Here I want to do two separate but related things. I want to discuss certain aspects of the nature of fieldwork in my area in the 20th century that have had a strong effect on the way women have pursued their careers (or not). Although I characterize this as the situation of the 20th century, this does not mean that the situation has or has not changed substantially since then. Simply put, I’m not discussing the current career related situaton for women in field paleoanthropology here in this post.

The second thing I want to do is to talk about a successful female social scientist with a strong connection to fieldwork in palaeoanthropology, as well as theoretical and administrative contributions. This person is also someone who straddles the boundary between classic mid- to late-Twentieth Century patterns of professional activity (in these field sciences) and more recent patterns. I’m speaking here of Barbara Isaac.

The link between these two topics is a bit tenuous but it is also meaningful. There is nothing stereotypical about Barbara Isaac’s career, and there is nothing short of admirable about her as a person and a scholar. My intention here is to not make strong links between these two parallel topics.

Maybe most scientists are labrats, but just as majority rule in defining normalcy and typicality is damaging in matters of gender fairness and diversity, majority rule in matters of sub field should be viewed with a critical eye. In particular, it may be the case that field sciences are fundamentally different from lab sciences in important ways. Consider the fields of Palaeoanthropology and Primatology. Well known women in these fields include Jane Goodall, Alison Brooks, Sara Hrdy , and Mary Leakey, to name just a few. The significance of these women is not simply that they have been successful. It is much larger than that. People get the “Leakeys” confused, but in my experience with 20 years of teaching introductory classes in human evolution, if you mention Mary Leakey, the average person (students, members of the press, people I’ve just run into) knows that you are speaking of one of the main Africanists who have studied human origins. Many Americans are aware of Sara Hrdy because her books Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and The Woman That Never Evolved: With a New Preface and Bibliographical Updates, Revised Edition have been read so widely, and assigned in so many intro or mid level classes covering the biology of women, or intro bioanthropology. Indeed, people often ask me about her, having read the book at some point in time. The average American may not know who Alison Brooks is, but Africanists acknowledge her as one of the leaders, if not the leader in African Paleolithic archaeology.

For many years I have had the impression that Jane Goodall is one name that is often recalled when students are asked to name a living famous scientist. In an earlier “edition” of this blog post I made the claim that this was well known, and many individuals objected to this. Since I don’t have the time to investigate further I’ll assume that it might not be the case that Jane Goodall comes to mind when people are asked to name a scientist. (But in my heart of hearts I think her name DOES often pop up.) Surely, dear reader, YOU have heard of Jane Goodall.

My point is that there may be something about the field studies of which I speak that is different from other areas of science. The list of physisists who have contributed to our modern understanding of cosmology includes many women, but the list of people who come to mind when the average American (for instance) is asked to a name famous physicist is (it is my impression) mainly male. I’m arguing here based mainly on my own impressions that the opposite is true with palaeoanthropology and primatology. I could be wrong. But I don’t think so.

Does this mean that these fields are contributing in an important way to perceptions of diversity in the sciences generally? Well yes.

I would now like to make a carefully worded statement about the difference between men and women in traditional 20th century academia in the roles they played in both the professional and personal setting. Listen carefully.

All else being equal, most men in 20th century field sciences had the assistance of highly capable spouses … the proverbial woman behind the man, while most women did not. Women did not typically have this resource available to them. Numerous other barriers to women’s success existed, of course, but this differential is especially interesting in the context of field bioanthropology because of the nature of the pursuit itself. It is quite possible that some areas of science (or other endeavors) had more opportunities for a spouse (usually a woman) to assist the career professional (usually a man) than other fields. For various reasons, field Palaeoanthropology is probably one of these areas.

It is interesting to survey the primary African Palaeoanthropologists of the latter part of the 20th century. I can do part of this informally in my own mind as I recall various conferences, biographies, and obituaries of the day, and collate (again, this is all in my head….) these with acknowledgment sections of major monographs. Bill Howells acknowledged his faithful wife, Muriel, who traveled around the world with him measuring skulls and keeping him in line. C. Loring Brace never forgets, in a public talk to note the contributions Mrs. Brace made to his research efforts. Betty Clark was always there for her husband Desmond, in the field or in the lab. And so on and so forth. You get the picture.

