Take the BS by the Horns

Today while I was on my break at work, I sat in the wrong place, surrounded by conversations that distracted and annoyed me, but there wasn't another suitable place for me to sit.  It didn't help that I'm currently reading a novel that I'm very ambivalent about, which I may write about some other time.  That ambivalence made it even harder to concentrate.

Just a couple of feet away from me, two undergraduates were having an animated conversation about artificial intelligence and its implications.  "If you really believe in evolution," said one, "you have to believe that computers are going to get smarter and smarter until they're smarter than humans."  And so on, in that vein.  I gave up trying to concentrate on my book and spoke to them.  Computers, I told them, like culture, don't "evolve" according to Darwinian theory: they "evolve" according to Lamarckism, the transmission of acquired traits.  They acknowledged me, I shut up and went back to trying to read, though I continued to be distracted by their conversation.  The kid who'd talked about computers evolving said he knew about evolutionary psychology, and then chuckled, saying that he'd read a textbook.  His friend asked what his major was, and he replied Informatics, Philosophy, and something else.

I went back to work a few minutes early since I couldn't concentrate on my reading and couldn't give the kid the dope slap he so clearly needed.  It suddenly dawned me that Lamarckianism wasn't the proper way to think about computers.  The proper way was Creationism.  I'd remembered a science fiction story by James Morrow, "Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks," that I read about twenty years ago:*  Two science missionaries travel to a planet inhabited by androids, the product of an experiment many years earlier by some sociobiologists at Harvard.  The androids use Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man as sacred scripture, and accordingly believe that they evolved, like every other living thing.  The missionaries, scandalized, tell the androids that they didn't evolve, they were created.  Unwilling to tolerate heresy, the androids execute the missionaries.

The story is a satire, with numerous targets.  But how odd that I encountered a real-life devotee of the same cult, who believes that computers evolve like organisms, rather than being created like artifacts.  From other things I've read, I know he's not alone. Indeed, my university has harbored one of the cult's prophets.

*"Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks" can be found in Morrow's collection Bible Stories for Adults, Harvest Books, 1996.

Their Glory Is In Their Shame

Incidentally, there's a good post by Richard "Lenin" Seymour at Lenin's Tomb on the British protests against the Pope's visit, with some sharp criticism of Richard Dawkins. (Thanks to Jenny for the reference.) Lenin writes:

I also know imperial condescension when I see it - when I first came to England and found that people here believed that Northern Ireland was torn apart for thirty years or so because of religious sectarianism, because Prods didn't get on with Tims, I was shocked. And I was offended, as I still am when I think of it. When Dawkins et al repeat this ridiculous canard and apply the same logic, mutatis mutandis, to the explanation of the Israel-Palestine conflict (or worse, to the 'civil war' in Iraq), I know all too well that this isn't really about atheism, or secularism. It is about representing those who do not partake of the relative wealth and stability of the Anglophone imperial core as tribal-minded, bloodthirsty, backward idiots. We do not have conflicts based on rational interests, each making a claim to universalism, in which imperialist powers have weighed in on one side. We have petty, parochial struggles over atavistic ideas which are childish premonitions of modern, scientific truth claims, and where imperial power is invisible. Indeed, as Eagleton suggests, part of the whole basis of Dawkinsian befuddlement and outrage over religion is the feeling that things couldn't be so bad as to require a spiritual, much less messianic, solution. Class privilege benights its beneficiaries in this respect.

(Of course I don't have much use for Eagleton either.) Lenin also wrote:

Thus, some of those assailing religion have themselves played a key role in naturalising patriarchy and white supremacy, even though they always insisted that this was not their intention. Dawkins would argue that "genetic kinship" and reciprocation offer an explanation of, and evolutionary basis for, solidarity, equality and altruism amid the cruel, harsh and competitive world that his version of Darwinism evokes. But this is neither orthodox Darwinism, nor is it adequate. It does not explain the range of sacrifices that some people are prepared to make for others. The theory of gene kinship entails, as per Haldane's quip, that one will sacrifice oneself for other people who are genetically close to oneself. That would lead us logically to insularity rather than universalism. Indeed, for Dawkins' case to work, he has to suggest that we can subvert our 'selfish', competitive, vicious biological basis through a metaphysically strong 'free will', which is ultimately every bit as idealist as any statement made from the Vatican.

Dawkins' own free will still seems to be constrained by his selfish, competitive genes, however. To the imperial chauvinism mentioned above, we could add his intolerance of cultural difference - he has said, for example, that he experiences a visceral revulsion at the sight of a woman in a burqa, a sensation which is probably similar to that which I feel on witnessing an upper middle class white Oxonian telling Muslim women that what they're wearing disgusts him. In relation to the Pope's visit, he described his Romanness as the head of the second most evil religion in the world. What, I wonder, might come first? Buddhism? Judaism? Hinduism? Jainism? Zoroastrianism? No? Ah, right - so it'll be Islam again. One form of religious intolerance informs another prejudice, one which is bound up with race-making processes across the 'white' world. Such a ranking of religions according to alleged harm is not really to do with atheism.

