Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-22. Lambs. Aphrodite. Chained

Job (conclusion). Lycurgus. Rats.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology.

Lambs. Aphrodite. Chained Chained (conclusion). The Golden One. Lambs The dawn of the Christian era was darkened by the merciless slaughter of infants in Bethlehem and its environs. The birth of Jesus was the unwitting cause of the death of these innocents. And the glad tidings, alas, do not come without the suffering of a child — of hundreds of children. Jesus lived in the wilderness, preparing himself. At thirty he began to repay his debt to the innocently slain. Once, in ancient times, the Lord destroyed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, and commanded those who revered Him to smear the doorposts with the blood of the Passover lamb, and saved them, and led them out of the land of Egypt. I shall be your Passover lamb. I will mark you with my blood, so that you may be saved. Jesus, is it worth dying for the sake of a metaphor? A Roman thought it was not (the fellow calls himself the son of some local deity — and nothing more?). But the atoning sacrifice holds its appeal even after countless repetitions. The shepherd-gods in the otherworldly pastures needed slaves and livestock, and accepted only the very best. Agamemnon was prepared to sacrifice his daughter, and Abraham his son. The gods of antiquity, too, for various reasons sacrificed their children — as Zeus sacrificed Heracles — and in the more archaic variant even swallowed them in order to save themselves. But the old gods also died within their own creations. When Zeus carried Dionysus sewn into his thigh, or brought forth Athena from his cloven skull, he was undoubtedly performing an act of self-sacrifice, as one might say, investing a part of himself. Yet all of this is merely the disfigured wreckage of the most ancient, and therefore highest, metaphysics — one that conceived the creation of the world as a creative act in which the creator sacrifices himself in order to be reborn as something more perfect. This is the creation of order from disorder, of form from formlessness, of love from strife, of system from chaos. The sacrifice is necessary in order to overcome the second law of thermodynamics. Atum, the god of world order, is born from the abyss of Nun, which thereby ceases to exist. Primordial Chaos gives birth to well-ordered Cosmos and perishes within it. Every creative act contains within itself negation, sacrifice, and suffering. In creative individuals the pull toward self-destruction is stronger than in others. This is easily confirmed by statistics, which become still more compelling if one counts the "implicit" suicides of Empedocles, Socrates, Jesus, Bruno, Shelley, Pushkin, Lermontov, Van Gogh, and many others. A creative life cannot but be a life of suffering, since the creator (at whatever scale) sets himself against what exists. His suffering is the consequence of the system's resistance, the force of which corresponds to its stability. Suffering is alien to lower forms of life and increases as one ascends the evolutionary ladder. It is the price of relative freedom from the mass, indiscriminate death to which higher organisms, in comparison with lower ones, are less subject. If one follows the Platonic-Spinozist precept that treats freedom as conscious necessity, then suffering becomes the lot of the unreasoning — those who refuse to reckon with necessity. Yet the entire course of biological evolution asserts a different understanding of freedom — as liberation from necessity, the struggle against which becomes the very source of suffering. For the sake of freedom from biological death, humanity created a spiritual world — a meta-ecological system that, in principle, can secure eternal life. Paradoxically, this system itself becomes the source of the most grievous human suffering — spiritual suffering. This comes about through the ossification of meta-ecological structures, the transformation of ideas into dogmas, of faith into ritual, of the moral code into a legal code, and so on. This entire metamortmass deprives spiritual life of its inner freedom, which must be won anew through fresh sacrifices. But one who has sacrificed himself and risen again exactly as before — only with scars — is absurd. For the sacrifice not to be in vain, one must be reborn in the idea of World Love, which will unite us with our enemies, of whom the most persistent is ourselves. Aphrodite Suffering attains its goal when it is reborn as its opposite — pleasure. The ancients placed an equals sign between pleasure and love: both were governed by one and the same goddess. But love is not only pleasure; it is also suffering. It is an intimate feeling that blossoms in chaste silence. It is a feeling about which people have cried and sung at every crossroads for millennia. In short, it is the most sacred and at the same time almost the most base (fifth on Plato's list) of feelings. But Aphrodite herself is no less contradictory. Born from the sea-foam, she is the most ancient of goddesses and at the same time, as it were, the youngest daughter of Zeus. Married either to Hephaestus or to Ares, and yet giving birth to hermaphrodites by Hermes. Plato was right: there are in reality two, or even three, Aphrodites. The one he called common embodied the basic natural function of love. As mother-goddess she was identified with the Egyptian Isis, who had earlier been Io, the beloved of Zeus, transformed into a cow, who first fled eastward, then southward, and finally westward, to regain her former form on the banks of the Nile. The myth cannot say directly that in her totemic past Io-Isis-Aphrodite was a cow. That the common Aphrodite was the mother of all pleasures is not difficult to believe. Sexual pleasure is the compensation for the energy expenditure entailed by the sexual act. The simplest form of the sexual process (in Chlamydomonas, for example) consists in the fusion of two cells, which then clothe themselves in a sturdy membrane and in that state can survive an unfavorable period before commencing division. The obvious sense of fusion here lies in the accumulation of