Of sex, individuality and death. Essay by Gerd Folkers

Humans and sex belong together. That will not change even in times of modern reproductive technologies, because sex is the only way to guarantee the cornucopia of variations that gives our puny species the evolutionary lead.

Sadly, the times when my birthday fell on Lady Day seem to be over. This Catholic celebration of the Annunciation has lost its public holiday status almost everywhere. There may be sound economic reasons, or maybe the responsibility lies with modern society’s enlightenment, or a better term could be detachment. You can’t seriously sell immaculate conception to anyone these days. Even tinies play in kindergarten with dolls that explain the facts of life, under the benevolently watchful eye of the law.

As usual, however, detachment through enlightenment turns out to lead on to thin ice. An unbiased examination of procreation rites in the world of animate nature uncovers instances of immaculate conception and virgin birth in large numbers and many varieties, from flies and lizards to turkeys and hammerhead sharks. Admittedly, the literature only lists one single case in human beings; however, that may soon become a matter of definition in an age where cloning is possible. Because we humans have, of course, cemented a classic anthropocentric world view of the processes of procreation by a man and a woman: no sex, no offspring. And sex is the act of copulation between man and woman: the sperm is given and received, a mature ovum is then fertilised that develops into a pretty baby with its parents’ features.

What kind of sex produces which offspring?

For bees, whose ritual of pollenating flowers is universally employed as a metaphor for human sex, the reality is entirely different. Queens have the ability to unite two of their haploid1 egg cells and produce diploid offspring, naturally enough all daughters, which, however, show very little genetic variation. That’s clever thinking to secure your succession, and would have saved many human royal families from major disaster.

But how does it fit in with evolution, which is based on natural selection and therefore the best adaptation, and where that adaptation depends on genetic change and the resulting creation of new characteristics?

In more than 200 bird and around 120 mammal species, social structures are found in which some of the individuals do not themselves reproduce, for a time at least, and instead support their fellows in their reproduction. This seems to contradict Darwin’s hypotheses. Studies of these cooperative breeding systems have shown, however, that the more closely the helpers-at-the-nest are related to the young that are being raised, the more support is given as a rule. Since part of the auxiliary’s genome is identical with

1 Haploid describes the presence of a single set of chromosomes in a cell.
Humans have 23 (women: 22+x; men: 22+y). Normal body cells have the double chromosome set (diploid), gametes (mature reproductive cells) the single one.

that of the offspring, the helper therefore manages to pass on part of his or her genome without reproducing. In ants and social vespidae (wasps), the majority of the females do not reproduce at all at any time in their lives. Nevertheless, they are no less “fit” in evolutionary terms, since because of a genetic peculiarity they are more closely related to their sisters than to their own potential offspring. By bringing up their sisters, they therefore pass on a larger share of their genome than if they brought up their own daughters.

Genetic analyses cannot be separated from their environment. In bees and ants, sexually reproduced workers have genetic differences that come to the fore in a changed environment, are better adapted and allow food gathering and nest building to continue in a hostile environment. Within the state, however, the queen alone shapes the environment. Firstly, because frequent genetic variation would jeopardise a stable state system. Secondly, because procreation requires a lot of energy. In the most conformant, simple structure possible inside a nest, enormous energy can be saved through conformant offspring. In addition, it eliminates a lot of trouble and running around in the search for suitable sexual partners – another huge energy saving. Growth is guaranteed and resources used economically. Why don’t we humans do that? Aren’t the insects, many birds and mammals far superior to us?

Maximum complexity

At this point, I will introduce an idea that is very unpopular in evolutionary biology, that is, that Homo sapiens sapiens is an exception. This doesn’t mean it holds a position outside of biological evolution, but that it has reached a preliminary culminating point. The richness of human variation – of individuality – is overwhelming. And the combination of many abilities of single individuals to implement life strategies within a community is unique. This means that the maximum complexity so far has been reached, and it seems very likely that precisely this is one of the driving forces of evolution. Because systems with maximum complexity have the advantage of high resistance, coupled with a high level of innovativeness.

This means that although man’s natural abilities are often no match for those of other exponents of animate nature, as a species he commands many more of these abilities in aggregate. The outstanding feature is staying power. People are poor but indefatigable swimmers, poor but indefatigable runners and climbers. Also singers, merchants, design engineers, fantasists and liars. They can forge plans, negotiate, deceive, set traps. They are successful in all these things because they act economically and, out of necessity, cooperatively. This requires highly complex information processing. Evolution has equipped us with an appropriate body and a suitable brain, and enabled us to walk upright. This, in turn, gives us the ability to talk by means of a palate and larynx adapted to our gait, even at the risk of choking if we talk while eating – a nonsensical design from an engineer’s point of view, which, however, has not become established as a selection marker. The upright gait also makes it possible for us to have sex face to face, thereby enabling totally new social structures, responsibilities, taboos and dependencies.