This reminds me of Andre Pichot's book The Pure Society, which contains some excellent criticism of evolutionary psychology generally and of Dawkins in particular, and which I also learned about from Lenin.

P.S. Looking again at that weird photo above, of Ratzinger's robes being held open to reveal the lacy garments beneath while he holds rampant a crucifix on a stick, I wonder if I shouldn't have titled this post "The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes." I guess I'll save that one for another day.

All in the Family

Another interesting bit from the New York Times Magazine article I wrote about yesterday.

Since 2003, in addition to his investigation of female-female macaque sex, Vasey has also been studying a particular group of men in Samoa. “Westerners would consider them the equivalent of gay guys, I guess,” he told me — they’re attracted exclusively to other men. But they’re not considered gay in Samoa. Instead, these men make up a third gender in Samoan culture, not men or women, called fa’afafine. (Vasey warned me that mislabeling the fa’afafine “gay” or “homosexual” in this article would jeopardize his ability to work with them in the future: while there’s no stigma attached to being fa’afafine in Samoan culture, homosexuality is seen as different and often repugnant, even by some fa’afafine.)

There's nothing particularly remarkable about these men. "They're attracted exclusively to other men" -- presumably not to each other; if I'm right, they fit a pattern that turns up in societies around the world, including the US. Even the repugance for "homosexuality" is familiar: from Annick Prieur's Mexican vestidas who are repulsed by the idea of two mustached men kissing each other, to Megan Sinott's Thai toms and dees who reject the label "lesbian" because for them it refers "to two feminine women who are engaging in sex with each other", to any same-sex but hetero-gender-oriented people who think of two sissies having sex as "lesbianism" or "cannibalism." The ideas in this article conform to the tendency I've pointed out before, of confusing roles in sexual activity with sexual orientation.

In a paper published earlier this year, Vasey and one of his graduate students at the University of Lethbridge, Doug P. VanderLaan, report that fa’afafine are markedly more willing to help raise their nieces and nephews than typical Samoan uncles: they’re more willing to baby-sit, help pay school and medical expenses and so on. Furthermore, this heightened altruism and affection is focused only on the fa’afafine’s nieces and nephews. They don’t just love kids in general. They are a kind of superuncle. This offers support for a hypothesis that has been toyed around with speculatively since the ’70s, when E. O. Wilson raised it: If a key perspective of evolutionary biology urges us to understand homosexuality in any species as a beneficial adaptation — if the point of life is to pass on one’s genes — then maybe the role of gay individuals is to somehow help their family members generate more offspring. Those family members will, after all, share a lot of the same genes.

Yeah yeah yeah, we've heard this before. But there is no evidence to back it up: no evidence that these "superuncles" are genetically different from other Samoan men, no evidence that this pattern occurs outside Samoa, let alone that it appeared in prehistory. ("Prehistory" is a convenient place, where anything is possible, little can be proved or disproved, and people can be supposed to be driven by their biology with little interference from culture.) I expect that this "hypothesis" will dissolve when further research is done in other places and other situations; that's the normal outcome.

Is there a genetic basis for this tendency to assume that every human difference is the result of genetic difference? I once had an online exchange with a gay man who had a degree in some biological science. He said that all his scientific training required him to assume that there must be a biological cause for any human trait, including behavior. This may well be true -- so many scientists make exactly that assumption, and refuse to let go of it when it is undermined by evidence. Which is what I replied to this guy: I thought science was supposed to be a quest for truth, not the imposition of assumptions on reality. In many cases, clearly it isn't. But that makes it difficult, maybe impossible, to come up with useful, testable hypotheses about the real world.

Vasey and VanderLaan have also shown that mothers of fa’afafine have more kids than other Samoan women. And this fact supports a separate, existing hypothesis: maybe there’s a collection of genes that, when expressed in a male, make him gay but when expressed in a woman, make her more fertile. Like Wilson’s theory, this idea was also meant to explain how homosexuality is maintained in a species and not pushed out by the invisible hand of Darwinian evolution. But unlike Wilson’s hypothesis, it doesn’t try to find a sneaky way to explain homosexuality as an evolutionary adaptation; instead, it imagines homosexuality as a byproduct of an adaptation. It’s not too different from how Vasey explains why his female macaques insistently mount one another.

Again, Vasey and VanderLaan are assuming that having more kids must be genetically determined. It could be (almost anything is possible), but there is no scientific evidence to support it, no reason to believe it, and of course the very idea has its roots in long-discredited scientific racism. This "hypothesis" reminds me of Dean Hamer's genetic marker theory for gay men, which has not been replicated, but still gets cited by biological determinists of various sexual orientations.