Now, here comes a statement about this observation that is meant to be dripping in sarcasm and over the top in cynicism. But, some people (owing perhaps to their own biases) will not understand that this is a cynical statement about the patriarchy and how it operates. So, remember, the following statement is not what I or anyone with even a modicum of political enlightenment would ever think. If you do not understand what I am saying in the paragraph you are reading now, then GO BACK AND READ IT AGAIN! And if you still don’t get it, then PLEASE LEAVE NOW. OK, ready? Here goes:

That is, indeed, what every scholar needs: A wife (or two) who knows how to type, edit, wield a caliper, and still have time to do the grocery shopping, have lunch ready at noon, and give birth to and raise the kids.

But the women who are well known in this field come from a slightly different background. Either they powered ahead into the field of study along side their husband (about whom … the husband … I make no claims in this post) in a similar area, as with the archaeologist Mary Leakey, who’s husband was a palaeontologist or primatologist and naturalist Jane Goodall, who’s husband was director of the Gombe chimp field site and a film maker/naturalist, and/or they worked in a field setting for much of their career whereby they actually lived in-country, or both.

Living in-country provides a significant career advantage for anyone. The basic cost of transport and scheduling of research is different, and easier. When Ofer Bar Yosef was visiting Harvard from Israel, prior to being hired at the Ivy League college, he told me “I’ll never take a job here. In Israel, the sites I work on are in my back yard. Nothing is more than an hour drive away!” (Apparently Harvard made him an offer he could not refuse a year or so later.)

Another advantage of in-country work (meaning you LIVE IN THE COUNTRY IN WHICH YOU WORK), when the country is a developing (or in some cases, unraveling) nation, is the basic cost of doing business. Dianne Fossey , Jane Goodall, Shirley Strum (to name a few highly successful women) and a number of men as well have probably benefited significantly from having inexpensive household and professional staff while working in the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, and so on. An academic ex patriot’s (an ex patriot is someone who has moved to and works in a country other than their native land) household can be a very easy place to get things done. Excellent libraries may be far away, but you may have a driver and a cook and a cleaner and, as was the case with the Leakeys and many others, a number of technical staff who do not cost much but who can work with the fossils or carry out data collection better than any passing graduate student. Everyone knows, and the people involved readily acknowledge (to their credit) that the big names … Leakey, Walker, and so on, hardly ever actually found a hominid fossil. A hominid fossil found in Kenya is more likely to have been found by Kenyan Kimeu Kimoya than by anyone else.

For the present, I’ll just skip over the part about the subaltern contribution to the career of the privileged. Not because that is not important, but rather, because it is too important to address as an aside. I will save that for another time.

I have two reasons for mentioning all of this. One is simply to point out the nature of these field studies, and to note the fact that some of the successful women in these fields were successful in part because they had the equivalent (more or less) of a spouse, just like all the men in these fields did. (Keep in mind, this all primarily applies to a 20th century context.) The second reason is to mention that Barbara Isaac’s career involved being the spouse (for several years) and being independently successful without the aid of a spouse or minions as highly skilled low-salaried field workers.

Barbara’s career has been fairly low key. She contributed in all the usual ways, as part of a team, working with her husband, Glynn Isaac. Following Glynn’s untimely and tragic death, Barbara edited a volume of his major papers, and shepherded (a mild word compared to the reality) the production of the Koobi Fora monograph. At the same time, she continued work on an important research project that I’ll shift the focus to momentarily, on the role of throwing in human evolution.

Very few people know this, and I’m not going to go into any details here because they would necessarily be too vague, but Barbara Isaac was instrumental in the process of opening up international research in the Republic of Georgia, where the Dmanisi site has yielded important hominid fossils. Barbara stepped aside from that work early on, but it continues today. Barbara also oversaw the repatriation of Native American materials at the Peabody Museum, and served for ten years as assistant director of the Peabody.

I’ve always thought, but some may argue that I’m wrong, that Barbara was also responsible for the branding of African Stone Age archaeology, in a visual sense. Barbara did many of the illustrations for the work at Koobi Fora and for Glynn’s theoretical contributions. The fanciful rock art-inspired figures that play out the various theories of bipedalism, or central place foraging, or acheulean activities of one sort or another seem to have come from her imagination, although they’ve been imitated subsequently many times.

