The Cognitive Fictions and Functions of Gender in Evolutionary Psychology and
Poststructuralist Theory
Author(s): Dana Carluccio
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Signs, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 431-457
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Dana Carluccio
The Cognitive Fictions and Functions of Gender in
Evolutionary Psychology and Poststructuralist Theory
O
ne hundred and fifty years after the publication of The Origin of Species,
we have evolutionary versions of psychology, economics, political science, literary history, and feminist theory.1 The multidisciplinary interest in evolution seems to end one important component of the science wars,
but it has more accurately transformed them into a debate over the significance of their own ending. According to literary historian Brian Boyd
(2009), this multidisciplinarity signals the sciences’ triumph over poststructuralist philosophies that celebrate contingency and relativism; for
philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (2004), evolutionary theory forecloses any
credible scientific opposition to such notions. While both camps agree that
we should stop asking whether biological science can explain particular aspects of human experience, they disagree over the question of how to describe the resulting biology.
The discipline of evolutionary psychology—the first field to export evolution outside the biological sciences—plays a bellwether role in these disagreements. Evolutionary psychology uses Darwinian principles to advance
a universal account of human psychological experience, including everything from artistic impulses to gender psychology. Scholars like Boyd, who
see evolution as the weapon that won the science wars for the sciences, frequently depict evolutionary psychologists as an intellectual avant-garde.
Those like Grosz, who see evolution as having instead demanded a ceasefire, see evolutionary psychologists as a stodgy group. In her provocative
call for a truly interdisciplinary study of sexual difference, for example,
Grosz engages with Charles Darwin’s writings extensively but mentions
evolutionary psychology rarely, usually to fault it for being unimaginative
(Grosz 2004, 83). Brian Massumi (2002), another philosopher committed
to creating new dialogues between scientists and humanists, likewise singles
Thanks to Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric Fellows Group (Andrea Lunsford,
Marvin Diogenes, Joel Burges), Christina Walter, the anonymous readers for Signs, and the
Signs editors Miranda Outman-Kramer and Andrew Mazzaschi.
1
See Hodgson (1993), Buss (1994), Carroll (2004), Grosz (2004), and Westen (2007).
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2013, vol. 38, no. 2]
© 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2013/3802-0008$10.00
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out evolutionary psychologists’ research program as a “prime example” of
“imperialist disciplinary aggression” (19) that hampers truly innovative interdisciplinary work.
Yet surprising convergences emerge between Grosz’s and Massumi’s research and the field that they claim to surpass. According to both thinkers,
we must recognize temporality as the central feature of embodiment, and
the concept of tendency offers a way for us to do so. Grosz argues that the
temporal instability of evolution makes ineffable tendencies vastly more important than functionally ordered traits. Massumi reads tendency as “pure
futurity . . . a futurity that is contemporary with the past’s contemporaneousness with the present” (2002, 15), or as “pastnesses opening directly
onto a future but with no present to speak of ” (30); for things to exist “tendentially” is for them to exist as “inducers of directional movement of
which they mark the outside limits” (72). Yet, despite the distance these
descriptions stake out from contemporary evolutionary psychology, tendencies themselves are neither new to that field nor a challenge to its assumptions. On the contrary, I will argue, they are central to it. Although
significant differences certainly exist between these groups of scholars, the
hallmark of their supposed difference is thus ironically something they
share. This counterintuitive convergence points to a significant blind spot
in the debates that evolutionary psychologists and poststructuralist philosophers are engaged in.
This essay brings this blind spot into focus by analyzing the role of tendency in post-Darwinian debates over mind and body. Tendencies certainly
predate Darwinian evolutionary theory, but they play a unique role in facilitating that theory’s application to the human mind. I explore that role here
by considering both a very early and a very recent moment in the history of
that application. First, I turn to nineteenth-century American zoologist
William Keith Brooks, who helped establish evolutionary psychology as an
academic and popular program when he published “The Condition of
Women from a Zoölogical Point of View” (1879), a two-part essay arguing
that men and women “tend” toward particular forms of intellect. Next, I
turn to a 1990s exchange between evolutionary psychologist David M.
Buss and philosopher of science David J. Buller, which examines whether
men and women tend to have different experiences of romantic jealousy.
The obsolescence of Brooks’s theory makes this comparison possible and
productive: it allows us to disregard the content of his conclusions and focus instead on the tendential reasoning by which he drew them.
That reasoning, I will argue, is more consequential than any particular
theory. In both Brooks’s work and in the Buss/Buller exchange, the researchers make key errors that they have sufficient knowledge to avoid.
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Brooks created a complex theory of sexual differentiation and tried to anchor the mind in it, but he also assumed that the mind would include certain stereotyped features that his theory had ruled out. Rather than confront the incoherence in these parts of his theory, Brooks seems to have
been blithely unaware of any problem. Likewise, Buss and Buller debate research into romantic jealousy without betraying any awareness that the
hypothesis they are debating actually shifts multiple times in the research
under review. I will argue that tendency plays a key role in both situations.
Specifically, I will argue that it is part of a constellation of concepts—functions, tendencies, and cognitive fictions—through which we push the embodied mind far enough away from the traditionally conceived body to reflect a distorted version of it back to itself. In other words, we create a
paradoxically neo-Cartesian version of Darwinian evolution.
That this constellation recurs in late nineteenth-century writing and in
the work of scholars who present themselves as opponents in very different debates today suggests that these issues are broadly cultural, not disciplinary, ones. The question of how Darwinian principles shape our understanding of the embodied mind has generated social controversy since
the publication of The Origin of Species ([1859] 2000), but scholars discussing evolutionary psychology have approached the controversy in a distorting set of ways: they ask what social consequences particular hypotheses would have (and generally conclude that they are negative) or reject
that question as “ideological” and ask instead whether the hypotheses are
correct. To grasp the full relationship between the social and scientific,
however, we must consider how the assumptions that we inherit about
the mind/body relation shape our ability to generate evolutionary psychological claims—rather than only evaluate particular claims for their accuracy or social effects. This essay argues that cognitive fictions are such a
key assumption and that we must grapple with them in any effort to make
evolutionary theory the vocabulary for newly interdisciplinary studies of
human experience.
The abandonment of biology
Brooks wrote “The Condition of Women from a Zoölogical Point of View”
(1879) to determine whether evolution permitted feminism. The essay focuses on the attempt to open advanced education to women—what Brooks
calls the “attempt to improve the condition of women by ignoring or obliterating the intellectual differences between them and men” (349–50). His
argument against such education has two parts, published sequentially: the
first offers a Darwinian analysis of the physiology of sex cells; the second
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uses that account to construct the “psychological evolution” (155) of gender. His conclusions, Brooks acknowledges, are reactionary: he throws the
weight of his scientific credentials behind the proposition that educational
access for women “must result in disaster” (350). For Brooks, as for most
of his peers, evolutionary feminist theory is oxymoronic. But the only extended account of Brooks’s reasoning takes aim at his focus on “biology”
in the way that Grosz complains feminist theory has done more broadly.
