I recently finished reading Catching Fire - How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. The book, which is about how cooking is responsible for making human beings so successful, is published in the UK by the same people as published 13 Things, and I was invited to have dinner with Richard and some others. We had raw, seared and cooked courses in honour of the book.
It’s a great read and over all too soon. I got the feeling Richard was just warming to his theme when I reached the notes (which are fun by themselves, actually). But it has left me with the justification for some politically incorrect ideas. When humans first learned to cook, men had to travel great distances to hunt meat and had every right to expect to come home to a cooked dinner, apparently. While men needed a woman to stay home to forage and cook, women needed men to protect them, their children and their food stash from raiders – cooking releases lots more energy from food, but it also sends an “I’m here!” smoke signal into the sky.
There’s plenty of fodder for the unreconstructed male here – no wonder Richard is unpopular with the feminist movement.
What’s important to recognise, though, is that we aren’t bound by the culture of the first humans. Just as Richard Dawkins points out that understanding the selfish gene gives you the ability to rebel against the urges it prompts, revealing how things were in the first human society isn’t the same as endorsing it for today.
It’s true in lots of areas. I’m particularly interested in the biological issues of monogamy at the moment – my phase of life has me surrounded by suddenly wandering males. Can this be excused by biology: is the male midlife crisis as inevitable as the ticking biological clock that sees many women desperate to have a child?
I don’t know the answer, but this New Scientist article is interesting. Two monogamous biologists, married to each other for more than 30 years, make the point that, just because ducks are promiscuous, that doesn’t say anything about what a pair of humans, with all their social aspects of their relationship to consider, ought/ought not to be doing.
A review of the pair’s latest book is here, and it prompts an interesting question that I’ll leave you with. How, exactly, do you give a blackbird a vasectomy?
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