Patriarchy: a tough nut to crack
We all know who wears the panties on this planet
I’ve just finished rereading The Bonobo Sisterhood, and was amused and bemused by this passage:
The current patriarchal laws gaslight women into not believing what they know to be true. Recall Heidi Schreck sitting in her car, thinking something like ‘stay alive’ while a boy removed her panties. At that moment she knew something to be true, and in Bonoboland her truth will be acknowledged and acted upon, either in the moment if her cry is heard or afterward.
Diane L Rosenfeld, The Bonobo Sisterhood, p225
Of course there’s nothing amusing about date rape, which so many women have experienced, and which is dealt with at some length in the book, along with the male privilege and male solidarity that often facilitates such behaviour, but on this occasion I was struck by the word ‘panties’. Girls wear panties. Even grown women wear panties, apparently. Males never wear panties, even when they’re children. I’m presuming Rosenfeld used the term inadvertently, but it’s that very inadvertence that resonates. It’s an infantilising term, that’s so commonplace that we’re generally oblivious to its effect. But it’s important to make the connection. Children are under our control. They need to do as they’re told, to realise what’s good for them – it might hurt them at first, but they’ll finally recognise that it’s all for their own good…
Panties are pretty, underpants are boring, jocks are manly (they’re an Aussie term, not sure if they’re globally recognised). A lot of the names for clothing have underlying gendered and sexual connotations, some of which are subtle, others, like ‘panties’, not remotely so. Why do men have shirts while women are stuck with blouses? Why do women wear stupid shoes, aka stilettos, while men have Cuban heels or whatever? Like petticoats, it’s all a bit petty. And of course patriarchy is at the bottom of it all, and it’s telling that Rosenfeld, so clearly onto feminist issues, should make that slip … (slip for a female undergarment – sexist or not?)
Who wears the pants? The men of ancient Greece and Rome, all ultra-patriarchs, wore skirts and dresses, which they called robes or togas. Trousers probably started with horse-riding among the Asiatic nomads, males generally, though hopefully women too. And think of tights and slacks, socks and stockings, bloomers and knickerbockers, which somehow became knickers; ties and scarves, hats, caps and bonnets, all with their shiftingly genderised elements. And nowadays, for good or ill, we’ve gone beyond or underneath clothing, with trans and cis, shemales, bitches, butches, incels, alphas, betas, sluts and studs, to name a few. Language does seem to have its downside.
Which brings me back to those language-free, and clothing-free, primates that I like to go on about. You see how we’ve mucked things up a bit with all that paraphernalia. With bonobos, what you see is what you get. And what do they see, or sense? A backside to die for? A wet dream of pink bits? The sexy scent of those fabulous pheromones? A boner to… well, you get the idea. And even without the sexual stuff – though the sexual stuff is pretty central – bonobos have something which could almost be called a policy. No-one left behind. Yes, I’ve mentioned a bit of female-on-male discipline, which very effectively sends a message to the odd uppity male, who always seems to learn his lesson, but the contrast with their chimp neighbours north of the Congo and elsewhere, is stark. And I mean really stark. Here are the facts on chimp aggression, from Wikipedia:
Dominance Aggression: Adult males fight for social status and access to fertile females using charging, biting, and displays (like branch-shaking), which rarely result in death due to submission rituals.
Coalitionary Aggression: Multiple males or females gang up on a single rival to gain rank or improve mating opportunities.
Intercommunity Warfare & Raiding: Neighboring groups regularly patrol borders, ambush loners, and engage in coordinated lethal attacks. Famous instances include the Gombe Chimpanzee War (1974–1978) and ongoing civil strife among the massive Ngogo Chimpanzee Community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park.
Infanticide and Cannibalism: Males and females occasionally kill and consume infants from rival groups or within their own community to eliminate competition or speed up a mother’s return to fertility.
Sexual Coercion: Males frequently chase, hit, and bite estrous females to control mating access.
This is a truly stark contrast to bonobo behaviour, just as human patriarchal behaviour, in terms of numbers slaughtered alone, dwarfs that of chimps. But then, we’ve still managed to out-number them, by a huge margin. We doubtless need to produce fewer kids, and to look after them better. Like bonobos…
We have a lot to learn.
References
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
bonobos and me: a personal exploration
Yes, it’s me, why not?
So yes, like everyone, I was born into a patriarchal society, but it’s always complicated. The first society we start with and have to negotiate is family. We were more nuclear than most nuclear families (don’t worry, I’m not talking about radiation and fallout), because we left my native Scotland for Australia when I was five, leaving behind all grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on, never to be seen again, at least by me.
We came via ‘assisted passage’, as skilled migrants. My mother was the skilled one. South Australia was in need of nurses, and my mother heeded the call. She was always the decision-maker. I don’t know how she did it with three young kids, my older brother and sister and myself, but she took up a job as a nursing sister, and then as an assistant matron of a hospital in Gawler, and later still as a nursing teacher/lecturer. My father was an unskilled labourer, often out of work. It wasn’t a happy marriage – my mother did a lot of shouting, and I always worried that my father, who’d been an amateur boxer in his youth and was impressively muscle-bound, would lose it and go for her, but that never happened, though he’d sometimes threaten – ‘I’ll put your head through that wall’ was a favourite line of his. My mother, though, did occasionally throw things at him, including a pot of something, soup I think, from the kitchen. I don’t know if it was hot or cold.
I was always embarrassed and shamed by these noisy rants. People walking by could surely hear them. And as I got older, the thought of running away from home would seem more and more enticing. The transition from primary to high school was another trauma. The school’s headmaster was a rabid authoritarian who chilled the atmosphere whenever he showed up or spoke into the PA systems installed in every classroom. He haunted the school corridors in black ceremonial robes, which earned him the nickname ‘batman’, and I came quickly to despise him for his self-importance and ridiculously fearsome temper. He picked me out for a couple of dressing-downs, because he knew that I had the top IQ score for entry into the school, which was streamed into classes by those scores, and I wasn’t living up to my ‘potential’. By this time, at around fourteen, my anti-authoritarianism was at its height, and my school results were declining, as I took pleasure in reading everything but the prescribed texts.