Read that second sentence carefully: "this fact supports" an already existing "hypothesis": "maybe there's a collection of genes ...". There's no there there, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland. (I also notice that the reporter is violating the requirement of not calling the fa'afafine "gay" in this paragraph; if the Samoans refuse to work with Vasey in the future, we'll know who to blame, or who to thank.) I'm beginning to suspect that, since it is now well established that a single-gene theory can't explain the traits or behavior that biological determinists have their eyes on, they are now stipulating "collections of genes" to suggest a vague complexity that they don't understand either. ("Predisposition" was a popular hand-waving term for a while too.) This is a pretty speculation, but it isn't even a hypothesis yet.

Something else occurs to me. It looks as though the Times writer (and possibly Vasey too), however he tiptoes around the delicate cultural sensibilities of the Samoans, does not agree that the fa'afafine are not "gay" or "homosexual." Presumably they both buy into the standard scientific conception of homosexuality as a "third gender" (far from being a primitive notion of colorful native cultures, this is the foundation of contemporary scientific work on homosexuality), where the "homosexual" is by definition and genetic endowment the "catcher" sexually. (In women, the "homosexual" is the one in the smoking jacket, smoking the cigar, with a dildo.) So there's a lot of same-gender copulation going on this world, that the psychologists and biologists (along with the vestidas, the fa'afafine, the toms and dees, the bakla, the katoey, and so on) can't begin to account for, and may not even be aware of. The biological types they postulate can only be tip of the iceberg of same-sex eroticism, yet apparently these scientists and science writers are only interested in this sub-group, because it fits their primitive concept of what sexuality is.

I Like A Girl With Spirit!

There’s a story I’ve been hearing for some time now, from Golda Meir’s days in the Israeli cabinet, before she became Prime Minister. I haven’t had much luck tracking it down, but I have found this direct quotation (unfortunately unsourced):

Once in the Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister (a member of an extreme religious party) suggested a curfew. Women should stay at home after dark. I said: "but it's the men attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay at home, not the women."

Of course the proposed curfew was not enacted; contrary to what most people who tell this story seem to think, I wonder if it had a chance to begin with, since Meir singles out the minister who suggested it as “a member of an extreme religious party” (this was the 1950s, when the ultraorthodox were not the force they are today in Israeli politics). But everyone loves Meir’s comeback, because despite her general anti-feminism, she put her finger on the key issue: why should women, but not men, have to adjust their behavior?

Remember that one result of such a curfew would be that any woman who was raped after curfew would be legally assumed to be “asking for it,” thus letting off the rapist. (I’m not just speculating; such blaming the victim has been traditional in American practice, unquestioned until feminists fought it.) This would also be a consequence of Thornhill and Palmer’s suggestion, in A Natural History of Rape, that girls be taught not to dress provocatively, which is not just stupid and malevolent, it’s regressive. (The same is true, by the way, for their suggestion of mandatory rape-prevention classes for boys, teaching them that they are biologically prone to sexual assault. You don’t have to be a professional psychologist to know that such teaching would encourage rape, not discourage it. But Thornhill and Palmer are scientists, so they must know what they’re talking about.)

Martha McCaughey, in The Caveman Mystique, page 94, quotes two more guys who

remind readers that they do not mean to imply that women should begin to forgive sexual harassers:

It is simply our hope that the more we understand about the evolution of human psychology, the closer we will be to developing appropriate and effective solutions for such unfortunate and deplorable side effects of human nature and behavior as sexual harassment.

Their solution involves changing

the structure of the organizational environment which would reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances, and allow women more freedom to change jobs or change their working environment, as they feel is necessary.
Allowing harassers more “freedom” to get fired is not mentioned as a solution, nor is equal pay, although earlier the authors state that women’s economic position relative to men’s makes this male strategy surface (the way lots of gardening makes calluses come out). …

Notice the pious beginning, followed by the assumption that “the organizational environment” should be rearranged around men’s immutable “evolved” obnoxiousness, and that women should be freer to “change jobs” or, in some unspecified way, “their working environment.” (Certainly not in any way that would inconvenience the men.) It’s never clear in such discussions how we – that is, evolutionary psychologists -- know that women are so malleable, so flexible, compared to men’s “evolved” rigidity, which will go all limp if it’s not given free rein. I suspect that malleability is simply assumed, on the male-supremacist postulate that women exist to give service to men; not merely sexual and domestic service, but emotional service as well. (There are echoes of behaviorism in McCaughey’s targets: they want to structure the work environment so as to “reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances,” which is right out of Skinner.)

Richard Dawkins exploded (he tends to explode a lot) in a 1997 interview quoted by McCaughey (122f):

[T]he opponents of sociobiology are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically. They look at what we say about natural selection, as a scientific theory for what is, and they assume that anybody who says that so and so is the case, must therefore be advocating that it ought to be the case in human politics. They cannot see that it is possible to separate one’s scientific beliefs about what is the case in nature from one’s political beliefs about what ought to be in human society.

