Once it reached its current size, Johnson transported the twine to a giant
portico on his front lawn, where it sat until he passed away in 1989.

The
townspeople of Darwin, who recognize a good thing when they see it, had the city
move the ball to a special Plexiglas shelter across from a park, where anyone
who wants to can admire it, and be inspired by it.

So proud is Darwin of its twine that it is feted the second Saturday of every August
with a festival called “Twine Ball Days.”

For more — much more — on the twine ball and related phenomena, check out Twine Inertia.

There are some male mammals without nipples, a fact I was alerted
to by Aristotle, who wrote “Such, for instance, is the case with
horses, some stallions being destitute of these parts.”

Since Aristotle’s medical facts were sometimes a bit wobbly — he
said cabbage cures hangovers — I called an equine veterinarian. “I
have never seen a stallion with nipples,” she declared flatly. “And
I have looked around down there.” As far as I know, she’s never
seen a bald stallion, either, so that’s how they avoid being called
reptiles.

The veterinarian pointed out that a mare’s two nipples are located
toward the tail end of the body, as opposed to the chic head-end
location in humans. This, she daintily hinted, might be why
stallions don’t exhibit nipples. “There’s no room.”

These shocking facts sent me on a quest for other data on animal
nipples or, as medical types have long preferred to say, mammae.
Male nipples? Mammae masculinae. (If you need to be even more
obscure you can also call a nipple a mamilla or a thelium.)

My mother, when I told her of my research, may have been hinting
that there were more hard-hitting stories I could be working on by
bringing up the folk analogy “as useless as tits on a boar hog.” My
research appears to indicate that boar hogs do in fact have tits.
Which they are not known to use.

Not only do male platypuses not have nipples, neither do females.
The milk simply flows out through pores and is licked up by baby
platypuses. And while platypuses are not actually categorized as
reptiles, you’ll notice that people are always talking about how
“primitive” they are and making fun of their noses.

I would have assumed that nipples were only available in even
numbers had I not learned that female possums, for example, have
between seven and 25 nipples. The delightful Virginia opossum, which
inhabits the middles of American roads and highways, usually has
13, efficiently arranged in an open circle with one in the center.
This information should not tempt you to snicker and point the next
time you see a possum: They also have 50 teeth.

Most mammals, however, stick to even numbers of nipples, and often
the males get to have them too. In addition to boar hogs, dogs,
cats, all primates and many other animals feature the mamma
masculina.

It seems that human embryos develop mammary tissue before they
bother to check on whether they’re going to be male or female and
start modifying the basic plan with surges of this or that hormone.
After only a few weeks, milk ridges form — two stripes of tissue
that start in the armpits, curve out over the chest, go straight
down the stomach and then veer in toward the groin, ending
somewhere high on each thigh. Later the milk ridges regress to some
extent, usually leaving us with just two nipples.

Quite a few people end up with an extra, or supernumerary nipple
somewhere along the trail of the milk ridge, however. (One man had
five.) Sometimes they can’t be mistaken for anything but a nipple,
and other times they look like a mole. In fact, many people with
supernumerary nipples don’t know they have them until some
officious and informative person starts examining their moles.
Extras often run in families — Darwin cites two brothers who each
had a supernumerary nipple. Anyone who thinks that’s weird should
immediately leave the room and go check his or her torso for moles. How
do you know you’re not head-to-foot extra nipples and we’ve all
just been too polite to mention it?

What of male nipples as erogenous zones? You know they are, or why
would they be banished from the chest of Ken? (To avoid inflaming
Barbie.) I have looked into the matter of G.I. Joe: I never owned a
G.I. Joe, though I recall liking his accessories, particularly the
canteen. (Don’t take that the wrong way. Sometimes a canteen is
just a canteen.)

I asked a friend, who indicated with some annoyance that her
childhood G.I. Joes were just as smooth-chested as Ken. But it
seems that over the years G.I. Joe bulked up, and from being an
average Joe with an average physique became an eerily burly
muscle man who apparently never leaves the gym except to go to the
rifle range. Somewhere along the line some G.I. Joes acquired
nipples to go with their superior muscle definition and popping
veins. The effect is not particularly erotic: I suspect they’re
just there to give the viewer a reassuring landmark among all the
unfamiliar ripples of the bodybuilder’s torso caused by out-of-control delts, pecs, abs, intercostals and other oddities.

