Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [82]
Was this true? Was not consciousness itself precisely the general-purpose brain mechanism this guy claimed did not exist? Maybe it was like blood, circulating among the organs. Or the whole person as a gestalt decision maker. One decision after another.
Anyway, mate choice: or rather, males choosing females. Sexual attraction had something to do with it. (Was this true?) Potential mates vary in mate value. Mate value could be defined as how much the mate increases reproductive success of the male making the choice. (Was this true?) Reproductive success potential can be determined by a number of variables. Information about some of these variables was available in specific observable characteristics of female bodies. Men were therefore always watching very closely. (This was true.)
Reproductive variables: age, hormonal status, fecundity, birth history.
A nubile female was one having begun ovulation, but never yet pregnant. Primitive population menarche average start, 12.4 years; first births at 16.8 years; peak fertility between 20 and 24 years; last births at around 40 years. In the early environment in which they evolved, women almost always were married by nubility (were they sure?). The biological fathers of women’s children were likely to be their husbands. Women started reproducing shortly after nubility, one child every three or four years, each child nursed intensively for a few years, which suppressed conception.
A male who married a nubile female had the maximum opportunity to father her offspring during her most fecund years, and would monopolize those years from their start, thus presumably not be investing in other men’s children.
If mate selection had been for the short term only, maximal fecundity would be preferred to nubility, because chance of pregnancy was better at that point. Sexual attraction to nubility rather than maximal fecundity indicates it was more a wife detector than a short-term, one-time mother detector.
Was this true?
In the early environment, female reproductive time lasted about 26 years, from 16 to 42, but this included average of 6 years of pregnancy, and 18 years of lactation. Thus females were pregnant or nursing for 24 of the relevant 26 years, or 92 percent of reproductive life. So, between first average birth age (17) and last conception age (39), average woman was nonpregnant and nonlactating for two years; thus 26 ovulations total. Say three days of fecundity per cycle, thus females were capable of conceiving on only 78 of 8,030 days, or one percent of the time. Thus only about one in a hundred random copulations could potentially result in conception.
Did this make sense? It seemed to Frank that several parts of an algorithm had been crunched into one calculation, distorting all findings. Numbers for numbers’ sake: specifics following an averaging was one sign, “random copulations” another, because there were no such things; but that was the only way they could get the figure to be as low as one percent.
In any case, following the argument, a nubile woman before first pregnancy was more fecund than a fully fecund woman in her early twenties, if one were considering her lifetime potential. And so nubility cues were fertility cues, as males considered their whole futures as fathers. (But did they?) Thus natural selection assigned maximum sexual attractiveness to nubility cues. And this attraction to nubility rather than fecundity indicated monogamous tendencies; male wants long-term cohabitation, with its certainty about parentage for as many offspring as possible.
And what were nubility cues? Skin texture, muscle tone, stretch marks, breast shape, facial configuration, and waist-to-hip ratio. All these indexed female age and parity. Female sexual attractiveness varied inversely with WHR, which was lowest at