nutrients. In other primitive forms of the sexual process one can also discern a kind of nourishment — an increase in the energy potential of the cell preparing to divide. The original sense of sex is not entirely lost even at the higher stages of evolution. In insects, birds, and humans, the sexual function is in one way or another connected with the feeding of the female. The male offers the female a fly he has caught, his spermatophore, or, finally, himself. The female praying mantis devours the male during copulation, beginning with his head (while the convulsive movements of the decapitated spouse prolong the sexual act). In humans, sexual aggression manifests in the most varied forms, from a stolen kiss to rape and even — admittedly rare — sexual cannibalism. (Salvador Dali, with his heightened interest in the subconscious, discerned in the act of swallowing an impulse "to feel to the utmost one's absolute union with the beloved being," whether the love in question is sexual or religious — the swallowing of the host in the rite of communion.) In specialist studies, a covert inclination toward sexual aggression is found in up to 30 percent of respondents of both sexes. Sadism, as the extreme form of sexual aggression, lays bare the connection between love and violence, a connection less explicitly traceable in courtship rituals involving the abduction of brides and the knocking out of front teeth, in marital quarrels accompanied by blows, in the submissive devotion of deceived and humiliated lovers. Even ostensibly harmless coquetry is a form of violence applied in order to provoke amorous feeling. The aggressiveness of lovers may have some adaptive significance, imparting the necessary energy to the sexual act. The combative force of aggression must, however, be neutralized in some way — the assault converted into a courtship ritual, the grip into an embrace, the bite into a kiss. The combination of aggression with mating presents a difficult problem to resolve. The firefly seeks in vain a compromise between the desire to attract a female with a light signal and the fear of being devoured by her. From conflict situations of this kind there grows a highly specific feeling called sexual love. For reasons difficult to explain — perhaps connected with the secondary nature of the sexual process — the organs performing so important a function turn out to be shared with organs of another purpose. In certain invertebrates and in rare cases among vertebrates (fish inhabiting the internal cavity of sea cucumbers) the sexual products are discharged through the mouth. In some cyclostomes and fish, as well as amphibians, reptiles, birds, and monotremes, the reproductive ducts open into the cloaca — an enlargement at the posterior end of the rectum. More highly organized forms possess a urogenital system. Through such combinations of organs, the sexual function is linked to other functions. The sexualization of vital functions not directly connected with reproduction as it were unites all forms of pleasure. Part of the theory of S. Freud, once considered most objectionable, was devoted to infantile sexuality. Freud showed that the sexual instinct manifests itself at a very early age, then as it were subsides, and flares up again at puberty. At the same time, owing to the underdeveloped state of the sexual sphere, infantile sexuality can manifest itself only in the form of a side-effect of other functions (suckling and urination in the first instance) — a side-effect evolutionarily connected with the sexualization of functions. One of the most general evolutionary regularities consists in the repetition of certain ancestral features at the early stages of an organism's development. Just as the human embryo possesses gills, so too in the development of sexual sensations there are apparently reproduced remote historical stages when the mouth or anus served as the sexual opening. The corresponding features of the sexual behavior of adults may be regarded as the retention at the sexually mature stage of features of infantile sexuality. All the features of sexual behavior are in one way or another related to the competition of gametes. The quantity of sperm and the frequency of sexual acts depend on the reproductive structure of the population. In social species, females copulate much more frequently with two or more males than in solitary species, and accordingly gamete competition is of greater significance here. Many insect species are capable of accumulating sperm from successive copulations in spermathecae, but human gametes also retain motility for seven to nine days — long enough for competition to arise. The phenomenon of orgasm is apparently directly related to gamete competition, providing favorable conditions for the gametes of the preferred male. Since gametes bearing X or Y chromosomes also compete, orgasm probably participates in sex determination as well (if in crocodiles, for example, sex depends on temperature, and in fish females can turn into males when the latter are scarce, then higher vertebrates require more subtle mechanisms for regulating the sex ratio). In any case, the purpose of the energetically costly actions performed during the sexual act consists primarily in the synchronization of male and female orgasms, which allows one to ascribe an important biological function to this phenomenon. Synchronization of orgasms is more probable in the optimal reproductive state, which is determined by physiological and psychological factors connected with age, nutrition, and frequency of sexual acts. Some bearing on this hypothesis is the fact that high levels of androgens (testosterone in particular) at the time of conception favor the birth of boys (as well as left-handers and homosexuals; see W.H. James: J. Theor. Biol., 1988, 133, 261-266). The anthropologist V.A. Geodakyan (Zeleny Krest, 1992) cites various evidence of a shift in the sex ratio in favor of boys when the optimal reproductive state is disturbed — during wars, when men are separated from women, in harems, where hundreds of women in their prime spend their time awaiting the sultan's favor (only boys are born), and so on. Moreover, when there is a