Prestige and reproductive success in man

Prestige and Reproductive Success in Man

J. Hill

The relationship between prestige and reproductive suc-

cess is explored in ten human societies. Formally, the aim is to test the hypothesis that prestige and reproductive success are positively correlated in all populations. It is concluded that in societies at or slightly above the subsistence level prestige and reproductive success are congruent, but that with the accumulation of surplus wealth sources of prestige which have no relevance for

reproductive success begin to appear, their development being facilitated by the law of diminishing returns as applied to parents’ nonbiological investment in off-

spring, a point being reached where further investment can have no beneficial effect on reproductive success. As a result so&cultural success and reproductive success may separate. In some societies, where prestige depends upon the possession of real estate, population control is embraced by wealthy families in order to keep their es-

tates intact, thus increasing the effectiveness of the law of diminishing returns by reducing the “fixed re-

sources” (i.e., number of offspring) available for investment. In these conditions, which may spread to the less wealthy, so&cultural success often takes precedence over reproductive success.

Key Words: Evolution; Law of diminishing returns; Prestige; Reproductive success; Socioculture; Wealth.

The recent literature contains several models that bring organic and sociocultural evolution within a single coevolutionary framework but none of them deals satisfactorily with the problem of human behavior which appears to be biologically neutral, i.e., which seems to have no effect on the reproductive success (RS) of the individuals exhibiting it. Durham (1976; 1977; 1979) and Pulliam and Dunford (1980) admit the existence of the problem but their models do not come to terms with it; Lumsden and Wilson

Received December 8, 1982; revised February 3, 1984. Address reprint request to: I. Hill, 108A Goldhurst Ter-

race, London NW6, England.

(1981) meet it only partially by suggesting that biology holds culture on a loose rein. Alexander (1980) does not present a model for sociocultural evolution but his belief that all sociocultural variation is explicable in terms of the different strategies adopted by individuals under varying cir- cumstances to maximize their inclusive fitness amounts to a denial that the problem exists. Flinn and Alexander (1982) make the same point.

At the opposite pole, Hill (1978; 1984) has argued that sociocultural evoluation is a process quite distinct from organic evolution with its own version of the generic evolutionary factors (fitness, information, environmental selection pressures, isolation and extrinsic events) which also underly the more widely known factors of organic evolution. But this approach still leaves open the question of how sociocultural processes can be independent of RS, to what extent can nontrivial human actions be biologically neutral?

Th present article is an attempt to answer that question by exploring the relationship between RS and sociocultural success, prestige being taken as the expression of this success. For- mally, its purpose is to test the hypothesis that prestige and RS are positively correlated in all human societies.

An investigation by Irons (1979) of the Turk- men of Persia took wealth as the criterion of sociocultural success and he demonstrated that RS and wealth were closely correlated in that society. Hartung (1976) commented on the relationship between wealth and inclusive fitness with especial regard to inheritance in the male line and Dickemann (1979) noted a correlation between high social status and high RS in several stratified societies. Among the Ygnomamii of Venezuela headmen are significantly more fertile than nonheadmen because their prestigious position enables them to acquire more wives

77 Ethology and Sociobiology 5: 77-95 (1984) 0 Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc., 1984 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, New York 10017

0162-3095/84/$03.00

J. Hill

than average (Chagnon et al., 1979). I shall try to extend the field by looking at several other societies chosen partly in order to cover as wide a geographical range and as wide a range of social structure as possible and partly because suf- ficiently detailed ethnographical reports exist for them. A literature survey of this kind suffers from many drawbacks since the data on which the published reports are based were gathered with quite other problems in mind. In particular, the lack of detailed demographic information must be regretted as it is now too late to obtain it from many small scale societies that have come under Western influence so that their present demography may no longer reflect their traditional culture. But I think the exercise is well worth undertaking because it may still throw light on the relationship between biology and socioculture.

Ideally, figures should be quoted for each stratified society comparing the average number of children born and the proportion surviving to age 15 years for fathers belonging to classes with high and low status. An approximation to this is given in the final example from the UK. With unstratified societies lineages or local descent groups might be used in place of classes. As these figures are simply not available in the published literature for most societies I have had to compromise. With poorer ones the argument has been based upon prestige and polygyny since Chagnon et al. (1979) have shown for the Yan- omamo that the above average RS of headmen is due to the number of wives they have rather than to the increased fertility of individual wives. This should be a reasonable compromise where even the most prestigious individuals have little surplus wealth to devote to the care of their children so that survival rate is probably much the same in all families. In richer societies the effect of nutrition and general care on the fertility of wives and on the survival rates of adults and children must be taken into account and I have tried to do this as far as possible.

Prestige will be treated as an attribute of individuals which reflects the status of their social position and their performance in that social position, performance being largely equated with goal achievement. Since individuals may occupy different social positions in different groups their prestige may also vary from group to group. It always involves the receipt of attention from other group members although attention does

not necessarily imply prestige. Prestige is a major component of sociocultural fitness (Hill, 1978; 1984) but this aspect of it will not be considered here. It should be understood, however, that it is not a quality restricted to leaders but an attribute which all members of a group pos- sess in greater or lesser degree in some situa- tions, as is shown by the fact that all members will receive at least a modicum of attention from some of the other members.

With this definition of prestige it should be possible to measure it sociometrically but in large scale societies variance in prestige across the whole society is so great that variance in RS cannot possibly reflect its full range, so that no direct comparison between RS and prestige is really possible. Because of this difftculty the relationship between prestige and RS may be better revealed by a study of the effects on RS of the various attributes which confer prestige, and this method will be adopted below for small as well as large scale societies in order to maintain a consistency of approach. The danger of this is that it provides scope for unsubstantiated spec- ulation but I shall try to guard against this by accepting only those effects for which an une- quivocal mechanism can be clearly demonstrated, e.g., the beneficial effects of nutrition on survival up to the point of adequacy but not beyond.

HUNTER-GATHERER SOCIETIES

The !Kung

Lee (1972) found that approximately 5% of marriages were polygynous among the !Kung of the Dobe area in Botswana and Marshall (1976) records only nine cases in 88 marriages (10%) among the !Kung of the neighbouring Nyae Nyae area. The men in both areas favored polygyny but the women did not like being co- wives. Howell (1979, p. 268) concluded that polygyny played “some role in men’s reproductive success but not an overwhelming one,” although the low level of polygyny would suggest that the benefit for individual polygynists may have been greater than appears at first sight from the figure for mean male fertility. The variance of RS was greater in men than in women, as might be expected (Howell, 1979). Infant and child mortality were high, with only about 42% of live births surviving to the age of 15 years (Howell, 1979).

Prestige and RS in Man

The !Kung practise infanticide amounting perhaps to some six in 500 births (Howell, 1976). They do this because if children are too close together in age they fear that they will not be able to feed them adequately and there will also be difftculty in carrying them from camp to camp (Marshall, 1976). They also destroy one of each set of twins, presumably for the same reason, and all children showing serious birth defects (Howell, 1979).

One of the principal sources of prestige among !Kung men is hunting ability and this is clearly congruent with maximizing RS since a good hunter will be in a better position than a poor one to feed his family. Although he will have to share his catch with other members of the band he will still be able to give large portions to his wife and children. This is indeed recog- nized by the !Kung themselves and they therefore do not allow a youth to marry until he has killed a large animal (Marshall, 1976). This means that a youth who is a particularly good hunter may be in a position to marry earlier than a poor one, although among the !Kung the first baby may not arrive for as much as 5 or 6 years after marriage, if the bride is premenstrual, as sometimes happens (Marshall, 1976). A good hunter may also stand a better chance of acquiring a second wife. A woman who is a particularly good plant gatherer would also be able to feed her family better than average but there is no suggestion in the literature that a good gatherer has more prestige than a poor one, although that may still be the case.

