Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (94 page)
Many cultural traditions work to distance people’s emotions from a newborn until its survival seems likely. People may be enjoined from touching, naming, or granting legal personhood to a baby until a danger period is over, and the transition is often marked by a joyful ceremony, as in our own customs of the christening and the bris.
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Some traditions have a series of milestones, such as traditional Judaism, which grants full legal personhood to a baby only after it has survived thirty days.
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Some traditions have a series of milestones, such as traditional Judaism, which grants full legal personhood to a baby only after it has survived thirty days.
If I have tried to make infanticide a bit more comprehensible, it is only to reduce the distance between the vast history in which it was accepted and our contemporary sensibilities in which it is abhorrent. But the chasm that separates them is wide. Even when we acknowledge the harsh evolutionary logic that applies to the hard lives of premodern peoples, many of their infanticides are, by our standards, hard to comprehend and impossible to forgive. Examples from Daly and Wilson’s list include the killing of a newborn conceived in adultery, and the killing of all a woman’s children from a previous marriage when she takes (or is abducted by) a new husband. And then there are the 14 percent of the infanticidal justifications on the list that, as Daly and Wilson point out, do not easily fall into categories that an evolutionary biologist would have predicted beforehand. They include child sacrifice, an act of spite by a grandfather against his son-in-law, filicides that are committed to eliminate claimants to a throne or to avoid the obligations of kinship customs, and most commonly, the killing of a newborn for no other reason than that she is a girl.
Female infanticide has been put on the world’s agenda today by census data revealing a massive shortage of women in the developing world. “A hundred million missing” is the commonly cited statistic for the daughter shortfall, a majority of them in China and India.
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Many Asian families have a morbid preference for sons. In some countries a pregnant woman can walk into an amniocentesis or ultrasound clinic, and if she learns she is carrying a girl, she can walk next door to an abortion clinic. The technological efficiency of daughter-proofing a pregnancy may make it seem as if the girl shortage is a problem of modernity, but female infanticide has been documented in China and India for more than two thousand years.
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In China, midwives kept a bucket of water at the bedside to drown the baby if it was a girl. In India there were many methods: “giving a pill of tobacco and bhang to swallow, drowning in milk, smearing the mother’s breast with opium or the juice of the poisonous Datura, or covering the child’s mouth with a plaster of cow-dung before it drew breath.” Then and now, even when daughters are suffered to live, they may not last long. Parents allocate most of the available food to their sons, and as a Chinese doctor explains, “if a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once, but if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ll see how she is tomorrow.’ ”
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Many Asian families have a morbid preference for sons. In some countries a pregnant woman can walk into an amniocentesis or ultrasound clinic, and if she learns she is carrying a girl, she can walk next door to an abortion clinic. The technological efficiency of daughter-proofing a pregnancy may make it seem as if the girl shortage is a problem of modernity, but female infanticide has been documented in China and India for more than two thousand years.
119
In China, midwives kept a bucket of water at the bedside to drown the baby if it was a girl. In India there were many methods: “giving a pill of tobacco and bhang to swallow, drowning in milk, smearing the mother’s breast with opium or the juice of the poisonous Datura, or covering the child’s mouth with a plaster of cow-dung before it drew breath.” Then and now, even when daughters are suffered to live, they may not last long. Parents allocate most of the available food to their sons, and as a Chinese doctor explains, “if a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once, but if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ll see how she is tomorrow.’ ”
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Female infanticide, also called gendercide and gynecide, is not unique to Asia.
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The Yanomamö are one of many foraging peoples that kill more newborn daughters than sons. In ancient Greece and Rome, babies were “discarded in rivers, dunghills, or cesspools, placed in jars to starve, or exposed to the elements and beasts in the wild.”
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Infanticide was also common in medieval and Renaissance Europe.
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In all these places, more girls perished than boys. Often families would kill every daughter born to them until they had a son; subsequent daughters were allowed to live.
121
The Yanomamö are one of many foraging peoples that kill more newborn daughters than sons. In ancient Greece and Rome, babies were “discarded in rivers, dunghills, or cesspools, placed in jars to starve, or exposed to the elements and beasts in the wild.”
122
Infanticide was also common in medieval and Renaissance Europe.
123
In all these places, more girls perished than boys. Often families would kill every daughter born to them until they had a son; subsequent daughters were allowed to live.
Female infanticide is biologically mysterious. Every child has a mother and a father, so if people are concerned about posterity, be it for their genes or their dynasty, culling their own daughters is a form of madness. A basic principle of evolutionary biology is that a fifty-fifty sex ratio at sexual maturity is a stable equilibrium in a population, because if males ever predominated, daughters would be in demand and would have an advantage over sons in attracting partners and contributing children to the next generation. And so it would be for sons if females ever predominated. To the extent that parents can control the sex ratio of their surviving offspring, whether by nature or by nurture, posterity should punish them for favoring sons or daughters across the board.