shortage of men (in the general case, of males), a greater proportion of conceptions occur involving individuals who are too young or too old and who under normal conditions do not participate in reproduction. In all these situations, a disturbance of the synchrony of orgasms is probable, accompanied by a shift in the sex ratio of the offspring, compensating for the deficit of the male sex. If our reasoning is correct, then there may at last be realized the long-awaited possibility of conceiving a boy or a girl at will (though one can speak only of statistical probability). Moreover, at the instinctive or intuitive level this possibility seems already to be realized. Otherwise it is difficult to explain the periodic shifts in sexual preferences accorded in certain periods to men and women with strongly pronounced secondary sexual characteristics (fashion for femininity and masculinity) or, conversely, to effeminate men and adolescent-looking women. In the same vein may be found a biological basis for the difficult-to-explain and often tragic attraction of aging men to very young women, and for the favor shown by women of Balzacian age (which, since Balzac's time, has risen by at least ten years) toward youths who have barely reached sexual maturity. Jealousy in its elementary manifestations, common to both humans and animals, is also connected with gamete competition and is explained by the striving of the male to protect his own gametes from competition, while at the same time preserving the possibility of increasing his genetic contribution to the next generation through occasional extramarital liaisons. The female lacks such a possibility — extramarital liaisons do not increase her fecundity. Men and women have entirely different natural incentives toward promiscuity and jealousy. Therefore it is impossible, without doing violence to nature, to demand of them complete equality in marital relations. Sexual instincts are extraordinarily stable. Even in the most refined members of the human race there manifests itself the "insurance copulation" studied in animals: an increase in the frequency of sexual acts after the reunion of a pair that has been separated for some time, or after copulation "stolen" by a chance partner (A.P. Moeller et al.: Biol. J. Linnean Soc., 1989, 38: 119-131). The point of insurance copulation is to ensure the overwhelming predominance of the gametes of the permanent partner. (Deceived husbands who experience heightened sexual attraction toward their unfaithful wives — an attraction that injures their pride — may perhaps find some relief in understanding the biological nature of these experiences.) Chained The smith-god Hephaestus, wishing to expose Aphrodite's love affair with Ares, constructed a magical net that bound the lovers fast. The lame Hephaestus then loudly summoned the Olympian gods to witness the shame of the helpless pair. And the gods burst into that irresistible laughter which we call Homeric. If Aphrodite is the goddess of pleasure, then why is it considered necessary to keep her in chains? Why is her cult shrouded in a veil of mystery? Why do we still regard with suspicion those anthropological theories that assign the leading role to the sexual sphere? For reproduction is the principal function of all living things. Christian tradition may of course have played some part, but sexual shame is a more general phenomenon, having natural roots. (Phallic and scabrous epithalamic rites represent not natural but ritual, metaphysical shamelessness.) The Biblical original sin merely proposes an explanation — a rationalization — of shame that goes back into the subconscious and consequently has a long evolutionary history. In the animal world, the sexual act is performed covertly or openly depending on solitary or gregarious modes of life, social hierarchy, the probability of sudden attack, and so on. During the sexual act, animals are least protected against possible aggression from rivals or predators. In the evolutionary history of the ape-like ancestors of man, the most vulnerable period was that of transition from arboreal to terrestrial life (preserved in genetic memory as a gravitational pull toward forest margins and possibly refracted in the legend of Eden with its trees of life and knowledge). The concealment of the sexual act may have arisen in this period and later acquired additional meaning in connection with the prevention of close-kin matings. In the crowded conditions of cave-dwelling, the first objects of sexual attraction were almost inevitably related individuals, whose attempts at intimacy were harshly suppressed by elders. As a result, sexual attraction became firmly associated with prohibition — as something reprehensible, shameful. Negative associations may, however, have arisen still earlier, in infancy, when suckling and urination, automatically linked with sexual sensations, were forcibly interrupted for dietary or hygienic reasons. And finally, concealment helped to avoid sexual competition, which in animals is exacerbated when the sexual act is performed in the presence of an audience of males, increasing the frequency of copulations. Sexual competition manifests in the form of tournament fights, threats, displays of strength and willpower, territorial seizure, and so on, and results in some individuals reproducing more successfully than others. There arises a hierarchy in which the dominant individual (usually a male, though a parallel female hierarchy may also exist) realizes its reproductive potential, partially or entirely (as in the house mouse) depriving the others of a sexual life. In hierarchical communities, the public sexual act may have been the prerogative of the dominant male alone, and even in historical times was sometimes still the privilege of a prince or emperor (Nero, for example). In subordinate individuals, the subconscious fear of being caught during copulation reduces sexual activity and may even be the cause of sexual perversions. Man inherited sexual competition from his animal forebears and, thanks to year-round sexual activity, transformed it into a constant dominant of social behavior. In a society of two or more human individuals, a