I may be wrong about this, but I suspect that there are many people out there, both men and women, who, after hearing for weeks about Harvey Weinstein, and observing the avalanche of condemnation of his behavior and cries of dismay at how a blatant sexual predator could get away with it for decades, say to themselves, cynically:

“That’s all well and good, but nothing’s going to change. People were up in arms about Clinton and Trump and Cosby and Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, and what good did it do? It’s the way nature made us. Those guys were alpha males, and alpha males get what they want, including women.

Look at our cousins. Is that old grayback gorilla who’s king of the hill going to take no for an answer from a female in his group? No way. Let’s face it, male primates do what nature has programmed them to do, and no amount of hand-wringing and high-minded moralizing is going to change anything.”

There are two possible responses to this rather despairing assessment of the human male. One consists in pointing out that we humans are as much a product of cultural as of biological evolution, and that, over and over again throughout history we have modified our biologically driven behaviors as a consequence of cultural influences. This is true, but it seems to concede the premise that male misbehavior is built into the human genome because of our evolutionary heritage. And, in an important sense, that is not true.

There’s no doubt that, for many of our close relatives — gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans — the males are substantially larger than the females, are sexually aggressive toward them and, through intimidation and violence, virtually control the females’ mating activities. Moreover, males of those species create hierarchies through competition with one another and the dominant male in the hierarchy impregnates most of the females that come into estrus.

These hierarchies are impermanent, however, for younger males regularly challenge the dominant one and eventually replace him. That’s why infanticide is common among these primates. Any infants that already exist when a new male assumes dominance are not his. It’s also characteristic of these apes that males do not help in any way with child rearing.

But that isn’t the only primate evolutionary path. Pygmy chimpanzees, called bonobos, for example, are strikingly different. Bonobo males do not compete for dominance and sexual aggressiveness toward females is rare. Both male and female bonobos engage in sexual behaviors frequently, with many individuals, of both sexes, and even when the females are not fertile. Childrearing, however, follows the ape pattern, and is entirely a female responsibility.

We human apes have taken yet a different path. Human males are far less physically threatening to females than other ape males, and less aggressive. There is less of a size difference between the sexes, and males lack the lethal weapon that other ape males have: large, razor-sharp canine teeth. Human males are also unique in that they assist in raising young. Perhaps because of that, they are much less promiscuous than their ape counterparts. Human females have a number of traits unique to our species: concealed ovulation, permanent breasts, an hour-glass body shape, and a desire for sexual activity as both a pair-bonding device and a source of pleasure.

Why have humans evolved so differently? For a great many years the default evolutionary explanation of why any organism has become what it is, has been “natural selection.” That’s Darwin’s theory that random genetic mutations produce a variety of traits in an organism and some of those turn out to be adaptive, i.e. they enhance survival and reproductive success in a given environment. Those traits constitute what is usually called “fitness,” and they persist, through inheritance, and accumulate.

But Darwin thought there was another evolutionary mechanism: sexual selection. When females, for example, are free to choose which of the available males they will mate with, that will also have evolutionary consequences, and their choices may or may not be the same as those which “nature” makes. In other words, what the females find attractive in a male may not coincide with his “fitness,” in the natural selection sense.

Biologist Richard Prum, who is an advocate for the importance of sexual selection, contends that females choose males that they find attractive, and that attractiveness often involves ornamental features of the male’s appearance, such as color, or behavioral traits like elaborate courtship performances. These aesthetically-guided choices will vary in unpredictable ways.

But Prum also believes that there is a predictable element in female selection: females choose mates with traits that are likely to enhance something that they value highly, viz. their freedom to choose their mates. So, males that are more physically intimidating, or sexually aggressive and coercive, are less likely to be selected, Over evolutionary time, these undesirable traits gradually disappear.

Prum thinks it probable that human evolution has been profoundly affected by sexual selection. In our species, both females and males choose mates, so we should find the effects of selection in both sexes. And we do. In fact, all of the traits mentioned above could well have resulted, at least in part, from sexual selection. Yet perhaps most importantly, human females, in the process of acquiring and preserving their sexual autonomy through mate choice, have shaped the human male into a radically different kind of ape.

I don’t deny that there are plenty of Harvey Weinsteins around today. But at least it’s not because human males are all gorillas under the skin, nor because human females have acquiesced in being the prey of sexual predators.

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU’s Oboler Library in 2006.