Thus, even a non-mammalo-centric view reinforces our dog's interpretation: we are the ones who are bizarre. We marvel at what seems to us the weird behavior of peacocks and big-bang marsupial mice, but those species actually fall securely within the range of animal variation, and in fact we are the weirdest of them all. Species-ist zoologists theorize about why hammer-headed fruit bats evolved their lek mating system, yet the mating system that cries out for explanation is our own. Why did we evolve to be so different?
This question becomes even more acute when we compare ourselves with our closest relatives among the world's mammal species, the great apes (as distinguished from the gibbons or little apes). Closest of all are Africa's chimpanzee and bonobo, from which we differ in only about 1.6 percent of our nuclear genetic material (DNA). Nearly as close are the gorilla (2.3 percent genetic difference from us) and the orangutan of Southeast Asia (3.6 percent different). Our ancestors diverged “only” about seven million years ago from the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos, nine million years ago from the ancestors of gorillas, and fourteen million years ago from the ancestors of orangutans.
That sounds like an enormous amount of time in comparison to an individual human lifetime, but it's a mere eye-blink on the evolutionary time scale. Life has existed on Earth for more than three billion years, and hard-shelled, complex large animals exploded in diversity more than half a billion years ago. Within that relatively short period during which our ancestors and the ancestors of our great ape relatives have been evolving separately, we have diverged in only a few significant respects and to a modest degree, even though some of those modest differences— especially our upright posture and larger brains-have had enormous consequences for our behavioral differences.
Along with posture and brain size, sexuality completes the trinity of the decisive respects in which the ancestors of humans and great apes diverged. Orangutans are often solitary, males and females associate just to copulate, and males provide no paternal care; a gorilla male gathers a harem of a few females, with each of which he has sex at intervals of several years (after the female weans her most recent offspring and resumes menstrual cycling and before she becomes pregnant again); and chimpanzees and bonobos live in troops with no lasting male-female pair bonds or specific father-offspring bonds. It is clear how our large brain and upright posture played a decisive role in what is termed our humanity-in the fact that we now use language, read books, watch TV, buy or grow most of our food, occupy all continents and oceans, keep members of our own and other species in cages, and are exterminating most other animal and plant species, while the great apes still speechlessly gather wild fruit in the jungle, occupy small ranges in the Old World tropics, cage no animal, and threaten the existence of no other species. What role did our weird sexuality play in our achieving these hallmarks of humanity?
Could our sexual distinctiveness be related to our other distinctions from the great apes? In addition to (and probably ultimately as a product of) our upright posture and large brains, those distinctions include our relative hair-lessness, dependence on tools, command of fire, and development of language, art, and writing. If any of these distinctions predisposed us toward evolving our sexual distinctions, the links are certainly unclear. For example, it is not obvious why our loss of body hair should have made recreational sex more appealing, nor why our command of fire should have favored menopause. Instead, I shall argue the reverse: recreational sex and menopause were as important for our development of fire, language, art, and writing as were our upright posture and large brains.
The key to understanding human sexuality is to recognize that it is a problem in evolutionary biology. When Darwin recognized the phenomenon of biological evolution in his great book On the Origin of Species, most of his evidence was drawn from anatomy. He inferred that most plant and animal structures evolve-that is, they tend to change from generation to generation. He also inferred that the major force behind evolutionary change is natural selection. By that term, Darwin meant that plants and animals vary in their anatomical adaptations, that certain adaptations enable individuals bearing them to survive and reproduce more successfully than other individuals, and that those particular adaptations therefore increase in frequency in a population from generation to generation. Later biologists showed that Darwin's reasoning about anatomy also applies to physiology and biochemistry: an animal's or plant's physiological and biochemical characteristics also adapt it to certain lifestyles and evolve in response to environmental conditions.
More recently, evolutionary biologists have shown that animal social systems also evolve and adapt. Even among closely related animal species, some are solitary, others live in small groups, and still others live in large groups. But social behavior has consequences for survival and reproduction. Depending, for example, on whether a species' food supply is clumped or spread out, and on whether a species faces high risk of attack by predators, either solitary living or group living may be better for promoting survival and reproduction.
Similar considerations apply to sexuality. Some sexual characteristics may be more advantageous for survival and reproduction than others, depending on each species' food supply, exposure to predators, and other biological characteristics. At this point I shall mention just one example, a behavior that at first seems diametrically opposed to evolutionary logic: sexual cannibalism. The male of some species of spiders and mantises is routinely eaten by his mate just after or even while he is copulating with her. This cannibalism clearly involves the male's consent, because the male of these species approaches the female, makes no attempt to escape, and may even bend his head and thorax toward the female's mouth so that she may munch her way through most of his body while his abdomen remains to complete the job of injecting sperm into her.
If one thinks of natural selection as the maximization of survival, such cannibalistic suicide makes no sense. Actually, natural selection maximizes the transmission of genes, and survival is in most cases just one strategy that provides repeated opportunities to transmit genes. Suppose that opportunities to transmit genes arise unpre-dictably and infrequently, and that the number of offspring produced by such opportunities increases with the female's nutritional condition. That's the case for some species of spiders and mantises living at low population densities. A male is lucky to encounter a female at all, and such luck is unlikely to strike twice. The male's best strategy is to produce as many offspring bearing his genes as possible out of his lucky find. The larger a female's nutritional reserves, the more calories and protein she has available to transform into eggs. If the male departed after mating, he would probably not find another female and his continued survival would thus be useless. Instead, by encouraging the female to eat him, he enables her to produce more eggs bearing his genes. In addition, a female spider whose mouth is distracted by munching a male's body allows copulation with the male's genitalia to proceed for a longer time, resulting in more sperm transferred and more eggs fertilized. The male spider's evolutionary logic is impeccable and seems bizarre to us only because other aspects of human biology make sexual cannibalism disadvantageous. Most men have more than one lifetime opportunity to copulate; even well-nourished women usually give birth to only a single baby at a time, or at most twins; and a woman could not consume enough of a man's body at one sitting to improve significantly the nutritional basis for her pregnancy.