Anthropological field research found that people in stone-age environments use arranged marriages for cooperation. Using this information, this book proposes that arranged marriages explain humanity's unique behavioural and physical traits.
An arranged marriage is an exchange of cooperation for reproduction: "If you cooperate with us, your son can marry our daughter, and our daughter will marry your son". This marriage system creates a cooperative system requiring no central government or money and a mating system where there is no choice between sexual partners. All individual sexual selection is outside of marriage.
This leads to conclusions: love is for extra-marital sexual relationships, married partners did not evolve to be cooperative, human intelligence is based on manipulating extremely complex marriage systems, and people use eye contact to initiate sexual interest because unmarried and unrelated men and women could not freely communicate.
This book will redefine humanity as the ape that exchanges cooperation for reproduction.
Taylor makes an impressive debut with a book that takes on the very origins of humanity. At first, readers may find his premise outlandish: He argues that ancient and prehistoric cultures’ systems of arranged marriage played a primary role in shaping the course of evolution. As humans evolved to use projectiles instead of mere brute force to hunt food, he asserts, the need for cooperation increased. Arranged marriage promoted such cooperation, because it encouraged disparate groups to interact in order to increase their numbers; it also helped expand the size of the human gene pool. For readers who assume that evolution is a result of a simple process of natural selection, this book may come as a revelation, as the text is filled with intriguing anecdotes and case studies of primitive cultures that convincingly support Taylor’s arguments. Scientists often cite environmental factors such as food access and geographical location to help explain evolution, but, as Taylor shows in exacting detail, such explanations are inadequate at best. His systematic argument touches on so many cultural, historical and scientific factors that it has an undeniable credibility, and by the end of the book, even the most skeptical readers may be swayed by Taylor’s hypothesis. The book’s dense, technical sections will likely appeal primarily to anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, but they’re also one of the book’s strengths. Taylor is clearly an expert in his subject, and he succeeds in illustrating how complicated, interconnected and ultimately unknown the subject of human evolution is. Although his book is complex, sometimes to the point being nearly impenetrable, readers who stick with it will find many rewards. - Kirkus Reviews