Another characteristic that brings approval in both sexes is self control and the avoidance of quarreling. Fighting is something the !Kung dread because of the ready availability of poi- soned hunting arrows which could be very dan- gerous (Lee, 1972; Marshall, 1976). Generosity is admired and parents are often reluctant to let their children marry into a mean family (Mar- shall, 1976) so that a reputation for generosity may help the members of a family to raise their inclusive fitness.

These forms of prestige among the !Kung are concerned, therefore, with obtaining food and keeping the band together (avoidance of quarreling and the exchange of gifts promote group cohesion), both of them essential for individual survival in the !Kung environment with a primitive technology. Individuals are so little pro- tected by their society from the immediate pres-

sures of the physical and biotic environments that social and biological success must be very closely related.

However, there is another source of prestige that seems to have no connection with RS. This is healing ability (Marshall, 1969; Lee, 1972) and the activities involved are carried out in “lei- sure” time, between bouts of economic activity or when economic activity is impossible, at night, for example. Such activities are only possible because enough surplus energy, or food, can be accumulated to relieve individuals tem- porarily from the exigencies of survival.

The Murngin

The Wulamba tribes, also referred to collec- tively as the Murngin, occupy territory in north- east Arnhem Land in Northern Australia. Po- lygyny exists among them to the extent that middle-aged men have an average of 3.5 wives each; one man is said to have had 17, several of whom were stolen from other clans or were obtained by killing their husbands (Warner, 1958). Berndt and Berndt (1964) state that no number up to 10 or even 12 is regarded as exceptional. Young men have fewer wives than old or middle- aged ones. The excess of marriageable women arises partly because women marry earlier than men and partly because men are killed in inter- clan warfare.

Infanticide is practised to some extent. If a woman has children who are too close together, particularly if she has twins, one of them is killed on the grounds that she would feel like a dog with a litter if she had more than one at a time (Warner, 1958).

In view of the way most wives are obtained in Murngin society, as a gift from an elder brother or a maternal uncle, a man’s chances of having several wives will depend partly upon the accidents of birth and death. If his uncle has several daughters to bestow and few eligible neph- ews, or if more than one elder brother should be killed in battle or die so that he inherited their wives, he would acquire more than the average number regardless of his personal attributes or abilities. But his own characteristics may never- theless affect his RS. For example, if he is a particularly accomplished fighter, a trait that is greatly admired, he is more likely to win his elder brother’s approval through the success of some expedition against a common enemy, and such

80 J. Hill

approval is traditionally marked by the elder brother presenting the younger with a wife (War- ner, 1958). In doing this the elder would diminish his personal fitness but this would be offset to some extent by a gain in inclusive fitness, and a failure to reward his brother in the normal fashion might result in a loss of assistance in the fu- ture. A man who is a particularly good fighter might also be might also be more likely to suc- ceed in stealing wives from other men. Berndt and Bemdt (1964, p. 172) state that in “north- eastern Arnhem Land the men with the most wives were originally those with a reputation as fighters, or with access to special trading mo- nopolies.”

Success in trade brings prestige particularly when the trade takes place over a long distance with relatives who are both geographically and genealogically far away. A man wishes especially to establish relationships with distant clas- sificatory mother’s brothers as a regular exchange of gifts with such a person brings considerable prestige (Warner, 1958). Such trade may also help in the acquisition of wives because the man has “goods which can be used as gifts in betrothal arrangements [so that] fathers of eligible girls are very ready to negotiate” (Berndt and Berndt, 1964, p. 172). The number of clans a youth visited to invited people to his circum- cision, the distance he traveled, and the number who attended also bring prestige (Warner, 1958) and will add to the circle of his acquaintance which may help to increase his chances of obtaining wives.

Men may also gain prestige through hunting and sometimes a man with a good reputation as a hunter has been able to obtain a wife previously betrothed to someone else (Berndt and Bemdt, 1964). A good hunter may also be in a better position to feed his family adequately.

As with the !Kung, there is a close connection between social success and RS, and again like the !Kung the medicine men found among the southern tribes, although not among the north- em ones, have considerable prestige (Elkin, 1945; Warner, 1958) although it seems to have no relevance for biological fitness.

The Tlingit

The Pacific coast of America from the northern border of California to south west Alaska provides a rich environment for hunter-gatherers

because of the vast numbers of salmon and other fish which spawn in the rivers and off the shore, and because of the many sea mammals, whales, porpoises, seals, and sea lions, which are at- tracted by them. The aboriginal peoples of this coast were, therefore, very unusual among hunter-gatherers in that they lived comfortably above the subsistence level. They were able to dry the fish and obtain large quantities of fish oil from the olachen, which could be kept and also used to preserve the abundant berries found in the autumn. Consequently, large quantities of food could be stored for use in the winter (Drucker, 1965). I shall be concerned here with the Tlingit, the most northerly population of the complex. The bulk of the following account is taken from Oberg (1973).

The Tlingit were matrilineal and ideally they practised bilateral cross cousin marriage so that a man’s immediate successor was his sister’s son and the next in line of succession was his grand- son. It often happened that two house groups in a village were closely united in this way by a succession of marriages. Boys remained with their parents until they were six or seven when they joined their mother’s brother’s group, which would normally be in the same village, but girls remained with their parents until they married. The house group was the main economic unit and the men belonging to it worked together under the direction and authority of the head of the group, the yitsati. The territorial unit was the local clan group which owned land in the village on which its houses stood and also valuable salmon streams, hunting grounds, berry patches, and sealing rocks where all clan members, but no others, were allowed to fish, hunt, or gather.

Unlike !Kung and Murngin society, the most important thing in Tlingit society was rank. The clans in a village were ranked in order of im- portance and within each clan the house-groups were also ranked. Marriage was ideally between houses of equivalent rank but in practice people often tried to marry into a higher group. A man’s rank was assessed primarily by the size of his mother’s bride price. The rank of a house-group within the clan group depended upon the number of potlatches it had initiated and the rank of a local clan group in the village depended partly upon the value of its crests and partly upon how long it had been represented in the village and also, according to Olson (1967), upon its nu- merical strength, its success in war and certain

Prestige and RS in Man 81

legendary events in its putative history. The value of the crests depended upon the value of the property given away or destroyed at potlatches when the right to display them was most recently established.

When a local clan group included several house-groups the highest ranking ones were regarded as anyeti or “nobles” and they intermarried with other anyeti in the village but not normally with commoners, so that the village as a whole would be divided in two ways which cut across one another, into clans, and into classes. The dominant groups in one village would not necessarily belong to the same clan as the dominant groups in another, it depended largely upon the past accumulation of wealth. The rank of a household could rise or fall according to the potlatches it gave, and a man could cease to be regarded as an anyeti if he failed to behave like one (Olson, 1967).

The most important ceremonial function of Tlingit society, the potlatch, was the means through which the prestige of individuals and house-groups was established. Each clan had a number of totemic crests which its members had the right to display. They were normally kept by the anyeti but any house-group in the clan had the right to use them if it could afford to validate that right at a potlatch. A potlatch itself normally took the form of a feast together with dancing and other displays followed by the distribution of gifts to the guests. As a rule, the proceedings lasted 4 days or longer and were held mostly in June, July, November, and December when there was less essential work to be done. Po- tlatches might be intravillage when the guests would be members of the other moiety but the important ones were intervillage affairs.

