One morning, Alice and Jane both discover on awakening that they have turned bright red in order to advertise impending ovulation and sexual receptivity. Alice and Ted make love at home before they go off in their separate directions to work. Jane and Ralph go together to work, where they copulate occasionally on the office sofa in the presence of their co-workers.
Bob cannot help lusting for Alice and Jane when he sees them bright red and sees Jane and Ralph copulating. He is unable to concentrate on his work. He repeatedly propositions Jane and Alice.
Ralph drives Bob away from Jane.
Alice is faithful to Ted and rejects Bob, but the hassle also interferes with her work.
All day, Carol in her office elsewhere is seething with jealousy at the thought of Alice and Jane, because Carol knows that Alice and Jane are bright red and attractive to Bob, while she (Carol) is not.
As a result, the office succeeds in bagging few contracts and accounts. In the meantime, other offices, where ovulation is concealed and where copulation is private, prosper. Eventually, Bob's,
Alice's, Ralph's, and Jane's office goes extinct. The only offices that survive are those with concealed ovulation and copulation.
This parable suggests that the traditional theory, by which concealed ovulation and copulation evolved to promote cooperation within human societies, is plausible. Unfortunately, there are other, equally plausible theories that I will now explain more briefly.
2. Theory preferred by many other traditional male anthropologists.
Concealed ovulation and copulation cement the bonds between a particular man and woman, thereby laying the foundations of the human family. A woman remains sexually attractive and receptive so that she can satisfy a man sexually all the time, bind him to her, and reward him for his help in rearing her baby. The sexist message: women evolved to make men happy. Left unexplained by this theory is the question of why pairs of gibbons, whose unflinching devotion to monogamy should make them role models for the Moral Majority, remain constantly together despite having sex only every few years.
3. Theory of a more modern male anthropologist (Donald Symons).
Symons noted that a male chimpanzee who kills a small animal is more likely to share the meat with an oestrus female than with a non-oestrus female. This suggested to Symons that human females might have evolved a constant state of oestrus, in order to ensure a frequent meat supply from male hunters by rewarding them with sex. As an alternative theory, Symons noted that women in most hunter—gatherer societies have little say in selection of a husband. The societies are male-dominated, and male clans just suit themselves by exchanging daughters in marriage. However, by being constantly attractive, even a woman wed to an inferior male could privately seduce a superior male and secure his genes for her children. Symons' theories, while still male-orientated, at least represent a step forward in that he views women as cleverly pursuing their own goals.
4. Theory produced jointly by a male biologist and a female biologist (Richard Alexander and Katherine Noonan).
If a man could recognize signs of ovulation, he could use that knowledge to fertilize his wife by copulating with her only while she is ovulating. He could then safely neglect her the rest of the time and go off and philander, secure in the knowledge that the wife he left behind was unreceptive, if not already fertilized. Hence women evolved concealed ovulation to force men into a permanent marriage bond, by exploiting male paranoia about fatherhood. Not knowing the time of ovulation, a man must copulate often with his wife to have a chance of fertilizing her, and that leaves him less time to develop dalliances with other women. The wife benefits, but so does the husband. He gains confidence in his paternity of his children, and he need not worry that his wife will suddenly attract many competing men by turning bright red on a particular day. At last, we have a theory seemingly grounded in sexual equality.
5. Theory of a female sociobiologist (Sarah Hrdy).
Hrdy was impressed by the frequency with which many primates—including not only monkeys but also baboons, gorillas, and common chimps—kill infants not their own. The bereaved mother is thereby induced to come into oestrus again and often mates with the murderer, thus increasing his output of progeny. (Such violence has been common in human history: male conquerors kill the vanquished men and children but spare the women.) As a counter-measure, Hrdy reasoned, women evolved concealed ovulation in order to manipulate men by confusing the issue of paternity. A woman who distributed her favours widely would thereby enlist many men to help feed (or at least not to kill) her infant, since many men could suppose themselves to be the infant's father. Whether this theory is right or wrong, we must applaud Hrdy's overturning of conventional masculine sexism and transferring sexual power to women.
6. Theory of another female sociobiologist (Nancy Burley).
The average 7-pound newborn human weighs double a newborn gorilla, but the 200-pound gorilla mother dwarfs the average human mother. Because the newborn human is so much larger in relation to its mother than are newborn apes, birth is exceptionally painful and dangerous in humans. Until the advent of modern medicine, women often died in childbirth, whereas I have never heard of such a fate befalling a female gorilla or chimpanzee. Once humans had evolved enough intelligence to associate conception with copulation, oestrous women could have chosen to avoid copulating at the time of ovulation, and could have thereby spared themselves the pain and peril of childbirth, but such women would have left fewer descendants than women who could not detect their ovulation. Thus, where male anthropologists saw concealed ovulation as something evolved by women for men (Theories 1 and 2), Nancy Burley sees it as a trick that women evolved to deceive themselves.
Which of these six theories for the evolution of concealed ovulation is correct? Not only are biologists uncertain; it is only in recent years that the question has begun to receive serious attention. This dilemma exemplifies a pervasive problem in establishing causation in evolutionary biology, as well as in history, psychology, and many other fields where one cannot manipulate variables to perform controlled experiments. Such experiments would afford the most convincing way to demonstrate cause or function. If we could remodel one tribe of people so that all women advertised their day of ovulation, we could then see whether cooperation within or between couples broke down, or whether the Women used their new knowledge to avoid becoming pregnant. In the absence of such experiments, we can never be certain what human society Would really be like today without concealed ovulation. If it is hard to determine the function of things happening today under our eyes, how much harder must it be to determine functions in the vanished past! We know that human bones and tools were different hundreds of thousands of years ago, when concealed ovulation may have been evolving. Probably human sexuality, including the function of concealed ovulation, may also have been different then, in ways now hard for us to picture. Interpretation of our past runs the constant risk of degenerating into mere 'paleopoetry' stories that we spin today, stimulated by a few bits of fossil bone, and expressing like Rohrschach tests our own personal prejudices, but devoid of any claim to validity about the past.
Nevertheless, having mentioned six plausible theories, I cannot just walk away from the problem without attempting some synthesis. Here again, we come up against another pervasive problem in establishing causation. It is rare for complex phenomena such as concealed ovulation to be influenced by only a single factor. It would be as silly to seek a single cause of concealed ovulation as to claim that there was a single root cause of the First World War. Instead, there were many independent factors in the period 1900–1914 pushing towards war, others pushing towards peace. War finally broke out when the net weight of factors tipped towards war. Yet that does not excuse going to the opposite extreme of 'explaining' complex phenomena by an unweighted laundry list encompassing every conceivable factor.