Early Origins

While standard social sciences focus on social causation, research shows that 30%—50% of who we are is due to our genetic ancestors. Obviously, our individual qualities arise from a mix of genetic and social contributions.

Opposites as Equals authors use evolutionary psychology to soften the battle of the sexes

In the book Opposites as Equals, the authors use evolutionary principles to analyze the ongoing battle of the sexes and to explore ways to compromise and reconcile. The importance of female choice in mate selection should be of no surprise.

For instance, research shows that women are more insistent in personal arguments while men tend to concede, placate, or withdraw. Insistence is sensible for women, to test the strength of a commitment, while a reluctance to offend is a more viable tactic for men, who must rely on women to transport their genes into the next generation.

The authors identify chivalrous tendencies to support women against offending men, whereas men are expected to take care of themselves. The man who supports women improves his chances of mating, whereas a man who stands against women lowers his chances. So we accept women who express their righteous grievances against men, while we scorn men who openly berate women. The result is that we consider only one side of our many highly sensitive gender controversies.

Equality benefits relationships. Opposites as Equals advocates open and equal participation as a means to soften the escalating contentiousness between men and women.

Intermediate Fathers

Gibbons, also known as small apes or lesser apes, are best known for their breathtaking acrobatics a hundred feet high or more up in the trees. An adult gibbon can swing from branch to branch at a speedy 35 miles per hour, and can soar as far as 50 feet in the air as he swings from one tree to another. Gibbons can do almost everything but actually fly.

Gibbons mate for life, and a family consists of a bonded adult pair and their juvenile offspring. The families use hooting calls and menacing gestures to announce their presence and to warn trespassers away from their precious fruit trees, with the adult pair standing to gether and youngsters sometimes joining in. The females carry the infants and feed and tend to them, while the males seem to have no further family responsibilities past protecting their territory. The males gain from the continuing mating opportunities, and the bonded pair provides improved protection for the youngsters.

Pair bonding occurs infrequently among primates, in about six percent of primate species, and the bonded males guard the families but are not seen to contribute the material support that we would ordinarily associate with fatherhood. Among primates, the bonded pair appears to be a halfway step between stag arrangements of unbonded males and the active and supportive participation we expect of our own human fathers.

Flesh and spirit

Judeo-Christian traditions see human nature as "flesh" and "spirit," meaning biological and also spiritual. The late Pope John Paul II accepts human evolution, along with the Big Bang, and then went on to reconfirm that however the world was created, God was there. In an official statement, the National Association of Biology Teachers no longer insists that the mutations behind evolution must be random ones, correctly realizing that science cannot categorize these unobserved changes as either strictly random or unfolding by some unseen plan. The Buddhist and Hindu quests for higher spiritual consciousness recognize that we must wrestle with the "monkey brain" or "monkey mind" within, referring to our biological natures. So we see here that religion and science need not continue to lock horns at all, but can find ways to accommodate each other.