The Trouble with Testosterone Read online

  Primate Peekaboo

  BABOON DOC SEZ: “EVERYONE LIKES TO WATCH”

  Beryl Cook, Keyhole, 1981; courtesy Portal Gallery, London

  Already, it’s all beginning to blur, although I’m trying to hold on to the details. Was “Kato” Kaelin secretly Tonya Harding’s lover? Do I remember correctly that Heidi Fleiss hired the Menendez brothers to do the hit on John Wayne Bobbitt? And was Woody Allen driving the white Ford Bronco when Michael Jackson fled the apartment being rented by John-John Kennedy and Daryl Hannah?

  It’s embarrassing to have such a poor memory sometimes. And it’s more embarrassing to have ever known such things. You sit there on the commuter train, conspicuously reading Sartre in French, Sony Walkman cranked up so everyone can hear that you’re listening to a Bartók string quartet. And then you can’t help it, you just can’t stop yourself, you have to lean forward ever so slightly to peer over the shoulder of the person in front of you, the one with the People magazine, all to check out Leslie Abramson’s new hairdo.

  It’s even worse when you have a get-together of friends. There’s a tentativeness about bringing up any of the hot scandals, an offhandedness. Once the subject is raised, there are definitely rules on how you can do it, as a card-carrying intellectual. Simpson—America, where you can get all the justice that money can buy, versus the racial angle, versus another go at the death penalty debate. Woody and Mia—breakdown of the nuclear family. The night wears on and the pressure to be detached and intellectual grows. Lorena Bobbitt—obvious parallels to Australian aboriginal genital mutilation rites. Menendez brothers—new unlikely insights into the Louisiana Purchase and the decline of the American bison herds. And despite the highbrow tone, you still feel sullied. We should be discussing Marx and what his carbuncles had to do with dialectical materialism. And because of the highbrow tone, you feel maddeningly frustrated. I want to ask everyone who they think would be more of a drag to be stuck with in an elevator, Johnnie Cochran or Nancy Kerrigan.

  How can we be so voyeuristic, so little able to resist sensationalism and Oprahatics? When I’ve hit bottom, when I’m exhausted at work because I stayed up late watching Ted Koppel—even Ted!—go after one of these fifteen-minutes-of-famers, I resort to a reassuring fact. We are not alone.

  I lead a dual scientific life, and when I’m not in the laboratory studying neurons and stress hormones, I spend my time in the grasslands of East Africa, studying troops of wild baboons. I spend an inordinate amount of time watching their social machinations, the complexities of their interactions among a hundred animals in the savannah. And they do the same thing.

  Bunch of baboons sitting around in a field when there’s a fight. Two large, high-ranking males, tension has been building up between them over something, and it finally erupts. A hundred pounds of muscle and testosterone, sharpened canines that are bigger than in an adult lion, slashing, lunging, brawling. Someone in the vicinity might get hurt, either amid the fighting or immediately afterward, with the loser taking out his frustrations on someone smaller. What’s the logical thing? Get the hell out of there. And what do half the animals do? Stop what they’re doing, stand bipedally, push in closer, all for a better view. Perhaps they are trying to pick up some pointers about strategy, or maybe they are bearing silent witness to the failure of pacifism. Nah. They just want to see what’s going to happen.

  Sometimes the voyeurism takes another familiar form. A few years ago, an adolescent male whom I named Absolom joined the troop, and he took this habit to new heights. He had just discovered girls, i.e., female baboons. Nothing was happening to him personally in that department, and he was reduced to a vigilance that consumed half his day. Any sexual consortship in the troop, and he would be lurking around in the bushes nearby, trying to catch sight of the good stuff, craning for a view of the action, holding his tail throughout. Here’s how bad he got: one day, a high-ranking male and a female who was at the peak of being in heat sat quietly grooming each other. They were peripheral to the rest of the troop, secluded, no doubt working up to a moment of even greater intimacy. Suddenly, Absolom, who had silently slithered his way out to a branch of the tree just above them for a really good view, collapsed it under his weight and crashed down on top of them. None were pleased.