The valuables given away were not the normal goods of everyday life but special potlatch valuables which were used for no other purpose and they all came from outside Tlingit territory so that they had to be purchased with local prod- ucts like olachen oil, and they represented a very considerable investment. Originally they were coppers and slaves, slaves being specially bought for the purpose, but after contact with Europeans, woollen blankets and money were incorporated.

By increasing, or at least maintaining, the prestige of the host group a potlatch would probably give the younger members a better chance of marrying well, but as a source of prestige it

lacked the direct positive impact on RS of hunting, trading, or gift exchange among the !Kung and the Murngin. This does not mean that individual men made no effort to maximize their inclusive fitness through polygyny (Olson, 1967) and by investing adequately in their children or their sister’s children but it does mean that much of their total effort was devoted to other ends.

It is not apparent from the literature whether polygyny was more common among anyeti than among others, but it could have been since they were richer. But even if they produced more viable offspring than commoners, they were still investing additional wealth in their prestige without affecting their RS. Given their primitive medical knowledge there was nothing they could do to improve their RS once they and their children were adequately fed, clothed, and housed. Overfeeding and overprotection could be counterproductive and there was certainly overeating at potlatches (Olson, 1967; McClellan, 1954) although no overprotection of boys who were brought up by their maternal uncles to be very hardy (Laguna, 1952; Oberg, 1973).

Apart from wealth, some measure of prestige could be won in North Pacific Coast societies by special skills as seen in the war leader, the suc- cessful sea hunter, the skilful canoe maker and carver, but especially in the shaman. In all the societies shamans had very great prestige and the Tlingit were no exception (Drucker, 1965; Olson, 1967; Oberg, 1973). But whereas Oberg says they were very well rewarded for their healing, Drucker speaking of the coast as a whole says that they did not receive much in the way of payment. Olson makes no comment on this aspect of shamanism which he estimates to have had an incidence of 5 to 10 shamans per tribe of 1000 or so people. The question of whether seeking prestige through shamanism was consistent with maximizing RS must, therefore, remain open.

OTHER UNSTRATIFIED SOCIETIES

The Ygnomamo

Males among the Yanomamo of Venezuela (Chagnon, 1977; 1979a,b) are exceptionally bel- ligerent and it is their women that they fight over. Ferocity is the personal attribute most admired in adult males, both by men and women, and a man who is known to be fierce will have

J. Hill

a better chance than one who is not of securing wives of his own and of keeping them free from the attentions of other men, and also of seducing the wives of less fierce men. Every woman is married to one man or another for the whole of her reproductive life but some the men never marry. The extent of polygyny is shown by the fact that the average fertility of the married men is just over twice that of the women which means that twice as many women as married men must have been involved in reproduction. The im- portance of women to the Yanomamo men lies not simply in their sexual motivation or even in their desire for children, though both are strong, but primarily in the fact that women are the main commodity which they exchange with one another. They are the basis of alliances between lineages within villages and they also enter in the more fragile alliances between villages, although these are initiated by trade and feasts.

There is a chronic shortage of women to exchange partly due to polygyny and partly to preferential female infanticide, since women are more likely to save a male than a female baby when there is doubt if they will be able to care for it adequately. This shortage is counteracted to some extent by the earlier age at which women get married and by the greater number of men of all ages killed in combat. but not enough to eliminate severe competition which is exacerbated by the fact that all men in a position to do so will acquire more than their fair share for themselves or their kinsmen. Headmen in particular are more fertile, with a mean number of offspring of 8.6, compared with 4.2 for other men in the sample tested. This greater fertility is due to the ability of the headmen to acquire more wives (Chagnon. et al., 1979). A man becomes a headman through being the leading member of the largest lineage in his village, which means that he has many relatives on whom he can call for assistance in arranging marriages and in fighting. Fierceness and RS would appear to be two of the main characteristics of headmen, although they should also be capable of settling intravillage quarrels.

Fierceness and the acquisition of women, which bring prestige among the Yanomamo, clearly contribute to the maximizing of RS, although too great a readiness to be aggressive will be counterproductive since the more aggressive an individual the more likely he is to get killed. Yanomamii culture, however, includes semiri-

tual forms of combat, chest-pounding side-slap- ping, and club-fighting which enable the men to display their fierceness without killing one another. Most intravillage fights. which are usually about women, are club fights (Chagnon, 1977).

Hunting ability also brings prestige and since a good hunter will be able to feed his family better than a poor one this will also help to increase his RS. Since hunting for his parents-in-law is the form which bride service takes (Chagnon, 1977), a man with a good reputation as a hunter may also be favored as a potential son-in-law. Although shamanism exists it does not carry the high prestige it does in some societies, which is not surprising when it is realized that up to half the men in each village may be shamans (Chag- non, 1977).

By and large, the Yanomamo man who has above average prestige is likely to have above average RS.

The Nuer

The Nuer are pastoralists who occupy part of the flood plain of the upper Nile in the southern Sudan. They are a fervidly egalitarian society so that there are not great differences in prestige between the adult males. Each village consists of households whose heads are related in some way, by blood or marriage, to some other member(s) so that they can all claim relationship to the village head, or “bull” as they call him. The reason why families often break up so that brothers or cousins part is because men wish to found their own villages by gathering a community of kin around themselves (Evans-Prit- chard, 1951). Such “bulls” are in no sense chiefs who issue orders which other men will obey, for no Nuer can do that, but they do take the most prominent part in discussions of group affairs among the village elders (Evans-Pritchard, 1940).

It is the possession of cattle that the Nuer prize before anything else, and although it is impossible here to enter into details of the religious, economic, and social significance that their cattle have for them (Evans-Pritchard, 1940; 1951; 1956) certain points must be mentioned.

1) Although all their beasts are eventually eaten they are never killed for this purpose except in conditions of famine; normally they are


sacrificed in some religious context before being consumed.

2) Although cattle are under the control of men, only women and uninitiated boys are allowed to milk the cows, so that it is impossible for a man to maintain a herd unless he has a wife, mother, sister, or daughter to milk them for him.

3) Cattle are used as bridewealth, their essential function in this context being to legitimize the children, so that they belong to their father’s lineage rather than their mothers. Once the cattle have been paid by the bridegroom’s family to that of the bride in the name of the groom, the children born to that woman are regarded as his even though they may be born long after he is dead. Only if he divorces her is this link broken and after two children are born divorce is very uncommon, although it does occur before this. Divorce involves the return of some of the cattle, but at least six must remain with the mother’s family if one child has been born (Evans-Pritchard, 1951).

4) Although the senior male in a family controls .the cattle they are regarded as a family asset, and may be used as bridewealth on behalf of any male member of the family. But it is considered that sons should be married in order of age and that no son should acquire a second wife before his brothers are married. Cat- tle received by a girl as bridewealth will normally be used by one of her brothers in order to marry.

Adultery is fairly common although not often the subject of serious quarreling. If the husband has proof then he may claim six cows as a compensation, but if a healthy child should be born five of the cattle must be returned if the adulterer is to have no claims on the child (Evans-Prit- chard, 1951). Apparently the husband is quite happy to invest in the biologically unrelated child since it is legally his. This illustrates in mi- crocosm how individuals can seek to maximize their biological fitness only within the constraints of their socioculture.

In the absence of the relevant demographic data it is impossible to decide whether the “bulls” in Nuer villages, like Yanomamo headmen, have a higher inclusive fitness than other men in the community although they may well have larger than average herds at their disposal which would enable them to acquire more than the average number of wives.

