A similar situation appears to be the case in the animals officially classified as “asexual.” Careful study reveals that these organisms—such as the all-female populations of whiptail lizards that inhabit the southwestern United States—still undergo chromosome sex processes at the cellular level. In the case of the female whiptails, they also mount each other and produce more eggs when another female has mounted them. Thus asexual animals appear to be evolutionary rarities that have devolved from a sexually reproducing state, rather than truly “asexual” beings.
To understand the depths of sexuality, we don’t just need to study animals and microbes, for the roots of sexual reproduction lie in events that are many hundreds of millions of years old. The Red Queen, and other theories explaining why sex is genetically worth the trouble, assumes that most species of plants and animals could simply lose the trait of sexual reproduction if it were adaptive. But this may simply not be the case.
We may wish we could fly because it would be more “adaptive,” but the physiological option is simply not open to us. Sexual reproduction may be so old that most species are unable to lose it. And those that do may become vulnerable to rapidly spreading parasites, and therefore removed from the gene pool. Simon Robson, a biologist at James Cook University in Queensland, says of zoologists who theorize on the maintenance of sex without regard for its nonanimal history: “They’re working from a data set two billion years out of date.”
In fact, in the 1940s the Harvard University biologist Lemuel Roscoe Cleveland solved the mystery of the origin of fertilization and how cells with one set of chromosomes (haploid cells) came to merge with each other and develop two sets of chromosomes (becoming diploid). Cleveland noticed that in some cases, hungry amoebalike cells would incompletely devour each other, merging cell membranes and cytoplasm and pooling their chromosomes in a single nucleus. He reasoned that the first fertilization was the result not of a sexual but a starvational urge to merge.
This theory is borne out by evidence from other quarters. Some cells today reproduce asexually . . . at least until they are faced with starvation, such as from lack of nitrogen in their environment. In this case, they fuse together to make a diploid. Primordial sexual fertilization, which Cleveland witnessed among microbes called hypermastigotes, may have had a most unromantic genesis. Cleveland also carefully chronicled and photographed the necessary separation from the state of doubleness, which he called “relief from diploidy.” We undergo such relief when we produce haploid sperm cells or ova from diploid body cells; aside from these sex cells, the rest of the cells in our body remain in a diploid state, with forty-six chromosomes, twenty-three each from mum and dad.
THE KINKIEST HUMANS are utterly unimaginative compared with the sexual variety on display in the animal world. African bedbug males, for example, routinely pierce females through any part of their carapace in order to impregnate them.
Natural selection is amoral. Which dysfunctional human family is comparable to the behavior of Adactylidium, the nasal mites whose mothers give rise to 99 percent females? Inside the mite’s womb, one unborn male inseminates all his unborn sisters, then dies. The incestuously impregnated females grow, eating their mother’s body from the inside out to provide themselves with nourishment. They are born pregnant, beginning the cycle again.
Although we are accustomed to regarding serial monogamy as normal, our hominid ancestors may well have regarded us as deviants. Robert L. Smith, an entomologist at the University of Arizona and a leading theorist in sperm competition, suggests that human ancestors Homo erectus were more promiscuous. The mating systems of our closest relatives, the great apes—gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees—differ. Gorillas are sexually possessive and live in “harems” dominated by older silverbacks, and a single male dominates females and males. Orangutans are loners who occasionally come together to copulate. Chimpanzees, however, are relatively promiscuous. A female chimp in heat will develop a red and swollen pudendum and copulate with virtually every sexually active male in her troop except for her own sons.
In troops of chimpanzees, if couples go on “safari”—or disappear to be alone together in the woods—as often as not they are beaten upon their return. The group considers elopement behavior, normal for human lovers, aberrant. Whereas big gorillas have erect penises that measure just 2.5 centimeters, promiscuous chimpanzees produce more sperm than any other great ape. Humans are the second most copious sperm producers among our genetically closest primates, suggesting to sperm competition theorists that our ancestors were more promiscuous. Today we have a “mixed” mating system that resembles both the “free-loving” chimpanzee and the “patriarchal” gorilla styles. We are at the crux of two evolutionary approaches to coupling, with neither being any more “natural” than the other.
The unusual vulnerability of human infants has evolutionarily favored females who lost their putative ancestral period of visible ovulation—the estrus with the accompanying reddening that attracts chimps. Such females were more likely to interest sex-obsessed males throughout the month, increasing the chances that they would stay around for child care. Some suggest that culture itself, from poetry to painting to music, is a by-product of ancestral human females attempting to find outward expressions, and exaggerations, of male genetic fitness.
Human intellect in some sense may thus be the mental equivalent of the peacock’s tail feathers: sexual displays aimed at attracting a mate. Whatever the true story of the origin of sex, the quirks and oddities of sexual behavior show that normality is a fleeting commodity. Each new sexual species renders its ancestors obsolete as it incorporates new behaviors and new pools of mutating, recombining genes.
THE EVOLUTION OF MATING SYSTEMS knows few bounds. Among the plethora of life-forms on Earth, sex is manifested in a staggering variety of ways.
