Why We Have Families
Tucker, William
would give an opening to Col. Moammar Qaddafi. The Tunisians attributed the killing of several Tunisian Jews by a berserk policeman shortly after the air strike to anti-Semitic broadcasts beamed...
...Unfortunately, Moynihan received so much criticism for being a "racist" that he 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 now shies away from the issue...
...Mating among these birds takes place in the dead of the Antarctic winter, with temperatures often reaching 50-below-zero and winds at 100 miles an hour...
...Women are simply having children without bothering to acquire husbands-a practice that is the rule in nature, but has been almost unknown in human cultures...
...shown in [one] study of a black Midwestern ghetto neighborhood, AFDC women have a surprisingly large circle of relatives based on ties built up by their sequential liaisons," wrote Harris...
...This has produced single-parent homes across the entire population...
...0...
...As for the longterm social costs, everyone else pays the bill...
...Divorce rates among whites have soared in recent years...
...The AFDC grant, Harris pointed out, serves as a kind of dowry-a "nest egg" a woman inherits when she becomes pregnant...
...Human sexuality is evolutionary millennia away from the quick, 30-second copulations of our chimp and gorilla cousins...
...Although 17 percent of white children are in single-parent homes, all but 2 percent of these are the result of divorce or death of a parent...
...The inevitable cups of strong black coffee are served...
...We must hope that the decision to force down the Egyptian plane signals a future decisiveness as well...
...It is immoral to wage ,a war one does not intend to win...
...Nevertheless, the eggs hatch and the next generation arrives...
...The female exchanges sexual availability for male companionship...
...Thus, traditional divorce lawsawarding custody of children to the father-worked against the biological interests of both men and women, but in favor of the family and a familyoriented society...
...Lovejoy proposed that it had to do with the spacing of children...
...What was remarkable about Moynihan's performance-and about the entire liberal approach to the problem-is its incredibly shallow perception of the family as a human institution...
...The mammalian family of motherand-her-children became so common as to be almost a universal "law of nature...
...This ritual has two important consequences...
...The female orgasm is unknown to other species, she pointed out, and females can theoretically exhaust several males in non-stop sexual encounters...
...As long as both men and women can run off from their responsibilities without sacrificing anything, high divorce rates will continue...
...In fact the underlying principles were much different...
...A recent study among blue-collar families in Chicago, for example, shows that premarital sex is actually quite common...
...She argued that the "sex bond" has been the key to human evolution...
...In a world without stability or assets," he wrote, "AFDC [becomes] a vital resource that puts women and motherhood at the center of things...
...Males still retain an evolutionary advantage in promiscuity, while females have to worry about getting pregnant...
...So was President Reagan's decision to bring to justice the terrorists responsible for the murder of one of his citizens, despite the opposition of some friendly Arab states...
...Social custom is adjusting...
...As a result, it is the easiest thing in the world for men to run off and leave the responsibility of child-rearing to the mother...
...What does a woman want...
...Soldiers man checkpoints at all entrances to the square...
...I was up at Harvard last April when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan presented his own somewhat similar analysis in a widely reported lecture series on the "Crisis in the Family...
...Couples often live together for more than a year without getting married...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 The bigger the animal, the longer it carries its young...
...It is the afternoon of December 24 and I am talking with Bethlehem's Mayor Elias Freij in his office overlooking Manger Square...
...The pain we feel in witnessing this retrogression is only a measure of the degree to which we have become human...
...While it is true that human females have evolved into highly sexed creatures, with a capacity for sexual enjoyment greater than that of other mammals, this isn't the end of the story...
...This is how "mated pairs" are created...
...That is the savvy he demonstrated in ordering the invasion of Grenada...
...If males started helping females take care of their children, Lovejoy argued, the female could go into heat again sooner, spacing children only a year or two apart-exactly the pace at which humans reproduce today...
...In 1983, anthropologist Helen Fisher pulled this information together in a book called The Sex Contract...
...In courtship, the female makes the male go through a certain performance-a dance, a display of feathers, a nest-building enterprise-before making up her mind...
...This is because, when fish mate, the female first releases her eggs into the water...
