Christmas Biology Lesson

***

I am writing this as a submission for the

Winter Holidays Story Contest

for 2023.

I wrote it on a whim and didn't have a chance to run it by my editing crew. As always, all errors are my fault.

This is a work of creative fiction.

None of characters are under the age of eighteen and there are no depictions of sex in this story.

Please do not complain to me about the logical fallacies in what the characters are discussing in the story or the flaws in the description of evolutionary reproduction of Homo sapiens. These are written intentionally into the story, which is meant for entertainment purposes only.

The views of the characters expressed in this story are not the views of the author.

You may not copy this work off of this web site.

***

Greg was so pissed he lost his Christmas spirit.

The problem was that he is a subject matter expert in this field. He knew the answer to this question cold, but he did not want to get dragged into this discussion. He just wanted to lay low until dessert was served just before the party broke up.

The dinner dishes had been cleared away from the big oval table a few minutes before. They were in the private room at the back of an upscale restaurant. The wait staff had left a coffee service on a side board and had given the room to the guests until they called for the dessert course.

Greg panicked when the conversation suddenly lurched in this direction. It had been ruthlessly steered in that direction due to relentless axe grinding and a touch of pot stirring.

Greg's wife Quiara quickly ground her heel into the top of his foot. Fighting back a grimace, Greg injected as much meekness into his voice as he could and said, "Ah, please no. I catch enough crap for being the resident science nerd. The last thing anyone wants is for a biologist to rattle on regarding a topic which is about ethics more than biology."

Everyone at the table were Doctors of Philosophy. Greg was the only Ph.D. with a hard-science background. He was a Biologist who specialized in reproduction. His most recent papers all had to do with reproduction in Homo sapiens.

The other twenty-three attendees were in the Language Department. All of them were experts in the literature, philology, and linguistics of various languages alive and dead. This meal was the Christmas party for the language department, masquerading as a "solstice celebration."

Greg thought that it had been a clever manipulation to imply that calling on him to lecture in this scenario would bore people and make him feel awkward. He had high hopes as he flicked his eyes to his wife, who flashed her eyes in approval at his cleverness.

Sadly, his gambit didn't work. Radu, in his role as resident axe-grinder, was undeterred. "Oh. Come on Greg. I think everyone here is genuinely interested in hearing the answer," said Radu. "If you want to know the answer to this, raise your hands."

About three fourths of the table raised their hands immediately. After seeing how the vote was hopeless, the remaining quarter slowly raised their hands so they didn't look suspiciously out-of-line with conventional wisdom. Greg marveled at the way that perceived social pressure got people to compromise their values almost immediately and on a subconscious level.

Greg silently noted the three people who least wanted the discussion to go in this direction were Kailey, Elodie, and Quiara. Greg thought of them as the "three amigos". Kailey was the wife of Radu, the instigator. Elodie was wife of the department head, Emile. Quiara was Greg's wife and the reason why he was at the dinner at all. The fact that these three were against it wasn't surprising.

In October, Elodie and Kailey travelled to a conference in Vancouver to present a paper together. The day they returned, Elodie and Kailey showed up to Greg's house unexpectedly. Quiana pushed him out to his backyard shed and the women spent almost the entire day holed up in the master bedroom.

It was impossible to miss the fact that Elodie spent that entire day crying hysterically in an advanced state of emotional breakdown while Kailey and Quiara desperately tried to put her back together.

Greg was completely excluded from that discussion, but he did overhear Quiara advise Elodie to "come clean" and later he heard Kailey suggest, "what happens in Vancouver stays in Vancouver." It wasn't difficult to infer what was going on.

At the time, Greg wrestled with whether he should tell Elodie's husband, Emile. If it had been a friend, Greg would have spilled the beans immediately. The problem in this case was that Greg and Emile hated each other.