Barbara’s work with throwing is especially important and underscored a number of her excellent intellectual and personal skills. Here is the basic question: Did throwing things, as weapons, play any role in hominid evolution? It turns out that many of the earliest considerations of this idea, and some of the investigations carried out contemporaneously with Barbara’s interest in this, were kinda nutty. One ‘researcher’ took the opportunity of being a tourist at Olorgesailie — a site excavated by the Isaacs in Kenya at which thousands of hand axes are seen still on the ground, with the tourists walking over them on a wooden catwalk — to pick up an actual hand axe from its place in situ and wing it across the landscape to see what would happen. Crazy people with crazy ideas totally ruined the whole throwing thing, simply because taking a look at throwing would be received like launching an expedition to find Bigfoot. Crazy.

But, the idea is not really so crazy, and Barbara Isaac recognized this because of some work she had done on the question. So, despite the Bigfoot like nature of the throwing hypothesis, she went ahead and assembled a large amount of information in an effort to have a run at the idea. This is how many ideas in palaeoanthropology are addressed scientifically. You can’t run lab experiments for most of these things. So instead you work out a model that described the putative phenomenon, and then apply several lines of evidence to the model to see how stupid the model turns out to be. This evidence can include some experimental work, but it also includes seeking patterns in the archaeological records (objects that can be thrown) looking at medical, physical, or anecdotal evidence (cases of successful homicide by throwing, sports related research), and ethnographic evidence where available. After numerous attempts to make the idea look stupid, if it ends up not looking too stupid, then you may be on to something!

The point here is that Barbara had the cachet in the field, among her peers, to look for Bigfoot and be taken seriously. And when she looked, fully prepared to reject the idea, she ended up making a reasonable argument that throwing was a plausible technique for interpersonal conflict, defense, and hunting. She would not and did not go beyond plausibility, but that is all she attempted. The idea of her work was to demonstrate the implausibility of the throwing hypothesis, and she ended up essentially unable to do so, leaving the idea standing at the end. As plausible. That is good paleoscience.

“Ability to throw was probably achieved at an early stage in human evolution but has received little scholarly attention. Although this ability is poorly developed in apes, anatomical studies suggest that the hand of Australopithecus afarensis was adapted to throw with precision and force. Archaeological evidence and early ethnographic observations are cited in order to demonstrate the importance of the throwing skill in human evolution.”

This of course applies to the use of thrown spears but Isaac looked beyond this to the idea of any deadly projectiles, including basic rocks or the famous Middle Stone Age “spheroids” (rocks shaped by hominids to be round) and such contrivances as bolas. Even to this day, the validity of any claim that a particular artifact is a throwing spear or something similar is very questionable prior to the Upper Paleolithic.

Isaac reviews the ethnographic record and there are a number of examples of cultures in which throwing relatively simple objects for hunting is documented. Most of these are cases of people throwing rocks (as a regular practice) at small things like hyraxes . But there are more extreme cases. The Portuguese encountered natives in the Canary Islands who were able to keep the Portuguese at bay using thrown stones and horn tipped wooden lances.

“In hardly any time at all they had so badly beaten us that they had driven us back into shelter with heads bloodied, arms and legs broken by blows from stones: because they know of no other weaponry, and believe me that they throw and wield a stone considerably more skilfully than a Christian; it seems like the bolt of a crossbow when they throw it…”

(Notice the passive-aggressive “that’s all they know” along with the “They kicked our arses.”)

In addition to the ethnographic record, Isaac reviews the archaeological, human and more broadly hominid anatomical evidence, and looks at chimps. Again, there is general support for the idea.

She concludes, among other things: Stone throwing can be highly lethal, and is widespread in areas where there are no firearms, in the ethnographic record; The anatomy allows for this practice, and there is evidence of this ability in early hominids as distinct from ape models.; The archaeological evidence is suggestive but equivocal to date, owing mainly to a lack of consideration of the nature of the evidence. She also briefly discusses observed sex differences in throwing behavior.

