Nicholas Lezard
BODY LANGUAGE
Jared Diamond asks an interesting question in the title of his recent book Why Is Sex Fun? To which the first answer could be: is it? I remember one bookshop which put The Joy of Sex in its fiction section.
This is not just a joke. It illustrates that there are parts of human behaviour – perverse, counterproductive – that sociobiology finds hard to explain. Not that it might never explain the weirdest regions of human behaviour.
Diamond tackles such problems as why, of all male mammals, only the Dyak fruit bat lactates, or why, when compared with our nearest relatives, the great apes, human female ovulation is concealed, why we are largely monogamous, why women undergo menopause, and why men are so generously endowed “down there”.
Even gorillas, who could literally tear us to pieces without breaking into a sweat, can only manage members one-and-a- half inches long.
Diamond suggests that our own members are the result of runaway selection, like the peacock’s tail, and that “it is large enough that if the same quantity of tissue were instead devoted to extra cerebral cortex, that brainy redesigned man would gain a big advantage”.
I suspect that most men, faced with a brain/ knob trade-off, would happily forsake a few IQ points for an extra inch or two.
As for the male member as an example of runaway selection – well, it doesn’t feel like it. An elephant’s clitoris is six inches long.
Bully for her, but so what?
There are grounds for unease which go beyond any of the rights or wrongs of Diamond’s conclusions.
We are going evolution-crazy.
We have latched on to this explanation for every aspect of our behaviour with an avidity that even scientists should find unnerving. Witness the recent
controversy about the “naturalness” of
rape.
When we are told that men want to spread their genes around as much as possible, or that women are on the prowl for the best genetic material, or that we are a survival strategy adopted by our genes, we take it on the nod; but there is something about the language used that makes me think we are witnessing a new version of the pathetic fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to animals; only we are now anthropomorphising molecules.
This might be good science, but it makes bad philosophy, not least in the way that it absolves us of responsibility for our more ignoble impulses.
More worryingly, it is creating a new mythology with which to grasp the world; and even if sociobiology is ultimately “right”, the popular understanding of it is wrong.
As Professor Steve Jones pointed out recently: “Evolution is to allegory as statues are to birdshit: a convenient platform upon which to deposit badly digested ideas.”