Cynthia Eagle Russett (1991) links Brooks’s work to a “confusion between biology and culture pervading late-nineteenth-century thought”
(86); for Russett, that confusion led Brooks to reject the social “equality
of the sexes” on the basis of a reading of the “differing functions of the
[male and female] sex cell” (93). Criticizing Brooks for being too biologically reductive has things exactly backwards, however: in fact, a deeper respect for the biological constraints that Brooks took for granted would
have prevented his errors. Brooks’s work thus lends force to Grosz’s claim
that biological analysis and feminist theory need not be opposed, while allowing us to see that his actual error is his reliance on a particular, tendential model of biology, which Grosz’s work and contemporary evolutionary
psychology share.
Brooks eventually turned his Popular Science essays into a book that begins with a critique of recapitulation, establishing his ability and willingness
to reason carefully about biological form. Recapitulation theorized heredity, or the way organisms assume the characteristics of their species and not
some other; it posited that they do so by repeating (recapitulating) the developmental stages through which their ancestors progressed as they
evolved. Making an example of Ernst Haeckel, Brooks criticizes this theory
for begging the question it purported to answer. To say that “individual development [recapitulates] the evolution of the species,” he notes, is to say
that the “marvelous changes which lead from the simple egg . . . [to] a perfect bird” are “simply natural” (Brooks 1883, 31). Phrases like “simply natural,” he concludes, confirm that recapitulation “is in no sense an explanation of heredity” (31; emphasis added).
This care in reasoning also appears in “The Condition of Women,”
where he turns his attention to gender. There, he actually rejects the coarsest physiological theories of women’s incapacity for intellectual achievement. His peers argued that women’s reproductive anatomy demanded so
much energy that none remained for intellectual complexity, a view that established a war between women’s wombs and brains. Brooks rejects this
view in the language of political fairness: “It is no more than just . . . to point
out that the peculiar bodily organization and physiological functions of
woman have nothing to do with our conclusion. If the perpetuation of the
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human race were as simple as that of the starfish, where the demands made
upon the female organism during reproduction are no greater than those
made upon the male, the mind of woman would still be the organ of intellectual heredity, and the mind of man the organ of intellectual variation”
(1879, 350). Brooks’s own account of sexual psychology is more elegant
and nuanced. It combines male variability with pangenesis, Darwin’s theory
of heredity. Male variability is the belief that males of a species exhibit more
variation in secondary sex characteristics than females (Darwin 1871;
Geddes and Thompson 1890; Fausto-Sterling 1992). Pangenesis (Darwin
1868) posited that evolution was enabled by particles called “germs” or
“gemmules” that were emitted by every organ and collected in sex cells.
These germs somehow recorded variations in their originating organs and
provoked those same variations in offspring. The more germs, then, the
more likely variations would be inherited. Combining these two ideas,
Brooks hypothesizes that male sex cells have a heightened ability to accumulate germs. If germs “ which are formed in the male body are vastly more
likely to be transmitted to descendants than those which are formed in the
female body” (Brooks 1883, 160), then “we should . . . expect to find that
parts which are confined to [the] male [body] are more variable than parts
confined to [the] female [body]” (166–67)—an expectation that male variability confirmed. Brooks reasons further that if males varied, females
would “conserve,” creating the twin engines of evolution: variation and heredity. “The Condition of Women” seeks to determine how this physiological system would affect gender psychology.
This methodical use of sex cell physiology creates a theory of gender less
fixed and binarized than innovatively androgynous. First, it posits a complex set of biological systems that produce both masculinity and femininity
as equally contingent effects. This approach anticipates developmental systems theory (DST), a research model that attempts to strip biological investigations of scientific essentialism. DST proponents argue that biological
research becomes essentialist when it describes the distributed workings of
a complex system (including such elements as genes, mitochondrial DNA,
fetal environment, nutrition, and toxins) as if they could be divided into a
preexisting blueprint housed in just one of that system’s elements (genes)
and the unfolding of that blueprint in all the others. These blueprints,
Susan Oyama (2000a, 2000b) claims, represent a modern-day “ghost in
the machine”—an artificially congealed and rigid version of something that
is diffuse and variable (Oyama 2000b, 8). Oyama depicts DST as a feminist
biology; Brooks’s peers responded to his work with a similar view. Patrick
Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson (1890) believed that Brooks’s biology
made masculinity too capricious and fragile—that is, too much like femi-
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ninity. They objected to Brooks’s efforts to derive some features of masculinity from others, believing the effort made masculinity dependent and derivative; they preferred to define masculinity as the set of all things that correlated with it, effectively rendering it an explanation of itself. By focusing
on biological reductivism, we risk missing this key element of Brooks’s
work; Russett (1991) in fact groups Brooks with Geddes and Thompson as
scientists who believed in “constitutional maleness and femaleness” (89),
even though both Geddes and Thompson claimed that such a theory would
render Brooks’s account superfluous.
Had Brooks followed his account to its logical conclusion, he would
have made good on the androgynous implications of his method in a second way: Brooks’s derivation of male variability from sex cells would predict
no cognitive sex differences. According to the theory of pangenesis on
which Brooks drew, germ aggregation led to evolutionary change only in
a second generation. A heightened ability by male sex cells to aggregate
germs would determine a variation’s origin (fathers) but not the locus of its
inheritance (sons or daughters). Thus, only transmission of variations
would be linked to males; their development or display would not be. While
Brooks’s account should predict a lot of variation in male secondary sex
characteristics, it shouldn’t predict a greater male display of variation in
body parts shared by both sexes—and thus no greater cognitive differences,
because both males and females possess brains.2 Someone wishing to use
Brooks’s theory to discuss the education of women should have noted that
there were no cognitive grounds for resisting such education (regardless of
political or social ones).
The only thing more surprising than Brooks’s creation of a feminist biology is his complete obliviousness to its implications. Having established
his account of male variability, Brooks used it to assure his Popular Science
readers that men had a clearly greater ability than women to “pursue original trains of abstract thought, to reach the great generalizations of science, and to give rise to the new creations of poetry and art” (1879,
155). The essay concludes that if higher education aims to produce people
capable of such things, it will be wasted on women. This conclusion is, of
course, reactionary, but it takes a strained reading to attribute it to a sudden rearing of biological reductivism. In fact, we would have to posit—as
Russett does—that Brooks must have assumed something that he never
says: “that the transmission [of germs] was [itself ] sex-linked” (Russet
2
This point does not imply that sex-linked cognitive differences are incompatible with
feminist theory. But such differences are not predicted by Brooks’s theory, and thus his insistence on them signals a gap in his argument ripe for analysis.
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1991, 93). But if we acknowledge that Brooks’s biological account demands a conclusion directly opposite to the one he draws, and if we recognize that Brooks appears to believe that his reasoning really does work
without any additional, unstated assumptions, then we need to explain not
what assumptions he must have made but instead why he didn’t realize
that he needed any.
