Roughgarden - Evolutions rainbow: diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people

EVOLUTIONS RAINBOW

Evolutions Rainbow

Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality

in Nature and People

Tenth Anniversary Edition

With a New Preface by the Author

Joan Roughgarden

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2004, 2009, 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 978-0-520-28045-8

eISBN 9780520957978

The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition of this book as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roughgarden, Joan.

Evolutions rainbow : diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people / Joan Roughgarden.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-24679-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Biological Diversity.2. Sexual Behavior in animals.3. Gender identity.4. Sexual orientation.I. Title.

QH541.15.B56.R682004

305.3dc222003024512

Manufactured in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 ( R 1997) ( Permanence of Paper ).

To my sisters on the street

To my sisters everywhere

To people everywhere

Contents

Preface to the 2013 Edition

After ten years, Evolutions Rainbow still offers a valuable overview of how diverse the sexuality and gender expression is among animals and people. Part of this books lasting value is how it brings the scope of this diversity together in one place.

Another value is that this books approach is biological, whereas most books about sexuality and gender come from the humanities or medicine. My approach is what a Martian biologist would take in an expedition to Earth. A newly arriving Martian would gaze about to discern the diversity here in animals, including humans. As you read this book, imagine youre a young Darwin, not the bearded, aged thinker of most photographs but the young lad trying to discover just whats out therethe Darwin who jumps ashore in the Galpagos to marvel at the strange and surprising creatures he finds. As you jump ashore onto the field of sexuality and gender, you too will find many surprising facts. The task is to scope out this diversity, not to explain it but to accept it and put it all on the table for further discussion later on. I wrote this book with the mind-set of an expeditionary biologist, like those in the 1800s or a Martian visiting Earth today. I knew that the stereotypes of male and female behavior werent accurate in animals and suspected they werent accurate for people either. So this book is an expedition to find out what is going on out there.

This book also shines a searchlight on the inadequacies of existing science to account for the diversity in gender and sexuality it now knows about. Scientists today are interested, so they say, in research that is transformative, and the major science-funding agencies of the U.S. government and some private foundations claim to be seeking proposals for work that satisfies this aim. However, two kinds of scholarship are transformativeextensional and destabilizing. Extensional research is easy to be enthusiastic aboutits usually risky, but wow, if it works, then it can answer all sorts of questions. Extensional research often involves developing a new technology and applying it to long-standing empirical problems. Destabilizing scholarship can be just as transformative as extensional research. But instead of enthusiasm, defensiveness and hostility invariably greet it. No one wants to see their cherished theories dashed to the ground, becoming a midden of broken ideas. Evolutions Rainbow is transformative and destabilizing. The main tool for destabilizing scholarship is criticism. Of course, transformation is only complete when reconstruction succeeds the destabilization. My efforts at reconstruction appear in my sequel to this book, The Genial Gene. Evolutions Rainbow sets the table for the reconstruction that is beginning to take place now.

This book criticizes a venerable account of universal male and female gender roles that Darwin wrote about in 1871 under the heading of sexual selection. this book and my subsequent writings. Of course, this reconstructed version of sexual selection may still often be incorrect if traits thought to evolve in response to competition for mates actually evolve in response to some other form of natural selection, such as those involving cooperation between males and females, as The Genial Gene describes. The generality of the revised version of sexual selection is presently an open research question in biology.

Evolutions Rainbow has now appeared in translation in Brazilian Portuguese and in Korean, and The Genial Gene in French. Also, a talented graphic artist, Gwen Seemel, has written and illustrated a lovely book that features many of the animal species discussed here and is suitable for children, titled Crime against Nature. I hope you join the many readers who have enjoyed and benefited from Evolutions Rainbow.

Joan Roughgarden

Kapaa, Hawaii

April 17, 2013

NOTES

J. Roughgarden, 2009, The Genial Gene, University of California Press.

C. Darwin, 1871, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, John Murray.

D. M. Shuker, 2010, Sexual selection: Endless forms or tangled bank?, Anim. Behav. 79:E11-E17.

G. Seemel, 2012, Crime against Nature: A More Accurate Telling of Whats Natural, self-published.

Preface to the 2009 Edition

Evolutions Rainbow surveyed the extensive diversity in sex, gender, and sexuality now known to exist among both nonhuman animals and people. When the book appeared in 2004, the extent of same-sex sexuality in animal societies was poorly publicized, even among biologists. Other phenomena such as gender multiplicity, sex-role reversal, and sex changes were even less well known. Biology undergraduates as well as the general public were being misled by textbooks and nature shows into thinking of a heterosexual binary as natures way. Today the situation has begun to improve; for example, exhibitions for the general public about gender and sexuality diversity opened in 2006 at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo, Norway, and in 2008 at the Museum of Sex, in New York City. Also in 2008, the Lesbian and Gay Veterinary Medical Association produced a DVD of my lecture at its 2007 annual conference in Washington, DC, titled Sexual Diversity in the Animal Kingdom, distributed through Amazon.com. Although it may be decades before information about the extent of sexual and gender diversity becomes common knowledge, the genie is out of the bottle at last.

The challenge today is to work through the implications of this diversity whose reality destabilizes our understanding of biological nature. The standard evolutionary account of gender and sexuality originates with Charles Darwins writing on the topic of sexual selection and these specific writingsnot his overall theory of evolutionare challenged by the new information. I concluded in 2004 that the extent of this diversity pointed to sexual selections being on the wrong track. I proposed that Darwins theory of sexual selection should be replaced by a new theory that I christened social selection. Whereas sexual selection emphasizes mating, focusing on who mates with whom, social selection would emphasize participating in a social infrastructure to produce and raise offspring, and would focus more on how to deliver offspring into the next generation than on how to attract mates. In the social selection context, the diversity of gender and sexuality makes evolutionary sense, rather than seeming at odds with evolution, because of the valuable social roles the diversity represents.