Many insects produce spermatophores: packages of sperm inserted into females or given to the female for self-insertion. Male octopuses use one arm to deposit sperm. Male anglerfish are diminutive creatures that attach themselves to the genitalia of females. Some wasps mistake orchids for females, pollinating the flowers instead of inseminating their own kind.
Then there’s the laughing hyena, which hunts in all-female packs. Hormonally masculinized, their clitorises are longer than the penises of the males. They give birth through their urethra, and the cub’s passage through the U-shaped birth canal usually kills the mother.
Even when it comes to the division of organisms into discrete genders, things aren’t black and white. Only 5 to 7 percent of plants have males and females separated into distinct organisms, in the way that most animals are. Twenty to 30 percent of plants have male and female flowers on the same organism. The majority of flowering plants, such as tulips, have both sexes in the same flower, and they mature at the same time.
People worry about tiny differences within our own human mating system—but there really is no such thing as “normal” in sexual evolution. Take the great grey slug, Limax maximus, whose hermaphroditic midair mating antics first attracted attention over a century ago. Meeting up on a branch or bracket fungus, the lovers kick off with a bit of tentacle foreplay. Then they close in on each other, circling in a mouth-to-tail dance that lasts up to two and a half hours.
Then, at the point of utmost passion, each slug “bungee jumps” from the tree, stopping itself short on a 38- to 46-centimeter line made of its own mucus. Swinging in midair, each slug unsheaths its penis, up to 10 centimeters long, and inserts it in the appropriate bisexual organ. After exchanging sperm, they either climb up the mucus cable whence they came or drop to the ground from the sheer orgasmic exhaustion the French call la petite morte . . . the little death.
The exchanging of genes in sexually reproducing species has a long and titillating history whose variations transcend the imagination of the most dedicated pornographer. From DNA repair mechanisms in bacteria to flower images sent over the Internet, sex in its great diversity can be expected to persist beyond
the demise of the human species. Or, alternatively, be involved in our evolution into new species.
CHAPTER 6
WHO IS I?
AT THE END of the year last, in a party diverse with ethnicity and artistry, not to mention anarchists, a question was asked of me by none other than myself. Yet, as it was done in company, I credit the question as much to my companions.
You see, after I described some of my political views, mentioning the strange question of the status of the Federal Reserve as a private corporation, as well as some of the scientific anomalies surrounding the events of 9/11, I was told that my views pretty much matched those of members of the Tea Party. Now I knew I was against the neocons, but I had no idea that, according to a helpful anarchist, that made me a fledgling member of the Tea Party.
I don’t watch TV news and now find most of the alternative media as noxious as the mainstream kind. Which doesn’t leave me much of an informational safety net except for the Internet, which, as we know, is full of holes. Yet that’s where I, insofar as I am an I, swim in a roiling sea of glorified gossip and the occasional fresh tidbit of gleaming truthlike debris.
Of course that’s also where Wild River Review (where this chapter was first published) is, so it is at the very least convenient for this essay. But it also means I was inured from my status as a putative Tea Party nutcase (not to be confused with nutjob, nutbag, or nutbar). I had hardly known that I had metamorphosed in my sleep. But in case there was any doubt, an ex seconded the motion on Facebook, wondering since when had I developed an affinity for the extreme right wing.
Well, I never.
When I asked the anarchist if he thought Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame was a double agent (because his revelations had apparently been vetted by Israel, and because such an operation could be used as an excuse to shut down the Internet in the name of security), he assured me that he (Assange) could be a triple agent, which I found nicely to my liking. Assange could be fooling both sides.
Not to be outdone, I spent the rest of the party spicing up my conversation with the perplexing notion of the quadruple agent, a concept around which it is indeed hard to wrap one’s mind. The anarchist added that Sarah Palin, who later terrorized the country with her gunsight campaign graphics, was probably, at least financially, a creation of the neocons.
Right wing. Left wing. What?
Needless to say, I was confused. But the confusion did me good, as it allowed me to muse on some of the rarefied niceties of that perplexing morass of abstract marble from which we shape ourselves into selves. I speak of identity. I can answer where I am (on the third rock from the Sun, in the outskirts of the Milky Way), what I am (proteins and genes and bones and whatnot made from atoms common in the universe), how I am (okay), when I am (twenty-first century, etc.), and maybe even why I am (more on that later) more easily than I can tell you who I am.
Apparently I am not alone in this perplexing dilemma. Although it will do no justice to paraphrase the great popularizer of mysticism and expositor of world religions Alan Watts, who devoted a whole book to the subject (The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are), Watts gave an elegantly Hindu answer to the question: you are the universe playing a game of hide-and-seek with itself.
Basically it boils down to this: Because the universe is eternal, which can get boring, it likes to pretend that it is divided into individual parts. Some of these parts not only die, they know they die. This realization may get those parts worked up, but it also keeps them from being bored.
Watts pointed out that the universe doesn’t like to show off in this regard, but rather to “show on”—as a character would show up in the pages of a book, or an actor upon the world’s rotund stage. Later in his life Watts distanced himself somewhat from this Hindu metaphysics, but The Book still stands as a brilliant testimony to one of the simplest and most enduringly convincing ideas of cross-cultural religion: We are bits of the all, the cosmos engaged in a grand game of self-play.