Emile had never been friendly to Greg, and had always treated him as if he were a servant. The dislike had turned into active enmity during the Faculty Ball the previous spring. Quiana sent Greg to the bar to get fresh drinks. When he retuned to the table, Quiara wasn't there. He found her out on the dance floor with Emile. Emile's hands were all over Quiara-- breasts, back, and ass. Quiara looked embarassed, but did not protest. Greg waited until the couple circulated on the dance floor next to the Chancellor. That's when then stepped in and deliberately made a scene with the Chancellor as his audience. This forced Emile to publicly apologize to him and withdraw from the dance floor in shame.

Greg expected Quiara to be furious over what he'd done. Instead, she was embarrassed and meek, making Greg wonder if she was complicit. On the way home that evening, Quiara told him that she was quietly trying to get Emile to behave, but he wouldn't. Quiara said she was afraid of making a scene and was secretly delighted Greg intervened. For weeks afterwards, Quiara called Greg, "my hero" whenever she greeted him.

Ever since that incident, Emile refused to acknowledge Greg's presence and had not said one word to him. When Greg found out Emie's wife was had cheated on him, Greg decided not to tell him. Judging by her distress, Elodie was certainly remorseful for her actions. He let it slide.

At the table, after the vote for Greg to answer the question unexpectedly became unanimous, Greg resigned himself to his fate. "Ok, then Radu, state the question concisely and I will try to answer it."

"Is it equivalent offense when a husband cheats on his wife as when a wife cheats on a husband?" Radu asked with a smirk.

Greg smiled. "You posed that as a yes/no question. Letting the biological chips fall where they may, there is a clear answer, but no one at the table is going to like the answer. We'll have to get into a technical discussion of why that answer is clear and then everyone is going to lose their shit and disagree. It isn't worth it."

Quiara frowned when Greg used profanity, but no one in the group seemed fazed by it. Quiara had a flash of inspiration and suddenly spoke up. "Alright, new rule: if this starts descend into an argument, then we change topics. Does anyone disagree?"

Quiara was well-respected in her department and had a keen mind. There was silence at the table as everyone consented or her proposal. Quiara made eye contact with Kailey. Greg saw Kailey give Quiara a slight nod.

Quiara turned to Greg, so he began. "Biologically, a man cheating on a woman is not an equivalent offense to a woman cheating on a man. They are different acts with different causes, executions, impacts, and outcomes."

This answer stunned the table.

Gerhart, the bearded professor from Bremen quickly asked, "If they aren't the same, which is worse?" In his thick accent, the W was pronounced as a V.

You could hear a pin drop at the table. Everyone wanted to know the answer. Even Greg's wife Quiara was looking at Greg expectantly.

"Biologically, it is much worse when a female cheats on a male than the other way around," Greg said.

Kailey taking her cue, groaned out loud. "Ah, come on, that just male patriarch hyperbole bullshit! Women have been oppressed by men for all of human history and are much more vulnerable when their mates choose to abandon them."

The table descended into pandemonium and chaos and Greg leaned back and breathed a sign of relief. Greg made eye contact with Quiara, who smiled back and then made eye contact with Kailey. Kailey actually had to do a two-finger whistle to get the arguments and discussion to die down.

"Everyone agreed that if an argument erupted, that we'd agree to disagree," said Kailey. "Time for a new topic. I would really like to hear what Churan has to say about that conference she just got back from in Beijing."

In the sudden silence, everyone looked around the table and Churan wasn't there. Churan's husband Chen said, "Sorry, she just left to go to the ladies room. She'll be back in a few minutes."

In the silence, Elodie's lightly accented soprano voice suddenly piped up. "Why is it worse? I would like to know."

There was something both compelling and emotionally vulnerable with her request for the information. She sounded as if she desperately needed to know the answer. This caught everyone's attention. Greg silently swore in his own head. This was exactly what he had been trying to avoid. Quiara was instantly grinding my foot like she was heal-toeing a seventies-era Formula One race car.

"Look, this discussion is controversial and it is about to go off the rails," pronounced Greg. "Please don't make me ruin the Christmas party."

"Solstice party!" called out Dorotea, predictably. When Dorotea was born in Maryland, her parents named her Dorthy. She'd met and married her husband Pietro while studying Italian literature in Turin. She started calling herself Dorotea after she married him and took his last name. It was good for her career as a scholar of Italian literature.