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One naïve hypothesis comes out of the realization that it is the number of females in a population that determines how rapidly it will grow. Perhaps tribes or nations that have multiplied themselves to the Malthusian limit on food or land kill their daughters to achieve zero population growth.
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One problem for the ZPG theory, however, is that many infanticidal tribes and civilizations were not environmentally stressed. A more serious problem is that it has the fatal flaw of all naïve good-of-the-group theories, namely that the mechanism it proposes is self-undermining. Any family that cheated on the policy and kept its daughters alive would take over the population, stocking it with their grandchildren while the excess bachelor sons of their altruistic neighbors died without issue. The lineages that were inclined to kill their newborn daughters would have died out long ago, and the persistence of female infanticide in any society would be a mystery.
125
One problem for the ZPG theory, however, is that many infanticidal tribes and civilizations were not environmentally stressed. A more serious problem is that it has the fatal flaw of all naïve good-of-the-group theories, namely that the mechanism it proposes is self-undermining. Any family that cheated on the policy and kept its daughters alive would take over the population, stocking it with their grandchildren while the excess bachelor sons of their altruistic neighbors died without issue. The lineages that were inclined to kill their newborn daughters would have died out long ago, and the persistence of female infanticide in any society would be a mystery.
Can evolutionary psychology explain the gender bias? Critics of that approach say that it is merely an exercise in creativity, since one can always come up with an ingenious evolutionary explanation for any phenomenon. But that is an illusion, arising from the fact that so many ingenious evolutionary hypotheses have turned out to be confirmed by the data. Such success is far from guaranteed. One prominent hypothesis that, for all its ingenuity, turned out to be false was the application of the Trivers-Willard theory of sex ratios to female infanticide in humans.
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The biologist Robert Trivers and the mathematician Dan Willard reasoned that even though sons and daughters are expected to yield the same number of grandchildren on average, the
maximum
number that each sex can promise is different. A superfit son can outcompete other males and impregnate any number of women and thereby have any number of children, whereas a superfit daughter can have no more than the maximum she can bear and nurture in her reproductive career. On the other hand a daughter is a safer bet—an unfit son will lose the competition with other men and end up childless, whereas an unfit daughter almost never lacks for a willing sex partner. It’s not that her fitness is irrelevant—a healthy and desirable daughter will still have more surviving children than an unhealthy and undesirable one—but the difference is not as extreme as it is for boom-or-bust sons. To the extent that parents can predict the fitness of their children (say, by monitoring their own health, nutrition, or territory) and strategically tilt the sex ratio, they should favor sons when they are in better shape than the competition, and favor daughters when they are in worse shape.
maximum
number that each sex can promise is different. A superfit son can outcompete other males and impregnate any number of women and thereby have any number of children, whereas a superfit daughter can have no more than the maximum she can bear and nurture in her reproductive career. On the other hand a daughter is a safer bet—an unfit son will lose the competition with other men and end up childless, whereas an unfit daughter almost never lacks for a willing sex partner. It’s not that her fitness is irrelevant—a healthy and desirable daughter will still have more surviving children than an unhealthy and undesirable one—but the difference is not as extreme as it is for boom-or-bust sons. To the extent that parents can predict the fitness of their children (say, by monitoring their own health, nutrition, or territory) and strategically tilt the sex ratio, they should favor sons when they are in better shape than the competition, and favor daughters when they are in worse shape.
The Trivers-Willard theory has been confirmed in many nonhuman species and even, a bit, in
Homo sapiens
. In traditional societies, richer and higher-status people tend to live longer and attract more and better mates, so the theory predicts that higher-status people should favor sons and lower-status people should favor daughters. In some kinds of favoritism (like bequests in wills), that is exactly what happens.
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But with a very important kind of favoritism—allowing a newborn to live—the theory doesn’t work so well. The evolutionary anthropologists Sarah Hrdy and Kristen Hawkes have each shown that the Trivers-Willard theory gets only half of the story right. In India, it’s true that the higher castes tend to kill their daughters. Unfortunately, it’s not true that the lower castes tend to kill their sons. In fact, it’s hard to find a society
anywhere
that kills its sons.
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The infanticidal cultures of the world are either equal-opportunity baby-killers or they prefer to kill the girls—and with them, the Trivers-Willard explanation for female infanticide in humans.
Homo sapiens
. In traditional societies, richer and higher-status people tend to live longer and attract more and better mates, so the theory predicts that higher-status people should favor sons and lower-status people should favor daughters. In some kinds of favoritism (like bequests in wills), that is exactly what happens.