(In addition to the mute testimony of dolls, many actual men state
emphatically that male nipples are erogenous zones.)

Of course, the principal reason for the nipple’s enduring
popularity is its function as a food delivery device. Ask any baby.
Ask any father who has held his child in his arms and suddenly had
said infant jerk its head to the side and latch optimistically onto
a nipple. After a moment, the baby gives the father the reproachful
look of an innocent child betrayed: You’re no fun!

Darwin, who thought about everything, naturally wondered about
nipples. He collected case reports of men and women with extra
nipples (which he called mammae erraticae), including the case of
a woman who allegedly nourished a child via an extra nipple on her
thigh. (Why? Why not use the ones on her chest? Pure showboating,
that’s my guess.) This led him to suspect that we are descended
from creatures with more than just the two mammae.

He also pondered male nipples. In “The Descent of Man,” Darwin
suggests the possibility that “long after the progenitors of the
whole mammalian class had ceased to be androgynous, both sexes
yielded milk, and thus nourished their young; and in the case of
marsupials, that both sexes carried their young in marsupial
sacks.”

Darwin defended mammae masculinae: “The mammary glands and nipples,
as they exist in male mammals, can indeed hardly be called
rudimentary; they are merely not full developed, and not
functionally active.” He suggested that ancestral males gave up the
practice of nursing, after a prolonged period, perhaps because
litters were smaller. When “the males ceased to give this aid,
disuse to the organs during maturity would lead to their becoming
inactive; and … this state of inactivity would probably be
transmitted to the males at the corresponding age of maturity. But
at an earlier age these organs would be left unaffected, so that
they would be almost equally well developed in the young of both
sexes.”

Surely this is why everybody loves Darwin. Who else was thinking up
ancestral father animals suckling pouches full of thirsty babies?

I asked mammalogist Douglas Long, collections manager for
ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences,
whether there’s any new thinking on this particular suggestion of
Darwin’s. “Unfortunately, the fossil record doesn’t give much of
a clue at all,” Long said. “It’s very intriguing.”

While there’s no evidence to refute or support Darwin’s hypothesis,
Long points out that of the thousands of species of living mammals,
“Not a single one has a male that is able to lactate in any way.”
Why all the male nipples, then? Long cites the embryologic process
that creates mammary tissue and also notes that, evolutionarily
speaking, “It’s a lot more difficult to lose an organ than develop
an organ … It could be that males still have nipples because
there’s nothing deleterious about nipples. There’s no real need to
get rid of them. Why do we still have toenails, for example? Other
animals use them for digging, scratching or fighting, but we
don’t. They’re useless but at the same time they don’t distract
from the business of living.”

Pigeons and a couple of species of fish do something similar to
suckling their young, a task they split down the middle. Male and
female pigeons and doves feed their nestlings “pigeon’s milk,” a
cheesy substance they manufacture in their crops. Discus and orange
chromide fish feed their young with a nutritious mucus from the
sides of their bodies.

(Which reminds me. I do not want to hear about the breast being
just a modified sweat gland one more time, OK? That was a long
time ago and it was a pretty radical modification. Milk isn’t
sweat. Do you ever hear people say “the sweat of human kindness,”
“She rode a sweat-white horse” or “got sweat?” There’s a reason:
Milk is different from sweat. Until I hear you describe your hand
as a modified flipper, there will be no more talk of sweat glands.)

Male humans look pretty unhelpful next to pigeons. Newborn babies,
still pumped full of maternal hormones, usually lactate slightly,
producing a few drops of “witch’s milk.” Medical conditions like
acromegaly (excess growth hormone) can induce male lactation.

Dr. Miriam Stoppard, author of “The Breast Book,” agrees with
Darwin that male nipples are more than rudimentary, cheerfully
suggesting that “men could develop fully functional breasts given
the right hormonal conditions.”

That’s right. If men would just submit themselves to an intense
barrage of hormone therapy, affecting every organ system of the
body in unknown ways, maybe they would be able to suckle their
young and throw off the charge of reptilianism once and for all.
But where is the research? Where is the funding? Where is the will?

Whither the male nipple? Is it ever likely to stomp off in an
evolutionary snit over not getting any respect (“Enough about boar
hogs!”) and leave male humans as smooth-chested as stallions or
bulls? It seems unlikely. They’ve managed to hang in there all
these millennia, and many guys speak well of their nipples and
would clearly vote to retain them. Ask any boar hog and he’ll
tell you the same.