...Human females obviously have a highly developed sexuality, yet most cultures have been built around courtship, chastity, and the "myth" of the females lower sexual capacity...
...If paternity is uncertain, they can count on at least tacit protection from all the males...
...The obvious purpose of these evolutionary developments seems to have been to bind the male and female together permanently through an active, year-round sex life...
...They had to give up their children in the process...
...Since women are the victims, then the feminist agenda must be the solution...
...The male no longer had to stick around to protect his investment, and as a result, the need to form a "two-parent family" diminished...
...Although I'm sure Senator Moynihan doesn't realize it, this notion is taken straight out of Friedrich Engels's portrait of the family as an "oppressive institution" invented by capitalism...
...Birth control and abortion have erased the need for females to act coyly and to refrain from premarital sex in order to avoid getting pregnant...
...But there is also a third set of footprints, made by a smaller creature...
...The 1980s are shaping up as the "Decade of the Family...
...Among American blacks in particular, families are no longer forming...
...Even Jimmy Carter approved the attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages, which surely endangered both the hostages and innocent Iranians...
...Selfish gene theory has provided an answer...
...Church bells ring...
...It is always easier for a man to pick up his stakes and start a new family...
...If only one woman possessed it, she could use it to attract and hold onto a male of her choice...
...Thrilling confirmation of Lovejoy's thesis came in 1981 when anthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the "first human footprints" in a fossil lava bed in East Africa...
...According to their interpretation, family breakups mainly victimize women...
...By 1990 half of all American families may be headed by only one adult," announced Newsweek in a cover story en William 7iicker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent and author of the new book, Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime (Stein and Day...
...As for the failure in family formation-particularly among blacksthe welfare system is the obvious target...
...Although the family has been with us since the beginning of human evolution, it remains a relatively fragile biological institution...
...The strongest bonds are those between mothers and their children, although males also form strong "friendships" among themselves...
...He pointed out that female chimps spend five years raising one offspring before they go into heat again...
...Her fertile periods are so little advertised that a woman herself often does not know when she is ovulating...
...Without cultural reinforcement-or with wrongheaded social intervention-our biological drives can quickly carry us back to the earlier mother-and-herchildren mammalian family...
...What if it involves sitting on a nest for three months, for example, without the opportunity to hunt for food...
...What has happened to undermine them...
...This became still another strand woven into the web of the pairbonded nuclear family...
...The most persuasive evidence has come from human biology itself...
...Most notable is the human female's year-round sexual receptivity...
...When a female chimp goes into heat she advertises it by developing bright red buttocks...
...In 1979, Dr...
...There are still the six American hostages in the Middle East, and the Islamic Jihad announced that it murdered one of them, U.S...
...As...
...Selfish gene theory has provided an answer...
...Then they would marry that one...
...Since the 1920s we have "liberated" ourselves by shifting the system to work in favor of both individual men and women, but against stable families...
...It cannot be said often enough that reforming welfare would be the single most positive way to begin lifting black Americans out of poverty...
...The solution-unfortunately-is increased welfare payments to femaleheaded households...
...The possibility of abortion, however, has considerably disrupted this folk custom...
...Bethlehem at Christmastide is an inviting target for terrorism...
...Klinghoffer grimly demonstrated...
...And by having children with them the men establish a claim on the shelter which women control...
...Mary Leakey thinks they were holding hands...
...As usual, liberals are first out of the starting gate, riding high on a horse called "The Feminization of Poverty...
...The permanent sexual availability of every female does not automatically create a male-female bond...
...Males seek her out, and she will mate with all of them...
...Female biology, on the other hand, argues for keeping the children...
...Greek Catholic, Syrian Catholic, Maronite, Franciscan, Lutheran, Baptist, and Anglican services are in progress all over town...
...In any case, the female is almost always left with the "last chance to abandon," while the male can be long gone...
...The most obvious new element is the sexual revolution...
...Human beings, however, are slightly off the scale...
...How have we entered what can accurately be called "an evolutionary retrogression...
...Instead, it only shifted its center of gravity to a new female-dominated structure built around a woman who has a string of children with various men...