hierarchy inevitably arises, for the consolidation of which organs of power are created and laws written. Man invariably and already automatically evaluates himself in relation to other representatives of the same sex. In this connection, the reproductive success of a man depends directly on the number of sexual relationships: the more relationships, the greater his genetic contribution to the offspring. For a woman no such dependence exists — the number of relationships does not in general determine the frequency of conceptions. Accordingly, man receives from nature a far more powerful incentive to sexual competition, which drives him to succeed in life. This is the leading factor of physical, intellectual, and technological progress. (In particular, technological progress has as its original aim the compensation of the natural inequality of people; as Americans say, the Lord for some reason created some people large and strong, others small and weak — but Mr. Colt corrected this mistake.) In developed hierarchical structures, sexual competition takes on an ever more mediated character. Steep climbs in dreams and a fondness for climbing in waking life have a sexual subtext. Yet as a person ascends the social ladder, he more and more frequently sacrifices reproductive success, and in the extreme case renounces sexual life altogether for the sake of sporting achievement, fame, wealth, or power. There occurs a substitution of means for ends — not uncommon in evolution — which also manifests as the pursuit of sexual relationships for the sake of self-affirmation. Sexual self-affirmation in its most candid form is widespread among young men making their careers (approximately half of European literary output, from Benjamin Constant to John Braine, is devoted to this theme), but to some degree is characteristic of all ages as a component of hierarchical behavior, alongside sexual jealousy, an equally universal motive of the human comedy. Jealousy is multilayered. A well-known sociological theory connects this feeling with the psychology of private property: the husband regards his wife as his property and jealously guards her, whereas the lover does not usually feel jealous of the husband. This is probably so, but when the issue is property rights, the matter is usually settled by a fine. (Hephaestus threatens to exact a fine from his wife's parent, i.e., Zeus, while another jealous proprietor, Soames Forsyte, presents a bill to the lover.) If a genuine tragedy unfolds, it is not on account of property. After all, animals too are jealous. A herd stallion, consumed by jealousy, expends so much energy in fighting rivals that almost none remains for the mares. In a hierarchical community, only the dominant individual displays jealousy; the rest acknowledge its right to sexual preference. Among humans, the lawful spouse is jealous but not the lover, who intuitively perceives the husband in this situation (regardless of his personal qualities) as the dominant male, placed beyond competition. Having himself become a husband, the former lover as it were raises his social status with all the accompanying psychological effects, including jealousy. The family in its biological essence is a means of protection against sexual competition. Its structure in different species depends on the characteristics of sexual behavior (and vice versa). In this connection it is worth noting that primates in general, and humans in particular, are distinguished by an exceptional diversity of family structure. Monogamy is apparently primary for them. In any case, lower primates, leading for the most part a nocturnal existence, are solitary or monogamous. Among apes, Japanese macaques, for example, form a marital bond for one season and subsequently avoid each other, almost as close relatives do. The polygamous family was formed in parallel in various evolutionary lineages; among lower apes polyandry (multiple husbands) predominates, among the great apes polygyny (multiple wives). African australopithecines, the direct ancestors of humankind, judging by fossil footprints, exhibited considerable differences between males and females in height and weight. Such pronounced sexual dimorphism is common among polygamous species (the weight of a male fur seal, for example, may be several times that of the female). In animals as in humans, competition of male gametes is associated with an increase in the size of the reproductive organs, which is particularly marked in polygamous species compared with monogamous ones forming permanent pairs. (See R.L. Smith, ed., Sperm competition and the evolution of animal mating systems. Orlando, Flo.: Acad. Press, 1984, 687.) With the transition to the monogamous family, sexual dimorphism as a rule diminishes, unless it is maintained by a secondary function not directly connected with sexual relations — such as the division of labor between the sexes. The polygamous family can realize all the evolutionary advantages conferred by gamete competition. Polygyny is favorable for increasing the birth rate and may have become established in populations whose numbers are subject to large fluctuations (in periodically arid zones), whereas polyandry prevents overpopulation (the number of children in the family does not increase with the number of husbands) while at the same time ensuring the care (of all husbands) for the offspring. The instability of polygamy in humans evidently has both social and physiological causes, among which no small role is played by the concomitant disturbance of the sex ratio (in harems, as we have already noted, boys are born more frequently). Beyond the bounds of European civilization, various forms of family organization have survived to the present day, including polygyny and polyandry (among Tibetans); however, the tendency toward monogamy manifests itself, apparently, everywhere. This is accompanied by an equally general tendency toward the reduction of sexual dimorphism, against the background of which, however, there appear periodic fluctuations connected with the restructuring of the social system and aesthetic norms, the biological underpinnings of which we shall endeavor to elucidate further on.