To answer this question, I propose that rhetorical analysis is particularly
useful. Such an analysis does not imply that the phenomena Brooks studied
were purely rhetorical creations; it evaluates the effects of his language on
his reasoning about those phenomena. I begin by characterizing Brooks’s
argument as a persuasive act, one in which he made conscious decisions
aimed at particular audiences. While such decisions are deliberate, their effects are not always so: rhetorical decisions may shape an argument’s substance in unmarked ways. A rhetorical analysis of Brooks’s essay reveals a
reservoir of invisible constraints regarding the relation of body to mind, the
core issue in his attempt to link sex cell physiology and gender psychology.
More specifically, I argue that Brooks made his most important rhetorical
decision when he cast germ accumulation as male sex cells’ “especial and
peculiar function” (1879, 154; emphasis added). Reading this appeal to
function rhetorically recasts a decades-long philosophical debate over functions in evolutionary analysis. Until the 1960s, functions’ Aristotelian link
to telos motivated charges that they were logically impossible—an anthropomorphic attribution of purposive behavior to elements that couldn’t
have goals. This rejection has not stuck because, as philosopher of science
Robert Cummins (1975) puts it, we need functions every time we wish to
capture the difference between what something does and how it does it.
Evolutionary analysis in particular makes this distinction: researchers study
the effects of traits within an environment, not the mechanics underlying
those effects. Thus, philosophical investigation has focused on how to ascribe functions in a nonteleological way. Yet the rhetoric of function in
Brooks’s work is not teleological but paradoxical: it creates a template for
defining the essence of a thing in terms of what the thing might not do—
a template that Brooks ultimately made central to his argument and that allowed him to establish and abandon limits at the same time. This template
left all of Brooks’s careful reasoning about gender intact but irrelevant,
turning gender into a floating propensity that would always exceed the empirical facts making it up. This process, I will argue, is not limited to
Brooks’s work but becomes a persistent cultural habit when talking about
the evolution of gender, one that is hazy enough to cross the disciplinary
and theoretical lines that separate Grosz’s feminist theory from the evolutionary psychology it seeks to complicate.
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The functions and tendencies of sexual difference
To appreciate Brooks’s rhetorical use of the term “function,” we need to
note that he didn’t really need this term in order to make his argument.
Most basically, Brooks argued that germ accumulation was one of the male
sex cell’s abilities. He also believed that this ability conferred a reproductive
advantage on organisms that bore it and made a unique contribution to a
larger system of sexual reproduction in which those organisms participated.
Finally, on the basis of both of these facts, Brooks implied that germ aggregation could have been what the male sex cell was selected for—that is, the
environmentally specific effect that led to its increased incidence in a population. The philosophy of science now has technical terms for Brooks’s
final two claims: contributions to systems are called “causal roles,” and
effects that may have been selected for are called “selected effects” (Cummins 1975; Millikan 2002). Brooks did not need the term “function” to
convey any of these ideas, however, whether in their nineteenth-century or
twenty-first-century forms. Although it is certainly possible to use the term
“function” to convey ability, reproductive advantage, a unique contribution, or an effect that has been selected for (as well as to convey causal role
or selected effects), the term “function” does not communicate these
meanings any better than those phrases themselves do. The term was superfluous to the substance of Brooks’s claims and thus requires rhetorical analysis to fully understand.
And whatever the technical details of Brooks’s argument, the term
“function” brings a great deal of rhetorical force to it. In its most everyday definition, this term conveys that there is something at stake in, or
something riding on, a particular action. These stakes have two consequences. The first has to do with propriety. As Brooks puts it, the ability
of the male sex cell to accumulate germs is its “especial and distinctive”
function, language that signals that we are in the realm of definition, or
of laying out the actual properties of a thing. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “function” points to this register, noting that a function is a “special kind of activity” that is “proper” to an object.3 The sense
of propriety, of belonging, suggests an essential, inherent characteristic,
without which the very identity of a thing changes. Rhetorically, functions thus insist that what is at stake is inherent and unavoidable. At the
same time, however, these special and proprietary activities arise precisely
and only in the space in which they might not occur: when something
isn’t performing its function, we don’t generally say that it doesn’t have
3
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “function.”
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a function but instead that it isn’t functioning.4 The inherence or inescapability of what is at stake is thus also fragile and delicate. To put these
three implications together, we can say that functions define a result as
both central to and detachable from the thing that might produce it. The
rhetorical consequence is to create a sense of necessity and of looming
unavailability at the same time.
These rhetorical consequences play an important role in Brooks’s essays,
whose publication in Popular Science aimed specifically at a nonacademic
audience. By discussing the function of the male sex cell in a nontechnical
sense, Brooks made a rhetorical choice to call his audience’s attention to
what was at stake in his understanding of sexual difference. Given Brooks’s
goals, this choice was a good one, for his theory entailed a set of stakes particularly important to American readers. Although Brooks did not explicitly
acknowledge the racialized political and social context in which he wrote,
he nonetheless made race the ultimate consequence of his argument about
sex cells and gender difference. By referring to the function of sex cells,
Brooks communicated to his nineteenth-century American audience that
his particular model of sexual difference was absolutely essential to the production of racial difference, and at the same time that it was inescapably
fragile. The clear message was that anyone who cared about race should care
about Brooks’s argument, too. This rhetorical positioning drew heavily on
and consolidated contemporary discourses of the intersections of race and
gender, but more importantly, it established a template for reading evolution and gender paradoxically, and Brooks’s move from physiology to psychology unwittingly drew on that template.
To see the context for this appeal, we have to recognize that Brooks was
hardly alone in articulating sexual and racial difference: recapitulation, the
theory for which he had such distaste, produced the most influential late
nineteenth-century account of the intersection between sex and race (Stepan 1993; Bederman 1995). Brooks’s own model is more tightly entwined,
however. By making males responsible for variation, Brooks effectively
makes them responsible for difference as such; as he puts it, “there must be
a greater uniformity in female character than in male character” (1879,
348). More specifically, because variation is the engine of evolutionary differentiation, Brooks’s assignment of variation to male organisms actually
makes evolution the function of the male and heredity or stasis what would
happen if there were no males. Brooks inadvertently says as much: while the
4
Christopher Boorse (2002) claims that if something isn’t fulfilling its function, then we
should conclude that it doesn’t have one. This proposal that we talk differently about functions
is worth engaging, but it doesn’t change my argument about how we do talk about them.
