Why is Sex Fun?: the evolution of human sexuality (7 page)

The other type of upkeep of machines and bodies is regular or automatic maintenance to reverse gradual wear, regardless of whether there has been any acute damage. For example, at times of scheduled maintenance we change our car's motor oil, spark plugs, fan belt, and ball bearings. Similarly, our body constantly grows new hair, replaces the lining of the small intestine every few days, replaces our red blood cells every few months, and replaces each tooth once in our lifetime. Invisible replacement goes on for the individual protein molecules that make up our bodies.

How well you maintain your car, and how much money or resources you put into its maintenance, strongly influence how long it lasts. The same can be said of our bodies, not only with respect to our exercise programs, visits to the doctor, and other conscious maintenance, but also with respect to the unconscious repair and maintenance that our bodies do on themselves. Synthesizing new skin, kidney tissue, and proteins uses up a lot of biosynthetic energy. Animal species vary greatly in their investment in self-maintenance, hence in the rate at which they senesce. Some turtles live for over a century. Laboratory mice, living in cages with abundant food and no predators or risks, and receiving better medical care than any wild turtle or the vast majority of the world's people, inevitably become decrepit and die of old age before their third birthday. There are aging differences even among us humans and our closest relatives, the great apes. Well-nourished apes living in the safety of zoo cages and attended by veterinarians rarely (if ever) live past age sixty, while white Americans exposed to much greater danger and receiving less medical attention now live to an average of seventy-eight years for men, eighty-three years for women. Why do our bodies unconsciously take better care of themselves than do apes' bodies? Why do turtles senesce so much more slowly than mice?

We could avoid aging entirely and (barring accidents) live forever if we went all out for repair and changed all the parts of our bodies frequently. We could avoid arthritis by growing new limbs, as crabs do, avoid heart attacks by periodically growing a new heart, and minimize tooth decay by regrowing new teeth five times (as elephants do, instead of just once, as we do). Some animals thus make a big investment in certain aspects of body repair, but no animal makes a big investment in all aspects, and no animal avoids aging entirely.

Analogy to our cars again makes the reason obvious: the expense of repair and maintenance. Most of us have only limited amounts of money, which we are obliged to budget. We put just enough money into car repair to keep our car running as long as it makes economic sense to do so. When the repair bills get too high, we find it cheaper to let the old car die and buy a new one. Our genes face a similar tradeoff between repairing the old body that contains the genes and making new containers for the genes (that is, babies). Resources spent on repair, whether of cars or of bodies, eat away at the resources available for buying new cars or making babies. Animals with cheap self-repair and short life spans, like mice, can churn out babies much more rapidly than can expensive-to-maintain, long-lived animals like us. A female mouse that will die at the age of two, long before we humans achieve fertility, has been producing five babies every two months since she was a few months old.

That is, natural selection adjusts the relative invest ments in repair and reproduction so as to maximize the transmission of genes to offspring. The balance between re-pair and reproduction differs between species. Some species stint on repair and churn out babies quickly but die early, like mice. Other species, like us, invest heavily in repair, live for nearly a century, and can produce a dozen babies in that time (if you are a Hutterite woman), or over a thousand babies (if you are Emperor Moulay the Bloodthirsty). Your annual rate of baby production is lower than the mouse's (even if you are Moulay) but you have more years in which to do it.

It turns out that an important evolutionary determinant of biological investment in repair-hence of life span under the best possible conditions-is the risk of death from accidents and bad conditions. You don't waste money maintaining your taxi if you are a taxi driver in Teheran, where even the most careful taxi driver is bound to suffer a major fender-bender every few weeks. Instead, you save your money to buy the inevitable next taxi. Similarly, animals whose lifestyles carry a high risk of accidental death are evolutionarily programmed to stint on repair and to age rapidly, even when living in the well-nourished safety of a laboratory cage. Mice, subject to high rates of predation in the wild, are evolutionarily programmed to invest less in repair and to age more rapidly than similar-sized caged birds that in the wild can escape predators by flying. Turtles, protected in the wild by a shell, are programmed to age more slowly than other reptiles, while porcupines, protected by quills, age more slowly than mammals comparable in size.

