Josephson, SC

Pound, N

BioScience

English

Brunel University Research Archive

February 2005 / Vol. 55 No. 2 •  BioScience 177BooksSexual Selections: What We Can andCan’t Learn about Sex from Animals.Marlene Zuk. University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, 2003. 250 pp. $16.95(ISBN 0520240758 paper).The temptation to infer humanlikemotivations and thought processescan be hard to resist when watching an-imals engage in behaviors with seem-ingly obvious human parallels, such as acourtship rituals. Anthropomorphism,however, can lead to flawed interpreta-tions of animal behavior, particularlywhen combined with sexist biases andstereotypes. Marlene Zuk, a professor ofbiology at the University of California,Riverside, argues these points in an en-gaging, highly readable, and thought-provoking book, Sexual Selections: WhatWe Can and Can’t Learn about Sex fromAnimals, now available in paperback. Thepitfalls of anthropomorphism are illus-trated to great effect with a number of en-tertaining examples, many of whichdocument a distinct male bias. Zuk argues that feminism can provide an-thropomorphist biologists with the in-tellectual tools needed to cure their badhabits.In this lively and humorous book, Zukskillfully highlights the often-missed ten-dency in biology to view interactions be-tween the sexes from a male perspective.This has led some to the absurd notionthat female reproductive concerns areunimportant, or at least uninteresting.Zuk’s book was written to draw attentionto this bias, and here the book is at its best,packed with examples of observationsby biologists of behavior that challengesexual stereotypes. This abundance ofexamples, unfortunately, does rather un-dercut the other axis of this book—thesuggestion that feminism is needed tocorrect the bias—since many of the con-trary observations were made by scientistswithout an explicitly feminist agenda.Zuk repeatedly asserts that “feminismhas more to offer biology than vice versa,”but the book is not completely persuasivein this respect. It is indeed important, asZuk suggests, to be “aware of the stereo-types to be able to break them.” Ways ofthinking honed by feminists experiencedat detecting bias in society at large may behelpful for detecting bias in science. Butfeminism is an ideology and consequentlyincorporates not just ways of thinkingabout problems but also beliefs and biasesof its own. So even if, as Zuk suggests, re-searchers have too often in the past beenconstrained and biased by male chau-vinism, is feminism necessarily the bestremedy? Is offsetting one bias with an-other an aid to objectivity? Zuk showcasesthe work of many scientists who, likeherself, are feminists, but their work is ex-cellent not because they are good femi-nists but because they are good scientists.Feminism may have helped throw malebias into sharp relief, but biology pro-vided the tools to rectify it.As for the claim that male chauvinismhas hampered progress in biology, someof Zuk’s examples are convincing, butothers are less so. For example, in chap-ter 5, “The Care and Management ofSperm,” Zuk examines how research onsperm competition has tended to focuson male adaptations, such as the abilityto allocate sperm prudently, rather thanfemale adaptations that might influencethe outcome of such postcopulatorycompetition. In many species, sperm donot seem to survive in the vagina as wellas might be expected if sexual reproduc-tion were an entirely harmonious andcooperative venture. Consequently, someresearchers have described the vagina asa “hostile” environment for sperm. Zukfinds this troublesome, and suggests thatwhile it may seem “hostile” from a maleperspective, it could equally be describedas “selective.” This is not, however, sim-ply a matter of terminology and per-spective. “Hostility” can be readily anddirectly observed, for example, if spermdie more quickly when suspended invaginal fluid, rather than just seminalfluid. So the vaginal environment may beobjectively hostile to sperm, but to de-scribe it as “selective”presumes a functionand implies that  sperm mortality may benonrandom with respect to an individ-ual sperm’s haplotype or to the malepartner’s diploid genotype. Selectivitythere may very well be, but that is an em-pirical question that follows from theinitial observation of “hostility.”It is true that not a great deal is knownabout what happens to sperm inside a female, but the reasons for this, as formany other examples of apparently ne-glected topics in biology, are probablymethodological