The Flamingo's Smile

"He will talk, for example, about a male spider that throws himself into the jaws of a female as they mate. She will actually devour him while he is still mating. It is bizarre. Gould would pick out these examples and write these essays to champion a particular view of evolution and to try to critique other views. Someone like Richard Dawkins would look at this as potentially being an adaptation, and would ask, ‘How does this behaviour raise the reproductive success of the male, so that natural selection favours that expression and it spreads?’ Gould likes to push people to think about other possibilities. Maybe some things are a fluke of history. Maybe something that looks like an adaptation is nothing of the sort. It might be a by-product of some other adaptation, for example. Gould wanted to get people to think more broadly. So he picked out these sorts of examples from biology which are really mind-blowing, and then used them to make his case. Gould’s legacy is huge, but it is certainly not uncontested. For example, with the spiders, Gould was effectively mocking the idea that they could actually have reproductive success. Scientists who have studied this process took this as a challenge. It was good, in the sense that it stimulated them to go out and do more experiments to make their case. Yes. And in that particular case of Australian redback spiders, I have to say that the evidence shows Gould was wrong. A lot of careful research shows that the males let themselves be cannibalised. The longer the female spends munching on them, the more sperm they get into her. These males only come across females infrequently, so the best strategy is to get as much sperm into them as possible. They are not living to mate another day! Yes. There may be other cases in which cannibalism is just a side effect. But not this one."