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male organism starts out as “the progressive or variable factor in the process
of the evolution of the race,” it soon becomes “the originating element in
the process of evolution” (1879, 150, 154; emphasis added). Brooks’s explicit reference to “the race” is not what makes his argument one about racial difference; rather, racial difference was considered the primary unit of
human difference and evolution by late nineteenth-century scientists.5
A long passage explicates the racial subtext of Brooks’s argument, leading his theory of sexual difference to culminate in racial difference as the
most specific unit of human identity:
All the characteristics which unite [the human child] with the other
vertebrates, as a member of the sub-kingdom Vertebrata, are like
those of its parents, and also those which place it in the class Mammalia, and in its proper order, family, genus, and species. It also shares
with its parents the features or race characteristics of the particular
tribe or race to which they belong. If they are Chinese, Indians, or
negroes, the child belongs to the same race, and manifests all the
slight, superficial peculiarities of form, constitution, and character by
which that race is characterized. Even the individual peculiarities of
the parents, intellectual and moral as well as physical, are now known
to be hereditary. . . . We must recognize the universality of the law of
heredity, but we must not overlook the equally well-established fact
that each organism is the resultant of this law and another, the law of
variation. . . . Paleontology and embryology now . . . prove that all hereditary characteristics, even the most fundamental, were originally
individual variations. (1879, 146–47)
Brooks’s discussion of “peculiarities” is key, and his approach to them
takes an hourglass conceptual shape. The gradual move from kingdom to individual parent seems to constrict import, and by the time the discussion gets
to racial groupings the “peculiarities” are as “slight” and “superficial” as the
word itself sounds. The significance expands, though, when we learn that
“individual peculiarities” actually determine the “most fundamental” hereditary characteristics. Indeed, these suddenly consequential “peculiarities” are
just another word for the male variations that Brooks has called the “originating element” in the evolutionary process. Thus, all forms of group difference are implicated by Brooks’s argument about gender. Just as males vary,
their variations produce new, and explicitly racialized, forms of difference.
Brooks’s rhetorical appeal might be of mild interest if it remained only a
conscious act of argumentative positioning. But it doesn’t: it bleeds into
5
See Stanton (1960), Bederman (1995), Gossett (1997), and Ross (2004).
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Brooks’s argument in apparently unconscious ways, dramatically shaping its fundamental components and eventually facilitating his flawed leap
from sex cells to psychology. That process takes place in three stages. First,
Brooks’s rhetoric of function shapes the construction of his research methods. His decision to label certain things “functions” leads him to render elements and their effects so synonymous that he fails to recognize when his
research method failed to correlate them empirically. This failure leads
Brooks to be more confident about what a thing’s function is than he
should be. While this methodological failure indirectly shaped Brooks’s
conclusions, the rhetoric of function directly supplies the content of his
conclusions as well. Brooks uses function as a template to define the nature
of sex differences as paradoxical—whatever they happen to consist of. Thus,
he makes them empirical at the same time that he insulates them from empirical test. Finally, Brooks uses the rhetoric of function to locate such paradoxical differences. Specifically, he maps the poles of his paradox onto the
relation between mind and body, turning the mind into a kind of backstop
for gendered characteristics that his own argument makes it difficult to locate in traditionally conceived bodies. By surveying this process in full, we
get a picture of the rhetorical structure that continues to shape discussions
of evolution today.
First, in order to establish the function of the male and female in sexual
reproduction, Brooks’s essays survey the relationship between variation
(the dependent variable of his research) and the male and female sex cells
(the independent variables of it). To make this survey successful, Brooks
seeks to show that he can isolate his dependent variable from his independent variables—that is, that he can break down the process of sexual reproduction into the contributions of male and female sex cells. Although that
task might seem to pose an obstacle insofar as the defining characteristic of
sexual reproduction is ordinarily the conjoining of male and female sex
cells, Brooks believes he has found a way around it: parthenogenesis, or the
solitary reproduction by the female of a sexually differentiated species.6
While “The Condition of Women” offers only a breezy explanation of the
process, Law of Heredity spends a great deal of time documenting specific
instances.7 Having distinguished parthenogenic from sexual reproduction,
6
“Parthenogenesis” literally means “ virgin birth.” Unlike some of Brooks’s other ideas, it
takes place, although rarely; see Chapman et al. (2007).
7
In “The Condition of Women” (Brooks 1879), a single sentence states that “there are
many animals whose unfertilized eggs not only commence, but complete the developmental
process, and give rise to adults which may in turn produce young in the same way: and this may
go on indefinitely, without the intervention of a male” (149). Law of Heredity (Brooks 1883)
expands this sentence into a nineteen-page discussion of examples (55–74).
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Brooks concludes that the role of the male sex cell is isolated whenever
males participate in sexual reproduction. And having purportedly isolated
male and female roles in sexual reproduction, Brooks’s next step is to show
that the male role initiates and perpetuates “new variations” (1879, 150).
Yet a problem pervades this method. Brooks’s functional definition of
gender invisibly supplies the analytical categories with which he interprets
his data, creating a procedural circle that is both easy to make and easy to
miss. Brooks contends that by distinguishing male-fertilized reproduction
from parthenogenic reproduction, he has isolated the roles of male and female sex cells. The distinction between male-fertilized and parthenogenic
reproduction, however, does not isolate any such thing. Rather, it distinguishes sexual reproduction—with both male and female sex cells—from
the possibility, in some female organisms, of asexual reproduction. Malefertilized reproduction, in other words, is simply sexual reproduction;
nothing distinct to either males or females has been isolated in the process
at all. Brooks’s rhetoric of function is responsible for his failure to acknowledge this point. Brooks has described the uniquely variable results of sexual
reproduction as the “function” of the male sex cell and has thus presented
sexual reproduction as the addition of the male to asexual reproduction. As
he puts it, there is “no essential distinction” between sexual and asexual reproduction except “the necessity for impregnation” (1879, 149)—that is,
the necessity for the male. Once the event of sexual reproduction simply is
the function of the male element, the terms “sexual” and “male” can readily
replace each other, with little sense that any replacement is even going on,
and one can imagine that one has isolated male function when one is really
looking at a sexual reproductive event.8
Brooks does not just allow his rhetoric of function to lead him into
methodological errors; doing even more damage, he embraces that rhetoric
as a substantive template for sexual difference itself. I have suggested that
functionalist rhetoric depicts an effect as both synonymous with and detachable from the thing that performs it. Brooks makes this paradox central
to sexual difference by positing that gender consists not of characteristics
but of tendencies. Just as rhetorical analysis reframes the contemporary
philosophical debate over functions, appreciating the relationship between
the rhetoric of function and the work of tendency will reframe another node
8
The oddity of Brooks’s reasoning surfaces in his argument about male variability: if variation were the function of the male element, then sexual differentiation (itself a variation)
would be an effect of the male element; sexual difference would be produced by males. And
if the male element constitutes sexual difference, then there’s no such thing as a female element; there are male elements and asexual elements. Brooks should see that this argument is
nonsense, but he doesn’t.
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in contemporary debates over scientific reasoning—this time, debates over
statistical analysis. The history of science includes a long-standing debate
over statistical analysis that focuses on whether such analysis maintains the
distinction between descriptions of groups and prescriptions regarding individuals (Poovey 1998; Thrailkill 2007). Yet tendency works by creating
new kinds of description.
To appreciate how it does so, we can take a neutral example: the statement that “it will tend to rain today.” The awkwardness of this sentence
stems from the fact that it combines a definitive prediction with something that may or may not occur—a combination that is the hallmark of
tendency. If we imagine movement taking place along a continuous line
and we imagine one end of that line representing a traditionally conceived
observable characteristic, then tendency interprets the act of moving—
whether it consists of a small step, a large step, or a final step—not as a
step toward a characteristic, nor as a prescription that dictates eventual
arrival at the line’s end, but instead as a characteristic in and of itself.
