EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY , INFANTICIDE AND ABORTION

In the reading of a very interesting book, I stumbled across several interesting paragraphs that seemed to me to relate to the prochoice debate that is currently raging in out society from the evolutionary psychology point of view.. The book is Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, The Penguin Press, (2006) authored by Nicholas Wade, who is a scientific journalist. The author sets the stage for stability of the human genomes or preservation of stable genetic patterns by tying genomes to a stable environment.  The belief that the humans first evolve evolved in an environmentally stable area of sub-Saharan Africa. Anthropologists have extensively studied tribes of people living in that region from both the physical and cultural point of view. The implication being that knowing these people will be the closest scientists will ever get to knowing how our hunter-gatherer ancestors behaved 10 to 15,000-years ago.

Evolutionary psychology is based on the concept of genetic stability. Irrefutably, human behavior is genetic and traceable back to biopoiesis. It seems clear that living things can modified behavior by mutation but can also modified behavior by learning: the nurture verses nature debate is essentially over with nature winning easily. Scientists can trace human behavior, recognized by Dr. Donald Brown and others as cultural universals, back to our bestial beginnings. We can think in terms of such genetic tendencies including but not limited to  xenophobia, selfishness, hierarchy dominance, and gregariousness as having a high degree of influence on our behavior.

This post is about one such example of that behavior. The story of the women of the San tribe, as reviewed from the anthropology literature and described by author Wade, tells of women leaving the group to give birth. The mother excludes the father from the scene. The new mother carefully inspects the newborn for defects to decide if she will keep it or not, or if there are twins, she selects one to keep; she decides to smother what she rejects. In other words, when the mother returns to the tribe, she may or may not have a baby—it is her business. The baby nurses for 4-years. The nursing-ovulation cycle biologically controls fertility; imperfectly to be sure but still controls it. During those four years, the mother literally carries the baby on her hip along with all of her possessions on her back; in a nomadic society, this is the woman’s burden, which directly affects her quality of life. Social scientists have described the entire child rearing process in terms of parental investments. The father has very little investment in contrast to the mother, who has a tremendous investment in terms of time and labor. It is biologically important to have a return on her investment.

This kind of thinking is not confined to one little tribe in Eastern Africa. It is worldwide and extends from the darkness of our unknown past into modern life. It extends from at least 15,000 years ago to now. There is no reason to think that it started with the San tribe but extends back into volumes of time. It wasn’t just east Africa. On the other side of the world, Hawaii, the first explorers described new mothers putting their newborn babies into the sea if they had a defect even if they had such slight imperfections as a birthmark.

Stephen Pinker in his 2011 book, The Better Angles of Our Nature: Why Violence Declined (2011), includes a discussion of infanticide. He cites anthropologist Laila Williamson “infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by every kind of society, from non-state bands and villages (77percent of which have an accepted custom of infanticide) to advanced civilizations. Infanticide is a cultural universal. Pinker goes on to say that in the past people killed 10 to 15% of all babies shortly after they were born—obviously, parents did not kill newborn babies to punish them. In some societies, the infanticide rate was as high as 50%.  Against what we perceive in our altruistic eyes as a gruesome background, Pinker shows data indicating that rates of abortion are falling across the world. I am sure that contraception as well as a belief in the sacredness of life affects this rate just as medical science has allowed mothers to determine the “defects” of her conceptus and genetic counseling prevents conception.  All of these things are helping us modify our genetically embedded bestial behavior; something we call humanization. Our humanization includes due consideration for the rights and quality of life of the mother.

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