SIXTEEN - The Love Life of a Fact

Summary

Introduction

Once upon a time, a very masculine cluster of facts left their home for love. These facts first existed only as a story about competing sexual strategies. Their saga stretches back to a tryst between two prehistoric lovers, a rambling man and the pregnant woman he was tempted to abandon; their scarcely compatible reproductive needs left their mark, according to the story, in instincts that still drive much of gendered behaviour today. Ironically, though the story itself was about travel (the travel of gendered behaviour through time), the narrative form of these facts made their own travel cumbersome – the facts could only move slowly, from storyteller to storyteller. Then came a day when these facts were discovered by expert storytellers, romance writers, who realised that the facts could be used not simply to make a story but also to create a hero. They named him the Alpha Hero, and he gave the facts about sexual selection a second life in the world of romance. He was tall, sexy and powerful, a winner in the battle of the fittest; his main antagonist in each romance novel was a monogamous woman with romantic and reproductive interests antithetical to his own. As an avatar for the facts about sexual selection, he could speak for them, enact them, embody and even propagate them. This new hero helped his facts travel exceptionally well, better than many other facts in this volume. He was not merely a good companion but also a host; he not only maintained the facts’ integrity while they ventured very far from their origins, but he also saw them safely through to the return trip: After years of expatriate living, the facts were rediscovered by their first storytellers and returned to their home discipline unscathed, hero in tow. This is their story.