Greg took silence to be consent, and started to breathe a sigh of relief that his run in the mine field was over. Unfortunately, resident axe-grinder Radu spoke up. "Aren't you an expert in this field, Greg? This is what you've done your last few research papers on, isn't it?"

"Yes Radu, you are correct," replied Greg. "This type of question is all over my CV. However, my expertise won't make it any less controversial."

"I want to hear your considered opinion, Greg." said Radu, with a flash of victory in his expression. The man was an epic pot stirrer.

Everyone at the table was looking at Greg again. Greg looked at Quiara in a desperate attempt to get her to bail him out. Quiara just shrugged.

"Well, fuck! Here we go," Greg said to himself internally.

"Here is the argument," he started. "As a species, Homo sapiens evolved to exhibit sexual dimorphism. There are different genders and each gender has a separate and distinct capabilities. That puts them into different roles vis-à-vis reproduction and child rearing.

"Ethically and morally speaking, the two genders are fully equivalent in value. A human life if a human life when considering subjective criteria, like 'value'. Do you follow me so far?"

Greg could see people at the table nodding. Everything he said so far made sense to them.

"Ethics and morals have nothing to do with biology. Biologically speaking, when you get down to the hard facts of reproduction: ovaries, eggs, testicles, sperm, uterus, placenta, mammary glands, the male and female genders are not equivalent. They are complementary."

"What about transgender?" asked Dorotea.

"Transgender is not a biological term. In biology, you can either be male, female, or intersex. Intersex has a precise biological definition in which gender cannot be classified, either because the genital anatomy and chromosomes don't match, or due to a congenital defect that renders their sexual anatomy utterly ambiguous. The condition on Intersex is exhibited in only 0.018% of the population. That's about fifty to sixty thousand out of the entire US population of 32 million."

Greg said it like this to bait everyone to argue about transgender issues. Personally, he was sympathetic to people with gender identity issues. He suspected most of the people here tonight were too. His hope was that the table would take up this axe to grind and descend back into chaos. Greg looked meaningfully at Kailey hoping she'd pick up on his cue, but she was so busy giving her husband Radu a death stare, she missed her window of opportunity. Surprisingly, the blow up that Greg prayed for never came.

At this point. Churan came back to the table, intrigued at the silence and tension, "What did I miss?"

Chen shushed her and began whispering to her.

"Everyone with me so far?" Greg asked, practically begging someone to object. No one did.

"There are two arguments for this: disparate impact, and gender complementarianism.

"The disparate impact argument is that if you look at all of human history, around 85% of the women who made it to maturity reproduced. Less than 40% of all men who made it to maturity reproduced. In some eras, it was less than 20% of men. Women are far likelier to reproduce than men."

Gerhart broke in at this point to ask a question, "What is the scientific basis for such a claim?"

"Have you all heard of the Human Genome Project, run by Francis Collins?" Greg asked. "They mapped the entire human genome back in the nineties."

About a third of the guests nodded. "I heard about that on NPR!" said Fatima. She was delighted to be a part of the conversation at last.

"As an offshoot of the Human Genome Project, a new discipline, known as 'Computational Biology' was invented. Biologists study changes in DNA over time by gene sequencing human remains from different historical periods. They use computers to crunch through the genetic changes and modifications over time."

"And from these calculations they are able to establish that more than twice as many women as men reproduced?" asked Gerhart.

"Precisely," said Greg. "It is a hard factual mathematical data."

There were nods across the table. Greg congratulated himself that this was the right thing to say. He knew they weren't going to argue about the validity of math with a hard science geek like him.

"The studies are quite striking," Greg continued. "Somewhere around 8,000 years ago, the genetic diversity in males suddenly declined. The ratio of women reproducing to men reproducing was seventeen to one. One way of looking at this is that each man that reproduced had seventeen wives. It suggests that humanity was massively polygynous."

"Why was that?" asked Quiara. Greg laughed to himself that his wife, who had been trying to shut down this conversation moments before, was now honestly curious.

"There are several anthropological hypotheses, but there isn't any factual scientific basis for these," Greg replied.

