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Key points
- Fathers compete less with their daughters than they compete with their sons.
- The reason is Darwinian: a man can have children by many women; a woman usually needs only one man.
- Historical evidence backs that up: fathers come in conflict with their sons, and the winners collect women.
- Evidence from myths, in Hesiod and Homer and other authors, is consistent: fathers eat their own sons, or swallow their mothers.
One day in or around the 8th century before the common era, Hesiod wrote his Theogony, about the births of the gods. In the beginning, there were a few nasty fathers. Uranus, the sky god, had his sons hidden in a secret place inside of their earth mother. So with a scimitar provided by Gaia, their youngest son, Cronos, castrated his father. “Eagerly he harvested his father’s genitals, and threw them off.”
Cronos went on to swallow his own sons as soon as they were born. Their mother Rhea laid them one by one across her lap, but their father grabbed them, and gulped them down. For the usual reason. “He had in mind that no proud son of heaven should hold alpha status among the gods, except himself.”
In an already classic paper from the 21st century of our own era, Rebecca Sear and Ruth Mace asked the question: “Who keeps children alive?” They looked at the evidence from 45 societies, historical and contemporary, and found that, overall, maternal relatives are more helpful than paternal relatives are. Child survival is invariably affected by the loss of a mother; but in most cases, the loss of a father has little or no effect. In many cases, the loss of a grandparent is more important. Mothers’ mothers can be especially helpful, and fathers’ mothers occasionally are. Fathers’ fathers, and fathers themselves, often are not.
In Gambia and Malawi, and among the Kipsigis of Kenya and Tsimane of Bolivia, fathers have no measurable effects on their infants’ survival. And in Gambia and Malawi, among the Kipsigis of Kenya and Oromo of Ethiopia, neither maternal nor paternal grandfathers help. Older sisters and brothers better an infant’s prospects in a number of cultures. And a mother is indispensable.
The most recent, most detailed, most collaborative work backs that up. Over the last couple of decades, the anthropologist Eckart Voland and colleagues have studied the demography of the Krummhörn, a group of German farmers and laborers. Their database, the Ortssippenbücher, or local clan registers, reconstructed from 18th and 19th-century tax lists and parish records, includes information on 34,708 families. And those data show that mortality in the first month of life was about twice as high after the loss of a mother, than after the loss of a father. Across age categories, fatherless children did better than motherless ones.
So it went for 18th and 19th- century Finnish fishermen and farmers. The biologist Virpi Lummaa, with help from another group of coworkers, has spent years sorting through Finnish parish registers, with information on over 100,000 fishermen and farmers spanning up to 15 generations. And as it turns out, in early modern Finland, as in early modern Germany, women whose mothers were around to help left more descendants than mothers without. Having an older brother or sister could be helpful, as well. But infants with coresident grandfathers had higher mortality than infants whose grandfathers lived out.
Several centuries after Hesiod wrote his Theogony, Alexander, the great Macedonian prince, succeeded his father Philip II and marched toward the East. He invaded Persia in 334 BCE, and he invaded India 8 years later. At the age of 33, he died in a Babylonian palace, but by then had collected 365 traveling companions, all women. There were suspicions that Alexander had murdered his father. Philip was assassinated after he married Eurydice, his youngest wife. That upset Olympias, his older wife. And it upset her son Alexander, who asked: “What, do you take me for a bastard?” In Plutarch's words: “The disorders in his household, due to the fact that his marriages and amours carried into the kingdom the infection, as it were, which reigned in the women's apartments, produced many grounds of offense and great quarrels between father and son, and these the bad temper of Olympias, who was a jealous and sullen woman, made still greater, since she spurred Alexander on.” Fathers are often ambivalent about their sons.
Mothers tend to be all in. More than a millennium after Alexander swept across Asia, in 1660 CE, Charles II succeeded Charles I, and became the restored king of England. A decade earlier, after the civil wars were over, his father had been decapitated at Whitehall on parliamentary orders. His mother, Henrietta Maria, had stayed home in Paris. She abandoned her husband to his scaffold, but nurtured her oldest son. Charles II took after his cousin, Louis XIV, le Roi Soleil, the sun king of France. Months after his father was executed, the brown, beautiful, bold but insipid Lucy Walter presented him with a son; and a year later there was another bastard. To the diarist and eventual president of the Royal Society, Samuel Pepys: “The king hath many bastard children that are known and owned.” And to Philibert, the count of Gramont: “He was the wittiest man in the world and he was king: these are no mean qualifications.”
Men often do fabulous things for their children. They carry them and comfort them, they protect and provide for them. They build empires on their behalf. But they’re not always eager to give those empires up.
For reasons Darwin and his followers have thought obvious, fathers often compete with their sons. As he put it in the sequel to his 1859 classic On the Origin of Species, his 1871 book on Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man: “Women are the constant cause of war both between members of the same tribe and between distinct tribes. So no doubt it was in ancient times.” Boys, like their progenitors, covet wives, and women on the side.
Across cultures, fathers are more polygamous than mothers. Men are more likely than women to parent more than one family: multiple paternity is more common than multiple maternity. Fathers’ loyalties are more often divided. Especially toward sons.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, after Cronos castrates his father, his own youngest son Zeus gets the better of him. Zeus frees his brothers; then, by craft and power, he conquers his father. “With violence and force, he drove him out.” The thunder god makes himself king of gods and men. And has affairs with many women, both mortal and divine.
Sons could be dangerous. And so could their fathers.
References
Chapman, Simon et al. 2023. Grandparental co-residence and grandchild survival. Behavioral Ecology, in press.
Betzig, Laura. 2020. Evolution and history. In Sage Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. T. Shackelford and V. Weeks-Shackelford, chapter 4. New York: Sage.
Betzig, Laura. 2015. The French connection: Sex and the English revolution. In T. Schackleford and R. Hansen, eds., pp. 79-98. The Evolution of Sexuality. New York: Springer.
Sear, Rebecca and Ruth Mace. 2008. Who keeps children alive? A review of the effects of kin on child survival. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29: 1-18.
