High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [31]
Oh, but Dr. Wilson, which truth? Never in the deep blue sea will we ever be that conscious of our motives. The problem with identifying the biological roots of such things as sexism, aggression, and racism is that we’re looking at our past through spectacles tinted with sexism, aggression, and racism. On Human Nature devotes a full chapter to the innateness of gender roles, in which women are passive and men naturally aggressive. (Not because God made us that way, but allegedly because it helped us survive.) Wilson began developing this line of thinking in an earlier book, Sociobiology, in which he wrote, “The populace of an American industrial city, no less than a band of hunter-gatherers in the Australian desert, is organized around [the nuclear family]….During the day the women and children remain in the residential area while the men forage for game or its symbolic equivalent.” He took this to be self-evident, and worked backward to construct a biological rationale for the arrangement. Stunningly, he did this in spite of the fact that in 1975, the year of the book’s publication, 47 percent of all U.S. women aged sixteen and over were out working for the “symbolic equivalent,” holding down two out of every five jobs.
In a similar feat of circular thinking, paleoanthropologists of the sixties and seventies presumed that human evolution was greatly influenced by pair bonding and a division of labor by gender. Evidence for this was the fact that skeletal remains of early hominids showed a marked size difference between males (larger) and females (smaller). These remains consisted only of fragments, never whole skeletons. They had been sorted into male and female with difficulty, frequently on the basis of nothing but their size!
Not only the answers we find but the very questions we ask, as scientists, are bathed in unconscious motives. The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, exposes the myriad ways science has been used throughout history to prove the superiority of Caucasian males, which happens to match the description of the scientists who did the work in question. Their work was earnest, painstaking, and dazzlingly blind to its own biases. European science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presumed intelligence and human worthiness were things contained in the head, and set itself like a dog on a bone to measuring skulls. Thousands upon thousands of skulls: male and female, Cauca-sian and Asian, Hottentot and Huron. Skulls of professionals were pitted against those of clerks and laborers. The results are a testament to science’s deep roots in creative interpretation and selective oversight: the expected winners always came out on top. The measurements were unconsciously bent, again and again, to make it so. Just as Dr. Wilson forgot to notice that half of all modern female “gatherers” were out “hunting,” a nineteenth-century physician named Samuel George Morton conducted his world-renowned work on the essential character of human races without encumbering himself with contradictory evidence. Of the Greenland Eskimo he wrote, “Their mental faculties, from infancy to old age, present a continued childhood,” and of the Chinese, “So versatile are their feelings and actions, that they have been compared to the monkey race, whose attention is perpetually changing from one object to another.” Armed with these foregone conclusions, he compared the brain sizes of these and other races in his enormous