"The New York Times"
July 14, 2002
'Sexual Selections': Show Me Your Plumage
By EMILY EAKIN 

Once an obscure ape dwelling in remotest Zaire, the bonobo
surged to celebrity in the mid-1990's on a groundswell of
liberal sentiment. Here was a primate tailor-made for the
age of political correctness: vegetarian, peace-loving,
female-dominant, with an outsize libido and an open-door
policy when it came to sex. (Male, female, night, day --
almost anything would do.) Moreover, 98 percent of its
genes were ours too, making the bonobo not a freak of
nature but a next of kin -- like us, only better. 

''The very model of a modern liberated woman,'' one
scientist exulted. ''Every program in women's studies
should include a little excursion into the world of the
bonobo,'' urged another, comparing the apes' largely
conflict-free lives to the ''make love, not war'' ethos of
1960's hippies. Conservatives were left to grumble that the
bonobo society was too P.C. to be true, bearing a
suspicious resemblance to -- as one disgruntled male
commentator put it -- life on the campus of Brown
University. 

He was onto something. As Marlene Zuk demonstrates in her
fascinating and persuasive new book, ''Sexual Selections:
What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex From Animals,'' the
tendency to hold up animals as role models -- to see in
their behavior inspiration or vindication for our own -- is
as rampant in science as the common cold, and considerably
more debilitating. ''The lens of our own self-interest not
only frequently distorts what we see when we look at other
animals,'' she writes. ''It also in important ways
determines what we do not see, what we are blind to.'' Most
of what we know about bonobos we've learned in the last 20
years, Zuk notes, ''after the feminist revolution in
anthropology.'' Had we focused on them earlier, she
speculates, they might have been seen as more violent and
warlike, ''simply because the paradigm of the day
emphasized male aggression, which the bonobos do possess.''


Zuk, a biologist at the University of California,
Riverside, who guards against wanton anthropomorphism in
her own work by studying insects (''it is harder to see
myself reflected in their behavior''), likens bonobos to
Pokemon -- just another fad toy. She worries that the
''bonobofication'' of our culture amounts to abandoning one
set of stereotypes about humanity's innate predilections
(war, hunting, male dominance) for another (lesbian sex,
food sharing). 

But Zuk's book is no antifeminist tract. On the contrary,
though she disapproves of using animals to advance feminist
or any other agendas -- ''Bonobos suit a trendy view of
sexuality, but what happens when the trend is over?'' she
wonders ominously -- Zuk believes that feminism can do much
to advance animal science, fostering ''an awareness of our
biases, not a reordering of them.'' On this point, she
echoes other forceful critics of ''male science,''
including the historian of science Donna Haraway and the
anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. But Zuk proves less a
polemicist than an enthusiast. More than anything else, she
wants to show how marvelously varied the natural world
becomes once we stop trying to see ourselves in it. 

Forgoing righteousness for humor, she conducts the reader
on a gripping tour of gender and mating behavior in the
animal kingdom, lingering over the weird and the grotesque
(fruit flies with sperm 20 times their size, parasitoids
that eat their cricket hosts alive) and pausing for
one-liners (''females do more than simply provide a pool
with the medal at one end of the swim lanes''), while
compiling a hefty catalog of unnecessary ignorance, missed
opportunities and hilariously misguided research. 

That it took more than 4,000 years of beekeeping -- and the
invention of the microscope -- to establish the queen bee's
sex is, by Zuk's reckoning, hardly surprising. Though ''one
could simply have observed which individual laid eggs,''
she notes dryly, pro-male bias, not empirical observation
or common sense, has tended to carry the day. For that
reason, she argues, Darwin's theory of sexual selection
languished for decades. The concept of ''female choice'' --
the idea that females helped drive evolution by selecting
only certain kinds of mates (the males with the longest
tails, showiest plumage or most elaborate antlers) -- was
apparently too much for early-20th-century biologists,
weaned on notions of female sexual passivity, to
contemplate. 

More disturbing is Zuk's contention that such stereotypes
persist, shaping and misshaping research on everything from
monogamy and maternal care in birds to homosexuality and
menstruation in humans. For example, female birds once
thought to be attached to a single male are now known to
pursue frequent ''extra-pair couplings,'' or E.P.C.'s. This
raises interesting questions about avian reproductive
strategies since, as Zuk points out, ''two males cannot get
a female any more pregnant than one.'' Yet moralizing
repeatedly intrudes on analysis. There's the warbler study
published in Nature that refers to offspring from E.P.C.'s
as ''illegitimate.'' And the one on red-winged blackbirds
that makes a disdainful allusion to ''female promiscuity.''


Remove the distorting lens of bias, and the world becomes a
fresh and exciting place. Sex doesn't end with triumphant
male conquest or simply amount to a battle to the death
among competing sperm -- like ''a cellular version of the
video game Mortal Kombat.'' Zuk describes tantalizing
evidence for ''cryptic female choice'': alert and choosy
females may control fertilization by stocking up on sperm
from several males and then selecting the best ''at their
leisure.'' 

According to Zuk, researchers have come up with any number
of ideas to explain the capacity for orgasm in human
females. But virtually no one, she says, has tried to
account for it in males. ''Why do men need the
reinforcement of orgasm while women can reproduce perfectly
well lying back and thinking of England?'' she asks.
Conversely, she notes, menstruation was until recently
ignored by evolutionary biologists who meanwhile swelled
the scientific journals with ''speculation on the adaptive
significance of penis size, sperm length, breast asymmetry
and . . . the size of different parts of the digestive
tract.'' 

Zuk is not an ideologue, just an unusually cleareyed
scholar. No doubt some readers will resist her efforts to
claim scientific dispassion for feminism. But few will
dispute her modest and sensible conclusion: for those
open-minded enough, ''nature does not provide object
lessons so much as challenges to our assumptions.'' 

Emily Eakin is a reporter for the Arts & Ideas section of The Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/14/books/review/14EAKINT.html?ex=1028340668&ei=1&en=1149702305db891a

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