"What are they, Greg?" Quiara asked.

"The main hypotheses is that large scale stable agricultural societies emerged around this time. This allowed the accumulation of wealth and power, which necessitated the creation of military to protect the accumulated wealth. This led to labor specialization and the creation of professional soldiers. This led to the creation of empires through large-scale conquest warfare.

"You had concentrated wealth, large numbers of young men being taken off to war under the command of a small number of professional military types. The best of the young men who survived were usually the fittest and most capable, and they were typically co-opted into the professional military. After a couple of cycles of this, you had two types of men: super alphas and confirmed betas.

"The super alphas were reproducing and the betas either weren't allowed wives, or they didn't survive long enough to conceive," Greg replied.

"But this is what anthropologists would say. A biologist like myself can't take it seriously. It is a non-scientific hypothesis. It isn't testable."

To Greg's chagrin, only two heads nodded at that declaration.

"What is the impact of a one to seventeen reproduction ratio on society?" asked Quiara.

"You had the fittest men reproducing more frequently. The result was a fitter gene pool, but with less genetic variation. This was advantageous to the alphas, it was awful for the women, and it was utterly disastrous for the betas."

"How was it bad for the women?" asked Kailey."Don't they get better genes for their children?"

"If the male to female breeding ratio is one to seventeen, women were splitting their share of their mate's time and attention to a seventeenth of what they'd normally get. That's if the mate is fair. Knowing how people are, however, the male would have favorites and they'd get almost all of his availability. The rest would get scraps. Imagine being one of seventeen wives. You'd spend a less than twenty nights each year with your mate and your children would barely know their father."

The women at the table didn't like that.

"Additionally, the value of a single wife essentially drops down to nothing. A wife will know that he's got sixteen others just like her. She would have zero leverage to get the husband to cooperate in any way. Also, can you imagine the politicking between the wives to get the husband's time and attention?"

Greg shuddered at that dramatically and the men all laughed. Even some of the women smiled.

"But that's not how things are now," observed Quiara.

"Correct," Greg replied, smiling in admiration at his wife. "Human civilizations evolved social systems that worked against hypergyny. Legal systems which protected individual rights developed. As an offshoot to individual rights, women were given the legal right to own property and to have self determination. Monogamy as an enforced social institution developed."

"How did legal systems impede hypergyny?" asked Chen.

"I'm not an anthropologist or a sociologist, Chen," said Greg. "You really need to ask someone with those credentials to get a full insight. I suspect that an anthropologist would say that the development of legal systems and individual rights ended 'Might makes right.' The strongest man was no longer allowed to simply take what he wants."

"Yeah? And what makes monogamy so great?" asked Radu with a smirk, as if it were self-evident that monogamy was bad.

"Monogamy represents the best possible deal for all men and all women across the spectrum." Greg stated. "Individual folks, the ones who get married to shitty partners, may not like it, but it is the best possible deal for society as a whole. It ensures a greater percentage of men have the opportunity to procreate, it maximizes genetic diversity for the species, and it maximizes the amount of support a wife receives from her husband for child rearing."

"Wait," said Chen, "We haven't answered the original question. Why does the fact that less men than women reproduce mean that a woman cheating on a man is worse?"

Greg was thankful for Chen's interjection.

"There are more women than men to start with, Men are in a minority. Further, they have a much smaller chance to reproduce than women. They are tremendously disadvantaged relative to females. Any cheating that takes place harms both parties, but as the man is already disadvantaged, the effect on him is, by definition, worse. Therefore, there is a disparate impact," Greg pronounced.

The room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. Gerhart suddenly erupted into a booming deep belly laugh, "Ho ho ho ho! Greg is very wily, is he not? Bandy words with him at your own peril!"

Gerhart's bonhomie lifted the table, and soon many others were laughing too and congratulating Greg on his argument. A few glasses were raised.

When the laughs died down, Gerhart asked, "You said there was a second argument, one from gender complementarianism?"

"This topic is a lot nerdier. Have I lost the room yet?" Greg asked, hoping people would be bored. For some reason, everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. He decided his is where he would take his stand.