Lady truth

A common reaction to the new Darwinian view of sex is that it makes perfect sense as an explanation for animal behavior -- which is to say, for the behavior of ‘nonhuman’ animals. People may chuckle appreciatively at a male turkey that tries to mat4 with a poor rendition of a female head, but if you then point out that many a human male regularly gets aroused after looking at two-dimensional representation of a nude woman, they don’t see the connection. After all, the man surely knows that it’s only a photo he’s looking at; his behavior may be pathetic, but it isn’t comic. ~ Page 53

Resistance of lumping humans and turkeys under one set of Darwinian rules has its points. Yes, our behavior is under more subtle presumably more “conscious,” control than is turkey behavior. Men can decide not to get aroused by something -- or, at least, can decide not to look at something they know will arouse them. Sometimes they even stick with those decisions. And although turkeys can make what look like comparable “choices” (a turkey hounded by a shotgun-wielding man may decide that now isn’t the time for romance_, it is plainly true that the complexity and subtlety of options available to a human are unrivaled in the animal kingdom. So too is the human’s considered pursuit of a very long-run goals.

It all feels very rational, and in some way it is. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t in the service of Darwinian ends. To a layperson, it may seem natural that the evolution of reflective, self-conscious brains would liberate us from the base dictates of our evolutionary past. To an evolutionary biologist, what seems natural is roughly the opposite: that human brains evolved not to insulate us from the mandate to survive and reproduce, but to follow it more effectively, if more pliably; that as we evolve from a species whose males forcibly abduct females into a species whose males whisper sweet nothings, the whispering will be governed by the same logic as the abduction -- it is a means of manipulating females to male ends, as the abduction -- it is a means of manipulating females to male ends, and its form serves this function. The basic emanations of natural selection are refracted from the older. Ineer parts of our brains all the way out to its freshest tissue. Indeed, the freshest tissue would never appeared if it didn’t toe natural selection’s bottom line. ~ Page 53/54