Lambs The dawn of the Christian era was darkened by the merciless slaughter of infants in Bethlehem and its environs. The birth of Jesus was the unwitting cause of the death of these innocents. And the glad tidings, alas, do not come without the suffering of a child — of hundreds of children. Jesus lived in the wilderness, preparing himself. At thirty he began to repay his debt to the innocently slain. Once, in ancient times, the Lord destroyed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, and commanded those who revered Him to smear the doorposts with the blood of the Passover lamb, and saved them, and led them out of the land of Egypt. I shall be your Passover lamb. I will mark you with my blood, so that you may be saved. Jesus, is it worth dying for the sake of a metaphor? A Roman thought it was not (the fellow calls himself the son of some local deity — and nothing more?). But the atoning sacrifice holds its appeal even after countless repetitions. The shepherd-gods in the otherworldly pastures needed slaves and livestock, and accepted only the very best. Agamemnon was prepared to sacrifice his daughter, and Abraham his son. The gods of antiquity, too, for various reasons sacrificed their children — as Zeus sacrificed Heracles — and in the more archaic variant even swallowed them in order to save themselves. But the old gods also died within their own creations. When Zeus carried Dionysus sewn into his thigh, or brought forth Athena from his cloven skull, he was undoubtedly performing an act of self-sacrifice, as one might say, investing a part of himself. Yet all of this is merely the disfigured wreckage of the most ancient, and therefore highest, metaphysics — one that conceived the creation of the world as a creative act in which the creator sacrifices himself in order to be reborn as something more perfect. This is the creation of order from disorder, of form from formlessness, of love from strife, of system from chaos. The sacrifice is necessary in order to overcome the second law of thermodynamics. Atum, the god of world order, is born from the abyss of Nun, which thereby ceases to exist. Primordial Chaos gives birth to well-ordered Cosmos and perishes within it. Every creative act contains within itself negation, sacrifice, and suffering. In creative individuals the pull toward self-destruction is stronger than in others. This is easily confirmed by statistics, which become still more compelling if one counts the "implicit" suicides of Empedocles, Socrates, Jesus, Bruno, Shelley, Pushkin, Lermontov, Van Gogh, and many others. A creative life cannot but be a life of suffering, since the creator (at whatever scale) sets himself against what exists. His suffering is the consequence of the system's resistance, the force of which corresponds to its stability. Suffering is alien to lower forms of life and increases as one ascends the evolutionary ladder. It is the price of relative freedom from the mass, indiscriminate death to which higher organisms, in comparison with lower ones, are less subject. If one follows the Platonic-Spinozist precept that treats freedom as conscious necessity, then suffering becomes the lot of the unreasoning — those who refuse to reckon with necessity. Yet the entire course of biological evolution asserts a different understanding of freedom — as liberation from necessity, the struggle against which becomes the very source of suffering. For the sake of freedom from biological death, humanity created a spiritual world — a meta-ecological system that, in principle, can secure eternal life. Paradoxically, this system itself becomes the source of the most grievous human suffering — spiritual suffering. This comes about through the ossification of meta-ecological structures, the transformation of ideas into dogmas, of faith into ritual, of the moral code into a legal code, and so on. This entire metamortmass deprives spiritual life of its inner freedom, which must be won anew through fresh sacrifices. But one who has sacrificed himself and risen again exactly as before — only with scars — is absurd. For the sacrifice not to be in vain, one must be reborn in the idea of World Love, which will unite us with our enemies, of whom the most persistent is ourselves. Aphrodite Suffering attains its goal when it is reborn as its opposite — pleasure. The ancients placed an equals sign between pleasure and love: both were governed by one and the same goddess. But love is not only pleasure; it is also suffering. It is an intimate feeling that blossoms in chaste silence. It is a feeling about which people have cried and sung at every crossroads for millennia. In short, it is the most sacred and at the same time almost the most base (fifth on Plato's list) of feelings. But Aphrodite herself is no less contradictory. Born from the sea-foam, she is the most ancient of goddesses and at the same time, as it were, the youngest daughter of Zeus. Married either to Hephaestus or to Ares, and yet giving birth to hermaphrodites by Hermes. Plato was right: there are in reality two, or even three, Aphrodites. The one he called common embodied the basic natural function of love. As mother-goddess she was identified with the Egyptian Isis, who had earlier been Io, the beloved of Zeus, transformed into a cow, who first fled eastward, then southward, and finally westward, to regain her former form on the banks of the Nile. The myth cannot say directly that in her totemic past Io-Isis-Aphrodite was a cow. That the common Aphrodite was the mother of all pleasures is not difficult to believe. Sexual pleasure is the compensation for the energy expenditure entailed by the sexual act. The simplest form of the sexual process (in Chlamydomonas, for example) consists in the fusion of two cells, which then clothe themselves in a sturdy membrane and in that state can survive an unfavorable period before commencing division. The obvious sense of fusion here lies in the accumulation of nutrients. In other primitive forms of the sexual process one can also discern a kind of nourishment — an increase in the energy potential of the cell preparing to divide. The original sense of sex is not entirely lost even at the