    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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