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By Root 497 0

its tail into a whitefly, discovers that the aphid is already occupied by a young wasp, then she does something that seems remarkably intelligent. She withholds sperm from the egg she is about to lay, laying an unfertilized egg inside the wasp larva that is inside the whitefly. (It is a peculiarity of wasps and ants that unfertilized eggs develop into males, while all fertilized ones develop into females.) The ‘intelligent’ thing that the mother wasp has done is to recognize that there is less to eat inside an already-occupied whitefly than in virgin territory. Her egg will therefore grow into a small, stunted wasp. And, in her species, males are small, females large. So it was ‘clever’ of her to ‘choose’ to make her offspring male when she ‘knew’ it was going to be small.

But of course, this is nonsense. She was not ‘clever’; she did not ‘choose’ and she ‘knew’ not what she did. She was a minuscule wasp with a handful of brain cells and absolutely no possibility of conscious thought. She was an automaton, carrying out the simple instructions of her neural program: If whitefly-occupied, withhold sperm. Her program had been designed, by natural selection, over millions of years: wasps that inherited a tendency to withhold sperm when they found their prey already occupied had more successful offspring than those that did not. Yet, in exactly the same way that natural selection had ‘designed’ an eye, as if for the ‘purpose’ of seeing, so natural selection had produced behaviour that seemed designed to suit the wasp’s purposes.9

This ‘powerful illusion of deliberate design’10 is so fundamental a notion and yet so simple that it hardly seems necessary to repeat it. It has been much more fully explored and explained by Richard Dawkins in his wonderful book The Blind Watchmaker.11 Throughout this book I will assume that the greater the degree of complexity there is in a behaviour pattern, a genetic mechanism or a psychological attitude, the more it implies a design for a function. Just as the complexity of the eye forces us to admit that it is designed to see, so the complexity of sexual attraction implies that it is designed for genetic trade.

In other words, I believe that it is always worth asking the question: why? Most of science is the dry business of discovering how the universe works, how the sun shines or how plants grow. Most scientists live their lives steeped in ‘how’ questions, not ‘why’ questions. But consider for a moment the difference between the question ‘Why do men fall in love?’ and the question ‘How do men fall in love?’ The answer to the second will surely turn out to be merely a matter of plumbing. Men fall in love through the effects of hormones on brain cells and vice versa, or some such physiological effect. One day some scientist will know exactly how the brain of a young man becomes obsessed with the image of a particular young woman, molecule by molecule. But the why question is to me more interesting, because the answer gets to the heart of how human nature came to be what it is.

Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she’s pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and health, which are indications of fertility. Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women and every person inherits from those ancestors the same preference. Why is that man a slave to his genes? He is not. He has free will. But you just said he’s in love because it is good for his genes. He’s free to ignore the dictates of his genes. Why do his genes want to get together with her genes anyway? Because that’s the only way they can get into the next generation; human beings have two sexes