In Which Science Corner Resurrects Your Distant Memories of Being Primordial
Friday, July 18, 2008 at 2:50PM 
I know I keep hammering this point home, but it's just so insane to me that scientists believed until very recently that sexual selection was dependent on male animals being slutty and females being monogamous. Animals are sluts! They will do whatever the hell it takes to ensure reproduction occurs. We are talking about Nature!
To use a couple of true clichés, variety is the spice of life and one animal's trash is another animal's treasure. We all like wildly different things, often at the same time. I have some sort of weird predisposition towards Blond Men, but that doesn't mean I'm not also constantly attracted to Dark-Haired and/or skinned dudes as well. Sexual attraction is not exactly a mutually exclusive thing.
I am not so attracted to fellow Gingers though, that'd be sick.
There is no such thing as a dysgenic trait. Genetic variety rulez!
It takes all kinds, and debating the "genetic fitness" of traits is what led to Eugenics, forced sterilization of the mentally ill, and the Holocaust concept of "life unworthy of life".
Anthopometry proves nothing! Social Darwinism is a lie!
Amplexus is like frottage (dry humping) that gets you pregnant. If you're a frog. It's literally Latin for "embrace" and it can involve more than two frogs, kind of a froggy swingers' party where everyone tries to knock a girl frog up. When multiple partners are involved (toads, newts, snakes, and other animals do a similar thing for sex) it's known as a "mating ball."
Froggy Went A Courtin' And He Did Ride
Basically female frogs fuck all the male frogs in the area and let their sperm fight it out. Competing sperm will literally form a circular barrier around the egg to stop a rival male's sperm from fertilizing it first. Similar behavior has been observed in other species, especially birds and monkeys.
Like many snakes, the male garter snake has two penises, called "hemipenes," on each side of its body. The male will try to use the best-positioned penis to mate with the female in the center of the mating ball.
Polyandry is a type of mating system where females mate with more than one male during a breeding season, resulting in the offspring of one female having more than one father. Polyandry has been traditionally thought of as a rare phenomenon, however recent research has shown this trend is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, with evidence of multiple mating by females in many groups. This trend is surprising because it appears to go against the basic principles of sexual selection.
Funfact! The form of polyandry in which two (or more) brothers marry the same woman is known as fraternal polyandry, and it is believed by many anthropologists to be the most frequently encountered form. Double funfact, the most well known human practitioners of polyandry are in Tibet.
Scientist Kate Hutchence lays it out for you:
The current consensus is that females are mating multiply to gain genetic benefits for thier offspring. There are several different ways this might be happening, and it is possible that a combination of these factors may be driving polyandry:
1. Genetic bet-hedging: females mate with many males to gain greater genetic diversity in their offspring, thereby hedging their bets against a changing environment.
2. Genetic improvement or Trade-up: females are remating with a good quality male in order to 'trade-up' on a previous mating with a low-quality male.
Everybody pile on now! Let's go eighths on a baby!
3. The good genes model: females mate multiply to gain access to 'good genes' for their offspring by trading up, or post-copulatory cues (this assumes that there in one best male for all females).
4. The genetic incompatibility model: females are mating multiply to gain access to the male that they are most genetically compatible with by trading-up, or postcopulatory cues (this assumes that there is no one best male for all females, and that due to the genetic complexity of organisms each female has her own best mate).
The belief that Polygyny is somehow the "natural" order of the world is how the FLDS Mormons convince themselves and their followers old dudes should get to have 400 little girl wives. The fact that (founder of Mormonism) Joseph Smith was a total wingnut is something they tend to leave out.
Comfort Wives: Big Love Style
Charles Darwin believed and taught that women were biologically inferior to men, and this idea greatly influenced his theories of natural selection and the hundred plus years of scientific research that followed. It was also taken for granted that white people were superior, and that "nature" was to thank for all this. This is also how white dudes got to have ethnic "comfort wives" and not consider it cheating.
Comfort Wives: Creole Plaçage Style
That we are just now untangling the ingrained sexism and racism in Science is one of the many reasons I am thrilled to be living in the 21st century and not any other, when I would probably have been burned at the stake.
My science hero Stephen Jay Gould
The tremendous Natural Historian polymath Stephen Jay Gould is to thank for debunking much of the pseudoscience that passed for evolutionary psychology in the past. He would be stoked about this election, that's for sure.
Charles Darwin listed the advantages of marrying, which included: "constant companion, (friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with—better than a dog anyhow—Home, and someone to take care of house". Darwin reasoned that as a married man he would be a "poor slave, worse than a Negro," but then reminisces that, "one cannot live the solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless and childless staring in one's face" Darwin concludes his discussion on the philosophical note, "there is many a happy slave" and shortly thereafter, married his cousin.
Darwin concluded that adult females of most species resembled the young of both sexes and from this and the other evidence, "reasoned that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females". Many anthropologists contemporary to Darwin concluded that "women's brains were analogous to those of animals," which had "overdeveloped" sense organs "to the detriment of the brain".
Carl Vogt, a University of Geneva natural history professor who accepted many of "the conclusions of England's great modern naturalist, Charles Darwin," argued that "the child, the female, and the senile white" all had the intellect and nature of the "grown up Negro"
Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a pioneer in the fields of social psychology and collective behavior, whose classic study of crowd behavior (The Crowd; 1895) is a social science staple, wrote:
"Even in the most intelligent races are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. Women represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.
They excel in fickleness, inconsistency, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without a doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely."
Superior Women = A Gorilla With 2 Heads = Double Bananas!
