Beta Males

I’m a beta male and proud of it. I’ll let the alpha males swagger around and show off their strength and (in Dixie) act like their big trucks prove their virility even if paying for them drives them into bankruptcy. In contrast, I live in a world of quiet intelligence and keep my finances from disaster. Let the alpha males have their alpha females; I like beta females just fine, not the least of whom is my wife, who is as quiet, intelligent, and responsible as I am, if not more. My wife and I have not spent one moment wishing we were alphas.

You might think it would be fun to be an alpha male. But, in nature, alpha males experience a lot of stress because they have to constantly fight off the other aspiring-alpha males. Only in human harems can the alpha male sit back on his cushion and relax as his eunuchs guard him. Elephant seal alpha males lose up to half their weight during the breeding season, not by producing sperm (which are cheap) but by waddling around all day and all night (which is also day in the Arctic) fighting off the challengers. Their cortisol levels are much higher than those of the beta males.

(Photo by A. Friedlaender)

Beta males sometimes save the species. In nature, sexual selection favors alpha males who develop outlandish adaptations such as huge antlers. And the alpha females love it. Sexual selection favors ever more and more outlandish adaptations. One might guess that this process would go on until the males could not even lift their heads, and the species would go extinct.

But this is not what happens. While the alpha males are butting their horns together and injuring each other, the beta males are hanging around the outskirts, so to speak, and they have some action with the beta females. Many of the females in the alpha male harem have some action with the beta males, since the alpha male can’t be everywhere at once. By the time Mr. Alpha has waddled around to chase away the beta intruder, the female has already welcomed his sperm. And if the alpha adaptations ever do become so outlandish as to, it would seem, crash the species, the beta males are always there to step in and do the job.

You’re welcome.

Another Arms Race of Social Evolution: Getting Published

In order to get something published, you have to first get noticed, whether by an editor of a magazine, or an agent, or an editor at an academic publisher (these publishers still prefer direct submissions from authors). So when you write a story, you have to catch the attention of the reader—usually, a reader who has already looked at a hundred other submissions that day. This is a process of social evolution.

And it is a process of accelerating social evolution—an arms race of social evolution. As time goes on there are fewer publishers of literary or academic works, and more authors. This means that authors have to keep going to ever greater lengths to get noticed.

To a certain extent, this is good. Take a short story, for example. It has to have an interesting beginning so that the reader, who has many other demands upon his or her time, knows whether to keep reading. It is simple courtesy on the part of the author to have an interesting start to the story. It is truth in advertising: if the story has an interesting middle, it should be visible at the beginning. In chemistry, one would call it activation energy: you have to put a little more energy into the reaction to get it started, and then it will go to completion with its own energy. The publishing arms race is driving poorly-written stories—at least stories with poorly written beginnings—to extinction. But the expectations for what has to happen in the first paragraph are getting excessive, as I here describe.

Unfortunately, one of the unsuccessful approaches to writing a story, which is falling by the wayside, is to begin at the beginning. I recently pulled out of my files a story that I consider one of my better ones. It begins with an interesting scene, in which a food chemist tastes a totally unexpected new kind of honey, and decides to track it to its source. But the beginning does not give any idea of what the story is going to eventually be about (the discovery of a tribe of Homo heidelbergensis people in Madagascar). I realized I had to change this, and start in the middle, where the main male character, the origin of the point of view (which insiders call POV), sees the pre-human woman with whom he develops a complicated and intense relationship. He is in the archaic-human tribe, and thinks back over the events that brought him there. In this way, I offer the reader a glimpse of what they can expect if they read my story. And I have to deliver on the promise in due time.

(As an evolution educator and writer, I consider fiction to be an excellent way of exploring not only the facts of human evolution but questions about what it means to be human—questions that we will never be able to test through direct scientific investigation.)

Getting to know a story is like getting to know a person. It is a relationship. And the most intense relationships, with people or with stories, are the intimate ones. Let us consider the trajectory of a relationship that becomes intimate. How does it develop?

The way such a relationship cannot successfully develop is to begin with the setting—to describe a house, or a neighborhood, or even (despite my botanical inclinations) a forest. In this sense, a story is like a person: if you meet someone interesting, it is not because you saw the person’s house first (unless it is unusual and part of the plot). And the relationship must begin because there is something appealing, to you, about the person. The world is so full of people that you cannot start making new relationships at random. In the case of a potentially intimate relationship, there has to be something romantically enchanting about the person. A good story, therefore, often begins with the appealing person doing something interesting that reveals something beautiful—bodily, or mental, or both. In the case of my story, the main male character looks into the face of a woman who is beautiful but in a way very different from what our species may think. Is her look pity, or is it love?