Of course it was also that time of life when sex was rearing up its enflamed head. I would make a list in my mind of the prettiest kids in my school or elsewhere, male or female. I took pride in thinking in these ambisexual terms. I played with the thought that some girls would be better off as boys, and vice versa. I imagined kissing boys, just because I knew it was ‘wrong’. And once, when attending a wrestling match, of all things, with a friend, I got an erection from watching his handsome profile as he intently watched the muscle-bound ogres in the ring. Again, this didn’t make me feel ashamed or confused, it made me feel somehow superior and aesthetically enlightened. However, as the boys became hairier and less pretty young men, I gave up on bisexuality, rather sadly and wonderingly.
I’ve written in my novel In Elizabeth about my first sex, on my 16th birthday, granted to me by my girlfriend of a few weeks, who was experienced in these matters, so she told me, though a year or so my junior. It was short, furtive and uneventful, and it seemed to me that kissing her beautiful face was much more of a thrill. But what happened shortly after this event had much more to do with our primate cousins.
Due to all the domestic strife I was spending much of my spare time away from home, hanging out with other kids, mostly older, at the parks around the local shopping centre. I wasn’t exactly accepted by these kids, but I hung around the fringes, feeling vaguely despised because I knew nothing about car engines and other esoterica. I was an obsessive reader of Thomas Hardy novels at the time, but somehow I didn’t think…
However, my new girlfriend was very interested in these boys, some of whom she vaguely knew, and she wanted me to introduce her… Of course I agreed, though I knew, I just knew, that this would be disastrous.
So we duly arrived at the park one early evening, and I could see that the sight of Edwina, my putative girlfriend, caused some arousal. One of the lads, gigantically proportioned compared to me, and a solid thick-thighed defender in the local soccer team which I also played for, began to niggle and jab at me, which then led to a kind of long, one-sided wrestling match which, of course, left everyone amused except myself. And so ended the beginning of my sex life.
So alpha maledom was never within my purview. And looking back at that scene, I can’t help but think of chimpanzees – very basic (with apologies to chimps). I would ever be the subordinate male, wishing and hoping but never really expecting. I should also point out that, from age five to fifteen, I was the smallest kid in my class, male or female. Size does matter, they say.
Of course, I’d never heard of bonobos back then. I first heard of them on the ABC radio ‘Science Show’ when I was around thirty years old. The male journalist ended his report saying something like ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’. They’ve been a kind of leitmotif for me ever since.
I’m rereading Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood, recognising that the book is principally addressed to women, which perhaps disappointed me first time around, as a far-from-alpha male who never made aggressive advances towards a woman (and certainly not towards men!), and whose more or less pathetic advances were likely repudiated due to their pusillanimity. And I can also admit to rejecting advances of women I was attracted to, due to performance anxiety. At least one of those rejections, I felt, was one of the dumbest and costliest of my life. But who knows…
So I don’t know where I’m going with all this, except to say that the battle of the sexes needs to continue, and women need to win. I don’t really believe in equality between the sexes, because I see matriarchy as a far better solution – which of course doesn’t need to disadvantage men, if only they could see what might be in their best interest. The wars going on at present are thoroughly male, as wars tend to be, and feminism seems currently to be struggling, not just in the USA. Female political leadership, spotty though it is, is coming to be taken for granted, as it’s nowhere near commonplace enough to seriously challenge patriarchy. I worry that something truly disastrous may have to happen before we find ourselves taking that positive turn in any big way.
Bonobos managed to take that turn, though, and it doesn’t seem to have been born of disaster. It even may have been born of plenty. We really don’t know quite how, and it’s probably the big question we should be asking. The USA, for example, should be the land of plenty – which it likes to advertise itself to be. For some it is, of course – the rich-poor gap is massive there. Its per capita incarceration rate is the highest in the developed world. Its name for itself – the United States – is a sick joke..
But of course I’m veering off-topic. Bonobos present us with a true society, with no-one left behind unless they’re overly violent, and then they can be forgiven. And they don’t make war with their neighbours, for no good reason. We need to keep focussing on the example they set. I know I’ll keep being inspired.
Reference
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
Women in charge? One day…?
To start with – ‘Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression’ – Nelson Mandela
A few years ago I read Australian author Jess Scully’s book Glimpses of Utopia, which looked at hot spots in the world where positive developments were happening, often within otherwise chaotic or brutal situations and regimes. It wasn’t an overtly feminist work, but it was clear that women were behind most of the good stuff. Unfortunately I loaned the book out and it never returned, as happens, so I’m not sure if she wrote about the Palestinian and Israeli women working together to try to reduce the suffering and set an example of peaceful co-existence, or if I read about it elsewhere. …
In any case, Israeli and Palestinian women are still marching and advocating for peace. I’ve written, of course, about the Palestinian situation many times, and ever since, as a child, I read about the slaughter and betrayal of the native people of the so-called ‘new world’ – new, that is, to the European colonists of what is now called North America, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the issue of what is now euphemistically called ‘settler colonialism’. But of course, it has happened, time and time again, here in Australia, and in New Zealand, and throughout the Americas. David Reich, in his ground-breaking and comprehensive book Who we are and how we got here, provides genetic evidence of the rapid spread into Europe of the Yamnaya people and culture from about 5,000 years ago. Intermixing was commonplace and the genetics tend to dispel all notions of hereditary purity, whether in individuals such as the reigning British monarch, or in broader ethnicities, such as the Celts or the Goths or the Jews. A lot of this intermixing was the result of rape and pillage, which can sometimes be identified through complex genomic analysis, and we can consider this with regard to the concept of miscegenation, once frowned upon, but now virtually dismissed as an issue, at least in the so-called developed world.
Women will be at the forefront of this intermixing, whether sexual or otherwise, because they’re more attuned to collaboration than males in general, but we need to socially acknowledge and facilitate female leadership as much more of a priority than ever before. Think of the fact that we’re now living in a world in which some of the world’s most dangerous countries, including if not especially the USA, are now nuclear-weaponised. Russia and China, both of which are more or less unstable oligarchies/dictatorships, have very sizeable nuclear weapons stockpiles, and other not-quite-reliable countries, such as North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel, belong to the nuclear fraternity. All of these countries, of course, are led by males and their male advisors and lapdogs, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable. What will it take, to recognise that female leadership and unity is pretty much the sine qua non of future human survival.
