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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (85073)	8/9/2000 1:16:45 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Sex and the Single Fly msnbc.com Ok, so maybe the last one didn't get you hot, but this one might do the trick. It turns out that old "higamous, hogamous" ditty may have been, er, ill conceived. From behavior to physiology to anatomy, sex throughout the animal kingdom has always been and will surely always be more bizarre than the Kama Sutra lets on. But at least it’s becoming less mysterious. Such previously inexplicable facts of life as weird genitalia and ludicrous copulatory practices (such as the 79 straight days that stick insects remain in flagrante delicto), biologists are now realizing, are adaptations to something they managed to overlook for a few millenniums: female promiscuity. “Generations of reproductive biologists assumed females to be sexually monogamous,” says biologist Tim Birkhead of the University of Sheffield in his new book “Promiscuity,” a masterly recounting of scores of recent studies. “But it is now clear that this is wrong. Females of most species... routinely copulate with several different males.” How routinely? Once they started looking, biologists found promiscuous females in some 70 percent of the species they studied. A clutch of grasshopper eggs can have several fathers. Thirty-five percent of baby indigo buntings, a pretty little songbird, are sired by a male other than the guy Mom came in with. So are 76 percent of Australian fairy wrens. In five hours, a female Scottish Soay sheep paired up with seven rams for a total of 163 encounters. Female chimps copulate a total of 500 to 1,000 times for each pregnancy: a 1997 study using DNA to run paternity tests found that 54 percent of baby chimps were fathered by males other than Mom’s supposed partner. A single clutch of goshawk eggs is inseminated some 500 times. Female monogamy is the exception rather than the rule, contrary to the pat sociobiology argument that only men gain an evolutionary edge by spreading their seed widely. Surveys find that human females’—that is, women’s— “ideal number” of lifetime sexual partners is less than men’s, and that they indeed have fewer partners than men. Based on that, “a lot of people want to simplify human mating and say that women are monogamous and men are promiscuous,” says psychologist David Buss of the University of Texas. “But that’s a gross oversimplification: both sexes pursue both strategies.” Female promiscuity triggers a war between the sexes. If a male is to have a fighting chance of fathering offspring and getting his genes into the next generation (the definition of evolutionary success) in the face of faithless females, he needs both crafty mating habits and seemingly outlandish mating equipment. One favored adaptation is a penis decked out with features much more elaborate than your basic sperm-meets-ova job requires. Hence the tools of male damselflies and dragonflies: both are covered with horns and hooks whose sole purpose, biologists have finally deduced, is to scoop out sperm that have arrived in the female’s genital tract before theirs. The wild variety in testes size (relative to body size) throughout the animal kingdom suddenly makes sense in light of female promiscuity, too: the more promiscuous the females of a species, the larger the equipment a male grows so his sperm have a swimming chance at fatherhood. That’s why gorillas’ testes are small (faithful females) but chimps are... well, there’s a reason circus chimps are usually clothed. Cheers, Dan.