Mr. Darwin and the Evolution of the Bitch
When a book’s title is “Bitch,” one doesn’t think of spiders and frogs as the subject matter. It sounds more like a tale of Hollywood harlots or Big Apple broads, overlaid with Frette sheets and social calendars clocked by Audemars Piguet.
But author Lucy Cooke is a British zoologist, not a a chronicler of jet-setting social mores. Her focus is non-human animal behavior, specifically as it relates to gender stereotypes. Bitch is a new way of looking at male and females — and the surprising gradations of same — and subversively blowing them up.
Cooke begins by describing Charles Darwin as her “idol,” and notes that his masterwork, On the Origin of Species, is “as brilliant as it is simple and justly hailed as one of the greatest intellectual breakthroughs of all time.”
At the same time, she acknowledges some of its flaws, gaps, and omissions. Natural selection alone, i.e., the most efficient adaptation to one’s environment over the course of time, can’t explain why male stags have such, well, staggering antlers or why male peacocks have such ridiculously flamboyant tails. Darwin recognized this lapse and attributed it to a “secondary evolutionary mechanism” — the quest for sex. “Primary sexual characteristics” were reproductive organs and genitals, the baseline tools for reproduction. “Secondary sexual characteristics”…
