20
Loth
ario can easily inseminate as many girls as he wants. The 99 who
don't make it will have proven their inferiority by virtue of their very
failure to hang in until mating time."
In the north, on the other hand, food is scarce, and the season in
which you can safely raise your youngsters is short.  Nestlings have to
be stuffed with delicacies so they can grow as rapidly as possible.
When winter comes, if the kids are not ready to fly south they're dead
meat.
In northern climes female birds need all the help they can get.
The result: male birds are dressed as inconspicuously as their consorts,
camouflaged  for protection against poultry connoisseurs.  After all, the
males are valuable. Without them, females can't possibly bring up their
young.31  In northern areas, it also takes more than one human to raise
an infant.  No wonder monogamy tends to be a practice of the north,
while polygamy is a custom of the prodigal south.
Males, with their viciousness and violence, sometimes seem like
a sex humanity would be better off without.  Among mountain
gorillas, however, they serve one indispensable function--they're the
linchpin of social organization, the key to the superorganism.  The
gorillas Diane Fossey studied in the Virunga mountains were
organized in small groups of four to ten individuals.  Those groups
depended on each other for affection, for comfort, for protection and
for breeding.  The groups were extremely stable.  They stuck together
for ten or twenty years.  But the central presence that gave them their
cohesion was their dominant male, their silverback.
Fossey watched as groups she had known for years lost their
silverbacks to old age.  When the emaciated and unhealthy elderly
male gorilla leaders finally died, the little communities that Fossey had
thought would last forever disappeared.  Their members dispersed.
The females joined other bands, bands dominated by another
silverback male. For without the silverback to provide a focal point for
organization, resolve quarrels, and offer protection against the
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