The Meme Machine

128 THE MEME MACHINE
concealed ovulation – neither they nor their partners know at what times of the
month they are fertile. A man cannot guard a woman all the time; so she may be
able to trick him into caring for another man’s child. Indeed, this may account
for the evolution of concealed ovulation (R. R. Baker 1996).
There are many ways for a man to increase the probability that he is the
father of the child he is feeding or protecting. Marriage is one, and it is
reinforced by men insisting on premarital chastity and marital monogamy.
Some of human beings’ nastiest practices (at least from the female point of
view) may also serve: to increase paternal certainty, such as the mutilation of
female genitals, chastity belts, punishment of women (but not men) for adultery,
and various methods of locking women away from the world. I suppose I fell
foul of the same unfairness in a minor way in the early l970s. During my first
term at Oxford I was unfortunate enough to get caught with a man in my room at
eight in the morning. The man concerned was fined two shillings and sixpence
(about twelve pence in today’s money, and not much even then) and told to be
more careful by his ‘moral tutor’. My parents were summoned to college and I
was sent away from the University for the rest of the term.
If parental certainty is so important, jealousy should serve different functions
in men and women. The evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo
Wilson argued that if what men fear most is being cuckolded they should be
especially jealous of their partner’s Sexual infidelity, whereas if what women
fear most is desertion they should be most jealous of their partners spending
time and money on a rival. Many studies show that this is exactly so (Wright
1994). David Buss even wired people up with electrodes and asked them to
imagine their partners having sex with someone else or forming a deep
emotional attachment to someone else. For men it was the sex that caused all
the physiological signs of distress; for women it was the emotional infidelity
(Buss 1994).
Finally, there is a last wicked twist to the argument. Women certainly want
to get as much male investment as possible, but they may not be able to find
both good genes and a good provider in the same man. Indeed, a man with good
genes – tall, strong, and intelligent, for example – may find it so easy to get sex
that he need not bother with putting effort into child care. This is apparently true
in zebra finches and swallows where the more attractive males have been shown
to work less hard in bringing up the young, leaving the females to work harder.
On the ‘best of both worlds’ theory a woman’s best bet may be to capture a nice,
though unattractive man, who will rear her children, and then go and get better