Carin Bondar, a biologist, writer, TV host, and public speaker. Carin is probably best-known for covering the topic at the forefront of everyone’s mind: sex. In various forms, she has documented all the strange and fascinating ways that animals approach enterprise reproduction–including us.
Watch the full interview with Carin here: https://sciencentric.com/episode/sex-monogamy-with-biologist-carin-bondar/
EDITED TRANSCRIPT
Eric R. Olson: Chimps are very promiscuous and the males have very large testicles.
Carin Bondar: Yes.
ERIC: And they engage in a lot of what’s called sperm competition. One female will mate with many males and then instead of the males duking it out to get access, the sperm compete and there’s all kinds of ways of doing that. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have gorillas, where the males literally battle it out, or at least intimidate the crap out of each other, to get access to all the females. And that’s sort of a winner take all approach. And gorillas have very, very small testicles. But then humans are kind of in the middle. So, like in terms of, you know, testicle size to body weight. So what does that mean?
CARIN: What does it mean? That’s such a good point and the gorilla and chimp examples, such a good one for looking at. What does it mean to have those muscles versus the big testicles and the big penis ’cause the gorilla has very small penis and testicles as you said. I think that humans definitely have an evolutionary history of being more promiscuous. So we have kind of those middle-sized testicles and yet, penis size is quite big in humans. Comparatively speaking. And so I think that we’ve selected for more of a monogamous framework, just in terms of our brief evolutionary history. Because we have smaller testicles and yet, they’re still pretty big . They’re certainly big enough. So that one I think the jury is generally out on whether that’s actually, you know the evolution of the penis in humans, I mean there’s a lot of research to suggest that there are so many mechanisms at work there. In terms of female preference and in terms of biological success.
CARIN: So there’s the shape. The shape of the phallus is another thing that sort of changes the success of specific sperms that are coming out of that shape if you will. There’s the head of the penis and there are some hypotheses to suggest that that is like a scooping mechanism, to scoop out sperms that have been there before. And so it seems to me like the amount of sperm competition is vast within an individual. But then you even take that to another level of scale when you have that individual competing with the sperms of other individual. Human sperm competition I think is alive and well. I feel like even though we have set up a monogamous framework for ourselves over the past several hundred years, I don’t know how monogamous we are as a species to be perfectly honest with you. I think it would be really interesting to know about genetic data and who’s children are really who’s, I think that would be quite a funny thing to know.
ERIC: Yeah, I think there is some data that says that basically we have twice as many female ancestors as we do male ancestors.
CARIN: Oh interesting.
ERIC: So, I don’t know what that means. I think there are different ways you can interpret that, because we also know that males tend to be bigger risk-takers and win a lot of Darwin awards. And also have higher rates of mental illness and down syndrome and things like that. And also have a wider, IQ spread. So there may be a lot of males that aren’t successful in the mating game.
CARIN: Yep.
ERIC: Not having anything to do necessarily with female preference. I mean, obviously female preference plays a role there.
CARIN: That’s interesting. It’s interesting to consider that even if your social game has won it for you, your biological game might not be won. Because even if, for example, a female selects a certain male, that’s not guaranteed that he will be the provider of the successful sperm. And in fact, you know, I think generally in the western world we have issues with that. You know there’s a lot of times where couples are having trouble getting pregnant and I wonder how much of that is because we’ve taken away a lot of the biology behind, you know, what it is that we’re trying to accomplish. So, yeah, just kind of thinking about it from that perspective of the different. You know, sperm competition at many, many, levels of scale.
ERIC: Yes. That’s always interesting. Have you by chance read Christopher Ryan’s book, “Sex at Dawn”?
CARIN: “Sex at Dawn”, yes.
ERIC: This comes up a lot and it’s been kind of pilloried by a lot of people in the sort of evolutionary biology world.
CARIN: Because basically the thesis of the book is that non monogamy is–
ERIC: Is sort of the default, you know?
CARIN: I don’t disagree with that to be honest with you. I mean, if you look at non-monogamy is the way it is in all chimps, I mean in all apes, in all primates, and arguably in humans too. Other than our frameworks. That’s a tricky one.
ERIC: Yeah.
CARIN: I mean I guess I don’t know a lot about the specific human history and the different cultures of the human world. I just kind of know about animals. And none of them are monogamous, Eric. Not even one. Not even one. Too complicated, we are just too complicated. But you know why I love saying that though? It’s because, at the end of the day, sex really does dictate everything about our lives. It really does. You know, we opened our conversation thinking about that theme, and it’s just like the framework of your relationship. You know, whether you’re in a monogamous partnership, whether you’re raising children together in your family and stuff. That’s actually an embodiment of your sex life
CARIN: And I think that’s why I find it so funny that people don’t generally want to talk about sex, but really, if we’re talking about any aspect of your life, you’re actually talking about sex.