I have been assuming in this discussion that our distinctively human life-cycle traits have some genetic basis. The comments that I made in Chapter One about the function of genes in general apply here as well. Just as our height and most of our observable traits are not influenced by only a single gene, there surely is not a single gene specifying menopause, testis size, or monogamy. In fact, we know little about the genetic bases of human life-cycle traits, though selective breeding experiments in mice and sheep have illuminated the genetic control of their testis size. Enormous cultural influences obviously operate on our motivation for providing child care or seeking extramarital sex, and there is no reason to believe that genes contribute significantly to differences among individual people in these traits. However, genetic differences between humans and the other two chimpanzee species probably do contribute to the consistent differences in many life-cycle traits between all human populations and all chimpanzee populations. There is no human society, regardless of its cultural practices, whose men have chimpanzee-sized testes and whose women forego menopause. Among those 1.6 % of our genes that differ between us and chimps and that have any function, a significant fraction is likely to be involved in specifying traits of our life-cycle.
The story of our uniquely human life-cycle occupies the five chapters of Part Two. Chapter Three begins by taking up the distinctive features of human social organization and of sexual anatomy, physiology, and behaviour. As already mentioned, features that make us strange among animals include our societies of nominally monogamous couples, our genital anatomy, and our constant and generally private pursuit of sex. Our sex lives are reflected not only in our genitalia but also in the relative sizes of men's and women's bodies (much more equal than are the bodies of male and female gorillas or orangutans). We shall see how some of these familiar and distinctive features have known functions, while others continue to defy understanding. No honest discussion of the human life-cycle could get away with noting that we are nominally monogamous and just leaving it at that. Pursuit of extramarital sex is obviously greatly influenced by each individual's particular upbringing and by the norms of the society in which the individual lives. Despite all that cultural influence, we are left with having to explain the facts that both the institution of marriage and the occurrence of extramarital sex have been reported from all human societies; but that extramarital sex is unknown in gibbons, although they do practise 'marriage' (that is, lasting male/female pairing to rear offspring); and that the question of extramarital sex is meaningless for chimpanzees because they do not practise 'marriage'. Hence an adequate discussion of our uniquely human life-cycle must account for our combination of marriage with extramarital sex. As Chapter Four will show, animal precedents exist to help us make evolutionary sense of our combination: men and women tend to differ in their attitudes towards extramarital sex much as geese and ganders do.
Chapter Five turns to another distinctive human life-cycle trait: how we select our sex partners, marital or otherwise. That problem scarcely arises for baboon troops, in which there is little selection: any male tries to mate with each female as she comes into heat. While common chimpanzees practise some selection of their sex partners, they are still much less selective and much more promiscuously baboon-like than are humans. Mate selection is a decision of major consequence in the human life-cycle, because married couples share parental responsibilities as well as sexual involvement. Precisely because care of human children demands such heavy and prolonged parental investment, we have to select our co-investor much more carefully than does a baboon. Nevertheless, Chapter Five will show that we can find animal precedents for our procedure in choosing sex partners, by going beyond primates to rats and birds. Our mate selection criteria, explored in Chapter Five, are relevant to human racial variation, as will be discussed in Chapter Six. Humans native to different parts of the globe vary conspicuously in external appearance, as do gorillas, orangutans, and most other animal species occupying a sufficiently extensive geographic range. Our visible geographic variability has often been taken as a pretext for exercising a human hallmark to be discussed in Chapter Sixteen: genocidal killings. Some of the geographic variation in our appearance surely reflects natural selection moulding us to local climate, just as weasels in areas with winter snow develop white fur in winter for better camouflage and survival. But I shall argue in Chapter Six, as Darwin maintained, that our visible geographic variability arose mainly through sexual selection, as a result of those mate-choice procedures of ours discussed in Chapter Five.
Chapter Seven brings the discussion of our life-cycle to an end, by asking why our lives have to come to an end. Aging is another feature of our life-cycle so familiar that we take it for granted: of course we shall all grow old and eventually die. So will all individuals of all animal species, but different species age at very different rates. Among animals we are relatively long-lived and became even more so around the time that Cro-Magnons replaced Neanderthals. Our longevity has been important for our humanity, by permitting effective transmission of learned skills between generations. But even humans grow old. Why is aging inevitable, given our extensive capacity for biological self-repair?
Here, more than in any other chapter, the importance of thinking in terms of evolutionary tradeoffs becomes clear. If measured by the ability to leave increased numbers of offspring, it just would not pay us to make the increased investment in self-repair mechanisms required to live longer. We shall see that the trade-off concept also illuminates the puzzle of menopause: a shutdown of child-bearing, paradoxically programmed by natural selection so that women can leave more surviving children.
THREE
THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN SEXUALITY
Human sexuality seems normal to us but is bizarre by the stmdards of other animals. Our bizarre sex lives were as crucial to cur rise to human status as were our large brains.
No week passes without publication of yet another book about sex. Our desire to read about sex is surpassed only by our desire to practise it. You might suppose that the basic facts of human sexuality must be familiar to lay people and understood by scientists. Just test your own grasp of sex by trying to answer these five easy questions:
Among the various ape species and man, which has by tar the biggest penis, and what for?
Why should men be bigger than women?
How can men get away with having much smaller testes than chimpanzees?
Why do humans copulate in private, while all other social animals do it in public?
Why don't women resemble almost all other female mammals in having easily recognized days of fertility, with sexual receptivity confined to those days?
If your answer to the first question was 'the gorilla', put on a dunce's cap; the correct answer is man. If you gave any intelligent answers to the next four questions, publish them; scientists are still debating rival theories.
These five questions illustrate how hard it is to explain the most obvious facts of our sexual anatomy and physiology. Part of the problem is our hang-ups about sex: scientists did not even begin to study the subject seriously until recently, and they still have [rouble being objective.
Another difficulty is that scientists cannot do controlled experiments on the sexual practices of us humans, as they can on our cholesterol intake or tooth-brushing habits. Finally, sex organs do not exist in isolation: they are adapted to their owners' social habits and life-cycle, which are in turn adapted to food-gathering habits. In our own case that means, among other things, that evolution of human sex organs has been intertwined with that of human tool use, large brains, and child-rearing practices. Thus, our progress from being just another species of big mammal to being uniquely human depended on the remodelling not only of our pelvises and skulls, but also of our sexuality. Given knowledge of how an animal feeds, a biologist can often predict that animal's mating system and genital anatomy. If we want to understand how human sexuality came to be the way it is, we have to begin by understanding the evolution of our diet and our society. From the vegetarian diet of our ape ancestors, we diverged within the last several million years to become social carnivores as well as vegetarians. Yet our teeth and claws remained those of apes, not of tigers. Our hunting prowess depended instead on large brains: by using tools and operating in coordinated groups, our ancestors were able to hunt successfully despite their deficient anatomical equipment, and they regularly shared food with each other. Our ability to gather roots and berries also came to depend on tools and thus to require large brains.