Do men fizzle out after marriage?
NICHOLAS WADE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WHEN Julius Caesar was touring the Spanish city of Cadiz in his
early 30s, the ancient Roman biographer Suetonius reports, he came
across a statue of Alexander the Great and wept beside it.
Alexander at the same age had conquered the known world, while
Caesar was just a minor Roman official - a source of severe chagrin
to the ambitious future autocrat.
It must be almost equally discouraging for scientists to see the
graph that plots the age at which eminent male scientists make
their big discoveries.
It peaks at age 30 and then plummets, giving precious little time
after one's hard-earned PhD to get that invitation from the Nobel
prize committee.
The productivity of jazz musicians and painters is also highest in
their mid-30s. And it's not just creativity that attains its zenith
early in the male career. Crime, too, follows just the same
parabolic curve.
Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London
School of Economics and Political Science who has studied these
patterns of male achievement, believes he has the
explanation.
Young men in any profession are driven to seek wealth and prestige
because these attributes are attractive to women.
Once men's urges to start a family have been satisfied, the
wellsprings of productivity, whether in science, art or crime, run
dry, he suggests.
In support of his thesis, published in the current Journal of
Research in Personality, he notes that marriage seems to have a
quenching effect on both creativity and crime.
Scientists who remain unmarried, he says, reached their peak of
productivity at age 40, much later than the wedded sort.
Criminals, too, retain their productivity much longer if unwed but
tend to hang up their crowbars after marriage.
'Both crime and genius are manifestations of young men's
competitive desires to gain access to women's reproductive
resources,' he concludes.
Dr David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of
Texas at Austin, said he agreed with the general idea that
scientific productivity, writing and crime are all activities
driven by men's pursuit of wealth and status.
But Dr Kanazawa's thesis, in attributing everything to a switching
on and off of some male competitive drive, was a 'wild
oversimplification', he says.
For one thing, men need to command resources after marriage as well
as before, or they will find themselves divorced. Indeed, income in
the United States peaks around age 55 for men, Dr Buss said.
Evolutionary psychology is the attempt to relate human behaviours
to the purposes for which they evolved.
Since evolution's criterion for success is getting as many genes as
possible into the next generation, it is reasonable to seek to
understand human behaviour in terms of reproductive
advantage.
Dr Buss has shown that women in many different cultures are
attracted to men with money and prestige.
'Scientific and artistic endeavours are male attempts to compete
for status and resources, although I don't think men conceptualise
them that way,' he said.
Evolution has built in a drive for male competitiveness and
status-seeking because it is attractive to women; there's no need
for the drive to be conscious.
In his recent book The Mating Mind, Dr Geoffrey Miller argues that
intelligence and creativity are the product not of natural
selection, the struggle for survival, but of sexual selection, the
struggle for reproductive advantage.
The peacock's tail, a flamboyant example of sexual selection, is a
costly encumbrance of no help at all to physical survival, but of
great value in seducing peahens.
Sexual selection tends to work much faster than natural selection
and has a tendency towards weird excess because of a runaway
reinforcing process - the peahens, who favour long tails, and the
peacocks, who have them, both have more progeny, so in the next
generation, even longer tails are de rigueur.
Dr Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, sees human intelligence as
the weirdest excess of all.
We are far smarter than was necessary for just surviving in the
savannah, he says, and our close cousins, the great apes, never
needed to develop our kind of intelligence. Therefore, intelligence
and creativity must be the product of sexual selection: Women
preferred smarter men, the better singers and dancers and
spell-binders, and vice versa.
If Caesar had only known that his desire to emulate Alexander - his
spectacular conquest of Gaul, his renowned oratory, his elegant
military histories, his provident reform of the calendar - stemmed
from an unconscious drive to bed more women, would he not have wept
all the more?
Source: The Straits Times
