Adultery: Bred into the species?

I hate to say “I told you so,” said David Barash in the Los Angeles Times, but I did tell you so. While the rest of the world was reeling from the news of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s career-ending dalliance with a call girl, I, as an evolutionary biologist, just saw it as more proof of what we’ve been saying all along: Evolution has bred the male of the species to philander. Among our fellow mammals, males are invariably “aggressive sexual adventurers” driven by their genes to couple with as many partners as possible. As we try to find some final meaning in Spitzer’s fall, we would do well to bear in mind that scene from the movie Heartburn, in which the weeping heroine complains to her father about her husband’s many infidelities. “You want monogamy?” the dad advises her. “Marry a swan.” It’s good advice—or it would be if we hadn’t recently learned, through DNA studies, that “even those famously loyal swans aren’t sexually monogamous.”

Scientists have been pushing this “threadbare argument that men just can’t help themselves” for years, said Jennie Dusheck, also in the Times. Or at least they had until recently, when DNA analysis of offsprings’ parentage revealed that infidelity is “common among female animals as well as males.” The larger question, obviously, is why we’re even looking to the animal kingdom for lessons in morality. Unlike animals, which have no consciences, human beings can choose whether to act upon an impulse or to suppress it.

But how successfully do we humans suppress those impulses? said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. You have to wonder, after months of headlines about the sex lives of politicians—including Spitzer, former President Bill Clinton, and former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who now says he sometimes engaged in a ménage à trois with his then-wife and another man. Many people, it seems, lead “double lives.” That’s why people find these public sex scandals so fascinating—and so “terrifying,” said Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, most of us “desperately want to think that long-term sexual monogamy will work.” But when a straight-arrow family man such as Spitzer gets caught hiring hookers, or an anti-gay crusader like Sen. Larry Craig is arrested for soliciting sex in a men’s room, it suggests that human beings—including your spouse—are, sexually speaking, secretly capable of anything. “No wonder we keep searching for meaning in a story whose real meaning is something we don’t exactly want to know.”

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