ROCK PROPHECY VS. EVOLUTION

RP 1999: Cultural anthropologist Margaret MacKenzie points out, "The body is closer to nature, and the body and nature are both to be controlled. Who represents the body but women? Women are closer to nature, women should be controlled. They are dangerous, in our historical tradition, in the way that they can distract men from the higher preoccupations of study and scholarship and art."

RP 1999: The birth process itself is the central event associated with physical life, and it is exclusive to women. This fact makes men appear more removed from nature than women, according to the thinking of ancient men who wrote biblical myth, especially during prehistoric times when the male's role in procreation was still unknown. Men are less connected with creating physical life than are women. A female in labor is an obvious vessel for life. Males could therefore point to childbirth and proclaim how relatively unphysical men are by comparison. Among ancient people, whereas the physical body appeared to be the creation of women exclusively, men claimed the spirituality of the mind as the province of males. The battle between the sexes thus produced a mythology of physiology.

EV 2001: Eggs are more complex than sperm and take a larger investment of energy; females make only a limited number of eggs. Fewer eggs mean fewer chances to pass on genes, and that means females, unlike males, do better if they are choosy. At a deep biological level males and females want different things, regardless of how things appear on the surface. Small sperm versus large eggs, quantity versus quality, these are the evolutionary roots of the war between the sexes. This war is a lot more than fodder for poets and philosophers and soap opera writers. It can explain a lot about how species evolve, and why they look and act the way they do.

RP 1999: Anthropologists theorize that the menstrual cycle of human females is what encourages one-partner mating, but geneticists point to other factors that encourage promiscuity. For example, in environments where food and safety are plentiful, women can raise children without help from men. Instead of bonding with one woman to procreate, it is more effective for men to have sex with as many mates as possible. Through widespread distribution of his genes, a male increases chances that his progeny will survive. "The female of the species had no such biological carte blanche," claims Tannahill. "Her genes could be propagated only in the children born of her own body; the result, regardless of climatic conditions, was a powerful genetic urge toward protectiveness." Natural selection favored women who were strong nurturers of healthy children.

EV 2001: For all of their downside, males are worth the trouble. Think of them as a female's insurance policy against losing her children to rapidly evolving threats, like measles and the flu…So here is an evolutionary revelation about gender: male and female roles are not set in stone. They are largely determined by which sex competes for mates, and which sex invests in the young.

RP 1999: As living conditions fluctuated from good to indifferent to bad during the long ice-scarred millennia of mans early history, there may have been a slow pendulum swing from near-promiscuity to near-monogamy, and back again. And it may have been the women, not the men, who were promiscuous - for it was they who were in the minority. Males of pre-history outnumbered females by three to two, and men, on average, outlived women by eight years. This larger population of males, men who lived longer and were more aggressive than females, created a situation where males were able to force upon weaker members of society the beliefs and customs designed to restrict sexual options for women.

EV 2001: Darwin saw two strategies at work in the courtship idiosyncrasies of different species. For males it's competition. For females it's choice. Males fight for access to, or control over, the females themselves, or a resource females need, like food or territory…Female choice is that part of sexual selection that has to do with females choosing particular males over others. You would expect that the female, who invest more per egg, per offspring, should be much more choosy about whom she has offspring with, who she combines her genes with. Whereas the male, who is investing so little, you would expect that he wouldn't care so much.

RP 1999: Professor Kim Wallen…reported, "Male interest in the pair bond wavers after some period of time…this probably reflects a fundamental difference between males and females in the way they approach sexual behavior. It is characteristic of males that they have been selected to be interested in sex on a relatively continuous basis. Females on the other hand have been selected to be interested in sex on an intermittent basis. When females are interested in sex, they are as intensely interested in sex as males are, it's just that it's not as frequent as the case for males. So I think this tendency for pair bonds to split up after some period of time really reflects this tension between the male approach to sex and the female approach to sex."

RP 1999: Compared with humans, the mating habits of most other primates are influenced more by hormones. Whereas most primates are usually capable of mating at any time, hormone levels typically trigger fertility periodically in females and thus determine when mating actually occurs. For example, Wallen has found that in the 28-day mating cycle of Rhesus monkeys, sexual desire is greatest in females during their three-day period of fertility. During the days furthest from ovulation, there is no sexual interest or activity.