Infanticide does not seem to be practised by the Nuer. The excess of marriageable women over men which permits polygyny would appear to arise partly from the fact that most girls marry around 17 or 18, whereas men seldom marry until the age of 25 or 30, and partly from the number of men killed in fighting (Evans-Prit- chard, 1940; 1951).

The Nuer hunt and fish and grow millet in their gardens (Evans-Pritchard, 1940) but none of these activities is bound up with prestige as is cattle-keeping. The only other important attribute that all Nuer men aspire to is fighting ability. As might be imagined, they fight over their cattle, particularly about watering and pasturage rights in the dry season, but they may also fight if one strikes another’s son, and sometimes over adultery (Evans-Pritchard, 1940). It is essential that a man should be adept with his spear in order to protect his rights and to maintain his herd so that this source of prestige is quite consistent with the promotion of RS. And, in the days before the pax Britannica, an effective war- rior stood a better chance of succeeding in cattle raids against the Dinka thereby increasing his chances of acquiring bridewealth. However, a man should not be too prone to pick a quarrel in which he kills his adversary because in that way he would impoverish himself through having to pay cattle in compensation to the victim’s kinsmen.

Evans-Pritchard (1956) refers to prophets who seem to have arisen towards the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th. They claimed to be possessed by spirits and there is no doubt that the Nuer paid them much attention. All of them practised healing but the more powerful ones also interpreted the wishes of the spirits with regard to attacks on the Dinka and resistance to Arab slavers and to the British ad- ministration. There were few of them but they appear to have been particularly avaricious and those who instigated raids on the Dinka received many head of cattle as their part of the booty. Their pursuit of prestige was, therefore, quite consistent with the maximizing of RS.

The Tallensi

The Tallensi, composed of two intermingled peoples, the Tali proper and the Namoos, occupy territory in northern Ghana. Traditionally, their society was composed of patrilineages

84 J. Hill

grouped into exogamous clans. They were ag- riculturalists who grew cereals on the land around their homesteads and kept some cattle and other domestic animals. Very few of them were rich enough to own more than one or two head of cattle, for the vagaries of rainfall and the unpredictable ravages of locusts made their liv- elihood extremely precarious and their economy never rose above the subsistance level. The following account is taken from Fortes (1940; 1945; 1949).

Brideprice was fixed at three cows and a bull or whatever was agreed to be their equivalent in other animals or goods. Competition for wives was intense, particularly among the younger men, even though girls normally married at 16 or 17 whereas men seldom married before they were 25. The privilege of polygyny was mostly confined to men over 45, and out of 100 married men only 40 had more than one wife, and two thirds of them had only two (Fortes, 1949). Most settlements had one or two men who acquired prestige through being richer than average. This extra wealth was normally used to increase the number of their wives (Fortes, 1940).

Under the traditional system chiefs might have up to six wives each, but under the British system of direct rule which functioned during the early part of the present century this number rose to about 30. because the British svstem enabled chiefs to extort wealth from their lineage which they never could have done under the na- tive system. It is significant that this additional wealth was used almost entirely to increase RS. As Fortes (1949) has remarked. since the Tal- lensi had few durable goods of great productive or prestige value and few prestigious offices their great interest in life was the perpetuation and increase of their lineages.

The data are all taken from Nadel (1942). At the head of the emirate was the Etsu Nupe, or king of Nupe, who was surrounded by the other members of the royal family, by a nobility and by commoners. A dominant feature of the social system was that of patronage and clientage, with all important members of the society from the Etsu down acting as patrons to a number of clients. These clients fell broadly into three types, those who sought political protection, those who sought economic benefits, and those who sought to rise in the social scale through their connection with a powerful patron. Clients of the first type did not work for the patron or bring him gifts and were called by the term used for adopted children, but the others were true clients who attached themselves to the patron’s household as servants, messengers, soldiers in the patron’s private army, and so on. The lower Nupe classes, particularly in the country, were pagans whereas the upper classes were Muslims and becoming a client often involved conversion to Mohammedanism.

Whatever was true of the countryside at that time, the economy of Bida town was predomi- nantly monetary and people were less concerned with kinship than they were with economic, and particularly political, advancement. Nadel di- vides the outgoings of Bida households into three sections:

1) Those devoted to the satisfaction of primary needs such as nutrition and shelter plus what was required to maintain the household’s productive organization, usually various crafts in

The pattern here is similar to that found among the Yanomamo, therefore, with prestige and number of wives being positively correlated.

2)

3)

the town. Those devoted to certain essential cultural needs, particularly brideprice and taxation. Those devoted to social display and to keeping up the householder’s position in society. The poorest people spent nothing on this.

Brideprice was always high so that although it was usually balanced by dowry it was still dif-

STRATIFIED SOCIETIES licult for many men to accumulate sufficient wealth. As a result of this, various ways round the difficulty were devised. For instance, what

The Nupe the Nupe referred to as “family marriage,” that The Nupe occupy territory in central Nigeria on is marriage to a related woman, involved a lower the river Kaduna. The following account will brideprice than marriage to an unrelated woman. concentrate on the people of Bida town, the cap- Since the upper class families were all related to ital of the Bida emirate, because their society in some extent through previous intermarriage, the 1930s was divided into definite classes, un- “family marriage” resulted in a high level of like contemporary Nupe society in rural areas. upper class endogamy which increased the di-


vision between the upper and lower classes since it meant that lower class men who wished to marry above them were at a disadvantage as they had to pay the higher brideprice. Sometimes, however, a patron would marry his daughter to one of his clients and pay the brideprice himself, or, in the case of a mallam, he might waive the brideprice as a pious gesture to a man of religion and learning. Rich men would sometimes enable their sons to marry earlier than normal, even when they were still at school, as a sign of their wealth and status. Among poorer people the high brideprice resulted in the head of a house providing it for the eldest son only, the others having to save their own if they wished to marry.

Both hypergyny and hypogyny were practised, but without loss of social status, for in hypergyny the wife took the status of her husband and in hypogyny the husband was usually ac- cepted into the wife’s class and her children certainly belonged to her class. If a man had a chance of making an advantageous marriage the high brideprice could often be accumulated with the help of friends and relations.

High brideprice together with a great range of wealth between the inhabitants of Bida town meant great differences in the number of wives the men had. A large number was undoubtedly a status symbol. In the royal family and among the nobility the Moslem rule limiting the number to four was easily evaded, partly by having concubines in addition to legal wives and partly by divorcing the old ones and marrying young girls in their place. The high level of polygyny among the rich was made possible in part by the im- portation of girls from the countryside.

In considering the relationship between polygyny and RS among the Nupe, two more factors have to be taken into account. First, abor- tion and birth control were practised in the town because in the middle levels of society, at least, childless women had great opportunities for trading which were not open to those with children. Second, in large polygynous households there was much sexual frustration among the women and homosexual practices were reported to occur in the royal harems. A large establish- ment did not necessarily bring a corresponding increase in the man’s fecundity over smaller polygynous households. Altogether, polygyny among the Nupe seems to have been concerned more with social status than with procreation although it was almost bound to result in the birth

of more children than monogamy, especially when a youth was enabled to take his first wife at an early age.

Apart from the number of children born, rich families were able to spend more than poor ones on what Nadel referred to as the necessities of life so that their children would be better fed and sheltered than those of the poor and, consequently, more viable. But there comes a point beyond which additional investment of this kind has little effect. Increasing knowledge of disease may reveal ways in which further investment would increase RS through improved medical care of self, wives, and offspring but among Nupe in the 1930s medical knowledge and care were limited.

