“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles" (Sun Tzu, The Art of War)
Some male spiders voluntarily "castrate" themselves during sex in order to increase their chances of fathering offspring, a new study shows.
The males break off the entire sex organ while it is still in the female, allowing it to keep injecting sperm long after they have scuttled away.
A quick getaway is understandable; the females often eat their male mates.
Writing in Biology Letters journal, a team now says castration increases the amount of sperm transferred.
There is an old story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend: "It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear,"says the logical friend:"I don't have to,"replies the philosopher: "I only have to outrun you." (p.33)
Nicholas Humphrey, a Cambridge psychologist, was the first to see clearly the solution to this puzzle: We use our intellects not to solve practical problems but to outwit each other: Deceiving people, detecting deceit, understanding people's motives, manipulating people — these are what the intellect is used for. So what matters is not how clever and crafty you are but how much more clever and craftier you are than other people. The value of intellect is infinite. Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species." (p.33-34)
One day in 1973, before his beard was so gray, Van Valen was searching his capacious mind for a phrase to express a new discovery he had made while studying marine fossils. The discovery was that the probability a family of animals would become extinct does not depend on how long that family has already existed. In other words, species do not get better at surviving (nor do they grow feeble with age, as individuals do). Their chances of extinction are random.
The significance of this discovery had not escaped Van Valen, for it represented a vital truth about evolution that Darwin had not wholly appreciated. The struggle for existence never gets easier.However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches., Survival is a zero-sum game. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species. (p.64)
Sex is about disease. It is used to combat the threat from parasites. Organisms need sex to keep their genes one step ahead of their parasites.(p.86)
It is irrelevant to our generation whether people in the past wanted many children and grandchildren or whether it just happened. The only factor to shape our characteristics is who in the past had children (and how many) and who did not. (p.4)
We have already mentioned that a woman is slightly more likely to have routine sex with her partner during the infertile postovulatory phase of her cycle. The same is not true for infidelity. A woman is much more likely to have penetrative sex with a man other than her partner during her fertile phase. Moreover, she is much less likely to use or insist on the man using contraception on such occasions. (p.42)
What her conscious mind will not realize, though, is that having collected sperm from her ex-boyfriend, her body is now very keen also to collect sperm from her partner.Her body hall already decided that, on balance, her ex-boyfriend would make a better genetic father than her partner. The one thing it doesn't know is how their ejaculates compare. She wants to have hell egg fertilized by her ex-boyfriend only if his ejaculate is also the more fertile and competitive. The way for her to discover this is to pit one ejaculate against the other. In other words, her body wants to promote sperm warfare between the two men, and this is probably her only chance ever to do so. (p.44)
Humans are not, of course, the only animals to indulge in oral sex. Most male mammals, from rats and dogs to elephants and monkeys, nuzzle, smell and lick the female's vulva during foreplay. Monkeys also touch a female's genitals, sometimes inserting their fingers in to her vagina, then smelling and licking them on withdrawal. What all these males are doing is collecting information. They are seeking the answer to three questions. Is the female healthy? Is she fertile? And has she recently had sex with another male? A man is doing exactly the same — and the information he collects can be a big help in his pursuit of reproductive success. (p.72)
Surveys of many cultures around the world consistently show that,in looking for a long-term partner, women prefer men who have, or have the potential of, wealth, status, stability and durability. In the past, in all cultures, the children of women paired to men at the top of the scale for these qualities had a far greater chance of survival,health and subsequent fecundity. The same holds true even in today's industrialised societies. (p.139)
Moreover, when we look at which children are most likely to belong to their partner, women show a clear pattern. (...) the child most likely to have been sired by a woman's partner is the second; the children least likely are the first, and particularly the last. The reasons, though, are slightly different for first and last. (141)
Those pieces of DNA that plays this game , causing themselves to be replicated by whatever means, are called genes. The fact that evolution seems to revolve around their well-being rather than our makes them selfish genes.
Paradoxically, one way that scientist confirm the selfish-gene theory is by noticing unselfish behavior in animals. Female worker bees have evolved to labor all their lives to support their mother, the queen, and have no children themselves, because by a genetic quirk their mother's offspring share more DNA with them than their own offspring would. It serves their selfish genes better to behave that way than to go off on their own. (p.52)
Evolution always works for the benefit of selfish replicators. Usually, an animal's survival and reproduction contributes to the same end as the replicator's copying and spreading, but when there's a conflict, the replicator always wins.
Until a few thousand years ago, DNA was the foremost method in the known universe for storing and replicating information. That's why you can't talk about evolution without talking about DNA: evolution is about the replication of information, and almost all the information on the Earth was stored in DNA. (p.62)
Remember that genetic evolution selects for genes, not individuals.
Memes involving danger, food, and sex spread faster than other memes because we are wired to pay more attention to them - we have buttons around those subjects. (p.72)
Biologists call this the pair-bond. We’ve institutionalized it as marriage. The bad news is our pair-bond is designed to last for as long as it takes our offspring to reach some level of independence.
Genes aren’t designed to make us happy. They design us to make more copies of themselves. (p.16)
In all social species with pair-bonds, females are attracted to evidence that males display a chance for
power in the community. (p.27)
Female macaque monkeys are attracted to power, but even more so to signs of potential power. (p.28)
But remember, a woman needs a Pleistocene provider for fifteen years at least, so it doesn’t do her much good to marry the 70- year-old chief of the tribe. The Anna Nicole Smith strategy could be a problem if the old chief kicks off while she’s breast feeding and a new chief inherits his status. Women must predict future chiefs, so women are less attracted to power than ambition for future power. Girls in fairy tales hung their hopes not on the king but the prince. Remember guys, the car you drive is not as sexy as how driven you are. (p.30)
Money didn’t even exist a million years ago. The real Pleistocene currency by which a hunter was ranked was not cash but attention. (p.42)
Humans compete less for territory than for rank. Territory and possessions are only symbols of rank. The attention of the tribe is a kind of psychic territory where we harvest the resources we cooperative apes need to survive. He who controls the attention is high status and sexually attractive. ( p.43)
Genes aren’t designed to make us happy. They design us to make more copies of themselves. (p.15)