It is, however, Dawkins who is clearly too stupid to understand the difference he harps on. In his bestseller The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976, p 126) he wrote:

Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused. … Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

I found this bit of old-fashioned scientific racism (the Pope is ordering the stinking Irish to breed like rabbits so he can take over England!) quoted in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984) by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In its original context it’s even worse, deranged in fact: to start with, Dawkins believes that there is a gene “for having too many children”, which makes no sense. Evolutionary theory is based on the assumption that all animals have “too many children”: “All species overproduce offspring, not all of which can survive to reproduce in their turn. Thus, there is inevitable competition among the individuals of each species for the means to survive and reproduce, and any inherited advantage in this competition will be naturally selected” (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, quoted in McCaughey, p. 27). Further, “the family” is not the “unit of economic self-sufficiency”, communities are, and “the old selfish ways” are a figment of Dawkin’s imagination: societies have always made provision for people who need help, and adults limited the size of their families long before modern contraception. Infanticide, especially, is very old, both as a means of culling and as a means of redistributing children to parents who can and want to support them. (Exposed children didn’t always die, as exemplified by the fictional but realistic case of Oedipus.) I’ve often observed that people who like to think of themselves as hard-headed realists tend to be soft-headed fantasists, and Dawkins fits the mold.

“Men must stop prostrating themselves to science,” McCaughey says (136), but “hiding behind” might express it better. It seems to be typical for evolutionary psychologists to begin their sermons by deploring the amorality of “nature.” (They also tend to personify “nature” and “evolution,” but that’s a topic for another day.) They think that doing so proves they don’t justify rape or male promiscuity, and they get very self-righteous when their magic shield doesn’t work. Considering that they have no real evidence that all men are genetically predisposed to abuse women, they shouldn’t be so surprised when feminists (and not only feminists) suspect that they aren’t as disinterested as they’d like to think. When your conclusions aren’t supported by your evidence, it is only reasonable to suspect that you have a personal investment in your conclusions. As Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote over thirty years ago in her brilliant (though, I admit, uneven) book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976, 215ff):

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are.

I detect just that kind of smirk in David Barash’s complaint, “If Nature is sexist don’t blame her sons,” quoted by Hilary Rose in Alas Poor Darwin (Harmony Books, 2000, 139). Notice first the personification of “nature”; Nature is not a person and cannot be sexist. But “her sons” can be, and often are; hiding behind Mother’s skirts won’t help them.

Nasty, Brutish And Short On Foreplay

(I swiped that title from Barbara Ehrenreich, bless her heart. See "How 'Natural' Is Rape?", Time, January 31, 2000, p. 88.)

I’ve been thinking more about Aaron Gillette’s book on the nature-nurture debate, and something occurred to me.

Gillette represents the debate as involving two sides, which he calls “evolutionary psychology” (including eugenics, sociobiology, and biological determinism generally; I’ll call it EP for short) and “environmental behaviorism” (cultural anthropology, behaviorist psychology, biological non-determinism generally; EB for short). EP he presents as non-ideological, though he pays lip service to the fallible humanity of science (in an explicitly religious analogy) and acknowledges the involvement of so many early evolutionary psychologists in unfortunate social movements. EB, by contrast, he presents as essentially ideological, pretty much without scientific content, the absurd posturing of people who can’t face reality and don’t want to.

This is false, and in fact Gillette is muddying the difference between scientific and political claims. (That’s apart from his weird, probably politically motivated conflation of “environmental” and “behaviorism.”) It isn’t like he doesn’t know the difference: he’s adamant about separating the two where EP and eugenics are concerned. But behaviorism is not an ideology, it’s an approach to the study of organisms, a research program even if a very limited one. The same can be said of biological determinism. Noam Chomsky wrote in his dissection of arch-behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity,

[I]t would be improper to conclude that Skinner is advocating concentration camps and totalitarian rule (though he also offers no objection). Such a conclusion overlooks a fundamental property of Skinner's science, namely, its vacuity.

While Chomsky is a Leftist, as I mentioned before, he also believes that innate mechanisms underlie such human behavior as language. He even wrote, while verbally garroting Richard Herrnstein in the late 1960s,

It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely so. Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society?

But mark those words, “a decent society.” Chomsky was under no illusion that we live in one.

Though Gillette repeatedly deplores the racism of his eugenicist heroes, he still finds it awfully unfair that they should have been criticized for the worthless scientific claims they used to justify it in their own day. But he has the situation backwards, asserting that the scientific claims of biological determinism have been criticized and rejected because of the ideology of the scientists who advanced them. In fact the critics have pointed out that, given the “poor data collection, glaring inconsistencies, and obvious statistical oversimplification” (Gillette, 65) that characterized the evolutionary psychologists’ scientific work, it is reasonable to suspect that the acceptance they achieved had more to do with ideology than science.