Prestige involved having clients as well as numerous wives, and some of the clients were fed regularly every day, sometimes almost doubling the total cost of housekeeping. Other calls upon the income of prestigious members of the community were lavish kinship feasts and hospitality to influential men, generous gifts to the Ersu Nupe, expensive clothes, guns, and a horse. It might be argued that kinship feasts raised inclusive fitness and that other forms of hospitality were reciprocated and also acted as a form of insurance against unforeseen disasters. While these arguments are correct as far as they go, they do not cover investment on display in the form of rich clothes, weapons, and horses, none of which are likely to have had any effect on RS.

In sum, the Nupe valued children, and marriage was considered devoid of real meaning without them, but the richest men had far more money than they needed for promoting their RS so it was devoted instead to fostering other sources of prestige.

The Rajputs

The Rajputs form a land-owning caste in northern and central India. In origin they were probably invaders from the north in the 5th and 6th centuries AD who were later absorbed into the caste system as they established small states among the ruins of the Gupta empire. They regard themselves as survivors of the old Ksha- triya varna although their only connection is probably in the similarity of role as soldiers and land-owners. They are currently divided into 36 exogamous clans which trace their descent from the Sun, Moon, and Sacred Fire. In any partic-

86 J. Hill

ular area these clans are socially ranked although the rank order is not the same in all areas. Mar- riage between the clans is hypergynous- women marrying into clans of superior, or at least of equal status-and as a reflection of this, members of the bridegroom’s family are always treated with respect by members of the bride’s family. Marriage involves the payment of a large dowry, the higher the status of the groom’s family the larger the dowry that is expected (Blunt, 1931; Karve, 1953; Rawlinson, 1952).

Rajput prestige depends essentially upon clan status, upon wealth deriving from the ownership of land, and upon the maintenance of a large household in a well kept house where extrava- gant ceremonies involving much conspicuous consumption are held. The source of an individual’s strength in the community lies in his family and his friends, the former being preferably large and rich in land and the latter numerous. The “big men” of contemporary Rajput communities tend to be married, middle-aged, own enough land to give them at least moderate wealth, and to have the support of numerous friends and closely related kinsmen, particularly sons (Min- turn and Hitchcock, 1966). Rajputs must spend heavily on ceremonies if they are not to lose social standing. Unfortunately, good husbandry is not regarded as a Rajput virtue, and in particular, they consider it demeaning to put a hand to the plough. Their roles are land-ownership and the supervision of others. It is not surprising, therefore, that Rajputs should have a reputation for extravagance and bad husbandry (Blunt, 1931).

Traditionally, Rajput women were kept in purdah and never worked in the fields like lower caste women, a practice that increased the husband’s confidence in the paternity of his wife’s offspring and thus made it genetically more worthwhile for him to invest heavily in her children. This should not be mistaken for an explanation of purdah, it simply shows that the institution is quite consistent with the maximizing of the husband’s Darwinian fitness.

Female infanticide among the Rajputs has been fully discussed by Dickemann (1979) who concluded that it supported the hypothesis put forward by Trivers and Willard (1973) to the effect that when conditions are good it pays to invest in males and when they are less good, to invest in females. Traditionally, men of higher rank acquired a disproportionate number of

wives through polygyny, they enjoyed better health, presumably through being better fed and housed, and they married earlier, also their children were healthier and a higher proportion reached maturity. Most of the girls were killed at birth because the practice of hypergyny made it impossible to find husbands for them (Dick- emann, 1979).

Families lower on the social scale would receive dowries from those still lower but these would be smaller than the ones they had to provide for their own daughters. The higher the family they could marry into and the larger the dowry they could amass the better the chances of their grandchildren surviving to maturity. Al- though many of their female grandchildren would be killed at birth, the reproductive success of the males might well compensate for this loss of reproductive potential. However, genetic considerations were not the only ones, there was also prestige. By marrying his daughter to the son of a man of rank a father gained prestige and political support from the alliance (Minturn and Hitchcock, 1966). These were the immediate goals he sought, rather than the more remote genetic advantages, and he would still gain these even in the fairly frequent cases (Dickemann, 1979) where his daughter was widowed before reproduction.

At all social levels the richer members had greater potential for RS than poorer ones, for at the top they were able to invest more in their offspring so that they had a better chance of reaching maturity and at lower levels they were able to marry a larger number of daughters without ruining themselves in providing dowries. The poorer members at the lower levels were faced with the alternatives of killing female offspring at birth, thus reducing their reproductive potential, or ruining themselves in order to provide dowries thereby reducing their ability to invest in their sons’ children. They had to balance this against the chances of a daughter’s suc- cessful marital alliance bringing greater wealth.

Above a certain level of wealth, as at the old Rajput courts, for example, conspicuous consumption would be possible without prejudicing RS, but it could have a deleterious effect upon that of less wealthy followers who were obliged by social pressures to maintain a standard of living they could not well afford. The whole marriage system through hypergyny, dowries, and polygyny would work for the benefit of those at


the top and to the detriment of those beneath who would have to sacrifice both wealth and RS.

The Chinese

In China during the first half of the 20th century, as well as under the traditional system, great em- phasis was put on the need for children. Boys, in particular, were required in order to continue the ancestral cult. Unfortunately, only the richer families were able to afford as many children as they wanted and they took great pride in them, partly because they were a visible sign of wealth. Only rich men could increase the size of their families by plural marriage to concubines and only wealthy widowers could afford to take another wife of childbearing age. Stem families, where parents lived with unmarried children and one married son, and joint families, where more than one married son continued to reside with the parents, were found among the relatively rich but not among the poor (Fei, 1939; Lang, 1946; Yang, 1947; Hsu, 1949; Freedman, 1958).

In order to acquire prestige the Chinese needed not only wealth but also large families, but since there was no institution of primogeniture, every son having a right to share in the inheritance (Lang, 1946; Hsu, 1949), a large estate would soon become divided into small par- cels unless the sons stayed together. This, and the social benefits to be gained by belonging to an influential group, tended to keep the richer families together whereas poorer ones split up into their constituent nuclear families much more readily since more was to be gained by breaking away than by staying together (Lang, 1946; Freedman, 1958). Yang (1947) describes the way in which families rose and fell in a cycle of roughly four generations. Those of the first rising generation would work hard to buy land and the second generation would continue the pattern, but the members of the third generation tended to sit back and enjoy life with the result that they had to sell land in order to keep up their life style, so that the fourth returned to pov- erty.

Many families had too little land to feed themselves adequately and were compelled as far as possible to keep down their numbers which was achieved partly by late marriage sometimes to a childless widow. Infanticide, particularly of girls (Dickemann, 1979), was also resorted to as, unlike boys, they could not carry on the ancestral

line and they also needed a dowry before they could marry. Sometimes, however, girls were sold into slavery or went as children to their fu- ture husband’s family when they were lucky enough to become betrothed (Lang, 1946).

There is some evidence of a positive correlation between crop area of farmland and the fertility of the women, the number of children born per 100 women rising from 503 on small farms to 535 on large farms and to 551 on very large farms (Lang, 1946). The mortality rate among infants and children was also higher among the poor than among the rich (Lang, 1946) as one might expect.

Altogether, there can be little doubt that social success and RS were closely related in China, at least from 1850 to 1950.

