The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [106]
If we were chimpanzees, our society would still look fairly familiar in some ways. We would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial and aggressive towards groups other than those we belonged to. In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist and belligerent, which we are. Adult males would spend more time trying to climb the political hierarchy than with their families. But when we turn to sex, things would begin to look very different. For a start, men would take no part at all in rearing the young, not even paying child support; there would be no marriage bonds at all. Most women would mate with most men, though the top male (the president, let us call him) would make sure he had droit de seigneur over the most fertile women. Sex would be an intermittent affair, indulged in to spectacular excess during the woman’s oestrus, but totally forgotten by her for years at a time when pregnant or rearing a young child. This oestrus would be announced to everybody in sight by her pink and swollen rear end, which would prove irresistibly fascinating to every man who saw it. Men would try to monopolize such females for weeks at a time, forcing them to go away on a ‘consortship’ with them, but would not always succeed and would quickly lose interest when the swelling went down. Jared Diamond, of the University of California at Los Angeles, has speculated on how disruptive this would be to society by imagining the effect on the average office of a woman turning up for work one day irresistibly pink.10
If we were pygmy chimpanzees, or bonobos, we would live in groups much like those of chimpanzees, but there would be roving bands of dominant men who visited several groups of women. As a consequence, women would have to share the possibility of paternity still more widely, and female bonobos are positively nymphomaniac in their habits. They have sex at the slightest suggestion and in a great variety of ways (including oral and homosexual) and are sexually attractive to males for long periods. A young female bonobo who arrives at a tree where others of the species are feeding will first mate with each of the males in turn – including the adolescents – and only then get on with eating. Mating is not wholly indiscriminate, but it is very catholic.
Whereas a female gorilla will mate about ten times for every baby that is born, a female chimpanzee will mate five hundred to a thousand times and a bonobo up to three thousand times. A female bonobo is rarely harassed by a nearby male for mating with a more junior male: mating is so frequent that it rarely leads to conception. Indeed, the whole anatomy of male aggression is reduced in bonobos: males are no larger than females and spend less energy trying to rise in the male hierarchy than ordinary chimpanzees. The best strategy for a male bonobo intent on genetic eternity is to eat his greens, get a good night’s sleep and prepare for a long day of fornication.11
The Bastard Birds
Compared to our ape cousins, we, the commonest of the great apes, have pulled off a surprising trick. We have somehow reinvented monogamy and paternal care without losing the habit of living in large multi-male groups. Like gibbons, men marry women singly and help them to rear their young, confident of paternity, but, like chimpanzees, those women live in societies where they have continual contact with other men. There is no parallel for this among apes. However, it is my contention that there is a close parallel among birds. Many birds live in colonies, but mate monogamously within the colony. And the bird parallel brings an altogether different explanation for females to be interested