Isaac, Barbara (1987). Throwing and Human Evolution The African Archaeological Review, 5, 3-17

She was sitting there in class two weeks ago and exploded. She does not know that I know this, but I noticed it happen. Since she was sitting, as usual, in the front row, and it was all in her face, the other students did not see it but I definitely did.

By “exploding” in this case I mean that her brain suddenly filled with unanswered questions, which she then started sending me in frantic emails. Many of these questions are about things we will eventually get to in class, but some are on issues that we won’t touch on at all. I decided, and I received her kind permission to do this, to answer her questions by blogging them. This way I get to kill two birds with one stone, which is usually a good thing (unless of course you are the second bird).

In some cases I’ve re-written the question a little, but in all cases, they are good questions. I cannot guarantee that all of my answers will be good. But I do appreciate Marta’s inspiration, and find it inspiring myself. My only concern is that Marta gets interested enough in this material to become a biological anthropologist and thus wastes an otherwise potentially productive life. I’m hoping she becomes a doctor or a world leader instead, but we’ll see…

OK, on to the first question (I’ll deal with others in later posts):

Why did bonobos (Pan paniscus) evolve from common chimps (Pan troglodytes)?

The flippant answer is that we never really know or care why one species gives rise to another, we just see that it happens and document it. But underlying this question is the presumption that bonobos have interesting features that we do not expect to see in apes, and this is an opportunity to think interesting thoughts about evolution.

Bonobos are different from chimps in a few ways that we can presume are derived … meaning that they are novelties found in bonobos that arose as part of their differentiation from the common chimps, or subsequently. Since none of these features have a fossil record at this time it will be hard to say which known differences, if any, account for the speciation event itself.

The differences (that we’ll talk about now … this is not an exhaustive list):

• Bonobos have a female matriline in which dominance ranking of the females determines the dominance ranking of the female’s male offspring.
• The “chief bonobo” in a group is typically the highest ranking female. With chimps, most males are dominant over most females.
• Bonobos seem to have a lot of sex, and at least as interesting, they seem to have all kinds of sex, whereby all combinations of age, gender, and which body part is involved seem to occur except one: Males do not have sex with their mothers.
• Overall, there seems to be a higher level of agonistic (nasty) behavior among common chimps, especially involving males, while bonobos prefer sexual encounters over agonistic ones. One way of thinking of this is expressed on the Columbus Zoo web site: Chimps resolve sex issues with power; bonobos resolve power issues with sex.
• Bonobos probably live in larger groups. It is thought that having a large number of females in a group allows the females to dominate.

So, how, why, when, where, etc?

A key fact is that common chimpanzees have lived forever in a more or less continuous distribution (but there are important details of that I’m leaving out) across the breadth of the African Rain Forest north of the Congo/Zaire river, while bonobos live only south of the river. The genetic diversity and geographical range of the common chimps, and the fact that gorillas also live only north of the river, leads us to assume (this could be wrong but probably not) that at some point in time (about a million and a half years ago, maybe) a group of common chimpanzees somehow ended up on the other side of this river … a formidable geographic boundary … and subsequently gave rise to bonobos.

Richard Wrangham’s original hypothesis on this was that in the absence of competition for terrestrial herbaceous vegetation (THV), a major fall back food for chimps and THE major food for gorillas, bonobos were able to live in larger groups, leading to the large-number-of-females effect (see above) and thus ultimately to a totally different social system.

Subsequent studies by Wrangham and others have failed to show the expected difference in access to THV, thus probably falsifying this hypothesis. I’ve often thought that a very thorough study of all of the elements of the forest, not just THV, would show a number of candidate differences between the two regions (including other THV eaters, human hunter-gatherers, etc.), and I don’t think this kind of explanation should be ruled out yet.

However, there is another distinct possibility that should be considered, not necessarily as an explanation per se, but as a context for any explanation: I call this the “Fish or Cut Bait” phenomenon.

Imagine that there are two ways to do something, each of about the same effectiveness and of about the same cost. Or at least, the cost-benefit ratio of each approach is so close that you can’t say that they are different. In an evolutionary sense, either strategy could be an “evolutionary stable strategy” … one is not clearly going to invade and take over the other, in game theory terms … but only one will work at at time. They can’t both happen together in a given system. So it has to be one or the other. Fish or cut bait.