On the lecture circuit, her audiences include federal judges, fellow anthropologists and sex workers. Her latest book, “The Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce” (Norton, 1992), explores mating and divorce among humans and other animals. In 1982, Fisher published “The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior” (William Morrow). She is currently finishing a book about “how gender differences in the brain will play out in the next century.” She’s also studying “the brain physiology of infatuation” — what actually happens inside the brain when humans fall madly in love.

Americans “love love,” she tells me — and Fisher is mad about the subject, herself. She recently shared some of her thoughts on her favorite subject with Salon.

My first thought, when I saw Monica Lewinsky’s face on the front page of the New York Post was: “If you’re sleeping with a head of state in this day and age, you don’t tell anyone!”

Women talk. That’s human nature. Any woman having an affair with the president would talk — but usually, it’s who you talk to. If Bill Clinton had an extramarital affair, he should have picked a woman who had a lot to lose. Monica didn’t have a lot to lose — she’s young. And her mother has bragged about sleeping with an opera singer — they both seem to be a little questionable.

When men gossip, they talk about sports and business. Women talk about feelings and lovers because women are more interested in “connection.”

Why are men less likely to discuss sex?

It’s adaptive strategy. If a man tells a man whom he’s sleeping with, he may be in competition with that man tomorrow afternoon. It’s not adaptive for men to talk about their sexual connections because they may get cut off from them. But it’s often adaptive for a woman to talk about her sexual connections because, by gossiping, she’s building networks with other women.

We think we’re building something, but girl talk can be self-destructive, as Lewinksy may have discovered. Don’t you think Linda Tripp’s behavior was profoundly hostile?

Very hostile. That part of it troubles me more than any other — that Linda Tripp betrayed her friend and used all that information for her own purposes.

Are we in denial about the animosity that exists between females?

Yes. Primatologists have discovered what American women somehow have missed: Women are in direct competition with other women. This whole thing of getting together for women’s rights has clouded our eyes to the Darwinian nature of “survival of the fittest.” Women will compete with other women just as men will compete with other men, and they do it very cleverly.

You take one look at Lewinsky and Tripp and you have to wonder: Why did this young, bubbly chick confide in such a sour-looking stepsister? That’s a recipe for betrayal.

You’ve got to pick your friends, and it’s remarkable how many women don’t! It’s stunning. Even me — I said something to somebody recently that could be used against me! But we do this to connect.

Are women in other cultures more realistic about rivalry and less likely to talk freely with other women? Or does every culture have its trusting, chatty Monicas and scheming Lindas?

Every culture in the world. This scenario happened two million years ago in the grasslands of Africa, and it happened in ancient Greece and ancient China. Gossip evolved along with the evolution of language, and gossip is very useful. It is basically gossip which may pull down this president.

Do you think Clinton’s sex life should be of concern to us?

No, it’s really nobody’s business. I don’t even think it’s anybody’s business that he lied. Americans seem to assume that, if you have poor judgment in your sex life and you lie about it, you are also going to have poor judgment in your business or political life and lie about that. But there’s no evidence of this. There’s a great deal of evidence from around the world that men who have sticky sex lives can still conduct the business of running a country perfectly well. We have had about 14 presidents about whom there were allegations of either a mistress or an extra affair or even an illegitimate child. And these men still ran our country.

Do you find that you have to tone down some of your ideas in order to reach the public?

I almost got into trouble when I appeared on CNN’s “Talk Back Live.” They asked: What is all this discussion doing to our children? There were three of us — [former Nixon advisor] John Dean, myself and a history academic. So I jumped in and said, “Well, in many traditional societies, children grow up knowing everything about the community. They start knowing about sex and even seeing sex as soon as they’re conscious.” I got that far and the academic leapt down my throat. He basically said that children should not be seeing this kind of “seamy” sex. What I didn’t have time to say was: If you want children to have moral values, then you’ve got to show them the bad parts as well as the good so that they can build their moral understanding of what is good and what is bad. You can’t pull them out of a glass box at age 21 and expect them to make intelligent moral decisions about sex — or about anything else — if you don’t let them ride through the times. In the New York school system, when a few teachers come in and talk only about anatomy — it’s called an organ recital.

A surprising number of baby boomers in this country were deprived of a real education when it comes to sex. How about you?

