Is It All in Our Genes?

Why do young women want older men?

Why do kids need stay-at-home moms?

Why is monogamy doomed to fail?

Why are guys so wild?

Robert Wright is holding forth on the subject of chimpanzee testicles when an attractive young waitress approaches the table. He freezes midsentence and waits in awkward silence. Only when she is out of earshot does he resume speaking.

You would think Wright would be used to raising eyebrows. His latest book, The Moral Animal, about the field of evolutionary psychology, caused a stir the moment it was previewed in Time magazine last summer. The cover of the magazine showed a broken wedding ring and, in large letters, the word Infidelity, followed by a statement that caused more than a little uneasiness within many a married couple: It may be in our genes. Since then, Wright's findings have been argued over by feminists, the religious right and anyone who has even heard of his provocative book.

The Moral Animal--based on Wright's extensive research--is a scientific worldview that explains how we got to be the way we are. Starting where Charles Darwin left off, Wright argues that our every emotional, psychological and biological impulse is determined by evolution. There is, he says, one thing that motivates us: "All any animal is designed to do is to get its genes into the next generation." That is why we feel lust, competitiveness, jealousy and even love. Wright maintains that the reason older men leave their wives for beautiful 18-year-olds is not just that they may be immature scoundrels in mid-life crises, as some believe, but also that the need to procreate is deeply embedded in their psyches by centuries of evolution. That's also why we occasionally give spare change to a bum on the street. The implications of Wright's research are surprising. They explain how Johnny Carson is responsible for the fact that some guys have a hard time getting dates and why feminism may well go against the basic nature of women.

Wright, a columnist for The New Republic and a contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and Time, lives in Washington, D.C. and has passed along his genes, with the help of his wife of 15 years, to two children. He has a boyish shock of brown hair that is parted on the side, curious eyes behind thick-lensed glasses and, if we are to believe his theories, testicles that are larger than the average gorilla's.

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Playboy: If you were going to write personal ads for a man and a woman based on evolutionary psychology, what would each say?

Wright: The premise to the field is that all basic human traits exist because they helped to get genes into the next generation. As crass as that sounds, it is the criterion that has designed our biology, including the human mind. We're not conscious of it, but it's all in there. So the ads would be exactly the kinds of ads you see now: Fortyish man looking for younger woman. Woman looking for financially secure man. These are euphemisms.

Playboy: Is there a reason men are attracted to younger women?

Wright: Men are unconsciously looking for fertile women. Youthfulness, of course, implies fertility.

Playboy: Is this why men sometimes leave their wives for younger women?

Wright: Yes, but it's not that they're obeying a desertion impulse. They're obeying a polygamous impulse. It's just that in our society polygamy is illegal, so they have to choose between wives.

Playboy: Do you think polygamy is more natural than monogamy?

Wright: Of the 1200 or so cultures that have been studied, all but 150 have been polygamous. When you look at male promiscuity in primates, there is a correlation between the sizes of the male and the female in the species. So we can use body size to tell a primate's polygamy rating--that is, how likely it would be that one male would have multiple mates. Male gorillas have much bigger bodies than female gorillas, and one male can have a harem of females. Our body size shows that, compared with other primates, we are mildly polygamous--more than gibbons, animals that have only one mate, but not as much as gorillas, which have many mates.

Playboy: What happens when mildly polygamous creatures like you and me attempt to adhere to monogamy?

Wright: That's the trick, isn't it? Our impulses are controllable. That's what makes us moral animals.

Playboy: But are you saying that it's inevitable that, like Jimmy Carter, we lust in our hearts?

Wright: Yes, though whether we should try to confine it to lusting in our hearts is itself an interesting question. It's unresolved. Is it a better strategy not to even look at women on the street, because that will only lead your mind in directions that aren't good for your marriage? Or is it better to go for it and get it out of your system?

Playboy: You've just given some men the excuse they've been looking for.