That generalization also fits us and our ape relatives. Ancient humans, who usually remained on the ground and defended themselves with spears and fire, were at lower risk of death from predators or from falling out of a tree than were arboreal apes. The legacy of the resultant evolutionary programming carries on today in that we live for several decades longer than do zoo apes living under comparable conditions of safety, health, and affluence. We must have evolved better repair mechanisms and decreased rates of senescence in the last seven million years, since we parted company from our ape relatives, came down out of the trees, and armed ourselves with spears and stones and fire.

Similar reasoning is relevant to our painful experience that everything in our bodies begins to fall apart as we grow older. Alas, that sad truth of evolutionary design is cost-efficient. You would be wasting biosynthetic energy, which otherwise could go into making babies, if you kept one part of your body in such great repair that it outlasted all your other parts and your resultant expected life span. The most efficiently constructed body is the one in which all organs wear out at approximately the same time.

The same principle, of course, applies to human-built machines, as illustrated in a story about that genius of cost-efficient automobile manufacture, Henry Ford. One day, Ford sent some of his employees to car junkyards, with instructions to examine the condition of the remaining parts in Model T Fords that had been junked. The employees brought back the apparently disappointing news that almost all components showed signs of wear. The sole exceptions were the kingpins, which remained virtually unworn. To the employees' surprise, Ford, instead of expressing pride in his well-made kingpins, declared that the kingpins were overbuilt, and that in the future they should be made more cheaply. Ford's conclusion may violate our ideal of pride in workmanship, but it made economic sense: he had indeed been wasting money on long-lasting kingpins that outlasted the cars in which they were installed.

The design of our bodies, which evolved through natural selection, fits Henry Ford's kingpin principle with only one exception. Virtually every part of the human body wears out around the same time. The kingpin principle even fits men's reproductive tract, which undergoes no abrupt shutdown but does gradually accumulate a varinty of problems, such as prostate hypertrophy and decreasing sperm count, to different degrees in different men. The kingpin principle also fits the bodies of animals. Animals caught in the wild show few signs of age-related deterioration because a wild animal is likely to die from a predator or accident when its body becomes significantly impaired. In zoos and laboratory cages, however, animals exhibit gradual age-related deterioration in every body part just as we do.

That sad message applies to the female as well as the male reproductive tract of animals. Female rhesus macaques run out of functional eggs around age thirty; fertilization of eggs in aged rabbits becomes less reliable; an increasing fraction of eggs are abnormal in aging hamsters, mice, and rabbits; fertilized embryos are increasingly unvi-able in aged hamsters and rabbits; and aging of the uterus itself leads to increasing embryonic mortality in hamsters, mice, and rabbits. Thus, the female reproductive tract of animals is a microcosm of the whole body in that everything that could go wrong with age may in fact go wrong— at different ages in different individuals.

The glaring exception to the kingpin principle is human female menopause. In all women within a short age span, it shuts down decades before expected death, even before the expected death of many hunter-gatherer women. It shuts down for a physiologically trivial reason-the exhaustion of functional eggs-that would have been easy to eliminate just by a mutation that slightly altered the rate at which eggs die or become unresponsive. Evidently, there was nothing physiologically inevitable about human female menopause, and there was nothing evolutionarily inevitable about it from the perspective of mammals in general. Instead, the human female, but not the human male, has become specifically programmed by natural selection, at some time within the last few million years, to shut down reproduction prematurely. That premature senescence is all the more surprising because it goes against an overwhelming trend: in other respects, we humans have evolved delayed rather than premature senescence.

