Chapter Two, but also on these remarkable new features of our life-cycle. Unlike the case with our skeletal changes, however, we cannot follow through our evolutionary history the timing of each of these life-cycle changes, because they leave no direct fossil imprint. As a result, they receive only brief attention in paleontology texts despite their importance. Archaeologists have recently discovered a Neanderthal hyoid bone, one of the key pieces of our speech-producing equipment, but as yet no trace of a Neanderthal penis. We do not know whether Homo erectus was already on the road to evolving a preference for having sex in private, in addition to having evolved his and her well-documented large brain. Our sole clues about the dating of these life-cycle changes are that something about longevity can be inferred from skeletons, and that size differences between fossil men and women may be indirect reflections of their mating system (more of that in Chapter Three). We cannot even prove through fossils, as we can for our large brain size, that we rather than living apes are the ones whose life-cycles diverged most from the ancestral condition. Instead, we have to be content with merely inferring that conclusion from the fact that our life-cycles are exceptional compared not just to living apes but also to other primates, suggesting that we were the ones who did more changing.
Darwin established in the mid-Nineteenth Century that the anatomy of animals has evolved through natural selection. Within this century, biochemists have similarly traced how the chemical make-up of animals has evolved through natural selection. But so has the behaviour of animals, including reproductive biology and sexual habits in particular. Life-cycle traits have some genetic basis, as we shall see below, and vary quantitatively among individuals of the same species. For instance, some women are genetically predisposed to give birth to twins, while genes for long lifespan run in some families more than in others. Life-cycle traits affect our success in passing on our genes, through affecting our success in wooing mates, conceiving and rearing babies, and surviving as adults. Just as natural selection tends to adapt an animal's anatomy to its ecological niche and vice versa, so natural selection also tends to mould animals' life-cycles. Those individuals leaving the most numerous surviving offspring promote their genes for life-cycle traits as well as for bones and chemical make-up.
A difficulty with this reasoning is that it seems as if some of our traits, such as menopause and aging, would reduce (rather than enhance) our output of offspring and should not have resulted from natural selection. It often proves profitable to try to understand these paradoxes through the concept of'trade-offs'. In the animal world there is nothing that is free or pure good. Everything involves costs as well as benefits, by using space, time, or energy that could have been devoted to something else. You might otherwise have thought that women who never underwent menopause would leave more descendants than women who do. But consideration of the hidden costs of foregoing menopause (Chapter Seven) will help us understand why evolution did not design these strategies into us. The same considerations illuminate such painful questions as why we grow old and die (Chapter Seven), and whether we are better off (even in a narrow evolutionary sense) in being faithful to our spouse or in pursuing extramarital affairs (Chapter Four).
I have been assuming in this discussion that our distinctively human life-cycle traits have some genetic basis. The comments that I made in Chapter One about the function of genes in general apply here as well. Just as our height and most of our observable traits are not influenced by only a single gene, there surely is not a single gene specifying menopause, testis size, or monogamy. In fact, we know little about the genetic bases of human life-cycle traits, though selective breeding experiments in mice and sheep have illuminated the genetic control of their testis size. Enormous cultural influences obviously operate on our motivation for providing child care or seeking extramarital sex, and there is no reason to believe that genes contribute significantly to differences among individual people in these traits. However, genetic differences between humans and the other two chimpanzee species probably do contribute to the consistent differences in many life-cycle traits between all human populations and all chimpanzee populations. There is no human society, regardless of its cultural practices, whose men have chimpanzee-sized testes and whose women forego menopause. Among those 1.6 % of our genes that differ between us and chimps and that have any function, a significant fraction is likely to be involved in specifying traits of our life-cycle.
The story of our uniquely human life-cycle occupies the five chapters of Part Two. Chapter Three begins by taking up the distinctive features of human social organization and of sexual anatomy, physiology, and behaviour. As already mentioned, features that make us strange among animals include our societies of nominally monogamous couples, our genital anatomy, and our constant and generally private pursuit of sex. Our sex lives are reflected not only in our genitalia but also in the relative sizes of men's and women's bodies (much more equal than are the bodies of male and female gorillas or orangutans). We shall see how some of these familiar and distinctive features have known functions, while others continue to defy understanding. No honest discussion of the human life-cycle could get away with noting that we are nominally monogamous and just leaving it at that. Pursuit of extramarital sex is obviously greatly influenced by each individual's particular upbringing and by the norms of the society in which the individual lives. Despite all that cultural influence, we are left with having to explain the facts that both the institution of marriage and the occurrence of extramarital sex have been reported from all human societies; but that extramarital sex is unknown in gibbons, although they do practise 'marriage' (that is, lasting male/female pairing to rear offspring); and that the question of extramarital sex is meaningless for chimpanzees because they do not practise 'marriage'. Hence an adequate discussion of our uniquely human life-cycle must account for our combination of marriage with extramarital sex. As Chapter Four will show, animal precedents exist to help us make evolutionary sense of our combination: men and women tend to differ in their attitudes towards extramarital sex much as geese and ganders do.