MDM: Mary, you’ve been writing on and for Science for many years now, being it for print, film and/or television, both for kids and for adults, and your efforts have been consistently recognised, including with an Emmy nomination. Your books receive rave reviews and particularly ‘Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates’ is considered by readers and professors alike to be one of the best texts out there on animal (and human) mating systems and the biology of female choice. We are very happy that you will share with us some of the wealth of knowledge that this great book covers, it’s a privilege and a pleasure, thank you very much.

Is the human female choosing her mates today as she was choosing them a thousand of years ago?

MARY BATTEN: Yes and No. Yes, in the sense that women, like females across the animal kingdom, want males with resources. If you’re a female bird, you want a male who will help build the nest, help raise the babies, and protect you and your kids from predators. If you’re a woman, you want pretty much the same thing.

No, in the sense that women in modern Western societies are competing as fiercely for men as men usually compete for women. This unusual situation has arisen because men in these societies are making a considerable parental investment.

The way mate choice works is that the sex that makes the greatest biological investment in offspring – usually the female across all species – makes the mate choice. This means that females choose which males will mate. This is why males of most species compete – sometimes violently – to be chosen by females. But in our modern industrial societies, men are investing a great deal of themselves and their wealth in marriage and children. But not all men are equal in their abilities to provide the resources that would make them desirable marriage partners. So you’ve got a shortage of these men and a lot of women looking. In this situation, the evolutionary tables are reversed, so to speak, and women are competing for men.

MDM: What is the most ‘anti-natural’ rule that social and cultural mores impose on both females and males nowadays?

MARY BATTEN: I don’t think I’d use the word “anti-natural.” But there are and have been for centuries a great deal of anti-woman movements, customs, traditions, superstitions and outright hatred of women throughout the world. Many of these efforts to restrict and brutalize women and relegate them solely to childbearing roles have been sanctioned by religions, laws and governments. The anti-abortion movement is fundamentally anti-woman in that it attempts to seize control of her reproductive choice and make a woman’s body property of the state.

War is the most anti-male behavior I can think of because it basically says to young men – most soldiers are young men – “You’re dispensable.” The vast economic investment in warfare is investment in death. I believe war has taken male-male competition that normally goes into trying to attract mates and directed it into the pathological arena of seizing and controlling the resources of other people and other nations. Seizing resources for their own sake underlies greed.

MDM: Can our biological predisposition be overridden?

MARY BATTEN: Yes. Contraception enables humans to override the genetic programming to reproduce. It’s the most revolutionary technology ever developed. It freed both women and men from the tyranny of their genitals. By giving women reproductive choice, contraception made it possible for women to make choices in other areas of life as well.

MDM:  What’s the triggering factor behind male controlling behaviour and why does it appear that many women are attracted to this type of behaviour?

MARY BATTEN: In the context of evolutionary biology, male controlling behavior, meaning efforts to control women, results from uncertainty of paternity. In other words, women always know they are the mothers of their children. A man can’t be sure. As a result of this uncertainty, some of the most brutal anti-woman systems, including genital mutilation, are practiced. Across the animal kingdom, males do anything to subvert female choice. Some male insects even plug the female’s genital orifice with a gluey secretion so that no other male’s sperm can get in. Men don’t use glue but they try to achieve the same end – certainty of paternity – through laws, economics and religions that try to control women’s mate choices and reproductive biology. It’s sobering to learn that no other female primate is treated as brutally as are women in some societies.

Women aren’t attracted to brutal behavior directed against them, but they are attracted to behavior that gives a man status among his peers. Women – or their families in societies where marriages are arranged -- are looking for high-status men with the resources to protect and provide for them and their children. Sometimes this means protection against other predatory men. So warriors are desirable mates in societies that place a high value on warfare. All too often, this proves to be a mistaken choice when the violence is turned against a woman or her children.

MDM: Is gender competition just a ‘human thing’? MARY BATTEN: Gender competition isn’t just human behavior. Males of all species compete to be chosen by females. Biologically, if a male isn’t chosen by a female, he’s a genetic zero. He leaves no offspring. This is why males compete so fiercely for females. Females are highly competitive for status among many primates – chimpanzees, gelada baboons, macaques, howler monkeys, and others. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, points out that competition between females is the central organizing principle of primate social life. MDM: Why is there so much ‘confusion’ as to who actively select and thus act as a directive force in evolution? What would both, the female and the male, need to change immediately in order to avoid eventual self-destruction? MARY BATTEN: It isn’t so much confusion as miseducation. For many years, the myth of the passive female dominated science. It’s easy to understand why. Most field biologists were men and they paid most attention to male animals. Males are the flashier sex – they strut, sing, dance, butt horns, puff out their chests and fight. Among birds, males are the most colorful and elaborately plumed. Think of birds of paradise and peacocks. Men had a vested interest in stroking the passive female myth. The Victorian attitude was that so much of a woman’s energy went into reproduction, she didn’t have enough left to develop her brains. Darwin got a lot of flack for suggesting that female mate choice might be important. Until women biologists went into the field in the 1970s and ‘80s and began observing female animals, even many scientists bought into the idea that males were the driving force of evolution. As evidence for female mate choice accumulated, biology textbooks had to be rewritten. It’s now well accepted that female mate choice has a powerful effect on evolution because it determines which males will leave offspring and which male traits will be passed along to the next generation.