But as a writer without an impressive list of fiction publications—four of them, all in magazines cheaply published and now extinct—I feel pressured to start with something more compelling. I feel that I have to begin, at least a little bit, with sex. That’s the only thing, it seems, that can make my story stand out among the ten dozen others submitted to the science fiction website that day. The only question is how much sex. My story does, in fact, have a sex scene, though not a graphic one; after all, from the head on down, Homo heidelbergensis was pretty much like us. The other way to start a story these days is with a violent conflict in which the hero or heroine is in the midst of mortal combat—or a chase scene, only my story has no such element in it.

But I refused to begin with the sex scene. Instead, I merely added a little sex—not gratuitous sex, but relevant to the story—to the scene in which the man looks into the woman’s face. He notices her breasts and her strong shoulders. And she caresses him, to help heal his injury. (Stories should not have gratuitous sex or violence because there is no room for any gratuitous anything in a story.)

Getting to know a story is like getting to know a person, as I said. There has to be something appealing to capture attention. But the marketing of fiction by means of sex is unethical for the same reason that it is unethical in the start of a relationship. Try to imagine a society in which the very first step in forming a relationship is for the potential partners see one another naked before even meeting. However common this might be, it is not a good way to start a meaningful relationship, but only as a prelude to a sexual encounter. Open sex is the way to begin porn, not a short story. There are specialized publishers for porn. I do not believe that all short stories will go this far, though, of course, I could be wrong.

So I am going to submit my story with a beginning that has the slight hint of sex but not the full thing. I want my readers to be rewarded with something better in the middle and at the end than they experienced in the beginning. But we’ll see how it goes. My reasonable approach might simply get my story eliminated from consideration.

Resource Spaces of (Bestial) Competition

Wherever there is a resource space, entities capable of reproduction will inhabit it and begin fighting one another. This can be bacteria in a broth, humans fighting over territory, ideas competing with one another for attention in the collective human mind. I have witnessed competition and outright war in a place I would never have expected it, in a resource space that I created. I refer to the comments on my YouTube channel.

Yes, I created a resource space when I started my YouTube channel in 2010. On this channel, I pretend to be Charles Darwin, and I take an often humorous look at bite-sized evolutionary concepts. I try very hard to do outrageous and funny things, often drawing the humor upon myself. You know, things like falling off of a cliff or into a river. Like most channels it got a slow start, but it quickly built up to have over five hundred followers. I have to date had over 34,000 views. Check it out. It’s fun and you’ll learn a lot.

Viewers post comments on this as on most other YouTube channels. Sometimes, the comments are pretty insulting to me. Some are insulting to the guests I interview. But this is pretty rare. I more commonly get appreciative comments. What really surprised me recently is that the people have started posting comments about one another, making some pretty brutal statements not against me but against other viewers. In effect, I have created a resource space in which people, hidden in anonymity, can wage war on one another, with few rules of decency.

It is awesome. And awful, too. I marvel at it. For a while, there was a war between someone named Atheist Rex and someone named Raining Fire, who was (or pretended to be; one cannot know) a fundamentalist. They wished death upon one another; Raining Fire fervently desired that God would rain fire down out of heaven on Atheist Rex and kill his or her children. For a while, I began to wonder if I should report this activity to Homeland Security. But, they probably know about it already. Anyway, they might just be playing. No language is off limits, for either the atheists or the Christians.

Usually the arguments are just name-calling and counter-name-calling (you’re-so-stupid-all-you-can-do-is-name-calling etc.) Sometimes the arguments can take an interesting turn. Somehow the topic of abortion came up—a topic I never remember mentioning online. Prepare yourselves for some interesting mind-expanding concepts here. A woman (unless the photo is fake) accused Atheist Rex of supporting the mass genocide of babies in abortion clinics. Atheist Rex responded that God one time commanded the killing of all the babies in the world: at the time of Noah’s Flood. Good point. Then the woman responded that the babies were not really human, because demons had sex with human women and produced satanic spawn who needed to be killed in the Flood. That’s a pretty creative idea—one that, incidentally, is not in the Bible. So far they have not discussed the fact that, according to the book of Joshua, God commanded the killing of entire populations, including the children—and these were humans, not half-satanic creatures. Anyway, it was the first time I ever opened my inbox and found 45 comments only slightly connected with my video. The video was about the dinosaur tracks in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. A similar flurry of activity has continued since this original flare-up.

I’ll just mention that I refuse to take responsibility for any of this craziness. I am like a man who purchased land and built a school on it, with a playground. The man is not responsible for the bullies fighting one another on the playground.

And I will just sit back and see what happens next. Thank God they cannot track one another down. I hope.

What’s Different about Humans?

Lots of answers to this question but I am focusing on one particular thing. The natural world is a constant struggle of all against all, but this struggle is quite different from the worldwide violence that humans have created.  What is different about natural vs. human struggle?