Wright: Theoretically perhaps, but it seems unlikely that it would be possible to get sex out of your system. In reality, the more sex a man gets, the more he wants. At the same time, there are some real psychological costs to repression. There are marriage counselors who make tons of money by convincing men that if they feel any kind of adulterous impulse it means something is wrong with their marriages. That's just not the case. It's normal for both men and women to feel disenchanted and even to feel extracurricular attractions. It's what you do with it that matters.

Playboy: But if monogamy is contrary to our nature, why should we fight the urge to stray?

Wright: If you have egalitarian political values, monogamy makes sense. Truly polygamous societies are very ugly. In a truly polygamous society, high-status men monopolize the sexual resources of women at the expense of low-status men. Because of this, there tends to be a lot of violence emanating from the low-status men. That's why we try to be monogamous, though we have a sort of de facto polygamy in our culture. It's manifested in serial monogamy--that is, men going from wife to wife. In this way, a high-status man who would gather many wives in a polygamous culture goes through a series of young wives--one at a time. Johnny Carson has had a series of young wives. A less fortunate guy somewhere is left womanless. This causes discontent. It's a fact that most violent crime is committed by unmarried men.

Playboy: Is that why men feel possessive toward their mates?

Wright: It's completely natural for men to treat women as property, though this does not mean that the inclination is good or beyond control. What O.J. Simpson is accused of doing isn't natural per se, but the impulse of jealous rage is. Jealous, violent rage is natural for a man. You can even argue that killing a wayward spouse, or at least killing the man she's sleeping with, could have had a genetic payoff during evolution. If O.J. killed anybody at all, it would have made more sense if he had killed only the man, the competitor, and physically punished the woman. If you kill her, any lessons she might learn from your violence won't be put to good use.

Playboy: Do any animals kill mates who stray?

Wright: Baboons physically keep their mates in line. But of course, none of this means that our culture should not take a stand and punish anyone who fails to control the impulse.

Playboy: You've explained why men fall for young women, but why do women respond to older men?

Wright: A woman needs two things to fulfill her genetic destiny: a man who can impregnate her and one who can care for her and her young. It makes sense for a woman to be attracted to a successful man who can provide for her. It's why women aren't interested in the kind of anonymous sex that men like. They have a stake in follow-through. It's why men like pornography in which the sex is explicit and anonymous, while women want emotional involvement.

Women do not often fantasize about having anonymous sex with a series of men. You're never going to find a culture where magazines such as Playgirl are more successful than magazines such as Playboy. You're never going to find a culture where most of the prostitutes are men. It boils down to the fact that women are designed to focus more exclusively on the quality of the mate than the quantity. Furthermore, they are designed to incorporate such things as emotional attachment into the calculus of quality. It can explain why a woman might cheat on her spouse.

Playboy: But you said women are the ones who want follow-through.

Wright: Yes, but it is possible that the way for a woman to get the best of both worlds is to get good genes from one man and investment in the children from another. We know that women who cheat are more likely to do so during ovulation, when they can get pregnant.

Playboy: They're screwing around to find good sperm stock?

Wright: Right, even though it's an unconscious motivation. And you can imagine other scenarios. A woman can imagine other scenarios. A woman can use sex to gain resources from a man. When that is the case, she may unconsciously have sex with a certain kind of man only when she's not ovulating. A female friend of mine once said she needed help from a guy to move some furniture. She said, "I could tell that part of the implicit deal was that I sleep with him," and she did. I thought, This doesn't make any sense. She was getting such a meager gain for surrendering this precious good--her egg. But then I realized that maybe she wasn't ovulating, and though she didn't understand that logic, that's exactly what happened. She fooled him.

Playboy: So you're saying that deception is a natural trait, too.

