I generally don’t like to get involved in these
“which-sex-is-the-best” debates, but here’s a case where I’ll have
to make an exception. Last week the New York Times ran an
op-ed entitled, “Men:
Who Needs Them?” It was written — wouldn’t you know? — by a
man, a professor at Boise State. Since this article questions the
very existence of people like myself and since it is filled with
such misinformation and errors as might imperil the future of human
society, I feel compelled to respond.
The author is one Greg Hampikian, professor of both biology and
criminal justice in yet another cloistered academic community where
anything can happen to a man’s brain. Hampikian puts forth the
premise that since men play only a very brief role in the physical
conception of a new individual, and since from there until birth
the burden of reproduction is carried entirely by the mother,
therefore men — or just about all men — could be eliminated from
the earth with little or no consequence. Here is the way he puts
it:
If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to
secure sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The
only technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw and a
turkey baster…. If all the men on earth died today, the species
could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappeared, it’s
extinction.
Ultimately, the question is, does “mankind” really need men?
So intent is Professor Hampikian on this self-abnegation that he
proclaims the term “Homo sapiens” represents only an “18th century
masculine bias in science” and that “mankind” is a “gross
misnomer.” He prefers “mammals,” since the term refers specifically
to the mammary glands, possessed only by women.
Somehow Professor Hampikian’s lack of confidence in the male
role is strangely reminiscent of those men in primitive tribes who
are said to live in supernatural awe of women’s reproductive
powers. It is often speculated that the Stone Age “Venuses,” those
small female statues with prominently exaggerated hips and
reproductive organs, were amulets whereby men sought to control
women’s mysterious procreative abilities. I’ve always thought they
might be just Stone Age pornography, but who knows? — maybe it
amounts to the same thing.
In any case, since Professor Hampikian is a biologist and
presumably believes in evolution, maybe we can use a little
evolutionary biology to shore up his self-esteem.
Let’s start with a simple observation. Biologists have recently
determined that when it comes to genetic structure, we differ from
our chimpanzee cousins by only 3 percent of our genes. That
means, if you believe in evolution, that there is very little
distance between ourselves and the chimps. In the 5 million years
or so since we branched off, only a few minor changes have occurred
to separate the two species.
Now here’s the interesting part. Of that 3 percent of changes,
95 percent have taken place on the Y
chromosome. That’s the chromosome carried only by men
— the only thing in fact that differentiates men and women. In
other words, pretty much all the things that have happened to
separate us from our chimpanzee ancestors have been
things that happened to men. Does that
make the term “”mankind” sound a little more appropriate?
Actually, to anthropologists, this isn’t anything new. For
decades, they have noted that, in terms of reproductive behavior,
female chimpanzee and human females are not very different. Both
become pregnant, nurture the fertilized egg in the womb, give
birth, nurse their offspring, and then carry them around and
protect them for about five years until the young are ready to
venture out on their own. In behavioral terms, there’s not much any
difference.
What is different about human beings is the behavior of men.
Male chimps band together in “brotherhoods” that are often compared
to tight-knit fraternal clans or street gangs. They mark out
territory and defend it against other males. This creates a safety
zone in which their females can raise their young without worrying
about unprovoked attacks from unrelated males. (This is critical
because if other males take over the troop they will immediately
kill all the young in order to put the females to work raising
their own offspring.)
What male chimps do not do is: a) pair
off with individual females, or b) play any role in child-rearing.
In fact, it is against the code of chimpanzee society for any male
and female to take too much interest in each other or pair off.
Instead, the strict rule is that every male gets to mate with every
female. This maintains the brotherhood and allows male chimps to
cooperate among themselves without being torn apart by sexual
competition. The females enforce this code as well, making sure to
mate with every male, no matter how low his status. This is called
“confusing paternity.” The purpose is to make every adult male
believe he might be the father. That
prevents any of them from harming the offspring.
