It has been a long day’s journey into the night. Nor has morning brought succor: the harsh light of dawn has broken on us blinking, naked, shivering, and exposed. Nothing is left to us but to gather the last remaining shreds of our masculine self-respect, clothe our nakedness, and figure out what is to be done.
That is, of course, if anything even can be done.
Well, that depends. The dismal results outlined in this book can be traced to three causes: culture, ontogenetics, and genetics. The first two we can do something about; it’s the third that’s the problem. If our shortcomings should turn out to be genetic in origin there would be very little, short of extensive gene therapy, that we could do about them.
Is there any evidence, then, that they are?
Unfortunately, there is. Those findings on the partial heritability of premature ejaculation and impotence are just the start. A clearer example of one of our deficiencies that is at least partially genetic in origin is our shortsightedness. Charles Darwin was one of the first to highlight this modern physical failing. In his 1839 account of his voyage on HMS Beagle he noted the phenomenal eyesight of the two native Fuegian men, Jemmy and York, who were being returned to their South American homeland via the Beagle:
…sailors are well known for their good eyesight, & yet the Fuegians were as superior as another almost would be without a glass. When Jemmy quarrelled with any of the officers, he would say “me see ship, me no tell.” Both he & York have invariably been in the right; even when objects have been examined with a glass.1
This had to be hereditary, Darwin remarked, because even in cases where Europeans were brought up among native peoples, and thus exposed to the same environmental influences, their eyesight still seemed less acute.2 Early nineteenth-century whalers in Australia, similarly, soon learned not to contradict their Australian Aboriginal shipmates, who could spot whales unaided at ranges far beyond those of European capabilities. A famous half-caste Australian Aboriginal whaler, Tommy Chaseland, for example, amazed Captain J. Lort Stokes of the Acheron by not just spotting a dead whale floating outside telescope range but also accurately describing the harpoon and fathoms of rope attached to it. Another shipmate wrote that Chaseland could spot land from thirty miles away and see a mile underwater. This difference is still evident today: the Australian ophthalmologist Hugh Taylor reported in 1981 that Australian Aboriginal men in Western Australia had 20/5 vision—they saw clearly at twenty feet what European Australian men could only see at five.3
Why should the eyesight of Australian Aboriginal men be genetically so much better than that of European males? Clearly it is because of their only recently abandoned hunting lifestyle. The selective landscape in which Australian Aboriginal men lived until just one hundred to two hundred years ago exerted great selective pressure in favor of sharp eyesight. European males, by contrast, have lived in a farming environment for at least eight thousand years, where the plants and animals on which sustenance, and therefore reproductive success, depended were never more than yards away. This apparently led to a relaxation of selective pressure for visual acuity, allowing our eyesight to deteriorate to its current level over the course of several thousand years.
Some of our shortcomings really are, therefore, genetic in origin. This is dispiriting, to be sure, but it’s some comfort, at least, that they seem to be in the minority. We have the evidence of our bones to prove it; recall from BRAWN that the articular ends of our long bones—the component whose growth is most directly under genetic control—are still roughly as robust as those of our relatives of a million years ago. We can, therefore, breathe a belated sigh of relief. The causes of our multiple shortcomings seem to be more cultural and ontogenetic, which we can do something about.
Even some of those deficiencies that are genetic in origin, for example, can be tackled through cultural changes. Premature ejaculation, to quote one, is often treated with sexual training to habituate the sufferer to sexual arousal. Perhaps it’s time for all of us—pathetic, two-minute wonders that we are—to be put through an urgent crash course on remedial sexual technique. Perhaps a UN task force of any remaining Pokot, Mangaian, Trobriand Islander, and Tahitian men who have managed to resist our slovenly influence can be immediately dispatched to all corners of the Western world—to show us how it’s done.
More seriously, knowledge of the foibles revealed here does give us scope for recapturing lost masculine virtues such as bravery and paternal instinct by instituting simple cultural changes. Suitable outlets for the instinctual bravado of young males, for example, can be created; this is one reason diversionary sports programs are so successful in reducing crime rates among young males.4 Extensive paternity leave arrangements and flexible workplace practices, similarly, could help us strive for the quantity, rather than quality, time so essential to the superior fathering of those remarkable Aka dads.