  And sometimes the voyeurism has the feel of small-town coffee klatching. It was the season that a female named Rebekah had her first child. Primiparous mothers—those with their first child—are rarely particularly skillful, but Rebekah was plain awful. She forgot the kid when she left a group of other females, slapped him frequently, couldn’t seem to learn how to position him to ride on her back, so that he sprawled sideways, clutching the base of her tail. One day, as she leapt from one branch to another in a tree with the kid in that precarious position, he lost his grip and dropped ten feet to the ground. We various primates observing proved our close kinship, proved how we probably utilized the exact same number of synapses in our brains in watching and responding to this event by doing the exact same thing in unison. Five female baboons in the tree and we two humans present all gasped as one. And then fell silent, eyes trained on the kid. A moment passed, he righted himself, looked up in the tree at his mother, and then scampered off after some nearby friends. And as a chorus, we all started clucking to each other in relief.

  An anthropologist once said, “Humans had to invent language so we would have something to talk about around the fire at night.” Koko and Michael are the gorillas famed for having been taught the rudiments of American Sign Language. Whether that constitutes language use on their part is rejected by most in the know, and I find their criticisms pretty convincing. Nevertheless, they are doing something communicative. Once, one morning, Michael witnessed one of his human teachers arguing with his girlfriend. And later that day, Michael told another human teacher about it. Proto-gossip.

  Mark Twain defined humans as the only species that can blush or that needs to. We may indeed blush when we reveal that we’re unduly informed about the details of the Presley-Jacksons, whereas the baboons would never blush as they elbow for a better view of their equivalent of Madonna tussling with David Letterman. But beyond that, there are few differences. Rubber necks appear to be a common feature of the primate order.

  EPILOGUE (SUMMER 1996)

  There was a temptation to update this piece by substituting this week’s scandals. The trouble is, of course, that this week’s and last year’s will be equally archival by the time next week rolls around, so, by definition, it is not possible to have this piece be anything other than a trivia test by the time it is published. Thus, to refresh the memories of most readers, or to give important new information to those who wasted their time a few years back thinking about global warming or the collapse of the Soviet Union:

  Kato was the world’s most famous houseguest and poster child for the Let’s Put Diction Lessons Back in our Classrooms movement. Tonya and Nancy provided us with the greatest villain/heroine set piece since Saturday cliff-hanger movies until Tonya pushed the villainess envelope by crying in front of the Olympic judges and Nancy did in her statuesque goddess number by being mean and cranky at Disneyland. Meanwhile, back on the farm, Heidi Fleiss illegally provided a service so that a bunch of rich and famous Hollywood males with testosterone problems could do something illegal in return and wound up being the only one to get in trouble for it.

  Leslie Abramson inspired future generations of lawyers by sticking the Menendez boys in cardigans and temporarily delaying their getting convicted for blowing away their folks; she at least resisted the “take pity on them, they’re orphans” gambit. In an unrelated episode, Lorena Bobbitt took an ax and gave John Wayne forty whacks, or at least one effective one; judging by his subsequent behavior, it’s clear he didn’t learn much from the incident.

  Woody and Mia gravely disappointed us all by winding up on this list.

  Michael Jackson possibly did some disturbed things with children and then, just when we least expected it, managed to top t
hat. The Presley-Jacksons’ connubial bliss lasted about a year, if my history textbooks are correct. Meanwhile, JFK Jr. and Daryl Hannah had such a brief, incandescent instant of being The Most Important Couple in the World before giving the crown back to those fun Windsors that I can’t remember a thing about them anymore. Sorry.

