Polygyny introduces risk, in essence, raising the stakes. Many male animals, from stag beetles to elephant seals, expend valuable energy besting one another in battle. Their fossilized antlers now decorate the mantles of Europe s castles and country manors, for the Irish elk went extinct 11,000 years ago. The elks racks, it is believed, simply became too large. Struggling to nourish their mineral-hungry antlers and navigate those massive appendages through the dense forest, the overburdened males couldn t survive long enough for their antlers to fulfill their purpose of vanquishing rivals and winning mates.
Many feminists view Darwinian theories on sex with skepticism, or bile.
Feminist theory often cloaks male dominance in terms of power, denying that significant biological differences exist between men and women. Natural selection does shape human behavior, they say. But it emboldens women as much as men, and in ways that would surprise many testosterone-obsessed theorists. The new thinking of Darwinian feminists was not entirely original. A short four years after Darwin published The Descent of Man , Antoinette Brown Blackwell politely questioned the author s objectivity in her own book, The Sexes throughout Nature .