Polygyny and Anteaters

Posted by jns on 31 August 2005

Two selections from today’s reading in Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004), mostly to confound fundamentalists and creationists:

The Ethnographic Atlas of G.P. Murdock, published in 1967, is a brave compilation. It lists particulars of 849 human societies, surveyed all over the world. From it we might hope to count numbers of societies that permit harems versus numbers that enforce monogamy. The problem with counting societies is that it is seldom obvious where to draw lines, or what to count as independent. This makes it hard to do proper statistics. Nevertheless, the atlas does its best. Of those 849 societies, 137 (about 16 per cent) are monogamous, four (less than one per cent) are polyandrous [females having more than one male partner], and a massive 83 per cent (708) are polygynous (males can have more than one wife). The 708 polygynous societies are divided about equally into those where polygyny is permitted by the rules of the society but rare in practice, and those where it is the norm. [p 208]

The anteaters don’t seem to have made it into North America, but three genera survive in South America, and very unusual mammals they are. They have no teeth at all and the skull, especially in the case of Myrmecophaga, the large gound-dwelling anteater, has become little more than a long, curved tube, a kind of straw for imbibing ants and termites which are chivvied out of their nests by means of a long sticky tongue. And let me tell you something amazing about them. Most mammals, like us, secrete hydrochloric acid[*] into our stomachs to aid digestion, but South American anteaters don’t. Instead, they rely upon the formic acid from the ants that they eat. This is typical of the opportunism of natural selection. [p. 215]

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^*In particular, I want to draw towards this point the attention of those Splenda alarmists who are so concerned that a tightly bound chlorine atom in the sweetner is going to get loose, shoot through their bodies, and mutate them out of existence. The human body, to which salt (sodium + chlorine, recall) is essential and hydrochloric acid is in everyday use, is rather adept at dealing with a chlorine radical should it actually manage to get loose.