Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture

Genetic prison population

In 1993, when the human genome was being mapped, Dean Hamer, a senior American scientist at the National Cancer Institute, reported "evidence that one form of male homosexuality is preferentially transmitted through the maternal side and is genetically linked to chromosomal region Xq28". This was not to say that only one gene was involved, nor that all homosexual men would have this genetic marker, nor that every person with this genetic marker is bound to become a homosexual, nor that environmental influences are irrelevant, or even insignificant. Media reports nevertheless proclaimed the discovery of "the gay gene". Gay activists in America rejoiced. This proved what they had been saying all along, that they had been born gay. There was a vogue for T-shirts with the legend: "Thanks Mom for Xq28". For their part, some extremists began to look forward to a day when genetic engineering would cleanse society of homosexuality. In the meantime, Dean Hamer became a celebrity, and he cashed in with a popular book, The Science of Desire.

It is a lucky thing for geneticists and evolutionists that their subjects have some sex appeal. And in fact they do have to think about sex a lot. Mating throws the dice for inheritance. Evolutionary theory is about descent with modification, and modern genetics has transformed our understanding of how this process works. But it is also about natural selection. The environment favours some modifications and curtails others. Success breeds success. Adaptive traits spread through a population. Most adaptive advantages are temporary, because the environment is never stable, but perhaps some traits are so robust and so useful that elements of human nature have become fixed within narrow limits. And precisely because sex matters so much, the differences between male and female may be very ancient and rigid.

Homosexuality therefore poses intriguing questions for evolutionary theory. How is it transmitted? Inherited tendencies towards homosexuality should be bred out, unless homosexuals routinely make substantial contributions to the survival of their nieces and nephews, who carry the same genes. Or it may be that homosexuality is not a significant barrier to reproduction. Some homosexuals have children, and in less differentiated societies they may have as many children as anyone else. There is also the possibility that many, perhaps all forms of homosexuality are fostered, or even caused, by environmental circumstances.

In The Trouble with Nature, Roger N. Lancaster reviews a number of studies which attempt to establish that our sexual behaviour is genetically programmed, even differentially inscribed in the brains of men and women. His aim is to criticize, but he does succeed in identifying disabling logical errors, experimental flaws and failures to consider inconvenient facts. And he shows that too often these studies fail to question what it is that they are trying to explain.

Hamer, for example, takes it for granted that he knows what homosexuality is. But does our category "homosexual" correspond to a single and undifferentiated natural type? "Among my acquaintances", Lancaster counters, "I know men who are, as they say, 'versatile', but I also know men who are exclusively 'tops', 'bottoms', cock-suckers, fistfuckers, leather queens, S&Mers, masturbators, and men who only get blown." Is it reasonable, he asks, to lump all these types together, and then to identify a single biological cause for their various sexual preferences? Not only may homosexual men have diverse sexual tastes. The category "homosexual" is itself a recent invention, and one that might seem strange to many other peoples in the world.

But in their frustration with the crude triumphalism of sociobiology, some critics are tempted to exaggerate the plasticity of human behaviour. Lancaster wants to persuade his readers that sexual behaviour is almost infinitely variable. His strategy is to provide lists of strange customs, as if these prove that when it comes to human affairs, anything goes. There are villages in New Guinea where boys are initiated into manhood by imbibing the semen of elders. In pre-Columbian North America, some men cross-dressed and were identified as belonging to a "third sex". And so, more or less reliably, on. But do these ethnographic curiosities demonstrate that gender is infinitely malleable? That our sexuality is detached from our biology?

For evolutionists, the bottom line is successful reproduction. Where slow breeding humans are concerned, pregnant and nursing women need special care. (And for most of human history, the majority of fit adult women were, at any given moment, either pregnant or nursing a small child.) The upshot is that, particularly in societies where survival is in any case chancy, men take any special risks that may be going. Among hunter-gatherers, therefore, it is usually men who go out hunting while women stay close to the home base, and gather vegetables and fruits. Lancaster points to reports of women also hunting and fishing, but these cases are very rare. Moreover, the exceptions may make good sense in evolutionary terms. Hunting need not always be a dangerous business, which takes the hunter far from home. It is only where hunting involves physical risks or long journeys that it need be the exclusive business of men.