In this case, we have agonistic interactions to mediate social issues vs. erotic encounters to mediate social issues. For the former, how this works is obvious. Individuals perform nasty acts against each other, coalitions are formed, politics happen. This should be easy for any human to understand because this is the core of our own social system. Unfortunately. The latter may be harder to understand, but this also is part of our own social system as well (to a lesser extent) so we can relate to it.

In the case of agonistic (nasty) interactions, there is a psychological/emotional state that individuals strive for. Individuals are selected to do what it takes to not be in pain, not threatened, not stressed. You may do this by forming a tight coalition and the members of the coalition get left alone, occasionally groomed, not challenged very often. Or you might do this by avoiding the dominant individuals or coalitions. That’s all pretty obvious. Please don’t bite me, I wasn’t really looking at your girlfriend. Sure, you can have my banana.

But there may also be a state of being that one strives for that is accomplished by erotic interactions. It’s a temporary state of comfort or satisfaction that occurs through erotic interaction (including but not limited to “sex” … let’s not go into that definition too much. Here I mean sex to have babies, a behavior that is selected for regardless of the social dynamic, as opposed to all that other stuff bonobos do, which does not produce babies and is thus not selected for directly in relation to reproductive success).

Perhaps agonistic social politics and erotic bonding can each work about the same in the group dynamic of a medium sized frugivorous social ape. It is highly unlikely that either could work without interfering with each other. You can have a culture of general nastiness or a culture of erotic satisfaction. (I’m sure there are some who will say you can have both, but I’m pretty sure that is illegal in Minnesota.)

So now you have these common chimpanzees wandering around in a forest in which they or any other ape never before existed, because they somehow got across the Zaire river. I’m actually imagining that these come from a subgroup of chimps that lived in somewhat less forested environments, because they probably were the southeastern extension of the chimpanzee range, down south of present day Gombe, where they could stay in a forest and make it to the region south of the river, in times of maximal forest expansion during an interglacial.

As they move into the central forest south of the Zaire River, they find themselves in an environment that may have been richer than where they previously lived because of this shift from savanna-forest mixed habitat to true forest. (I quickly add that since chimps and fruiting trees probably have some important seed dispersal relationships, one might have to expect a difference in the distribution of key food sources, but let’s ignore that for now).

The point is that these are apes moving into a forest with virtually no conspecific or even congeneric neighbors against which to compete. In modern chimps, males spend considerable time and effort patrolling borders, and occasionally killing individual chimps from neighboring groups. According to Wrangham’s model of this behavior, the long term goal is to diminish the numbers of chimps in your neighboring group, so that if and when you need to expand your territory because of food stress, you can go over to the neighbor’s place, run them off and/or do them in, and at least temporarily enjoy a much expanded territory.

It is almost certainly true that day to day male agonistic interaction and the related coalition building in common chimps is essential for this strategy to work.

But these wandering chimps south of the big river, which would ultimately give rise to the bonobos, are expanding across an ape-free landscape, so this pattern is rarely selected for. Over several generations, in the absence of selection for the more traditional chimp-like social behavior, both the agonistic model and the erotic model of society are roughly equal in likelihood. We don’t need to postulate a specific reason why the erotic model emerged instead of the agonistic model. There would have been, according to this hypothesis, a roughly 50-50 chance of one or the other.

It is possible, though, that in this chimp-free landscape (at the outer edge of their range of expansion, at least) females could get into larger groups, and thus be more in charge. Since females will always lose in the agonistic model, but win in the erotic model, the erotic model was more likely to happen.

Every now and then I wonder about this question, not one that Marta asked: What would happen if a group of chimps and a group of bonobos, in the wild, found themselves as neighbors?

The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University.

I would like to weigh in.

The real answer, as is so often the case, is “You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!”

But I don’t think they are going to do that.

I find it very interesting that even though the question does not mention IQ across gender, the details of the ‘debate’ (disguised as ‘rules’) actually specify that the commentators will tackle both race and gender links. Kinda proving that Nature is indeed playing the race card.

