Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives

Venla Oikkonen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136200175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the early 1990s, evolutionary psychology has produced widely popular visions of modern men and women as driven by their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical appeal of evolutionary psychology by viewing it as part of the Darwinian narrative tradition.

Refusing to start from the position of dismissing evolutionary psychology as reactionary or scientifically invalid, the book examines evolutionary psychologists' investments in such contested concepts as teleology and variation. The book traces the emergence of evolutionary psychological narratives of gender, sexuality and reproduction, encompassing:

• Charles Darwin's understanding of transformation and sexual difference
• Edward O. Wilson's evolutionary mythology and the evolution-creationism controversy
• Richard Dawkins' molecular agency and new imaging technologies
• the connections between adultery, infertility and homosexuality in adaptationist thought.

Through popular, literary and scientific texts, the book identifies both the imaginative potential and the structural weaknesses in evolutionary narratives, opening them up for feminist and queer revision. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, particularly in gender studies, cultural studies, literature, sexualities, and science and technology studies.

1 Foundational trajectories in Darwin and sociobiology

Debates about the scientific validity of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology often turn to Charles Darwin. In popular discourses of science in particular, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are typically portrayed through such phrases as “as Darwin already recognized,” “as Darwin showed,” or, alternatively, “unlike Darwin.” Not surprisingly, proponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology tend to equate sociobiology with the cultural authority associated with Darwin. For example, evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright insists on calling sociobiology and evolutionary psychology “the new, improved Darwinian theory” (Wright [1994] 2004: 4) and their practitioners “new Darwinian social scientists” (Wright [1994] 2004: 5). Similarly, evolutionary psychologist David Buss states that “[t]he breakthrough in applying [Darwin’s] sexual selection to humans came in the late 1970s and 1980s, in the form of theoretical advances initiated by my colleagues and me in the fields of psychology and anthropology” (Buss [1994] 2003: 3). This assumed connection between Darwin and sociobiology also provides a major marketing strategy, as suggested by the title of Michael Gilbert’s The Disposable Male: Sex, Love, and Money: Your World through Darwin’s Eyes (2006), or the quote from Tom Wolfe on the cover of the 2001 Abacus edition of Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience: “There’s a new Darwin. His name is Edward O. Wilson” (Wilson [1998] 2001). In all these instances, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology appear as inevitable extensions of Darwin’s theory.

Critics of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, by contrast, have dismissed or emphasized the Darwin–sociobiology connection depending on their view of Darwin, respectively, as a progressive or a reactionary. For example, sociobiology’s unrelenting critic Niles Eldredge maintains that “beginning in the 1960s, evolutionary biologists began to revamp old-style Darwinian evolutionary notions—especially ‘natural selection’—expressly in terms of genes. This is where the excesses began” (Eldredge 2004: 20). Eldredge insists that “Darwin’s original description of natural selection—as the effect that success in an organism’s economic life has on its reproductive life—remains far and away the best way of thinking about this, the central evolutionary process” (Eldredge 2004: 26). This insistence on a theoretical disconnection between Darwin and sociobiology is also evident in such book titles as Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology (2000), edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, or Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won’t Work (2010) by Brendan Wallace. At the same time, there are many critics who consider both Darwin’s and sociobiologists’ sexual politics as conservative and thus fundamentally alike. For queer scholar Roger N. Lancaster, for instance, “Darwin’s ‘general law’ of sexual selection” is characterized by a “fetishistic naturalization of heterosexuality,” which sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists “lay hold of and distill” (Lancaster 2003: 107).

This chapter sets out to clarify the relationship between Darwin and sociobiology by examining sociobiology’s discursive, narrative, and conceptual commitments to Darwin’s textual politics. In particular, the chapter identifies affinities and disruptions between Darwin’s and sociobiology’s reworking of ideas of transformation and stasis. In doing so, the chapter touches upon a range of seemingly nonsexual and non-gendered issues such as progress, teleology, history, origins, future, destiny, uncertainty, foundationality, religion, mythology, nationalism, imperialism, and epistemic authority. I suggest that these concepts are at the heart of ongoing cultural debates about evolution—including those of gender and sexuality. By exploring the historical intersections of these seemingly nonrelated issues, we may better understand the cultural preconditions of evolutionary models of gender and sexuality.