  On another front, the white Ford Bronco was part of the pioneering marketing gimmick of generating sales by having celebrities drive it slowly. And Johnnie Cochran, besides fostering racial tolerance in our land, pioneered the use of wool caps and rhyming couplets in the courtroom. Finally, Madonna appeared on David Letterman’s show and was foul and unappealing even by late-night TV standards. The incident did not particularly harm her: as of this writing, she is reveling in her next supernova of fifteen minutedom with her first foray into maternal behavior, while continuing to serve ably as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  FURTHER READING

  People magazine, of course.

  The incident about Michael the gorilla is reported in T. Crail, Apetalk and Whalespeak (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1981), 137, 150.

  The Night You Ruined Your Pajamas

  Scherer and Ouporov, Jacob’s Ladder, 1994; courtesy the artists

  Oh, what an unmitigated horror puberty was. For girls, there was the inevitable first menstruation that came right in the middle of gym class: the bloody shorts, the panic—no one had told you you’d bleed that much—and the conviction that you were about to die of either embarrassment or hemorrhage. Training bras, pubic hair, acne; there was no end to disquieting changes. For boys, there was the first wet dream, inevitably occurring at sleep-away camp—sneaking off to the woods to bury your disgusting soiled pajamas—the visible erection with a mind of its own in the swimming trunks, the voice that cracked whenever you spoke to someone of the opposite sex. Humiliation, agonies, pimply insecurities; you wondered if life would ever return to normal, and the answer, you knew, was no. Most of all, there was the heartfelt prayer of every pubescent child: “Please, please, if I have to go through this, don’t let it happen to me one minute before or after it happens to everyone else. Please don’t let me be different.”

  For the peer-pressured adolescent, the timing of puberty is everything. It turns out that for all mammals going about the business of being fit enough to survive and reproduce, the timing of puberty is pretty important. And some mammals do something about it. As social or environmental conditions shift—when there’s a change in the availability of food, for example, or in the number of animals competing for mates—many animals find that it sometimes pays to reach puberty at an earlier age, and it’s sometimes better to delay the process.

  Now there’s evidence that humans, too, might alter the timing of puberty’s onset. In a controversial paper published in 1991, a team of researchers proposed that girls reach puberty at an earlier age if they are raised in homes filled with parental strife or where the father is absent because of divorce or abandonment.

  The notion that our bodies can engage in such weighty deliberation shouldn’t be surprising. After all, we’re comfortable with the idea that some of our lives’ landmark events are decided strategically. We do it constantly. For example: “Oh, let’s not. What a terrible time this would be for me to get pregnant—you’re out of work, my dissertation research is bogged down, the Nazis are marching on Paris and we’ll have to flee.” That sort of thing.

  Such strategies, however, are conscious. It’s harder to think about the timing of puberty as a conscious strategy. We do not think, “The time is ripe—I’ve decided to start ovulating,” any more than a bamboo plant decides, “The rainfall’s been fabulous—I think I’ll start flowering,” or a deer decides, “Ah, spring is in the air—time to grow me some antlers.” The “thinking” and “deciding” do not really occur. Instead, a more complex evolutionary process is taking place: organisms that have the biological means to time an important life-history event (such as reaching puberty or flowering or growing antlers) so that it occurs at an optimal time have an advantage over organisms that cannot do so; therefore more of them will survive, more will reproduce, and more will leave copies of their genes to future generations. And thus their adaptive timing mechanism will become more common in their species over the millennia.

  When does it make the most sense to go through puberty? Well, to start with, puberty is an energetically costly experience, so it is logical to go through it early only if you’ve been fed well and you’re healthy and can afford the metabolic expense. It wouldn’t hurt to make sure that there is someone attractive around who is available to mate with, and it also helps if the environment is conducive to the survival of any children you may have. And when is it logical to defer puberty? If things are bad enough that you need your energy to survive instead of to reproduce, if it’s logical to still be taken care of by Mom instead of becoming a mom yourself, if there’s no one around to mate with except close relatives.