Observe the more brutal aspects of male leadership today. Here’s the latest Wikipedia data on the Putin war on Ukraine:
The casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian war include six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas,[1] and between 1,274,000 and 2 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to June 2026.
Obviously there have been more casualties to October 26, and every expert analyst I’ve listened to has argued that Putin has virtually no chance of winning, even if he orders full-scale mobilisation. Then there’s the nuclear option, and this really worries me.
This is just about one male who clearly doesn’t care about the suffering he causes, to his own people and others. And then there is Trump, with his regime’s international and domestic attacks upon innocent people. The world is crying out for more female leadership – collective female leadership – but it would only be likely to happen in those countries already on their way to female equality, and there are precious few of them. I like to think Australia is one, but my country has virtually no leverage on the world stage. What will it take to bring about anything close to a bonobo humanity? Will we have to be brought to the precipice? Are we there yet?
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia: real ideas for a fairer world, 2020
https://www.vitalvoices.org/barefootwalk/
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here: ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
back to my big issue: bonobos and us
Time to focus on, and keep focussing on, how a mammal so close to us – no mammal closer, genetically – a highly social mammal like us, with a similar sexual dimorphism to us (though with humans, the individual variations in size and strength are ‘all over the shop’ to use a technical term), became female dominant in the 1.5 million to 2 million years since it became a species apart from its chimp neighbours.
So, first, are bonobos really a species apart? I’ve heard that bonobos and chimps have inter-bred successfully, as did Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis back in the day. A New Scientist article from 10 years ago reports:
The genetic evidence shows that a little less than 1 per cent of the chimpanzee genome came from bonobos, from one contact between 200,000 and 550,000 years ago and another, more recent one less than 200,000 years ago…. It’s not yet clear whether the two episodes of gene flow happened at low levels over a long time or in discrete pulses.
Clearly, then, being separate species isn’t always a barrier, but I suspect genetic disparity is. For example, can a human successfully breed with a chimp or a bonobo? I’m here to ask the tough questions. The answer, sadly, is no, but they’re free to have deeply loving relationships. Okay, humans have 23 chromosome pairs, chimps and bonobos have 24, end of story, at least until we can work out a way…
But getting back to the big issue, female dominance. An article published in Communications Biology in April 2025 has just the title for me: Drivers of female power in bonobos. In the abstract, the authors found… well, let me quote:
Here we test three main hypotheses explaining intersexual power relationships, namely the self-reinforcing effects of winning and losing conflicts, the strength of mate competition, and female coalition formation. We test these for bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of our closest living relatives, where females have high status relative to males despite male-biased size dimorphism. We compiled demographic and behavioural data of 30 years and 6 wild living communities. Our results only support predictions of the female coalition hypothesis (my emphasis).
So, this study makes clear that female coalitions are absolutely central to female dominance in bonobos. And would be absolutely central, IMHO, to female dominance in humans. A bonobo sisterhood indeed. And I should add that this study – a godsend to me – explores gender-based dominance in many mammalian species, with coalitions being generally key to female dominance where it exists.
This is so important. As I’ve written previously, I get push-back from women who say that this female Prime Minister X, or that female boss Y, or my horrible mother Z is somehow proof that women are, at the very least, no better than men, in terms of leadership. I try to suppress my annoyance at this totally irrelevant response. In an environment of male dominance, it’s not surprising that some women will behave ‘more manlier than men’, in order to gain prominence. Indeed, they may feel that they have no other choice. Again I’ll quote the simple remark made by the African-American novelist Toni Morrison: ‘the problem isn’t men, the problem is patriarchy’, to which I respond, ‘the solution isn’t women, it’s matriarchy. It’s sisterhood.’
So my new resolution, to focus more or less exclusively on this issue (a very tough one to keep to, I admit), has made me decide to reread Diane Rosenfeld’s book, referenced below. The book begins with the problem of male domestic violence in the USA. She’s a lawyer, and has dealt with many domestic violence and domestic abuse cases. So, interestingly, I looked up statistics on male domestic violence in the USA, and was shocked to find a listing of male victims of domestic violence in that country. I twice rephrased my enquiry, and both times it gave me the same men-as-victims results. Conspiracy theories anyone? I would generally not entertain such ideas, but in Frumpistan, tout est possible. When I keep trying, I find the statistics are all over the place, but of course women are more often the victims, especially of the more extreme forms of violence, including, unsurprisingly, murder. In February 2026, the FBI released a report on DV over a five-year period, 2020 to 2024:
Over the five-year period studied, the percentage of violent crimes within domestic relationships increased. Law enforcement reported more than 11,000 domestic violence murder victims and an additional 1.1 million victims of domestic violence. Nearly 75 percent of the victims were female.
Again, I would think it most reasonable to assume that if the violence was extreme, or ended in murder, the perpetrator would be male in far more than 75% of cases.
So this post is a statement of intent. To explore and encourage female coalitions – such as those I’ve read about between Palestinian and Israeli women. Women in difficult and male-dominated regions such as Iran, the Arabic world, China, Turkiye, Russia, and presumably many parts of Africa. I’m making guesses here, to some degree, and hopefully, in researching these countries further, I’ll find some silver linings. I don’t think I’ll be looking at the USA in the near future, at least until Frumpistan is no more.
References
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-07900-8
Diane L Rosenfeld, The Bonobo Sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, 2022
a few reflections on the great dying…
This is a self education piece. Or maybe that applies to all my writing. Anyway, it’s about the great dying at the end of the Permian period, a couple of hundred million years ago. I’m trying, not too successfully, to get my head around eras and periods and epochs and such, so… the Permian-Triassic extinction event, aka ‘the great dying’, was the biggest event of its kind in the planet’s history, resulting in the wiping out of 90% to 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates, not to mention lots of insects. It also, apparently, marked the boundary between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras.