Watts here and elsewhere espoused a doctrine of realistic reincarnation. He looked at his red-headed grandchildren and saw himself. He opined that all organisms “think they’re human.”
And he spoke of the need to escape from the illusion of the “skin-encapsulated ego” in order to recognize the connection in each to the infinite. Turning a noun into a verb à la Heidegger, he said that when a baby is born the universe “I’s” itself. It is the same cosmos I-ing itself in a myriad of forms. We may die, but the great game goes on. New beings are born, but they make the same discoveries. They, in a sense, “R” us.
(And I think it’s weird how in English we ask how “are” you—as if in addressing another in the second person we are somehow secretly acknowledging their multiplicity. Shouldn’t it be, how is you? Or maybe, what you be?)
Samuel Butler, novelist and neglected philosopher, is an interesting case in the exploration of multiple identity. Butler wrote of walking down the street and noticing that every person reminded him of someone else. So this guy might look most like the Earl of Sandwich, another like Jesus, a gal like Queen Victoria. We’re familiar with this syndrome from its extreme form in the asylum. Butler just entertained a light version, Watts’s naturalistic reincarnation applied to the other rather than the self, reincarnation right out on the street.
Butler experienced other disruptions of the self. His Erewhon: Across the Range—a utopia that combined New Zealand and northern Italy, the Maori and the English into a satiric fictional blend—was originally thought by the public to have been written by Sir Thomas More. It sold briskly until its real author was divined, and sales dropped. Still, for Butler, the experience of being taken for another was not entirely displeasing.
Butler had already played at identity by arguing with himself in the op-ed pages of the Press in Christchurch, New Zealand (where on February 22, 2011, there was an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale). One of Butler’s avatars (“Cellarius”) took the position that machines (of which the telegraph and train were the most advanced examples of the time, 1865) were taking over the planet, whereas another, anonymous author (writing a piece called Lucubratio Ebria, Latin for “drunken nightwork”) scathingly disagreed with Cellarius, pointing out that devices like umbrellas were extensions of our skin and that a train is only a “seven-leagued foot that five hundred may own at once.”
The author of fictions indulges in this same sane version of multiple personality syndrome; she is the outermost concentric personality who knows the true status of her characters while they, poor saps, have nary a clue, mostly, of the whimsy-driven coffee-drinking goddess controlling their fate.
Indeed, Socrates’s dialogues in Plato’s hands were arguably the earliest modern novels, as they allowed a panoply of distinct voices to transcend the limitations of isolated opinion in order to create a multipersonal philosophy beyond individual opinion. The irony here is that Plato, according to Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (great title, that), had originally planned to be a dramatist, that is, a tragic playwright.
Under the influence of Socrates’s rationalism, however, Nietzsche supposedly burned all his plays as a mystical enterprise unbefitting the truth-telling agenda of the philosopher. But what the Socratic method sacrificed, according to Nietzsche, was the realization that the multipersonal realm of Attic tragedy was a sacred reenactment (a “showing on” in Watts’s lingo) of the primordial drama of human separation from the cosmos that defines us.
Euripides, also under the influence of Socrates, started it by getting rid of the chorus. A central part of the essentially spiritual ancient Greek tragedies, the chorus was not meant to be taken literally as representing people but was, instead, a manifestation of the cosmic realization that we are all one, illusorily separated from one another like raindrops glinting in the sun as they fall, unaware that their source and destination is the current of an indivisible river. Getting rid of the chorus paved the way to melodrama and soap opera, to simple
representations of daily life obscuring the tragic truth dramatized by the ancients, that our separateness is life’s temporary illusion.
Butler’s deconstructions of identity, his divisions of the would-be indivisibility of individuality, also took a biological turn: is it not arbitrary to identify death as occurring at the transition from maternal butterfly to eggs? Is not the transition from egg to caterpillar, or caterpillar to chrysalis, or, most spectacularly, from pupa to winged form, equally as striking?
He argued also that as infants, we are more like other infants than ourselves as octogenarians. The arguments were of a piece, with one another and with Watts’s bombshell in The Book: “We” are not what we think we are, the stable identities conferred by pronouns like me, my, and mine.
Instead, in the words of the Vedic Sanskrit hymns, the Rig Veda, “thou art that”: We are not just within but outside our skin, like waves connected to the whole ocean. Our true identity is (to use a Butler term) extracorporaneous: It is the universe itself, glittering forth galaxies, solar systems, planets, and beings.
MY COWBOY FRIEND Bill Huth, longtime owner of the Willow Springs Raceway in California, is a devout reader (and sometimes publisher) of old texts on evolution and spirituality. Huth argues that what we call “life” is eternal, evolving, a restless “thing” of ever-changing forms. This makes each of us eternal whether we know it or not, and generally we don’t. Huth himself, now eighty-seven but once a tireless and quite accomplished conman, was accused multiple times in his earlier years of impersonating a preacher.
Once, he laughs, the police called his mother in L.A. to tell her.
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