westhunt | Humans exhibit a diversity of strategy “choices” that are solutions
to the allocation problem between mating and parenting. Males can devote
most of their effort to mating effort, usually involving competition
with other males. Male commitment to parenting effort is not common in
mammals but there are familiar examples like beavers, coyotes, gibbons,
and some humans. In the jargon the polar strategies of male mammals are
called “cad” and “dad” strategies.
Females have a more restricted set of strategy choices because of
their engineered commitment to parenting. At one extreme a human female
can seek a dadly male who provides resources like food and protection to
their joint offspring. At the other extreme, a human female can pay
little or no attention to her mate choice, instead letting the guys work
things out. In the jargon these female alternatives are called “coy”
and “fast”.
You can find a more detailed account of this game between the human
sexes works in a chapter of our book (that the editor discarded as “too
academic”) on our website here.
Briefly we are likely to find dad males/coy females in ecological
situations where male labor and resources are critical for successful
reproduction. Think of labor-intensive agriculture, European peasants
and Asian farmers, as examples. In the United States in the past,
“working class” meant stable mated pairs who together provisioned and
cared for children. An archetype of working class in American television
was Archie Bunker.
Social organization with cad males and fast females is found
prominently among tropical gardeners where women provide most of the
food for themselves and their children as well as for the men, who are
often just parasites on the women. The euphemism in economics for these
societies is “female farming systems”. These share many characteristics
with our industrial “underclass” in which women have no ecological force
pushing them into long term stable pair bonds.
Notice that in each of the above descriptions there are two hands
clapping: in cad/fast social systems neither a coy female nor a dad male
does very well while in dad/coy systems neither a fast females nor a
cad male does very well. The two polar social types are deeply rooted in
contemporary politics. The zany feminism of the 1980s (“a woman needs a
man like a fish needs a bicycle”) precisely advocated the cad/fast
setup. Our religious right with its chatter about “the natural family”
and “stable marriages” and the like pushes hard for a dad/coy world.
Back to our social engineers who know biology. They share a goal of a
society in which dad males mate with coy females because children enjoy
the care and security of a stable home and streets safe from gunfire.
The new policy is simple: welfare payments are to be given only to
males.
This policy would mimic, they think, the ecology of most dad/coy
societies. How would this work out? In a new post we can imagine how the
new policy can be modified when the engineers are given a sense of
human decency and responsibility for human well being.
