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The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture

Posted on: Tuesday, 23 March 2004, 06:00 CST

Dissecting the Science or Sex

The Trouble wiifh Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture By Roger N. Lancaster University of California Press ISBN 0-520-23620- 3 PB, $21.95, 442pp.

The spaces where science and popular culture overlap are fascinating sites for investigating the state of knowledge in general, and popular understandings of what it means to be human. In The Trouble with Nature, anthropologist and cultural critic Roger Lancaster dissects an impressive range of contemporary science (and pseudo-science) that aims to explain the nature of sex through various forms of biological determinism. The result is a terrific critical overview of recent attempts to assert that the complexities of sex, gender and sexuality are reducible to isolatable biological features, such as genes, hormones and regions of the brain. And because Lancaster highlights the ways that such inquiries have been taken up and represented by popular media (especially The New York Tim.es and its writers), the book also provides a sharp analysis of American culture's current tendency to gravitate toward the view that gender differences are genetically hard-wired, in the midst of an age marked by radically effective reconfigurations of the meanings of sex and gender. As Lancaster writes,

In popular culture today, when it comes to questions about "human nature," biology is almost always taken to be sodobiology, a set of claims organized around the assumption that biology is destiny for humans, that genetic predispositions determine (or ought to determine) our behavior toward others and our institutional, forms. Sociobiology and its offshoot, evolutionary psychology, which explains our attitudes and behaviors in terms of natural selection and sexual selection, are thus reductive, and unapologetically so: they reduce culture to nature, pure and simple-and to a very simple conception of nature, at that.

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are notorious for their "grounding" in prejudicial assumptions and manufactured origin stories, typically based on analogies with nonhuman species or agrarian societies that are thought of as "closer to nature"; they are also often motivated by the view that all of human reality can be reduced to reproductive drives. But such arguments from analogy are dubious. First of all, the choice to focus on any particular animal species to illustrate something about humans is arbitrary at best-even our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, exhibit stunning behavioral differences. And the best evidence about other species cannot prove anything about humans. At most, such evidence can prove that certain behaviors (such as same-sex mating or maternal violence) happen to occur in the nonhuman world. Perhaps even more troubling, conclusions about human nature that are drawn from descriptions of aboriginal and tribal peoples merely enact scientists' own prejudicial hierarchies. Why would anyone assume that contemporary Westerners are advanced evolutionary products, but aboriginal Australians have somehow not changed since the dawn of humanity?

Although his scope is broad, Lancaster's discussion highlights examples of experimental science that are of particular interest to queers, such as Simon LeVay's "gay brain" studies, and the search for a "gay gene." Tracing the resonances of such questionable science in American pop culture (from Home Improvement to one writer's testosterone-driven claims that "manhood has a natural and unchanging essence"), the book is a useful resource for anyone interested in the popularization of science, and the connections between heteronormative cultural assumptions-like the view that the species is necessarily heterosexual, or that masculinity and femininity are fixed-and the production of knowledge in general.

While this expose of heteronormative science and popular science writing is quite useful, the most compelling sections of die book discuss basic relevant scientific matters and concepts, and present scientific findings that fly in the face of evolutionary psychology. Deflating discussions of the man-the-himter myth, and the true effects of testosterone (higher levels have been found to make men more alert, more optimistic and more friendly), are revelatory, and remind us that we should never take common-sense science at face value. As influential thinkers like Anne Fausto-Sterling and die late great Stephen Jay Gould repeatedly point out, the physical features diat science typically looks to for rock-bottom explanations, such as genes and parts of die brain, are diemselves not as isolatable, or even as clearly understood, as we generally assume them to be. The best evidence shows diat biological traits and features are necessary and influential factors that function and evolve in concert widi particular and dynamic social, environmental and historical realities, resulting in complex and diverse qualities, and a wide variety of forms of human life. This is die information that most effectively arms die reader witii the tools we need to understand and deconstruct die fallacious science diat promotes silly hetero norms.

Chris Cuomo is associate professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Cincinnati, and author of The Philosopher Quern: Feminist Essays m War, Love, and Knowledge (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing (Routledge, 1998).

Copyright Lambda Rising Feb 2004

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