Gender Matters: What Evolutionary Biology Can (and Can't) Tell Us

Gender Matters – What Evolutionary Biology Can (and Can't) Tell Us

With the recent resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer because of sexual scandal and the admission by the incoming Governor Patterson of his own sexual infidelities, pundits and scientists have raced to give the American public their views on why men so often stray even when the risks of discovery are so high. “Why do they do it?” the public wonders, and psychologists and evolutionary biologists are quick to provide answers, if not always nuanced ones.

It is true that recent studies of sex differences in genetics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience show that biological differences between the sexes are real, although what those differences mean in a species affected perhaps as strongly by culture (nurture) as by selection (nature) is a vexed question.

But both the researchers and the media who relay these findings in “sound-bite” format are all too ready to apply them with a broad brush. This can lead to rash generalizations about men and women that reinforce long held stereotypes, without any consideration of the extraordinary complexity of the contexts in which human beings now live and reproduce.

For example, in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece, David Barash, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, notes that the discovery of “extra-pair copulations (EPC)” among animals long thought to be monogamous, can offer one explanation of Governor Spitzer's sexual infidelity. He argues that human males who are sexually unfaithful to their mates are “responding to the biological pressures that whisper within [them]” (“Want a Man or a Worm?” March 12, 2008).

While Barash specifically states that his characterization of homo sapiens as EPC-inclined does not justify adultery, because humans “are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses,” his argument still suggests strongly that adultery, at least among human males, is “natural,” and something that human females should accept unless they marry a truly “monogamous” creature like the parasitic worm, Diplozoon paradoxum, whose body literally fuses with that of its mate upon their first copulation.

However, in his opinion piece, Barash enacts a sleight-of-hand elision between species and sex that is telling of a cultural tendency to take male behavior as paradigmatic. Professor Barash refers first to EPCs among animals in the general sense but then goes on to give only male examples of EPCs in creatures ranging from elk to seals to chimpanzees, and, of course, humans. What Barash doesn't mention, doesn't even apparently think worthy of mention, is what role female EPCs play in the evolutionary biology of these different species.

For presumably, these male “adulterers” are having sex with a female partner, and let us not forget that many biologists have also found evidence of opportunistic female infidelity among different species. With apologies to Barash and Spitzer, it's not just the males who fool around when they get the chance.

However, there is something more insidious in Barash's application of evolutionary biology to human behavior than his simple occlusion of the role played by females in his examples, and his assumption that what males do suggests a paradigm for the entire species.

Professor Barash also commits the logical fallacy of comparing apples and oranges, when he suggests that elephant seal harems, Maori tribesman, and modern-day call girls' sexual liaisons with high-status men can all be compared without doing violence to the many important cultural differences between them.

For what separates humans from other animal species is not simply biology but culture. The egg/sperm differential that puts a biological premium on males to spread their seed as widely as possible, and the opposing care that females take in choosing who may fertilize their eggs are important factors in how humans choose a mate, but the social and cultural contexts in which this reproduction takes place are equally important.

In a state of nature, humans may only be concerned with ensuring the success of the species; but at the level of the tribe, the village, and the state, human societies are also concerned with reproducing social structures, and in particular, the family unit.

At the species level, it doesn't matter how many sex partners a male has as long as he reproduces with as many females as possible; in society, the sex partner does matter, because societies are just as concerned with the inheritance of livestock, goods, and land, as they are with the generation of children.

At the societal level, the impulses of evolutionary biology run headlong into the biological fact that for most of human history, only maternity could be known for certain; a man could merely assume that he was the father of his children and his legitimate heirs.

It is this cultural organization that creates what anthropologist Gayle Rubin famously called the “traffic of women” in a seminal article of the same name (“The Traffic of Women: Notes on the political Economy of Sex” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, 1975).

Rubin noted that women were traditionally the means of exchange that cemented ties of kinship and that this exchange ensured the reproduction of a family structure based on patriarchy. A father chose a husband for a daughter based on the family's best interests, not her individual desires, and it was the woman who became part of the husband's extended family upon her marriage. Such relations also created the ideal of female “virginity” and female “chastity” in order to ensure that a “legitimate” heir inherited the family wealth and not the progeny of some other male interloper.

Patriarchy also tended to legitimate both sexual and physical violence against individual women, since the family's “honor” was now invested in the “honor” of the woman whose sexual desires were subordinated to the family's interests. Rape, abduction by another man, even being in the wrong place at the wrong time, could all make it “appear” that a woman's chastity was in question and thus justify her punishment and even death at the hands of her husband, or her own family.

Further, the very subordination of women's individual sexual desires in this system of patriarchy generated a cultural fear that women might not be able to guarantee their own chastity out of physical weakness or that they might fall prey to their own suppressed and therefore uncontrollable sexual appetites.

Thus a French churchman, Michel de Pure, wrote in the 17^th century of the Roman heroine Lucrece, who was said to have committed suicide to restore her family's honor after she had been raped: “Her blood was nothing more than the color of pride that she poured out over her unbound desire to deceive us and make us believe that she had not died of pleasure,” suggesting that even one of the most-cited examples of a woman defending her chastity with her life, was nothing but a hypocrite and a fraud.

It is no accident either that as late as the eighteenth-century in England, rape was literally a crime of property, and the injured party was not the woman, but the man legally responsible for her – either her father, husband, or male guardian. For centuries women had scarcely any legal identity at all: they could not initiate a divorce, own property, or maintain custody of their children, much less cast a vote.

“What does this have to do with men and women in the U.S. In the 21st-century?” you may ask. Well, scratch the surface of contemporary discourse about sexual relations in this country, and you will find the same prevalent sexual stereotypes underlying both Professor's Barash's commentary (it's “natural” for men to cheat) and media coverage of Governor Spitzer's “high-priced” call girl (what does she have to complain about – she was getting paid).

Hardly any reporters asked how much of the money Governor Spitzer spent actually made it into the hands of the young woman in question, or raised the issues of physical violence many sex workers endure, or even asked why these women were selling their bodies (a number of the call-girls in the ring turned out to have serious drug habits). Thus what seems like a simple sexual exchange – high status man pays beautiful young woman a lot of money for non-reproductive and possibly unprotected sex – turns out to be a more complicated tale--not just of biological “whispering” but of cultural taboos, that both men and women violate at their peril, even in the free-wheeling twenty-first century where the sexes are presumably equal.