Yet since the science is still uncertain it is fair to ask why scientists, the media and the general public should be so keen to think that we are all the prisoners of our genes, particularly when it comes to sex. Lancaster believes that science is politics by other means. The two projects cannot be torn apart. This is the basic premiss of the "constructivist" position in the Science Wars. But like many big ideas, constructivism comes in a weak form and a strong form. Formulated weakly, it is banal, but probably quite sensible. At its least strident, the constructivist case is that scientists who deal with human beings are not immune from political and economic pressures and popular prejudices.

In its strong form, embraced by Lancaster, the constructivist claim is more interesting, but less easily swallowed. The proposition is that nobody is free from bias, and that therefore all knowledge is relative. To put it in their own preferred idiom, truth is situated. It depends on who you are, where you stand, what you want to believe. It follows that only people who share the same prejudices can have a genuine argument about the facts. And since science influences what we believe about ourselves, and so affects practical politics, scientists who offer explanations of human behaviour must be pushing ideological agendas, whether wittingly or not. In some ways, Dean Hamer turned out to be a model reflexive scientist. After the discovery of the gay gene had made him famous, he came out as a gay man and appeared on platforms with gay activists.
And when various features of his study were questioned, he insisted that straight scientists were not competent to comment on his research. (Follow-up studies have failed to replicate Hamer's findings.)

Lancaster, however, is not simply a constructivist. He favours a new and highly specialized form of relativism, queer theory, that gives priority to the interests and concerns of people who are (rightly or wrongly) lumped together as homosexuals. As Lancaster sees it, the overriding priority for queer theory is to get rid of the idea that some kinds of people, and some forms of sex, are more natural than others. "In the context of this prolific, contested, and oh-soslippery 'nature', those of us who once belonged to 'unnature' engage in a certain kind of intellectual game, a deadly serious sport of claim and counterclaim regarding our place in the scheme of things." Hamer has sold the pass, then, because he actually reinforces the idea that the homosexual is a natural type. And that is really why the media made him famous for a while.

In Lancaster's view, the media provide the crucial link between scientist and public. Editors seize on studies like Hamer's not just because they get a kick out of stories about sex. They are ideological warriors, primed to depict biology as destiny. Their message is that you can't change human nature (or, in Lancaster's satirical phrase, the "heteronormative conception of human nature"). Lancaster thinks that to understand how the whole devious business works one should study Marx's theory of "fetishism", to which he devotes a very long chapter. (Marxism is a retro fashion that flourishes in university departments of cultural studies.) Curiously, however, Lancaster does not consider other institutions that influence American popular beliefs about human nature, such as fundamentalist Christian Churches, which are still important, at least outside Manhattan.

In any case, the capitalist plot which Lancaster has discovered begins to unravel towards the end of the book. He reports that the New York media are becoming camp. Gay is now chic. "Homoeroticism sells", he tells us. "And queer sells." Why this flip-flop in the inner conclaves of capitalism? "Ongoing, uneven transformations in sexual culture since the 1960s have everything to do with reforms wrought by the new social movements", at least according to Roger Lancaster, which suggests that capitalism is a softer target than Marx imagined. He adds that these transformations "also have to do with new forms of production and consumption in contemporary capitalism". If capitalism maximizes choice, perhaps queer theorists should rejoice with Wall Street. But if asked to choose between the Hamers and the Lancasters, we should make our excuses and look elsewhere.

The boring old truth is that human biology matters, very much indeed, but within limits that are still to be determined, and sometimes in ways that remain obscure. Sensible evolutionists accept that we are not just chimps who have learned to ride bicycles. Nor are we all hunter-gatherers who have lost our way. Survival into adulthood is virtually guaranteed in modern industrial societies. Technologies permit the efficient planning of procreation. A consistent evolutionist should predict that sexual behaviour will adapt to these changes. And so it does.

Adam Kuper is Professor of Anthropology at Brunel University. He is the author of "Culture: The Anthropologists' Account", 1999.

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