The struggle for existence in nature can sometimes be very violent, and can (especially for victims of parasites) gruesome. But usually what you see in nature is a struggle that can be called “I will outgrow you” or “I will out-reproduce you” or “I can do better than you” rather than “I will kill you.” Natural selection, the engine of evolution, is not always bloody; it is competition.

Consider a forest. You look all around you, and you see green leaves. If you look closely, and at the right time, you will also see herbivores such as caterpillars. The leaves produce toxins, and the caterpillars tolerate them, resulting in a balance that ends up, by chance rather than by design, allowing both of them to survive and even flourish. This is struggle for existence but not violence. You can feel peace in a forest but not, of course, on a battlefield or the scene of an ISIS terrorist attack.

In contrast, you cannot hear a single day of news without being confronted with violence, sometimes unspeakable violence, all around the world. Humans, perhaps uniquely among all species, have gone far beyond the Darwinian struggle for existence and gone into what can only be described as evil. Humans, unlike other animal species, are not content with simply out-competing another person. In this sense, the religious people might turn out to be right, that humans, alone among species, are fallen.

Insights from an Old Book

I ran across an old book in my office yesterday. It is not old enough of a book to be historically important, like The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace, nor is it a classic like plant ecologist John L. Harper’s Population Biology of Plants. You probably cannot find this thirty-year-old paperback anywhere except in the basement of an archiving library. It is Studies on Plant Demography: A Festschrift for John L. Harper, edited by James White. John L. Harper (1925-2009) was one of the most famous plant ecologists of the twentieth century. The scattershot of 24 papers in this book gave examples of different ways to study plant population biology, and reflect the great diversity of approaches that Harper took in his own research. The papers in the book are about everything from weeds to crops that act like weeds to pandanus trees to temperate forests. They describe processes such as how plants spread by underground runners, to how they space their branches out just right to help them compete against their neighbors for light, to how they invade new continents. It represented the best efforts of plant ecologists in 1985, back when illustrations were still done by hand with mechanical pens and Zipatone.

I planned to glance through the book a little and try to find a general take-home message. I quickly realized there was none. But before I put the book in my give-away pile, I had a sudden realization. The fact that there was no way to summarize the book is the message. Different species of plants, different populations of plants within the same species, and even the same individual plant can have an enormous variety of ways to not only survive but to spread and prevail over their competitors. I looked up from the book and around at the plants in my back yard. Of course! While none of the plants in my yard use all the different possible ways of spreading, each one uses several. I had just finished cutting down hundreds of sugarberry saplings. Birds spread their seeds, but that is not the only way sugarberries persist in my yard.  If you cut a sugarberry sapling, a half dozen others will grow from its tiny stump. Sugarberries thrive in the sun but also persist in the shade. I looked up at the wisteria vines. Not only do they send thick and sometimes enormously long branches through the privet bushes, but also along the ground, where they produce roots at the nodes. I was watching a war of all the plants against all the other plants in my yard, each one using numerous tactics or strategies. My yard is not tidy; I have not forced my plants to keep to their own little patch of ground spaced out like doodads on a blanket. I let them go wild, perhaps naively thinking that they would play nicely together.

While I might have expected simple rules in the natural world, what I beheld was a crazy diversity.

There was one other thing I noticed from this book. Near the beginning was a list of all of John L. Harper’s publications as of 1985. His very first publications, in 1950, were about the ability of different breeds of bananas to resist Panama disease, a fungal pathogen. While Harper and the numerous ecologists who followed him have mostly studied “pure science,” in an attempt to understand nature, Harper himself began with an important concept in agricultural research: we need lots of genetic diversity in our crops in order to save our agriculture from disease. If a disease kills one breed of crop, we need to have another breed to take its place. The crazy diversity of nature, or even of an untidy back yard, is the key to the success of life on Earth.

Competitive Photosynthesis

Announcement: See the earlier blog post about the Second Annual Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip! Full information, and registration, are available at the website of the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association. Bob Melton will soon post one revision: the Saturday afternoon trip will not visit the fossil site out on Highway 51. It takes too long to get there and the parking along a busy highway seems inadequate to me. My wife and I went out to check on Redbud Valley yesterday, and she helped me find even more fossils there than I had known about.

Warning: If you go to a Chinese buffet and have one of those steamed mussels, do not open up the body. Just pretend the whole thing looks like that nice grayish muscle tissue. If you open the body up, you will see a bunch of organs, most of which are digestive and some, I assume, reproductive. A knowledge of biology only makes the experience worse. Tastes good, though. Now for the essay.

