Why is Sex Fun?: the evolution of human sexuality

 
CHAPTER 3. WHY DON'T MEN BREAST-FEED THEIR BABIES?: The Non-Evolution of Male Lactation
Today, we men are expected to share in the care of our children. We have no excuse not to, because we are perfectly capable of doing for our kids virtually anything that our wives can do. And so, when my twin sons were born in 1987,I duly learned to change diapers, clean up vomit, and perform the other tasks that come with parenthood.
The one task that I felt excused from was nursing my infants. It was visibly a tiring task for my wife. Friends kidded me that I should get hormone injections and share the burden. Yet cruel biological facts seemingly confront those who would bring sexual equality into this last bastion of female privilege or male cop-out. It appears obvious that males lack the anatomical equipment, the priming experience of pregnancy, and the hormones necessary for lactation. Until 1994, not a single one of the world's 4,300 mammal species was suspected of male lactation under normal conditions. The nonexistence of male lactation may thus seem to be a solved problem requiring no further discussion, and it may seem doubly irrelevant to a book about how the unique aspects of human sexuality evolved. After all, the problem's solution seems to depend on facts of physiology rather than on evolutionary reasoning, andexclusively female lactation is apparently a universal mammalian phenomenon not at all unique to humans.
In reality, the subject of male lactation follows perfectly from our discussion of the battle of the sexes. It illustrates the failure of strictly physiological explanations and the importance of evolutionary reasoning for understanding human sexuality. Yes, it's true that no male mammal has ever become pregnant, and that the great majority of male mammals normally don't lactate. But one has to go further and ask why mammals evolved genes specifying that only females, not males, would develop the necessary anatomical equipment, the priming experience of pregnancy, and the necessary hormones. Both male and female pigeons secrete crop “milk” to nurse their squab; why not men as well as women? Among seahorses it's the male rather than the female that becomes pregnant; why is that not also true for humans?
As for the supposed necessity of pregnancy as a primary experience for lactation, many female mammals, including many (most?) women, can produce milk without first being primed by pregnancy. Many male mammals, including some men, undergo breast development and lactate when given the appropriate hormones. Under certain conditions, a considerable fraction of men experience breast development and milk production even without having been treated hormonally. Cases of spontaneous lactation have long been known in male domestic goats, and the first case of male lactation in a wild mammal species has been reported recently.
Thus, lactation lies within the physiological potential of men. As we shall see, lactation would make more evolutionary sense for modern men than for males of most other mammal species. But the fact remains that it's not part of our normal repertoire, nor is it known to fall within the normal repertoire of other mammal species except for that single case reported recently. Since natural selection evidently could have made men lactate, why didn't it? That turns out to be a major question that cannot be answered simply by pointing to the deficiencies of male equipment. Male lactation beautifully illustrates all the main themes in the evolution of sexuality: evolutionary conflicts between males and females, the importance of confidence in paternity or maternity, differences in reproductive investment between the sexes, and a species' commitment to its biological inheritance.
As the first step in exploring these themes, I have to overcome your resistance to even thinking about male lactation, a product of our unquestioned assumption that it's physiologically impossible. The genetic differences between males and females, including those that normally reserve lactation for females, turn out to be slight and labile. This chapter will convince you of the feasibility of male lactation and will then explore why that theoretical possibility normally languishes unrealized.
Our sex is ultimately laid down by our genes, which in humans are bundled together in each body cell in twenty-three pairs of microscopic packages called chromosomes. One member of each of our twenty-three pairs was acquired from our mother, and the other member from our father. The twenty-three human chromosome pairs can be numbered and distinguished from each other by consistent differences in appearance. In chromosome pairs 1 through 22, the two members of each pair appear identical when viewed through a microscope. Only in the case of chromosome pair 23, the so-called sex chromosomes, do the two representatives differ, and even that's true only in men, who have a big chromosome (termed an X chromosome) paired with a small one (a Y chromosome). Women instead have two paired X chromosomes.
What do the sex chromosomes do? Many X chromosome genes specify traits unrelated to sex, such as the ability to distinguish red and green colors. However, the Y chromosome contains genes specifying the development of testes. In the fifth week after fertilization human embryos of either sex develop a “bipotential” gonad that can become either a testis or an ovary. If a Y chromosome is present, that bet-hedging gonad begins to commit itself in the seventh week to becoming a testis, but if there's no Y chromosome, the go-nnd waits until the thirteenth week to develop as an ovary.
That may seem surprising: one might have expected the second X chromosome of girls to make ovaries, and the Y chromosome of boys to make testes. In fact, though, people abnormally endowed with one Y and two X chromosomes turn out most like males, whereas people endowed with three or just one X chromosome turn out most like females. Thus, the natural tendency of our bet-hedging primordial gonad is to develop as an ovary if nothing intervenes; something extra, a Y chromosome, is required to change it into a testis.
It's tempting to restate this simple fact in emotionally loaded terms. As the endocrinologist Alfred Jost put it, “Becoming a male is a prolonged, uneasy, and risky venture; it is a kind of struggle against inherent trends towards femaleness.” Chauvinists might go further and hail becoming a man as heroic, and becoming a woman as the easy fallback position. Conversely, one might regard womanhood as the natural state of humanity, with men just a pathological aberration that regrettably must be tolerated as the price for making more women. I prefer merely to acknowledge that a Y chromosome switches gonad development from the ovarian path to the testicular path, and to draw no metaphysical conclusions.
But there's more to a man than testes alone. A penis and prostate gland are among the many other obvious necessities of manhood, just as women need more than ovaries (for instance, it helps to have a vagina). It turns out that the embryo is endowed with other bipotential structures besides the primordial gonad. Unlike the primordial gonad, though, these other bipolar structures have a potential that is not directly specified by the Y chromosome. Instead, secretions produced by the testes themselves are what channel these other structures toward developing into male organs, while lack of testicular secretions channels them toward making female organs.
For example, already in the eighth week of gestation the testes begin producing the steroid hormone testosterone, some of which gets converted into the closely related steroid dihydrotestosterone. These steroids (known as an-drogens) convert some all-purpose embryonic structures into the glans penis, penis shaft, and scrotum; the same structures would otherwise develop into the clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora. Embryos also start out bet-hedging with two sets of ducts, known as the Mullerian ducts and Wolffian ducts. In the absence of testes, the Wolffian ducts atrophy, while the Mullerian ducts grow into a female fetus's uterus, fallopian tubes, and interior vagina. With testes present, the opposite happens: androgens stimulate the Wolffian ducts to grow into a male fetus's seminal vesicles, vas deferens, and epididymis. At the same time, a testicular protein called Mullerian inhibiting hormone does what its name implies: it prevents the Mullerian ducts from developing into the internal female organs.