Butting Heads

Posted on April 25, 2005 in Anthropology Evolution & Creation

Warning: This is a criticism of certain accounts of evolution and its effects on animal behavior by a writer who believes in the fact of evolution. It should not be construed as evidence that there is no such thing as evolution. It is inhouse discussion.

Imagine humanity if leadership and the right to breed were decided in the boxing ring or at WWF events. Mike Tyson would be president of the United States. Hulk Hogan, instead of Reagan, would have led us through the 1980s. Power would have passed based on a fall to the canvas. There would be no crime of rape except when performed by one not entitled to breed.

One might say that such a society would not survive for long. Yet they do in Africa and other parts of the world. They have been chosen by cultures as a blueprint for living. And, without outside intervention or ideological conversion, they survive.

There’s a myth of an ideal society based on the strong ruling the weak which is derived, I think, from another myth about the “adaptiveness” of certain behaviors or rituals regularly performed by wild animals. For purposes of thought, let’s focus on bighorn sheep.

Bighorn and other alpine rams are noted for their annual displays of head-butting. The crack of heads going against heads can be heard for miles. The winner gets to control a harem of ewes. Nature scientists say this is a mode of natural selection: the strongest and the best ram gets to reproduce. I suggest that this does nothing of the sort, that the differences between the competitors are small, for one thing, and, for another, this year’s breeder might be next year’s loser. This idea might make sense if Lamarckian Evolution worked (namely that characteristics acquired by the parent in life pass on to the offspring) but that’s not the way the world works.

It’s important to remember that Evolution is neutral in all things except who survives to breed. Based on this, I suggest that the butting of heads makes little difference in the scheme of things — instinct or no instinct. I don’t see this marriage ritual granting the species much of an adaptive advantage. All the rams who arrive to rut are able to jump around on steep cliffs and breed with the ewes. The differences they show in strength are not significant. If the weakest ram of the lot were to breed, the species would survive as long as it suffered no encroachments on its habitat.

Head butting, I offer, is an instinctual behavior that came along for no particular reason. The rams do it, perhaps, because they enjoy the adrenaline thrill. In other species — such as human beings — that same behavior might be confined to a sports arena or a prison or a mental ward.

The reason why the behavior persists among mountain sheep is that Evolution only cares about one thing: do you breed? If a few rams started to use the occasion of the fights to breed in secret while the other rams bashed each other until their brains began to look like cheese, you can bet that the winning of the Crown each year would not make much of a difference. (In fact, in many harem species this does happen.) I further submit that rams aren’t thinking at all about whose genes get reproduced and everything about relieving the burning in their genitals. Species keep going for reasons that are unconscious to the individuals. If it were not for animal lust, there would be no reproduction. And the existence of that impulse is a lucky accident. If it didn’t exist, this world might well be one of individual cells, splitting and covering the land in a thick slime.

Rams butt heads not because it allows the fittest to breed but because it doesn’t prevent the species from breeding. Fortunately, Evolution is not Lamarckian: if the winner cracks his skull, the defect doesn’t pass on to his offspring. Evolution would just as well allow the species to persist if this behavior didn’t occur. It is a meaningless accident that does not obstruct breeding. Mountain sheep will survive as long as they are able to copulate.