REVIEW BY BEN REID
The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture
By Roger Lancaster
University of California Press, 2003
442 pages, $60
Surely but subtly, an alliance of poor science and the popular media has established a new orthodoxy of genetic determinism. A range of social maladies, which were once said to be the work of divine forces, are now "in our genes". Roger Lancaster's The Trouble with Nature is a timely, comprehensive and witty refutation of these fashionable theories.
Basing his critique on the Marxist traditions of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and biologist Richard Lewontin, Lancaster convincingly shows how a series of highly speculative claims that allege the existence of genetically programmed behaviours in humans have become popular truths.
For instance, a common explanation for rising levels of obesity and dietary diseases in the Western world has emerged based on genetic determinism and evolutionary psychology. It has been claimed that humans retain an innate urge to gorge themselves on sugar. For much of history this urge suited humans well as fruit was their main source of sugar. Fruit was relatively rare and when encountered has to be consumed quickly as a source of energy.
The trouble is,with sucrose now regarded as a staple in the West, humans have too ready access to sugar. A genetically ingrained behaviour therefore shapes our psychology and this conflicts with our modern surroundings — hence the sky-rocketing rates of diabetes.
As Lancaster shows, however, this theory is based on some questionable assumptions. First, nobody has yet to identify the alleged gene that gives us all a sweet tooth. Second, it ignores considerable anthropological evidence about the highly regulated nature of food consumption within subsistence societies.
The image of half-starved humans seeking rare fruit trees does not fit the real picture and is a product of the modern imagination. Actually, humans developed highly regulated dietary systems. What the modern myth of the starving hunter-gatherer still lurking within does is divert attention and blame away from the profiteers from, and promoters of, sucrose-intensive food products and how successfully they have established a "need" for sugar in developed capitalist societies.
As Coca Cola is discovering in China, it is actually not that easy to establish a taste for sucrose's sickly sweetness in many cultures.
The book's main focus, however, is on questions of gender and sexuality. Lancaster sets about pointing to the mountains of evidence that contradicts the notions that humans are "hardwired" into adopting certain behaviours such as compulsory heterosexuality and strict gender roles. On the contrary, there is ample evidence of diverse forms of socially accepted human behaviour throughout history.
The book exposes the ways in which scientific knowledge — just as much the behaviour it describes — is "socially constructed". More often than not claims to "scientific authority" and "objectivity" in capitalist societies in fact mask ideologically driven arguments that re-enforce the power of ruling elites.
For Lancaster, genetic determinism converts the broad potentialities for different behaviours inherent in human biology into often absurdly narrow interpretations of human motivation. Evolutionary psychology provides crude explanations for social maladies that point to alleged contradictions between the institutions of modern society and "hard-wired" human behaviour.
Single parents, homosexuality, declining birth rates are all the outcome of increasing contradictions between innate human behaviour and the attempts by feminists and other social reformers to confuse gender roles. Male violence and resentment and social decay are the outcomes. Competition is what motivates humans (especially males). So go the mantras of the North American political right.
In fact, "scientific" notions about the alleged universality of the family, gender roles and heterosexuality are relatively recent products of history. Drawing on the ideas of French post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucault, Lancaster contends that claims about the "science of human behaviour" reflected a regime of power relations — "heteronormativity" — that emerged with the onset of capitalism and the need to "regulate" the morals of the working masses.
Lancaster lambastes the newly reasserted notions about the "science" of human behaviour. A particularly hilarious section considers the responses by various commentators to the victory of a gay man in the first of the ridiculous Survivor television series. The evolutionary psychologists literally tie themselves in knots of contradictions trying to explain how a "deviant" of this type could have won this "competitive game".
In the final section, Lancaster locates the growing backlash against women's liberation entailed in the popularity of these theories as a an attempt by the capitalist ruling class to roll back gains made by mass social movements against the oppressive relationships that capitalism imposes on people.
On the whole, the book is both a lucid and highly enjoyable read. Lancaster's "social contructivism" maintains its grounding in a materialist analysis of capitalism and class relations, despite what at times borders on an eclectic reliance on ideas borrowed from Foucault and structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. These latter concepts tend to confuse rather than enlighten. Despite this, it is an essential reference text for any serious Marxist concerned with questions of science and society.
Polemics such as these, which deal with pertinent yet fundamental issues, are unfortunately rare nowadays and can play a revived role in the ideological struggle against dominant bourgeois ideas.
From Green Left Weekly, February 4, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.