The United Kingdom

Statistics are available for the United Kingdom so that the RS of a high status class can be compared directly with that of the population in general rather than indirectly as in most of the previous examples. In this monogamous society the RS of males depends much more upon the fecundity of one woman and the survival of her children than in the earlier cases. The conclusions below are based on the demography of the British Peerage compared with that of their con- temporaries in the population of England and Wales as a whole (Hollingsworth, 1964). The areas of the two populations do not overlap ex- actly as Scotland and Ireland are included in the peerage figures, but there are very few peers whose sole titles are in Scotland or Ireland and who would have to be omitted if the figures were confined to England and Wales. Hollingsworth concluded that the number of illegitimate births in the peerage was too small to make a significant difference to his figures which are based on le- gitimate offspring.

The relevant figures are gathered in the Table. Those for mean family size in the peerage are taken from Table 19 (Hollingsworth, 1964) and the corresponding ones for the general population from Table 34, the time of marriage being assumed to be 20-25 years after birth since Table 34 gives family size by date of marriage rather than by date of parents’ birth as in Table 19. The figure for parents born in 1800-1824 is based on Hollingsworth’s statement that the fertility of the general population “seems to have been al-

88 J. Hill

most constant, in terms of crude birth rates and fertility rates, from the time the first census was taken in 1801 up to 1883” (Hollingsworth, 1964, p. 31).

The survival figures for the peerage are taken from Hollingsworth’s Table 52, assuming that children will be born from 20 to 40 years after their parents, and the figures for the general population come from Table 53. Where no precisely applicable figure was available in these tables a rough average is given. Where the survival figures for males and females differ, as they usually do, an average has been given in the table. The figures in the final column have been calculated from those in the two preceding columns.

Looking at these figures it is clear that during most of the 19th century the fertility of the peerage was below that of the general population as were their child mortality rates. In the first quarter of the 20th century their fertility was only marginally above that of the general population and their child mortality was only marginally lower. The net result was that even from 1800 to 1824 when the fertility of the peerage was still quite high, following a great rise in the second half of the 18th century (Hollingsworth, 1964, Table 32) the mean family size of those surviving for 15 years was virtually the same as that for the general population. From 1850 to 1874, when the fertility of the peerage had shown a sudden decrease, the number per family surviving for 15 years was markedly less than for the genera1 population and from 1900 to 1924 the number surviving was marginally above that of the genera1 population. At no time, therefore, did the peerage show any advantage in RS over the general population and Hollingsworth concluded that even as early as 1650 some means of family limitation was used and was effective, although there is no positive evidence for it.

The relatively large average income of the peers was not devoted, therefore, to the promotion of their RS although a great deal of it was undoubtedly spent on keeping up their position by maintaining large houses and estates and by entertaining on a commensurate scale. Consid- erations of prestige were what concerned them most. An heir who would marry and provide a further heir was needed but beyond that offspring were not particularly sought, for the standing of individual peers in the community did not depend upon a large family and numerous relations, as was the case with high status males in some of the societies previously mentioned. This should not be taken to imply that they took less than normal interest in promoting their relatives rather than unrelated people, only that they were less concerned to increase the number of their relations.

The most relevant difference between them and the peoples discussed so far is that large families added nothing to their prestige which derived primarily from their social precedence, i.e., their forma1 proximity to the Sovereign, and secondarily from their possession of large estates. The important thing was to keep the estate intact, which was achieved through primogeniture and entail, and the easiest way for a peer to lose prestige was to ruin the estate by squan- dering the income.

DISCUSSION

In most of the examples described in the preceding sections high prestige was accompanied by high RS, or at least by the potential for it in an above average rate of polygyny. The exceptions were the Tlingit, where the necessary data on fertility or even polygyny are unobtainable, and the British peerage where RS was not above

Table 1. Fertility and Survival in the UK.

Parents Cohort

born Mean family size

(all live births)

Children

% Survivors to 15 years of age

Mean family size (survivors only)

Peerage 1800-1824 4.64 86 4.0 1850-1874 2.79 93 2.62 1900-1924 2.38 92 2.2

General population 1800-1824 5.75 68 3.9 1850-1874 5.94 to 4.13 74 4.4 to 3.0 1900-1924 2.2 90 1.98


average. In most of the examples the major characteristics bringing prestige were either RS itself or attributes like hunting ability, fierceness or wealth, which would promote it. There were again some exceptions: the conversion of real wealth by the Tlingit into special potlatch goods which could not be used for anything else, social display among the Nupe, belonging to a high ranking clan and conspicuous consumption among the Rajputs and their equivalents in the British peerage.

These exceptions must now be examined to see if and how they necessitate modification of the hypothesis that prestige and RS are positively correlated. Like other Indians of their culture complex, the Tlingit were exceptional for hunter-gatherers in two ways which were probably connected, they were able to accumulate a considerable surplus of goods and their society was stratified with “nobles” (anyeri), commoners, and slaves. The lack of evidence on the polygyny and RS of “nobles” compared with commoners means that the discussion must be confined to the probable effect of prestigious attributes on RS. All freemen took part in the institution of the potlatch, although “nobles” are likely to have spent more on it in absolute, if not in relative, terms than commoners. The signifl- cance of the potlatch here is that it involved the conversion of real wealth which could, perhaps, have been used to increase RS into special potlatch goods which could be used for nothing else, so that whatever happened to them, whether they were destroyed or presented as gifts, they represented the permanent sacrifice of real wealth for purely prestigious ends. This was only possible because the Tlingit were able to accumulate such a large surplus, but it brings with it the question of whether a group of in- novative “nobles” could have displaced the tra- ditionalists by refusing to take part in potlatches and devoting their accumulated wealth to RS instead. In other words, was potlatch activity in effect an evolutionarily stable strategy?

I shall argue that the innovators would have found that they were unable to increase their RS by devoting additional wealth to it, the reason being that economic investment in offspring is subject to the law of diminishing returns. This law has been summarized as follows:

“An increase in some inputs relative to other fixed inputs will, in a given state of technology, cause total output to increase; but after a point the extra

output resulting from the same addition of extra inputs is likely to become less and less. This falling off of extra returns is a consequence of the fact that the new ‘doses’ of the varying resources have less and less of the fixed resources to work with” (Sam- uelson, 1976, p. 27).

If we take the fixed resource as a single child then this suggests that there is an upper point beyond which further investment by the parents will have a diminishing effect on the child’s increase of viability. Where the income of the parents rises little above the subsistence level this point will not be reached, as with the !Kung, the Mumgin, the Ygnomamb, the Nuer, the Tal- lensi, and the poor Chinese peasants, but the Tlingit “nobles,” at least, rose above this level. The law is confined to a given state of technology and the relevant technology here is medicine, so that an increase in medical knowledge would enable parents to increase their RS by devoting more wealth to overcoming illness, but this does not apply to the Tlingit case where medical knowledge remained at a primitive level.

It might be argued against this that there is no independent evidence that Tlingit nobles had reached the point where the law of diminishing returns could become effective and that even if they had there is no reason to suppose that this law had any relevance for potlatch activity. On the first point, Oberg (1973, p. 115) states spe- cifically that there was always plenty to eat, that the people were well clothed, and that the houses were warm and free from draughts. It is true that he saw them long after they had been in contact with our civilization but there is no reason to suppose that conditions were any worse under the traditional system, certainly the country was very rich in potential food and it was always possible to obtain nonlocal furs by trade so that protective clothing presented no problem. On the second point, I am attempting to show that the law of diminishing returns fur- nished a mechanism whereby prestigious activity could break free from the constraints of RS, provided surplus wealth was available. I am not arguing that this was the only mechanism involved and I certainly do not mean to imply that it was a sufficient condition for potlatch activity although it would have been a necessary one in the absence of any other mechanism with a similar effect. What I am suggesting is that it would inevitably have broken the link between RS and prestige so that any further congruence between

90 J. Hill

them would be fortuitous. No matter what the Tlingit did with their surplus wealth it could not have increased their RS.