higher stages of evolution. In insects, birds, and humans, the sexual function is in one way or another connected with the feeding of the female. The male offers the female a fly he has caught, his spermatophore, or, finally, himself. The female praying mantis devours the male during copulation, beginning with his head (while the convulsive movements of the decapitated spouse prolong the sexual act). In humans, sexual aggression manifests in the most varied forms, from a stolen kiss to rape and even — admittedly rare — sexual cannibalism. (Salvador Dali, with his heightened interest in the subconscious, discerned in the act of swallowing an impulse "to feel to the utmost one's absolute union with the beloved being," whether the love in question is sexual or religious — the swallowing of the host in the rite of communion.) In specialist studies, a covert inclination toward sexual aggression is found in up to 30 percent of respondents of both sexes. Sadism, as the extreme form of sexual aggression, lays bare the connection between love and violence, a connection less explicitly traceable in courtship rituals involving the abduction of brides and the knocking out of front teeth, in marital quarrels accompanied by blows, in the submissive devotion of deceived and humiliated lovers. Even ostensibly harmless coquetry is a form of violence applied in order to provoke amorous feeling. The aggressiveness of lovers may have some adaptive significance, imparting the necessary energy to the sexual act. The combative force of aggression must, however, be neutralized in some way — the assault converted into a courtship ritual, the grip into an embrace, the bite into a kiss. The combination of aggression with mating presents a difficult problem to resolve. The firefly seeks in vain a compromise between the desire to attract a female with a light signal and the fear of being devoured by her. From conflict situations of this kind there grows a highly specific feeling called sexual love. For reasons difficult to explain — perhaps connected with the secondary nature of the sexual process — the organs performing so important a function turn out to be shared with organs of another purpose. In certain invertebrates and in rare cases among vertebrates (fish inhabiting the internal cavity of sea cucumbers) the sexual products are discharged through the mouth. In some cyclostomes and fish, as well as amphibians, reptiles, birds, and monotremes, the reproductive ducts open into the cloaca — an enlargement at the posterior end of the rectum. More highly organized forms possess a urogenital system. Through such combinations of organs, the sexual function is linked to other functions. The sexualization of vital functions not directly connected with reproduction as it were unites all forms of pleasure. Part of the theory of S. Freud, once considered most objectionable, was devoted to infantile sexuality. Freud showed that the sexual instinct manifests itself at a very early age, then as it were subsides, and flares up again at puberty. At the same time, owing to the underdeveloped state of the sexual sphere, infantile sexuality can manifest itself only in the form of a side-effect of other functions (suckling and urination in the first instance) — a side-effect evolutionarily connected with the sexualization of functions. One of the most general evolutionary regularities consists in the repetition of certain ancestral features at the early stages of an organism's development. Just as the human embryo possesses gills, so too in the development of sexual sensations there are apparently reproduced remote historical stages when the mouth or anus served as the sexual opening. The corresponding features of the sexual behavior of adults may be regarded as the retention at the sexually mature stage of features of infantile sexuality. All the features of sexual behavior are in one way or another related to the competition of gametes. The quantity of sperm and the frequency of sexual acts depend on the reproductive structure of the population. In social species, females copulate much more frequently with two or more males than in solitary species, and accordingly gamete competition is of greater significance here. Many insect species are capable of accumulating sperm from successive copulations in spermathecae, but human gametes also retain motility for seven to nine days — long enough for competition to arise. The phenomenon of orgasm is apparently directly related to gamete competition, providing favorable conditions for the gametes of the preferred male. Since gametes bearing X or Y chromosomes also compete, orgasm probably participates in sex determination as well (if in crocodiles, for example, sex depends on temperature, and in fish females can turn into males when the latter are scarce, then higher vertebrates require more subtle mechanisms for regulating the sex ratio). In any case, the purpose of the energetically costly actions performed during the sexual act consists primarily in the synchronization of male and female orgasms, which allows one to ascribe an important biological function to this phenomenon. Synchronization of orgasms is more probable in the optimal reproductive state, which is determined by physiological and psychological factors connected with age, nutrition, and frequency of sexual acts. Some bearing on this hypothesis is the fact that high levels of androgens (testosterone in particular) at the time of conception favor the birth of boys (as well as left-handers and homosexuals; see W.H. James: J. Theor. Biol., 1988, 133, 261-266). The anthropologist V.A. Geodakyan (Zeleny Krest, 1992) cites various evidence of a shift in the sex ratio in favor of boys when the optimal reproductive state is disturbed — during wars, when men are separated from women, in harems, where hundreds of women in their prime spend their time awaiting the sultan's favor (only boys are born), and so on. Moreover, when there is a shortage of men (in the general case, of males), a greater proportion of conceptions occur involving individuals who are too young or too old and who under normal conditions do not participate in reproduction. In all