So why these different names? Apparently because the Palaeo- and Mesozoic eras span hundreds of millions of years (the Palaeozoic lasted from 541 to 252 million years ago), while the Permian period started about 299 million years ago and ended tens of millions of years later, 252 million years ago, bringing in the Triassic, which ended 201 million years ago, with the start of the Jurassic. Anyway, I’ll have to make a wall chart. So, hundreds of millions versus tens of millions. But surely there are other reasons? What do these terms actually mean?
Oh, but first, the great dying. It was caused by a relatively sudden global warming. Our Earth was very different then, with much or all of the land forming one super-continent, Pangaea. In the north, a sudden eruption of volcanic activity filled the atmosphere with methane, sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide – the precise levels and rates of change are still under dispute, and the Wikipedia article on the event is I think the longest piece I’ve ever seen from them.
No more trilobites after that, sadly – what pets they would’ve made….
So we’re now in the Phanerozoic eon? Aren’t periods and eras enough? It’s horrible, but apparently – I have to get this straight – there are four established ‘hierarchies’ of geologic time, at least for now. Well, actually, one hierarchy of four. Eons, sub-divided into Eras, subdivided into Periods, sub-divided into Epochs, which could then be subdivided into my birthdays, but no that’s probably too personal…
Sorry, the great dying. Methane (CH4) and CO2, the two greenhouse gases we’re most concerned about today (nitrous oxide, N2O, comes in third), due to abundance combined with individual effects… okay, here’s Wikipedia:
The scientific consensus is that the main cause of the extinction was the flood basalt eruptions that created the Siberian Traps, which released sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, resulting in euxinia (oxygen-starved, sulphurous oceans) elevated global temperatures, and acidified oceans. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide rose from around 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm with approximately 3,900 to 12,000 gigatonnes of carbon being added to the ocean-atmosphere system during this period. (References removed).
It’s certainly very thought-provoking that this massive life-annihilating event, which lasted only a few tens of thousands of years, occurred a mere 252 million years ago on our approximately 4.6 billion-year-old planet – pretty late in the day, really. Has everything under the surface of our planet ‘stabilised’ since then? I wouldn’t bet on it. As to that measure of atmospheric CO2, shifting from 400 to 2,500 ppm, it’s worth comparing to the ‘recent’ levels, before the industrial revolution – about 280 ppm – and currently (about 430 ppm, and gradually rising, of course).
The whole extinction event lasted about 100,000 years, and involved an overall rise in temperature of about 8 degrees celsius, and an increase in ultraviolet radiation, which significantly affected plant growth. Much of the detail is necessarily speculative, but there seem to have been more intensive El Nino events, and, in amongst it, a massive extra-terrestrial impact, which created the Araguainha crater in what is now Brazil, and which caused a massive release of methane. Ozone layer destruction was also a factor. Increased ultraviolet radiation led to plant mutation and death, which, it’s speculated, led to increased fungal growth. Uncertainty abounds, however – land masses were completely different from what they are today, and different studies in different parts support everything, it seems to me, from overall gradualism to pulses of extinction followed by relative stability – but the last (million!) years of the Permian seem to have been the worst.
Examinations of marine versus terrestrial extinctions haven’t arrived at much consistency either. It has to be admitted that arriving at ‘the truth’ from examining such altered landscapes and seascapes is a near-impossible task. In any case, some believe that the two extinction types were asynchronous, others disagree, and both camps of course have evidence to back up their positions. It may be that both camps are correct due to global differences in temperature and atmospheric conditions. In any case, marine organisms suffered most, especially those with calcium carbonate skeletons. Ocean acidification due to increased CO2 made producing those skeletons more difficult. Another strong risk factor was endemism – being found only in specific regions.
Wikipedia goes into extreme detail on all the types affected – conodonts, ammonoids, bryozoans and foraminifera, among many others. I’ve looked up images of them, or of their fossilised remains, in memoriam. I think the key to this is to expect the unexpected – which is precisely something we cannot do, but we can, through knowledge, through a better understanding of our planet and the dangers to it, from within and without, and how we might avert those dangers – anthropogenic global warming being the most obvious – we can reduce the ‘degree of unexpectedness’. That’s one of the many things science is good for.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event
If Odette was a human bonobo – and other reflections, mostly on Stendhal…
I’ve almost finished reading Swann’s Way, for a reading group I’m a member of, and it’s not my first time. I even read Du côté de chez Swann as part of Honours French at university, which I never finished – Honours, that is, not the Proust. Anyway, my first reading of Proust was almost fifty years ago, when I was keen to be a connoisseur of the finest literature available, according to the cognoscenti. However, I never quite got through Le Temps retrouvé, finding it all a bit much – and now, having exposed myself for the third or fourth time to Proust’s celebration or exposé of the parasitic upper class of Combray, wherever that is, I feel I’ve had more than enough. After all, I grew up in working-class Elizabeth, South Australia, a slightly different environment. I was beaten up a couple of times, I was twice hung by my feet from the top of a two-storey stair-well by my schoolmates, I was slapped across the face by my headmaster for chewing gum in his presence, which led me to quit the school forthwith, as a 15-year-old, and over the next few years I worked on a farm (for one day), on a demolition team (for a week), in two washing machine factories, in a factory constructing mobile classrooms, in a wire-works, at a plastic pipe-making factory (in the office that time), at a steel tubemaker, in a hospital enticingly titled The Home for Incurables, as a kitchen hand in a French restaurant, and, much later, in a printing press. And somewhere amongst that, at the latter end of all these travails, I managed half an honours degree in French (I dropped out) and then an honours degree in English, together with some basic teaching qualifications.
Perhaps I got carried away with reciting all that, but at least it makes the obvious point that my background is somewhat different from that of Proust, or Monsieur Swann, to whom coachmen or stockbrokers are at a level below which it’s scarcely possible to imagine.