The chapter focuses on Charles Darwin’s and pioneering sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson’s textual politics. This framing leaves out a number of sociobiological texts by other writers, as well as a number of texts written in the hundred years between the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Wilson’s Sociobiology. However, this focus allows me to pay detailed attention to the imaginative potential of the Darwinian narrative as a cultural narrative. By examining continuities and contingencies between Darwin and Wilson, I locate a textual site where the uneasy relationship between narrative structure and cultural context is negotiated. Although I read Darwin’s texts as fundamentally ambiguous and thus resonant with postmodern feminist politics, my intention is not to glorify Darwin. Rather, I wish to show the extent to which Darwin’s writing is multivalent and thus the extent to which both sociobiological and contemporary evolutionary narratives rely on omissions, reversals, and shifts of emphasis. Furthermore, I do not evaluate the empirical accuracy of Darwin’s or sociobiologists claims about evolution. Since a text’s correspondence to material reality does not determine the influence it has on wider cultural discourses, such a project would be beside the point. Instead, I focus on discursive travels between texts and contexts. My examination of these textual moves will be guided by the idea of evolution as a foundational narrative.

Foundational narratives

The one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of The Origin of Species in 2009 generated wide media coverage of Darwin’s work and its contribution to today’s science. Tributes included new editions and translations of Darwin’s texts, documentaries on Darwin’s life, and special magazine issues dedicated to Darwin’s work. The National Geographic, for example, published two articles on Darwin’s legacy in February 2009. One of the articles, “Modern Darwins,” outlined how modern science had proved correct Darwin’s hypotheses (Ridley 2009). In doing so, the text inadvertently articulated many of the tensions surrounding Darwin’s work in contemporary culture. Referring to the advances in molecular biology and genetics in the second half of the twentieth century, the author, evolutionary biologist and science writer Matt Ridley, writes:

The vindication came not from fossils, or from specimens of living creatures, or from dissection of their organs. It came from a book … To understand the story of evolution—both its narrative and its mechanism—modern Darwins don’t have to guess. They consult genetic scripture.

(Ridley 2009: 58)

As audiences versed in popular scientific metaphor immediately recognize, the book Ridley refers to is the genetic code written in the DNA alphabet and carried by every organism. This DNA book is not, however, just any book. It is the new scripture, the foundational account of the world that, Ridley’s biblical imagery implies, challenges the authority of the Judeo-Christian creation story. The way in which Ridley invokes both “narrative” and “mechanism” further suggests that these two are intimately connected: narrative emerges from the mechanistic processes of evolution, while both narrative and mechanism unfold as a result of scientific advance.

Ridley’s portrayal of evolution as the ultimate epic written in the genome did not introduce anything new to the public debates about the significance of evolutionary theory. The idea of a genetic “text” has been around since the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953.¹ The debates about evolution and religion, in turn, date all the way back to the pre-Darwinian accounts of evolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. When Darwin published his theory of natural selection in 1859, he was faced with a long tradition of opposition to any challenge to God’s direct involvement in the creation of species.² Darwin’s critics immediately recognized the threat implicit in the idea of natural selection, which had no space for supernatural interference in the emergence and extinction of species. What raised the stakes even higher was the fact that Darwin—unlike Alfred Wallace Russell, the other theorist of natural selection—placed humanity within the mechanistic laws of nature. The way in which Darwin emphasized natural selection and the absence of direct supernatural engagement made it difficult to see humankind as an exceptional divine creation. It was precisely this dual threat to the authority of religion and the position of humanity in the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchical “ladder” of nature, that made evolution, as Daniel Dennett puts it (1996), a “dangerous idea” with fundamental implications for questions of origins, purpose, and destiny. This contested role of evolution as a foundational narrative continues to underlie today’s debates about evolution, creation, materiality, and spirituality.

