[lbo-talk] Just-so Stories (was re: Language of Contempt)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Jun 8 07:30:48 PDT 2006


On 6/7/06, Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/7/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's monogamy that needs explaining,
> > if anything.
>
> correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read that even the species of birds
> that were supposed to be monogamous are not so.

Sexual monogamy is not in "bird nature" either. :->

<blockquote>Monogamy, originally defined as a long-term social and sexual relationship between one female and one male, is an unusual mating system in vertebrates. Males of most species irresponsibly take off right after insemination, often to look for other mating opportunities. The conspicuous exception among vertebrate phyla has traditionally been the birds, held up as models of fidelity and marital bliss, and of female-male cooperation in bringing up the young. Either male or female or both may build the nest, forage for food, or incubate the eggs. In many species of birds, the same male and female are seen socializing and procreating together each mating season until death do them part.

The shockeroo came about ten years ago when DNA fingerprinting was first applied to several "monogamous" species such as the indigo bunting and red-winged blackbird. Although careful field observations had failed to spot any deviation from a strict pair bond, the minisatellites told a terrible tale. One-third of the offspring of these closely bonded species had been fathered by males other than the mate--often a nearby neighbor!

Indeed, according to Luis Baptista at the California Academy of Sciences, DNA fingerprinting or blood protein studies have revealed that some 70-80 percent of socially monogamous songbirds have engaged in extramarital affairs and produced illegitimate offspring.

A female house sparrow can be a veritable hussy. Several observers have reported seeing female sparrows soliciting copulation with tails pointing upward and wings drooped down and quivering. The males line up like tomcats. A husband, returning to this disgraceful scene, drives off the rival males. He then massages her cloaca with his bill until she ejects the accumulated sperm, and then copulates with her himself.

These revelations stunned the hundreds of ornithologists who had logged in countless hours of birdwatching and somehow missed the crucial trysts (primly referred to as "extra-pair copulations" or EPCs) that must have been going on all the time right under their binoculars. This gross oversight demonstrates the truism that we tend to see what we expect to see and often screen out data that doesn't match expectations. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the supposedly monogamous bird partnership was a projection of the idealized human nuclear family.

The finding of female infidelity in so many bird species was particularly disconcerting for the growing cadres of evolutionary theorists who try to explain in mathematical terms why it is that living organisms do the things they do, especially in the arenas of sex and reproduction. Female hanky-panky yanked the cornerstone out of their carefully erected house of cards.

(Jerold Lowenstein, "Can This Pair Bond Be Saved?" California Wild: The Magazine of the California Academy of Sciences, Winter 1998, <http://www.calacademy.org/calwild/1998Winter/stories/counterpoints.html>)</blockquote>

On 6/7/06, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >
> > Few people have practiced monogamy except when they have been forced
> > to do so, and even then they have flouted the law or custom, even at
> > the potential cost of grave penalties. It's human nature to be a bit
> > nutty and a bit slutty, to use David Brock's infamous phrase against
> > the grain. Lust doesn't last. It's monogamy that needs explaining,
> > if anything.
> >
> Just as Doug has revolutionary fantasies about who he'd line up against
> the wall for summary execution, I have a dream that any sentence that
> begins with "it's human nature to" would disappear from every human
> language. This moratorium would massively improve the likelihood of
> understanding the interesting and complex ways in which genetics and
> environmental conditions interact to create psychological traits and
> patterns of behavior.

Ah, but it's so much more fun to be wrong than right! "When women go wrong, men go right after them," said Mae West.

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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