Saint Calvin, and the Evidence He Stands For

A teaching of Natural Revelation Church. Observation II.

The anecdote

President and Mrs Coolidge were shown around a government poultry farm, on separate tours.

Mrs Coolidge, passing the chicken pens, asked the farmer how often the rooster performed his duties. Dozens of times a day, she was told. Tell that to the President, she said.

When the President reached the same pen, the remark was passed on. He asked whether it was the same hen each time. No, the farmer said — a different hen every time.

Tell that to Mrs Coolidge.

The story is almost certainly untrue. We say so at the outset, because a church whose first principle is honest observation cannot open with a fable it has not labelled. There is no contemporary record of it; it circulated among researchers and reached print decades later.

But the thing it names is real — and the naming was itself a joke, told deadpan, which is the most fitting provenance a saint of this Church could have.

Frank Beach, the founder of behavioural endocrinology, had worked on rat sexual behaviour with Lisbeth Jordan in 1955; Alan Fisher found that introducing a new female drove the numbers back up, and Beach's group replicated it. When Dick Whalen presented the work to the Western Psychological Association in 1958, Beach told him to call it the Coolidge Effect — and to offer the meeting no explanation whatever for the name.

He offered none. It has been called the Coolidge Effect ever since.

What the effect actually is

Place a male rat with a receptive female and he will mate until he stops — not from exhaustion but from satiety. He is finished. Return the same female and he remains finished.

Introduce a different female and he is not finished at all.

The pattern has been demonstrated across a great many species — rodents, cattle, sheep — and it is not a moral observation about males. Females of several species show it too, where the experiment has been run properly. The mechanism appears to be dopaminergic: novelty re-engages the reward circuitry that satiety had switched off. What looks like appetite is closer to attention.

That is the whole of it. It is not a claim that anyone must act on anything, and this Church makes no such claim. It is a fact about how a nervous system was built.

The other measurement

Sperm competition is what occurs when the sperm of more than one male are present in a female's reproductive tract at the same time. Where it happens often over evolutionary time, anatomy responds — and among the great apes the anatomy is unusually easy to read.

Chimpanzees mate promiscuously, several males with one female in close succession. Their testes are enormous for their body size: they produce sperm in volume, because volume is what wins that particular contest.

Gorillas live in single-male groups where a silverback's paternity is settled by fighting other males, not by outproducing them. A gorilla is several times the mass of a chimpanzee and his testes are a fraction of the size. There is nothing to compete with once the fight is over.

Humans sit between the two, and much closer to the gorilla.

That is the finding, and it is worth stating with precision, because it is routinely overstated in both directions. Human anatomy does not describe a species built for indiscriminate promiscuity — the chimpanzee is that species, and we are not it. Nor does it describe a species built for lifelong exclusive pairs, or the figure would sit at the gorilla's end. It describes a species with some history of sperm competition. Some. Not none.

An observation the Church has retired

Robin Baker and Mark Bellis proposed that human ejaculate contained distinct classes of sperm with distinct jobs — some to fertilise, and some whose only function was to attack the sperm of rival males, destroying themselves in the process. The "kamikaze sperm" hypothesis was written up in popular books and repeated for years.

It did not survive examination. In 1999 Moore, Martin and Birkhead mixed samples from fifteen men in every combination and looked for the predicted killing, clumping and damage. They found none, and published under the title No evidence for killer sperm or other selective interactions between human spermatozoa in ejaculates of different males in vitro. It remains the only serious attempt at replication, and it failed. The hypothesis has fallen out of favour.

We record it here rather than omit it, for two reasons. It is the sort of claim that supports an argument this Church might like to make, which is exactly when one should be most careful. And the Register of this Church does not delete: a teaching found wanting is marked superseded and left legible, so that anyone may see what we once thought and why we stopped thinking it.

What this Church takes from it

Not licence. Nothing here instructs anyone to do anything, and the man these findings are named after was, by every account, entirely faithful to his wife.

What we take is the First Principle, made concrete.

If the natural order is testimony, then the Coolidge Effect is in the text, and so is the anatomy. They were not smuggled in. They are on the same page as everything a preacher is happy to quote. A tradition which calls nature the work of God and then declares this particular chapter disordered is not reading its own scripture; it is editing it, and hoping the congregation does not check.

We decline to edit it. We also decline to draw from it any conclusion it does not support — that men are helpless, that fidelity is unnatural, that anyone is owed anything. The evidence says a species carries a capacity for novelty-seeking and a modest evolutionary history of competition. It says nothing whatever about what any particular person should do on a Tuesday.

What follows is the Third Principle. A drive that is acknowledged can be discussed, weighed, resisted, indulged or set aside by agreement between adults. A drive that is denied cannot be any of those things. It can only be hidden — and the damage done in these matters is done almost entirely by the hiding.

Saint Calvin is canonised for the shape of his reply. He was told a fact about a rooster, he asked the one question that made it meaningful, and he repeated it without embarrassment to a room that would rather not have heard it.

That is the method of this Church.

Sources

The naming. Frank A. Beach, founder of behavioural endocrinology; the term was deployed by Dick Whalen at the Western Psychological Association, 1958, at Beach's instruction and without explanation.

The comparative anatomy. A. H. Harcourt, P. H. Harvey, S. G. Larson and R. V. Short, "Testis weight, body weight and breeding system in primates," Nature 293 (1981), 55–57. The founding paper on relative testis mass and mating system, and still the reference point.

The retired hypothesis. R. R. Baker and M. A. Bellis for the original claim; H. D. M. Moore, M. Martin and T. R. Birkhead, "No evidence for killer sperm or other selective interactions between human spermatozoa in ejaculates of different males in vitro" (1999), for the failed replication.

Entered on the Register of Observations.