BIOLOGICAL BASES OF THE FAMILY

Family may not be indispensable, in the sense that the functions performed by it can be taken over by other agencies of the social system, or a special agency created for them in society—such as the Israeli Kibbutz or the Soviet Kolhos, which take care of the socialization of the young. Children can be produced by surrogate mothers,³ or through a medical process called in vitro, which does not require copulation.

However, the fact that family figures in all societies has led scholars to believe that ‘it is in the nature (biological) of the humans to have a family’. This assumption is being questioned, but at the same time it is also recognized that there are some biological factors that facilitate family formation. We may briefly allude to them.

1. Like many mammals, particularly the primates, a human child at birth is hopelessly helpless and an overly dependent creature. Its survival depends on the care taken by elders, particularly the mother.
2. Not only is the human child helpless at birth, it also takes much longer for a human child to be on its own. A human child takes a much longer time to mature, take care of itself, and strike an adjustment with the environment. Physical maturation does not mean becoming skilful. Heavy dependence on elders makes it almost obligatory to live together. We have instances of wolf children—children left in the jungles and reared by wolves—who remained underdeveloped and behaved more like wolves. It is the family that transforms a biological brute into a human animal. This animal cannot live in isolation, even for its natural growth; it needs the company of other men and women.
3. However, because of the faculty of reason and a well-developed brain, a human child is better able to learn and imitate the behaviour of its elders. It does not have to invent the ‘wheel’ over and over again. The elders transmit their knowledge pool to the new generation and empower them to deal with the environment and with physically ferocious animals through cultural tools, which include sophisticated weaponry. It is not instincts that ‘impel him to build a shelter, to kill other animals, to grow plants, or to create tools—Even at five or six years of age man’s physical achievements and endowments seem insufficient to enable him to survive alone.’ Even sexual impulse gets socially conditioned and made dependent on learning. We need Vatsyayan’s Kamshastra⁴ to learn the techniques of love making! The point is that in all societies, the sex drive is channelled and restricted through our social upbringing. This is the reason why physically attractive and geographically available persons of the opposite sex in the family—sisters and brothers, for example—do not arouse any conscious sex desire. Of course, there have been exceptions; some perverted individuals have committed incestuous crimes—newspapers continue to carry such stories from different parts of the world
4. It is the biological urge for sex in all animals that brings males and females together in a close relationship. But what is peculiar to humans is the fact that the sexual impulse can be curbed, that is, made more social. The human female has no rutting season associated with the estrus cycle. The human female has a menstrual cycle, and this feature makes her available around the year for copulation instead of only in the mating season, as is the case with other animals. In some apes, the changing colour of the ischial callosities indicates the sexual readiness of the female. Not so in humans. Humans can have sex any time of the year, any hour of the day, and even with non-cooperative (non-consenting, unwilling) sex partners—hence the incidence of rape.⁵ It is this possibility that facilitates spouses living together throughout the year.
5. Among the bio-social factors that make living together as a family possible, the following may be of special importance:
   1. Some sort of family grouping: ‘e.g., in a pride of lions, an adult male, one or more adult females, adolescents, and whelps; among gibbons, an adult male and female, together with adolescents and still younger gibbons. It may be composed of essentially two kinds of strong biological ties, between adult male and female and between the mother and her offspring … the group is identifiable, and may persist for years and through the birth and maturation of several sets of offspring’ (Goode, 1964: 16).
   2. Territoriality: ‘Each such group occupies a definite space, large enough for an adequate food supply. Its members usually defend their territory …. Here biological needs are linked closely with the needs of the family’ (ibid.).
   3. Jealousy. ‘often in the female, perhaps always in the male’ (ibid.).
   4. Hierarchy of Dominance: The group of close kins in mammals is not simply a collection of its members—an aggregate, it has a structure, a kind of pecking order with a dominant animal (usually an adult male) at the top. This is the crudest form of learned behaviour.

These biological and bio-social factors form the foundation of the family. The most important is the fact that since the sexual urge can be satiated around the year, sex partners continue to stay together. The mother stays with her children because they need her care. But living together also requires a reduction of the conflicts of interest and jealousy. How these are resolved is not dictated by biology. It is here that the boundaries of biology stop and the contours of culture take over.

Let us elaborate this further. In a family, sexual relationship exists between males and females. But whether it is one male and one female, or one male and more than one female, or one female and more than one male who enter into this relationship, and whether the male or the female is brought from without for this purpose (what we call marriage) and where they are brought from, or whether such relationships can also be allowed within the house between clearly designated persons are matters of cultural prescription.

Whose name does a child carry—the father’s or the mother’s? How is property inherited? What are the roles and responsibilities of the husband and wife? Questions such as these do not have a single, universally applicable answer. Man’s ‘biological traits make his family systems possible and set some limits to their variation …’ (Goode, 1964: 12).

The question that arises is: why do people stick to the family? As we have seen, there is sexual attraction between people of opposite sexes, and that unlike other animals, sexual accessibility is not seasonal. This is a strong inducement for sexual partners to be together.