The deeper message of the bones, though, is that we are, quite simply, traitors. We are traitors to the countless generations of male humans and proto-humans who lived and died—mostly died—to hone the genetic heritage we so signally fail to live up to. Recall that the reduced robustness of those bone shafts, compared to those of Homo erectus and other earlier species, is an ontogenetic, or developmental, phenomenon. It is entirely the product of our modern sloth and inactivity. We never give our bodies or minds the stimulation—be it mechanical or intellectual—they need to fully realize the potential encoded in our genotypes, though opportunities to do so surround us every day. True, it is no longer in our power to retrieve the strength of our chimpanzee—or even, probably, our Neandertal—cousins. But we could regain the strength of those work-hardened laborers of the early Industrial Revolution, if only we were prepared to exert ourselves as they did. We could row as fast as the Greek trireme rowers, run as fast as the Ice Age runners of prehistoric New South Wales, jump as high as the gusimbuka-urukiramende high jumpers, and shoot with both the phenomenal accuracy of the Mongol horse archers and the stamina of the medieval Japanese tōshiya archers—if only we were willing to put in the grueling training to do so. We could even rap—really rap—just like Homer and the Slavic guslars if we would but test ourselves with the same fire of words they did.
We are doubly traitorous because our sloth betrays not just our own genetic potential, but that of our sons, too. Recall that the male body is most responsive to the mechanical stresses that stimulate growth between the ages of eight and fourteen. By inducing our sons to follow in our own less-than-glorious footsteps we are sentencing them to a lifetime of brittle bones, weak tendons, and softened bodies and brains. We do our children a real disservice by imagining them as incapable as we ourselves are; without such negativity who knows what heights they might reach? They might even, God forbid, stand a shot at realizing the potential that ought to be their birthright—the promise encoded in their twenty-three pairs of chromosomes.
Fixing the problem then, for both ourselves and our sons, would seem to require nothing more than sheer will. Is there any chance we will muster it?
The signs, unfortunately, are not good.
The first step to solving the problem is facing it, and even here, it seems, we are somewhat lacking. Think back to our happy self-delusion when reporting (actually over-reporting) the sexual satisfaction of our partners, our bravery in facing medical procedures, or the ferocity of our hand-to-hand combat. Self-deception, in fact, seems to define us as a species. It even has its own evolutionary logic—many an evolutionary psychologist has pointed out that the bluffing so essential to threatening behavior in males is much more effective when the male himself believes it, regardless of how true it is. If such self-deception seems a strangely ignoble outcome of evolution, well, so what? Even Darwin never claimed the process necessarily tended toward morally satisfying results. It has, after all, just as readily produced the cowardly hyena as the noble lion.
An interesting primate parallel is the case of the orangutan. Most orangutan males are fearsomely macho, with huge bodies weighing up to 260 pounds and deep calls that boom through their rainforest homes. It is expensive to grow so imposing, but they have to, since only the largest males win the fights necessary for sexual access to females. Orangutan females also flatly refuse to mate with males who are too puny. Yet evolution has also hit on another, less noble, solution to the male orangutan’s problem of how to pass on his genes. Some orangutan males forgo the dangerous business of growing big and fighting, instead choosing to live out their lives as small-bodied adolescents. These cowardly “small males” use the energy they save through not fighting to chase females, whom their reduced body size also allows them to catch more quickly than the big males can. Though the females strenuously resist the mating attempts of these inferior specimens, the “small males” strength is still usually sufficient to force them.
Evolution has, effectively, turned orangutan “small males” into sneaky little rapists. It doesn’t get much more ignoble than that.
Fortunately, most modern human males retain enough decency to shun such violatory activities. In so many other respects, though, as I hope this book has shown, we are the “small males” of our genus Homo—only without the orangutans’ honesty. Orangutan “small males” at least have the courage to embrace and exploit their second-best status; we instead persist in masquerading as “big males.” One can only wonder what our Homo erectus ancestors—real “big males”—would have made of our behavior. If we plucked a male Homo erectus, circa 1,000,000 BCE, off the African savannah and set him down in a modern Western all-male event—say a NASCAR rally, or a supposed couples’ gathering in a swingers’ club—what would he say? It’s a matter of some debate, of course, whether he would say anything at all, since it’s still unclear if Homo erectus even could talk. Yet if he could, surely he would be moved to protest our betrayal of the genotype he fought, suffered, and died for. Surely he would paraphrase the words of the deity whose very existence wouldn’t even be conceived of for a million years to come—
“My sons, my sons, why have you forsaken me?”