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of humpback whales. Pilot whales, the other mammal species in which female menopause is well documented, are a prime example. Like traditional hunter-gatherer human societies, pilot whales live as “tribes” (termed pods) of 50 to 250 individuals. Genetic studies have shown that a pilot whale pod constitutes in effect a huge family, all of whose individuals are related to each other, because neither males nor females resettle from one pod to another. A substantial percentage of the adult female pilot whales in a pod are postmenopausal. While childbirth is unlikely to be as risky to pilot whales as it is to women, female menopause may have evolved in that species because nonmenopausal old females tended to succumb under the burdens of lactation and child care.

There are also other social animal species for which it remains to be established more precisely what percentage of females reach postmenopausal age under natural conditions. Those candidate species include chimpanzees, bonobos, African elephants, Asian elephants, and killer whales. Most of those species are now losing so many individuals to human depredations that we may already have lost our chance to discover whether female menopause is biologically significant for them in the wild. However, scientists have already begun to gather the relevant data for killer whales. Part of the reason for our fascination with killer whales and all of those other big social mammal species is that we can identify with them and their social relationships, which are similar to our own. For just that reason, I would not be surprised if some of those species too turn out to make more by making less.

CHAPTER 7

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING The Evolution of Body Signals

Two friends of mine, a husband and wife whom I shall rename Art and Judy Smith to preserve anonymity, had gone through a difficult time in their marriage. After both had a series of extramarital affairs, they had separated. Recently, they had come back together, in part because the separation had been hard on their children. Now Art and Judy were working to repair their damaged relationship, and both had promised not to resume their infidelities, but the legacy of suspicion and bitterness remained.

It was in that frame of mind that Art phoned home one morning while he was out of town on a business trip of a few days. A man’s deep voice answered the phone. Art’s throat choked instantly as his mind groped for an explanation. (Did I dial the wrong number? What is a man doing there?) Not knowing what to say, Art blurted out, “Is Mrs. Smith there?” The man answered matter-of-factly, “She’s upstairs in the bedroom, getting dressed.”

In a flash, rage swept over Art. He screamed inwardly to himself, “She’s back to her affairs! Now she’s having some bastard stay overnight in my bed! He even answers the phone!” Art had rapid visions of rushing home, killing his wife’s lover, and smashing Judy’s head into the wall. Still hardly able to believe his ears, he stammered into the telephone, “Who . . . is ... this?”

The voice at the other end cracked, rose from the baritone range to a soprano, and answered, “Daddy, don’t you recognize me?” It was Art and Judy’s fourteen-year-old son, whose voice was changing. Art gasped again, in a mixture of relief, hysterical laughter, and sobbing.

Art’s account of that phone call drove home for me how even we humans, the only rational animal species, are still held in the irrational thrall of animal-like behavioral programs. A mere one-octave change in the pitch of a voice uttering half a dozen banal syllables caused the image conjured up by the speaker to flip from threatening rival to unthreatening child, and Art’s mood to flip from murderous rage to paternal love. Other equally trivial cues spell the difference between our images of young and old, ugly and attractive, intimidating and weak. Art’s story illustrates the power of what zoologists term a signal: a cue that can be recognized very quickly and that may be insignificant in itself, but which has come to denote a significant and complex