...Instead of being "irresponsible" (from the female's point of view), he now has a strong incentive to stay on as well...
...As carriers of genetic material they are identical...
...The fundamental inclination of male sexuality leads to abandoning children and going on to produce others...
...was a question that puzzled Freud...
...It was this increased sexual capacity, argued Fisher, that tied a single male to his female partner, and bound him to child-rearing...
...A staggering 54 percent of all single-parent families are below the poverty line, compared to 18 percent of two-parent families...
...What can be done to stem the tide of family disintegration...
...What AFDC has accomplished, then, is to free lower-class women from the age-old female problem of having to find a husband before she can have children...
...Our immediate reaction may be to say this was determined by "male chauvinism...
...By working against the biological impulses of both men and women, paternal custody made divorce much more painful for both parties...
...This is an attractive theory, but it has a serious flaw...
...The entire population pairs off in courtship rituals that take four to five weeks, leaving little room for illicit liaisons...
...Jane Goodall took note of these differences in the 1950s when she observed older male and female chimps grow affectionate and pair off for a few days after mating periods...
...Still, the sexual revolution is probably overrated as a cause of family breakups...
...The U.S...
...Traditional divorce laws were built around the principle that the father got custody of the children...
...If men wanted to divorce, they couldn't just dance off care-free...
...There is more physical pain involved, and it is much more difficult for a woman to begin reproducing anew after 40...
...Similarly, the U.S...
...Micah Morrison CHRISTMAS IN BETHLEHEM Not all it's cracked up to be...
...Such an action by a Western premier shows how far from victory we really are in the war against terrorism...
...This makes human children even more helpless, and thus creates another reinforcement of the two-parent family...
...The nuclear family was not invented in Europe in the eighteenth century nor in Europe of the eighth century, nor even Ancient Egypt of the eighteenth century B.C...
...Obviously, it didn't, because he released the suspected mastermind of the hijacking, Mohammed Abbas...
...there have been attempts in the past...
...Both were impressive, courageous, and lonely stands...
...Chimp copulation lasts only about 30 seconds, and Flo would often have a half-dozen males lined up, patiently waiting their turn...
...Similarly, back in June during the TWA hijacking he said he could take no action that jeopardized the hostages, the implication being that the U.S...
...Of course, individual animals don't go through this reasoning process...
...The fossil impressions show two different-sized creatures-probably a male and female-walking side by side...
...There is no dealing with terrorists any other way...
...Raise women's salaries, legislate "comparable worth," eliminate "sex discrimination," and these truncated families of women and-their-children will be able to take their rightful place in society...
...Over half of black marriages now result in divorce-and this doesn't include the shifting common-law marriages that have become characteristic of lower-class black culture...
...The implication, of course, is that since we are now headed into a post-industrial welfare state, we can safely lay the nuclear family aside in favor of single-parent homes, "group" families, and whatever other kinds of "alternative" institutions catch people's fancies...
...Marvin Harris, perhaps the country's most widely published popular anthropologist, examined the disintegration of the black family in his 1981 book, America Now...
...This is how "motherhood" comes into being...
...Women now routinely get custody of the children in most cases...
...Yet our mating rituals-our very biology-have changed completely...
...It is a sure thing," the paper said, "because the quite rational men who plan these incidents know two things about their strategy: It works and it carries no costs...
...At this point, they "have to" get married...
...The inclination is intensified in human males who can reproduce often well beyond the age of 50...
...Since females usually have far fewer eggs than males have sperm, the female must be more selective in her mating habits...
...He has stayed alive-and in office-for more than a dozen years, testimony that his views threaten 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...Without the possibility of ongoing physical intimacy, these chimp couples soon drifted apart...
...Chimps live in gregarious tribes of loosely associated males and females...
...The desires of individual men and women do not "naturally" work in its favor...
...Is he capable of building a good nest...
...Senator Moynihan's present interpretation is that children are the "new poor...
...More than 25 percent of all children are now being raised in "single-parent homes'up from 12.5 percent in 1970...
...It appears that a young child followed one of the adults across the newly fallen lava ash the same way a boy would follow his father's footsteps across a field of freshly fallen snow...