Wright: A great deal of our behavior developed just so we would get what we want, or at least what we need. The reason men need to feel that they can trust a mate, for instance, is that they cannot always be around to monitor her. But many primates are suspicious of their mates when they are away. A (continued on page 146) In Our Genes? (continued from page 66) study showed that if you haven't had sex with your wife for a week, your sperm count will depend on whether you've been able to monitor her during that week. If you've gone out of town, then after that week you will pump more sperm into her than if she had been by your side the whole time. That suggests that throughout evolution females have sometimes been unfaithful. You pump in more sperm because you are trying to make up for the possibility that she's storing another man's sperm--it's a counter weapon. The sperm are trying to nose one another out, and the more troops on your side, the better your chances. If you have no fear of your mate straying, you don't need to send in as many troops.

In primates, testicle size is a reflection of that situation: The larger the testicles, the more semen a species has. Female gibbons aren't promiscuous, so male gibbons have small testicles. Female chimps, on the other hand, are sex machines. The males have developed extremely large testicles so they can pump in as much sperm as possible in the hopes of being the one to impregnate her.

Playboy: And humans?

Wright: Our testicle size tells us that human females are mildly to moderately promiscuous.

Playboy: But both sexes don't merely feel lust. They also feel love.

Wright: Love is determined by evolution, too. A man's love for a woman does many things. It keeps him around during the period of her impregnation long enough for him to be sure he's the father of the offspring, in which case it makes sense for him to invest in the offspring. When he's infatuated, he spends all his time with her--he can't stand to be away from her. That means no other men will be near her. After the baby is born, his love for the woman helps keep him around to care for her so that she can care for the baby.

Playboy: Then why do people fall out of love?

Wright: It may be your genes' way of telling you to discard a mate. It's interesting that one common situation in which people fall out of love is when they have sex for a long time and, because of contraception, do not have children. During evolution, if a man had sex with a woman for a year and she didn't get pregnant, it meant that they were both wasting their time, because one of them wasn't fertile. It made perfect sense that one would sour on a mate after a lot of sex without offspring. I'm not advocating it, but the impulse may make sense.

Playboy: What is the cost of attempting to keep our natural impulses at bay?

Wright: The discrepancy between the environment we were designed to live in and the environment we live in accounts for a lot of suffering. There are many examples. The human mind was designed to live in small groups with people we have known for a long time, many of whom are related to us. In a modern environment, in which we live among people we don't know, it's a recipe for going nuts. Suburban housewives are in especially bad shape, and it is understandable that feminism gained momentum in the late Fifties and Sixties. The classic Fifties husband was living a life that wasn't that different from a hunter-gatherer, really. He went away, hung out with men, did his job, came back, said hi to the kids, loved them but wasn't with them all the time. The woman, on the other hand, was living nothing like the life she was designed to live, which was one where she had a job that was smoothly integrated with child-rearing and where she was with a large group of other women. But modern feminism has made it even more difficult for women.

Playboy: How?

Wright: At some point feminism adopted the dogma that men and women are by nature identical and that any observed differences between them are the result of cultural warping. It's ridiculous. You would not expect males and females in any species to be identical. The biology of reproduction steers the evolution of minds in different directions. The women I know who are mothers of young children and work full-time seem extremely conflicted about it. It's because we have not yet managed to integrate women's careers with child-rearing. There is an evolutionary basis for the fact that women can't go off to work and not feel guilty about it and men can.

Playboy: These days many couples share the parenting. Is that unnatural?

Wright: Yeah, and a lot of men are finding that they're ill-suited to the task-- they lose their tempers more quickly with kids, they get irritated more easily. After 15 minutes the joy goes out of it.

Playboy: Are you saying we should return to the traditional roles?

Wright: There's a certain amount of flexibility in human behavior. But for most people, trying to share parental responsibilities equally is a recipe for trouble.

Playboy: What is the effect on the children?

Wright: We don't know. My wife and I are putting our three-year-old daughter in preschool, and we're doing it in a very minimal way--a total of six hours a week. But even still, I wonder. Kids definitely weren't designed for that. When you take them to school on the first day and they freak out, that's no surprise. Kids weren't designed to suddenly, at three years old, run into all these kids they have never seen and be separated from their parents. It has to be traumatic. Whether it's worth getting over that hump is a hard question to settle empirically, but I worry.

Playboy: Basically, your argument is that women should stay home with their kids.

Wright: Not really. But child-rearing must be integrated into their careers. The problem with the feminist movement is that it's fighting human nature. It's like communism: You can be politically egalitarian, but you can't deny basic facts about human nature. Communism eventually collapsed by denying them.

Playboy: Are you suggesting that successful, childless career women who profess to be happy are lying?

Wright: No. But I think in a lot of cases if they had kids, their perspective would change radically.

Playboy: No wonder feminists hate you. You are basically saying that women are made for a single purpose, to make babies.

Wright: The impulse is inside somewhere. Certainly people are not designed consciously to want to get their genes into the next generation. During evolution there was no contraception, so people didn't have to think about it. If you had lustful impulses, you wound up with kids. And once you have kids, you're designed to grow infatuated with them. But you're not necessarily designed to anticipate that. Upon childbirth, women release a hormone called oxytocin, which helps bond them to their children. It's not that women who say they don't want children are in denial. I don't think women are designed to anticipate wanting children. But it's common for women, when they have children, to report that their careers just aren't as important anymore.

Playboy: If the natural impulse is to become infatuated with one's children, why are kids abused--and even killed-- by parents?

Wright: A lot of it turns out to make surprising sense in terms of evolutionary psychology. Two Canadian evolutionary psychologists, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, were puzzled by headlines about men killing their children. They looked into the data, and it turned out that often it was stepfathers killing their children. Not parents. A child is 80 to 100 times more likely to be killed if he or she is living with a stepparent. He or she is also considerably more likely to be physically abused.

Playboy: How does that make sense genetically?

Wright: A stepparent is not acting consciously, but that's the reason for an attitude that may range from indifference to the child's welfare to actual hostility. It makes no genetic sense to kill your child, but it does to kill a competitor's child. A male langur monkey, upon pairing up with a female, will try to kill her existing offspring. She'll fight him over it, but he'll try. It makes sense in that way. It would be interesting to see if a man who could closely monitor his wife for infidelity throughout the period when she got pregnant is later more devoted to the resulting children. You might imagine there would be a correlation; if there were, the feminists would die. It would lead to the idea that constraining a woman's freedom around the time of impregnation could help the welfare of the kids.

Playboy: Your theory explains violence toward children, but not sexual abuse. If lust is designed to perpetuate the gene pool, wouldn't lust toward one's child be detrimental?

Wright: Well, if a stepparent sexually abuses a girl who is 13 or 14, it makes sense. Any young woman who is approaching the age of fertility is a female with whom it makes strictly Darwinian sense to have sex.

Playboy: What about when it's not a stepparent but the biological father?

Wright: Well, it would be interesting to see if men who have those feelings toward a child also question their paternity, because there clearly is an incest diversion in nature.

Playboy: How do you explain sexual abuse of younger children, even infants?

Wright: I can't. Clearly there is a kind of evolved impulse that gets derailed and warped. That applies to many behaviors--to people actually going nuts. It's pathological even from a Darwinian perspective. But a lot of things that we call pathological aren't. Extreme violence from a stepparent may have developed because it is an unnatural situation for people. There is no precedent in evolution--no stepparents, no divorce--because a man's wanderlust, or his desire to acquire another mate, was satisfied through polygamy. That kept him in touch with his previous children, and it didn't turn the children over to another man.

Playboy: Why are there so many fatherless families in America if fathers have a stake in staying around and raising their children?

Wright: First of all, it makes Darwinian sense that if a woman cannot find a man to invest in her children, she will have children anyway. It would not make sense for women to respond to a shortage of devoted husbands by just giving up in the genetic sweepstakes altogether. They do the best they can.

Playboy: What about the men? What happens to the impulse to follow through with their part of the bargain?

