Spiky Penises and Sexual Pessimism

Spiky Penises

If you haven’t seen this image on its internet cycle yet, it’s the penis of a beetle. Yikes. It’s like the multiple rows of teeth in a Great White shark but just turned inside out and inserted into the body of a female beetle. The spikes make a mace seem like a walk in the park.

Why on earth would these beetles have such monstrous penises? The prevailing theory is they eliminate competition. If a male destroys a female’s reproductive system during mating, he ensures others don’t mate with the female. This increases his reproductive advantage over males with less spiky penises. This results in an evolutionary arms race producing more and more spikes. (Up to the point where it might cause too much damage to the female and thereby reduce the reproductive success of both the male’s and female’s genes.)

It’s silly to apply the ideas of justice to the life of a beetle. But at the very least, we can say it’s a sub-optimal, non-egalitarian solution to the reproductive problem. The beetle is by no means alone. There a whole great blog series: The World’s Most Terrifying Penises [Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5].

Sexual Pessimism

But these are just the obvious cases. Really, all sexual reproduction (with 2 distinct sexes) is sub-optimal and highly non-egalitarian. Sex started off with hermaphrodites: any member of a species could mate with any other. Then a strategy developed. Increase the size of your sex cells, pack more nutrition into them, provide better development for your offspring. However once that happened a second parasitic strategy became possible. Decrease the size of your sex cells to the bare minimum and piggy-back off a larger sex cell (which has the goodies already). The results of the 2 strategies are the egg and sperm.

In a brilliant chapter of The Selfish Gene called Battle of the Sexes, Dawkins outlines how this simple difference in reproductive strategy has effectively pitted males and females against each other for a great deal of species. There is nothing conscious about it but genes that adopt strategies hostile to the other gender thrive and hence increase in the population. The spiky penis is one example but it pervades the anatomy and behaviour of most sexually-reproducing animals. Including humans (eg. the reproductive success of a rape strategy for men).

Here’s where the pessimism comes in. Yes, humans are vey malleable because we have memes. Yes we can, and do, transcend biological “imperatives”. But it’s ludicrous to believe we’ll overcome all the biological makeup that’s making equality harder. Not when hundreds of millions of years of sexual reproduction have encouraged strategies of undermining the sex you’re mating with. Not when nature’s put us in a situation when sexual reproduction can be a zero-sum game. To create a properly egalitarian society we’ll need to think of some very creative solutions. Ones that take into account the chains our evolutionary history has bound us in.