...When I was in college in the 1960s, I knew men who would sleep with every girl they met until they ran into one who refused them...
...The female may carry the egg, or lay it, or nurture it within her body...
...The male tendency to wander is well documented in history...
...It also appears that the family may have been the primary social invention that turned us into human beings in the first place...
...A bomb blast in the packed square, the stabbing of a soldier, a surface-to-surface missile launched from the desert and sent crashing into the city would instantly command world attention, demonstrating Israeli inability to maintain order in the territories and protect the thousands of Christian visitors who come to the holy places every year...
...The answer turns out to be very complicated...
...Although 25 percent of the nation's families are now headed by single women, fully one-third of these are concentrated in the 12 percent of the population that is black...
...The question is whether President Reagan, given his statements, would even give the goahead for such a rescue attempt...
...The crisis in the family" is very much an American phenomenon...
...Both male and female reproductive cells-the sperm and egg-carry half an offspring...
...This theory essentially confirms Samuel Butler's aphorism, "A chicken is just the egg's way of making another egg...
...First, it gives the female some informaton on which to base her decision...
...A man chases a woman until she catches him" is the way we express it, and this is quite correct...
...Faced with - this overwhelming evidence that something remarkable is happening, the really important competition has already begun-the race to define the problem...
...Fisher also noted that our diet seems to be formed around the male-female bond...
...The female began incubating the egg inside her body...
...But something else is happening as well...
...For us, sex is a leisurely, friendly, intimate activity...
...It may not be very pretty, but it is a good thing to have in mind while designing social policies...
...This was a vague suggestion that the nuclear family emerged "somewhere around the seventeenth or eighteenth century in Europe...
...Writing from a mildly feminist viewpoint, Fisher suggested "the human female's increased capacity for sexual enjoyment...
...Jane Goodall noted that chimp mothers are very possessive and usually reluctant to allow their children to play with friendly males, even when the children themselves obviously desire it...
...One of the most immediate payoffs of selfish-gene theory has been an explanation of "motherhood...
...When compared to that of other animals, human sexuality has evolved to the point where we could almost be called "sexual connoisseurs...
...Males will often collect "harems" or "prides," but only to have a group of fertile females available for reproductivity...
...As usual, males have a wide opportunity to spread their genes with minimal effort...
...Therefore the perverse incentives in the welfare system can be casually dismissed...
...Family disintegration undoes the original com promise on which the evolution of our species has been built...
...In almost every culture, women withhold sex in order to obtain marriage...
...The human female, on the other hand, is sexually available all year round...
...Nor can she expect to enlist other females-they have their own responsibilities...
...What is rarely observed, however, is that black divorce rates were always about double the white rate, and have remained almost twice as high as white rates have soared...
...But what if the job proves too difficult...
...Our upright posture, she noted, narrowed the female pelvis...
...But government intervention, through social security, solved the problem...
...such behavior has been selected through evolutionary history until it has become "instinctive...
...But once every woman has it, we are back where we started...
...It is finally beginning to dawn on Americans that many of the things that have gone wrong with this country stem from the disintegration of the nuclear family...
...We, of course, have quickly and effortlessly dismantled this convention...
...Take as an example the emperor penguin...
...to be too closely identified with the Israeli retaliation...
...Soldiers watch from rooftops, patrol the alleys and the market...
...About ten years ago, biologists developed the concept of the "selfish gene...
...It is virtually certain that our evolutionary ancestors observed mating patterns similar to those of chimps today...
...At some point, however, they "make a mistake" and the woman gets pregnant...
...Navy F-14 Tomcats to bring down the Egyptian plane carrying the PLO members to Tunisia, President Reagan said in Chicago that however much one wants to retaliate, if innocent lives are threatened, well, then "you have to swallow your gorge and you don't do it...
...To the researchers, it seems obvious that this "mistake" is actually a mutual consent between the couple that they are willing to make a longterm commitment...
...A great white screen hangs on the wall of the police station: Midnight Mass at the Church of Saint Catherine, next to the Basilica of the Nativity, will be relayed on to the screen-and around the world-by closed-circuit television...