Like many botany instructors, I use variegated coleus as a way of demonstrating that photosynthesis occurs only in green tissue. The leaves of variegated coleus have sections that are green, or red, or white, or both red and green. The procedure is simple. You use a double boiler and ethanol to remove chlorophyll and anthocyanin from a leaf, then use iodine solution to stain the starch. Starch is present only in the green parts of the leaf. (The ethanol boiling process is itself a source of pleasure, I might add.) A variegated coleus leaf is sort of like a field trial with two experimental conditions (chlorophyll vs. anthocyanin), a control (the white part), and an interaction (red overlaps green).

Variegated coleus grows well in gardens and greenhouses and homes, even though approximately half the leaf area is non-photosynthetic. It only recently occurred to me that this ought to seem strange. Why would a plant produce non-photosynthetic leaf area, unless it is modified for some other function? The answer is obvious: variegated coleus is an example of a mutant form that would not survive in the wild.

But why would it not survive in the wild? The plant grows perfectly well. But a plant that produces twice as much leaf area as it “needs” would be unable to survive in the wild because of competition with other plants. That is, if plants produced only as much leaf area as they needed to keep themselves alive, the world would have only about half as much leaf area as it does. Forests and grasslands would look very shabby, and noticeably less green. Even from outer space, our planet would look a lot less green if it were not for the extra leaf area that plants produce in order to compete with other plants. This is what I mean by “competitive photosynthesis,” which might otherwise sound like a new Olympic sport. (The sportscaster would say, Look, there goes a carbon dioxide molecule now…it made it into a glucose molecule! There goes a water molecule, and here comes the oxygen!)

This is not a new idea, but it is a good one to stop and think about. A long time ago Garrett Hardin pointed out that if it were not for competition, all plants would be crusty green goo. Why do any plants grow up into the air? The sun is 93 million miles away, so a 300-foot-tall tree is not significantly closer to the sun than is a one-foot-tall shrub. But the tree’s leaves are closer to the sun than the shrub’s leaves. It is like the old saying, if you and another person are running from a bear, you don’t have to outrun the bear, just outrun the other person. This is competition, the basis of natural selection and evolution. Hardin called it “in praise of waste.”

A natural world without competition would be much less interesting, at least much less green. Competition is a good thing. In our economic system, however, it has gotten out of hand. Big money crushes small business, and anyone who chooses to serve humankind rather is doomed to a life of near-poverty. I say this as a college professor, husband of a librarian, and father of a school teacher. We public servants work hard and well, harder and better than many people richer than we are. Competition is good, but so is altruism. In our species, we need to lay a greater claim on altruism.

The Only Gorilla in the Room

Being an alpha male is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Ask any alpha male gorilla or elephant seal, if you dare. It is very stressful. (Not that I speak from personal experience or anything.) The alpha male must constantly patrol his territory (which usually includes a harem) to drive away other males who are either sneaking in for amorous visits with females in the harem, or directly challenging his leadership. I have read that alpha male elephant seals lose about half of their weight during the breeding season under the midnight sun.

The alpha male never becomes a dictator, however, because he is constantly challenged by other males. Also, the social group as a whole benefits from a diminution of hostilities within the group. A group that has a greater amount of altruism within the group will therefore prevail over groups that have excessive internal strife. One group prevailing over another because of altruism? This sounds like “group selection,” which was a reviled concept when I was in graduate school. Recently, Edward O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson (no relation), and Martin Nowak have re-introduced group selection to the scientific conversation, particularly as it relates to the evolution of altruism. I am still trying to understand how a group can become altruistic in the first place, but once it does, it will clearly prevail over other groups.

But what happens if there are no male challengers? Then the alpha male can do whatever he wants without fear of reprisal. And what if the group controlled by this alpha male rules the entire species? This would seem to be a formula for disaster. Of course, it never happens in nature.

But it appears to be happening in our species right now. The United States is the only world superpower, a fact of which we constantly remind the rest of the world. The United States can pretty much do as it likes in the world without fear of reprisal, though we could get ourselves into a lot of diplomatic and economic trouble if we took excessive measures. We are, as a country, the only gorilla in the room.

One example of this is the recent revelation that the United States has been spying on the leadership of many of our European allies. No, not just on suspected terrorists in Europe, but on leaders such as Angela Merkel of Germany. While the member states of the EU each consider a continued Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. to be in their interests, the EU coalition leader has expressed hesitation (see the Deutsche Welle article). Even under the leadership of a president who has won the Nobel Peace Prize, the United States seems to be acting like the ultimate alpha male.

And nothing can stop us. If we insist on acting like an alpha male, we can bring the world down into chaos. I doubt that this will actually happen, but the evolutionary and other forces that prevented alpha male gorillas and alpha male Genghis Khans from dragging the world down into chaos appear to no longer be operating. We can express regret that our actions have unfortunate consequences (such as one of our drones killing a 68-year-old Pakistani grandmother picking okra) but it is only our choice, not a necessity, that will keep us from shattering what little international goodwill there now is in the world.