The Doctrine
Inhabitants of the modern Western world are well aware that each child has one biological
father and one only. We know that, in sexually reproducing organisms, only one sperm
fertilizes the egg, and we know this rule holds for people as well as penguins. The doctrine
of single paternity, as a folk belief, goes so far back in Western history and is so extended
through our social and legal institutions that it is difficult for us to imagine that anyone could
entertain any other view of biological paternity. Nowhere in all the begats of the Bible do we
find any hint that a child might have more than one father. Aristotle (1992, 53-54) offers no
suggestion that a human child might have multiple fathers – although he does hold out that
possibility for birds. The Law of the Twelve Tables, the oldest surviving codification of
Roman law (451 B.C.), clearly assumes that a child is the product of a single biological
father:..............................................
The idea is roughly that men provision women and their
children with foods that the women cannot obtain on their own, because they are
burdened with dependent children. Men are willing to share their food because the women,
faithful to their mates, provide the men with a high degree of paternity certainty. When a
man brings his game home to his woman, he can reliably assume that the children it feeds
are his own (Alexander and Noonan 1979; cf. Washburn and Lancaster 1968.) This
scenario, now two decades old, is sometimes called the Standard Model of Human
Evolution. It remains the dominant version of the story of the evolution of food sharing and
the human family........................................................
These views of universal human nature, as well as the male-female bargain behind the
Standard Model of Human Evolution, are called into question by decades of ethnographic
research among tribal peoples in lowland South America. Some of the older work is cited in
this introductory essay. Recent findings, particularly those directed to the issues raised here,
are reported in this volume. This work, old and new, has made two relevant findings about a
substantial number of lowland South American societies. First, the people of these societies
have a different doctrine of paternity, one that allows for a child to have several different
biological fathers. Second, these people act on that doctrine in such as way as to confute
such statements as Pinker’s that “in no society do men readily share a wife.”
In addition to the societies discussed in this volume, there are quite a few other societies in
lowland South America where the idea that paternity is partible, that more than one man
can contribute to the formation and development of a fetus, has been reported. These
societies are dispersed over much of the continent, and represent many different languages
and language families.
The distributional evidence argues that it is
possible to build a biologically and socially competent society – a society whose members
do a perfectly adequate job of reproducing themselves and their social relations – with a
culture that incorporates a belief in partible paternity......................... A decade
and a half ago, Counts and Counts published a report on the ideology of the Lusi of West
New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea:1 “The notion that the foetus grows as a result of
multiple acts of intercourse seems to prevail, for the Lusi – even the young people who
assert that only one act is required – generally agree that it is possible for a person to have
more than one father” (1983, 49). All these findings seem all the more expectable in the
light of recent calculations by Wyckoff, Wang, and Wu (2000), which are compatible with
the proposition that a good deal of human evolution may have been marked by a reproductive pattern in which semen from multiple
mates may have been present at the same time in the female reproductive tract. Indeed, even
in the present day there is reason to inquire whether belief in partible paternity may not
provide some advantages that are lacking in cultures whose theories of conception are
limited to plain-vanilla single paternity. There are a couple of ethnographic cases in South
America where we can explore this claim, although we cannot test it directly among all the
peoples who profess a belief in partible paternity.........................................
Frequently, pregnancy is viewed as a matter of degree, not clearly distinguished from
gestation. For the Kulina, for instance, all sexually active women are a little pregnant. Over
time, as Pollock reports, semen accumulates in the womb, a fetus is formed, further acts of
intercourse follow, and additional semen causes the fetus to grow more. Only when semen
accretion reaches a certain level is pregnancy irreversible.
Lea reports somewhat similar ideas among the Mebengokre, where there is “neither a
notion of fertilization nor of subsequent ‘natural’ growth; rather the fetus is built up
gradually, somewhat like a snowball.”............................................
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