...Like it or not, the new sexual freedom is now a technical possibility...
...When the first diminutive human-like creatures walked on the planet 3.5 million years ago, they had already formed the nuclear family...
...Reagan didn't really believe this, but was simply biding his time and waiting for the perfect opportunity to demonstrate what force can do...
...These kinship ties give AFDC women additional security and influence and people to turn to in case of emergencies...
...However noble their cause, however sincere their intentions, however deserving of redress the wrongs done to them, terrorists nullify these claims by their refusal to operate within civilized norms...
...To understand the implications of this unexpected turn in human evolution, we should take a look at those animals that form "pair bonds" between mating males and females...
...The family becomes "matrilocal" and "matrilinear...
...A security net, extending far into the surrounding countryside, has been thrown over Bethlehem, for this is the West Bank, occupied territory, Judea, and the Israelis want no trouble...
...Moreover, there is a division of labor...
...Since 1979, the anthropological view of the human family has changed rapidly...
...Egg strategy" is built around producing a few offspring and taking good care of them to ensure their survival...
...Made more than 3.5 million years ago, they clearly indicate two creatures about four-and-a-half feet tall, walking upright...
...Once an egg has been fertilized, both male and female have an interest in seeing that it survives...
...It is finally beginning to dawn on Americans that many of the things that have gone wrong with this country stem from the disintegration of the nuclear family...
...This made childbirth more difficult...
...As a result, we are all born a bit premature...
...Yet once it became firmly established, evolution suddenly took another unexpected turn...
...The evidence of this can be seen in what has happened to the American black family...
...Despite efforts to keep Bethlehem dry, many of the Micah Morrison is The American Spectator's Israel correspondent...
...Second, it prolongs the mating procedure so that by the time it is over, the male no longer has the opportunity to seek other female partners...
...In almost all species, the male deposits its sperm in such a way that the female is left "holding the egg...
...The answer appears to lie in the "first chance to abandon...
...diplomat William Buckley, after learning of the Israeli attack...
...In that year, Owen Lovejoy, an associate of Donald Johansen (discoverer of the "Lucy" skeleton), proposed that the nuclear family was the first evolutionary step that lifted us above the apes and put us on the road to becoming human beings...
...The hijacking of an Italian liner ought to have taught Prime Minister Bettino Craxi that good relations with terrorists like the PLO don't mean much...
...Inner-city men respect women who have this resource...
...In addition, the various paternities give welfare mothers a wide net of potential economic support...
...It is also the easiest thing in the world for a woman to walk out on her husband (or ask him to leave), knowing that the courts will award her custody...
...There are many other aspects to our well-developed sex lives...
...For the world's liberal democracies-the targets, after all, of terrorism-this demands in turn a mustering of broad public support for the strong measures such a victory requires...
...Thus human sexual activity is constant...
...Which male...
...Today we face a situation where children are becoming an impoverished group," he argued...
...Or was it to catch small game or to defend ourselves while scavenging for meat on the African savannahs...
...Mammalian families almost always involve only the mother and her children...
...The most effective way to pursue this mixed diet, Fisher pointed out, would be for a pair-bonded male-andfemale couple to share their meat and vegetables...
...As mammals evolved, however, "nesting," which restricted both male and female, was no longer necessary...
...Eggs, on the other hand, are usually fewer and larger...
...Thus, in the great majority of species, the female becomes the "mother...
...After coitus, each parent knows that if he or she abandons the fertilized egg, the other parent will still be there to take care of it...
...has countless other tourists, diplomats, and expatriates around the world, all of whom are prime targets for kidnapping and murder, as the seizure of the Achille Lauro and the murder of Mr...
...The hope is that Mr...
...The larger point is that if we are real ly engaged in a war against terrorism, we'd better be prepared to win it...
...Mammals have extended post-natal "motherhood" far beyond that of most other animals...
...In nearly all species, males do the pursuing until the female makes her choice...
...In short, once the human female developed this capacity for year-round sexual enjoyment, she had to turn around and repress it again, in order to attend to the age-old concern of binding the male to the task of raising children...
...For females, however, there is also an advantage...
...The answer lies in one word---!'courtship...
...Alimony payments once restricted this freedom, but lax enforcement and "no-fault" divorce have weakened the deterrent...
...To defeat them, moreover, the West must have enough faith in its system of values and enough confidence in its forces to meet the challenge...
...Innocent lives depend on the Commander in Chiefs willingness to take risks...
...Thus, the abandoning parent will have the opportunity to go out and mate with other partners, and increase his or her chance of "spreading its genes...
...What is most astonishing is the "family constellation" that can be inferred from the discovery...
...Senator Moynihan is an odd source for such ideas...
...Doubtless he was right...
...The Tunisians attributed the killing of several Tunisian Jews by a berserk policeman shortly after the air strike to anti-Semitic broadcasts beamed into Tunisia by Radio Libya...
...14...
...In truth, the family is really a carefully constructed compromise...
...They have taken their usual early lead...
...The theory has since been elaborated in many ways, but the major premise still stands and most anthropologists now agree with it...
...Their evolution has only left them more vulnerable to the inherently more promiscuous males...
...According to selfish-gene theory, the gene is the fundamental unit of evolution, with every living creature operating under an imperative to "spread its genes...
...young people filling Manger Square are drinking beer and wine...
...It created the human family-the mother, her children, and that peculiar human invention, the "father...
...can never do anything that risks innocent lives...
...Just how this family formation tied in with the emergence of other human characteristics is still a matter of intense debate...
...If he or she now abandons the fertilized eggs, no one will be there to protect them...
...A small percentage of these teenage mothers are married...
...Thus, the formation of the nuclear family would have given proto-humans an ever-soslight evolutionary advantageparticularly in the harsh Pliocene environment in which we originally evolved...
...Not only is the nuclear family now believed to be as old as mankind itself...
...And what has it meant for family formation...
...The one that fertilized her egg is the obvious candidate...
...On the other hand, if women wanted to divorce, they couldn't just "take the children and run...
...How is it decided which parent does the "mothering...
...In terms of mating behavior, we have evolved remarkably over an astonishingly short period of time...
...Chimps are 95 percent vegetarian, the males hunting small animals only occasionally...
...did not get the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table until President Nixon ordered the bombing of Hanoi...
...For a woman, this can be a very positive strategy...
...They seemed to enjoy each other's company, she said, but there could be no sexual bond between them...
...One-half of all black females now have a baby before they turn 20, and one-quarter have two...
...titled "The Single Parent...
...In other species, adult males often kill offspring that are not their own...
...Single-parent homes quickly veer toward poverty...
...Few mammalian species form mating pairs...
...There are really two things going on...
...They are within the larger footprints...
...How and why did it happen...
...Thus, nearly all mammals form "families," but they are very different from the human family...
...Israel's retaliation against the heart of the PLO was an admirable expression of such commitment...
...All other mammalian females "go into heat," becoming sexually active only at very specific times of the year...
...In many THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 species, males and females live entirely apart, coming together only briefly during the mating season...
...With many fish, for example, males care for the young...
...Therefore, once the first parent has abandoned, the second parent's best bet is to stay and nurture the fertilized egg to viability...
...The evolutionary task assigned to the human female is indeed one of the most complex in nature...
...Yet these patterns have now been changed radically, if not entirely shattered...
...policy, or innocent lives will continue to be threatened...
...In courtship, the male's options become much more limited...
...The time has now come to bring these efforts together, and welcome the help of all those who will join and ignore those who will not...
...Consider again the biological impulses of males and females...
...The other concern pressing on Mr...
...As Harris pointed out, the welfare matriarchy has not entailed a complete disintegration of the black family...
...But the job can often be handled tolerably well by only one parent...
...El...
...The male penis, for example, is about four times as large as the gorilla penis, even though gorillas have three times our body weight...
...It only increases the opportunities for male philandering...
...And we can start by asking a simple question that doesn't seem to require an answer: "Why do we have mothers...
...Because if the President's line about not doing so if innocent lives are at stake still stands, then little has been accomplished...
...government officials, dignitaries, clergymen, and the press have been welcomed...