Wright: Actually, the men who are leaving may not know who their kids are. They engage in what is in effect a situation of serial monogamy--it's just that they often don't get formally married. The ones who know who their kids are often don't have much to invest. That may be part of the impulse not to take on the responsibility.

Playboy: You indicated that low-status men won't find sex partners because of guys like Johnny Carson.

Wright: The black underclass and middle-upper-class white societies are distinct populations; it's not like Johnny Carson snatched a woman from the clutches of an underclass black man. There isn't much interchange of women between those groups. The way to analyze it would be within a discrete population. Let's look at an underclass neighborhood and see who's winning by virtue of the high degree of what is effectively polygamy. I think you'll find that it's the high-status guy with the car and the nice clothes who gets the best of it. With any distinct world, the guy on the bottom of the ladder is not doing so well.

Playboy: Does that also explain all the deadbeat dads? Have they gone off in search of other families?

Wright: They are investing their resources elsewhere, though maybe not in kids. They are probably investing them in sexual opportunities that could lead to kids.

It's important to remember, though, that in the environment of evolution, you did not have to leave your children to go with a new wife. You didn't have to make that choice.

Playboy: So it's not just that men are naturally pigs--

Wright: Depending on how you view it. And, by the way, you could say that when women are piggish, they are doozies, even though they're less often pigs. Cuckolding a man is, in Darwinian terms, the greatest catastrophe that can befall him, one that causes extreme anguish upon discovery.

Playboy: Is that what jealousy is all about?

Wright: Oh yeah. It's also the reason that jealousy differs between men and women. What most threatens a man's genes is sexual infidelity on the part of the woman. That's why men are less possessive of a woman as she ages. You don't find men staying up at night wondering how their postmenopausal wives are spending their time. There may be some residual jealousy, but it's been shown that men most fiercely guard young, highly fertile women.

On the other hand, what most threatens a woman's genes is emotional infidelity--or the budding attachment of a husband to another woman, which may signal a future diversion of resources away from the first wife's children. Men are most outraged by strictly sexual infidelity and find it very hard to forgive a mate. Women don't like sexual infidelity in their mates, though they find it much easier to forgive. But not emotional infidelity. When a man is emotionally going toward another woman, many women are happy to forgive his sexual infidelity whenever the guy's willing to be forgiven. It's tragic when you see a woman try to win a man back even though he's complete scum.

Playboy: But it certainly happens the other way around, doesn't it?

Wright: It happens less often. If it's a case of sexual infidelity, a man is less inclined than a woman to want to win back a mate. Presumably, it's a sign that he can never again be confident that she will be carrying his genes. If he does win her back, you will probably find he's going to monitor her more closely. We have reason to believe that if O.J. Simpson had won his wife back, he would not have thereafter followed a laissez-faire policy in terms of how she spent her evenings.

Playboy: Does evolutionary psychology explain why a guy is attracted to a particular woman?

Wright: It depends on whether he's interested in a long-term relationship or just sex. If it's a long-term relationship, there are factors such as trust, worthiness and the ability to be a good parent.

Playboy: What if it's just sex?

Wright: If it's for sex, the fact that she's a member of our species and isn't male is enough--especially if she is a young and robust specimen.

Playboy: How do we know who would make good mothers for our children?

Wright: We don't know, though there are theories. One of the theories is that we choose people who are in some ways similar to us, perhaps even related. Although mating with a close relative is likely to lead to genetic pathology, when you get beyond close relatives it may be efficient to mate with someone relatively close to us--it means that your kids will have slightly more of your genes than they otherwise would. Now that we live in a much larger world than the ones in which our ancestors lived, it may be more likely that we would be attracted to people who aren't related to us but who trigger the same impulses. You can imagine situations that psychologists would explain differently--where a woman is attracted to a man who somewhat resembles her father. It may be why people often seem to be attracted to people who look like themselves. It may even explain why they're attracted to people who are temperamentally like their parents. Of course, the attraction depends on whether one is looking for sex or for a mate.

Playboy: How do we respond differently depending on what we're looking for?

Wright: That's where the Madonnawhore complex comes from. Men dichotomize between women they want to have sex with and women they might fall in love with. What one thing seems to put women in the sex-only category? A reputation for extreme promiscuity. Although we like to have sex with those women, we don't often want to marry them. The obvious Darwinian reason is that extremely promiscuous women make very bad wives in genetic terms, because you may spend your life rearing kids who may not have your genes. It may explain why men often lose interest in a woman who has sex with them on the first date. If you see that as part of her general pattern, then you think, Whoa, I don't like a woman who can't control herself around men, not as a wife, anyway. It may be an innate part of the male mind. Therefore, women should listen to their mothers: He won't respect you in the morning.

Playboy: The recent University of Chicago sex survey of Americans contradicts the picture you paint. It says that 94 percent of married people surveyed said they had been faithful the previous year.

Wright: First of all, a lot of faithful spouses probably didn't have a choice in the matter. They didn't face any easy opportunities to be unfaithful. But it also may be that people are admirably imposing moral order on their lives. It may be that they are finally realizing that infidelity often leads to trouble for the people they love, including their kids. They may have learned that you're kidding yourself if you think you're going to do it only once. Sex in general is designed to be addictive, and that would include infidelity.

Playboy: What impact have sexually transmitted diseases, especially AIDS, had on people's behavior?

Wright: There could be an evolutionary response to these diseases, but there hasn't been enough time. Therefore, we have to fight it culturally, and we do. You can see that diseases certainly have an impact on behavior.

Playboy: What about the impact of contraception?

Wright: It short-circuits the Darwinian logic, but it doesn't change the impulse much. Lust is still lust.

Playboy: But doesn't contraception make it safer for men and women to have sex outside, of a stable relationship?

Wright: Maybe, but it may also lead to a kind of absurd perspective on life: men feverishly looking for adulterous opportunities because of lustful impulses to get their genes into the next generation, but the logic is derailed by contraception.

Playboy: How does evolutionary biology explain other conditions, including low self-esteem and depression?

Wright: Minor depression is your genes' way of getting you to change course in life. But in a modern environment, lacking a natural social and familial network, a productive depression can slide into an extreme depression.

Playboy: Well, there's always Prozac.

Wright: There's debate over whether Prozac does people a disservice. I have not seen the evidence that it does, but the fear is that it will alter behavior that makes sense. In a company, for instance, you'll be interrupting your boss very self-confidently and eventually get fired. Variable self-esteem seems to have evolved as a way for people to negotiate status hierarchies--we are designed to live in a status hierarchy.

Playboy: Does that mean that some people in the corporate world eventually accept that they're not going to be the boss because they're not good enough?

Wright: In a sense. There's a point after which aspiring to greater things is a waste of time. The psychological manifestation would be low self-esteem, and one of the biological corollaries of that seems to be your serotonin level. That's what Prozac fiddles with. It may also be a good thing. It's probably good for a lot of people who were too acutely sensitive to social feedback to begin with.

Playboy: Are corporate cultures ruled by Darwinian logic, too? Is that what the pecking order is all about?

Wright: Yes. I think men often pursue that more fiercely than women do. That makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms because men have historically competed over the scarcer sexual resource, women. You see this in chimps. In the process men make fools of themselves. For this reason, you could argue that an enlightened corporation might try to push women toward the top because women are less likely to be ruthlessly self-serving. Men often sacrifice the interests of their employer to their own self-interest. Mergers and takeovers are good examples: People like Barry Diller and his rivals wage testosterone battles and waste huge amounts of resources. Women are less likely to get into these ego wars.

Playboy: Aren't women designed to compete with one another for the men, if nothing else?

Wright: Yes, they are, but not so singlemindedly. They are innately more concerned with nurturing. It's the way they ensure that their genes survive.

Playboy: If it's all about passing on our genes, why has natural selection determined that a percentage of the population will be homosexual?