Cultural anxieties about the epistemic reach of evolutionary theory have not been just about religion. While sociobiologists’ violent and pessimistic view of human nature has raised loud protests within academia since the 1970s,³ these protests have been underwritten by a more fundamental concern about the association of evolution with scientific advance and epistemic authority. For example, late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould cautions against evolutionary models that imply a narrative of progress, as they serve to “nurture our hopes for a universe of intrinsic meaning defined in our terms” (Gould [1989] 1990: 43). More sarcastic in tone, Roger Lancaster asserts that contemporary evolutionary discourse “joins what is, in American society, a perpetually vexed and tormented problem—the question of origins—with evolutionary fables that are scarcely distinguishable from creationist myths” (Lancaster 2006: 102). Both Gould and Lancaster question the assumption that evolution provides an epistemically privileged explanation of the telos of modern humanity.

My exploration begins with the premise that this potential for foundationality makes evolutionary narratives sites where the cultural authority of science can be invoked, contested, and reproduced. Turning to Darwin and Wilson, I ask where this foundational potential arises from and to what purposes it can be appropriated. Through my reading of Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and Wilson’s On Human Nature, I explore the narrative dynamic through which evolutionary narratives produce a sense of foundationality, and the ways in which that foundationality is intertwined with the rhetorical production of scientific fact. I also identify textual fractures and contradictions, which suggest that evolutionary narratives are unable to fully accommodate cultural anxieties raised by the idea of evolutionary foundationality.

Darwin’s ambiguous origins

Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was first published in 1859. The book develops the idea of natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolutionary change by bringing together Thomas Malthus’ idea of scarcity as constraining growth and engendering competition, and Charles Lyell’s theory of the gradualness of geological change. Through an abundance of examples of variation among wild and domesticated species, Darwin then theorizes the processes through which certain traits become prominent or disappear in populations. In 1871, Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which ventured into the political minefield that was the question of humanity’s place in nature. Invoking again an astonishing range of examples from the natural world, the book traces similarities between humans and animals in behavior and physiognomy as well as explains the workings of sexual selection in nature. Whereas The Origin is primarily concerned with the questions of origins, change, and the interconnectedness of species, The Descent interrogates the trajectory of human evolution.

In a nutshell, Darwin’s theory of descent understands species as having emerged from the accumulated variation within earlier species. Instead of using the word evolution, which, at the time, was usually associated with the development of an organism from a rudimentary form (such as an egg), Darwin referred to this process of change as descent with modification.⁴ The chief mechanism through which this change takes place is natural selection—a term coined by Darwin—which passes on to subsequent generations those traits that are useful for survival in a specific environment. Organisms that best adapt to environmental conditions and changes in those conditions—scarcity of food, changes in climate or population density, introduction of new species or disease in the area—are the ones most likely to reproduce successfully. If the trait responsible for the organism’s success is hereditary, then the offspring of that organism are also more likely to reproduce than the offspring of organisms that lack the trait—provided, again, that there are no dramatic changes in the environment that might disfavor the trait. This leads to increased differentiation both among and within species, which may eventually lead to further events of speciation. In this framework, the gradual accumulation of difference engenders new species while extinction is understood as the failure of species to respond to the changing environment.

The process of natural selection is complicated by sexual selection, the preference of one sex—usually the female—for particular traits in the other sex. The preferred traits are not necessarily related to survival, and indeed may seem to jeopardize survival by attracting predators or requiring an increased supply of calories—the peacock’s tail is a famous example. Yet the very fact that some males are able to maintain such traits suggests health, strength, and reproductive potential. As a result, the females demonstrating the preference for such a trait in males tend to have more and healthier offspring than other females. Since the offspring inherit their parents’ traits, both the preferred trait and the preference itself may become common in the population. Sexual selection, then, may direct evolution in paths seemingly opposed to the bare logic of survival.