Now, somewhere in the mists of time, on the Savannas of East
Africa, our ancestors abandoned this sexual communalism and adopted
instead a system where couples paired off to form monogamous “pair
bonds.” This is rare among mammals, although not entirely unknown.
About 5 percent of mammals practice monogamy. Among them are our
distant cousins, the gibbons of Southeast Asia. Gibbon couples pair
off in the jungle and live in solitude, singing weird, haunting
tenor-and-soprano duets to warn other males and females out of
their territory. They reproduce successfully but do not engage in
co-operative effort with any other gibbons.
What was completely unique about the proto-human society of our
forebears is that they learned to practice monogamy
within the larger group. This occurs
among gregarious flocks of birds that spend weeks or months
nurturing their young but is unknown among other mammalian species.
What it accomplished was to maintain the male solidarity of the
chimpanzee troop under much more trying circumstances, while still
providing each individual with a reasonable chance to mate. The
outcome paved the way for human evolution.
Our earliest ancestors were hardly formidable creatures. They
stood three feet tall, had no sharp claws or ferocious teeth, could
not outrun predators and had no trees in which to escape. Yet
somehow they managed to hold their own in a sea of larger, swifter
predators. By sticking together in troops of about 20-25, they were
able to protect themselves while scavenging the prey of other
animals and eventually becoming hunters themselves. Male chimps
hunt for about 5 percent of their diet and do not share with
females or offspring. Hunter-gatherer males provide about 35
percent of the diet and share their kill with both mates and
children. That is the difference between us and the chimpanzees. It
is a legacy of which any male can be proud.
Yet pair-bonding within the group produced much more than this.
It also engaged males in child rearing. This additional paternal
protection paved the way for other developments — most notably our
larger brains. Anthropologists have long noted that upright posture
narrowed the hips and made giving birth more difficult for early
hominid females. At the same time, the social demands of
maintaining the monogamous band in a more challenging environment
put a premium on social intelligence.
Researchers now believe it was these personal demands — and not
some inclination toward “tool-making” — that created the selection
pressure for bigger brains. But enlarged brains only made birth
even more difficult. As a result all human beings are born
about two months prematurely. Most mammals can walk and run within
a week whereas we are completely helpless for more than two years.
The only thing that would have made this long, out-of-womb period
of development possible would be the care of
two parents instead of one. The
domestication of males into child-rearing creatures was probably
the most important step in human evolution.
There is much more to the story. Read Professor Hampikian’s
article and you will find he lavishes most of his detail on how our
mothers provide nearly all the substance
of our bodies, while the male contributes “less than one-millionth
of your mass.”
[Y]our father’s 3.3 pictograms of DNA comes out to less than one
pound of contribution since the beginning of Homo sapiens 107
billion babies ago.
But as Aristotle taught us, there are both material and
formal causes. That 3.3 pictograms may
not amount to much on the material scale, but it represents 5
million years of hard-won evolutionary progress. And almost all of
that progress has occurred on the Y chromosome.
By concentrating only on the act of reproduction, Professor
Hampikian has also missed out on something else — what we might
call “civilization.” Here the shape and form of our public life —
the rules and regulations by which we live, the trade and
cooperation, conflict and war — have all essentially been crafted
and created by men. Women are getting very good at participating
and in some cases even exceeding the performance of men. But
despite what feminist historians will tell you, civilization — in
both its positive and negative aspects — has essentially come out
of the male gene.
What Professor Hampikian is paving the way for, of course, is
the culture of single motherhood. Once confined to the
Africa-American underclass, it is now making headway at all levels
of society. Indeed, many of the responses on the Times
website were from single mothers telling how proud they are to have
conceived without a man. But what we are really witnessing here is
the unraveling of five million years of human evolution. Professor
Hampikian and others like him would do well not to get too hung up
on the question of which sex provides more nourishment in the womb.
After all, there’s a lot more to being human than the act of
reproduction.
