The Queen - Matt Ridley

In any case, the principle—marry a nice guy but have an affair with your boss or marry a rich but ugly man and take a handsome lover—is not unknown among female human beings: It is called having your cake and eating it, too: Flaubert's Emma Bovary wanted to keep both her handsome lover and her wealthy husband: The work on birds has been conducted by people who knew little of human anthropology: Iri just the same way, a pair of British zoologists had been studying human beings in the late 1980s, largely in isolation from the bird work: Robin Baker and Mark Bellis of Liverpool University were curious to know if sperm competition happened inside women, and if it did, whether women had any control over it. Their results have led to a bizarre and astonishing explanation of the female orgasm.

What follows is the only part of this book in which the details of sexual intercourse itself are relevant to an evolutionary MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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argument: Baker and Bellis discovered that the amount of sperm that is retained in a woman 's vagina after sex varies according to whether she had an orgasm and when. It also depends on how long it was since she last had sex: The longer the period, the more sperm stays in, unless she has what the scientists call "a noncopulatory orgasm " in between:

So far none of this contained great surprises; these facts were unknown before Baker and Bellis did their work (which consisted of samples collected by selected couples and of a survey of four thousand people who replied to a questionnaire in a magazine), but they did not necessarily mean very much: But Baker and Bellis also did something rather brave: They asked their subjects about their extramarital affairs: They found that in faithful women about 55 percent of the orgasms were of the high-retention (that is, the most fertile) type: In unfaithful women, only 40 percent of the copulations with the partner were of this kind, but 70 percent of the copulations with the lover were of this fertile type: Moreover, whether deliberately or not, the unfaithful women were having sex with their lovers at times of the month when they were most fertile: These two effects combined meant that an unfaithful woman in their sample could have sex twice as often with her husband as with her lover but was still slightly more likely to conceive a child by the lover than the husband.

Baker and Bellis interpret their results as evidence of an evolutionary arms race between males and females, a Red Queen game, but one in which the female sex is one evolutionary step ahead: The male is trying to increase his chances of being the father in every way. Many of his sperm do not even try to fertilize her eggs but instead either attack other sperm or block their passage.

But the female has evolved a sophisticated set of techniques for preventing conception except on her own terms. Of course, women did not know this before now and therefore did not set out to achieve it, but the astonishing thing is that if the study by Baker and Bellis proves to be right, they are doing it anyway, perhaps quite unconsciously. This, of course, is typical of evolutionary explanations. Why do women have sex at all? Because they con-

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sciously want to. But why do they consciously want to? Because sex leads to reproduction, and being the descendants of those who reproduced, they are selected from among those who want things that lead to reproduction. This is merely a form of the same argument: The typical woman's pattern of infidelity and orgasm is exactly what you would expect to find if she were unconsciously trying to get pregnant from a lover while not leaving a husband: Baker and Bellis do not claim to have found more than a tantalizing hint that this is so, but they have tried to measure the extent of cuckoldry in human beings. In a block of flats in Liverpool, they found by genetic tests that fewer than four in every five people were the sons of their ostensible fathers. In case this had something to do with Liverpool, they did the same tests in southern England and got the same result. We know from their earlier work that a small degree of adultery can lead to a larger degree of cuckoldry through the orgasm effect. Like birds, women may be—quite unconsciously—

having it both ways by conducting affairs with genetically more valuable men while not leaving their husbands:

What about the men? Baker and Bellis did an experiment on rats and discovered that a male rat ejaculates twice as much sperm when he knows that the female he is mating with has been near another male recently. The intrepid scientists promptly set out to test whether human beings do the same: Sure enough, they do. Men whose wives have been with them all day ejaculate much smaller amounts than men whose wives have been absent all day. It is as if the males are subconsciously compensating for any opportunities for female infidelity that might be present. But in this particular battle of the sexes, the women have the upper hand because even if a man—again unconsciously—begins to associate his wife 's lack of late orgasms with a desire not to conceive his child, she can always respond by faking them. 2S

CUCKOLDRY PARANOIA

The cuckold, however, does not stand by and accept his evolutionary lot even unto the extinction of his genes: Birkhead and Moller MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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think that much of the behavior of male birds can be explained by the assumption that they are in constant terror of their wives ' infidelity. Their first strategy is to guard the wife during the period when she is fertile (a day or so before each egg is laid): Many male birds do this: They follow their mates everywhere, so that a female bird who is building a nest is often accompanied on every trip by a male who never lends a hand; he just watches. The moment she is finished laying the clutch of eggs, he relaxes his vigil and begins to seek adulterous opportunities himself.

If a male swallow cannot find his mate, he often gives a loud alarm call, which causes all the swallows to fly into the air, effectively interrupting any adulterous act in progress. If the pair has just been reunited after a separation or if a strange male intrudes into the territory and is chased out, the husband will often copulate with the wife immediately afterward, as if to ensure that his sperm are there to compete with the intruder 's.

Generally it works. Species that practice effective mate guarding keep the adultery rate low. But some species cannot guard their mates. In herons and birds of prey, for example, husband and wife spend much of the day apart, one guarding the nest while the other collects food. These species are characterized by extremely frequent copulation.

Goshawks may have sex several hundred times for every clutch of eggs.

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This does not prevent adultery, but at least it dilutes it: Just like herons and swallows, people live in monogamous pairs within large colonies. Fathers help to rear the young if only by bringing food or money: And crucially, because of the sexual division of labor that characterized early human hunter-gathering societies (broadly speaking, men hunt, women gather), the sexes spend much time apart. So women have ample opportunities for adultery, and men have ample incentives to guard their mates or, failing that, to copulate frequently with them.

To demonstrate that adultery is a chronic problem throughout human society, rather than an aberration of modern apartment blocks in Britain, is paradoxically difficult: first, because the answer is so stunningly obvious that nobody has studied it, and second, because it is a universally kept secret and therefore almost impossible to study. It is easier to watch birds:

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