...Mayor Freij is talking politics...
...William Tucker WHY WE HAVE FAMILIES In the past quarter-century we've undone what it took 3.5 million years to create...
...Thus, there is a certain inherent promiscuity built into male reproductive strategy...
...She no longer has to share all her children with a single father...
...Egg strategy is based on using resources wisely...
...They had to take the children with them...
...But the price we are now paying for waffling each time the issue arises-encouraging retaliation, but refusing to support anyone who actually retaliates-is higher still...
...Yet this delicately created social institution cannot suffer too much disruption-particularly the kind of social mayhem that we have created over the past twenty-five years...
...It has also freed black men of the age-old problem of having to take on the responsibility of a family in order to produce offspring...
...Is he physically up to par...
...Sperm strategy" is built around the tactic of producing many offspring and hoping that a few will survive...
...Human females do indeed have an increased capacity for sex ual activity, but that does not necessarily create a pair-bond...
...They do not eat through the entire three-month ordeal, and may lose half their body weight...
...Women do not automatically desire to share their children...
...Moreover, because this extended period of gestation is more time-consuming, females have an incentive to nurture their young following birth as well...
...Does the male have beautiful plumage...
...In almost all primitive human societies males hunt while females gather vegetables and roots...
...Did we start walking upright to bring vegetation back to a central place, as Lovejoy and others suggest...
...Over 60 percent of black children are now living in single-parent homes, and 70 percent of these are officially classified as "poor...
...Without the opportunity for promiscuity, he now has as much stake as the female in nurturing the offspring...
...But 28 percent of black single-parent homes are headed by a mother who has never married...
...The statistics are astounding...
...Birds are the best example...
...Chimp mothers, for example, nurture their babies for five years...
...After the female lays her egg, the couple takes turns sitting on it for two months, barely moving...
...A tiny Christmas tree twinkles on the table beside him...
...In over 90 percent of all cases, this parent is the mother...
...But what was the key behavior mechanism that triggered family formation...
...First, divorce, for many reasons, has become easier...
...They usually advertise this blatantly with smells or visual signals, such as the female chimpanzee's bright red buttocks...
...In most mammals, the gestation period is directly related to adult body weight...
...After all, even the tenuous peace that exists now between Israel and Egypt owes itself to the latter's defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and President Anwar al-Sadat's realization that the defeat was final...
...Thus, to say that people are becoming "impoverished" because they have broken up their families (or are failing to form them) is about as profound as saying that people have trouble picking things up after they have cut off their thumbs...
...For President Reagan and others interested in peace in the Middle East, the conclusion to be drawn from the events of recent weeks is that peace is impossible until the PLO and its terrorist allies are defeated, not accommodated...
...Mayor Freij has earned the ambiguous appellation "leading Palestinian moderate" by skillfully walking the tightrope stretched between the rhetoric of Palestinian nationalism and the realities of life under Israeli administration...
...In her book, In the Shadow of Man, ethologist Jane Goodall described the mating periods of "Flo," a very popular old female, who would attract males from miles around...
...The female gives up her claim to be the sole creator of life in order to secure male cooperation...
...The male's advantage lies in spreading as many sperm cells as possible as widely as possible...
...But Lovejoy's major premise is now widely accepted-the formation of the nuclear family and two-parent child-rearing was a crucial step that occurred at the beginning of our evolutionary history...
...This is often overlooked in How is it decided which parent does the "mothering...
...Of probably much more lasting impact have been long-term changes in the divorce laws...
...Shultz's mind was the danger to innocent American lives were the U.S...
...The first thing to be recognized about the disintegration of the family, then, is that it is bound to create poverty...
...The female is almost always left nurturing the young...
...Even more remarkable is that all this ill-formed discussion is taking place at the precise moment when anthropologists have been revising evolutionary theory to put the nuclear family at the center of human culture...
...The female cannot do it all herself...
...It may not be very pretty, but it is a good thing to have in mind while designing social policies...
...Therefore, the male is left "holding the egg" and must assume the task of nurturing the young...
...More important, however, is the rate at which blacks are completely failing to form families...