I like the idea of addressing both the questions of gender and race in relation to any differences (IQ or whatever). The course that I have taught in many forms in the past, and will likely teach again next Spring, does this. I like to do this because of the very important difference of differences. Gender is, biologically, much much more “real” than race. Gender is demonstrably real (in many aspects) and race is demonstrably not real (in almost all aspects). Also, almost all race differences we see bandied about are linked to nefarious racism one way or another. Gender differences, however, run the full spectrum from really destructive to very positive, with a lot of difficult ambiguity in the in between parts. So, looking at the myriad of purported gender differences first, then race second, turns out to be very very interesting. (One could do it the other way round as well, but for various reasons this works better in the context of my class.)

Let me say a few things about each of these papers first (citations below), then I would like to make a few broader remarks about gender, race, and “IQ.”

Steven Rose does a very good job of explaining all the reasons why the answer to this particular question should be “No” … although I hope he would also agree with me that this is not exactly the question that should be asked. He rightly discusses motivation, noting that we are busy comparing certain “races” by IQ while utterly ignoring equally oft constructed multichotomies of difference.

The categories judged relevant to the study of group differences are clearly unstable, dependent on social, cultural and political context. No one, to my knowledge, is arguing for research on group differences in intelligence between north and south Welsh (although there are well-established average genetic differences between people living in the two regions). This calls into question the motivation behind looking for such specific group differences in intelligence, sheds doubt on whether such research is well-founded, and begs whether answers could possibly be put to good use.

He does not spend enough time on, but does address, the fundamental flaw of the question: If race is not a valid categorization of people, then how do we justify funding scientific research of it? He also notes that while people may bellyache about adjusting IQ scores across ‘racial’ groups, no one seems to complain about nor notice the adjustment of IQ scores between gender, whereby boy’s scores are raised to make them seem equal to girls. Who are smarter, obviously.

The other side of the coin argued by Cici and Williams is the usual drek that should not pass for scientific discourse. Race should be studied because … it is truth. Race should be studied because Stalin tried to stop this kind of thing. Race should be studied because … Larry Summers and James Watson and others have been victimized by the Liberal Left.

Whatever whatever.

I would like to note that the “yes” side is being argued by geneticists. That is pretty typical. Geneticists don’t study intelligence, they study genes and they overrate the value of knowledge of genetics and always have. The “no” side is argued by a neurbiologist. Neurobiologists understand things like culling and plasticity. Do you know what culling is? If not you don’t have a valid opinion about race and IQ. That would be like not knowing what an “Internal Combustion Engine” and a “transmission” are and thinking you have a valid idea of how to fix your car’s drive train. You’d be wrong.

About Gender vs. Race and IQ (or any other trait): Gender is both very real and highly constructed. It is probably often more constructed by context and upbringing than ever race is, but there are real aspects of gender. The vast majority of individuals who are constructed as women cannot inseminate a person with viable sperm in the absence of special technology. The vast majority of individuals who are constructed as men cannot carry and birth a baby at this time. Except in that one movie. This is for a number of biological reasons. The evidence suggests that a certain number of measurable gender differences in behavior between various genders are linked to biological differences and probably have something to do with hormonal conditioning which, in turn, may be mediated in some cases by behavior and cultural or social environment (so even hormonal differences are not entirely independent of constructed context). But there is all sorts of biological stuff going on there. And everything in the above paragraph applies to rats as well as humans.

Of course, you don’t inherit your gender, exactly. Well, OK, there is an ongoing argument that gay-osity is heritable. Maybe or maybe not. The argument seems to gain strength then get shot down again and again, like one of those tings many people need to believe is true but isn’t. If it is true, it is pretty wishy washy and depends a lot on stuff that is in turn hard to pin down. But your basic maleness vs. femaleness with respect to reproductive parts and so on is basically not inherited but is provided genetically, as we all know.

“Race” on the other hand is inherited, but in a very complex way. Since race is a social construct, two elements are needed to produce a certain race. First, there must be a construct extant that responds so some signal (like skin color or language dialect), then there must be a signal produced by a particular genetic variant (like skin color) or, in some cases, just a construct (like language dialect).

Imagine a racist act. Many racist acts occur in a broader social context and can be understood by all the people in that cultural milieu as such. Racists acts often have names or commonly understood index terms associated with them. Most people know at least roughly what the racist act is, how it is done, to whom (which race) it is done and by whom (which race) it is done, etc. That is the socially constructed racist act, and linked to it is a socially constructed race.

