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Biology

11     Biology has frequently been invoked to sanction social inequalities, not least those
2 associated with sex. A century ago, measures of head size and speculations about
3 physiology were used to make the case that women were intellectually incapable of
4 higher learning and physically unable to tolerate the strain of it. While these fallacies
5 have long since been discredited, the invocations they represent remain alive, finding
6 expression nowadays in the language of psychology, split-brain theory, endocrinology,
7 genetics and sociobiology. Various scientists would have it that the structure of women's
8 brains renders them, on average, less adept than men at spatial relations and
9 mathematics; that they are victimized by their hormones into moodiness, passivity and
10 volatility under stress; and that they have been fated by evolution to play social roles
11 subordinate to those of men.
212     In Myths of Gender, an instructive and provocative book, Anne Fausto-Sterling, a
13 developmental geneticist at Brown University, scrutinizes these claims and concludes
14 that most of them are just so many scientifically baseless manifestations of the status quo.
15 They owe their origins in the main to unconscious bias, she holds, for in the socially
16 charged area of sex differences 'it is inherently impossible for any individual to do
17 unbiased research'.
318     A debatable assertion, one would think, but in conformity with it Mrs
19 Fausto-Sterling feels duty-bound to declare her own biases - which are those of a
20 feminist - and to describe her book as unavoidably 'a scientific statement and a political
21 statement'. Must we then expect from her merely a set of mirror-image myths? Not at all,
22 she contends, because by shining a feminist light into the 'unlit corners of other people's
23 research' she is able to see what is otherwise obscured. As a matter of fact, a good deal in
24 this book renders her contention persuasive. However, one must add that her treatment
25 also depends heavily on her sharp and knowledgeable scientific intelligence, and that in
26 places her feminist searchlight produces more glare than illumination.
427     Mrs Fausto-Sterling is particularly concerned with the reliability of observations
28 used to support the idea that some psychological and behavioral characteristics are
29 gender-specific and, more important, with whether those characteristics can be attributed
30 to biological origins. According to her review of the evidence, sex differences on tests of
31 spatial visualizing skills are small and do not demand explanation by a theory linking
32 them to the chromosomes that determine sex - which is just bad genetics - or a highly
33 speculative theory of sex differences in the specialization between the brain's right and
34 left hemispheres. Spatial visualization may be an acquired skill, one traditionally fostered
35 among boys, who play with blocks and take mechanical drawing courses, and
36 traditionally not encouraged among girls.
537     Mrs Fausto-Sterling's critique of the notion that sex-related hormones make for
38 social destiny takes up a major portion of this book. She demonstrates that the ways
39 hormones work are extremely complicated and that, by extension, facile hormonal
40 explanations of sexual differences in temperament and behavior are simplistic and
41 probably wrong. She finds no reason to believe the contention that testosterone programs
42 males for aggressiveness or the commonplace that women's hormones condemn them
43 once a month during their fertile years to wild mood swings and a physical debilitation
44 bordering on incapacity.
645     Mrs Fausto-Sterling has provided an excellent manual of the issues that must be
46 considered in any scientific treatment of human behavior, whether sexually specific or
47 not. Myths of Gender is not - and does not pretend to be - the last word on human sex
48 differences. It does demonstrate the powerful merits of the precept that virtually no
49 human social behavior can be attributed to any single biological cause and that, as Mrs
50 Fausto-Sterling puts it, 'an individual's capacities emerge from a web of interactions
51 between the biological being and the social environment'.
 
     Daniel J. Kevies in The New York Times Book Review, December 29, 1985