One of the most intense debates in Darwin scholarship has focused on Darwin’s view of teleology. On the one hand, many scholars have emphasized Darwin’s belief in the idea of progress characteristic of nineteenth-century liberalism. For example, philosopher of science James G. Lennox finds “a selection-based teleology” (Lennox 1993: 417) and philosopher of science Julio Muñoz-Rubio locates assumptions of “a purpose and design that respect the laws of competition” (Muñoz-Rubio 2003: 311) in Darwin’s writing. Similarly, historian of science Robert M. Young maintains that “Darwin’s theory was no less bound by the principle of utility than was that of [William] Paley,” the famous author of Natural Theology (Young 1985: 97).⁵ On the other hand, many scholars have drawn attention to the key role of unpredictability in The Origin. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (2005), for example, identifies similarities between natural selection and the Deleuzian logic of becoming, and literary scholar Colin Milburn finds “family resemblances” (Milburn 2003: 604) between Darwin’s and Derrida’s understanding of origins and the logic of change. These differences in scholarly responses suggest that Darwin’s view on teleology was highly ambiguous. In her seminal work Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer argues that The Origin borrows elements from a range of cultural and literary discourses, thereby engendering associative richness that was “capable of being extended or reclaimed into a number of conflicting systems” (Beer [1983] 2000: 3). As Beer suggests, this ambiguity has contributed significantly to the heterogeneity of twentieth-century evolutionary narratives.

These debates about teleology (the assumption of predetermined trajectories) and foundationality (the assumption of fundamental consequences) are connected to the role of evolutionary origins in Darwin’s writing. Darwin’s discussion of descent tends to evade the question of origins, which he equates with “the dim obscurity of the past” (Darwin [1879] 2004: 679). Instead of origins, Darwin emphasizes the mechanism of evolutionary change—in The Origin, natural selection; in The Descent, sexual selection. While this emphasis points to Darwin’s need to distance himself from the politically explosive debates about creation and theology, it is also indicative of the ambiguity of origins in Darwin’s narrative of descent with modification. This ambivalence arises, to an extent, from the scarcity of paleontological evidence, which made a detailed discussion of the emergence of species difficult. More importantly, however, Darwin’s emphasis on variation as the raw material of incipient and new species rendered the idea of a distinct point of origin questionable. If variation is the precondition of change, then that variation must have emerged from earlier variation, which must have emerged from still earlier variation ad infinitum.

There is a fundamental tension between heterogeneity and homogeneity in Darwin’s representation of evolutionary origins. While Darwin locates origins in the singularity of “one primordial form,” this singularity itself is mythic rather than factual (Darwin [1859] 1985: 455). In other words, it is singularity of a set of formal contours and behavioral patterns rather than singularity of detail. As Elizabeth Grosz insightfully puts it, origins for Darwin are “always already implicated in multiplicity or difference” (Grosz 2004: 26). This ambiguity is not merely an accident, as Darwin seems to have been aware of the consequences of this emphasis on variation. In The Descent, for example, he cautions against conjuring a single original couple from which humans have descended:

It must not be supposed that the divergence of each race from the other races, and of all from a common stock, can be traced back to any one pair of progenitors … The process would have been like that followed by man, when he does not intentionally select particular individuals, but breeds from all the superior individuals, and neglects the inferior.

(Darwin [1879] 2004: 678)

The original singularity from which life emerged is marked by inherent multiplicity. At the same time, this point of origins cannot be fixed at any particular moment, as the chain of backward reference never reaches the instance of unpreceded wholeness. If such a moment exists, it is a fundamentally timeless and ahistorical site of beginning—which is precisely what later theories of the Big Bang have suggested.

This assumption of variance as always already there also informs the history of modern species in Darwin’s writing. In both The Origin and The Descent, Darwin repeatedly rejects the idea of a specific moment of speciation. Evolutionary biologist Robert J. O’Hara (1988) has argued that it is precisely this insistence on the gradualness of change that distinguishes Darwin from both natural theology—the idea of nature as the ultimate demonstration of God’s wisdom—and pre-Darwinian accounts of evolution. These earlier approaches had imagined nature as a fixed set of taxonomic hierarchies while “the things for which explanations were sought were not changes but rather states” understood in terms of their ultimate purpose (O’Ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Foundational trajectories in Darwin and sociobiology
• 2 Narrative variation and the changing meanings of movement
• 3 The gendered politics of genetic discourse
• 4 The narrative attraction of adulterous desires
• 5 Reproductive failure and narrative continuity
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index