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...his theory of sex roles, a subject called the 'theory of sexual selection.' (1)
In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin wrote: "Males of almost all animals have stronger passions than females," and "the female ... with the rarest of exceptions is less eager than the male ... she is coy." (2) Notice that the exceptions are dismissed as empirically insignificant ("almost all," "rarest of exceptions"), so that, for all practical purposes, males are universally "passionate" and females collectively "coy."
To explain this claim, Darwin considered the joint mechanisms of male-male competition and female choice. He envisioned that males compete for access to females, while females choose superior males on the basis of success in male-male competition and/or perceived beauty. In effect, through their choice of mates, females breed their offspring to have their mates' desirable traits, "just as man can improve the breed of his game-cocks by the selection of those birds which are victorious in the cockpit." Another example: "Many female progenitors of the peacock must [have], by the continued preference of the most beautiful males, rendered the peacock the most splendid of living birds." From a masculinist perspective, acquisition of females is a just reward for victory in male-male combat. From a maternalist perspective, the duty of females is to bed the victors, thus endowing their offspring with valuable traits.
The Darwinian narrative of sex roles is not some quaint anachronism. Restated in today's biological jargon, the narrative is considered proven scientific fact. The geneticist Jerry Coyne, at the University of Chicago, declared: "Males, who can produce many offspring with only minimal investment, spread their genes most effectively by mating promiscuously.... Female reproductive output is far more constrained by the metabolic costs of producing eggs or offspring, and thus a female's interests are served more by mate quality than by mate quantity." (3) So the passionate male has become the promiscuous male, and the coy female the constrained female. Yet the spirit of this present-day narrative is identical to Darwin's of nearly 130 years ago, and the sexual conflict that flows from attributing different objectives to males and females remains the starting point for sexual-selection theory today just as it did in Darwin's time.
I have been foolhardy enough to suggest that this thoroughly entrenched theory of male-female relationships is biologically mistaken. The response to my proposal offers a revealing commentary on the willingness of evolutionary biologists to face up to contrary evidence and logic. Let us turn to the proposal and then to the responses. (4)
I refer to sexual selection today as a system, meaning a set of logically interconnected theoretical propositions with a truth status independent of the facts they were originally intended to explain. As contrary data appear, the theoretical propositions are updated. Thus the system cannot be challenged and becomes, in effect, tautological.
By using the word system, I also echo the phrase "sex-gender system," coined in 1974 by the anthropologist and gender theorist Gayle Rubin. (5) Rubin emphasized how expectations flowing from how a culture defines gender wind up "the part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women, of sexual minorities." Although gender categories may not be constructed for the purpose of oppressing others, they end up authorizing such oppression by defining what counts as a norm and what counts as an exception, thereby privileging one over the other.
In place of sexual selection, I propose social selection. It is equally extensive but differs point by point from sexual selection. Social selection is selection for, and in the context of, the social infrastructure of a species within which offspring are produced and reared. The social strategies in the infrastructure generally include cooperation as much as--or more than--they do competition; and they revolve more around negotiation than 'winning.' Social selection, in my formulation, does not extend sexual selection but replaces it.
Ultimately, the evolutionary system of sex, gender, and sexuality that prevails determines our worldview of nature itself. Sexual selection's view of nature emphasizes conflict, deceit, and dirty gene pools. If this Darwinian picture of nature is true, so be it. But is it true?
To begin with, sexual selection and social selection differ in their accounts of the very origin of sexual reproduction and the sexes.
Origin of sexual reproduction. According to sexual selection, sexual reproduction evolved from asexual reproduction as a mechanism to cleanse the gene pool of deleterious mutations. According to social selection, sexual reproduction evolved from asexual reproduction to maintain a diverse gene pool needed for long-term population survival in an ever-fluctuating environment.
Origin of gametic male/female binary. The difference in size between the sperm and the egg is the basis for defining male and female in a sexually reproducing species. Sexual selection imagines the protosperm and protoegg playing a game against each other. Initially, both the protosperm and protoegg are the same size. But then the protosperm 'cheats,' becoming a little smaller so that more sperm can be produced with the leftover energy. This numerical advantage allows the smaller sperm to outcompete the less numerous sperm of the original size. The protoegg responds by increasing its size, restoring zygote viability to its original level. This compensating move is better than shrinking to try to match the smaller sperm; otherwise, the zygote would suffer a very deleterious double loss of investment. These responses of egg and sperm to each other culminate in one gamete--the protoegg--growing nearly as large as the zygote, and the other--the protosperm--becoming as tiny as possible.
In sexual selection, the distinction between male and female gametes arises from a battle: the sexes are created as combatants. But according to social selection, a parent divides the material it places into eggs and sperm to maximize the number of gametic contacts that produce viable zygotes. The number of gametic contacts increases as gametes become more numerous and form a large, dense cloud. The greatest number of viable zygotes is thus created when one of the gametes is close to the desired zygote size while the other is as small as possible.
Origin of whole-organism male/female binary. If a sexually...
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Reading the "Kamasutra": the strange & the familiar., March 22, 2007
Kafka & sex.(Austrian writer Franz Kafka), March 22, 2007
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