However, we only succeed in maintaining and developing this individuality via sex as a means of reproduction by carriers of the most complementary characteristics possible within the same species. Although we do have a choice between traditional sexual love and modern medical

technology, which likewise provides for an exchange of the father’s and mother’s chromosomes by artificial insemination, both of these methods are sexual reproduction. And this is the only way to guarantee variety.

However, sexual reproduction – and with it the greatest possible individuality – has been bought at a high price: the price of programmed death, as American biologist Lynn Margulis called it. Because death, in contrast to pure physical cessation, presupposes the disappearance of an individual. Also, unique relationships only exist with individually perceivable and thus uniquely labelled members of a species. Therefore, only individuality leaves a gap. If a single entity among hundreds of identical offspring vanishes, it goes entirely unnoticed. Human sexuality brings us the opposite: a high degree of individuality – but also, inevitably, death.

What does this mean for the possibilities of nonsexual reproduction? Let’s run the experiment through in our minds. Let’s assume we will soon reproduce by cloning using modern medicine; artificially generated multiple births will be the rule, in other words a series of identical copies for every individual. However: is it then still an individual? How can it be “recognised” as such? And is the biological loss, the death, of an identical copy less relevant than the loss of the original? Setting aside the experiences gained over a lifetime, the original could, after all, be copied again. In that case, will there still be an original to mourn for? No. Hence the conclusion to be drawn from the experiment is this: sex, the individual and death are extremely closely linked – and will remain so.

But of course it is unclear exactly what the future holds for our sexual reproduction. Artificial insemination, feature selection and genetic repair in embryo are the constant topics of politico-ethical-scientific committees. Will rational techno-sex soon become responsible for sexual love, and fragment love, eroticism, sex and procreation into separately encapsulated “jobs” – in a typical economic optimisation process? The idea has been around for a long time. In the 1920s, well-meaning social reformers were already proposing that we should use a human being for love and friendship, visit an institution equipped with perfect robots for sex and use a biological research institute with a children’s hospital attached to produce offspring. Obviously, a lot of emotional effort could be cut out and we would possibly be looking to a happier, more relaxed life.

Learning capabilities wanted

The economisation of reproduction and the social community in the sense of Fordism, with standardised mass production and mass consummation of sex and offspring, however, demands a knowledge of the natural processes of evolution that we simply do not have. And that we are unlikely to have for a long time to come. Two small examples from nature serve to illustrate our lack of understanding.

Certain types of lizard in the New Mexico desert reproduce by parthenogenesis. No males wanted, these girls can handle the production of their exclusively female offspring themselves. Nevertheless, observation has shown that wooing and love play has to precede the immaculate conception in order to produce particularly rewarding little ones. What does this imply? Epigenetic breeding, in other words that the regulation of contented babies is partly determined by context? The second example concerns human twin births. A whole Indian village and a small number of large families worldwide astonish the professional world by producing virtually nothing but twins. And monozygotic (“identical”) twins at that, human clones in biological terms. When such births occur in this form and are not statistically distributed, it is a likely conclusion that the development of monozygotic twins is genetically regulated post-conception. Because on average, only one set of twins is born for every 40 single births world-wide, and fewer than half of those are identical twins. Only one in a hundred. What does this imply? Are homozygote multiple births a “whim” or an “evolutionary strategy”?

In both cases, we need to be capable of learning. That means we have to liberate ourselves from ideologies, taboos and other moral constraints in such a way as to enable an open social discourse about what these observations mean. A romantic idealisation of nature is just as misplaced here as blind faith in technological progress. It is impossible to set humanity apart from “nature”. And it is superstition to believe that “culture” can get the better of “nature”. We should realise with all due modesty that all our cultural superiority is a simple emergence of evolution, which constantly progresses. Every cultural intervention in sexual reproduction triggers a compensatory action at places and times of which we are unaware. In this instance, I have absolute faith in the liberal economists: the market will sort it out, which simply means that if mankind fails to keep a proper perspective, it could become part of the collateral damage. For all our attacks on the social sciences, history and psychology, we still explore ourselves far too little. It remains an open question whether we could find meanings for “sex, no sex” or even derive rules for action from such a process. Evolution will be totally okay with that.

Gerd Folkers was appointed Professor for Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1991. He is a member of the Swiss National Research Council and on the board of several start-up companies. Since 2004, he has been director of the Collegium Helveticum, a joint institute of the University of Zurich and the ETH.