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January 18 - April 20, 2020
I have learned that it does not suffice for things to be true to just want them to be true.
That does not mean that men and women will ever become the same; there will always be statistical, mean-group psychosexual differences between them, just as there will always be differences between people.
If a theory that goes by the name of feminism turns out to be good science, it just becomes standard science.
Feminism may prompt women to raise particular questions, but it cannot be the determinant of the answers.
“To reject Darwin because some of his ideas came from an analogy with the capitalist society in which he lived, is, precisely, the kind of thing we should not allow our prejudices to lead us to”
Darwin attributed a far more important evolutionary role to females than evolutionary biologists would do for almost a century after him.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell was the first woman to publish a critique of The Descent of Man, four years after its publication. Darwin (and Spencer), she argued in The Sexes throughout Nature (1875), had not given enough attention to the role of females in natural and sexual selection.
A better question would be: How much did feminism have to do with this transformation in primatology (and, as a consequence, in sociobiology)? The answer is: a lot, but mainly in an indirect way. The primary impact of feminism was that it led to more women studying and contributing to biology.
There exist animal species where males intrinsically invest more than females, because the males are the ones delivering the nutrients or hatching the eggs. In these species we see the males being discriminating about mating, and the females competing with each other for access to males. This is the case with, among others, Mormon crickets, seahorses, pipefish, and Panamanian poison arrow frogs.
In a group of shore birds known as phalaropes (sea snipes) the males incubate the eggs and care for the young. Females compete for males and males choose between females. Sexual selection therefore operates more strongly on females. As a consequence they are larger and more aggressive than males and have a brighter plumage. The evolutionary rationale for this pattern is that females have a potentially higher reproduction rate than males.
To set humans apart from even our closest animal relatives as the one species that is exempt from the influences of biology is to suggest that we do indeed possess a defining “essence” and that it is defined by our unique and miraculous freedom from biology. The result is an ideological outlook eerily similar to that of religious creationism. Ehrenreich and McIntosh 1997:12
References to biology in the explanation of human traits tend to be dismissed as ‘reductionist’, ‘biological determinist’, and ‘politically dangerous’, not only in academic feminism, but also in the social sciences in general.
Rosser, for instance, writes: “One can imagine that a society free from inequality between the sexes would not view sex differences research as a valid scientific endeavor” (1992:71—72), by which she suggests that this research is motivated by the wish to sustain socioeconomic inequality between men and women.
Boasian ideas on the nearly limitless malleability of human nature would live on for a while, not because they were scientifically based, but because of their political attractiveness
People are not born equal in strength, health, temperament, or intelligence. This is simply a fact of life no sensible person can deny. We have chosen a system of governance which has decided that despite such inequalities each individual shall have an equal right to just treatment before the law, as well as equal opportunity.
Why have biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer been accused of being ideological, of justifying rape, and of blaming the victim after the publication of their 2000 book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, not only in countless reviews in the popular press, but also by serious academics (e.g., Kimmel 2003; Shields and Steinke 2003; Rosser 2003; Wertheim 2000)?
They retain the Cartesian distinction between the body as a physical organism and the mind as nonphysical. The evidence is overwhelming, however, that our mental life depends entirely on patterns of physiological activity in our brain, the basic plan of which is largely shaped in the womb.
Some go so far as to claim that heterosexual desire is “eroticised power difference,” with no roots in biology at all (Jeffreys 1990, as cited in Patai 1998:130).
the number of children born with intersex genitals is not 4 percent, as Fausto-Sterling (1992) writes, nor 1.7 percent (Fausto-Sterling 2000b), but 0.018 percent (Sax 2002).
An evolutionary explanation does, however, not imply a conscious intent to reproduce.
An example: People like to have sex because sex is fun. This is a very good proximate answer to the question: Why do people have sex? The pleasure we experience while having sex, however, evolved “in order to” ensure that we would do what is necessary in order to propagate our genes. This is an ultimate answer to the question why people have sex. Both answers are right; they are just complementary. With our modern methods of birth control, sex and reproduction are no longer automatically linked. Sex, however, is still fun. Our bodies and minds have evolved over millions of years in an
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Female dunnocks live in cooperative breeding groups in which a female solicits multiple males. These males, in turn, help provision the chicks more or less in proportion to how much opportunity they had to inseminate the female when she was last fertile.
female, Hrdy (1999b) concludes, is doing much more than just selecting the one best male from available suitors. She is actively manipulating information available to males about paternity, in order to protect her offspring and to get resources. By being promiscuous, she is doing all she can to secure the survival of her young.
boys receive more punishment and physical discipline, that they are more allowed to horse around, and that mothers talk more and provide more emotional speech to their daughters than to their sons (Baron-Cohen 2003; Campbell 2002; Geary 1998).
After correcting for all social variables, Baron-Cohen (2003) found that the lower a baby’s prenatal testosterone, the more eye contact it will make as a toddler and the larger its vocabulary will be. At four years of age, lower levels of prenatal testosterone will have led to better levels of language,
It is women of reproductive age who are most restricted in their freedom, not children or postmenopausal women. The rationale for this pattern is, again, hard to identify from a social role perspective, but obvious from a Darwinian point of view. This does not mean that women are doomed to having their sexualities suppressed by men, since male coercive control is conditional. If female resistance becomes too organized and hence too costly to fight, men will be forced to tune down (Smuts 1996).
Or the finding that testosterone administration to postmenopausal women increases their sexual fantasy and sexual activity, and that estrogen and antiandrogen administration to male-to-female transsexuals decreases their sex drive (Bailey 2003).
As Steven Pinker (1997:48) asserts, “[i]f people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.” A denial of human nature, no less than an emphasis on it, can be used for harmful ends.
Evolutionary psychology is also an explicit refutation of the suggestion that one sex might be superior to the other. As David Buss (1996) explains, any notion of superiority is logically incoherent from an evolutionary point of view. A bird’s wings cannot be considered inferior or superior to a fish’s fins, and in the same way neither sex can be considered inferior or superior. Each sex possesses mechanisms designed to deal with its own adaptive problems. Most of these mechanisms are similar for women and men; some, specifically in those domains having to do directly or indirectly with
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If feminists continue to reject the mounting evidence from the biological sciences (e.g., genetics, behavioral genetics, neurophysiology, endocrinology, evolutionary biology) and the social sciences (e.g., cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, artificial intelligence) with regard to the biological underpinnings of human behavior, they back themselves into an embarrassingly uninformed corner. In order to understand human nature and human behavior, all possible sources of information should be taken into account, not just those that exert an ideological appeal to us.
Wright hits the mark in saying that, if feminists—rightfully—want laws that protect women against sexual harassment, they will have to admit that women are in some ways uniquely vulnerable. Men will not feel violated as soon and as deeply by unwanted sexual advances by the other sex, and for good evolutionary reasons.