My first memory of sex in my family involves walking on the beach in Cape Cod on a beautiful sunny day in late October with my twin sister, my mother and my father. I must have been 5 or 6. My father came over to my twin sister and me, gave us his watch and said, “You go up the beach, take this tennis ball and have fun. And don’t come back — don’t look back — until the minute hand …”

How long did they take?

I don’t remember! But I do remember shuffling up the beach, very sad to be ostracized, waiting for the time to go by and then coming back. Mother and dad were very different: Dad was smoking his pipe, and mother was acting kittenish! I remember that moment distinctly — something had gone on that was good, that made my life easier in this family. Mother had turned into a very sweet person and it turned into being a very nice day at the beach.

All through my childhood, sex was something that was natural and that one should learn to do well so that you had a good life. I was never sneaking in to look at my parents’ sex books — their sex books were right there. The only thing I inherited from my father was 20 books on sex. He was a wonderful man.

America is the collective child that hasn’t been taught about the closed door. We’re experts on sexual morality yet we’re ignorant about sexual etiquette. Why?

Americans are very religious about sex — compared to other Western people and to Asian people. Asian societies do not connect sex with sin. They connect it with social responsibility. In Japan and China, there are many sexual taboos — what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. But you’re not supposed to do it because it will be offensive to your family, not because it will be offensive to God.

Is this fuss really about whether Clinton’s sexual behavior offends God?

Actually, this fuss is about people thinking he has lied, about lying. Unlike most people in the world, Americans have this belief in rugged honesty at all costs: If you aren’t honest, you’re not good. Whereas many peoples in Latin America, for example, and throughout much of Asia, will graciously say dishonest things in order to be polite. I would say that, in most tribal societies, where community is absolutely essential, most people are willing to tell white lies to smooth over difficult social situations.

In much of the world, in fact, greasing social relations is far more important than what would be regarded as brutal honesty. Americans will tell you the truth even when it’s insulting. It may be the frontier mentality that we come from. Throughout Asia and Europe, people have been trying to get along with each other for thousands of years.

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Many people have been comparing American attitudes toward extramarital sex with French or Italian attitudes. Can we look at this in larger terms?

In 84 percent of worldwide cultures, men are permitted to have more than one wife. And if they are rich, they can take as many wives as they can afford. The Kung Bushmen of Southern Africa are polygynous, and if a man is rich or charismatic enough, and he can get more than one wife, everybody admires him for it. When I lived with the Navajo in New Mexico, there were some men who had two or three wives, or even four wives. In every polygynous culture, the first wife is generally the primary or most powerful wife. She gets more resources, she gets the most status, and then there are secondary, tertiary or minor wives.

So these households don’t breed sexual anarchy.

Oh, it’s totally organized. Sex is organized in every culture in the world. Every culture has rules about who you can sleep with and who you cannot sleep with. I think that was the first thing that mankind invented — rules for who you sleep with.

Many Americans like to castigate their own culture for being puritanical. How do we rate, in world terms?

Among the Ulithi, in Polynesia, there is one day every year on which you can pick any partner you want — and go and picnic and make love. They have a day off from their normal sex practices. We don’t have that. But every culture has sexual taboos. There are a great many societies that won’t even discuss homosexuality. And traditional societies often have taboos about menstruation. One group of people in Amazonia, the Mehinaku, regard a menstruating woman as profoundly polluting. She could kill you if she’s menstruating, so the moment she starts, she can’t touch any of the food or the utensils. She has to leave the community and sit in a menstrual hut for a few days.

We routinely see TV commercials that talk about menstruation in great detail.

Yes, and we often make love when we’re menstruating. Even if we don’t, it’s not “poisonous,” it’s not polluting. Many societies have taboos against intercourse before they go on an important trip or during certain festivals. The rest of the world has all kinds of incest taboos. In many cultures, you can’t go out with somebody from a particular clan or with someone who has a particular genetic or cultural relationship to you. Mainstream Americans have an incest taboo but it’s nowhere near as rigid as the Navajo incest taboo: You cannot go out with someone from your own clan.

How large is a Navajo clan? Is this like saying you can’t go out with your cousin?

Well, a clan is a related group of people — but it’s almost like saying, on any New York City block, that you can go out with anybody who lives on the opposite side of the street but with nobody who lives on the same side. It’s a lot of people.

Everyone has been making fun of Clinton for apparently believing that oral sex is not adultery.

