Extra Credit Assignment: Read the following article and type a 1-page reaction to it. Discuss points made in the article, how convincing the logic arguments were, and whether or not you agree or disagree. Just be sure to explain why you feel the way you do clearly and thoroughly. Your extra-credit points depend upon the way you support your thoughts.
Why should males exist?
By Matt Ridley
U.S. News & World Report 08-25-1997
You do not need to be a feminist to recognize that men are at the root of a lot of the world's troubles.
Compared with women, they are more likely to drive fast, commit murders, desert their spouses, abuse children, develop autism or hemophilia, get into fights, become alcoholics, fail at school, find modern service-sector employment uncongenial, get cancer, and die young. Now that Dolly the cloned sheep has shown us that female mammals can be produced directly from the cells of other females, the human race might well ask whether it's necessary to put up with these troubles anymore. Dolly aside, there are already many species that happily or occasionally indulge in parthenogenesis (Greek for virgin birth): Turkeys can develop (with difficulty) in unfertilized eggs. Whiptail lizards are an all-female species. Various fish, crustaceans, insects, and worms can reproduce without the male sex. Some microscopic animals, such as bdelloid rotifers, appear to have gone without sex for at least 40 million years. Many common plants such as dandelions are wholly asexual. These species stand as living proof that sex is unnecessary.
And not just unnecessary but downright wasteful: Sex means giving away 50 percent of the shares in your own offspring. Asexual reproduction means holding on to all the equity. Companies that give away 50 percent of their equity every few years have to grow twice as fast as companies that do not, or the market will bury them. This biological paradox is so puzzling that some biologists have been tempted to chalk up sex to an accident of history. It's useless, but species like ours can't get rid of it.
If sex were truly useless, though, a species that did manage to get rid of it ought to say good riddance and return to the happy state of the rotifer. But consider the greenfly: It is perfectly able to reproduce asexually, but it reverts to sexual reproduction after only a few generations. It simply would not do so if sex did not carry some evolutionary advantage.
Many ideas have been advanced to explain the purpose of sex; the only one that is definitely wrong is the one still given in most textbooks--that sex is good for the species because it helps it to evolve. That would be rather like one company arguing that it's willing to take a 50 percent loss because it's helping the evolution of all other companies in the same business in the process. Few shareholders would be impressed.
The search for other explanations for sex starts with the observation of where sex happens and where it does not. Almost all animals and plants living in tropical rain forests and coral reefs are sexual. Many animals and plants living in temporary or unstable habitats--freshwater ponds, ephemeral forest clearings, arctic tundras, alpine meadows--do without males. This counts against several theories: First to go is the idea that sex is there to repair mutations. Animals and plants that live at high altitudes, drenched with mutation-causing ultraviolet light, are among the most likely to be asexual.
Second to go are a bunch of theories that explain sex as a sort of reshuffling of the genetic pack to adapt to changing environments. Yet it is precisely in stable environments like rain forests that sex seems most indispensable.
The Red Queen. In accordance with Sherlock Holmes's famous dictum--eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth--many biologists now lean toward a bizarre but intriguing explanation: Sex is for combating parasites. In warm, rich, stable environments, living creatures are under continuous assault from microscopic parasites, which are constantly evolving new abilities to undermine their hosts' defenses. The hosts need to change their genes regularly if they are to stay one step ahead. Only small, rapidly reproducing creatures living nomadically in cold or fast-changing environments can keep ahead of parasites without having sex. This idea, championed by Oxford University's William Hamilton, is known as the "Red Queen" theory, after the character in Through the Looking Glass who must keep running just to stay in the same place.
Having invented males, this theory goes, our ancestors only subsequently found other ways to put them to good use. Most birds and many fish employ males as assistant parents, sharing the duties of building nests, incubating eggs, and feeding babies. But this was not so much the purpose of sex as a byproduct of it--an attempt by females to turn the given fact of sexual reproduction to their advantage by selecting as mates males that were not total freeloaders.
Even seemingly destructive male behavior may be explained by this genetic war between the sexes. Male elephant seals and peacocks, for example, are the ultimate boors of the animal world. The male takes no part in child rearing after a brief insemination of the female. Indeed, such is the male elephant seal's aggressiveness that he sometimes tramples babies under foot. Except as a sperm provider, he is a liability.
Or is he? Think of it this way: When the female elephant seal hauls her body onto the best part of the breeding beach, she finds that she has unwittingly become the property of the biggest, strongest, healthiest, and most agile of the males. He has fought long and hard to monopolize exactly that spot. Genetically speaking, he is not a bad father at all: He is equipped with superb innate abilities, excellent disease resistance, a good brain, a well-put-together body. The long and bloody battles he has fought, the enormous muscles he has grown--females are responsible for these. It is their fault, because they have been choosing to allow the victors of battles to win their hearts for thousands of generations. Seen from this eugenic perspective, males are a sort of genetic test bed, a sieve through which the genes of the species are passed in every generation, with only the best being selected.
So, far from railing against the fact that men fight, take risks, die young, and treat women as property, women should apologize for it. The reason men are that way is most likely that women have bred them that way, gradually and imperceptibly over many generations, by choosing macho men as fathers for their sons.
Human males stand somewhere in the middle of the boorishness spectrum. They share many of the aggressive tendencies of their fellow male primates, but they also are intimately involved in child rearing in a way that male chimpanzees and gorillas are not. A more accurate description, however, may be to say that human males combine both extremes. Again, that is the fault of females. Many seemingly monogamous birds, for example, try to have their beefcake and eat it too. The Danish biologist Anders Moller, using DNA fingerprinting to establish the paternity of nestlings, found that female barn swallows select the most nurturing male they can get as a social husband, to build the nest and rear the chicks--then often sneak around the back of the barn and cuckold him by getting sperm from a genetically superior male (as indicated in this species by his long tail).
This is uncomfortably close to home. Like swallows, human females have clearly been trying an evolutionary mixed strategy. They have been choosing good and faithful husbands keen on child rearing, but they also have been rewarding macho showoffs with a disproportionate share in the next generation.
However, men have their revenge. In most species, female behavior is little influenced by male selection, because males are sexually indiscriminate (which in turn is because sperm is cheap and quick to produce compared with eggs). Sexual selection is one-way traffic, which is why peacocks look ridiculous and peahens look normal.
But in humans, almost uniquely, males play the same game: They are quite selective in their choice of a mate, as much as females or even more. Their selectivity, over thousands of generations, has landed female human beings with sexually selected features--swollen breasts, narrow waists, wide hips--that have no higher evolutionary purpose than to produce a next generation of females who also will be sexually attractive to men. Women would not have these features if men had not been picking on them for such a long time. Pamela Anderson Lee was made by men, just as Mike Tyson was by women.