Steve Moxon blog

A monograph for the New Male Studies journal, it's available on Amazon.co.uk & Amazon.com in both paperback & Kindle versions; plus it's open-access on the NMS website. 

Amazon US paperback http://tinyurl.com/h8s5ujs Kindle eBook http://tinyurl.com/gwtsdpo Amazon UK paperback http://tinyurl.com/zh3cnux Kindle eBook http://tinyurl.com/hlxg5ko

This is the first time anyone has properly attempted to put forward a truly integrated account of human sociality, utilising all the latest lines of evidence in theory re male hierarchy, female 'personal network', the very different in-grouping according to sex, and pair-bonding.

The core argument is that all major aspects of male-female human sociality necessarily stem from biological principles; which all arise in solving the core problem faced by all life-forms: the relentless build-up of mistakes in the repeated copying of genes.

Explanation here has to be bottom-up, not top-down, because that is the direction of causation: all else is feedback, which in inherent in any system if it is to avoid breakdown. Culture – that is, the facility to have and behave in this way – could not have evolved unless its function is to feed back to and fine-tune the very underlying biology that gave rise to it. So the more complex the organism becomes, then the better it gets at being faithful to and expressing its biology. The notion that instead somehow we go off on a novel tangent and 'escape' biology is the very opposite of what happens.

To deal with all the accumulated gene replication error, the 'bad' genes somehow have to be filtered out, and this is the function of the male: why males came into being, and why men so fiercely compete with one another to form a hierarchy.

The female contribution to this 'genetic filter' mechanism is carefully to choose only the most dominant/prestigious males, cross-checking that indeed they do possess the best gene sets. This ensures genetic mutations and other errors that would seriously compromise reproduction are purged from the local gene pool.

With men tied to a hierarchy, women evolved to 'marry out' to avoid in-breeding. In preparation for this, girls have a very different social organisation, rehearsing for when later they have to make close bonds with non-kin, stranger-females for mutual child-care. This explains why female grouping is so tight and exclusionary, whereas males group all-inclusively.

Pair-bonding serves to exclude lower-ranked, whilst allowing access by still higher-ranked males; and to provide a serial father of children, thereby in effect projecting forward in time a woman's peak fertility, compensating for her deteriorating store of eggs, and consequent declining fertility and attractiveness. But although this is clearly all in the female interest, the male also gets something out of 'marriage': a more fertile partner than he would be able to acquire for 'no-strings' (promiscuous) sex. It's cross-sex bargaining.

The upshot is that there's an underlying sex dichotomy, to be sure; but it's perfectly complementary, with the sexes of equal importance in what amounts to a symbiosis