these situations, a disturbance of the synchrony of orgasms is probable, accompanied by a shift in the sex ratio of the offspring, compensating for the deficit of the male sex. If our reasoning is correct, then there may at last be realized the long-awaited possibility of conceiving a boy or a girl at will (though one can speak only of statistical probability). Moreover, at the instinctive or intuitive level this possibility seems already to be realized. Otherwise it is difficult to explain the periodic shifts in sexual preferences accorded in certain periods to men and women with strongly pronounced secondary sexual characteristics (fashion for femininity and masculinity) or, conversely, to effeminate men and adolescent-looking women. In the same vein may be found a biological basis for the difficult-to-explain and often tragic attraction of aging men to very young women, and for the favor shown by women of Balzacian age (which, since Balzac's time, has risen by at least ten years) toward youths who have barely reached sexual maturity. Jealousy in its elementary manifestations, common to both humans and animals, is also connected with gamete competition and is explained by the striving of the male to protect his own gametes from competition, while at the same time preserving the possibility of increasing his genetic contribution to the next generation through occasional extramarital liaisons. The female lacks such a possibility — extramarital liaisons do not increase her fecundity. Men and women have entirely different natural incentives toward promiscuity and jealousy. Therefore it is impossible, without doing violence to nature, to demand of them complete equality in marital relations. Sexual instincts are extraordinarily stable. Even in the most refined members of the human race there manifests itself the "insurance copulation" studied in animals: an increase in the frequency of sexual acts after the reunion of a pair that has been separated for some time, or after copulation "stolen" by a chance partner (A.P. Moeller et al.: Biol. J. Linnean Soc., 1989, 38: 119-131). The point of insurance copulation is to ensure the overwhelming predominance of the gametes of the permanent partner. (Deceived husbands who experience heightened sexual attraction toward their unfaithful wives — an attraction that injures their pride — may perhaps find some relief in understanding the biological nature of these experiences.) Chained The smith-god Hephaestus, wishing to expose Aphrodite's love affair with Ares, constructed a magical net that bound the lovers fast. The lame Hephaestus then loudly summoned the Olympian gods to witness the shame of the helpless pair. And the gods burst into that irresistible laughter which we call Homeric. If Aphrodite is the goddess of pleasure, then why is it considered necessary to keep her in chains? Why is her cult shrouded in a veil of mystery? Why do we still regard with suspicion those anthropological theories that assign the leading role to the sexual sphere? For reproduction is the principal function of all living things. Christian tradition may of course have played some part, but sexual shame is a more general phenomenon, having natural roots. (Phallic and scabrous epithalamic rites represent not natural but ritual, metaphysical shamelessness.) The Biblical original sin merely proposes an explanation — a rationalization — of shame that goes back into the subconscious and consequently has a long evolutionary history. In the animal world, the sexual act is performed covertly or openly depending on solitary or gregarious modes of life, social hierarchy, the probability of sudden attack, and so on. During the sexual act, animals are least protected against possible aggression from rivals or predators. In the evolutionary history of the ape-like ancestors of man, the most vulnerable period was that of transition from arboreal to terrestrial life (preserved in genetic memory as a gravitational pull toward forest margins and possibly refracted in the legend of Eden with its trees of life and knowledge). The concealment of the sexual act may have arisen in this period and later acquired additional meaning in connection with the prevention of close-kin matings. In the crowded conditions of cave-dwelling, the first objects of sexual attraction were almost inevitably related individuals, whose attempts at intimacy were harshly suppressed by elders. As a result, sexual attraction became firmly associated with prohibition — as something reprehensible, shameful. Negative associations may, however, have arisen still earlier, in infancy, when suckling and urination, automatically linked with sexual sensations, were forcibly interrupted for dietary or hygienic reasons. And finally, concealment helped to avoid sexual competition, which in animals is exacerbated when the sexual act is performed in the presence of an audience of males, increasing the frequency of copulations. Sexual competition manifests in the form of tournament fights, threats, displays of strength and willpower, territorial seizure, and so on, and results in some individuals reproducing more successfully than others. There arises a hierarchy in which the dominant individual (usually a male, though a parallel female hierarchy may also exist) realizes its reproductive potential, partially or entirely (as in the house mouse) depriving the others of a sexual life. In hierarchical communities, the public sexual act may have been the prerogative of the dominant male alone, and even in historical times was sometimes still the privilege of a prince or emperor (Nero, for example). In subordinate individuals, the subconscious fear of being caught during copulation reduces sexual activity and may even be the cause of sexual perversions. Man inherited sexual competition from his animal forebears and, thanks to year-round sexual activity, transformed it into a constant dominant of social behavior. In a society of two or more human individuals, a hierarchy inevitably arises, for the consolidation of which organs of power are created and laws written. Man invariably and already automatically evaluates himself in relation to other representatives