Read Online Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Melvin Konner
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many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditionsof life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.
This is most of the last paragraph of The Origin of Species, one of the greatest science books of all time. It sets forth in one sentence—“These laws . . .”—the long and short of his pivotal theory, and we can see how it was presaged by the grandfather he never knew. And in the two famous sentences that follow, Charles showed something of Erasmus’s poetic gift:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Thus ends The Origin, including a less risqué but clear account of sexual reproduction, Grandpa Darwin’s “masterpiece of nature.”
But Charles D. makes a separate point about the value of variation, on the “tangled bank” he asks us to envision. Its countless forms, each at least slightly different, depend on one another for the simple gift of life. Being unique, each can exploit the bank’s entangled opportunities in a slightly different way. In other words, if your offspring are identical to you and to each other, you will each have the same needs and will compete head-on with one another and your identical mother. Variation creates elbow room; each offspring lives by slightly different means. Another way to make elbow room, even in sexual species, is dispersal. When an oak spreads her seedon the wind, her offspring compete less with her and one another. But not every species can cast its seed, so variation is needed.
This idea has recently proved true for a species of sea squirt. It’s a translucent yellowish or turquoise vase-shaped thing, about the size of your thumb if you go down to the heel of your hand, although the little vase seems to split into two spouts at the top. When a bunch of sea squirts fix their bases close together, as they often do, they resemble a hand-sized blob of gelatinous wavy tentacles. Often found on rocks, boat hulls, and other submerged surfaces, the sea squirt is a pest, which means it’s a great evolutionary success, and we now know one reason is that when a female squirt mates with multiple males, she increases the genetic variation in her young. This, in turn, decreases competition among them when, as often happens, they hang around together.
But there is a third explanation of sex, now the most widely accepted: the Red Queen hypothesis.
The Red Queen comes from neither of the Darwins but (indirectly) from a younger contemporary of the grandson, another Charles, named Dodgson—the mathematician better known as Lewis Carroll. “It takes all the running you can do,” the Red Queen warns Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “to keep in the same place.” So the Red Queen hypothesis simply says, “It takes all the evolving you can do to keep in the same place,” because your environment keeps changing and, to paraphrase Heraclitus, you can’t step onto the same tangled bank
This is most of the last paragraph of The Origin of Species, one of the greatest science books of all time. It sets forth in one sentence—“These laws . . .”—the long and short of his pivotal theory, and we can see how it was presaged by the grandfather he never knew. And in the two famous sentences that follow, Charles showed something of Erasmus’s poetic gift:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Thus ends The Origin, including a less risqué but clear account of sexual reproduction, Grandpa Darwin’s “masterpiece of nature.”
But Charles D. makes a separate point about the value of variation, on the “tangled bank” he asks us to envision. Its countless forms, each at least slightly different, depend on one another for the simple gift of life. Being unique, each can exploit the bank’s entangled opportunities in a slightly different way. In other words, if your offspring are identical to you and to each other, you will each have the same needs and will compete head-on with one another and your identical mother. Variation creates elbow room; each offspring lives by slightly different means. Another way to make elbow room, even in sexual species, is dispersal. When an oak spreads her seedon the wind, her offspring compete less with her and one another. But not every species can cast its seed, so variation is needed.
This idea has recently proved true for a species of sea squirt. It’s a translucent yellowish or turquoise vase-shaped thing, about the size of your thumb if you go down to the heel of your hand, although the little vase seems to split into two spouts at the top. When a bunch of sea squirts fix their bases close together, as they often do, they resemble a hand-sized blob of gelatinous wavy tentacles. Often found on rocks, boat hulls, and other submerged surfaces, the sea squirt is a pest, which means it’s a great evolutionary success, and we now know one reason is that when a female squirt mates with multiple males, she increases the genetic variation in her young. This, in turn, decreases competition among them when, as often happens, they hang around together.
But there is a third explanation of sex, now the most widely accepted: the Red Queen hypothesis.
The Red Queen comes from neither of the Darwins but (indirectly) from a younger contemporary of the grandson, another Charles, named Dodgson—the mathematician better known as Lewis Carroll. “It takes all the running you can do,” the Red Queen warns Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “to keep in the same place.” So the Red Queen hypothesis simply says, “It takes all the evolving you can do to keep in the same place,” because your environment keeps changing and, to paraphrase Heraclitus, you can’t step onto the same tangled bank
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