There’s a great piece of writing in the Times Higher this week. It’s by Tim Birkhead of Sheffield University, and it’s all about how Darwin dealt with sex. Stuffed with anecdotes, sniggers and first-hand (and first-rate) information (Birkhead has been trawling through the Darwin Correspondence), it’s exactly what science writing is all about.
Birkhead argues that Victorian mores meant that Darwin self-censored once his writings were being read, or chose not to see what was right in front of him. Take the case of Darwin’s cousin’s geese: they showed clear evidence of infidelity, sperm competition and multiple paternity.
If Darwin had put two and two together, the study of sperm competition - now a major area of research - might have been launched in 1870 rather than 1970. “Why did Darwin ignore the evidence and why did it take a century for others to make the connection?
What Darwin didn’t censor, his daughter Etty often did. Later, she displayed her sensibilities in a strange campaign against nature:
In later life she single-handedly began a campaign to have the stinkhorn fungus - whose Latin name, Phallus impudicus, simultaneously both identifies and describes it - removed from the English countryside because of its influence on the maids.
The result, Birkhead says, is that the biology of sex has been set back a hundred years:
The upshot of all this was that Darwin steered clear of female promiscuity and plumped for female monogamy, an idea that then remained firmly fixed, in biologists' minds at least, for a full century.
I first came across this fixed mentality a couple of years ago in La Jolla at the Beyond Belief conference. Joan Roughgarden had a stand-up debate with Richard Dawkins where she said biology was plagued by “locker-room bravado". Basically, the boys in charge of biology have always liked the alpha male idea, and ignored the evidence of female promiscuity (and homosexuality, of course) for as long as they could.
It seems they can’t any longer. And, as Roughgarden explains in her book Evolution’s Rainbow (there's a free chapter on female choice through that link) that has profound consequences.
13 Things’ chapter on sex touches on some of this stuff as a route to explaining the problems with sexual reproduction. It’s a fascinating area of biology – but start with Tim Birkhead’s piece. Go on – it’s freely available, after all. Which I only found out after I'd bought it. Damn.
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