  Consider, as an example, a female prepubescent mouse left on her own. Eventually, of course, she will reach puberty. But put an adult male into the cage with her and she will reach puberty earlier. This intriguing phenomenon, known as the Vandenbergh effect, is produced by pheromones, odors in the male’s urine that cause a behavioral or physiological response in other animals. These pheromones, when smelled by the female, crank up her ovulatory machinery. The male’s urine does this trick even when the male isn’t present—just dab a smidgen of male urine on females and, voilà, earlier puberty. Moreover, the more male sexual hormones the mouse has in his bloodstream, the more effective he is at accelerating the onset of puberty.

  Conversely, when a prepubescent female mouse is exposed to a large number of adult females, puberty is delayed—why bother if there are no guys around? Once again the signal is a pheromone, found in the urine of the adult females. Block the young female’s sense of smell, and the puberty delay no longer occurs.

  Researchers have speculated that these signals might play some role in regulating population density. For example, a large number of adult females probably indicates a dense population. The puberty-delaying pheromones serve as a brake on fecundity: if the population density is high enough, there will soon be food shortages, and why should a starving female waste energy on ovulating and getting pregnant when the odds of her carrying through a pregnancy are pretty small?

  Such speculation is supported by a study conducted by zoologists Adrianne Massey at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and John Vandenbergh (i.e., Dr. Vandenbergh Effect) at North Carolina State University. The two researchers examined mouse populations in the acre or so of grass found in each loop of a highway cloverleaf out in the hills of North Carolina. Patches like these constitute “biogeographic islands,” closed mini-ecosystems where there are few mice immigrants (the ones who try to switch to a different cloverleaf patch usually wind up as roadkills). Massey and Vandenbergh studied the fluctuation of mouse populations in each patch. When the population of a particular patch became large enough, the females started to produce the puberty-delaying pheromone. And when the population dipped, the females stopped making this pheromone. Males indiscriminately made the puberty-accelerating odorant all the time, so when population density dropped and the delaying signals from the females were absent, puberty was accelerated. The bodies of prepubescent females were able to monitor the environment around them and choose wisely as to when to leap into the reproductive business.

  Male mammals often show a similar savvy. Antelopes such as gazelles and impalas grow up in social groups in which a number of females and their offspring live with a single breeding male. Other mature males live either as wandering loners or in all-male bands, butting heads and honing their fighting skills for the moment when they stage a coup d’etat against the breeding male.

  For a male growing up with his mother and the rest of the breeding group, puberty carries a stiff price. When an adolescent male sprouts pubescent “gender badges” such as horns, the breeding male perceiv
es the youngster as a potential sexual rival and harasses him, driving him out of the group. The apron strings are cut rather abruptly, with consequences that are not trivial—when males go out on their own, their risk of being eaten by predators soars.

  What is a prepubescent male antelope to do? By reaching puberty too early, he is subject to the abuses of the dominant male when he may not yet be ready to survive the rigors of exile from hearth and home. But by delaying puberty too long, he forgoes reproductive potential. Clearly he needs to make a carefully considered decision—and apparently he does. Richard Estes of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology has examined the timing of puberty in antelopes and found that if the outside world looks pretty challenging and dangerous, with other antelopes around to fight over limited food and a lot of lurking predators, the males delay the onset of puberty.

  Similar strategizing occurs in primates. If you have ever watched orangutans in a zoo, you may have noted that the males seem to come in two varieties. One is short-haired, limber, and agile. The other is much heavier and lumbering, with these weird fatty cheek flanges, thick long hair, and a huge muscular throat pouch. Primatologists studying orangutans in the wild always assumed that the more gracile form was simply an adolescent, the latter being the adult version. However, in zoo populations, some males retain the gracile form for decades. Invariably these are males living near an older, more socially dominant male. Some sort of signal given off by the dominant male makes the body of the subordinate delay the development of the adult secondary sexual features that give the heavier form its appearance. Take away the dominant male, and the eternally youthful subordinate rapidly develops all the mature traits.