rather than ideological.It is simply a lot easier to study spermemitted by, or extracted from, a malethan it is to study interactions between,and active manipulation of, sperm withinthe female reproductive tract. This ismost likely why direct evidence of post-copulatory sperm selection by femalesis scarce across species, and the exceptionstend to emphasize this point. It has beenshown that female feral fowl actively ejectsperm from lower-ranking males (Pizzariand Birkhead 2000), and there has beensome work on the functional significanceof the human female orgasm (discussedin chapter 9, “Soccer, Adaptation, andOrgasms”). Not coincidentally, both thesephenomena have been studied using as asource of data sperm ejected from fe-males. Sperm are more amenable to studywhen they are not hidden in ducts andcrypts. Some insights into how femalesWhat We Can and Can’t Learn about Biology from Feminism178 BioScience  •  February 2005 / Vol. 55 No. 2Booksmight control sperm usage within theirreproductive tracts have been obtained byrapidly freezing insects in copula (Hoskenand Ward 2000), but such a chilling formof coitus interruptus is obviously not ap-propriate for all species.Other supposed examples of male biasmay also stem from practicality ratherthan chauvinism. As Zuk points out,technological innovations such as DNAhaplotyping have yielded findings thathave challenged the prevailing view thatpromiscuity is beneficial only for males.This notion grew largely out of observa-tional studies of mating behavior, usuallya more important determinant of fitnessfor males than for females. This does notimply that female behavior is unimpor-tant, but merely that it is more convenientto study overt behavior by males thancovert paternity allocation inside females.Developments in methodology have pro-vided the evidence that females do havesomething to gain from mating withmultiple males. For example, there arepossible benefits of extrapair paternity insocially monogamous species, such as“good genes” for offspring or genotypicdiversification as a hedge against envi-ronmental unpredictability. Feminist sci-entists like Zuk may be entitled to say“we told you so,”but developments in sci-ence, not ideology, have made it possiblefor them to say it.Ultimately, although Zuk draws at-tention effectively to the dangers of an-thropomorphism, her message on therole of ideology in scientific research israther confused. On the one hand, sheasserts repeatedly that “feminism hasmore to offer biology than vice versa,”since it can, for example, help keep sci-ence “honest” (by ensuring that it fo-cuses on phenomena that are not merely“sexist spandrels”). On the other hand,she acknowledges that “taking an ideo-logical stance” can actually prevent re-searchers from asking interestingquestions. With the benefit of hindsight,we see that male behavior is only half thestory, but it does not follow that whatscience needed all along was a healthydose of feminism. In the end, it isn’tclear in which direction the majority ofinsight has flowed. Feminism seems tohave more to offer to biologists than tobiology itself, but biology clearly has agreat deal to offer feminism.NICHOLAS POUNDCentre for Cognition and NeuroimagingSchool of Social Sciences and LawBrunel UniversityUxbridge, UB8 3PHUnited KingdomSTEVEN C. JOSEPHSONDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of UtahSalt Lake City, UT 84112References citedHosken DJ, Ward PI. 2000. Copula in yellow dungflies (Scathophaga stercoraria): Investigatingsperm competition models by histological ob-servation. Journal of Insect Physiology 46:1355–1363.Pizzari T, Birkhead TR. 2000. Female feral fowleject sperm of subdominant males. Nature 405:787–789.DO ANIMALS HAVE GENDER?Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gen-der, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Joan Roughgarden. Universityof California Press, Berkeley, 2004. 474pp. $27.50 (ISBN 0520240731 cloth).Soon after transitioning as a trans-gendered woman, Joan Roughgar-den, professor of biological sciences atStanford University, undertook a book-writing project to celebrate and explaindiversity in sexual presentation. To doso, she explored all aspects of sexual re-production, including the sexual behav-ior of animals, the development ofhuman sex differences, and the variedrole that gender plays in world cultures.As she became deeply engrossed, how-

What we can and can’t learn about biology from feminism

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Brunel University Research Archive