Probably a good idea for me to have a part-time job at a school, since I can't deny that soon as it's winter break I sleep till 9 after watching Seinfeld re-runs into the small-numbered hours. In the last one I saw last night, Jerry and Elaine set up George with Elaine's jaded friend. There are hilarious alternating scenes in which they are making their respective pitches, Jerry to George, Elaine to her friend:
Friend: What's he look like?
Elaine [after a pause]: Well, he's somewhat short, but stocky and strong. In fact quite powerful. He can lift a hundred pounds!
Friend: Stocky? He's fat! I bet he's bald, too!
Elaine [with a crinkled face]: Bald-ing.
They go out on a blind date, which culminates with some off-screen sex that's described diversely by the participants in separate conversations with Elaine and Jerry. The site evidently was George's kitchen, not because they were too over-heated to make it to the bedroom, but because the bedroom triggered George's masculine anxieties, so he suggested the kitchen, "a more sociable room."
In the end, there is a pregnancy scare, thanks to a deficient condom supplied by Kramer. "My boys can swim!" exalts George when he hears the "bad" news, jubilant relief over the validation of his powers as a man defeating for the time every other self-interested consideration. Then Elaine's friend gets her tardy period and I went to bed before the next episode could start.
No matter how late it is, I always read a little in bed, and currently I'm working through Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. Last night by chance the 10 or so pages I read included the following account of how "our kind" of sexual reproduction likely evolved from that of, say, fungi:
In the days when all sex cells were interchangeable and of roughly the same size, there would have been some which just happened to be slightly bigger than others. In some respects a big isogamete would have an advantage over an average-sized one, because it would get its embryo off to a good start by giving it a large initial food supply. There might therefore have been an evolutionary trend towards larger gametes. But there was a catch. The evolution of isogamete which were larger than was strictly necessary would have opened the door to selfish exploitation. Individuals who produced smaller than average gametes could cash in, provided they could ensure that their small gametes fused with extra-big ones. This could be achieved by making the small ones more mobile, and able to seek out large ones actively. The advantage to an individual of producing small, rapidly moving gametes would be that he could afford to make a large number of gametes, and therefore could potentially have more children. Natural selection favoured the production of sex cells which were small, and which actively sought out big ones to fuse with. So we can think of two divergent sexual 'strategies' evolving. There was the large investment or 'honest' strategy. This automatically opened the way for a small-investment exploitative or 'sneaky' strategy. Once the divergence between the two strategies had started, it would have continued in runaway fashion. Medium-sized intermediates would have been penalized, because they did not enjoy the advantages of the two more extreme strategies. The sneaky ones would have evolved smaller and smaller size, and faster mobility. The honest ones would have evolved larger and larger size, to compensate for the ever-smaller investment contributed by the sneaky ones, and they became immobile because they would always be actively chased by the sneaky ones anyway. Each honest one would 'prefer' to fuse with another honest one. But the selection pressure to lock out sneaky ones would have been weaker than the pressure on sneaky ones to duck under the barrier: the sneaky ones had more to lose, and they therefore won the evolutionary battle. The honest ones became eggs, and the sneaky ones became sperms.
So that explains how George probably got his sneaky swimmers.
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