And Other Science Fables

Scientific objectivity should ensure that researchers discover or uncover the truth. How can scientists whose research subject is humans, claim an objective view when they are also implicitly researching themselves too? In this article, our editor, Elizabeth Debold, examines how researchers in different fields are changing assumptions about the fundamental nature of men and women. And she asks: What does this mean for the future of the social sciences?

Every time fruit flies appear all over the bananas that I have on the kitchen counter, the irritated thought crosses my mind, Where the heck did they come from? I am reminded of the theory of “spontaneous generation” from the 17^th C., which argued that living things could arise from nonliving matter—so mice could materialize from dirty rags and wheat kernels left on the floor of the barn. Or fruit flies spring from bananas. While to my eyes, the fruit flies really do seem to grow out of the bananas, I do understand that they actually don’t.

While our daily experience of the sunrise and set seems to defy Copernicus’s cosmos, the photos of the Earth taken from the Moon place us back in it—surrounded by an endless black sea. The understanding of ourselves and the universe that science has given us over the past five hundred years has taken us beyond our assumptions, senses, and deepest longings. The pushback from some who today are espousing a flat Earth—doubting the first significant discovery of the Scientific Revolution—seems to be a desperate attempt to hang onto the authority of our eyes and ears and the hands-on, concrete capacity to make sense of our lives and experience.

In fact, there has ongoingly been a tension between science as a confirmation of our social and physical reality and science that reveals a world both strange and open to new potentials. This is particularly true in the human sciences. For example, consider phrenology. In the early 19^th century, the Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall, with his associate Johann Spurzheim, devised schemes for interpreting the different brain “organs” that made themselves known through bumps on the skull. Measuring skulls from every angle, their science of phrenology “proved” that educated white males were superior to women, the lower classes, and any race other than Caucasian. Reflecting Gall and Spurzheim’s own beliefs, these supposedly scientific findings—written into the bones of our bodies, no less—provided a biological, natural rationale for the enslavement of other humans and the absence of white women from politics, business, and intellectual life.

While phrenology was debunked—except for a rather brief stint in the hands of the Nazis—the study of human bodies, cultures, and other sentient beings has suffered from a lack of the scientific objectivity that science is supposed to be based on. This has been true of comparisons between white and brown or black bodies and peoples. It is also true of studies about males and females. And I don’t mean studies from the 19^th C. I am speaking of now. How can science propose to offer us truth when the work of scientists often is clouded by their own unconscious biases?

The Standard Narrative

In the fields of anthropology and archaeology, a great deal of research has explored the beginnings of human cultures to find out how we became the women and men that we are. In this research, there is what is called “the standard narrative,” which researchers consider almost the template from which human culture has developed. Across time and place, since the dawn of time, males and females embody opposing evolutionary roles in this story. Females are, as they say, sexually “coy”: meaning that they are very choosy about who they mate with, trying to attract the most advantageous mate to support themselves and their children. Females “invest” more in raising children, so they promise their mate exclusive sexual access in order to limit male philandering and get food for their offspring. And males, the story continues, want to spread their seed far and wide to produce as many offspring as possible—and they won’t support other men’s children. This narrative is “explained” by a zero-sum game between heterosexual males and females that has locked us in genetic competition with each other since the dawn of time.

After perhaps a hundred years of looking backwards into Prehistory to see the Modern present, researchers have begun to question their own assumptions and, in the process, are seeing new, standard-narrative-busting evidence in their studies. One by one, the tired plot devices of the standard narrative are being rewritten. Female coyness? Our ancient Homo foremothers as well as females in tribes in South America, Papua New Guinea, and India are not shy about sex; they have multiple mates—often to ensure that a child inherits good qualities from different males. Far from being sexually withholding to select and attract an exclusive mate, adult females live together with males, including their children, in polygamous family groupings. This evidence has been available since the 19^th C. when Lewis Morgan noted that the Iroquois lived in family groupings that were essentially polyamorous. This was such a commonly observed phenomenon, notes anthropologist M. Kay Martin, that 19^th C. researchers called this “group marriage.” In case it’s not clear: with females no longer playing the femme fatale, the need for males to bang on their chests and compete with other men in order to have sex with women withers away. The idea that males used the hunt as a way of showing off before the ladies to get them to mate with them has also been discarded.

The new narrative is about cooperation. Our species’ success has to do with our capacity for teamwork and collaboration—which called on male and female and intersex humans to live life shoulder-to-shoulder and eye-to-eye. This comes through powerfully in recent research looking again at the fossil record of our Homo ancestors, in ethnographic research with still-existing hunter-gatherers, in studies of our fellow primates, and so on. In a 2015 study reported by Mark Dyble and colleagues at University College London, they concluded that sexual equality, like language, cooperation, and pair-bonding, is an overlooked aspect of our very ancient past that ensured the future of humanity.

