IT'S A STORY everyone knows: how Cinderella lost her mother as a little
girl, was humiliated and mistreated by her stepmother, and ultimately
rescued from a dysfunctional stepfamily by a handsome prince with an eye
for a slipper.

The story dates back at least to the 16th century in European folklore,
and is thought to be much more ancient, possibly originating in the Middle
East or Asia. Many other folk tales feature a cruel step-parent: think of
Hansel and Gretel, whose stepmother bullies their father into abandoning them in
the forest.

For many contemporary social critics, the growing number of stepfamilies
in Western societies is a symptom of moral decline, the legacy of easier
divorce and loss of respect for family values. Yet stepfamilies have
always been around. The prefix "step" comes from an old English root related to
"bereavement". Before the arrival of antibiotics, anaesthetics and the
rest of the arsenal of Western medicine, it wasn't uncommon to lose a spouse
early in a marriage and then remarry. What we call blended families have
been around a lot longer than the Brady Bunch.

But a controversial new theory would have us believe that the stereotypes
of cruel or heartless step-parents that run through folklore have a
biological basis. A pair of Canadian psychologists, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly,
claim that children are up to 100 times more likely to be abused or killed by a
step-parent than by a genetic parent. The husband-and-wife professors at
McMaster University believe the heightened level of violence suffered by
stepchildren is a product of evolutionary programming.

Daly and Wilson are in the vanguard of the self-proclaimed "new science"
of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists believe that all human
behavior has been shaped by a ruthless Darwinian calculus of reproductive
self-interest. As Robert Wright, one of the strongest advocates of
evolutionary psychology, puts it in his book, The Moral Animal: "Do
whatever you can to get your genes into the next generation".

If Daly and Wilson are right, in extreme cases "doing whatever you can"
may involve cutting short the lives of children who are not your own. In
purely Darwinian terms, stepfamilies are perilous places for a child to be.

The gist of their argument goes like this: we love our children, first and
foremost, because they are vehicles for our genes. Parental care, or
"investment", as evolutionary psychologists like to call it, is nature's
way of ensuring that we give our offspring the best chance of surviving and
thriving, so that they, in turn, will breed and pass on our genes to
successive generations.

This doesn't make the deep feeling of tenderness you experience gazing at
your sleeping progeny any less real: but the reason you feel it for them,
and not for the budgie or the children next door, is because they're
carrying your DNA. Daly and Wilson like to talk about parenting as a form
of "resource allocation". This goes for the obvious things, like food,
clothing and shelter, and the more intangible, but no less essential, parental
resources of affection, attention, time and patience.

In evolutionary terms, then, stepchildren will always be behind the eight
ball. There is simply no good Darwinian reason for an adult to "invest" in
a child who doesn't share their genes. So, in any blended family, there will
be an inherent conflict about who gets access to precious parental
resources: the stepchild or the natural child. Sometimes that conflict
will lead to physical and psychological violence, and even murder.

Daly and Wilson have put together an impressive array of statistics from a
number of countries, all of which point, in their view, to one conclusion:
that step-parents are, in fact, "hugely over-represented" as perpetrators
of child abuse, and "even more hugely as child murderers".

Beginning with a study of data collected by the American Humane
Association in the '70s, they found that children living in stepfamilies were seven
times more likely to be abused than those living with their genetic
parents. When they turned their attention to killings of children, the correlation
was even starker. Police records from Canada, and similar data from
Britain, Finland and NSW, all showed the same pattern: children were between 70 and
100 times more likely to be killed by a step-parent than by a natural
parent.

However, there is a paradox about these grisly statistics, one that seems
to upset the whole Darwinian applecart. In all these countries, the total
number of children killed by their natural parents is still higher than
that killed by step-parents. Evolutionary psychologists have developed some
ingenious theories to explain why it is that anyone should commit what
amounts to genetic suicide by murdering their own offspring.

But Daly and Wilson's riposte is much simpler. As a proportion of the
total population, they argue, stepfamilies still make up less than 10 per cent
of all families in a country such as Australia. However, step-parents are
responsible for a disproportionate amount of child abuse and child murder.

There is a touch of crusading fervor about the academics, whose pursuit of
the Cinderella complex goes back 25 years to their days as young
researchers at the University of California. Reading their papers and recent book, The
Truth About Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love, one could be
forgiven for concluding that they have it in for step-parents. Yet both
insist the opposite is the case. They believe their theory can be a step
towards greater social acceptance of step-parents, one that will increase
understanding of their problems.

"Violence is the tip of the iceberg," says Daly. "It's simply the most
visible sign of a much broader phenomenon, which is that genetic parents,
on the whole, love the child, wish it well, and are distressed by its
distress, while step-parents, on the whole, feel those things much less intensely,
or wish the child could be fostered out."

Within the scientific community are many who believe Daly and Wilson's
Darwinian view of parental love is flawed, and question their statistical
evidence and scientific reasoning. A major study published in 1991 by R.J.
Gelles and J.W. Harrop, veteran American researchers on family violence,
found that there was no significant difference between the rates of severe
violence perpetrated by natural parents and step-parents. And Steven Rose,
a professor of biology at the Open University in Britain, and a leading
critic of evolutionary psychology, argues that Daly and Wilson have tailored the
facts to fit their hypothesis.