Then there are the people. Among the people there will be allelic variation … everybody has the same genes, but the genes themselves have variants … alleles … that result in different phenotypes. So among the people there will be individuals of one socially constructed race and individuals of another socially constructed race, and the defined differences and identities will be an interaction between the alleles and the social constructs.

So if you have a handful of alleles that make you seem to be a Native American, for instance, some professor of higher education may look at you and think “Oh, another one of these guys. Last Native American I had to deal with …. well that didn’t go so well. Let’s get rid of this guy.”

That was the expression of a genetic trait possessed by the victim of a racist act. The genotype was the set of alleles that code for Native Americanosity, and the trait, in its fully expressed glory, was a racist act that emerged from the social context.

The same sorts of things happen with respect to both gender and race. In all cases it is hard to draw lines or make clear links between genotype and phenotypes. It is not so hard to understand the power relationships that usually drive the acts themselves. Even if most people engaged in these gendered and race-driven act are not cognizant of the power relationships, they are usually there.

Research in gene-behavior interaction is important. Research in genetic variation is important. Research based on either a race model (of any kind) or a simple two-step gender model is neither important or valid because such research is based on assumptions that not only cart-before-horse but are also sufficiently discredited to be abandoned. And, I suspect that not too much of this research is actually being funded anyway. A fair amount is published, but I’d love to see the actual link between funding source, proposal, research, and publication. I’d wager there is some disconnect there.

Steven Rose (2009). Darwin 200: Should scientists study race and IQ? NO: Science and society do not benefit Nature, 457 (7231), 786-788 DOI: 10.1038/457786a

Stephen Ceci, Wendy M. Williams (2009). Darwin 200: Should scientists study race and IQ? YES: The scientific truth must be pursued Nature, 457 (7231), 788-789 DOI: 10.1038/457788a

“The underrepresentation of women in firefighting is an alarming inequity that needs to be immediately addressed,” said Francine Moccio, director of the institute and co-author of the report, “A National Report Card on Women in Firefighting,” which was presented at the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services meeting, April 24, in Phoenix.”Women are not getting recruited and hired because of an occupational culture that is exclusionary and unequal employment practices in recruiting, hiring, assigning and promoting women generally — and women of color in particular — in fire service,” Moccio added.Working with two civil rights lawyers and an economist specializing in employment and human resource management, Moccio and the research team analyzed surveys from 675 firefighters from 114 departments in 48 states and interviewed 175 female firefighters in depth in the first study of its kind.The researchers found that despite more than 20 years of legislative reform and litigation, women are simply not being hired. When women are hired, the study found that 85 percent interviewed reported that they were treated differently; 80 percent said they were issued ill-fitting equipment, 37 percent reported that their gender creates barriers to career advancement; 50 percent felt shunned or socially isolated; and 37 percent were verbally harassed.”This landmark study shows that more than half (51.2 percent) of the nation’s largest metropolitan regions still have no paid female firefighters,” said Moccio. “The New York City Fire Department receives one of the lowest grades, with fewer than 0.25 percent women firefighters,” added Marc Bendick, an economist and co-author.That compares with the top 10 percent of firehouses (29 departments) with the most women, where women comprise, on average, 14.5 percent of firefighters. Locations with the highest percentage of women are Tuscaloosa, Ala. (24 percent); Kalamazoo, Mich. (almost 23 percent); Springfield, Ill. (19 percent); Racine, Wis. (almost 18 percent); and Redding, Calif. (17 percent).Although women account for about 47 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, “the conventional wisdom [in the field] is that women simply aren’t interested, and they can’t handle the job,” said Moccio. Yet, when the researchers looked at the percentage of women in comparable jobs requiring strength and stamina or involving dirty or dangerous work (e.g., drywall installers, loggers and welders), women represented 17 percent of workers. And, almost half of women firefighting candidates pass the physical ability tests.”We need to start in our own backyard, New York City, which has scored at the very bottom of this report card,” Moccio said. She stressed the need for immediate intervention from mayors, fire chiefs, legislators and fire service managers to recruit, hire and retain culturally diverse women into this occupation.The report highlights ways in which fire departments across the country can develop and reward best practices that address these issues and promote inclusion.[source]