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millions of years to perfect through natural selection, we have it in our power to short-circuit that evolutionary process by technology. Some combination of manual nipple stimulation and hormone injections may soon develop the latent potential of the expectant father—his confidence in paternity buttressed by DNA testing—to make milk, without the need to await genetic changes. The potential advantages of male lactation are numerous. It would promote a type of emotional bonding of father to child now available only to women. Many men, in fact, are jealous of the special bond arising from breast-feeding, whose traditional restriction to mothers makes men feel excluded. Today, many or most mothers in first-world societies have already become unavailable for breast-feeding, whether because of jobs, illness, or lactational failure. Yet not only parents but also babies derive many benefits from breast-feeding. Breast-fed babies acquire stronger immune defenses and are less susceptible to numerous diseases, including diarrhea, ear infections, early-age-onset diabetes, influenza, necrotizing enterocolitis, and SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Male lactation could provide those benefits to babies if the mother is unavailable for any reason.

It must be acknowledged, however, that the obstacles to male lactation are not only physiological ones, which can evidently be overcome, but also psychological ones. Men have traditionally regarded breast-feeding as a woman’s job, and the first men to breast-feed their infants will undoubtedly be ridiculed by many other men. Nevertheless, human reproduction already involves increasing use of other procedures that would have seemed ridiculous until a few decades ago: procedures such as external fertilization without intercourse, fertilization of women over the age of fifty, gestation of one woman’s fetus inside another woman’s womb, and survival of prematurely delivered one-kilogram fetuses by high-tech incubator methods. We now know that our evolutionary commitment to female lactation is physiologically labile; it may prove psychologically labile as well. Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices. Most of us choose to renounce murder, rape, and genocide, despite their advantages as a means for transmitting our genes, and despite their widespread occurrence among other animal species and earlier human societies. Will male lactation become another such counter-evolutionary choice?

CHAPTER 4

WRONG THE FOR LOVE The Evolution of Recreational Sex

First scene: a dimly lit bedroom, with a handsome man lying in bed. A beautiful young woman in a nightgown runs to the bed. A diamond wedding ring flashes virtuously on her left hand, while her right hand clutches a small blue strip of paper. She bends down and kisses the man’s ear.

She: “Darling! It’s exactly the right time!”

Next scene: same bedroom, same couple, evidently making love, but details tastefully obscured by the dim lighting. Then the camera shifts to a calendar slowly being flipped (to indicate the passage of time) by a graceful hand wearing the same diamond wedding ring.

Next scene: the same beautiful couple, blissfully holding a clean smiling baby.

He: “Darling! I’m so glad that Ovu-stick told us when it was exactly the right time!”

Last frame: close-up of the same graceful hand, clutching the small blue strip of paper. Caption reads: “Ovu-stick. Home urine test to detect ovulation.”

If baboons could understand our TV ads, they’d find that one especially hilarious. Neither a male nor female baboon needs a hormonal test kit to detect the female’s ovulation, the sole time when her ovary releases an egg and when she can be fertilized. Instead, the skin around the female’s vagina swells and turns a bright red color visible at a distance. She also gives off a distinctive smell. In case a dumb male still misses the point, she crouches in front of him and presents her hindquarters. Most other female animals are equally aware