"There's a huge difference in murder rates between, say, the UK and the
US," says Rose. "For their hypothesis to have any scientific validity, you
would expect the rate to be reasonably constant across populations. And even
more importantly, the actual percentage of step-parents who kill or abuse a
child is tiny. The vast majority are no different from genetic parents: if there
really were some deep Darwinian antipathy between step-parents and
stepchildren, you would expect a lot more step-parents to be killers, and
that simply isn't the case."

Leslie Margolin, a child-abuse researcher at the University of Iowa, is
less circumspect, calling Daly and Wilson's theory "patent nonsense".
"Step-parents don't have the same social supports and incentives to care
for children as biological parents," argues Margolin. "They don't have a long
shared history with the kids."

Margolin, who also trains social workers in counselling, has studied cases
of abuse and murder in detail, trying to understand the emotional and
social dynamics that lead step-parents to harm a child. His research uncovered a
disturbing element: in a significant number of instances, stepfathers were
encouraged to assault a child by the child's mother. Typically, the mother
urges a live-in boyfriend to discipline a child she can't control herself.
He starts out meaning to punish the child and ends up using fatal force.

This scenario, repeated consistently in the cases Margolin studied, seems
to strike at the roots of Daly and Wilson's work. So, why then would a mother
jeopardise her "precious Darwinian investments" (to use Wright's phrase)
by encouraging a genetic interloper to do them harm? Daly and Wilson shrug
off these criticisms. Like many evolutionary psychologists, they see
themselves as intellectual rebels, taboo-breakers who have had to battle a stifling
burden of political correctness.

Their chief target is the "social role theory" of the '60s and '70s, which
they believe painted a warm and fuzzy picture of blended families as
simply one kind of family type among many, all of them interchangeable and all
equally nurturing for children.

ACCORDING to social role theory, conflict in stepfamilies grew from the
issue of there being no defined role for step-parents, hence they often
felt confused, uncertain and inadequate in their relations with their
stepchildren.

In Daly and Wilson's world view, the truth is much simpler: step-parents
feel a kind of visceral resentment at "pseudo-parental obligation" that
is, in Darwinian terms, against nature. They cite some striking parallels from
the animal kingdom. Male langur monkeys and lions are notorious for wiping
out the offspring of other males. The adult male lion is a lonely hunter
until he mates. When he does, he forms an alliance with other males to
take over a pride of females. If successful, they immediately kill cubs
fathered by their predecessors. "It's a very systematic act," says Wilson. "There's
a special bite the male lions use to kill the cubs that they don't use in
any other context."

Like many of the comparisons evolutionary psychology makes between human
and animal behavior, this has a seductive surface appeal. Rose, however, calls
it a "crappy just-so story", no more deserving of scientific credibility
than Kipling's fables.

"If it's natural, and lions do it all the time, then why don't humans?"
says Rose, whose latest book, Alas Poor Darwin, will be published in July.

Rose argues that Daly and Wilson ignore counter-examples from animal and
human behavior that might make their theory look shaky. "The real clincher
is adoption. Adoptive parents have no genetic relationship to their
children, but there's no evidence at all that they are any more violent or
abusive towards their children than `natural' parents."

Despite these powerful critiques, Daly and Wilson's views on step-parents
have been seized upon eagerly in the British and American media and
championed by fellow neo-Darwinists such as Steven Pinker. They're also
beginning to influence debates on child protection in Canada.

In Australia, says Gillian Calvert, the NSW Commissioner for Children and
Young People, the theories have had little impact. "People resort to
biological explanations for social problems when their real agenda is to
deny the community's responsibility for fixing them."

CALVERT cites examples of Australian research that shows living with a
non-biological parent is a risk factor for child abuse, but only one among
many. "All our experience tells us that there's no single cause for child
abuse or killing. Nearly always, there is a complex build-up of factors:
domestic violence, psychiatric disorders, substance abuse, and physical
discipline of children."

In a sense, the answers from those who work in child protection are
depressingly familiar. People from low-income backgrounds are known to
have higher rates of divorce and relationship breakdown, and to repartner more
often. Poverty, job insecurity, second- or third-generation unemployment
and feelings of rejection by the social mainstream all contribute to the
stresses on young parents and step-parents, many of whom also have little
family or social support. All these stresses can contribute to a
heightened risk of violence against young children.

It is precisely because these problems seem so intractable that theories
such as Daly and Wilson's appeal, promising to cut through the
complexities of individual motivation, and illuminate what Yeats called "the foul rag
and bone shop of the heart" with the clear light of science. Many critics
question whether their theory amounts to science at all.

Interestingly, recent research from a different quarter suggests another
explanation for the Cinderella complex. Studies on mice suggest that males
undergo hormonal changes when their offspring are born which trigger
nurturing behavior. There may be a biological basis to the paternal
instinct.

Scientists have yet to investigate whether human males enjoy a similar
rush of paternal hormones. But there is evidence that men who have the chance
to be closely involved in caring for a baby early in its life are less likely
to harm it later on. It's easier, then, to understand why stepfathers who
miss out on early bonding, and have little chance to learn parenting
skills, might be more inclined to lash out at a child in moments of rage. It's no
more than a hypothesis, but no less plausible than Daly and Wilson's view.

Tom Morton produced The Descent of Man, a series on the new Darwinism on
ABC Radio National's Science program earlier this year.
 

Copyright  The Age Company Ltd 2000. Any unauthorised use, copying or
mirroring is prohibited. View our Privacy Policy.

Oryginal: http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000506/A43786-2000May5.html

POWRÓT