Free Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner Page A

and swam away with him, taking him into a cavity in the coral, where she finished him off. She spent twenty-four hours slowly eating him. The next morning another small male—discreetly, from behind a rock—extended an arm into her den and mated with her for three hours.
    Maybe the unlucky first male never injected sperm in all those tries, and his beloved finally thought, Since you’re not good for anything else, I might as well get a few meals out of you. But it’s also possible that he deposited sperm and she collected more from the next guy, whose destiny may also have been her culinary enjoyment. Of course, she didn’t think through these strategies; she didn’t have the brain for it, and few if any animals other than us do. But evolution gave her the means to act in her own best reproductive interests, almost as if she had thought it through—and maybe better, since our conscious minds don’t always serve us well.
    All this gives us a lesson in how the evolution of sex and gender work. The male widow, mantis, or octopus has only one function in life: seed the female. Having done this, he may as well find a functionin death—feeding her so she can better nourish the offspring that will carry forward their combined genes. Think of the jobless, depressed human dad who commits suicide thinking that his widow and orphans will collect his pension or life insurance. They don’t eat him, but, depending on local laws, they may live for a time on the funds generated by his death. In humans, a male might morosely weigh these grisly gains against his future value as a father. But in creatures with nothing remotely resembling fatherhood, giving your body for the cause may be the best move you can make—especially from your mate’s point of view.
    Still, a male (regardless of species) has his own interests, which might lead him to want to mate another day, perhaps with another female. Now the accounting changes, and we learn a critical lesson: male and female, joined together to make an offspring, have different interests from each other and, in the end, even from their individual young. This is true not just of creatures with sexual cannibalism but of every sexual species in the great spectrum of life. And this is where females lose control of the males they invented, to the process of divergent or even antagonistic evolution.
    Consider the syrupy primordial slime of three billion years ago. The early earth’s crust has mostly cooled, and in the process simple molecules have been cooked up into more intricate organic ones. These finally build a string of genetic material and an enzyme or two that can help the string copy itself. By definition, the string prevails by making more like itself, and the inevitable slings and arrows of fortune—cosmic rays, volcanic spray, toxins, and so on—will not break down all of them. If the genetic string—RNA or DNA—can elongate enough to make other large molecules, like proteins, that offer added protection, we will have new complexity and, over hundreds of millions of years, a very simple cell, which will give rise to many different kinds of one-celled creatures.
    By this point, living things have begun to deal with the challenges of nutrition, predation, and parasites that might make varietyadvantageous. It is not yet time for the “masterpiece of nature” to appear full-blown. But some mutants manage to trade genes, and by doing this each increases the variety of her offspring. “Her” is still right, because both partners in this soupy exchange can produce their own copies, out of their own bodies.
    Some non sexual species have mating types—strains within the species that differ enough genetically to avoid cloning by exchanging genes. This means that although you and your mate (the partner you trade a few genes with) can both produce offspring, you choose her from the type that you are not. Opposites attract, even within a basically all-female species. A likely example