Thus, in the meteorological example, the notion of tendency would require us to describe a day as in some sense rainy even if the day brought
no rain. The result is a paradoxical empiricism, one that makes it irrelevant whether we move from empirical descriptions to normative prescriptions. Brooks bears that out when he claims that the “average woman”
will be more like other average women than like the “average man”
(Brooks 1879, 348). There is nothing wrong with statistical discussions
of the average of group values, of course, but Brooks can’t be using the
term “average” in this way. Brooks believed that males would exhibit
greater variation around a norm, not that a male norm was shifted higher
than a female norm. For this reason, average males and females would actually be identical under Brooks’s argument. Yet Brooks asserts that the
average male and female typify gender difference. This claim can work only
if the average woman for whom something isn’t true still in some sense
counts as a prototype of the woman for whom it is. That result is possible
only if we assume that what the two women share is a tendency toward a
characteristic rather than a characteristic itself.9
9
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (2002) invokes the statistical nature of scientific claims
about gender to shield them from critics. He notes that claims like “men are better at math
than women” describe group averages without making predictions about individual men or
women and are thus correct. While Pinker is right that there is nothing wrong with statistical
claims, the phrasing of these claims actually often equivocates between statistical averages and
tendencies, and this equivocation does indeed create inaccuracy and logical impossibility. The
intersection of statistics and tendency is partly historical: Brooks developed his functional analysis as Francis Galton arrived at coefficients of correlation and as Karl Pearson created a full
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This outcome becomes increasingly explicit as Brooks’s argument moves
from sex cells to cognition. At first Brooks notes that the male sex cell does
not just accumulate germs; it has a “tendency” to do so (1879, 151). Moreover, he reasons that “since the male has for its function the production of
the variable reproductive element . . . it would clearly be of advantage
that the male organism should acquire a peculiar tendency to vary” (151;
emphasis added). Females, by contrast, “gradually acquire a tendency to develop . . . general characteristics more perfectly than the male” (151; emphasis added). This claim makes little sense, insofar as there is nothing inherently advantageous about variations per se.10 Instead, Brooks seems to
imagine some kind of tendency for organisms to become more and more
aligned with their own supposed tendencies. This supertendency brings not
only the source and inheritor of variation into alignment but also the products of variable organs: because the male transmits and inherits more variations, male minds become more variable than female minds, and thus
also there is a “greater uniformity in female character than in male character” (348). By the time such migrating tendencies have found their way to
minds, they have become impervious to their own implementation—so
that Brooks can offer the strange disclaimer that his understanding of male
cognition actually does not apply to most males. The capacity for intellectual rigor that he has defined as the function of the male is actually “exceptional” even among men, he notes, and it “must not enter into our conception of the ordinary male mind” (155). Nevertheless, he notes, the ordinary
male mind does indeed fulfill the male function because it possesses, “in a
lesser degree,” the power of “originating and of generalizing from new
experience” (155). Thanks to tendencies, in other words, men are exceptional even when they aren’t.
Once Brooks has turned the paradox of functionalist rhetoric into a template for his substantive argument about gender, it reframes his culminating
interest in the mind. Both the article and book form of Brooks’s argument
take a long time getting to that interest, making their way first through a
painstaking survey of one-celled organisms and plant reproduction in order
model of statistical analysis. That history helps explain why the literature on functions is so
concerned with the role of statistics in ascribing them. For a brief history of nineteenth-century
statistics, especially in biology, see Kevles (1995).
10
That is, a heightened ability to accumulate germs would mean that variations would
more often be passed on by males with that ability, not that they would come only from males.
Moreover, because most variations have no effects or have deleterious effects, that increased
frequency would pose as much potential for harm as for valuable innovation. Adding more variations to the mix would not change this calculus. There is also no reason that the increased
production of variations would be linked to their increased accumulation.
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to establish the unbroken line from “lower” life forms to human psychology that Darwin promised. Of course, we have seen that functionalist rhetoric propels this line at key moments, and we can now see that this rhetoric
produces the central error of Brooks’s argument, the move from the physiology of sex cells to the psychology of gender. Brooks distributes the paradox of functionalism across mind and body, so that the mind “tends” toward identities that, as Brooks’s own argument acknowledges, the body
may not reliably produce. In Brooks’s model of evolutionary psychology,
functional fictions thus become what we might call cognitive fictions.
We see this effect in the symmetry that Brooks imagines between variable
bodies and variable minds. To get from the body to the mind, Brooks supposes that variations accumulated by the male sex cell will make the mind
itself more productive of variation. At first glance this supposition seems
unremarkable: variation leads to variation. But of course a host of other
possible outcomes existed that would also have ensured Brooks’s ultimate
goal of deeming higher education more effective for men than for women:
for instance, that male minds would work faster, more precisely, or in a
more organized way. If we look in Brooks’s essays for the series of steps that
indeed lead from variation to variation rather than, say, from variation to
speed, we will find nothing more than the symmetry of the phrase itself. In
fact, in this exchange of connection for symmetry, we confront the heart of
Brooks’s imagined relation between body and mind: this model builds
slowly and patiently from one element to another—from gemmules to the
male sex cell to complex organs—and then at the last minute, when it
finally arrives at the mind, it assumes that the body will push the mind just
far enough away to reflect the body back to itself. And what the mind will
reflect back to the body is its tendencies. In this way, the strangely disembodied mind supplies the perfect location for the notion of tendency: if tendency interprets movement as a characteristic, then the mind as mirror puts
a picture of that process in the place where a traditionally conceived endpoint would be. Far from reducing the mind to the body, this model makes
it possible to relocate to the mind all of those characteristics that the body
might not reliably produce. If evolutionary theory makes the body newly
contingent and unpredictable, Brooks’s vision of the embodied mind turns
it into an ironically secure kind of storage space for those characteristics that
one considers particularly important. It thus makes a strange kind of sense
that when Brooks most directly discusses cognition, he begins to concede
most explicitly the paradoxes of tendency, acknowledging that not all male
minds actually work the way male minds supposedly work.
Brooks seems to realize the power of his imagined mind/body relation,
for he uses it to take his argument a couple of odd steps farther than he
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Table 1. Relative Power of Persuasion
To foresee the conduct
Is greater than the
To foresee the conduct
The power of
of or to influence
power of
of or to influence
Women
Women
Women
Women
Women
Women
Men
Men
Men
Men
Men
Men
Men
Women
Men
Women
Source: This table is reproduced from William Keith Brooks’s “The Condition of Women”
(1879, 349).
claimed it would go. Having produced an account of a sexually differentiated mind, Brooks argues that minds also identify with sexual difference.