So, Swann seems very aptly named, as he seems to spend all his time swanning about from salon to salon, with his not quite so refined mistress Odette in tow, all the time wondering whether she should be traded in for another model, for she’s never quite up to the mark. For Swann is the ultimate connoisseur of – well, things one should be connoisseury about – like sonatas and bas-reliefs and reredos. Women, though, are a problem for the cognoscenti, as they’re so changeable, unpredictable, ungraspable, so subject to ‘experience’. So wilfull, even in spite of their relative poverty, their dependence, their ignorance…
This first volume of Proust’s lengthy work was published in 1913, just around the time that carriages were gradually being reduced to cars. It would still be a long time, though, before mistresses became anything remotely like masters. In fact we’re still awaiting that transformation, and watching out for signs. We don’t quite know how long it took in the bonobo world, but it was surely a collective effort. So when, in coming to the section where Swann, in questioning Odette about her private life, especially vis-a-vis her female friends, is given hints about intimacies that disturb, but, I suspect, also enthral him, I reflect on that creeping, tantalising, exhilarating transformation that may have come about in the Congolese jungle when those female chimps-becoming-bonobos huddled together, sharing their fruits and nuts, slipping them from mouth to mouth, tasting each others’ saliva, rubbing and exciting each other, so gently at first, clinging to each other and, just feeling…
Humans, of course, are not so gross. Research tells me that when bonobo females are harassed by a male, usually sexually, they’ve been known to bite him somewhere in the sexual arena, putting him out of action for weeks or even months at a time. All of which makes me think of Swann pestering Odette about a private life which is obviously no business of his…
It’s interesting that, in the version of Swann’s Way I’ve been reading, which seems to be from 1992 (it’s complicated – described as ‘The new, fully revised and updated edition of the Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation’, and then ‘revised in translation by D J Enright’, with different dates mentioned), I came across a reference to a French writer very different from Proust, both stylistically and in general outlook. It appears on page 467 of the 513-page first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Another five volumes must be read. Allow me to quote:
The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit after reading the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact, smooth, violet-tinted and soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact, smooth, violet-tinted and soft, that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid of that heavy first syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirs, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets.
Apologies if this quote seems a bit long-winded, but after all it’s only one sentence, and arguably one of the shorter sentences in the book. And that’s the point. Stendhal, the author of La Chartreuse de Parme, Le Rouge et le Noir, De L’Amour and other works, is a writer very dear to me, more than just a favourite writer, and his style has a ‘less is more’ element, especially when treating of affairs of the heart. His female characters are powerful and often unfathomably complex, and generally unattainable. There are passages in his work where the short sentences are like a punch to the heart, making it hard to continue. I’ve had this experience personally, and it has made me reflect on the power of words when effectively used. So I don’t know quite what to make of Proust’s ‘Stendhalian sweetness’ except to say that, for me, it completely misses the mark.
Stendhal and Proust, a fascinating contrast. Both were aesthetes, we might say – Stendhal wrote about Italian art and music (he lived most of his adult life in Italy, finding the French to be overly bourgeois – ‘bourgeois assez plat’ was one of his favourite put-downs), and claimed to be energised by Italian forthrightness and exuberance. Of course, he was very much of the bourgeoisie himself, his father being a prominent land-owner, advocate and one-time mayor of Grenoble, though interestingly, he disliked his father and adored his mother, who died in childbirth when he was seven. But he was also, in his youth, much enamoured of Napoleon, and spent his early adulthood in the military, as much to ‘see the world’ as to ‘fight for the fatherland’.
So, to his feminism – avant la lettre – which is the facet that has most drawn me to him. Simone de Beauvoir wrote highly of him, and of his depictions of complex, rebellious women, and described him as a feminist writer. His female characters are also politically active, insofar as it was permitted at the time, and action, so generally missing in Proust’s oeuvre, is of course a feature of early 19th century western Europe, the era of Napoleon, in contrast to the early 20th century background of Proust’s first volume. And Proust is also obsessed with class, without ever being forth-right about the issue. In fact I’ve never read any work that is so saturated in class concerns as that of Proust. Of course, the French have this tu/vous dichotomy, which has equivalents in a number of other cultures, but I was bemused by a passage near the beginning of ‘Place names: the name’, which made me wonder about what a strange other country the past can be. The young narrator has become a playmate and impassioned admirer of Gilberte, who happens, as we later learn, to be the daughter of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, the apparently unequal lovers of ‘Swann in love’. So, I was struck by this passage:
And there was another day when she said to me: “You know, you can call me ‘Gilberte’. In any case, I’m going to call you by your first name. It’s silly not to.” Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more formal ‘vous’..
This struck me as bizarre – they’d been playing together, and with other children, for weeks or more, without using first names? What did they call each other? ‘Hey you’? ‘Spunkbutton’? ‘Fuckwit’? Is there a place where kids can play together regularly for weeks on end without mentioning each others’ names? Maybe, but surely not on this planet…? This, too, seemed to have something to do with class, but I can’t quite work it out.
So, having finished this 513-page first volume of In Search of Lost Time, which I seem to remember having read before, at least most of it, in French and in English, I’m wondering if I have the patience to go on. I’m much more into non-fiction these days, and yet… I think maybe I’ve been a bit harsh on Proust, and… I like to see things through to the end. I really don’t know…
having read more than a third of ‘Within a budding grove’, the second volume of some translator’s version of In search of lost time, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. Here’s one passage – among many – that irritated my 21st century sensibility:
she [Odette] would say, “Yes, I like this room; I use it a great deal. I couldn’t live with a lot of hostile, pompous things; this is where I do my work” (though she never stated precisely at what she was working, whether a picture, or perhaps a book, for the hobby of writing was beginning to become common among women who liked to do something, not to be quite useless)…
I should point out, if it needs to be, that this perfectly describes Proust’s hobby as well, and that he would surely have been aware of such English hobbyists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, and the enticingly named Fanny Burney, whom one female literary enthusiast recommended to me in a pub years ago as ‘the best of all that lot’.
But needless to say, there are no female intellectuals in anything I’ve read so far in Proust, and I’m not holding my breath… But of course, he’s ‘of his time’. More annoying are the interminable sentences with their many subordinate clauses, leading to a ‘punchline’ which, for its power and even its meaning requires you to go back to the first few words of the sentence, which, likely as not, are a hundred or so lines earlier. This is, presumably, Proust’s complexity, his nuance, his intellectual richness, and if you don’t appreciate it you’re just a dumb-ass, permanently excluded from ‘the happy few’.
