Read Online Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner - Free Book Online
Authors: Melvin Konner
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why is it rare for species to get rid of it, despite the huge advantage of going solo? This latter part of the question could have implications for us. Is the answer to Darwin’s century-and-a-half-old question even now hidden in darkness?
To begin with, there is more than one answer. One of them can be found by going back beyond Charles to another Darwin, his grandfather Erasmus. That ancestral Darwin wrote not only a scientific treatise but also an epic poem about evolution; contrary to popular belief, the idea was in play for centuries before Charles puzzled out how it works. Erasmus Darwin, a doctor who turned down a chance to become personal physician to King George III (of American Revolution fame), devoted much of his life to studies foreshadowingthose of the grandson who eclipsed him. In his big book on plants— Phytologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening— he wrote that
from the sexual, or amatorial, generation of plants new varieties, or improvements, are frequently obtained; as many of the young plants from seeds are dissimilar to the parent, and some of them superior to the parent in the qualities we wish to possess.
For these reasons, “sexual reproduction is the chef d’oeuvre, the masterpiece of nature.”
Perhaps it would take a man to miss the downside of sex, to call it the masterpiece of nature. Erasmus was sexually liberal (and liberally sexual) himself, Charles’s father being only one of his fourteen children by two wives and then the governess, after he was widowed. He may have had a fifteenth with someone else’s wife. But he was a great proponent of women’s rights and an enemy of slavery, and he understood what was evolving across the ocean. He wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1787, calling him “a Philosopher and a Friend” as well as “the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps of any century, who spread the happy contagion of Liberty.” Given his love for infant America, maybe Erasmus didn’t trust himself to take care of King George, who was trying to kill it in its cradle.
But Erasmus Darwin’s wider fame came from long poems that played a role like the most successful popular science today, although it’s hard for us to grasp the popularity of book-length poems back then. Erasmus’s most celebrated was The Loves of the Plants, which gave a genteelly pornographic account of plant reproduction. Since gardening was a popular women’s art, and botany therefore a popular subject of study for them, The Loves of the Plants became a not-so-secret source of guilty pleasure, and it was condemned as such. Dr. Darwin describes, for instance, the sex life of Lychnis, anEnglish field flower known as ragged robin, in which bright purple or pink females compete to be fertilized by males:
Each wanton beauty, Tricked in all her grace
Shakes the bright dewdrops from her blushing face;
In gay undress displays her rival charms
And calls her wondering lovers to her arms.
The Loves of the Plants had many, some perhaps furtive, women readers, who could not in that era easily or respectably read anything more explicit than this.
But the point is that he got something right about what his grandson would call the question hidden in darkness: by producing young that are different from the parent, sex provides grist for the mill of evolution. Today we say that sex reshuffles the deck of genes whenever sperm and egg form and meet, and the rate of evolution depends on the available genetic variation. But this only pays back part of the twofold cost of sex. And since we know that change is possible in asexual species, and even sexual species may not change for millions of years— if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, says selection—there has to be more to sex than just speeding up evolution.
A second answer is called the “tangled bank” hypothesis, named after this famously eloquent passage by grandson Charles:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with
To begin with, there is more than one answer. One of them can be found by going back beyond Charles to another Darwin, his grandfather Erasmus. That ancestral Darwin wrote not only a scientific treatise but also an epic poem about evolution; contrary to popular belief, the idea was in play for centuries before Charles puzzled out how it works. Erasmus Darwin, a doctor who turned down a chance to become personal physician to King George III (of American Revolution fame), devoted much of his life to studies foreshadowingthose of the grandson who eclipsed him. In his big book on plants— Phytologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening— he wrote that
from the sexual, or amatorial, generation of plants new varieties, or improvements, are frequently obtained; as many of the young plants from seeds are dissimilar to the parent, and some of them superior to the parent in the qualities we wish to possess.
For these reasons, “sexual reproduction is the chef d’oeuvre, the masterpiece of nature.”
Perhaps it would take a man to miss the downside of sex, to call it the masterpiece of nature. Erasmus was sexually liberal (and liberally sexual) himself, Charles’s father being only one of his fourteen children by two wives and then the governess, after he was widowed. He may have had a fifteenth with someone else’s wife. But he was a great proponent of women’s rights and an enemy of slavery, and he understood what was evolving across the ocean. He wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1787, calling him “a Philosopher and a Friend” as well as “the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps of any century, who spread the happy contagion of Liberty.” Given his love for infant America, maybe Erasmus didn’t trust himself to take care of King George, who was trying to kill it in its cradle.
But Erasmus Darwin’s wider fame came from long poems that played a role like the most successful popular science today, although it’s hard for us to grasp the popularity of book-length poems back then. Erasmus’s most celebrated was The Loves of the Plants, which gave a genteelly pornographic account of plant reproduction. Since gardening was a popular women’s art, and botany therefore a popular subject of study for them, The Loves of the Plants became a not-so-secret source of guilty pleasure, and it was condemned as such. Dr. Darwin describes, for instance, the sex life of Lychnis, anEnglish field flower known as ragged robin, in which bright purple or pink females compete to be fertilized by males:
Each wanton beauty, Tricked in all her grace
Shakes the bright dewdrops from her blushing face;
In gay undress displays her rival charms
And calls her wondering lovers to her arms.
The Loves of the Plants had many, some perhaps furtive, women readers, who could not in that era easily or respectably read anything more explicit than this.
But the point is that he got something right about what his grandson would call the question hidden in darkness: by producing young that are different from the parent, sex provides grist for the mill of evolution. Today we say that sex reshuffles the deck of genes whenever sperm and egg form and meet, and the rate of evolution depends on the available genetic variation. But this only pays back part of the twofold cost of sex. And since we know that change is possible in asexual species, and even sexual species may not change for millions of years— if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, says selection—there has to be more to sex than just speeding up evolution.
A second answer is called the “tangled bank” hypothesis, named after this famously eloquent passage by grandson Charles:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with
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