After calls in Britain to allow single women to have IVF, zoologist and 'Manwatching' author Desmond Morris asks how much children really benefit from having a father.
I once said that it is a wise primate that knows its own father. The reason I said this is that with other species of monkeys and apes, the young are brought up by their mothers and are not aware of which particular male is the father. In our species, because we rely on our enlarged brains as our main evolutionary asset, we require a longer period of juvenile care; the childhood of our species is stretched by about 10 years. This evolutionary change means we do not become sexually mature until 10 years later than most monkeys or apes, and this prolonged childhood enables the giant computers in our skulls to become fully programmed.
Our special evolutionary advantage is our greatly increased ability to combine old experiences to solve new problems. This skill requires experience, programming and memory, and all these features benefit from a particularly long infancy.
Modern times have stretched childhood even further, because although we become reproductive between the ages of 13 and 16, until recently, you had to be 21 before you were considered adult, and even now the threshold is 18. Our society has become even more complicated than it was in primeval times.
The point of all this is that we require, as growing children, much more parental care than any other species in the world, and the step that was taken during the course of evolution was to double parental care by adding paternal care to the typical maternal care of other primates. This was achieved by creating a pair-bond between males and females; to put it in common parlance, we fall in love, something that other primate species don't do. This meant we doubled the parental care available to an incredibly demanding offspring.
Any single mother will know how difficult it is to bring up a child on her own. We should have enormous admiration for any woman who does that.
Having the father involved in the upbringing of his own offspring dramatically increases the care given, so having a father as well as a mother is a huge advantage evolutionarily. And it's an advantage we would do well to maintain, because if we lose that, we're putting greater demands on the mother, and putting her back in the situation that the female monkey has to contend with. But it is easier for the female monkey, because she has two big advantages: she has fur to which her baby can cling, and her baby grows up twice as fast.
In cases where you have a second parent who is of the same sex, two women or two men, you still have the advantage of double parental care. The one disadvantage of same-sex parents is that a child does not experience the contrasting roles of masculinity and femininity that are present in a heterosexual family unit.
People might ask why that matters. It matters in the respect that the male characteristics of our species are slightly different from the female. I'm referring to mental attributes. We know that the male and female brains work in different ways; this has been tested and proved. Of course, you can break these rules. We are very flexible as a species. But there is a gender bias in favour of certain qualities and there is an advantage for a baby growing up in a family unit where he or she can observe and learn from those contrasting types.
If the baby is male, the absence of a male role model is going to be a disadvantage because the learning, the input, the experience that the baby gets when it is growing up will not fit with its own inborn feelings of what masculinity is. It won't have the factors from experience which will reinforce its natural tendencies to be male. (The same would apply to a girl reared by two fathers.) Studies have made it clear that if a child grows up with an extremely masculine mother or an extremely effeminate father, their personalities start to develop at cross-purposes with the child's own innate feelings and this creates confusion - a confusion never fully understood by the individual concerned.
When you use the terms "masculinity" and "femininity", because we are in a culture that stresses sexual equality, there is a tendency to feel you are making a distinction that is not politically correct. The point is that males and females are different but equal. Males are better at some things and females are better at others. And these differences aren't a matter of political opinion, but genetics. There is no question that the male and female personality are different.
We don't know enough about the effect of two lesbians bringing up a child. It's too new. But in theory, the child should receive more care, because women are more programmed for nurturing than men. So, in one sense, that child is going to be better off because it is going to have double-mothering, which is something any child would obviously benefit from enormously. The disadvantage, especially if it is a male baby, is that it will have no male figure in the family environment. But the baby should encounter males in other social contexts - teachers, or uncles, or friends of the parents. I don't see at this stage that you can say that kind of family unit is going to be damaging because it fits the bill of double parental care.
There have already been so many changes in modern times to the primeval pattern. One could argue the reduced role of grandparents, which is diminishing more all the time, is a major disadvantage. In primeval times, the grandparental role was very important and, indeed, one of the possible factors involved in our longevity has been having older people around to help care and advise. In extended families it used to be tremendously important, and it is a shame it is beginning to be lost.
As a species, we can adapt to all kinds of changes. But if one is looking for an ideal context for a child, a growing child, there are lessons to be learned from our primeval past. We spent a million years evolving as human beings and we have only had a few thousand to adapt to living in what I call the human zoo, an urban environment. Animals adapt to zoos but they pay a high price, and that can happen to us too. It is surprising how many things in modern society go wrong because we have drifted away from the kind of lifestyle to which we evolved over millions of years. That society was tribal, we lived in small groups, and now we live in supertribes. Living with the resulting stress means that any factors we can maintain that are linked to our distant past - such as being reared by parents of both sex - are going to increase our chances for happiness. If we drift further and further away from our primeval pattern, we are going to put bigger and bigger demands on the amazingly flexible brain we have.
- (Guardian Service)
Desmond Morris's Babywatching is published by Jonathan Cape