References
In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1: Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
evolutionary psychology, bonobos and our future
Having got stuck into evolutionary psychology in my last post (and others), or at least one essay published under this monicker, and recalling that the essay was published in 2016, I’m wondering how this relatively recently-minted field of study is faring. Wikipedia, I must say, gives the field a fair shake of the sauce bottle in its lengthy presentation. My own interest is largely in the area of sexuality, and I’m particularly interested in female sexuality. Bonobos, I’ve noted, engage in female-female sex, generally in the form of genito-genital rubbing, significantly more than males in male-male sex, and this, obviously, strengthens female-female bonding in general.
As I write this, I’m thinking of devoting a lot more of my writing to the sexual aspect of human behaviour, and how it can be utilised more productively, after the fashion of bonobos. Of course it can be argued, as Freud argued back in the day, that sublimation of the sex drive is – well, the basis of civilisation. By ‘controlling’ our sexual urges, or ‘channelling’ them, we’ve created art and science, and made piles of money. But then again, Genghis Khan sired oodles of children but still managed to slaughter, or preside over the slaughter of, millions – though there was nobody around to do a body count. The point being that you can build empires and spit out children at the same time, or something like that. But of course his campaigns and those of his rellies could hardly be said to be major contributions to civilisation.
It would be hard to describe marriage in terms of evolutionary psychology, but let’s try monogamy. It’s for the birds, surely. Mammals, not so much. The BBC Earth website tells me that only 3 to 5% of all non-human mammals are monogamous, though in primate species it’s closer to 30%. At least, that’s for social monogamy, which apparently isn’t the same as genetic monogamy. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:
Social monogamy does not describe the sexual interactions or patterns of reproduction between monogamous pairs; rather it strictly refers to the patterns of their living conditions. Rather, sexual and genetic monogamy describe reproductive patterns. It is possible for a species to be both genetically monogamous and socially monogamous but it is more likely for species to practice social monogamy and not genetic monogamy.
So, in the society that I and most of those around me were brought up in, i.e. Christian or post-Christian society, we’ve been expected to be socially and genetically monogamous, and many of us are. You could say it’s an easy and even lazy option. Of course we are sexually attracted to others outside of our marriage or coupledom, but it might be costly to act on, or try to act on, that attraction. We can also allow ourselves a sense of moral superiority in resisting temptation, even if the person we’re attracted to finds us as alluring as a rusty nail.
There are also difficulties in eschewing monogamy, due to our current highly segregated, and socially sanctioned, system of child-rearing, with essentially basic families all living under separate roofs, uniting two sets of genes to produce offspring. And of course this system has, by and large, proved extremely successful, though there’s no reason to suppose a more bonoboesque set of arrangements would be worse, IMHO.
Yes, shock, horror, don’t be ridiculous, I hear my tendentious twin barking, surely the private home and the nuclear family are here to stay. We don’t live in trees and wank each other all day, we make space telescopes, cyclotrons, LLMs, and superfoods, and it’s all down to monogamy and keeping our clothes on, mostly.
Well, I think we should keep our options open, at the very least. And that is happening, as we slough off religion and discover, through history, experimentation and the many-faceted post-industrial world, that there are more or less infinite ways of living collectively.
Experiments have been done with chimps and bonobos which are quite revealing in terms of their different strengths and weaknesses, and much has to do with the environment they grew up in. Bonobos landed themselves, quite fortunately, in an area south of the Congo River, heavily forested, with an abundance of food, especially of the non-meat variety. With enough to go round, there was no need to be overly competitive in obtaining the stuff. So, interestingly, the sexual dimorphism in bonobos has reduced slightly compared to that in chimps, remembering that they only separated between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, a sliver of evolutionary time. This is most likely due to a lesser need for strength in hunting live game – more of a male activity in that male-dominant society (and think of the implications for post-industrial human societies). More sharing, less competitiveness – this has led to general differences in bonobo versus chimp behaviours, and cognitive skills. Here’s a quote from a paper entitled Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees, published in PLoS One in August 2010:
We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
.There’s a lot of food for thought here, and, in my view, much to hope for. My thoughts naturally run to human males as more competitive, and females, the mothers of us all, as more empathic. It’s not a yawning divide, of course, and there are plenty of individual exceptions, but there have been changes in the western world, in particular, since Darwin’s remarks about women’s intellectual inferiority, so typical of his place and time – changes which include our much greater knowledge of neurology, as well as changes in work practices and education in the post-industrial age – changes which, with a bit of imagination, we can compare to the abundant bonobo world leaving behind the tough, competitive chimp environment. Today we have the tragic, stupid wars against Ukraine and Iran – egotistical decisions that were typically male – or I might say, wars started by increasingly atypical males in the context of an increasingly less male-dominated or macho society. But the wheel turns painfully slowly, and I’m getting old, dammit.
We’re facing crises today which aren’t about wars, in spite of the enormous local suffering they cause. They’re about climate change and our varied and in places devastating impact on the environment and its multifarious gigantic and minuscule inhabitants. Einstein dreamed of a world government, and as a humanist, who participated in a humanist group for a decade or so, that’s one of my wildest dreams too. We’re affecting the whole planet, and so our species has, whether we will or no, responsibility for that planet’s future. When will we come to fully realise this, as a collective?
Okay, maybe I’m getting carried away, but the bonobo example is a good starting point, methinks. They care and they share. It can even be sexy.
References
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/seven-animals-who-mate-for-life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_monogamy_in_mammalian_species
Are humans monogamous by nature? Will they always be?
bonobo girls
I often forget the title of this blog, and what I’m supposed to be writing about, so multifarious is my genius (I contain multitudes mate), so let me return, hopefully not too briefly, to bonobos, behaviour, patriarchy, matriarchy, evolution and all that stuff.
In an earlier blog piece, some time ago, I reviewed an essay in a probably defunct journal called Evolutionary Psychology which tried to get stuck into a couple of feminists for promoting a bonobo-type lifestyle. What struck me most about this extremely irritating article was that it had virtually nothing to say about bonobos – this in an Evolutionary Psychology journal! – and everything to say about the supposed absurdity of the feminist writers. Here’s a classic example:
It is egregiously naïve to conclude that, “bonobos reveal that an incredible range of sexual diversity is normal for animals like us” (p. 99, emphasis in original).
