Carla’s Reviews > The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature > Status Update

Mankind is a polygamist and a monogamist, depending on the circumstances. Indeed, perhaps it is foolish even to talk of humans having a mating system at all: They do what they want, adapting their behavior to the prevailing opportunity.

So two theories—truth in advertising and dishonest manipulation—seem to come to opposite conclusions. Truth in advertising concludes that females will discover a cheating seducer; dishonest manipulation concludes that males will seduce females against their better judgment.

In courtship, as in the world of advertising, there is a discrepancy of interests between the buyer and the seller. The female needs to know the truth about the male. The male wants to exaggerate the information. The female wants, the truth; the male wants to lie. The very word seduction implies trickery and manipulation.

Seduction therefore becomes a classic Red Queen contest.

The process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective: We do not regard any and all members of the opposite sex as adequate partners. We consciously decide whether to consider people, we fall in love despite ourselves, we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

The fact that one segment of the population is having sons makes it rewarding for the other segment to have daughters. Every animal is the child of one male and one female. So if dominant animals are having sons, then it will pay subordinate ones to have daughters.

Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today: A poor son is often forced to remain single, but a poor daughter can marry a rich man.

So human society, like ape society but unlike most monkey society, is a female-exogamous patriarchy, and sons inherit their father's (or mother's) status more than daughters inherit their parents' status. Therefore, says Trivers-Willard, it would pay dominant fathers and high-ranking mothers, or both, to have sons and subordinates to have daughters: Do they? The short answer is that nobody knows.

There are at least three different and better ways to determine your gender. The first is to choose the gender appropriate to your sexual opportunities.

A second way is to leave it to the environment.

A third way is for the mother to choose the sex of each child.

This, briefly, is the theory of sex allocation: animals choose the appropriate gender for their circumstances.

Far from settling down to a fair and reasonable way of determining gender, nature has to face an infinite series of rebellions: It suppresses one only to find it has opened the way to another: For this reason gender determination is a mechanism full of, in the words of Cosmides and Tooby, "meaningless complexity manifesting unreliability, aberrations, and (from the individual 's point of view) waste."

Maleness is a rather rare commodity at this stage. The few
remaining hermaphroditic mice are at a premium because only they
can produce the sperm that the all-female mice still need. The rarer
they get, the better they do. No longer does it pay to have the
male-killing mutation: Rather, the reverse. But if such a female
killing gene appeared, then the remaining hermaphrodites are no longer
at a premium.