Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature Read Online Free PDF Page B

picture, especially for the victimized infants and their mothers. iii But the latter might have a few tricks of their own, including perhaps one inherited by our ancestors: Typically, newly ascendant males spare the offspring of females with whom they had previously copulated, as though they say to themselves, “Isn’t that my old flame from several months ago? And just look at that cute little baby, he’s got my chin!” It has been suggested, in short, that female choice of multiple male sexual partners—itself facilitated by concealed ovulation—may be a means whereby our great-, great-, great-grandmothers fooled the men in their lives, inducing several to think that each might be the father and thereby taking out a kind of “infanticide insurance.”
    Here is a related but more cheery hypothesis for why human ovulation is concealed, focusing on benefits to the woman, ultimately via payoffs to her offspring. iv It is clearly advantageous to every woman to be fertilized by the best available sperm, which unfortunately might not be provided by her mate/husband. Sadly, the real world of potential sexual and social partners is not like Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” The average mate of the average woman is, well, average! Since a would-be mother is more likely to be reproductively successful mated to a less-than-perfect male specimen than if she were unmated, she might therefore be predisposed (which is to say, favored by natural selection) to increase her fitness by sticking with her partner—whopresumably is the best she is able to obtain—while also trying to have sex with more attractive men on the sly.
    The assumption here is that attractiveness, which is very much in the eye of the beholder, is likely to be determined by whether the person in question has traits that signal higher fitness to be experienced by his potential offspring: either unusually healthy, for example, or simply possessing traits that—once manifested in their sons—would likely be found attractive by the next generation of women. The possibility therefore exists that by concealing their ovulation, ancestral women were able to obtain desirable genes—as well as perhaps other immediate material resources—from desirable men with whom they mated adulterously, while also retaining paternal assistance from their socially designated but cuckolded partner.
    Another way of saying this: By dispensing with estrus (which is essentially equivalent to concealing one’s ovulation), early hominid women may have been able to exercise greater control over their choice of a sexual partner. This could have worked in either of two ways. For one, insofar as concealed ovulation facilitated clandestine matings with men other than their designated mate, this needn’t only have involved taking out “infanticide insurance.” It would also have provided the opportunity for women to engage sexually with men of their choice. And for another, consider that female mammals in “heat” (which is to say, in estrus because they are ovulating) are typically no more rational than their male counterparts. Lacking estrus—that is, having concealed their ovulation—women can remain comparatively cool and in sexual control … at least, compared to other mammals.
    By foregoing estrus, this particular argument goes, women have become masters of their genetic fate, empowered to pick and choose, deciding (maybe not consciously, but by exercising a degree of judgment nonetheless) among potential suitors. After all, the word
estrus
comes from a Greek term for a parasitic fly that pursues cattle and drives them crazy; a female animal in estrus seems more than a little crazy. By the same token, females who are not in estrus—which is to say, all women, all the time—are more likely to be sane, sober, and capable of better judgment.
    In his poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling wrote about the