Wright: That's a little bit of a mystery. Bisexuality isn't so much a mystery. Chimps are bisexual. Their bisexuality seems to be a form of social bonding, and their heterosexuality is, of course, vital in Darwinian terms.

Playboy: Why would male bonding involve a sexual attraction?

Wright: Because of our evolution, males find ejaculation to be an inherently gratifying act. That could be why men are aroused by whatever could lead to ejaculation, including a male-male relationship.

Playboy: And does that also explain masturbation?

Wright: Right. The impulse can be diverted to masturbation or bisexuality. Prison is a good example: Men will settle for what they can find because the male sexual impulse is so strong and indiscriminate. Homosexuality might be explained in that all humans may have latent bisexual tendencies, but for most people they never get aroused. Perhaps for some, the bisexual part gets aroused and the heterosexual part gets subdued. That's a possibility. There are more farfetched explanations, but I really don't think there are any good theories about homosexuality.

Playboy: If evolutionary psychology cannot explain homosexuality, perhaps it is flawed in other important ways.

Wright: We may not understand the full picture. It could be any number of things. It may be explained by a social phenomenon that we don't understand.

Playboy: What does evolutionary psychology tell us about gays serving in the military?

Wright: There are no obvious Darwinian reasons that gays shouldn't be in the military. There are, however, reasons for excluding women. You may occasionally find a woman who would make a great fighter, but women aren't designed to fight the way men are. The fact is, men are designed to fight over women. Putting one or two reasonably attractive women in the midst of a hundred men is a fairly reliable way to make it harder to achieve cohesion. I'm not saying that it settles the debate of women in the military, but let's be honest about the cost. We tend to move forward without examining the cost, and as a result we find ourselves in trouble.

Playboy: Why fight at all? If you get killed, your genes certainly won't be passed along.

Wright: We do a lot of things that may be destructive to the species. In fact, there are evolutionary bases for organized group aggression. It's a dangerous vestige of evolution, particularly in a world with nuclear weapons. Men fight because, on balance, fighting has been good for the genes. In some cases, warfare was a way to obtain mates. In others, it was survival--to win crucial resources. You can still find societies such as the Yanomamo in South America in which the men raid other groups and abduct the women and keep them. You hear about rapes in the course of war. Some of it may just be the pursuit of females by the biggest male in the hierarchy, and that sometimes means warring on another hierarchy. Once you understand evolutionary psychology it can change the way you look at life--at your own behavior and everyone else's.

Playboy: Change it how?

Wright: It's as engrossing and encompassing a worldview as a religion, though it differs from a religion in that its tenets are susceptible to scientific analysis. I find it amazing that we turned out as well as we did.

Playboy: What would you expect?

Wright: Though we tend to deploy our consciences in a self-interested fashion, we don't always and we don't have to. If the whole idea is to forward your own genes, why would we have attributes such as compassion? If you were going to try to anticipate evolution, you would probably not predict that an animal would be capable of altruism and guilt; you would not predict that those animals would evolve. It's a testament to human malleability that even the strongest impulses can be subdued by a combination of legal and moral sanctions. This compels us to have our moral and legal norms. What happens to a man who becomes known as a wife-beater? In almost all sectors of society he loses status. And men pursue their social status as ardently as they pursue women. The primary tool of effective moral systems is a person's social status. If a man walks out on his family, he is ostracized. That's the way you keep men from walking out on their families. A robust moral system is a harsh moral system.

Playboy: Can we assume that we will adapt to the society that we have created--that the human mind in the future will be adapted to monogamy, for instance?

Wright: There's no hope. We're stuck with these minds for millennia. But maybe it's good. If we were evolving rapidly, it would probably be toward an even worse human nature. Urban anonymity gives you chances to be subtly deceitful in ways that one could not have been in a hunter-gatherer society--and in ways that people still usually aren't. We don't go around taking every opportunity to cheat. If we evolve long enough in an urban environment, we probably will. We should be happy we're not so bad after all.

The problem with the feminist movement is that it's fighting human nature. It's like communism.