of the same sex. In this connection, the reproductive success of a man depends directly on the number of sexual relationships: the more relationships, the greater his genetic contribution to the offspring. For a woman no such dependence exists — the number of relationships does not in general determine the frequency of conceptions. Accordingly, man receives from nature a far more powerful incentive to sexual competition, which drives him to succeed in life. This is the leading factor of physical, intellectual, and technological progress. (In particular, technological progress has as its original aim the compensation of the natural inequality of people; as Americans say, the Lord for some reason created some people large and strong, others small and weak — but Mr. Colt corrected this mistake.) In developed hierarchical structures, sexual competition takes on an ever more mediated character. Steep climbs in dreams and a fondness for climbing in waking life have a sexual subtext. Yet as a person ascends the social ladder, he more and more frequently sacrifices reproductive success, and in the extreme case renounces sexual life altogether for the sake of sporting achievement, fame, wealth, or power. There occurs a substitution of means for ends — not uncommon in evolution — which also manifests as the pursuit of sexual relationships for the sake of self-affirmation. Sexual self-affirmation in its most candid form is widespread among young men making their careers (approximately half of European literary output, from Benjamin Constant to John Braine, is devoted to this theme), but to some degree is characteristic of all ages as a component of hierarchical behavior, alongside sexual jealousy, an equally universal motive of the human comedy. Jealousy is multilayered. A well-known sociological theory connects this feeling with the psychology of private property: the husband regards his wife as his property and jealously guards her, whereas the lover does not usually feel jealous of the husband. This is probably so, but when the issue is property rights, the matter is usually settled by a fine. (Hephaestus threatens to exact a fine from his wife's parent, i.e., Zeus, while another jealous proprietor, Soames Forsyte, presents a bill to the lover.) If a genuine tragedy unfolds, it is not on account of property. After all, animals too are jealous. A herd stallion, consumed by jealousy, expends so much energy in fighting rivals that almost none remains for the mares. In a hierarchical community, only the dominant individual displays jealousy; the rest acknowledge its right to sexual preference. Among humans, the lawful spouse is jealous but not the lover, who intuitively perceives the husband in this situation (regardless of his personal qualities) as the dominant male, placed beyond competition. Having himself become a husband, the former lover as it were raises his social status with all the accompanying psychological effects, including jealousy. The family in its biological essence is a means of protection against sexual competition. Its structure in different species depends on the characteristics of sexual behavior (and vice versa). In this connection it is worth noting that primates in general, and humans in particular, are distinguished by an exceptional diversity of family structure. Monogamy is apparently primary for them. In any case, lower primates, leading for the most part a nocturnal existence, are solitary or monogamous. Among apes, Japanese macaques, for example, form a marital bond for one season and subsequently avoid each other, almost as close relatives do. The polygamous family was formed in parallel in various evolutionary lineages; among lower apes polyandry (multiple husbands) predominates, among the great apes polygyny (multiple wives). African australopithecines, the direct ancestors of humankind, judging by fossil footprints, exhibited considerable differences between males and females in height and weight. Such pronounced sexual dimorphism is common among polygamous species (the weight of a male fur seal, for example, may be several times that of the female). In animals as in humans, competition of male gametes is associated with an increase in the size of the reproductive organs, which is particularly marked in polygamous species compared with monogamous ones forming permanent pairs. (See R.L. Smith, ed., Sperm competition and the evolution of animal mating systems. Orlando, Flo.: Acad. Press, 1984, 687.) With the transition to the monogamous family, sexual dimorphism as a rule diminishes, unless it is maintained by a secondary function not directly connected with sexual relations — such as the division of labor between the sexes. The polygamous family can realize all the evolutionary advantages conferred by gamete competition. Polygyny is favorable for increasing the birth rate and may have become established in populations whose numbers are subject to large fluctuations (in periodically arid zones), whereas polyandry prevents overpopulation (the number of children in the family does not increase with the number of husbands) while at the same time ensuring the care (of all husbands) for the offspring. The instability of polygamy in humans evidently has both social and physiological causes, among which no small role is played by the concomitant disturbance of the sex ratio (in harems, as we have already noted, boys are born more frequently). Beyond the bounds of European civilization, various forms of family organization have survived to the present day, including polygyny and polyandry (among Tibetans); however, the tendency toward monogamy manifests itself, apparently, everywhere. This is accompanied by an equally general tendency toward the reduction of sexual dimorphism, against the background of which, however, there appear periodic fluctuations connected with the restructuring of the social system and aesthetic norms, the biological underpinnings of which we shall endeavor to elucidate further on.

Job (conclusion). Lycurgus. Rats.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 pp. Part 22.

Lambs. Aphrodite. Chained.

Chained (conclusion). Golden.

Chained (conclusion). Golden.