I have recently come across several books that provide detailed accounts of the lives, cultures, and idiosyncrasies of various animal species. Several of these explicitly seek to promote the notion that we can learn something about ourselves by studying animals and their societies. That is not such a wild hypothesis, especially if we limit comparisons to mammals. We are all species with a shared evolutionary history, having the same body parts, and the same body chemistry. The comparison can be refined by restricting comparison to just primates, or even to apes, or perhaps just to chimpanzees and bonobos, our evolutionary cousins. If common traits appear in a number of related species, then those traits are likely to have a biological component. This has been a productive pursuit leading to interesting insights. The most recent is the subject of this article.
Carl Safina produced the book Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. His intent is to imprint in the readers’ brains the realization that complex animals, including humans, require a long maturation period before they learn how to exist as a member of their species. Each must learn how and what to eat, who is a danger and who isn’t, how to get along with members of their own sex, how to get along with members of the opposite sex, and what are the cultural rules of their society. Learning about how animals learn is obviously a highly relevant pursuit. In discussing this topic Safina provided the following intriguing observation.
“…there was a pattern: juvenile females were twice as likely to acquire the new skill as juvenile males or mature females. Least likely of all to learn the new trick: adult males. Across a wide swath of animals, the young, especially young females, appear to be the best learners (probably because young females generally divert less time to squabbling for dominance).
A middle-aged human teacher, sandwiched between a generation of boys and girls and a generation of aging parents, might read that statement and conclude it is generally consistent with their experience. Safina’s claim raises a number of questions. Is there a reason why quicker learning for females provides an evolutionary advantage? Is there a reason why slower learning for males is not an evolutionary disadvantage? Can this learning pattern be recognized in human societies?
Safina’s parenthetic comment provides a clue as to why young males and females are different: they generally have different roles in their societies, each with different learning requirements. The most fundamental evolutionary demand is that of reproduction. The nurturance of offspring is almost always the responsibility of the female. The male’s most fundamental responsibility is merely to provide sperm. In Of Chimps and Men: Males—What Are They Good For?, this quote from the female anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was collected.
“To put men in perspective....across all 5,400 or so species of mammals in the world. In the majority of them fathers do remarkably little beyond stake out territories, compete with other males, and mate with females. With outlandish auditory and visual displays which often entail specially evolved weaponry, bellowing, barking, or roaring, males engage in fierce contests to route their competitors. Then ‘slam bam thank you ma’am’ and the inseminator is off. Male caretaking is found in only a fraction of mammals. By comparison, males in the order Primates stand out as paragons of nurturing, unusual for how much protection and even direct care of young they provide.”
The distribution of sperm to a female is not a simple task for a male. There is a competition with other sperm-carrying males for access to any female, and then there is often the need to convince the female to be receptive to their approach. These tasks produce cognitive demands on males, but ones different from those of the females. Given that males are capable of disseminating sperm to a number of females, the individual female is more important to evolution than the individual male. Nature wishes the female to learn all that it is necessary to nurture offspring by the time they become fertile. If the male takes a little longer to learn what is necessary for it to compete for females there are plenty of other males around. That consideration and the greater responsibilities of females for continuation of the species suggests that it would not be surprising if females evolved a more efficient learning capability
Safina suggests that male competition is a factor in their ability to learn, not necessarily in their ultimate cognitive capabilities. Hrdy suggests that primates have evolved into species where males have the capability and, at least occasionally, the interest in assisting in caring for infants. Does this aspect of primates tell us something about ourselves. Safina claims that human evolution has produced a species that most closely resembles that of the chimpanzee.
“We aren’t ‘like apes.’ We are like chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are obsessed with dominance and status within their group; we are obsessed with dominance and status within our group. Chimpanzees oppress within their group; we oppress within our group. Chimpanzee males may turn on their friends and beat their mates; human males may turn on their friends and beat their mates. Chimpanzees and males are the only two ape species stuck dealing with familiar males as dangerous. A gender that frequently creates lethal violence within our own communities makes chimpanzees and humans simply bizarre among group-living animals. Chimpanzees don’t create a safe space; they create a stressful, tension-bound, politically encumbered social world for themselves to inhabit. Which is what we do. This behavioral package exists only in chimpanzees and humans.”
Frans de Waal provides insight into primate characteristics in his book Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist. He warns us that discerning differences in cognitive functioning between males and females is complicated because there are brain differences that come from genetics and there are brain differences that come from lived experience. Nevertheless, there are clear differences in males and females from birth, with each tending towards activities, playing modes, that are part of preparing for their future responsibilities. Male chimps seem immediately to anticipate competing with other males, both physically and mentally.
“I am always astonished at the inexhaustible energy with which young male apes romp around, jump up and down things, and go at each other, rolling over the ground with big laughing faces while they rip each other apart. Known as rough and tumble play, it’s mostly fake assaults, wrestling, pushing, shoving, slapping, and gnawing on each other’s limbs while laughing.”
Male chimps are infamous for their fiercely competitive male hierarchies. Females will form hierarchies as well, but they do it more efficiently without the continuous tension, leaving them to concentrate on their main function.
“Among primates, the orientation to vulnerable newborns and their substitutes, such as dolls or logs, is undoubtedly part of biology and more typical of females than males.”
“Young primate females are besotted with infants…Young females surround a new mother and try to get close to her infant. They groom the mother and—if they are lucky—get to touch and inspect the infant…Females follow the mother wherever she goes. They may play with the newborn and carry it if the mother lets them, which serves as a preparation for the moment when they get their own progeny.”
Male primates, including chimpanzees have demonstrated the tendency to nurture infants, but usually only when a mother is no longer available. Otherwise, competition with other males is the constant concern. Similarly for females, raising offspring is a constant, lifelong task. Both biology and culture suggest that there are likely differences in the capabilities and interests in learning between males and females.
Do these tendencies translate to humans. Richard V. Reeves provides an interesting perspective on male/female differences in an article for The Atlantic: Redshirt the Boys: Why boys should start school a year later than girls. The term “redshirting” refers to the practice of having a young athlete, usually a freshman at a college, sit out a year so he/she can gain another year of physical maturation before competing. This is normally for sports that demand considerable physical strength.
The basis for Reeves claim is the now well-known fact that males’ brain development occurs more slowly than that of females. At the age of five or six, girls are more ready to sit and listen to a teacher than a boy who will soon start looking out the window wishing he was outside playing (mostly some form of competition with other boys). This sounds a lot like Safina’s claim for male animals in general. And as we shall see, Reeves claims that males don’t seem to ever catch up, at least not through tertiary formal schooling.
“…the fact that boys mature later than girls is one known to every parent, and certainly to every teacher. According to a Rand survey, teachers are three times more likely to delay entry for their own sons than their own daughters. The maturity gap is now demonstrated conclusively by neuroscience: Brain development follows a different trajectory for boys than it does for girls. But this fact is entirely ignored in broader education policy, even as boys fall further behind girls in the classroom.”
“On almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates. The trend is so pronounced that it can result only from structural problems. Affluent parents and elite schools are tackling the issue by giving boys more time. But in fact it is boys from poorer backgrounds who struggle the most in the classroom, and these boys, who could benefit most from the gift of time, are the ones least likely to receive it. Public schools usually follow an industrial model, enrolling children automatically based on their birth date. Administrators in the public system rarely have the luxury of conversations with parents about school readiness.”
Reeves points to noncognitive factors such as diminished social and emotional controls in boys compared to girls to explain the difference in performance. In short, girls are better able to focus on the task at hand rather than having their minds wander off topic
“The problem of self-regulation is much more severe for boys than for girls. Flooded with testosterone, which drives up dopamine activity, teenage boys are more inclined to take risks and seek short-term rewards than girls are. Meanwhile, the parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, and future orientation are mostly in the prefrontal cortex—the so-called CEO of the brain—which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.”
“Other relevant centers of the brain follow suit. The cerebellum, for example, plays a role in ‘emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,’ according to Gokcen Akyurek, an expert on executive functioning at Hacettepe University, in Turkey. It reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys.”
The subject here is not the problems of school bias that haunt boys. The goal was to evaluate whether humans and other animals are all subject to similar biological factors that affect their development. As far as evolution is concerned, females are the gender that has the most responsibility for the continuation of a species and natural selection made sure they had the attributes necessary to perform that critical function.
Humans, for very good reasons, are trying to arrive at
societies in which males and females can be considered essentially equal. For thousands of years men had convinced
themselves that women were less capable and should be denied academic
opportunities. The elimination of bias
against females seems to be demonstrating that females are the better learners,
and it is the males who may need some form of affirmative action. Society will just have to learn how to deal
with this.
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