Biology of Gender | Greg Laden's Blog

Professor Desmond Clark, the consummate British gentleman and Africanist archaeologist, was fond of telling his intro class “if we were chimpanzees instead of humans this class would be severely interrupted owing to the presence of at least one or two ovulating females in the room at this moment.” I never took a class from Desmond (different school) but this quip was passed on to me by Glynn Isaac, and Glynn has passed it on to all of his students, we to ours, and so on. So this little off-the-cuff joke is surely repeated sixty or seventy times per semester, worldwide.

But the point of this is not ribald humor. Among the great apes, we are odd ducks. Actually, we would not be so odd as ducks as we are as apes, because ducks are birds and our system of mating is far more bird-like than ape-like. Desmond was a contemporary and colleague of Louis Leakey, and part of the small group of well connected Africanists studying human evolution active in the mid 20th century. These scientists appreciated back in the 1950s and early 1960s that an understanding of ape behavior and ecology would be essential to understanding human evolution. This was an explicit effort to advance Darwin’s comparative methods. Louis Leakey was instrumental in setting up Birute Galdikas, Dianne Fossey and Jane Goodall for fieldwork in Southeast Asia and Central Africa. The fieldwork of these pioneers in ape studies has served, and continues to serve, this purpose: Placing human evolutionary biology in a firm comparative framework.

And it is from this place … the perspective of our nearest living relative, the chimpanzees … that humans are odd ducks in ways that demand an evolutionary explanation. Continue reading The Evolution of Modern Human Mating Systems and Sexuality →

This is the first of a series of posts on the biology of gender. This is a research interest of mine, and generally has a big part in my teaching as well.

Behavioral biology seeks to understand behavior in an evolutionary framework. The widely held central dogma of evolutionary biology is that selection works on allele frequencies. This leads to simple models of behavior that assume behavior is acted on by selection, and that underlying alleles are selected for or against over time. This sort of logic can be seen in biological racist doctrine, sexist racist doctrine, and more politically ambiguous research such as the famous twin studies, and about every other article in journals such as “Evolution and Human Behavior” (not that I have anything against that journal in particular … but … well, you’ll see…)

When thinking about the biology of behavior, a common guiding principle is that the stronger the effect, the “more biological” it is. There is a certain logic to this. If a certain aspect of, say, human behavior is observed over and over again, across cultures, and it is shown to persist even when social, economic, or cultural influences seem to work against it, then it makes sense that it is somehow predetermined. Continue reading The Biology of Sex and Gender: What’s in a name? →