Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner Page A
Authors: Melvin Konner
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to the partner. Each sex may have to fight off rivals, but not to the extent shown by jacanas, where males invest the precious resource that females have to fight for. In pair bonds, parenting is share and share alike, so once they’ve found each other, the lovebirds can concentrate on the kids. As with the male jacana, this is a full-time job, but in these species it’s a full-time job for two. Emperor penguins lay one egg at a time in their frozen Antarctic landscape, and the look-alike male and female take turns warming the egg and then the chick while the other goes out to swim and hunt in the icy sea, returning faithfully to regurgitate fish for the young.
This egalitarian kind of baby care, so common in birds, has the crucial result that male and female have roughly equal reproductive success. Together they mate, brood the eggs, raise the kids—repeat next season. Sure, there’ll be stolen copulations, sneaking around on both sides, and even occasional desertions—folklore aside, no pair-bonding species, not even geese, is perfectly loyal. But why not act the female jacana, trotting around corralling male after male, dumping eggs on them, and withholding child support? For her there’s a huge advantage: she can field dozens of young in a season, while the male yields far fewer of his own offspring.
Only there’s a catch. He can pretty much count on that lower number year in and year out. She has a chance at the breeding jackpot but an even greater chance of being squeezed out by a larger, tougher, even vicious female. Some jacanas can have harems of docile, willing males and leave their eggs in good care all over the pond top, but—barring a rare surplus of males—this has to mean other females have none. In fact, it’s this greater, all-or-none variation in reproduction that made the females big and rough in the first place. Much more than for their meek little males, it’s a zero-sum game. The result for females is more competition, faster evolution, and divergence from the size, shape, color, and behavior of the male.
In a great many other species, including large numbers of fish and countless insects, females are larger than males. We saw how the use and abuse of males stakes out an extreme in the black widow, where the female has her way with males and wraps them up for a midnight snack, and the praying mantis, whose females, in a way, pray for males and then prey on them in mid-copulation, not missing a beat. We also encountered pregnant male seahorses and asexual lizards that have completely gotten over the whole male thing. Compared to them, the jacana way is mild. But in birds and mammals, even that much female dominance is rare. There are those eight thousand species of pair-bonding birds, as well as quite a few mammals, on the egalitarian plan. Yet often in birds and generally in mammals, the jacana arrangement is turned upside down.
A peacock struts his stuff slowly, arcing great turquoise plumes that dwarf his glistening blue body, raising a patch of iridescent gold coins, then sweeping a delicate green mesh up into a lustrous fan dotted by gorgeous, staring green-and-gold eyes, in which the bird stands onstage alone, radiating a gaudy spray with feathers like the sun’s rays, only in color. Another turn or two later, he enfoldshimself in drapery, collapsing his sumptuous feathers down into a sleek, pied multicolored tail that seems to loll along behind him endlessly. A drab female demurely watching this spectacle wouldn’t seem to stand a chance, but she does stand her ground, because he’s not the only male trying to wow and woo her. In fact, she has her pick of them, prancing, splaying, waggling, and dragging their stunning quills.
Like a breeder with a monocle at a dog show, she gets to choose which one’s genes are worthy of posterity. She sizes him up and matches him with her own calm and valued self—thus giving him a gene channel, a shot at the zero-sum. Over the eons, peacocks
This egalitarian kind of baby care, so common in birds, has the crucial result that male and female have roughly equal reproductive success. Together they mate, brood the eggs, raise the kids—repeat next season. Sure, there’ll be stolen copulations, sneaking around on both sides, and even occasional desertions—folklore aside, no pair-bonding species, not even geese, is perfectly loyal. But why not act the female jacana, trotting around corralling male after male, dumping eggs on them, and withholding child support? For her there’s a huge advantage: she can field dozens of young in a season, while the male yields far fewer of his own offspring.
Only there’s a catch. He can pretty much count on that lower number year in and year out. She has a chance at the breeding jackpot but an even greater chance of being squeezed out by a larger, tougher, even vicious female. Some jacanas can have harems of docile, willing males and leave their eggs in good care all over the pond top, but—barring a rare surplus of males—this has to mean other females have none. In fact, it’s this greater, all-or-none variation in reproduction that made the females big and rough in the first place. Much more than for their meek little males, it’s a zero-sum game. The result for females is more competition, faster evolution, and divergence from the size, shape, color, and behavior of the male.
In a great many other species, including large numbers of fish and countless insects, females are larger than males. We saw how the use and abuse of males stakes out an extreme in the black widow, where the female has her way with males and wraps them up for a midnight snack, and the praying mantis, whose females, in a way, pray for males and then prey on them in mid-copulation, not missing a beat. We also encountered pregnant male seahorses and asexual lizards that have completely gotten over the whole male thing. Compared to them, the jacana way is mild. But in birds and mammals, even that much female dominance is rare. There are those eight thousand species of pair-bonding birds, as well as quite a few mammals, on the egalitarian plan. Yet often in birds and generally in mammals, the jacana arrangement is turned upside down.
A peacock struts his stuff slowly, arcing great turquoise plumes that dwarf his glistening blue body, raising a patch of iridescent gold coins, then sweeping a delicate green mesh up into a lustrous fan dotted by gorgeous, staring green-and-gold eyes, in which the bird stands onstage alone, radiating a gaudy spray with feathers like the sun’s rays, only in color. Another turn or two later, he enfoldshimself in drapery, collapsing his sumptuous feathers down into a sleek, pied multicolored tail that seems to loll along behind him endlessly. A drab female demurely watching this spectacle wouldn’t seem to stand a chance, but she does stand her ground, because he’s not the only male trying to wow and woo her. In fact, she has her pick of them, prancing, splaying, waggling, and dragging their stunning quills.
Like a breeder with a monocle at a dog show, she gets to choose which one’s genes are worthy of posterity. She sizes him up and matches him with her own calm and valued self—thus giving him a gene channel, a shot at the zero-sum. Over the eons, peacocks
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