[TED#1.2] Marlene Zuk: What we learn from insects’ kinky sex lives

Now, I will maintain. and I think I can defend, what may seem like a surprising statement. I think sex in insects is more interesting than sex in people. (Laughter) And the wild variety that we see makes us challenge some of our own assumptions about what it means to be male and female. Of course, to start with, a lot of insects don't need to have sex at all to reproduce. Female aphids can make little, tiny clones of themselves without ever mating. Virgin birth, right there. On your rose bushes. (Laughter) When they do have sex, even their sperm is more interesting than human sperm. There are some kinds of fruit flieswhose sperm is longer than the male's own body. And that's important because the males use their sperm to compete. Now, male insects do compete with weapons, like the horns on these beetles. But they also compete after mating with their sperm. Dragonflies and damselflies have penises that look kind of like Swiss Army knives with all of the attachments pulled out. (Laughter) They use these formidable devices like scoops, to remove the sperm from previous males that the female has mated with. (Laughter)So, what can we learn from this? (Laughter) All right, it is not a lesson in the sense of us imitating them or of them setting an example for us to follow. Which, given this, is probably just as well. And also, did I mention sexual cannibalism is rampant among insects? So, no, that's not the point. But what I think insects do, is break a lot of the rules that we humans have about the sex roles. So, people have this idea that nature dictates kind of a 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. So that males are always supposed to be dominant and aggressive, and females are passive and coy.

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출처 : http://www.ted.com/talks/marlene_zuk_what_we_learn_from_insects_kinky_sex_lives/transcript?language=en