...Through the entire three days at Harvard, Moynihan made only one reference to the origins of the nuclear family...
...holiday carols blast from loudspeakers...
...As Edward O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, puts it, we are very "sexy" creatures...
...The abandoned parent may be able to go out and find other mating partners, but it will only face the same dilemma as before...
...Whatever havoc it may have caused originally is now largely over...
...Almost none ever did, in fact, until human beings came along...
...If they favored any particular male, however, they might face jealousy from other males, who might even harm their children...
...There are a few exceptions, however, and they very nicely prove the rule...
...And so, as Marvin Harris concluded: "Despite all the crafty scheming that has gone into the design of AFDC, the program has succeeded best in achieving exactly what it was designed to prevent: the formation of mother-centered families living on the dole...
...This is a huge investment of time...
...As the Wall Street Journal said at the time of the TWA hostage crisis, without swift and sure retaliation repetition of terrorist acts is inevitable...
...Human societies, however, generally have a diet of about 30 percent meat...
...The breakup of the family among blacks is a phenomenon that is almost unique...
...The pattern of female motherhood has become particularly well established among mammals, where females carry the fertilized eggs within their bodies over a long period of time...
...The Latin Patriarch has been greeted and escorted to the Church of the Nativity...
...By the time he is finished, the female can be long gone...
...There are long lines at all the checkpoints and one by one everybody entering the area walks into a wooden booth, is expertly and politely frisked, then allowed to pass...
...This pattern predominated in our own culture up until less than twenty-five years ago...
...He hasn't been able to prove his case to me," Moynihan said grandly...
...Where they differ is in their post-conception reproductive strategy...
...The male is assured of paternity by the promise of female chastity (as the saying goes, only women really know when they are raising their own children...
...The female, newly pregnant, would not be sexually receptive for another five years...
...Women usually feel they have made a larger biological investment in their offspring...
...Action must be U.S...
...At sixteen [welfare daughters] can get pregnant and apply for AFDC on their own, adding their own child's stipend to the family's income and perpetuating the female-centered dynasty of their mothers and grandmothers...
...His classic 1965 report, "The Negro Family: A Cause for National Action," which traced increasing black poverty to female-headed households, is more relevant today than it was twenty years ago...
...His mistake was not to follow through, which has rarely been President Reagan's problem...
...How does she persuade him to help...
...Before ordering U.S...
...Moynihan casually brushed aside Charles Murray's argument that welfare is actually aggravating black poverty...
...There is no known purpose for the enlarged female breast except to prove an attraction to the male-most mammals nurse their young very well with only a nipple...
...This support must be generated from the top...
...17 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 statistics that lump together black and white single-parent homes...
...No one is yet certain...
...Not surprisingly, he traced the disintegration of black families to America's ill-conceived "family allowance"-Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC...
...To answer this, we should review what biologists and anthropologists have discovered in the past ten years about why the human family formed in the first place...
...Changing the divorce laws to favor paternal custody is a first priority...
...Shultz distanced himself from his tough stand of a year ago because he thought that such a stand would carry a high price...
...The parent who is abandoned, on the other hand, has a more difficult choice...
...Only then can the male fertilize them...
...Mating is entirely promiscuous...
...This behavior makes sense for both males and females...
...Pubic hair is designed to set off the sexual organs...
...Consider, for example, our closest cousins, the chimpanzees...
...The great contribution of the nuclear family has been its efficiency in yoking men and women together to the task of raising children...
...What has been less recognized, however, has been the female desire to have children without going through the trouble of securing a husband...
...As a result, "female coyness" is very common in nature...
...Her best bet is to persuade a male to help her...
...They often come packaged with nurturing material for post-conception survival...
...In short, Mr...
...It is not occurring to the same degree in any other country...
...All his eggs are now in one basket...
...It requires the forcefulness and eloquence George Shultz demonstrated last year in his speech, not his backpedaling of this year...
...In the 1930s, everyone feared getting old because it meant falling into poverty," he said...
...In many species, this behavioral pattern has evolved into courtship rituals...
...Living in gregarious social groups, chimp mothers have to deal with a large number of males every day...
...they vie with each other for their favors...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