HOW CAN WE TRUST SCIENCE AS A MEANS TO TRUTH IF THOSE WHO PRACTICE IT ARE SO BLIND TO THEIR BIASES?

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Who Is the Coy Girl?

The very Victorian idea that females and males have dramatically different relationships to sexuality, or the rather contemporary idea that women and men are antagonists and almost different species, have made it very difficult for researchers to see or interpret their data objectively. In 1986, the Harvard-trained primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote that this “theoretical formulation about the basic nature of males and females” is “one of the more curious inconsistencies in modern evolutionary biology.” Noting that it “has persisted for over three decades, from 1948 until recently, despite the accumulation of abundant openly available evidence contradicting it.” Of course, she is referring to the assumption that “males are ardent and sexually undiscriminating while females are sexually restrained and reluctant to mate.”

Why? she asks. Charles Darwin was a Victorian, she notes, who saw that males were the “wooers” and females the choosers. According to Hrdy, the 1948 empirical research of Angus John Bateman on fruit flies, in which he made the claim that “an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females” was a sex difference that “might be expected to persist as a rule,” became the back up for Darwin’s Victorian division between coy females and promiscuous males of every species.

Why? I ask. There are fruit flies, like the ones on my bananas, on one side and human beings in our various complex cultures on the other. How could one think that the rules that apply to mating (and child-rearing) for these tiny flies and those that apply to humans would be basically the same?

“When generalizations persist for decades after evidence invalidating them is also known,” says Hrdy, “can there be much doubt that some bias was involved? We were predisposed to imagine males as ardent, females as coy; males as polygynists, females monandrous. How else could the [fruit fly] to primate extrapolation have entered modern evolutionary thinking unchallenged?” Some bias, for sure—on the part of both male and female researchers. Why? Such assumptions about males and females are the bedrock of Western culture with its gendered division between work and family life. They are also core to our identities as women and men. In fact, Hrdy notes that it wasn’t until she began questioning power and gender dynamics in her own life that these questions even became thinkable in her research.

Blinded by Hormones

The subtle impact of these deep-seated assumptions about men and women reverberates through other scientific disciplines. Research on hormones is a good example. In a circular argument, biologists who believed in this dichotomy between females and males study hormones with the grounding assumption that they are looking for two different hormones that will define two fundamentally different sexes.

One pair of hormones seems to support the idea that males are sexually aggressive and females are not: testosterone and oxytocin. Testosterone is linked with aggression and oxytocin with affection. Some, like John Gray, author of the classic Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, argue that these two underlie the basic personality differences that make men feel manly and women feel womanly (as he says). There is a neat symmetry in this gender assignment of the hormones that works so well with our expectations of women as coy and men as sexually assertive.

THE SHORTCOMINGS OF SCIENCE CAN BE MET BY THE ONGOING PURSUIT OF BETTER SCIENCE.

Dr. Katrina Karkazis and Dr. Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, a biomedical researcher and biomedical ethicist, respectively, and authors of Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, argue that “Testosterone is decidedly not a ‘male sex hormone’.” It is produced by females and is necessary for their health. “For a century,” these authors write, “talk about testosterone as the ‘male hormone’ has woven folklore into science, so that supposedly objective claims seemingly validate cultural beliefs about the structure of masculinity and the ‘natural’ relationship between women and men.”

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[Re-]Searching for Truth

I could point to similar biases in brain research (where there are not male and female brains) or medical research, but it all points to the same question: How can we trust science as a means to truth, if those who practice it are so blind to their biases?

“This is science as currently practiced: inefficient, biased, frustrating, replete with false starts and red herrings,” says Hrdy, “but nevertheless responsive to criticism and self-correcting, and hence better than any of the other more unabashedly ideological programs currently being advocated.” The new discoveries that Hrdy and other researchers are making beyond the standard narrative take us into new terrain: the way we are women and men is not fixed in some evolutionary sediment but has great room for creative play. Science invites us to develop our capacity for complex thinking, imagination, and integration—it takes us beyond the concrete experience of our senses into the unfamiliar and unthinkable.

The shortcomings of science can be met by the ongoing pursuit of better science that includes deeper self-understanding and questioning of one’s assumptions. The only answer to the limits of science is science: the open, systematic, and self-questioning exploration of ourselves and our world. That is just as true for us, as laypersons, as it is for the scientists.