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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)
Revising Darwin On Sex Roles and Human Implications of the Latest Thinking About Such Matters
There is a lot the average citizen, myself included, does not know about evolution. For that matter, there remains much that evolutionists don't know about evolution. In some ways, according to scholars who assembled recently under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Darwin's basic concept continues to ...well, evolve.
Among the subspecialties of experts who concern themselves with fine tuning and even revising some of the basic tenets of evolution that Darwin outlined in his extraordinary work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) are those who are known as "gender scientists." Some gender scientists believe Darwin was wrong about sex, or at least that he did not grasp the big picture, as they describe it.
According to some of these investigators, there is new evidence that "gender is not limited to the static male/female binary." Sex, some researchers believe, has social as well as reproductive uses. (On a somewhat related matter, did you know that some fish change their sex without any intervention by gender reassignment fish? That is an amazing thing to do, even for a fish. Think of the possibilities.) In some species, classification into one category or another is impossible. Further, most plants and some fish are hermaphrodites -- capable of producing eggs and sperm.
When Darwin described sexual selection, he focused on the process wherein physical and behavioral traits are favored that increase the odds that animals will reproduce. Such traits, Darwin noted, do not necessarily serve survival purposes for the animal, but do serve the species over time. A well-known case is the male praying mantis that presents for mating despite knowing his lover will eat him as they copulate. At least we assume he knows that. He dies, but passes along his genes.
In any event, the revisionists contrast Darwin's views on sex, versus more recent conclusions. Darwin portrayed the female species as mating rarely and choosing their mates carefully. The female behavior favored the selection of mates most likely to contribute healthy offspring. Males, according to Darwin, were just the opposite, aggressive and promiscuous, with less risk of procreation losses given that, unlike eggs, their sperm are plentiful and their responsibilities to offspring negligible or nil. It is traits like this that lead even some members of the male sex in good standing to say unkind thing about their own gender, as Mark Twain once did when he associated procreation-oriented males to the people of a well known European nation, "France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. France has usually been governed by prostitutes."
In similar manner, Darwin explained male sex traits. A peacock of the male persuasion, for instance, might be somewhat more vulnerable to predators due to its spectacular but unwieldy tail, but it serves the vital purpose of driving female peacocks to lust and consummation of peacock passion. Many humans have risked their own tails for similar opportunities. Now along come the gender scientists who say all this was too simple, and seek to update and refine parts of Darwin's theory of evolution.
Among other things, they note that some species, such as the Japanese macaque, evolved nicely with what seems to be a major role reversal from Darwin role typing. The female macaque, for instance, competes for the males, many of which ignore her despite desperate efforts for attention.
In a book about this Darwinian revisionism entitled Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (University of California Press, 2003), Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden suggests that much empirical evidence refutes Darwinian sexual selection. Roughgarden writes, "The exceptions are so numerous they cry out for explanation." Mating, she argues, functions for building relationships as well as procreating, not just sexual selection (as Darwin held.) "Female choice, I'm pretty sure, has much more to do with managing male power than it does with trying to obtain good genes."
In the 1980s, an anthropologist named Sarah Hrdy found that female langur monkeys promiscuously mate with many males, in part as a way to protect their offspring. At least that was the hypothesis of Dr. Hrdy, since dominant male langurs regularly kill babies that aren't their own. The female promiscuity thus can be shown to serve social as well as reproductive uses.
Roughgarden presents other examples. She describes a "market economy" among some species (for example, male waterbucks) where sexual opportunity is traded for other resources. Darwin noted that homosexual behavior is common among some species (approximately 300 vertebrates, including monkeys, flamingoes and male sheep, practice homosexual behavior), but did not explain it. The gender scientists do, suggesting it has a social role, such as among the pygmy chimpanzees who employ the practice to "calm tensions after a squabble, or to make sure that a large amount of food is shared."
Gender scientists caution against extrapolating animal behavior to humans, as some have tried to do since Darwin's time. One remarked, "People often look to animals to decide for themselves what's natural and what's not natural. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing to do. I mean, animals engage in cannibalism and infanticide. They also don't take care of elderly individuals. Just because animals do something doesn't make it right or wrong." (See "Darwin May Have Been All Wrong About Sex," by Stephanie Chasteen in the Stanford Report, February 19, 2002.)
Much of this debate can be tied to contemporary shifts in what we do and wish to expect of ourselves. Some of it is sexual politics, fought on a neutral turf. Gender identity issues are topical today far more so than when Darwin was writing or defending The Origin of the Species. Biology remains a major part of human destiny, but is not as fixed, especially socially, as once was the case.
Be well, and whatever sexual role you choose to play, keep it legal, be nice and don't be too hard on yourself for being weird -- and always try to look on the bright side of life.
Domain: purposeSubdomain: relationships
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