Not that racial and cultural differences cannot exist. Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind: But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely: The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the human mind—principally competitive relations with kin members, tribal allies, and sexual partners—are and have been the same for white and black men and were at work before the ancestors of whites left Africa 1 00,000
years ago. While skin color is affected by things such as climate, which differs markedly between Africa and northern Europe, the shape of the mind is affected only very marginally by nonhuman problems such as what kind of game to hunt or how to keep warm SEXING THE MIND
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or cooclass="underline" Infinitely more important is how to deal with fellow human beings, and that is the same problem everywhere—that is, the same for men everywhere and the same for women everywhere: But not the same for men and for women.
This is the essential difference between anthropology and Darwinism. Anthropologists insist that a Western urban man is far different in his habits and thoughts from a bushman tribesman than either is from his wife: Indeed, it is the foundation of their discipline that this is so, for anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity: Men fight, compete, love, show off, and hunt all over the world: True, bushmen fight with spears and sticks, whereas Chicagoans fight with guns and lawsuits; bushmen strive to be headmen, whereas Chicagoans strive to become senior partners.
The stuff of anthropology—the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals—is to me but the froth on the surface.
Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian an anthropologist studying the differences between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field: The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant: It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing."
One of the most persistent of those universals is sexual role playing. As Edward Wilson put it: "In diverse cultures men pursue and acquire, while women are protected and bartered: Sons sow wild oats and daughters risk being ruined: When sex is sold, men are usually the buyers. "" John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put the challenge to cultural interpretations of this universal pattern even more baldly:
The assertion that "culture" explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daugh-
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ters to protect their sons ' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age, and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other.'
Just as it is foolish to deny the differences between the sexes in the face of the evidence presented here, so it is foolish to exaggerate them. In the matter of intelligence, for example, there is no reason to believe that men are dumber than women or vice versa—nothing in evolutionary thinking suggests as much, and no data test the proposition. As noted earlier, the data do suggest that men are probably better at abstract and spatial tasks, women at verbal and social ones, which vastly complicates the job of trying to design a test that is gender-neutraclass="underline" Indeed, it helps to demolish the farcical notion of general, unitary intelligence altogether.
Nor does an appeal to sexual difference excuse anything: In the words of Anne Moir and David Jessel, "We do not consecrate the natural just because it is biologically true; men, for instance, have a natural disposition to homicide and promiscuity, which is not a recipe for the happy survival of society: "46
People seem to forget easily that the word is is different from the word should: If we choose to redress the sexual differences between the minds of men and women through policy, we are going against nature, but no more than when we outlaw murder. But we should be clear that we are redressing a difference, not discovering an identity. Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favor to either sex:
Chapter 9
THE USES OF BEAUTY
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
—Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
In the early 199os, there was a flurry of interest that a "gay gene " had been found on the X chromosome. The excitement faded as it proved hard to replicate the original study: But twin studies show that homosexuality is heritable, and one day the genes that can cause a man to be gay—perhaps in response to maternal genes expressed in his mother's womb—will be found.
The first implication will be politicaclass="underline" Although it raises the possibility of selective abortion by mothers who do not wish to have gay sons, the theory of the gay gene has been largely welcomed in recent years by homosexual activists: The reason is that they find it will convince their more stubborn detractors that homosexuality is a condition into which they were born rather than a choice they made: In the eyes of disapproving heterosexuals, it exculpates them, their parents, and their education for their sexual proclivity. It also relieves parents of any anxiety they might have that their son might be led into homosexuality simply because his favorite rock group consists of homosexuals or because he has been seduced by a homosexual during adolescence:
The second implication is moraclass="underline" The gay gene would at last demolish the myth that there is something "better" and less evil about theories that ascribe conditions to nurture or environment than theories that ascribe them to innate nature: In the name of Freudian nurture theories, gays were once treated with aversion therapy—electric shocks and emetics accompanied by homoerotic images: The most compelling of the new evidence for the gay gene is that fraternal twins, carried in the same womb and reared in the
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same household, have only a one-in-four chance of being gay: Identical twins, on the other hand, with the same nurture and the same nature, have a one-in-two chance of being gay. If one identical twin is gay, the chances that his brother is also gay are 50 percent: There is also good evidence that the gene is inherited from the mother and not from the father:'
How could such a gene survive, given that gay men generally do not have children? There are two possible answers: One is that the gene is good for female fertility when in women, to the same extent that it is bad for male fertility when in men: The second possibility is more intriguing: Laurence Hurst and David Haig of Oxford University believe that the gene might not be on the X
chromosome after alclass="underline" X genes are not the only genes inherited through the female line. So are the genes of mitochondria, described in chapter 4, and the evidence linking the gene to a region of the X chromosome is still very shaky statistically: If the gay gene is in the mitochondria, then a conspiracy theory springs to the devious minds of Hurst and Haig: Perhaps the gay gene is like those "male killer " genes found in many insects: It effectively sterilizes males, causing the diversion of inherited wealth to female relatives. That would (until recently at least) have enhanced the breeding success of the descendants of those female relatives, which would have caused the gay gene to spread: If the sexual preferences of gay men are greatly influenced (not wholly determined) by a gene, then it is probable that so are the sexual preferences of heterosexuals: And if our sexual instincts are heavily determined by our genes, then they have evolved by natural and sexual selection, and that means they bear the imprint of design: They are adaptive: There is a reason that beautiful people are attractive: They are attractive because others have genes that cause them to find beautiful people attractive. People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. Beauty is not arbitrary: The insights of evolutionary biologists are transforming our view of sexual attraction, for they have begun at last to suggest why we find some features beautiful and others ugly.