What the critics of biological determinism say is not “that human behavior is almost entirely molded by environment and culture, rather than instinct or heredity” (Gillette 171 note 4), but that what biological determinists hold to be controlled by instinct or heredity is affected (not necessarily determined) by environment or culture. As Noam Chomsky would say, that’s virtually a truism, and many contemporary evolutionary psychologists at least pay lip service to it. A wish to widen the gap between themselves and their opponents may help to explain why biological determinists try to confuse the issue by accusing their critics of believing that humans are a “blank slate.” Since their critics already agree that “there are genetic components to human behavior,” and the evolutionary psychologists admit that non-genetic components play a role, it might otherwise seem that their positions differ in degree rather than in basic approach.

I shouldn’t be too hard on them. These folks are simply unable to comprehend a middle ground between total genetic programming on the one hand, and a totally blank slate on the other. (Their disability might be a genetic blind spot, the result of millennia of evolution.) They also share the common human tendency to turn relative differences into absolute binary differences – going from data which indicate, for example, that girls score slightly lower than boys on math tests, to declaring that girls can’t do math, so there is no point in teaching math to girls at all. The fact that boys score lower than girls in verbal skills is never interpreted to mean that boys need not be taught to read and write; far from it. Instead they must be given more help learning these skills, and there is much lamenting the girl-friendly classroom environments that have made it impossible for boys to learn. Oh, the humanity!

As the sociologist Martha McCaughey points out in The Caveman Mystique (Routledge, 2008), the evolutionary psychologist David Buss

tells readers in his Evolution of Desire, … that his cross-cultural study found the predicted sex differences in human mating preferences universally. Internationally, men tend to value physical attractiveness and youth in a mate more than women, who are more likely than men to prioritize resources in a mate. Reading about the study, one would think that all men prioritize good looks in a mate above all else, and that looks don’t matter to women at all.

However, if you go back and read Buss’ boring old academic article, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1989, you will see that the picture is more complicated than that, and he readily admits to several limitations of his study. For example, he did not have a random sample. He also concedes that self-reports are limited and must be checked by other studies. (A man may say beauty in a woman is highly important, for instance, but then will actually pair up with someone who is rich and not very good looking.) Buss also notes that male and female preferences overlap significantly. Not only do women also express a preference for good looks in a mate (just not as strongly as men), both men and women prefer, first and foremost, kindness and understanding in their mates. … [115-116]

Buss took relative differences between the sexes and turned them into absolute differences for a lay audience. Where sex is concerned, evolutionary psychologists have a crucial blind spot. As Gillette put it (pp 87f),

Though evolutionary psychologists discussed women’s mating strategies from time to time, they were less concerned with women’s mating desires than with men’s. There are several possible reasons for this. For one, their patriarchal society felt most comfortable considering men’s sexual aggressiveness as opposed to women’s. Also, since most of the leading evolutionary psychologists were men, or in a few cases were female students under the supervision of male professors, the focus on male sexuality might simply have reflected a male fascination with their own sexual behavior.

Gillette was referring here to the biological determinists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but things have changed very little since then. What gets the most attention, both from researchers and from media and popular culture, is work which claims to explain male sexual behavior in terms of our evolutionary heritage.

And as the biologist Marlene Zuk showed in her book Sexual selections (University of California, 2002), even the study of sexual autonomy in females of non-human species makes male scientists very nervous indeed. In 1990 a Canadian scientist, Lisle Gibbs, published a paper on his work with red-winged blackbirds. DNA testing revealed that “many, if not most of the chicks in a given blackbird territory were fathered by a male other than the territorial one” (68) – the results of what are now called “extra-pair copulations”, or EPCs. And, Zuk adds, “EPCs are now known to occur in every avian family. That means ducks, warblers, woodpeckers, wrens, orioles, the lot. This is that same group held up as a model of monogamy just a few short years ago. It was a real revolution, and it took place within less than a decade” (70). Zuk comments that “Telling my animal behavior students about this research triggers the strongest reaction they have to anything I teach them in the course. … They are horrified … Then comes anger. … When they do express it, it seems to be directed at the female blackbirds, a bit like Olin Bray’s denouncing the females as promiscuous while indulging the males in their sexual excesses” (68-9).

Terms including “adultery,” “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “cheating,” “fooling around,” and more have been applied to findings like those of Lisle Gibbs in the popular press, and sometimes the scientific literature is not far behind. … Either males were roaming around and taking advantage of hapless females waiting innocently in their own territories for the breadwinner males to come home with the worms, or else females were brazen hussies, seducing blameless males who otherwise would not have strayed from the path of moral righteousness. Bray’s “female promiscuity” label is just one example. A paper published in the prestigious journal Nature refers to young in warblers as “illegitimate,” as if their parents had tiny avian marriage licenses and chirped their vows. That some scientists in our society take this view should come as no surprise to us; after all, it was Hester who wore that scarlet letter, not her partner, and the double standard of judging adultery in humans has received much attention from sociologists and feminist scholars [70-71].