It is most generally applied to a pollinator attempting to copulate with a flower. Some flowers mimic a potential female mate visually, but the key stimuli are often chemical and tactile. This form of mimicry in plants has been titled Pouyannian mimicry.
Orchids commonly achieve reproduction in this manner, secreting chemicals from glands called osmophores located in the sepals, petals, or labellum, that are indistinguishable from the insect's natural pheromones. The pollinator then has a pollinia attached to its body, which it transfers to the stigma of another flower when if it attempts another 'copulation'. Pollinators are often bees and wasps of the order Hymenoptera, and flies.
Orchids by Ernst Haeckel, master Zoologist and World Riddler.
Ontogeny does not really recapitulate phylogeny, but it's still a great turn of phrase.
Ernst Haeckel and friend
Parthenogenesis: In hybridogenesis reproduction is not completely asexual, but instead hemiclonal: half the genome passes intact to the next generation, while the other half is discarded. Hybridogenetic females can mate with males of a "donor" species and both will contribute genetic material to the offspring.
When the female offspring produce their own eggs, however, the eggs will contain no genetic material from their father, only the chromosomes from the offspring's own mother; the set of genes from the father is invariably discarded. This form of reproduction is seen in some live-bearing fish of the genus Poeciliopsis as well as in the waterfrog Rana esculenta and the donor waterfrog species Rana lessonae.
MARMORKREBS, the Amazonian crayfish civilization.
Kaguya the bamboo princess mouse.
Female shark parthenogenesis
Apomixis is the process whereby plants produce asexually, and it very rarely involves a male. Meaning the mother produces a copy of herself using only her own DNA.
A unique example of male apomixis has recently been discovered in the Saharan Cypress, Cupressus dupreziana, where the seeds are derived entirely from the pollen with no genetic contribution from the female "parent."
Gregory Goodwin Pincus experimented with parthenogenesis in rabbits and later invented birth control. Thanks for The Pill, Mr. Pincus! It's helped all us liberated womynfolk to become more polyandrous than ever.
tasmanian devils breeding the wrong way
Remember the singing mice from Babe? Turn out they are real, and they were just trying to get laid.
What this says to me is uh, animals can do whatever the fuck they want without emotional consequences? That's why they're animals.
But what do I know? Maybe even their shit is complicated, like Big Love with penguins and bonobos.
In the Galapagos, Nazca boobies get divorced because female boobies are cougars.
The chance of successfully breeding probably improves as the pairs of birds get older and are together longer, as has been found in other birds. But, often the female seeks a divorce after a few breeding seasons. Since males significantly outnumber females in the colony studied, there are plenty of bachelors available if the female has a wandering eye.
"Our study population has 50 percent more males than females, creating the opportunity for females to trade a current mate, which may be worn-out from recent breeding effort, for a 'refreshed' non-breeding male."
"This study really predicts that the probability of divorce increases with the birds' success at breeding and raising a chick, because the effort required may tire out the male and consequently his mate may reject him."
I mean, is being a male butterfly inherently emasculating?
Contrary to expectation, we also find that female promiscuity actually rises when male numbers are reduced. Greater numbers of female partners leads to fatigue in males. They start producing smaller sperm packages. Unfortunately, the female butterflies instinctively know that the packages are smaller and that their chances of having been impregnated after mating are lower than usual. This just makes them more rampant!"
Sounds like Brooklyn to me.
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She lives in Los Angeles, and she tumbls here.
MATE WITH THIS ONE MAYBZ?
"Oh My Sweet Carolina" – Ryan Adams (mp3)
"Bartering Lines" – Ryan Adams (mp3)
"Call Me On Your Way Back Home" – Ryan Adams (mp3)
"Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)" – Ryan Adams (mp3)
PREVIOUSLY ON SCIENCE CORNER
VOLUME I.
New Planets & Monkeys That Make Daggers & Live In Caves
VOLUME II.
Mega-Galaxy Milkdromeda & Face Reading & Napping Helmets
VOLUME III.
Wandering Black Holes & Underground Rivers & Robot Children
VOLUME IV.
Martian Oceans & Bonecrushing Wolves & The Origin Of Sex
VOLUME V.
H.P. Lovecraft & Red Pandas & Panspermia
VOLUME VI.
Lost Forests & Paper Bones & Axolotls
VOLUME VII.
Nematodes & Ginger Cavemen & Ancient Legless Crabs
VOLUME VIII.
Stellar Explosions & Toxic Algae & Forced Lobotomies
VOLUME IX.
Dark Matter & Thermoballing & Salamander Crossbreeds
VOLUME X.
Aquanauts & Peruvian Meteorite Hysteria & Dinosaur Fellatio
VOLUME XI.
Cloned Glow Cats & Purple Earth & Parasitic Stars
VOLUME XII.
Ice Quakes & Cannibalistic Jumping Spiders & Hubble Pix
VOLUME XIII.
Singing Mice & Booby Divorces & Walking Whales
VOLUME XIV.
Giant Jellyfish & Immortal Hydras & New Age Sea Condoms
Reader Comments (4)
Your "garter snakes" are really copperheads.
I think you have really nailed it this time.
Could you explain why?, if sperm is five times more potent on the L O S T island ....the ladies aren't all pregnant with triplets?
And another thing.
Womens brain lobes are Yes, in fact smaller then mens, but women use both hemispheres of their's concurrently BOTH AT THE SAME TIME, in a much more interesting and ergonomically creative way.
Animal mating is really so interesting. Green Porno has been on my internet video party trick list for a while http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno)