A New Form of Lit. Analysis

Hi all,

My local paper reprinted the following from the NY Times this morning. It
seems a new form of literary analysis has arrived to tell us all the obvious.
And it explains why I'm not getting enough action.

Enjoy,

--John

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For a Good Time, Well, Don't Call Dad

December 2, 2003
 By MARY DUENWALD

Sir Walter Scott was an author, not an evolutionary
theorist. He wrote his poems and historical novels 40 years
before Charles Darwin described the process of evolution -
and well over a century before scientists began in earnest
to apply principles of natural selection to the study of
human nature.

Yet Scott, a 19th-century writer, apparently shared with
modern evolutionary scientists the general notion that men
tend to follow two basic mating strategies.

The new research is part of the fledgling field of
Darwinian literary studies, in which scholars try to draw
connections between literature and evolutionary science.

According to a new study, Scott's dark heroes, rebellious
and promiscuous, and his proper heroes, law-abiding and
monogamous, reflect the two types of men scientists
recognize by the kinds of relationships they have with
women: cads and dads.

In the study, 257 women in college were asked to read
passages from Scott's novels. Each read a paragraph
describing a dark hero and one describing a proper hero.
Then the women were asked which type of man they would
prefer for a relationship.

As predicted by the cad-dad theory of human mating
strategies, the women preferred the proper heroes for
long-term unions. When asked which character they would
like to see their future daughters choose, they also
selected proper heroes. But when asked who appealed to them
most for short-term affairs, the women turned to the dark
heroes - the handsome, passionate and daring cads.

"These 21st-century female college students could
understand mating strategies intuitively," even when they
were described in dated language, said Dr. Daniel J.
Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of
Michigan's Institute for Social Research, who led the
study. It is published in the fall 2003 issue of the
journal Human Nature.

Finding a dichotomy between the two male types in Romantic
novels two centuries old informs both evolutionary science
and literary studies, Dr. Kruger said. It demonstrates that
the distinction between long-term and short-term mating
strategies is instinctive, and it gives literary scholars a
new way of examining old writings.

Men and women, playing off each other, use long-and
short-term thinking, and sometimes a mixture, in picking
partners, Dr. Kruger said. Women recognize the kind of men
who pursue short-term affairs, he said. They fit the
description of George Staunton in Scott's "The Heart of
Midlothian," who is handsome, daring and "unconstrained,"
and who displays "the abrupt demeanor, the occasionally
harsh, yet studiously subdued tone of voice." Such dark
heroes in Romantic literature, Dr. Kruger said, are
typically single and promiscuous.

The title character of "Waverley" illustrates the dad.
Waverley is in the army but shows little interest in
adventure. One friend says of him, "I will tell you where
he will be at home and in his place - in the quiet circle
of domestic happiness, lettered indolence and elegant
enjoyments of his family's estate." These proper heroes are
typically kind and altruistic and prone to tender emotions,
like love and melancholy.

Cad and dad strategies are both adaptive, from an
evolutionary perspective, Dr. Kruger said. The cad approach
enables a man to father many children, while the dad
approach ensures the children a man has will thrive.

Women get an obvious payoff from pursuing a long-term
relationship: help in rearing children. But they also
benefit from brief flings, said Patricia Draper, a
professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska who
in the 1980's was among the early scientists to describe
the cad-dad split. Women may not be as free as men to opt
out of their parental duties, but they still can have more
than one sexual partner, Ms. Draper said, and that allows
them to mix genes with sexually appealing cads.

"In some societies where there is little male investment in
parenting, a women's best strategy may be to find the
biggest, toughest, most attractive fellow out there," Ms.
Draper said. That way, a woman may end up with a "sexy son"
who, in turn, will successfully mate and have children.

Women may also gain material advantages from short-term
relationships, said Dr. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist
at the University of Utah who has written papers on the
topic with Ms. Draper. "The sexy son notion is plausible,"
he said, "but what females may also get from a short-term
affair is a new pair of shoes."

That both men and women have the inclination to engage in
short-term flings indicates how adaptive the behavior is,
Ms. Draper said, because men and women are very sensitive
to infidelity. "Men kill women who are unfaithful," Ms.
Draper said. And, she said, "women are sometimes driven to
murderous rage, too," citing the Greek tragedy of Medea,
who becomes enraged at Jason's infidelity and slaughters
their children.

Evolutionary theorists see parallels between the human
situation and that of other species, when the male and
female parents take care of the offspring. Female warblers,
robins and bluebirds, for example, engage in what
scientists call "extra-pair copulations," so that in many
cases the nestlings' biological fathers are not the
mothers' parent partners, said Dr. David Barash, a
zoologist at the University of Washington who has studied
the mating behavior of mountain bluebirds.

Some evidence suggests that when female birds engage in
extra-pair copulations, their choice of male is based on
the bird's sexual attractiveness, Dr. Barash said. Female
bluethroats, a Eurasian species, for example, will have sex
with males whose throats are an especially iridescent shade
of blue. And female barn swallows are drawn to males whose
tail feathers are deeply forked.

Those barn swallows with appealing tail cleavage also tend
to be less attentive as fathers than other males, Dr.
Barash said. "The payoff, to a female, of producing sexy
sons, via a cad, makes up for the cost of being stuck with
a comparatively deadbeat dad," he said.

Such females, if they are found out, pay a high price for
their infidelity, Dr. Barash said. "If a male bird
encounters his female in close proximity to another male at
the time of breeding, almost inevitably what happens is
that the male stops paying child support, essentially.
He'll stop investing in the offspring," Dr. Barash said.

But if they can get away with it, these females gain the
advantage of mixing their genes with those of highly
adaptive males, he said. "The optimum reproductive strategy
for females seems to have been and still is to mate with a
male who will invest in your offspring, but keep your eyes
open for one whose genes will interact well with your own,"
Dr. Barash said.

The concept of short-term and long-term mating strategies
in humans is nothing new, as 19th-century literature
attests.

"Bodice rippers, for centuries, have made a profit off this
sort of distinction," said Dr. Marlene Zuk, a biology
professor at the University of California at Riverside.
"Nice guys have been complaining that women don't want to
have sex with them for a long time. We've heard this."

She questioned whether it was scientifically useful to
identify the cad and dad types in literature.

"Looking at literature isn't going to let us advance
evolutionary theory," Dr. Zuk said. "You're just describing
what you're seeing. You're not testing a hypothesis."

Dr. Joseph Carroll, an English professor at the University
of Missouri at St. Louis and a proponent of Darwinian
literary analysis, argued that the study of Scott's heroes
goes beyond confirming the cad-dad mating strategy. "It
illuminates it and illustrates it," he said. "It gives you
a more subtle and nuanced feel for the whole thing."

Dr. E. Mavis Hetherington, emeritus professor of psychology
at the University of North Carolina, who studies
contemporary marriage and divorce, said the study affirmed
what was already known.

"Are you surprised that women are attracted to cads?" she
asked. "You wouldn't go out of your way to marry a cad, but
if you had a little fling with him, it might be fun and
exciting. He's probably a sensation-seeker, so you'd be
going off to Mexico or going on ski trips or going to watch
the bulls run at Pamplona."

But affairs can be disruptive. "Women are much more
cautious than men about getting involved in them," Dr.
Hetherington said. "And when they do, it's much more likely
to lead to the breakup of a marriage."

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Received on Tue Dec 9 10:01:28 2003