Sexual Selections
What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals
Introduction
An Ode to Witlessness
"... nature, heartless, witless nature ..."
A.E. Housman
Shortly after I entered graduate school at the University of Michigan, a
fellow student came into my office and flung himself into the chair
opposite mine. "I don't understand," he said, "how you can have feminist
politics and still be interested in all that stuff over in the museum."
The museum was the Museum of Zoology, and the "stuff" to which he referred
was the burgeoning field of sociobiology, the study of the evolution of
social behavior. It had become a flashpoint for vitriolic debate about the
ability of science to draw conclusions about animal behavior in general
and human behavior in particular. Both sex, meaning the genetic
distinction between male and female, and gender, referring to its social
and political associations, were a big part of the controversy from the
start. Feminists were quick to recognize that a classic application of
biology to oppression had ... read full excerpt from: Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals ebook
