutionary answers to questions of nutrition and immunity. And it is the gateway to much more. . . .
All mammals are cared for by their mothers, and mother’s love, we argue, is the most ancient and fundamental form of love. All true love is an elaboration on this concept. But mammals are not the only creatures in which love has evolved. The other place where this pattern flourishes—a whole separate evolution of it—is in birds. . . .
In the vast majority of bird species, parents actively tend their young, and these nurturing parents face exactly the same considerations about fitness and risk as mammal mothers do. Likely you have seen smaller birds mobbing larger, predatory birds to drive them away from their nest. That’s love for you. . . .
Committed relationships are a good thing, so valuable to the rearing of healthy children. Yet if women in the modern mating and dating scene don’t accept casual sex as normal, they’re often ignored. If they do embrace casual sex, they often unwittingly trigger fear of commitment. Men could be seen as profiting at the expense of women in this situation, which is partly true, but their windfall is mostly an illusion. Yes, men are built to find commitment-less sex rewarding, but they are also built to value loving partnerships. Casual sex is disrupting that.
Male and female are complementary states, and there is a healthy natural tension between them. There is, of course, plenty to say about the implications and evolution of homosexuality, in both humans and other species. While we have no room in this book for such an analysis, we will offer the short tease here that while lesbians and gay men are both homosexual in that they are attracted to individuals of the same sex, the differences between the two, in terms of both evolutionary origins and how the relationships tend to play out for those in them, are large, and consistent with the differences between women and men that we have laid out in the previous two chapters. Furthermore, both forms of homosexuality—female same-sex attracted and male same-sex attracted—are adaptations.
That said, heterosexuality is the norm, and not for socially constructed reasons. Among straight men and women: if women conclude that in order to be equal they must behave like men when it comes to sex, then the system breaks down into one in which everyone behaves like men at their most adolescent. In spite of its stodgy reputation, monogamy is the best mating system. It creates more competent adults, reduces the tendency to engage in violence and warfare, and fosters cooperative impulses. . . .
We love our pets, but do they love us? Humans have domesticated dozens of species of animals across the globe, mostly to provide food or do labor for us. Some of those relationships that began as purely functional—cats as mousers, dogs as protection—have since become cross-species friendships. Cats have befriended us for far less time, and remain more wild than dogs, more of their original selves, although they bond tightly to humans under the right circumstances. Even before we began to farm, though, dogs were by many of our sides, becoming domesticated. As hunter-gatherers, some of us already had dog friends.
Dogs are in many ways a human construct. We have co-evolved with them for so long that they are now attuned to human behavior, language, and emotion. Perhaps you could argue, then, that humans are also partially a canine construct.
Does your pet love you? Of course your pet loves you. (Qualifier: your pet can love you if it’s a mammal or one of a few clades of birds, like a parrot. If your pet is a gecko or a python or a goldfish, your pet is probably incapable of love.) Love develops for every evolutionary pairing that requires devotion. We love our pets, and our pets love us. Dogs, in particular, are love generators who hang out with you and help you know that you’re not alone. Dog is love, unmoored.
Watch how cats and dogs engage with each other, and with us. They don’t use language to convey meaning and emotion, but convey it they do. You have no reason to doubt that your dog is disappointed when you stop throwing the ball for him, or that your cat would prefer that you stay seated with her in your lap. We name our emotions—love, fear, grief—and when we attribute those words to animals, we may be accused of anthropomorphizing. As Frans de Waal, who has spent a lifetime studying emotion in animals, points out, this argument is rooted in assumptions of humans being not just exceptional, but wholly different from the other animals with which we share ancestors. We need to be careful in how we attribute emotion and intention to other animals—as we should within our own species as well—but there can be no doubt that many other species plan and grieve, love and reflect.
In our interactions with our pets, we read their cues without language. It is helpful, too, in your interactions with people, to turn the sound down sometimes. Be an animal behaviorist—or just act, sometimes, like a human before language evolved. We often use language to cover how we actually feel, to deceive, to throw off the scent of what is actually going on. When you watch people, especially strangers from a distance, it’s relatively easy to read the emotion of the situation. Pay attention to people’s behavior, not the stories that people tell about their behavior. That’s what your dog is doing. Your dog doesn’t buy your cover story—although he is likely to forgive you for your foibles. . . .
Remember Wile E. Coyote, whose life’s work was chasing the Road Runner in Looney Tunes cartoons? In hot pursuit he often found himself skidding off the edge of a cliff, where he would hang, suspended in air, until he looked down. Gravity did not apply until he recognized that it should. It was funny, because it was ludicrous. It was utterly ludicrous, and yet too many modern people seem to imagine that by changing people’s opinions or perspectives, you change underlying reality. In short, they believe that reality itself is a social construct. . . .
In this book, we have shared an evolutionary tool kit with which to understand the human condition, not to justify it. We are not served by ignoring what we are—brutal apes, by one measure. We are also not served by pretending that brutal apes are the only thing that we are. We are also generous, cooperative beings full of love. We have arrived in the 21st century with evolutionary baggage, and a fair bit of intellectual confusion. Let us understand the baggage, in order to reduce the confusion, and increase our odds of moving forward with maximal human flourishing.”—Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the Twenty-First Century (2021)