Around the world, adultery is defined entirely differently in different places. The Lozi in West Africa believe that giving a beer to a woman and carrying the beer into the woods is adultery.

Is Clinton’s predicament somehow a sign of things to come — or not — for other important men? Is the party basically over for the American alpha male?

Americans are out gunning for men. With the growing economic power of women in the course of this century, we are seeing a real turn toward curtailing male sexuality — and expressing female sexuality. Adultery in the Western tradition was defined as the woman having extra partners. It’s generally men who have been permitted to have extra lovers. With women’s growing economic power, the same rules are applying to both sexes.

It seems that the alpha male is also being asked to settle for the sex life of a middle management male. Can we really democratize sexual behavior?

There is a chemical relationship between rank and sexuality. Testosterone: If you inject a male bird or monkey — or even a fish — with testosterone, he will scramble and rise up the dominance hierarchy. The male drive to get to the top is associated with testosterone, and men have 10 times more than women. A high level of testosterone is associated with three things: rank, risk taking and a high sex drive. Generally the males at the top of a dominance hierarchy have more sexual opportunities than those in the middle or at the bottom — and they take those opportunities. Women around the world and females in other species are interested in these males. Clinton has probably maintained high levels of testosterone all his life. But levels of testosterone go up when you win — and here’s a man who has been on a winning streak. So, when you ask a man of high rank who has very high levels of testosterone — and he has girls constantly throwing themselves at him — not to satisfy his high sex drive, you are asking him to rise above his human nature. And, from a Darwinian perspective, we are asking him to settle for less.

Hillary Clinton has some important attributes, such as loyalty and shrewdness, that many powerful men seek in a mistress. And Bill — if he had an affair with Monica — seems to have very poor judgment.

In some societies, you would want a third or fourth wife who is docile and young, who won’t compete with the first wife. So you wouldn’t want a clever woman who is political.

So in some societies, Monica Lewinsky would have been an ideal romantic partner for Clinton?

Absolutely. In a different society, he could have moved Monica in, and she could have slowly become the second wife — and the first wife would not lose her power and status. The second wife wouldn’t have the power and status but she would have the resources of the man and the sexual focus of the man. In a polygynous society, a father would be pleased if his daughter attracted the attention of the most powerful male — but in this society, he might be displeased, because “she’s wasting her time.” So, in a different society, Monica would be a very good choice.

And in ours?

Not a good choice — someone like Camilla Parker-Bowles would be a better deal because she’s got political savvy. She’s not going to blab to people she doesn’t know. She’s not going to have that exuberant air when she’s around him. She has a sophistication that this girl doesn’t have.

Oral sex has been getting a bad rap during this scandal. But a man who restricts extramarital sex to oral sex may have reason to feel “less” adulterous because he can’t father a child that way.

No question about it. That is a different kind of relationship. It protects the woman and protects his existing family. She can’t get pregnant and bear a child that demands resources that would go to the child of his first wife.

In “Anatomy of Love,” you divide love into three varieties: lust, infatuation and attachment. Are they really so distinct?

Lust — or the drive for sexual gratification — is associated with lots of testosterone in the brain. Infatuation or passionate love — that elation, that euphoria — is associated with dopamine and norepinephrine, which are natural stimulants. It certainly appears like an infatuation on Monica’s part: the glistening eyes; the gleaming, smiling face; the compulsive need to talk about it — a person who will wait three hours on the street for him to come by — this is a brain that is overcome by dopamine. Attachment — or that sense of calm and security that you feel with a long-term partner — is associated with different chemicals, basically oxytocin and vasopressin. I would guess that Bill and Hillary feel deeply attached. It’s been a long team effort. It may still be a sexual relationship, but it is certainly a strong unit that pulls together in times of stress.

So, from Bill’s point of view, sex with Hillary would be a cocktail of “testosterone plus oxtysocin” and sex with Monica would be “testosterone plus dopamine”?

Any mixture is possible. Bill may experience the sex drive with his wife along with attachment. If he had an affair with Monica, it may have been infatuation plus sex. And with Paula Jones, it may well have been a momentary sex urge, if it was something at all. During the course of human evolution, these three emotions — lust, infatuation, attachment — have become somewhat unlinked from one another, and our brain is built to love more than one person at one time. The human animal is not well built for modern American life. Particularly, the brain is not well-suited for living in a glass bowl, as the president does, with everyone watching — not when we have so many things coming together at the same time.