Sexual Predator

ᵖᵃʳᵗ ᵒⁿᵉ❣️

What is the brain for? The smart-aleck answer to the question is sex. Put more completely, the brain exists to make better decisions about how to enhance reproductive success.

Reproduction is the central act in the life of every living thing. Once an individual has survived past the age of reproduction, the individual is evolutionarily useless. The struggle to reproduce can sometimes have peculiar effects. In nature, things are not always what they seem.

An ant climbs to the top of a grass stem, falls down and tries again and again ... until a sheep comes along and eats the grass (and the ant). WHY does the ant persist in climbing the grass? How does the ant benefit? 

There is no benefit to the ant. Its behavior was manipulated by a parasitic flatworm that needed to get into the gut of the sheep in order to reproduce. By commandeering its intermediate ant host to climb to the tips of the grass blades, the parasite increased the ant's chances of being eaten by a grazing animal. The benefit was to the reproductive success of the parasite, not the ant. Another parasite, Toxoplasma, can only reproduce within cats. It causes rats to lose their inherited fear of cats (cat scent) and thereby makes the rat more likely to end up as cat dinner. Another parasite causes fish to swim in shallow waters so birds can eat them, this parasite's final host.

Most animals and humans do something to attract the opposite sex. Since natural selection is ultimately about reproduction in a world of limited mates, some individuals were better at getting mates than others. The individuals that had an advantage in attracting prospective mates were "selected." Scientist have realized that many anatomical and behavioral characteristics didn't have any survival value but could play an important role in attracting mates. Strength and beauty were such signals. This mechanism is called sexual selection.

The force behind sexual selection is parental investment, or "any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring's chance of surviving (and hence reproductive success) at the cost of the parent's ability to invest in other offspring." Men need to attract women. But they also need to keep other men away from "their" woman. A woman must invest in each of her children. There is a nine month pregnancy and thereafter many years of child-caring. She invests time, energy and increases her chance of earlier death. There are limits to how many children she can produce during her lifetime. A man has less costs of reproduction. He can interact with many women and produce an enormous amount of children. He doesn't need to be around all the time. Many women can raise their children without help.