Theorizing about the evolutionary basis of human female menopause must explain how a woman's apparently counterproductive evolutionary strategy of making fewer babies could actually result in her making more babies. Evidently, as a woman ages, she can do more to increase the number of people bearing her genes by devoting herself to her existing children, her potential grandchildren, and her other relatives than by producing yet another child.

The evolutionary chain of reasoning rests on several cruel facts. One is the human child's long period of parental dependence, longer than in any other animal species. A baby chimpanzee starts gathering its own food as it becomes weaned by its mother. It gathers the food mostly with its own hands. (Chimpanzee use of tools, such as fishing for termites with grass blades or cracking nuts with stones, is of great interest to human scientists but of only limited dietary significance to chimpanzees.) The baby chimpanzee also prepares its food with its own hands. But human hunter-gatherers acquire most of their food with tools, such as digging sticks, nets, spears, and baskets. Much human food is also prepared with tools (husked, pounded, cut up, et cetera) and then cooked in a fire. We do not protect ourselves against dangerous predators with our teeth and strong muscles, as do other prey animals, but, again, with our tools. Even to wield all those tools is completely beyond the manual dexterity of babies, and to make the tools is beyond the abilities of young children. Tool use and tool making are transmitted not just by imitation but by language, which takes over a decade for a child to master.

As a result, a human child in most societies does not become capable of economic independence or adult economic function until his or her teenage years or twenties. Until then, the child remains dependent on his or her parents, especially on the mother, because, as we saw in previous chapters, mothers tend to provide more child care than do fathers. Parents are important not only for gathering food and teaching tool making but also for providing protection and status within the tribe. In traditional societies, the early death of either the mother or the father prejudiced a child's life even if the surviving parent remarried, because of possible conflicts with the stepparent's genetic interests. A young orphan who was not adopted had even worse chances of surviving.

Hence a hunter-gatherer mother who already has several children risks losing some of her genetic investment in them if she does not survive until the youngest is at least a teenager. That one cruel fact underlying human female menopause becomes more ominous in the light of another cruel fact: the birth of each child immediately jeopardizes a mother's previous children because of the mother's risk of death in childbirth. In most other animal species, that risk is insignificant. For example, in one study encompassing 401 pregnant female rhesus macaques, only one died in childbirth. For humans in traditional societies, the risk was much higher and increased with age. Even in affluent, twentieth-century Western societies, the risk of dying in childbirth is seven times higher for a mother over the age of forty than for a twenty-year-old mother. But each now child puts the mother's life at risk not only because of the immediate risk of death in childbirth but also because of the delayed risk of death related to exhaustion by lactation, carrying a young child, and working harder to feed more mouths.

Yet another cruel fact is that infants of older mothers are themselves increasingly unlikely to survive or be healthy because of age-related increases in the risks of abortion, stillbirth, low fetal weight, and genetic defects. For instance, the risk of a fetus carrying the genetic condition known as Down's syndrome increases with the mother's age, from one in two thousand births for a mother under thirty, one in three hundred for a mother between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine, and one in fifty for a forty-three-year-old mother, to the grim odds of one in ten for a mother in her late forties.

Thus, as a woman gets older, she is likely to have accumulated more children; she has also been caring for them longer, so she is putting a bigger investment at risk with each successive pregnancy. But her chances of dying in or after childbirth, and the chances that the fetus or infant will die or be damaged, also increase. In effect, the older mother is taking on more risk for less potential gain. That's one set of factors that would tend to favor human female menopause and that would paradoxically result in a woman ending up with more surviving children by giving birth to fewer children. Natual selection has not programmed menopause into men because of three more cruel facts: men never die in childbirth and rarely die while copulating, and they are less likely than mothers to exhaust themselves caring for infants.

A hypothetically nonmenopausal old woman who died in childbirth, or while caring for an infant, would thereby be throwing away even more than her investment in her previous children. That is because a woman's children eventually begin producing children of their own, and those children count as part of the woman's prior investment. Especially in traditional societies, a woman's survival is important not only to her children but also to her grandchildren.