This final argument suggests the mind’s self-conscious organization of itself around ideas, demonstrating that Brooks’s evolutionary model of a
mirroring mind is not so distant from a traditionally dualistic conception of
the mind/body relation. Brooks makes his argument in a chart that offers a
set of predictions about intersubjective epistemology. Assuming that male
variability will lead to a “greater uniformity in female character than in male
character” (1879, 348), Brooks infers that it will be easier for an average
woman to predict “what another average woman will do, or feel, or think,
or say in any given case, than for one average man to predict in the same way
of another average man” (1879, 348). He suggests that this set of differentiated interpretive abilities will also sexually differentiate the act of persuasion, which consists in “a vivid appreciation of . . . established motives and
incentives to conduct” (1879, 349). The headings of the table summarizing these inferences (table 1) reads like a sentence from left to right, with
each line filling in the substance; the first line would read “The power of
women to foresee the conduct of or to influence women is greater than the
power of men to foresee the conduct of or to influence men.” According to
Brooks, the degree of difference would decrease going down the chart.
The chart’s specific inferences are arbitrary and contradictory. For instance, if women represent a lowest common psychological denominator—
a “fundamental similarity” (1879, 348)—that men exceed, then we could
expect women to have a harder time forecasting men’s actions than the
other way around. The specific differences, however, matter less than the
fact that all of them are saturated with consciousness of the categories they
claim to produce. The chart’s divisions do not claim only that women and
men make guesses that more often turn out to be right about women
and men, respectively, but that women actively read women as such and
that men actively read men as such. Sexual difference thus becomes an intellectual filter for recognizing itself. It becomes—like functions—not only
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fictional but a specifically cognitive fiction: a built-in conceptual habit rather
than either a fully embodied category or a social construction.11 Brooks’s
language stresses the self-consciousness of this process by using the manipulative language of “power,” “fore[sight],” and “influence,” implying that
women and men actively deploy this filter. This power becomes even greater
if we recall that Brooks applies it to the average woman and man, for whom
his claims would be least true: these women and men seem at the level of
conscious prediction to duplicate those characteristics of their sex that they
actually do not embody.
Brooks’s work demonstrates that biological reductivism does not account for his scientific errors. We need a vocabulary that measures not the
degree to which bodies structure our explanations but the kinds of bodies
we take for granted. In Brooks’s case, as functionalist rhetoric takes over,
he revives a dualistic vision of mind and body within an evolutionary
scheme, creating a post-Darwinian neo-Cartesianism. That pattern leads
him not only to make mistakes but to make mistakes that he had sufficient
information to avoid. Writing of eugenics, the literary and cultural historian Daylanne K. English (2004) notes that we often pat ourselves on the
back for getting over quaint scientific notions like “gemmules” as we marvel at the misguided, oppressive, or dangerous social practices those notions abetted. Yet we cannot dismiss Brooks’s errors as the result of a benighted commitment to scientific novelties. On the contrary, Brooks could
have assumed all of his false premises and still realized that he needed very
different conclusions. His failure is not one of knowledge but of reasoning,
and it marks not the end but the beginning of a pattern—one we continue
to rely on ourselves.
The contemporary controversy over evolutionary psychology
We have accepted the rhetoric of function so fully today that we have forgotten it is rhetorical. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin campaigned against the dominance of functions in evolutionary history, comparing them to mechanisms like spandrels and genetic drift, but it never
occurred to them that functions were rhetorical creatures and that it therefore makes no sense to ask how important a role they play in evolutionary
11
The link between epistemology and function appears in modern philosophy. Seeking to
dissolve some of the theoretical knots in the literature on function, Daniel C. Dennett (1990)
posits that if a thing’s function is clear, then it has one, and if its function isn’t clear, then no
function exists. The notion that function exists in the eye of the beholder makes functions into
a way of thinking, an effect consistent with the very title of Dennett’s book (a stance). This position insulates function from any correlation to what it supposedly describes.
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processes (Gould and Lewontin 1979). That the most widely known critics
of functionalism took functions themselves for granted points to the
broader landscape in which students of evolutionary theory are introduced
to functions as the ultimate explanation of the forms life takes, and in which
critics who quarrel with functionalism continue to challenge only the extent
of its application (Sperling 1991). If Brooks’s seemingly deliberate use of
functionalist rhetoric shaped the substance of his argument, then our unconscious use of it would seem to make such influence impossible to avoid.12
To challenge this pattern most effectively, I examine here a case in which
critics and proponents of evolutionary psychology mirror Brooks’s errors.
In 1992, evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss et al. published an influential study of sex differences in jealousy, which seemed to confirm social
stereotypes about men and women—that men care about sexual infidelity
(romantic partners having sexual relationships with others) and women care
about emotional infidelity (romantic partners developing emotional attachments to others). In 2005, these findings became the subject of a debate between philosopher of science David J. Buller, who challenged Buss et al. in a
book-length critique of evolutionary psychology, and Buss and Martie Hasselton, who responded to Buller’s critique. Although the various elements of
Buss et al.’s original findings are elaborate, one element of the debate is extraordinary: the participants in it not only disagree over whether Buss et al.
prove their hypothesis but also fail to recognize what that hypothesis actually consists of. Buller focuses on what I call hypothesis 1, insisting it is not
supported; Buss et al. focus on what I call hypothesis 2, insisting that it is;
both fail to appreciate that the original research slips back and forth between
the two. Across their disagreements, then, both make arguments structured
by important invisible assumptions. As in Brooks’s work, the rhetoric of
function begins to put those assumptions in play.
Buss et al.’s original research does not use the term “function,” but it
uses a host of associated terms. For example, the authors hypothesize that
“sex differences in jealousy emerged in humans as solutions to the respective
adaptive problems faced by each sex” (1992, 251; emphasis added). “Adaptive problems” refers to constraints that create selective pressures; “solutions” refers to mechanisms that ensure fitness within those constraints; the
specific effects through which mechanisms achieve fitness (i.e., traits or abilities that are selected for) are known as functions. This language thus puts
functions in play. Moreover, the tight relationship between problems and
12
Evolutionary psychology occupies a schizophrenic cultural position today: it has become
a cultural juggernaut even as it remains the object of sometimes scathing academic criticism.
Jerry A. Coyne (2003) likens it to phrenology.
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solutions gets transferred to the relation between jealousy and its supposed
function, while the always-present possibility that a solution will not work
suggests function’s fragility. Jealousy, in other words, has an effect proper
to it that it might not fulfill. As in Brooks’s work, this paradoxical essence
that might not exist creates a sense of rhetorical urgency: whatever jealousy
does, it’s important. Jealousy solves problems—adaptive problems, problems of survival. In fact, it contributes to the survival of Buss et al.’s readers,
the humans in whom it emerged. Our link to those humans reinforces the
rhetorical effect: the language allows us to toy with the idea that they, too,
would have found jealousy essential before they had it. While there is nothing wrong with studying sex differences in jealousy, nor with studying the
contributions of forms of jealousy to survival or reproduction, we don’t
need this rhetoric to do either of these things.13 As in Brooks’s work, the
rhetoric becomes an unacknowledged template for contracting and expanding claims.
Buss et al. first claim that sexual and emotional infidelity “should be
weighted differently by men and women” (1992, 251), but it is not clear
what this difference consists of. The next version of the hypothesis identifies
one possible answer: “that men and women differ in which form of infidelity . . . triggers more upset and subjective distress” (252). This option opens
up three more possibilities: it could mean that one kind of infidelity triggers
more intense distress; that one kind of infidelity more often triggers distress
than the other kind; or that more men experience a certain kind of distress
than another kind, and vice versa for women. Whatever the meaning, the
fact that Buss et al. discuss contrasting kinds of jealousy and link those kinds
to men and women suggests that we should see contrasting patterns in men
and women as well.
