Let’s talk about sex
Whenever a couple of curious kids play a behind-the-woodshed game of doctor, they discover that male and female bodies are different. Later, they learn that nature designed masculine and feminine organs for particular functions, although the specifics can be confusing even for adults. Roseanne Barr says husbands think a uterus is a tracking device. Why else would they ask their wives to locate a milk carton hiding in plain sight in the refrigerator?
Last week, a team of scientists from Duke and Pennsylvania State universities published the results of a study of the X chromosome, which women and men have, and the Y chromosome, which only men carry. The research, part of an international effort to map the human genome, may illuminate some of the biological differences between the sexes, especially, one would expect, those not obvious to recreational investigators.
The hope is that a greater understanding of genes that affect disease might yield new therapies and even cures. That’s terrific. But what’s much more fun, on the shallow level of talk radio discourse and newspaper column blather, is the influence of biology on personality, the notion that DNA transmits to one gender the ability to belch at will.
Evolutionary psychologists have been beating the Darwinian drum for years, invoking the Victorian scientist’s name to explain everything from trophy wives to infanticide. In “The Moral Animal,” Princeton scholar Robert Wright illustrates how humans can overcome the sloth, greed, lust and covetousness dictated by their DNA by being aware of which maladaptive traits they’re fighting. “We don’t understand much about the linkages that ultimately translate from genes to behavior,” he says. “Right now, the causal chain between genes and behavior is still a black box.”
When the new X and Y studies were made public in the journal Nature, it was widely reported that differences between men and women, on the genetic level, were greater than previously thought. In other words, men and women are not alike. Tell us, oh genetic experts, something we didn’t know.
What was heralded as the more surprising finding came from zooming in on the X chromosome. The X, apparently, is one complex little number -- much more complicated than the Y. Therefore, the truth about the aberrant X provides scientific proof that women are different from each other. Forget PMS. A biology-is-destiny believer would conclude that a plethora of genetic variations explains feminine unpredictability.
The researchers, we respectfully suggest, need to get out more. The evidence of how different women are from one another is everywhere. Some women love to shop, others don’t; some aspire to the heights of the corporate world, others hear the call of domestic goddessdom. Some women swear by underwire and thongs, others are dedicated to soft cups and girly boxers. Men who conclude that all women are alike are a) delusional, b) myopic, c) consistently drawn to the same type of woman, d) all of the above.
Thanks to Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, gender differences, genetic or otherwise, are a hot-button issue. At an academic conference in January, Summers asked some provocative questions about why women hold fewer top jobs in math and the sciences. His intellectual inquiry set loose a firestorm, and in a bizarre game of telephone, what he actually said mutated into “Harvard president thinks men are smarter than women.”
Unless they’ve been locked in a soundproof laboratory for the first quarter of 2005, reports of the Summers flap undoubtedly reached the authors of the chromosome study. So in a hall of mirrors sort of way, the distorted media hype about one serious topic paved the way for their obscure scientific papers to be hyped, oversimplified and misinterpreted.
“What’s been written about the chromosome research sounds like an aha! response to what people think Larry Summers said,” says Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychologist at UC Santa Barbara. “The question of whether differences between people are caused by differences in their genes isn’t really a very interesting question. No behavior is actually genetically determined, and no behavior is environmentally determined. All behavior is co-determined by the interaction of genes and environment.”
Cosmides’ husband, and co-director of UCSB’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology, anthropologist John Tooby, says genes matter, but environmental and cultural factors also influence behavior. “No one knows about the mechanisms of the genes that define the human species,” he says. “The biology of these studies is pretty remote, but it’s getting attention because it’s linked to something that’s topical.”
The thing is, no one likes being reduced to a gender stereotype. The chromosome study got so much play -- in this newspaper, the Washington Post, the New York Times -- because it invalidated, it seemed, gross generalizations: Women talk too much, hate their bodies, are lousy drivers, can’t do math.
It’s naive to expect that information about our genes can solve all the great conundrums of life. Anyone expecting that science is now prepared to tell us why women dress for other women or why men won’t ask for directions should just go see “Kinsey.” The film about the famous sex researcher won’t explain those mysteries, but it is a really good movie.
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Mimi Avins can be reached at mimi.avins@latimes.com