This is, of course, not at all naïve. There are no animals on the planet closer to humans than bonobos, so to describe them as ‘animals like us’, is completely accurate. Elsewhere in his essay, he criticises his targets for not ‘understanding human sex differences in sexual desire’. He doesn’t elaborate on these sex differences. This is because there’s no such thing, any more than there is in bonobos. Of course there are individual differences. Some humans, and no doubt some bonobos, tend to be more randy than others, for all sorts of reasons, to do with up-bringing, neural development, genetics, whatever. Gender does play a role, of course, more in some societies than others. Let’s not forget that the penalty for adultery in early Christian society was to be stoned to death – but only for females (males were barely penalised at all). I say females, not women, since females were more often than not sold into marriage on the payment of a dowry from the age of ten, or even younger. A bit of a dampener for a girl’s promiscuous impulses, I’d say.
It’s my view that monogamy is more a cultural institution than a natural given for humans, and I would cite our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, both non-monogamous, as evidence. Some six to eight million years separate us from those relatives, and there isn’t much evidence about the sex lives of neanderthals, australopithecines or other hominins – and not much chance that we’ll ever find out about their sexual proclivities. It’s been argued that Australopithecus afarensis at least was a sexually dimorphic species, but there’s a question about the extent of evidence. In any case, though sexual dimorphism might have equated with dominance a million years ago, it’s hardly much of a factor for modern humans. From hunter-gatherers to post-industrial society, physical size has mattered less and less – power has been measured differently. We have evidence, presented by eminent researchers such as Joseph Henrich, that the ruling classes of not so long ago, evolutionarily speaking, tended to monopolise the field, with polygynous systems that left the lower classes bereft of partners. I’m talking male dominance here, of course, something like that of gorillas, with financial and military heft replacing that of physicality. Those upper class polygynous societies were essentially about female enslavement, though there would certainly be nuances – hierarchies among the women, benefits to the more intellectually endowed, even the occasional female ruler. But mostly it would be male dominance, which, in the more ‘intellectual’ cultures, such as those of Athens, Rome, Alexandria and later Baghdad, led to the dogma of ‘feeble-minded women’ (and if you don’t sufficiently recognise your inferiority you might suffer the fate of Hypatia), which has taken centuries to quash, and which in some regions, such as parts of the USA, is still with us.
Modern science has taught us that there is no evidentiary basis for male dominance. It certainly can’t be based on intelligence. Decades ago a young female friend expressed a belief to me that males were on average smarter than females. I was too stunned to respond. Did she think that male dogs and cats were generally smarter than their female counterparts? Her view was a relic of millennia of patriarchy. And recently I read something priceless, a comment on a youtube video presented by an anti-feminist young woman, bizarrely enough. The comments, less surprisingly, were all from approving males. This bloke’s simple remark was ‘They need to realise that power comes with responsibility’. I switched off pretty quickly, but this odd and ridiculous remark kept striking me with its arrogant ignorance, so here’s my response:
Responsibility is indeed important, like the responsibility for nurturing an embryo, then a foetus, then a child, as it grows inside a womb, and for suckling and feeding that child after his birth, guiding his first steps and teaching him his first words. Think of the billions of human infants who’ve been nursed and cared for in this way, just in the last few decades. And then think of our marital system – how many infants, born outside of that system, have been raised by men, rather than women? And within the system, how many women have left the marriage, and its children, compared to men? How many men have been the victims of domestic violence, compared to women? How is it that men sexually abuse or rape women, and this never happens to men, except sometimes at the hands of other men? So, yes, responsibility… there’s nothing more important.
Bonobos make good mothers, helped by other adults, and siblings, male and female. They engage in plenty of rough and tumble stuff, and they can get violent, usually when males get too uppity. A defensive violence, a sisterhood, because it’s a physical environment, much more so than our own, and the males are a wee bit bigger. It would be hard to translate their non-monogamous world into our own, which has become only slightly less monogamous over the last couple of centuries, but their example is, to me, an inspiring one, so vive les bonobos, let’s always manage to keep them in their wild state, so they can keep us thinking of different ways to be, collectively.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://prezi.com/wuvsj2ah8gbf/women-in-palestine-during-the-time-of-jesus/
on cyanobacteria, mostly
green stuff
So, since reading about photosynthesis and its emergence with cyanobacteria – perhaps – I’ve been fascinated and confused by the early ages of this planet and the beginnings of life. Here’s how Oliver Morton defines these bacteria in the glossary to Eating the Sun:
Cyanobacteria: the only bacteria which practice oxygenic photosynthesis. The chloroplasts in algae and plants are derived from cyanobacteria.
Is there another kind of photosynthesis? Clever me looked it up and, yes, anoxic photosynthesis is a thing. It’s a ‘light-driven metabolic process used by certain bacteria to make energy and organic compounds without producing oxygen as a byproduct’, according to AI.
Chloroplasts, to be clear to myself, are plant and algal organelles which convert sunlight into chemical energy. This photosynthesis process uses chlorophyll, a sunlight-absorbing green pigment, to turn CO2 and H2O into glucose and O2. It absorbs red and blue wavelengths and reflects green, hence the colour of all plants (I love that), and I notice it’s popular in dietary supplements – bien sûr!
So how did these cyanobacteria evolve, and how are they going these days? Apparently they evolved in the ocean – remembering how very watery our planet once was – some 3 billion years ago or more. The general view apparently is that those ocean waters were rather hot, with barely any oxygen. Anaerobic microbes existed in these waters (here be magic?) – for whom oxygen was toxic, although there were some ‘aerotolerant anaerobes’ who didn’t mind oxygen but had no use for it.
So cyanobacteria, aka blue-green algae, are thought to have evolved in freshwater (low salt) environments, in the ‘photic zone’, that’s to say the upper, sunlit layer. We only have clear evidence of their existence from 2.1 billion years ago, and disputed evidence from 2.7 billion, and maybe they go back to 3.5 billion, but their effect on the planet, via the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ (GOE), wasn’t felt until after about 2.4 billion. This rise in oxygen is likely to have adversely affected the biosphere of the time (made up of archaea, not bacteria), which fed largely on methane.