This double standard obtains in work on primates, especially human beings. Evolution apparently has affected men almost exclusively, making us a sex of horndogs, a pair of giant goggling eyes that swivel after every nubile female that comes in range, and if we can’t win her heart by heartfelt cries of “Hubba-hubba! Oh, you kid! Does your mother know you’re out?” – well, then, we will very likely take her by force. (Taking other males by force is generally not on the agenda, except among insects. The straight boys who study evolutionary psychology would mostly prefer not to go there.) At most, evolutionary psychologists have conceded that women have evolved to prefer wealth in their (male, of course) partners, and to be “coy” (a word that rightly annoys feminists no end) so as to inflame their/our ardor more. Aside from that, women apparently have no agency whatsoever: they just sit around, filing their nails and eating bonbons, until Alley Oop sneaks up behind them, clubs them over the head, and slips it in.

As McCaughey shows repeatedly (and as anyone who’s read books like Buss’s will recognize), male sociobiologists insist that men can’t help ourselves, that we’re driven by our genes and our evolutionary heritage to sow our seed wholesale. Take this revealing bit from Robin Baker’s Sperm Wars:

Some things, of course, will never change. Nothing – short of castration, brain surgery, or hormone implants – can remove a person’s subconscious urge to have as many grandchildren as they can. So, nothing will remove a man’s subconscious urge to have as many children with as many women as his genes and circumstances will allow.

I think that last sentence shows that the initial gender-neutral “person” with the “subconscious urge to have as many grandchildren as they can” is male, not female. What about women? Well, they don’t have sperm. Presumably they have a complementary urge to replenish the earth, but their desire not to wear themselves out with childbearing, and to enforce that desire with contraception and abortion, must be conscious and of no evolutionary account. In any case, what if a woman doesn’t want to be inseminated by all those roaming males with their subconscious urges? Tough luck, it appears.

Craig T. Palmer and Randy Thornhill, authors of an infamous (and hot-selling) EP book on The Natural History of Rape (MIT, 2000), “see their policy solutions – such as having the state teach boys, before they get their drivers’ licenses, about their biological propensity and teach girls not to incite that propensity with provocative clothing – as superior because their theory of rape is scientific” (McCaughey, 69). In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker dismisses this idiocy but defends Palmer and Thornhill against their evil feminist critics – they are so not justifying rape! (Pinker, 371) – before quoting Camille Paglia on the subject, which discredits him more effectively than anything I could say. Pinker forgets that feminists are, like, women, and women’s distaste for being raped is every bit as well-founded as men’s supposed “subconscious urge” to commit the deed. But women simply don’t register on these boys’ scientific radar, except as targets in a Sperm-Gets-Egg video game.

In general the EP boys are understandably defensive about rape – after all, they won’t get to perpetuate their own genes if women think they’re soft on rapists. Apparently they believe that if they condemn it vehemently enough they can then throw up their hands helplessly – What can you do? it’s in our genes – and their fatalism doesn’t constitute a justification. Which only shows how dumb they are, not just in terms of social policy, as Pinker assumes, but scientifically as well. Men have always condemned rape, though traditionally it’s as a crime against (their) property and by extension against themselves: the rapist has trespassed on and polluted another man’s property, his virgin daughter or his faithful wife, and therefore virtually raped them. The EP boys can’t seem to recognize that women are people, with interests of their own.

McCaughey also quotes (32) Naomi Weisstein, who points out sensibly enough:

evidence from hunter-gatherer societies suggests that deep into our prehistory women knew who the fathers of their children were, and aborted, neglected, abandoned or killed those infants they did not want to raise. Children conceived by rape may have been highly valued in some cultures. Most likely, they were snuffed out before they could reach the gene pool.

Interestingly in this connection, Marlene Zuk tells us about a biologist named Nancy Burley, who found that among zebra finches, males

often forced copulation on females with which they were not paired; in fact, 80 percent of all extra-pair copulations were aggressive, which she defined in a rigorous and repeatable way. These matings never resulted in any offspring, which is interesting by itself. Even more interesting, though, was that 28 percent of chicks in the aviaries were from the remaining 20 percent of EPCs that were not forced, an astounding success rate. What were the females doing to influence the fate of sperm from different males? No one knows. The cloaca of female birds is clearly capable of some sophisticated maneuvering; in several species, females have been observed ejecting sperm after a copulation. The organ’s structure and function has, however, been relatively little studied by scientists [84-5]

That’s male scientists, I bet, and those female zebra finches must be a bunch of man-hating pro-abortion feminazis, with their brutal disregard for the evolutionary heritage and subconscious urges of their males. There are other possible ways to prepare girls to deal with rapists besides putting them in burqas. Self-defense classes, for example. Martha McCaughey also has written a book on women’s self-defense classes, which I’m hoping to get to before long. But Nicola Griffith’s novel Always features a powerful account of the whys and wherefores of women’s self-defense, well worth reading.

