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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Why a bird-brained partner causes stress Why a bird-brained partner causes stress By ROBIN DUNBAR HAVE you been struggling yet again with your partner's faults and foibles? Do you find relationships really hard work? Well, it seems you are in good company. A recent study of brain size in a wide range of birds and mammals has revealed the species with the biggest brains relative to body size are precisely those that mate monogamously. Those that live in large anonymous flocks or herds and mate promiscuously have much smaller brains. It seems living with a partner is demanding and needs a lot of brain power. The birds make it clear the real issue is maintaining strong, resilient pairbonds. Birds that mate monogamously come in two quite different kinds. There are those – like many common garden birds, such as robins and tits – that choose a new mate each breeding season. But there are many others – such as many birds of prey, the owls and some of the crow family – that mate for life. It is this second group that has the biggest brains, far bigger than those that are seasonally monogamous, and this is true even when we control for differences in lifestyle, diet, and body size. Among mammals, monogamy is much rarer (only about 5 per cent of mammals mate monogamously), but here, too, those that do so – including many species of the dog family, such as wolves and jackals, and antelope such as the diminutive klipspringer and dikdik – have bigger brains than those, like the red deer and gazelles, that live in larger social groups where mating is promiscuous. Biologists probably wouldn't get so excited about having a big brain, were it not for the fact brain tissue is extremely expensive to grow and maintain – only your heart, liver and guts are more expensive. Evolving a bigger brain is thus no idle matter in evolutionary terms. Given what brains do, this suggests something about pairbonded relationships is significantly more taxing than life in the large anonymous flocks of shorebirds or the herds of deer and plains antelope. What makes monogamous pairbonds so cognitively demanding? One likely reason is that lifelong monogamy carries enormous risks. A poor choice of mate – one who is infertile, a lazy parent, or prone to infidelity – risks jeopardising your contribution to the species' gene pool. Since, biologically speaking, that is what life is all about, it is not difficult to see there are enormous evolutionary advantages to paying the cost of having a brain big enough to enable you to recognise the signs of a bad prospect when you see one. That way, you get to avoid a whole lot of trouble and do better for yourself in the evolutionary stakes. But there is another aspect to monogamy that must be just as important. Consider the case of the average songbird in your garden. The business of mate choice is over, the female has lain her eggs and now comes the tough bit – the long job of sitting on the nest while the eggs incubate and then the business of feeding of the fledglings that follow. Now, were it the case that one parent spent its day down at the avian equivalent of the pub, its mate would soon end up with the invidious choice of either having to abandon the eggs to cooling and predation so it can feed, or staying on the nest and starving. For a small bird that has to eat its own body weight in food each day just to stay alive, this is no mean issue. In short, you need a mate that is smart enough to figure out what your needs are and when it should return and take over its share of the nesting duties. So perhaps it's the need to be able to factor in your mate's perspective into your own that is so cognitively demanding. Our own experiences would tell us that keeping a relationship on course through the years is a very delicate business, requiring a lot of fancy footwork to anticipate and see off at the pass all those potential sources of disagreement. Or, when they come from left field and we don't see them until they hit us, it's being able to see how to mend the fences and restore equilibrium once again. So as you struggle to figure out why your spouse has behaved so badly yet again, console yourself with the thought that evolution has blessed you with one of its crowning glories – a brain capable of figuring out how to get the best out of a bad job. After that, it's all plain sailing. Even the humble birds on your garden bird table can sort this one out. Robin Dunbar is professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University.
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#1. To: Tauzero (#0)
(Edited)
I recently saw a sign put up by a woman I know, that says "Men are like hardwood floors. Lay them right the first time, and you can walk all over them forever". Something about that sign really trigged me, and I suddenly realized something: I've had it. No more dating or anything for me. Been married twice, and that was twice too often. From here on, I'm staying single. People out there are just not worth knowing at this point.
There are a few. And...there are different levels of relationships. Took me a long time to get that right.
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