Marshalling history, statistics, and science, this was Gamble’s piercing counterargument to Darwin and other evolutionary biologists. She angrily tweezed out their inconsistencies and double standards. The peacock might have had the bigger feathers, she argued, but the peahen still had to exercise her faculties in choosing the best mate. And on the one hand, Darwin suggested that gorillas were too big and strong to become higher social creatures like humans. Yet at the same time he used the fact that men are on average physically bigger than women as evidence of their superiority.
