overwhelming case for your hypothesis. I consider it now beyond doubt that life on Earth reproduces in the way you describe, using this strange device called 'sex. ' Some of the committee are less happy with your conclusion that many of
the peculiar facets of the earthling species known as human beings are a consequence of this sex thing: jealous love, a sense of beauty, male aggression, even what they laughingly call intelligence. ' The committee chuckled sycophantically at this old joke. 'But,' said Big Zag suddenly and loudly, looking up from the paper in front of her,
' we have one major difficulty with your report. We believe you have entirely failed to address the most interesting issue of all. It is a three-letter question of great simplicity. ' Big Zag 's voice dripped sarcasm:
Zog stammered: 'What do you mean, why?'
' I mean why do earthlings have sex? Why don 't they just clone themselves as we do? Why do they need two creatures to have one baby? Why do males exist? Why? Why? Why? '
' Oh,' said Zog quickly, 'I tried to answer that question, but I got nowhere. I asked some human beings, people who had studied the subject for years, and they did not know. They had a few suggestions, but each person 's suggestion was different. Some said sex was a historical accident. Some said it was a way of fending off disease. Some said it was about adapting to change and evolving faster. Others said it was a way of repairing genes. But basically they did not know. '
What is the purpose of sex? At first glance the answer seems obvious to the point of banality. But a second glance brings a different thought. Why must a baby be the product of two people? Why not three, or one? Need there be a reason at all?
About twenty years ago a small group of influential biologists changed their ideas about sex. From considering it logical, inevitable, and sensible as a means of reproduction, they switched almost overnight to the conclusion that it was impossible to explain why it had not disappeared altogether. Sex seemed to make no sense THE ENIGMA
::: 27:::
at all: Ever since, the purpose of sex has been an open question, and it has been called the queen of evolutionary problems.'
But dimly, through the confusion, a wonderful answer is taking shape. To understand it requires you to enter a looking-glass world, where nothing is what it seems. Sex is not about reproduction, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not about persuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affection. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony, cynicism, and profundity.
In 1858, the year Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace gave the first plausible account of a mechanism for evolution, the Victorian brand of optimism known as 'progress ' was in its prime. It is hardly surprising that Darwin and Wallace were immediately interpreted as having given succor to the god of progress.
Evolution's immediate popularity (and it was popular) owed much to the fact that it was misunderstood as a theory of steady progress from amoeba to man, a ladder of self-improvement.
As the end of the second millennium approaches, mankind is in a different mood. Progress, we think, is about to hit the buffers of overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, and the exhaus-tion of resources. However fast we run, we never seem to get anywhere: Has the industrial revolution made the average inhabitant of the world healthier, wealthier, and wiser? Yes, if he is German. No, if he is Bangladeshi. Uncannily (or, a philosopher would have us believe, predictably), evolutionary science is ready to suit the mood. The fashion in evolutionary science now is to scoff at progress; evolution is a treadmill, not a ladder.
PREGNANT VIRGINS
For people, sex is the only way to have babies, and that, plainly enough, is its purpose. It was only in the last half of the nineteenth century that anybody saw a problem with this. The problem was that there seemed to be all sorts of better ways of reproducing.
Microscopic animals split in two. Willow trees grow from cuttings.
Dandelions produce seeds that are clones of themselves. Virgin greenfly give birth to virgin young that are already pregnant with other virgins. August Weismann saw this clearly in 1889. 'The significance of amphimixis [sex], he wrote, 'cannot be that of making multiplication possible, for multiplication may be effected without amphimixis in the most diverse ways—by division of the organism into two or more, by budding, and even by the production of unicellular germs. ''
Weismann started a grand tradition. From that day to this, at regular intervals, the evolutionists have declared that sex is a
' problem,' a luxury that should not exist. There is a story about an early meeting of the Royal Society in London, attended by the king, at which an earnest discussion began about why a bowl of water weighed the same with a goldfish in it as it did without. All sorts of explanations were proffered and rejected. The debate became quite heated. Then the king suddenly said, ' I doubt your premise.' He sent for a bowl of water and a fish and a balance: The experiment was done. The bowl was put on the balance, and the fish was added; the bowl 's weight increased by exactly the weight of the fish: Of course.
The tale is no doubt apocryphal, and it is not fair to suggest that the scientists you will meet in these pages are quite such idiots as to assume a problem exists when it does not. But there is a small similarity. When a group of scientists suddenly said that
wrote Lisa Brooks of Brown University, 'is that many sexual organisms seem to be unaware of the conclusion.