So, maybe it isn’t an ideological bias that leads male evolutionary psychologists to ignore women. Let’s just say it’s a flaw in their science, which by their lights is even more damaging.

More on this next time; or if not, the time after that.

Won't Get Fooled Again

I just finished reading Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century, by Aaron Gillette, published last year by Palgrave Macmillan. Gillette, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown, has another book awaiting publication, on “the development of a ‘Latin’ variety of eugenics in the early 20th century. Latin eugenics was ultimately used as a tool by Fascist Italy in an attempt to dominate the scientific life of Latin America and other Latin countries.” Ooookay.

The best I can say for Eugenics and the Nature-Nurture debate in the twentieth century is that it’s frustrating. Like many scholars, Gillette gives good research: he’s dug into the archives of twentieth-century biology and eugenics, and has unearthed some interesting material, especially on eugenics in Fascist Italy. (Historians usually focus on the US, Britain, and Germany for this topic.) I’m no expert, but I’ve read a fair amount in this area, and I’m not sure how much light he really casts on the usual US/UK suspects; Daniel Kevles’s In the name of eugenics, for example, a careful and thoughtful study of the same era, isn’t even mentioned in his bibliography. What seems to be Gillette’s main argument, that 19^th and early 20^th century biologists did important work in what would now be called “evolutionary psychology”, doesn’t feel like news to me.

But research is only half of the work of scholarship, and like many scholars, Gillette stumbles when he interprets his data. This produces some bloopers from the beginning of the book, which largely set its tone. He begins by telling how,

On February 15, 1978, Edward O. Wilson sat on the stage of an auditorium, waiting to address an audience. Suddenly, a young woman leapt onto the stage, grasped a pitcher of ice water, and poured it onto Wilson’s head. Others ran onto the stage and waved anti-Wilson placards, chanting, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”

Several weeks before, two of Wilson’s colleagues, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, wrote an attack against him in the New York Review of Books. They claimed that Wilson was an ally of eugenicists, and his theory was a dangerous pseudoscience associated with “the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”

It’s not clear who is being quoted here. Gillette gives no citation for Lewontin and Gould’s “attack”; an endnote cites John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford, 2003), p. 3, and Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (Viking, 2002), p. 109. But he seems to be quoting from a letter published in the New York Review of Books on 13 November 1975 – three years earlier than the date he assigns to it – “prepared by a group of university faculty and scientists, high school teachers, doctors, and students who work in the Boston area” and signed by Gould and Lewontin along with many others. Sloppy, Aaron, sloppy.

I can’t see where the letter calls Wilson “an ally of eugenicists.” It does say at the outset that not Wilson’s but earlier biological-determinist theories “provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” I suspect that Gillette drew on partial quotations from this letter in Alcorn and Pinker without reading the whole text, which took me about five minutes to find on the web.

More damaging to Gillette’s account, the bulk of the letter criticizes the substance of Wilson’s theory, a critique that would be extended and developed in years to come. It also undermines Gillette’s main thesis, that the non-eugenic work of early 20^th-century biologists had been suppressed for ideological reasons and forgotten: the writers of the letter note the existence of that work, and comment that “Each time these ideas have resurfaced the claim has been made that they were based on new scientific information. Yet each time, even though strong scientific arguments have been presented to show the absurdity of these theories, they have not died.” The amnesia was actually to be found among the sociobiologists, and later evolutionary psychologists, who thought, or claimed for PR reasons, that they were offering new insights into human nature. (Among those PR reasons would have been the wish to dissociate themselves from the discreditable racism of their predecessors.)

Gillette undermines his own case by using the term “evolutionary psychology” anachronistically for all biological-determinist science from Darwin’s day to the present; the idea is presumably to stress the continuity of Wilson and Pinker with Robert Yerkes, Madison Grant, Julian Huxley, and other eugenicists – but that continuity is exactly what, for PR reasons, contemporary evolutionary psychologists want to deny. (I’m reminded of the way that Intelligent Design’s proponents hope that label will distance them from “Scientific Creationism”, also for PR reasons.)

Another important point from the letter (my italics, by the way):

We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange.

This is important because one standard riposte to criticism of biological determinism is the claim that the critic believes that human beings are a “blank slate,” or as Gillette puts it, “that human behavior is almost entirely molded by environment and culture, rather than instinct or heredity” (171 note 4). Attempting to settle the question by labeling, Gillette lumps together all critics of biological determinism under the rubric of “behavioral environmentalism.” This is disingenuous, to put it gently, since among those critics are people like Noam Chomsky, who believes that language is innate and is famous for his attacks on B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism; geneticists like Richard Lewontin and Ruth Hubbard, and other biologists. Those interested might look at Alas, Poor Darwin, edited by Steven Rose and Hilary Rose (Harmony Books, 2000) which covers most of the issues Gillette believes to be settled.