The first statement of the empirical findings reinforces this expectation.
Buss et al. report that “the first empirical probe, contrasting distress over a
partner’s sexual involvement with distress over a partner’s deep emotional
attachment, yielded a large and highly significant sex difference” (1992,
13
Buss et al. offer other such terms: they note that “men who were indifferent to sexual
contact between their mates and other men presumably experienced lower paternity certainty,
greater investment in competitors’ gametes, and lower reproductive success than did men who
were motivated to attend to cues of infidelity and to act on those cues to increase paternity
probability” (1992, 251). This language differs from saying that men’s motivation to attend
to cues of infidelity represents a “solution” to an “adaptive problem.” The functional language
prevents the researchers from acknowledging alternative solutions. For instance, in light of the
fact that emotional and sexual infidelity have something to do with each other (as Buss et al.
note briefly in their conclusion), we might suppose that men who were motivated to respond
to any kind of infidelity experienced greater paternity certainty than men who were motivated
to respond only or primarily to cues of either sexual infidelity or emotional infidelity.
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252). The promise to “contrast” one kind of jealousy with another, followed by the statement of a sex difference, suggests that contrasting kinds
of jealousy appear in contrasting patterns in men and women. The next sentence reinforces that suggestion. Buss et al. note that “Fully 60% of the male
sample reported greater distress over their partner’s potential sexual infidelity; in contrast, only 17% of the female sample chose that option, with 83%
reporting that they would experience greater distress over a partner’s emotional attachment to a rival” (252; emphasis added). “Fully” emphasizes
that 60 percent is greater than half of men, and 83 percent reinforces that
the pattern flips for women. This is what I am calling hypothesis 1: the supposition that men experience one kind of jealousy and women experience
the other kind.
Things get hazier, however, in the next sentence. Buss et al. report that
“[the first empirical] pattern was replicated with [a] contrast between sex
and love,” where “the magnitude of the sex difference was large, with
32% more men than women reporting greater distress over a partner’s sexual involvement with someone else, and the majority of women reporting
greater distress over a partner’s falling in love with a rival” (1992, 252–53).
Despite the supposed replication, things are not at all parallel. The first
statement of findings compares within-group percentages (60 percent vs.
an implied 40 percent, 17 percent vs. 83 percent) and does not calculate
a cross-group spread (43 percent difference), while the second statement
of findings provides only the cross-group spread. The change in pattern
correlates with a change in data. It turns out that in the second case, most
men do not fit the already established “male” jealousy pattern. A minority
(42 percent) reported the jealousy pattern that “fully 60%” selected in the
first empirical probe. As a result, a new version of the hypothesis takes hold:
the hypothesis cannot be that men and women will find contrasting kinds of
infidelity upsetting (because they don’t) but instead that men will always
find sexual infidelity more upsetting than women find it, even if they both
find it less upsetting than emotional infidelity—what I call hypothesis 2.
Buss et al. seem unaware that their hypothesis has changed.
In his original critique, Buller (2005) also seems not to recognize it.
He takes hypothesis 1 as Buss et al.’s claim and criticizes the authors for
failing to support it. In their response, Buss and Haselton (2005) again
overlook the variation; they accuse Buller of “misrepresent[ing]” the original argument, as if Buss et al. had never proposed hypothesis 1 (507).
Only in his reply to Buss and Haselton does Buller finally note the “ambigu[ity]” in the claims (Buller, Fodor and Crume 2005, 509), but he sets it
aside to insist on his own interpretation. His discussion points to even
more examples of slipperiness, for although Buss et al. (1992) left off with
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hypothesis 2, Buss’s later popularization of the research (1994) cited hypothesis 1 as the proven conclusion. While it is important to sort out these
competing claims, we must also ask how researchers who set out to draw a
fair conclusion do not realize that they haven’t—the question Brooks’s
work raises.
This pattern points to the second stage in Brooks’s argument: the move
from functionalist rhetoric to tendential logic. To see that stage here, take
Buss et al.’s hypothesis 1. This hypothesis predicts that men by and large
will feel sexual jealousy more than romantic jealousy, the results show that
“fully 60%” of men do so, and Buss et al. conclude that “men’s jealousy is
triggered primarily by cues to the possible diversions of their mate’s sexual
favors to another man” (1992, 128).14 Of course, 40 percent is a very large
minority, especially when the characteristic lacking in that 40 percent is
supposed to have increased rates of survival or reproductive success (if Buss
et al. had found that 60 percent of hearts pump blood and 40 percent don’t,
they’d place the word “only,” not “fully,” in front of 60 percent). So why
don’t the authors conclude that they found two male jealousy patterns
rather than just the expected one?
A critique of statistical prescriptivism would complain that by transforming 60 percent of men into “men,” Buss et al. turn statistical majority into
normative law, erasing the other 40 percent. But such a charge is not credible; the authors cannot imagine that sticking the word “fully” in front of
60 percent will make 40 percent look anomalous. “Fully” makes sense only
if Buss et al. believe that a 60/40 spread really does reveal something about
all men. In other words, they need to imagine that all men in some way do
something that not all men do. We need the concept of tendency to explain
this imagination, and we get it in the idea that “men’s jealousy is triggered
primarily” by anything at all. Compared to a modifier like “most” (“most
men’s jealousy”), “primarily” is a slippery term. “Most” has a numerical
meaning that divides outcomes cleanly: it includes a number of cases in
which something happens, and it excludes all other cases. “Primarily” has
instead an ordinal meaning: “to a great or the greatest degree; for the most
part, mainly” or “in the first instance.”15 This ordinal meaning makes “pri14
The percentage of men who occupy the male jealousy pattern decreases in another part
of the study. The researchers decided to increase the sample size and compare the responses of
men who had been in sexual relationships to those of men who hadn’t. They hypothesized that
men who had previously been in sexual relationships would be more likely to express the “male”
jealousy pattern, and indeed this was their finding. However, in the larger sample size, the percentage of men who fit the male pattern, even when restricted to those who have previously had
sexual relationships, drops to an even slimmer majority, from 60 percent to 55 percent.
15
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “primarily.”
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mary” factors always part of a larger mixture within any given object, persisting even where they give way to secondary factors. The move from
“60 percent of men” to “men’s jealousy is triggered primarily” shifts registers from numerical divisions to ordinal mixtures, and that shift allows
what is true of 60 percent of men to become true of the other 40 percent
(just as the average of what men do becomes in Brooks’s hands the
“average man”). For Buss et al., all of these men’s jealousy is triggered “primarily” by the same thing: in 60 percent, that trigger is visible, and in the
other 40 percent, it is not. In other words, men’s jealousy tends to be triggered by certain cues—even when it isn’t. The concept of tendency nullifies
the descriptive difference between these two groups, so Buss et al. can look
at them and describe them as one.