127
But with a very important kind of favoritism—allowing a newborn to live—the theory doesn’t work so well. The evolutionary anthropologists Sarah Hrdy and Kristen Hawkes have each shown that the Trivers-Willard theory gets only half of the story right. In India, it’s true that the higher castes tend to kill their daughters. Unfortunately, it’s not true that the lower castes tend to kill their sons. In fact, it’s hard to find a society
anywhere
that kills its sons.
128
The infanticidal cultures of the world are either equal-opportunity baby-killers or they prefer to kill the girls—and with them, the Trivers-Willard explanation for female infanticide in humans.
The ultimate misogyny of female infanticide may suggest a feminist analysis, in which the sexism of a society extends to the right to life itself: being female is a capital offense. But that hypothesis doesn’t work either. No matter how sexist these societies were (or are), they did not want a world that was
Frauenfrei
. The men do not live in all-boy treehouses in which no girls are allowed; they depend on women for sex, children, child-rearing, and the gathering or preparation of most of their food. Families that kill their daughters want there to be women around. They just want someone else to raise them. Female infanticide is a kind of social parasitism, a free rider problem, a genealogical tragedy of the commons.
129
Frauenfrei
. The men do not live in all-boy treehouses in which no girls are allowed; they depend on women for sex, children, child-rearing, and the gathering or preparation of most of their food. Families that kill their daughters want there to be women around. They just want someone else to raise them. Female infanticide is a kind of social parasitism, a free rider problem, a genealogical tragedy of the commons.
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Free rider problems arise when no one owns a common resource, in this case, the pool of potential brides. In a free market in marriages in which parents wielded property rights, sons and daughters would be fungible, and neither sex would be favored across the board. If you really needed a fierce warrior or brawny field hand around the house, it shouldn’t matter whether you raised a son for the job or raised a daughter who would bring you a son-in-law. Families with more sons would trade some of them for daughters-in-law and vice versa. True, your son-in-law’s parents might prefer him to stay with them, but you could use your bargaining position to force the young man to move in with you if he wanted to have a wife at all. A preference for sons should arise only in a market with distorted property rights, one in which parents, in effect, own their sons but not their daughters.
Hawkes noted that among foraging peoples, female infanticide is more common in patrilocal societies (in which daughters move away to live with their husbands and in-laws) than in matrilocal societies (in which they stay with their parents and their husbands move in with them) or in societies in which the couple goes wherever they want. Patrilocal societies are common in tribes in which neighboring villages are constantly at war, which encourages related men to stay and fight together. They are less common when the enemies are other tribes, and the men have more freedom of movement within their territory. The internally warring societies then fall into a vicious circle in which they kill their newborn girls so their wives can hurry up and bear them more warrior sons, the better to raid other villages, and to defend their own villages against being raided, for a supply of women that had been decimated by their own infanticides. The warring tribes in Homeric Greece were caught in a similar trap.
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What about state societies like India and China? In state societies that practice female infanticide, Hawkes noted, parents also own their sons but not their daughters, though for economic rather than military reasons.
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In stratified societies whose elites have indivisible wealth, the inheritance often goes to a son. In India the caste system was an additional market distorter: lower castes had to pay steep dowries so their daughters could marry higher-caste grooms. In China, parents had a permanent claim on the support of their sons and daughters-in-law extending into their dotage, but not of their daughters and sons-in-law (hence the traditional adage “A daughter is like spilled water.”)
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China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1978, made parents’ need for a son to support them in their old age all the more acute. In all these cases, sons are an economic asset and daughters a liability, and parents respond to the distorted incentives with the most extreme measures. Today infanticide is illegal in both countries. In China, infanticide is thought to have given way to sex-selective abortions, which are also illegal, though still widely practiced. In India, despite the inroads of the ultrasound-abortion chains, it is thought to remain common.
133
The pressure to reduce these practices will almost certainly increase, if only because governments have finally done the demographic arithmetic and realized that gynecide today means unruly bachelors tomorrow (a phenomenon we will revisit).
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131
In stratified societies whose elites have indivisible wealth, the inheritance often goes to a son. In India the caste system was an additional market distorter: lower castes had to pay steep dowries so their daughters could marry higher-caste grooms. In China, parents had a permanent claim on the support of their sons and daughters-in-law extending into their dotage, but not of their daughters and sons-in-law (hence the traditional adage “A daughter is like spilled water.”)
132
China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1978, made parents’ need for a son to support them in their old age all the more acute. In all these cases, sons are an economic asset and daughters a liability, and parents respond to the distorted incentives with the most extreme measures. Today infanticide is illegal in both countries. In China, infanticide is thought to have given way to sex-selective abortions, which are also illegal, though still widely practiced. In India, despite the inroads of the ultrasound-abortion chains, it is thought to remain common.
133
The pressure to reduce these practices will almost certainly increase, if only because governments have finally done the demographic arithmetic and realized that gynecide today means unruly bachelors tomorrow (a phenomenon we will revisit).
134
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