Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Fireflies out on a warm summer’s night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the flower’s female orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness, and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other’s nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation.

What is all this in aid of? What is this torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? Some beings, among them good-sized plants and animals such as dandelions, salamanders, some lizards and fish, can reproduce without sex. For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?

What’s more, sex is expensive. It takes formidable genetic programming to wire in seductive songs and dances; to manufacture sexual pheromones; to grow heroic antlers used only in defeating rivals; to establish interlocking parts, rhythmic motions, and mutual zest for sex. All this represents a drain on energy resources that could just as well be used for something of more obvious short-term benefit to the organism. Also, some of what the beings of Earth do or endure for sex endangers them directly: The displaying peacock is much more vulnerable to predators than if he were inconspicuous, fearful, and dun-colored. Sex provides a convenient and potentially deadly channel for the transmission of disease. All these costs must be more than offset by the benefits of sex. What are those benefits?

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Embarrassingly, biologists don’t fully understand what sex is for. In this respect the situation has hardly changed since 1862 when Darwin wroteWe do not even in the least know the final cause of sexuality; why new beings should be produced by the union of the two sexual elements … The whole subject is as yet hidden in darkness.

Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned—more elaborate, more redundant, more foolproof, more multiply capable instructions—sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. “The hen,” said Samuel Butler, “is the egg’s way of making another egg.” It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for.