Atomic Nerds

Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

-Rudyard Kipling, The Female of the Species

During the afterparty chatter in gunblogger chat after last night’s Gun Nuts TNG, Pax asked me what I thought of the essential view contained in Kipling’s poem. Kipling is much beloved by those I know, and this is another of the favorites he ever penned. As to what I think, it contains a fair amount of truth- for something as much a product of Victorian times as it was.

While there are certainly competing views, overall if you polled that portion of the world that believes men and women are innately different by nature, you’ll generally get the consensus that women are substantially less aggressive and less prone to violence than men, and that if God or evolution created separate roles for men and women, those roles are men to hunt, fight, and protect the weaker women and children, and for women to nurture children and soothe the male’s savage brow. (Or, depending on which culture you’re talking to, more directly to soothe his raging hardon.) While this is accurate up to a point- men are undeniably larger and substantially stronger and better suited for fighting than women- it also misses a bit of a point in evolutionary patterns as well, which is that just because one sex is stronger, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the pressure on the other sex is in the OPPOSITE direction- toward passivity and weakness rather than just not as pressured for aggression and strength.

In most of the animal kingdom, when significant sexual dimorphism (major physical differences between the sexes) is present at all, the female is the larger of the two. This has as much to do with the size difference of male and female gametes as anything else; the hardware for the production of eggs just takes up more room and needs more resources, especially if that female is also going to be housing any resultant offspring in her body for part or most of its development into an infant. Female spiders, snakes, and fish just need to be big enough to produce and feed that more expensive reproductive system- and the males get no larger than they need to be to do well in whatever place on the food chain they occupy. Extra body mass is expensive to maintain- it isn’t selected for unless it gives an advantage big enough to compensate for its additional costs in lean times. Things get more interesting when we get to birds, which have a variety of patterns in sexual dimorphism; sometimes the males are larger, sometimes the females. When the males are larger, it is always in a group that undergoes some form of intense competition for mates among males- being big is just another way to be flashy while you sing, strut, build bowers, or otherwise attempt to convince the ladies that you’re the best. It’s worth noting that among raptors, who don’t live in high enough population densities for these big yearly competitions to be practical, the females are the larger sex- which doesn’t make the males any less deadly on the kill than they are.

Likewise in mammals, which is where the larger-male-smaller-female pattern is more normal, big, tough males are all about intraspecies competition, for territory, for access to mates, and for position. In a lion pride, the males are too big and bulky to be as efficient hunters as the females- they’re a little TOO flashy when you’re a cat trying to be sneaky. The role of the male, and the purpose of his size and strength, is to hang on to a territory and a collection of females, either alone or in concert with one or two allies; they have to be big to reliably fend off other big males, not to hunt or to kick other predators around the savannah. This pattern doesn’t seem to be any less true with primates: the pressure on the males to develop big bodies and more aggression wasn’t to protect females or young (which often they won’t when the lion comes through, though sometimes they will), it was to gain a competitive edge against other males.

Likewise, for ancient hominids, for men the source and balance of selective pressure was mainly the pressure to be able to defeat or intimidate your peers versus the pressure not to be so big you eat your tribe out of house and home. While it’s normally presumed that men were the hunters while women were the gatherers (though patterns in modern hunter-gatherer tribes frequently aren’t that clear-cut along gender lines), being big only helps a hunter up to a point- especially when you’re a hominid whose major advantage in a hunt is his brain, both to create tools that can actually take down antoher animal, especially one bigger than the human, and to actually be able to find animals whose senses were largely better than the hominid’s and which were certainly fleeter of foot. More than that, however, problem number one for a human hunter- a bigger problem than finding or catching prey- was not BECOMING prey. In the savannahs of ancient Africa, there weren’t just the modern scary array of predators that we’re used to thinking about, there were even more and fiercer- this was an Africa before long-term human habitation introduced the Sahara Desert and sharply reduced the array of other species present. Any human that wanted to be out and about away from a fire and a thorn wall had to be able to convince the predator that he was too risky a meal to be really worth trying for- and the key point here is that this applied every bit as much to a gatherer. Saber-toothed tigers don’t leave you alone because you’re just picking tubers- if anything that makes you an even better target than the pack of men out chasing oversized ungulates around, much as being five-foot-nothing and built like Tinkerbell makes you a better target to a human predator looking to score a meal/booze ticket from your wallet. Ancient women didn’t experience much evolutionary pressure to be big and aggressive to beat up other women or men- but she certainly experienced plenty to be able to intimidate, hurt, or kill a predator. This went double for any ancient women with children with them- also known as “the chewy bite-sized ones” to predators. Modern attacks by wild predators on humans are usually on children, which we can presume the ancient men were sometimes a bit too busy out staving in mammoth skulls to rush to the aid of.

In most social primate groups and most other social mammal groups, the pattern of dispersal- a certain number of the group leaving at adolescence and finding another troop, to prevent long-term inbreeding- follows gender lines. Whether you’re a lion cub or a baboon, if you’re a boy, you leave your home not long after you start to get hair about the neck and chest and strike out for new people and especially new chicks that you haven’t known since you were born. This has a great deal to do with the subsequent social orders that are formed among the sexes; if you’re a male, your rank is something you fight and make and break alliances to achieve. If you’re a female, you’re born into your social order- unless there’s been a major upheaval, you inherit the same or close to the rank that your mother and grandmother held, and you’ll always be able to lord it over little Suzy from the poor part of the troop. Because males have so much to gain by challenging other males and females so little, there is a great deal of evolutionary pressure on men to be willing to challenge other males- and to back down to fight another day if it looks like the challenge will be a losing proposition, and to be able to restore amity later as a rival now may be a partner later in a challenge against one neither of you can hope to unseat on your own. If you’re a female, the pressure is to maintain general harmony among you- for as long as that’s possible.

As dog trainers know, while males will scuffle for rank and position frequently and are often looking for an opening for a challenge, they tend to be fighting to make a point- their fights rarely do truly serious damage and are resolved relatively quickly. When females can’t settle rank (it’s less heritable for dogs), or most especially when they simply decide they do not like one another- things get very serious very quickly. While the two males may spar until there’s a clear winner or loser and accept it from there, females with a grudge may well fight to the point of severe maiming or death, and if the female on the losing end of several such dedicated battles does not or cannot leave, she WILL eventually be killed, by the female she’s having the conflict with or even by all of her sisters if they’ve decided she’s no longer wanted among their group for whatever reason. As for dogs, females in other social mammalian groups that don’t normally compete physically among themselves have far less reason to fight in the first place, but also far less reason to stop once they come to the point of violence.

Men are bigger. They are stronger. They’re also more aggressive, especially with each other. There are sound evolutionary reasons for all of this- but none that women should be weak, or unwilling to rise to violence, whether for food or defense, when necessary- and in all the situations that evolution prepared her for when it comes to violence, fighting with everything she had was the only option available when it was necessary at all. If it seems otherwise, it’s worth bearing in mind that humans are an intensely cultural species, far moreso than any other animal… and nurture can be as harsh or harsher a master as nature. Sometimes embracing your inner ape isn’t just acceptable, it’s the only thing you can do to fight it.

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