The logical framework of tendency shapes not only hypothesis 1 but also
the movement between it and hypothesis 2. While functionalist rhetoric
bleeds into tendency within hypothesis 1, at the same time Buss et al.’s rhetoric keeps circling back to that hypothesis even when it isn’t borne out. The
word choice, sentence structure, and selection of data at various moments
all suggest hypothesis 1—the idea that there are male and female patterns of
jealousy—even though Buss, Haselton, and Buller all eventually agree
that the data best support hypothesis 2. That is why Buller seizes on hypothesis 1 as the one being tested. As in Brooks’s work, we see a rhetorical
appeal to function, a substantial notion of tendency, and a failed effort to
keep straight what has and hasn’t been proven.
All of these points culminate in the third element of Brooks’s work:
pushing the embodied mind far enough away from the traditionally conceived body to reflect supposed features of that body back to itself. For
much longer than evolutionary psychology has existed, men’s biology has
been identified with a sexual desire urgent enough to be uncontrollable,
and women’s biology has been imagined as less productive of sexual desire
than emotional attachments (Cott 1979). Buss et al.’s hypotheses at once
depart from and duplicate these assumptions. They depart insofar as they
deal with perceptual sensitivities and psychological orientations, not bodily
capacities. Moreover, those sensitivities respond to partners whose imagined behaviors also counter stereotypes: men forming emotional attachments, women having sexual affairs. Yet the sensitivity reconstitutes stereotypes in the mind: men care about sex, even if it’s women having it; women
care about emotional attachments, even if it’s men having them. Buss
et al.’s descriptions of their hypothesis occasionally traffic in stereotype
more directly: men look for the diversion of their partners’ sexual “favors,”
they report—as if women’s sexuality is an act of generosity, not desire. The
imagined mind thus reflects a set of stereotypes associated with the tradi-
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tionally conceived body; it becomes a holding pen for cognitive fictions.
This process ultimately narrows the hypotheses in the Buss/Buller exchange. For example, we might expect men who responded to cues of both
sexual and emotional infidelity to reproduce more successfully than men
who responded to either alone, given that these two things often have
something to do with each other.
This exchange thus shows that Brooks’s errors persist today. We may
have replaced germ accumulation with jealousy cues, but the language in
which we describe such concepts and interpret tests of them remains largely
unchanged. Like Brooks, we treat functionalist rhetoric so transparently
that it no longer seems rhetorical. We translate that rhetoric’s paradoxes into the logic of tendencies, and we map tendencies onto the mind/body
relation, turning the mind into a mirror that reflects the traditionally conceived body back to itself. These problems would have mattered in Brooks’s
work even if germ accumulation turned out to exist, and they matter in
Buss and Buller’s exchange regardless of whether jealousy is sexually differentiated. The point is that we allow rhetorical choices to bleed into and distort our reasoning about such questions.
Conclusion
Tendencies pervade the modern sciences and humanities well beyond evolutionary theory. The authors of a recent study of space flight note that “a
tendency to develop reentry orthostasis after a prolonged exposure to microgravity is a common problem among astronauts” (Summers et al. 2010,
1). Meant probabilistically, “tendency” is meaningless here, for the probability of something cannot be “common.” The term makes sense only
with the paradoxical meaning I’ve charted above. Today this paradox increasingly surfaces through other terms, like “propensities” and “predispositions.” The essay on space flight, for example, goes on to note that
“ women have . . . a much greater predisposition to the development of OI
[orthostatic intolerance] postflight than their male counterparts” (Summers et al. 2010, 1). Alongside orthostatic intolerance, scientists discuss
propensities for outcomes as varied as breast cancer and obesity.
Yet tendencies, propensities, and predispositions are also specifically
connected to both evolutionary theory and evolutionary accounts of psychological experience. Within the philosophy of biology, the most accepted
definition of evolutionary fitness is probabilistic propensity, which holds
that a trait confers fitness on an organism if that trait has the probabilistic
propensity of increasing the organism’s (reproductively viable) offspring.
In a short piece on evolution and aesthetics, philosopher Denis Dutton
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(2002) speaks of “a general human tendency to prefer landscapes combining open spaces and trees (preferably trees that fork near the ground, and so
offer escape from predation), water, green flora, flowers, and variegated
cloud patterns” (208). And while Dutton is an enthusiast of evolutionary
psychology, the pattern holds in those philosophers who see themselves as
moving past that field. Grosz (2004) uses tendencies to insist that arbitrary
aesthetic inclinations are an unappreciated engine of human evolution.
Massumi (2002) develops his provocative definition of tendency as “pure
futurity” (15) in part through a chapter on “the evolutionary alchemy of
reason” (89; emphasis added). Using the example of a bee perceiving a
flower, he argues that “a creature’s perception is exactly proportioned to its
action upon [a] thing” (90) and further defines the relation between perception and action as a “tending” (91). Furthermore, the actions in question are (naturally) selected; as Massumi notes, what the bee sees and smells
in the flower is “enough to extract pollen from it” (90).
The example of probabilistic propensity clarifies what is at stake in this
pattern. As Alex Rosenberg and Daniel W. McShea (2008) note, probabilistic propensities both separate and link fitness and reproductive success:
“The fitter among competing organisms will not always [in actuality] leave
more offspring” (312). This formulation evokes tendencies in its effort to
insulate characteristics from their own failure. Yet tendencies have more serious effects. While philosophers of science disagree about whether probabilistic propensities can account for natural selection, the argument hinges
on whether those propensities can really be distinguished from the empirical frequency with which outcomes occur—in other words, whether fitness
and frequency are really different things. The effect of tendencies, however,
is to blur such a difference: to assert that a particular thing really does take
place even when it doesn’t. In Dutton’s talk of a “general human tendency
to prefer ” rather than of a “general human preference,” we see this empirical
fluidity.
I have argued in this essay that the constellation of functions, tendencies,
and cognitive fictions are inherited concepts through which we conceive of
bodily processes and their significance regardless of field. Similarly, reimagining these concepts requires work of scholars across disciplines. For scientists, it means recognizing the rhetorical character of long-standing conceptual debates, especially the unnecessary rhetoric of “functions” shared by
scholars who split sharply over how to identify them. It also means acknowledging the direct and indirect influences of this rhetoric: direct in distorting
purported probabilistic reasoning and indirect in abetting an ironically neoCartesian evolutionary theory of the mind. For humanists, it means reconsidering the relation between evolutionary theory’s popular and disciplinary
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versions, as well as between philosophical and empirical disciplines. This
kind of work is particularly appropriate to a moment that scholars agree
postdates the science wars, for it requires asking not whether experience is
biological but instead how to conceive of biology. While this work is incumbent on all who write about embodiment, it matters especially to scholars
interested in the evolutionary feminist theory that Grosz envisions, because
it helps to avoid terms that can write scholars out of their own conclusions.
For such scholars, the implication of this essay is not that we should disengage with evolutionary theory as we study sex and gender but that we should
continue to make that engagement more fruitful.
Honors College
University of Maryland, College Park
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