The other standard move is to associate criticism of biological determinism with “the Left.” (For example, the Publishers Weekly review of Alcock’s The Triumph of Sociobiology identifies the field’s critics as “many feminist and socialist thinkers” who embrace “the competing blank-slate ‘culture is all’ theory.) If true, this only implies that leftists have better sense than rightists. But its purpose is to avoid addressing the substantive criticisms of the critics by attacking their ideology – exactly what Gillette, Pinker, and so many others accuse the critics of doing. One suspects projection.

Gillette also relies on overwrought rhetoric to present his eugenicists and sociobiologists as pitiful victims (or “casualties”) of behaviorist ideologues. Early on he tells of a hapless fellow named Craig Stanford, who,

while attending a seminar on primate societies, made the mistake of claiming that chimpanzee communities had cultures. The infuriated cultural anthropologists attending the seminar “fairly leaped across the seminar table” to verbally garrotte Stanford.

“Verbally garrotte”? Gillette continues through the book with terms like “the battle”, “the melee”, the “conflagration”; well, at least he didn’t use “Holocaust.” But only the biological determinists are haloed with such terminology. When he discusses Franz Boas, the influential anthropologist who opposed and criticized biological determinism in the first half of the 20^th century, Gillette clucks disapprovingly over Boas’s adversary, the eugenicist Madison Grant:

Grant would tell anyone willing to listen how much he loathed Boas[, who] “naturally does not take stock in any anthropology which relegates him and his race to the inferior position that they have occupied throughout recorded history."

Sound familiar? See the pattern? When Boas publicly criticized government censorship during World War I,

Boas’s enemies were delighted. They maneuvered the American Anthropology Association into censoring [sic] him, in 1919, for his “anti-American statements.”

But Gillette never uses his rhetoric of violence to describe the attacks on Boas, nor does he see it as ideological suppression of dissent that, though “Boas’s troops may have been gaining control over the American Anthropology Association, the hereditarians gained control over that most critical resource of modern science: money.”

More serious, Gillette minimizes the connection of American eugenics with Nazi “race science,” which is difficult to do since as he admits, the major American eugenicists endorsed Hitler’s eugenic programs. For example, he quotes Paul Popenoe, who wrote:

Not even Hitler proposes to sterilize anyone on the ground of racial origin. My impression is that the Germans are much more anxious to weed out the undesirable elements among the non-Aryan groups. The law that has been adopted is not a half-baked and hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime, but is the product of many years of consideration by the best specialists in Germany. I must say that my impression is, from a careful following of the situation in the German scientific press, rather favorable.

Gillette comments:

Hitler’s policies and the lukewarm support he received from some American eugenicists doomed eugenics in the United States.

To which I can only say: Jesus H. Christ – you call that “lukewarm”?

Gillette mentions just once, in passing, the American sterilization laws that influenced and inspired the Nazi programs, and which continued to be implemented through the 1970s: the Italian eugenicist “Corrado Gini also rejected the practice of American sterilization in a response to Davenport’s presidential address” at the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932, but Gillette never draws the connecting lines. That has to be deliberate, and it doesn’t speak well for him. (And really, why did John Alcock choose a title like The Triumph of Sociobiology? It calls up such unfortunate associations.)

Nor does his claim that

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have absolutely no interest in creating ideological movements or becoming involved in politics. With a few notable exceptions, they even eschew making policy recommendations to improve society. Such is the beneficial result of the reaction against eugenics and racism.

Well, maybe this is true if you overlook the ballyhooed tract The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, which said and did exactly what Gillette claims isn’t being done or said, and which got a lot of favorable media attention even before its publication in 1994. (It also got a lot of fierce criticism, from the usual “feminist and socialist thinkers.”) But maybe it’s one of Gillette’s “few notable exceptions.” The Bell Curve was another example of the pattern described by Wilson’s critics in 1975, where the same old claims are recycled periodically as new and exciting science.

Gillette’s repeated claims that evolutionary psychology today has nothing to do with eugenics don’t convince me. The eugenicists he exhumes would surely have rejected his thesis, and reasonably so. They insisted that the behavior determined by biology included things like criminality, poverty, and other kinds of deviance, and that such defects should be extirpated from society by eugenic measures, including sterilization of the carriers, whether voluntary or involuntary. Today’s biological determinists prudently refrain from making such recommendations, at least most of the time; they may, like Herrnstein and Murray, just shake their heads in sorrow and ask rhetorically, “What Is To Be Done?” This division of labor shouldn’t fool anyone who doesn’t want to be fooled. Evidently Aaron Gillette does want to be fooled.