The general application of this law and its relevance for the separate components of human RS must now be considered when it will be seen that diminishing returns lead on to no returns. A major component of RS is survival of the individuals themselves, their marital partners, and their children, and one of the most important factors in this survival is nutrition. A good diet must “furnish the appropriate levels of all nutrients to meet the physiological and biochemical needs of the body at all stages of the life cycle; and it must avoid excesses of any nutrients that increase risk of diet-related diseases” (Robinson and Lawler, 1977, p. 10). The result of overeating is obesity and it has been shown that the mortality rate is about one third higher in men who are 10% or more overweight and much higher in those who are 20% or more overweight (Chaney et al., 1979). This means that there is an optimal level above which more food does not merely fail to increase life expectancy, it actually decreases it. There is clearly a limit to how much people can raise their RS by increasing their food intake. It is true that the rich can spend more on it in some societies than the poor but if the extra expenditure does not bring additional health it adds only to their prestige not to their RS.

Another important factor is protection from the climate. It is clear, I think, that there is a point beyond which expenditure on clothes and housing adds nothing to survival rate so that there can be little doubt that the law of diminishing returns is effective here as well as in nutrition. With regard to illness it must be reem- phasized that the law works only in a fixed state of technology, but applying this rider to medicine there are limits even in our society to the amount which may be effectively spent on overcoming ill health although a great deal may be wasted on ineffectual and irrelevant measures that make no impact on survival. Altogether it would be difficult to argue that the law of diminishing returns does not apply to investment in survival.

Another component of RS is fertility. To the extent that low fertility is due to poor nutrition this could be rectified in any society where a sufficient surplus could be accumulated but as with nutrition in general no more can be accomplished once an adequate level of nutrition has

been achieved. Where low fertility is due to some other cause, medical knowlecge may be helpful but again for a given state of this knowledge only so much can be achieved, so that after a certain point no increase in fertility will ensue.

A third component of RS is access to the opposite sex which will involve polygyny where this occurs, although not polyandry which tends to result in fewer rather than more children. As with fertility, polygyny is a way of increasing RS by increasing the fixed resources, i.e., the number of children on whose upbringing wealth may be expended. This is not unlimited because the number of available women is not unlimited and only the autocrats of large groups can achieve a spectacular number of wives and concubines. Whether or not the number of children continues to increase with increasing size of the harem, and Nadel (1942) suggests that for the Nupe it does not, the limit to the number of women available will effectively prevent a continuous increase in the number of fixed resources no matter how wealthy a man might be, rare autocrats apart. Dowry and bridewealth also enter into this question of access to the opposite sex, and a man may have to meet the cost of bridewealth for his sons, as well as for himself, or of dowries for his daughters. But the sums involved are usually fixed by convention within certain limits so that they cannot be regarded as a cause for unlimited expenditure. There is no real possibility, therefore, that wealth would enable a man to increase his “fixed resources” indefinitely even in societies where polygyny is allowed, and certainly not in monogamous societies even though “se- rial polygyny” may be permissible.

So far I have considered only RS, which leads to personal fitness, but a rich man might be able to increase his inclusive fitness by investing in his near relations. A major drawback to this is that many near relations of the rich will also be rich so that it would be pointless to invest in them. This was certainly true of the Tlingit where “noble” house-groups intermarried only with other “noble” house-groups (Oberg, 1973), and among the Turkmen of Persia the brothers of wealthy men also tended to be wealthy (Irons, 1979). In practice it would probably be worthwhile genetically to invest only in children of full siblings and since siblings would so often be rich themselves there would really be very little to be gained by it. Although the law of diminishing returns cannot be demonstrated to apply so


clearly to inclusive fitness as it can to RS yet in practice there is probably no great outlet for surplus wealth in promoting inclusive fitness.

Taking a population as a whole, it is only necessary for the potential expenditure of the richest members to pass beyond the point of diminishing returns, for if they devote their surplus to biologically neutral goals these goals will auto- matically become prestigious due to the high prestige of the individuals who invest in them, so that the less rich members will have to follow suit as far as they are able if they wish to maintain their own prestige, even if it has a deleterious effect on their RS. This is particularly applicable to the Rajputs, but in order to appreciate their dilemma, it is necessary to understand why they should wish to maintain their prestige.

The evidence from the examples given above shows that prestige and RS are positively correlated in subsistence economies but the argument can be taken farther back than that. There is some evidence that high ranking males and females among nonhuman primates have more offspring than low ranking ones, although the evidence is not conclusive and is not wholly consistent from one observer to another (Chalmers, 1979), but it is precisely these high ranking individuals which are the centre of attention (Chance and Jolly, 1970) so that there is probably a correlation between RS and the attraction of attention in nonhuman primates. Barkow (1975; 1976) has argued that the general primate tendency to strive for high social rank has been transformed in man into the need for self-esteem which is expressed in the pursuit of prestige and he has examined the possible role of attention paying in human evolution with special reference to prestige seeking. Altogether, it seems probable that attention attraction in primates, which becomes prestige seeking in man, is what Lumsden and Wilson (1981) refer to as an epi- genetic rule. Humans are genetically pro- grammed to seek prestige because this brings RS with it. Like many genetic programmes, it will vary between individuals so that some will seek prestige more avidly than others, but it does ex- plain why the poorer Rajputs, and their equivalents in other societies, are faced with a real dilemma when prestige and RS pull in opposite directions instead of together.

If prestige is the preferred option for a group or a class, then the question of population control arises. The most elementary form of it may

be seen among poor Chinese peasants referred to above where preferential female infanticide was practised because there was not enough food. Male infants were kept whenever possible because they could maintain the ancestor cult when they grew up and because they did not require a dowry. The first reason demonstrates that, even well below the point where the law of diminishing returns was relevant, prestige and RS could conflict since it would be shaming for a family if its ancestor cult could no longer be maintained. But it must be remembered that poor Chinese peasants belonged to a society where the wealth of the richest brought them well above this point so that prestigious activities like the ancestor cult introduced by them might not promote RS.

Douglas (1966), who discussed population control in four diverse small scale societies, concluded that it was “more inspired by concern for scarce social resources, for objects giving status and prestige, than by concern for dwindling basic resources” (p. 268), so that even where the economy was only slightly above the subsistence level population control and prestige could be related.

The relationship was also close among Rajputs practising extensive female infanticide where female babies were killed because there was no chance of finding a husband of suffi- ciently high status for them and it was shaming to have unmarried daughters in the family. In some Tibetan societies a measure of population control was achieved by fraternal polyandry with the object of maintaining estates intact so that the family would suffer no loss of prestige (Goldstein, 1971; 1978). In the British peerage, where prestige also depended upon the possession of estates, population control which may have been practised from the mid-17th century (Hollingsworth, 1964) had the same effect. Here the mechanisms included primogeniture and entail which kept the estate intact while leaving younger sons to make their way in the army or the Church, frequently without marrying, and allowed for the support of unmarried daughters by the holder of the estate. This pattern was common to the aristocracies of several West Eu- ropean countries where unmarried women could also be accommodated in convents (Dickemann, 1979).

