Evolutionary Psych Strikes Back

So to what extent does biology, despite feminist objections, mean destiny? How willingly does our biology respond to our environment? And even if biology plays a role, how much of the male/female split is nonetheless reinforced by the culture we live in? During this era of great change in women's and men's roles--as we work out collectively who we will be in the coming generations--we need to know: Where do these differences come from and where might they go?

No little amount of rancor has been stirred up in the attempt to answer these questions, in no small measure because the psychologists themselves who are studying the origins of gender differences seem divided along gender lines. In undertones, some researchers suggest that all the evolutionary psychologists (EPs) are men, and those with theories about more varied etiology are women. Some accuse male EPs of seeing feminists as "the enemy," while others accuse female researchers of dismissing evolutionary theories which seem to reinforce male dominance out of hand. Each side tries to take the scientific high ground, pointing to the gender split with a cough or a sly look. They mean that, perhaps, these details are no accident: Maybe men, who still hold positions of relatively high status in American society, are promoting theories that maintain the patriarchal status quo; women, some of them self-described feminists, see a science that allows for more change.

This gender split raises important questions about the current research. Each of these social scientists has looked at hundreds of studies to support his or her claims. There's relevant data from cultures on every continent, from cultures in every era dating back hundreds of thousands of years, and from every species from chimps to phalaropes (a small shorebird) to mice. Faced with thousands of studies, each theorist must look selectively at the data. And if theory drives research, we need to ask how much of the narratives of human development we read come from the way the personal narratives of the individual researchers color their world view.

The latest round of hostilities in this gendered war started in the mid-1990s, when a group of evolutionary psychologists began publishing research that looked at the origins of gender differences through Darwin's eyes. These EPs claimed (and continue to claim) that differences between the sexes do exist and that, try as we might, we can't change them. (That's the spark in the political tinder-box.) Whether in pre-modern Africa or current-day America, they say, gender-specific skills come from distinct psychological mechanisms that can be traced back directly and very nearly wholly to the Darwinian principle of sexual selection. In other words, it's in our genes.

The narrative of sexual selection goes something like this: In the mating and survival game, we all have a choice. One option, as David Geary, Ph.D., of the University of Missouri-Columbia puts it, "is to take all your energy and focus it on competing to get as many mates as you can. The other option is to have few mates and invest your reproductive energies on raising [offspring]." Men--who for biological reasons can have as many children as women they impregnate--follow the former path. Women, bound to their offspring by pregnancy and nursing, follow the latter.

True in many species, this drama is complicated among humans because many men parent their children, albeit not as much as women. Women, for their part, will compete for those men who invest in their children, thus raising their value. While the impact of these elements varies from one culture to the next, the pattern remains: Women invest in children more than men, and men, all other things being equal, prefer more sexual partners than do women.