Much of our evidence of early life forms is based on stromatolites and oncolites. Stromatolites (prime examples are found at Shark Bay, Western Australia), are ‘layered biochemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water [the photic zone] by the trapping, binding, and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria’ (Wikipedia), and they are the oldest known fossil remains. Oncolites are small near-spherical structures forming around a spherical nucleus, like a shell fragment, and are untethered, unlike stromatolites. They’re an indication of warming waters in the photic zone, and are also found in contemporary freshwater. Oh, and they’re also formed by cyanobacterial growth.
So here’s another Wikipedia quote which I’ll then try to make my own sense of:
Oxygenic photosynthesis only evolved once (in prokaryotic cyanobacteria), and all photosynthetic eukaryotes (including all plants and algae) have acquired this ability from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria or their endosymbiont hosts. In other words, all the oxygen that makes the atmosphere breathable for aerobic organisms originally comes from cyanobacteria or their plastid descendants
Aerobic organisms, that’s us, amongst quite a few others. So, to unpack. I sort of know the prokaryote to eukaryote story, but let me go a bit deeper, or a bit less shallow. It’s where endosymbiosis comes in – a symbiosis, I think, where it’s the end o’ me as an independent organism, but I live on as an essential element in something bigger and grander, usually. Mitochondria are often the go-to example, former bacteria harnessed by eukaryotes to break down nutrients and convert them to energy in the form of ATP.
So what is ATP and why is it the energy molecule? See what I did there? I forced myself further into the murk. Adenosine triphosphate, the energy provider of all living cells, is made up of a nitrogenous purine base called adenine – formula C5H5 N5 (those three elements are always in there somewhere), and fundamental to DNA and RNA and no doubt much else that sparks with life.
This reminds me that there are purines and pyrimidines, but getting back to energy, AI never lies (and I have to say I’m quite frightened of this AI shite, because, as we all know, it’s controlled by billionaires who don’t have the interests of people like myself in mind) tells me this:
ATP does not technically create energy; instead, it acts as a chemical battery that stores and delivers energy. It releases this energy when a water molecule breaks the weak bond holding its third phosphate group off, turning ATP into ADP (adenosine diphosphate) and releasing usable power for the cell.
So why does this bond get broken? And I note that there’s also adenosine monophosphate (AMP). And the adenosine part consists of adenine, a nitrogenous base, and ribose (sugar). And all these complicated changes and breaking-downs are part of the process called metabolism, the conversion of the energy food provides into molecules that keep us going, such as proteins, but of course many others.
I’ve never spent much more than an hour or two in a lab, so I find it hard to think through these metabolic developments. Let me return to the ubiquitous cyanobacteria. I may be repeating myself, but mea culpa – they have a vast variety of forms (all with much the same colour), and some are much given to symbiosis with various unicellular and multicellular organisms. So, with their photoautotrophic, oxygen-producing abilities they’ve been the sine qua non of complex, oxygen-based life on this planet. I think I’ll just stop here.
References
Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: the everyday miracle of how plants power the planet, 2007
deciduous and evergreen: pourquoi?
star magnolia (Magnolia stellata) – I think. Thank you, internet
It’s now more or less officially spring, and leafless trees are blossoming, like the one across the lane from my new home, as pictured. So I’m wondering how they have the energy, and more broadly, why do some trees lose their leaves seasonally, and others not? I’m no expert on trees, and I hope, before this piece is finished, to identify this one, but at least I know it’s deciduous, I think.
I also want to know how this deciduous and evergreen dichotomy relates to photosynthesis, as surely it does. So, of course, I must look it up. Surprisingly, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun makes no mention of the evergreen-deciduous thing, but then I likely wouldn’t comprehend his explanation…
But here’s a photosynthesis formula that I can more or less comprehend:
6CO₂ + 6H₂O + light energy → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂
Which can be roughly translated as: six lots of carbon dioxide (from the air) plus an equivalent lot of water (from the soil), plus solar energy, makes glucose, and starch. The starch, the carbohydrate, is stored in the roots, trunk and branches. Deciduous trees shed their leaves in autumn, and enter a period of dormancy – reduced metabolism, which slows or stops growth. Presumably energy is expended, though, in the production of blossoms. It’s a risk worth taking, however, because blossoms exposed to the open air can be seen and more easily approached by pollinators and can have their seeds blown by the wind.
I’m guessing that evergreen trees are mostly located in dense forests, which tend to create their own microclimates, less susceptible to seasonal change. And they’re more of a thing in the tropics, where the weather’s always – tropical, more or less. And the leaves of evergreens tend to be thicker and spinier. Ms AI tells me this:
Evergreen tree leaves—whether needle-like or broad—are uniquely adapted with thick, waxy outer layers and robust cellular structures that minimise water loss and resist freezing. Instead of shedding all foliage at once, these trees retain functional, chlorophyll-containing leaves year-round, slowly replacing them individually over several seasons.
I’m hopelessly ignorant about tree and plant types but I’ve found a website that will freely inform me (or try to) of the identity of any tree or plant I present to them via a photo I’ve taken. Instant learning! I’m quite excited.
Apparently some individual tree leaves can live for over twenty years, and these leaves ‘tend to be tougher and thicker, and more expensive to build’, according to a Macquarrie Uni article, referenced below. Other interesting facts are that ‘conifers and other evergreen trees make longer-living leaves the closer they are to the poles’, and ‘deciduous trees do the opposite. Their longest-lasting leaves are found at the tropics’. It’s all about maximising carbon absorption. If you’re an evergreen conifer in poor soil and facing a long harsh winter you’ll need to make a long-term investment in your leaves, but if you’re a deciduous maple you’re best to create new leaves quick-smart that will capture the summer sunlight before dropping in autumn, and that means investing in fast-growing, cheap but flimsy leaves. I’m more or less paraphrasing here.
So I’ll make this piece a short one, but I’ll be taking more photos in the neighbourhood and trying to learn more about blossoms and soil and climate and photosynthesis for future posts and my own delectation. I’m feeling Spring in my step!
References
A Tree Blooms Without Photosynthesis (Leaves)? The Science Behind Spring Blossoms