It might be argued that those who practised population control would lose in competition

92 J. Hill

with those who did not. Such competition oc- curred in England through the partial breakdown of the class system that had prevented competition by keeping the upper classes separate through class endogamy and a strong sense of social isolation (Hill, 1978) on both sides so that they tended to have different sociocultural goals. The result of the partial breakdown of these bar- riers was not that the peerage gave up population control but that the general population adopted it as shown by the mean family size of 2.17 for the general population married in 1925 compared with 5.94 for those married in 1871 (Holling- sworth, 1964, Table 34). This was really the only road open to them since they wished to imitate, as far as possible, the prestigious way of life of the wealthy, and it was made easier by family limitation itself being prestigious since it was practised by the wealthy. In the prevailing cir- cumstances it was better for all classes since it enabled parents to have fewer and more viable children while at the same time maintaining a higher standard of living. It would, therefore, help to avoid a conflict between their biological and sociocultural goals.

The mean family size of 2.17 for the general population married in 1925 may be compared with 2.05 f 0.076 (S.E.) for marriages contracted from 1920-1930 inc. by 200 especially prestigious men. This figure was derived from data in Black (1981), given in the first 10 entries under each of the letters A-P, R, S, T and W which fulfilled the following conditions. Only married men whose “home country” was the UK, although they might have seen extensive service overseas, and who were not peers were included. The ‘date of marriage had to be given and the number of children, those entries which made no reference to children being excluded; a zero figure was allotted only when the entry specified “no c,” which would bias the mean upwards. Even so it is clear that the RS of these men was no greater than that of the general population. If one then considers the 25 nonroyal British dukedoms in existence in 1950, the 22 married dukes who died between 1951 and 1980 had a mean family size of 2.45 + 0.35 (S.E.) for marriages contracted between 1894 and 1954 (Black, 1961; 1972; 1981). In this calculation, a zero reading was given when no children were mentioned. The mean was higher than that for the general population but bearing in mind the ducal need for sons to inherit titles and estates

the RS was hardly adequate, with a mean number of 1.32 sons and only two dukes having more than two. Indeed, the dukedom of Leeds became extinct in 1964 for lack of an heir. Neither the RS of important commoners nor that of dukes at this period can be said to reflect their prestige.

The practice of some form of population control by the British peerage, and indeed by the highly prestigious throughout much of Europe and America, together with the effect of the law of diminishing returns, compels rejection of the hypothesis that prestige and RS are positively correlated in all human societies. They are positively correlated in societies at or only slightly above the subsistence level, but accumulation of wealth by the richest has enabled them to intro- duce new sources of prestige unconnected with RS. This sets up stresses among the less wealthy who cannot afford to maintain both their prestige and their RS, and as a consequence also adopt population control which increases the effectiveness of the law of diminishing returns by limiting the “fixed resources” to which wealth may be devoted and so helps to promote the pull of prestige over RS.

None of this should be taken to imply that people fail to increase their inclusive fitness by favoring relatives before unrelated individuals, although they do not always do so, but it does mean that many of them make no attempt to maximize the number of their relatives. There are exceptions, however, for scattered couples have large families, by choice rather than acci- dent, even when small ones are in fashion, and it is not clear to what extent this is due to genetic factors and to what extent to sociocultural in- fluences, but it does not invalidate the general argument.

Irons (1983, p. 206) suggests that in paleo- lithic hunting-gathering societies “occasional conscious attempts to space births or limit additional births were adaptive” under the prevailing conditions and he hypothesises that the proxi’mate mechanism by which family limitation was facilitated involved conscious concern with the quality of life for parents and children. This concern with quality, once having evolved, remains with us but becomes maladaptive in richer societies where it leads to low fertility because the cost of providing the desired quality of life is so great. This hypothesis provides an additional explanation of why people may limit their families, additional that is to my suggestion that

hestige and RS in Man 93

they are concerned to promote their prestige. There is no reason why both mechanisms should not play their part, reinforcing one another in rendering family limitation acceptable, particularly since quality of life and prestige tend to be positively correlated.

What data would falsify my conclusions? The existence of an affluent society in which members of the wealthier moiety had more RS on average than those of the less wealthy half would not, because there is nothing that denies that high prestige and high RS can go together, only that wealth has limited power to increase RS, so that the conclusions would be challenged only if RS continued to increase with prestige beyond the point of adequate investment in survival and fertility. Daly and Wilson (1983, Fig. 12-5) show that in the USA in 1970 the proportion of married women with no children decreased slightly with increasing income in all age groups, but in women aged 30-49 there was no corresponding increase in the proportion of those having 3 or more children, so that the correlation of RS with husband’s income did not apply to completed families of 3 or more. The fact that there was a slight decrease in the proportion of childless married women with rising income up to $25,000 suggests that men earning up to this level had not sufftcient surplus to rise above the point where the law of diminishing returns became effective. One reason may have been the high cost of medical treatment or special care necessary for marginally fertile wives; this could also account for the effect being limited to a maximum of two children. “Surplus” here means surplus to what the people themselves regarded as essential for their expected standard of life, not surplus to subsistence. What happened with higher incomes is not revealed because incomes above $25,000 are not differentiated in the figure, but further investigation would probably reveal whether the conclusions reached here are supported or contradicted by the evidence.

Another challenge to my conclusions would come from a society with a subsistence economy but no correlation between prestige and RS, and since surplus wealth plays a key part in the argument, a population in which prestige and RS were correlated while prestige and wealth were not would also undermine them. If neither surplus wealth nor RS were correlated with prestige it would not present a difficulty provided all families received adequate food, shelter, and med-

ical attention, so that RS and prestige were left free to float.

MacDonald (1983) sees a positive correlation between RS and the control of resources in human societies, although the strength of the as- sociation varies. He relates this variation in a general way to belief structures and sociopolit- ical constraints which, I would say, support the law of diminishing returns since they normally prevent any individual, no matter how wealthy, from acquiring an excessive number of wives, although this is permitted to a few autocratic or charismatic leaders.

If RS and sociocultural success are not correlated in some societies this means that any other links between biology and socioculture, and they are abundant, must be unrelated either to reproductive or to sociocultural success. Such biological characteristics belong to the materials out of which sociocultural evolution is built, but although materials have potentialities and limi- tations that affect the kinds of building that can be constructed with them, they do not determine the precise form of any particular building. In sociocultural evolution the forms are governed by selection from the available units and the criterion of selection is sociocultural success (prestige) just as in organic evolution it is RS. Because of this, a link between sociocultural and reproductive success is the only one that can bind the two evolutionary processes together; the other links between socioculture and biology play only indirect and subsidiary roles.

Careful work in two societies (Turkmen and Yanomamo) has shown that sociocultural success and RS are positively correlated and I have attempted to demonstrate that this may be true of several other societies, although not of all, and I have tried to show under what conditions the correlation breaks down. But if sociocultural success is ignored altogether and RS or inclusive fitness is taken as the only relevant evolutionary criterion, as in coevolutionary models, then it must be shown which sociocultural traits are positively correlated with RS or fitness in specified populations. It is not enough to produce elaborate mathematical models unless they are supported by specific examples and preferably by demographic data.

There still remains the question of whether the link between prestige and RS could be reestablished once it has been broken. If a society should be forced to return to a subsistence econ-

94 J. Hill

omy, the absence of a surplus would mean that the connection would presumably be restored because nothing would stand in its way, there would be no conflict between sociocultural and reproductive goals. But the link could never be reestablished in the presence of a large surplus because the law of diminishing returns would al-

ways prevent it.

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Prestige and reproductive success in man