Prestige and Reproductive Success in Man: A Reply to Hillard Kaplan

J. Hill

A wide variety of attributes may bring prestige and they vary from society to society and often from group to group. Some of them appear to promote reproductive success (RS) but others do not. The link between RS and prestige is me- diated through these attributes and again through the particular components of RS, such as survival or access to the opposite sex, which they in turn promote. Prestige itself is not a com- ponent of RS which is an error that Kaplan makes when he extends the term to nonhuman species and in so doing is forced to treat it as if it were. His extension of the term in this way is itself dubious since its use should be confined to Homo sapiens in order to avoid distorting its meaning. It is true that I refer to prestige as a component of sociocultural fitness but that is quite different from RS and Darwinian fitness.

Kaplan emphasizes that investment in pres- tige should be variable, but surely no one would disagree with this. The fact that the basis of pres- tige seeking is genetic does not mean that the levels of investment in it will be constant and predetermined, far from it, for there are whole layers of epigenesis between genes and overt be- havior which will affect investment decisions. He goes on to say that investment should vary specifically in order to maximize fitness but this is’merely an assumption unless it is supported by adequate data. In any case, the topic of var- iable investment is irrelevant to my argument which is concerned with the attributes that bring prestige in different societies because the link with RS depends upon the nature of these attri- butes not upon the proportion of total resources invested in prestige.

Received April 2. 1984. Address reprint requests to: Jack Hill, 108 A Goldhurst

Terrace, London NW6, England.

To turn now to Kaplan’s comments on the Tlingit, there was probably only limited scope for polygyny among them since “nobles” mar- ried only other “nobles” and the number of el- igible women must have been limited. This is particularly so because many house groups made up pairs which exchanged wives over several generations and opportunities for polygyny within this system would have varied indepen- dently of wealth. Even apart from this, the ac- quisition of wives was not directly linked with the giving of potlatches, as Kaplan’s model sug- gests, and indeed, the relationship could have been inverse; house groups which hosted many potlatches having fewer than the average num- ber of wives per adult male because they di- verted resources from bride price to potlatch goods. It is a great pity that no data are available on this point, but the information that is avail- able shows that “nobles” had far more wealth than they used for the payment of bride prices which opens the question of why bride prices were not raised in order to absorb more re- sources. Had the main concern of the “nobles” been RS this would surely have happened, fol- lowing the law of supply and demand. Since a man’s rank depended largely upon the size of his mother’s bride price such a rise would not have been inconsistent with the prevailing system of Tlingit values. The fact that it did not occur sug- gests that the demand for wives was not high enough and that concern with rank was greater. This limited Tlingit interest in RS as against pres- tige reveals the beginning of a trend which be- comes more prominent in wealthy monogamous societies where the possibilities for increasing the number of children are more limited, and it reaches its peak in monogamous societies where contraception is common.

With regard to the Nupe, neither Nadel nor I claimed that polygynists did not have more off-

119

0162-3095/85/$03.30 Ethology and Sociobiology 5: 119-120 (1985) 0 Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc., 1985 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, New York 10017

120 J. Hill

spring than monogamists, only that the increase in the number of children was not commensurate with that in the number of wives, particularly in the case of large harems. Since the Nupe, like the Tlingit, failed to increase bride price to ab- sorb more of their surplus wealth it is possible that they also were more interested in prestige than in RS.

Kaplan’s approach to the UK data seems to involve the creation of cohorts of illegitimate children in order to redress the balance in his favor. I do not think this “silent majority” ar- gument is really acceptable, but I do endorse his final point on the need for quantitative studies.

Much human behavior in complex societies appears to be biologically neutral which presents sociobiology with a problem and I think it is bet- ter to face this squarely to see if any acceptable explanation is possible rather than sweep it under the biological carpet in the hope that no one notices. In any event, it looks like another example of genes going astray in a novel envi- ronment, the novelty being the accumulation of surplus wealth rather than the development of a new economic system. It was in order to stress this that I included the Tlingit example, because they were hunter-gatherers. The nature of the novelty makes it unlikely that genes will be able to circumvent it.