Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

By Joan Roughgarden

In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science—and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality.

Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780520957978

Joan Roughgarden

Joan Roughgarden is Professor of Biology Emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of several books, including Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist and The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (UC Press).

Book preview

EVOLUTION’S RAINBOW

Evolution’s Rainbow

Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality

in Nature and People

Tenth Anniversary Edition

With a New Preface by the Author

Joan Roughgarden

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeleyLos 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.

Evolution’s 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

305.3—dc222003024512

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 Z39.48-1992 (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, Evolution’s Rainbow still offers a valuable overview of how diverse the sexuality and gender expression is among animals and people. Part of this book’s lasting value is how it brings the scope of this diversity together in one place.

Another value is that this book’s 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 you’re a young Darwin, not the bearded, aged thinker of most photographs but the young lad trying to discover just what’s out there—the Darwin who jumps ashore in the Galápagos 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 weren’t accurate in animals and suspected they weren’t 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 transformative—extensional and destabilizing. Extensional research is easy to be enthusiastic about—it’s 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. Evolution’s 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.¹ Evolution’s 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.² This account may already be familiar to you from popular media and nature shows that portray males as universally promiscuous and females as always choosy and coy. These male and female traits are purported to explain, for instance, why the peacock has a lovely tail—promiscuous peacocks are supposed to advertise their tails to peahens, who then choose only the most beautiful as their mates. This book illustrates how absurd these stereotypes are when faced with the real facts of life. In response to my critique beginning with this book, many biologists are redefining sexual selection so that it no longer refers to sex roles such as promiscuous male and coy female. Sexual selection has been redefined to be more generic, referring now merely to any traits that evolve because of competition for mates without attributing any general characteristics to males or females.³ This revised definition is much better than the early sex-role version this book criticizes. I regard this revision as a healthy reconstruction of sexual selection provoked by 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.

Evolution’s 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.⁴ I hope you join the many readers who have enjoyed and benefited from Evolution’s Rainbow.

Joan Roughgarden

Kapa’a, Hawai’i

April 17, 2013

NOTES

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

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

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

4. G. Seemel, 2012, Crime against Nature: A More Accurate Telling of What’s Natural, self-published.

Preface to the 2009 Edition

Evolution’s 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 nature’s 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 Darwin’s writing on the topic of sexual selection and these specific writings—not his overall theory of evolution—are challenged by the new information. I concluded in 2004 that the extent of this diversity pointed to sexual selection’s being on the wrong track. I proposed that Darwin’s 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.

In 2004, and probably even today, most biologists believe that Darwin’s original sexual selection theory can somehow be widened and extended to account for gender and sexuality diversity. I don’t think so. To the contrary, since 2004 the evidence and theoretical arguments against sexual selection have grown so much that those who continue to champion sexual selection theory are, I think, uninformed or in denial. Meanwhile, work on developing social selection into an alternative to sexual selection continues in my laboratory. This reissue of Evolution’s Rainbow accompanies the publication in 2009 of my new book, The Genial Gene, which extends my critique of sexual selection based on studies that appeared after 2004 and provides a summary of the research from my laboratory on social selection.

In addition to discussing diversity in gender and sexuality among animals, Evolution’s Rainbow, in the third of its three parts, reviewed gender and sexuality across cultures and through history. In particular, I called attention to passages in the Bible, in both the Christian and Hebrew Testaments, that teach the inclusion of gender-variant persons in community and worship. This theme has been taken up by religious scholars at Loyola University, Chicago, resulting in a book, Christianity, Gender, and Human Sexuality: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, by Marie Vigen and Patricia Beattie Jung, to be published in 2009. Also since 2004, many advances have taken place in the public sector to secure rights for diverse people, although much remains to be done. Only in medicine and psychology, the areas treated in the middle part of the book, has the progress been disappointing since 2004. These professions are still dominated by binarist thinking that retards coming to grips with the facts of diversity.

I hope you enjoy this reissue of Evolution’s Rainbow. The book was exciting, even exhilarating, to write as I was uncovering fascinating information that I knew would be inherently interesting to many and would also challenge our preconceptions about what is biologically natural.

San Francisco

August 2008

INTRODUCTION

Diversity Denied

On a hot, sunny day in June of 1997, I attended my first gay pride parade, in San Francisco. The size of the crowd amazed me. As I marched from Civic Center up Market Street to San Francisco Bay, a throng of onlookers six persons deep on both sides shouted encouragement and support. For the first time, I felt the sheer magnitude of the gay community.

I stored this impression in the back of my mind. How, I wondered, does biology account for such a huge population that doesn’t match the template science teaches as normal? When scientific theory says something’s wrong with so many people, perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people.

It wasn’t just the number of gay people that astonished me, but the diversity of personal expression in the parade. A drag queen or two were featured in the newspapers, but many other, less flamboyant presentations with different mixtures of gendered symbols were evident as well. I was intrigued, and resolved to investigate further if I ever got the chance. During the next few months I intended to transition into a transgendered woman.¹ I didn’t know what the future held—whether I’d be fired as a biology professor, whether I’d become a nightclub waitress, whether I’d even stay alive. I couldn’t make long-term plans.

Still, I found my mind leaping from one question to another: What’s the real story about diversity in gender and sexuality? How much diversity exists in other vertebrate species? How does diversity evolve in the animal kingdom? And how does diversity develop as individuals grow up: what role do genes, hormones, and brain cells play? And what about diversity in other cultures and historical periods, from biblical times to our own? Even more, I wondered where we might locate diversity in gender expression and sexual orientation within the overall framework of human diversity. Are these types of diversity as innocent as differences in height, weight, body proportion, and aptitude? Or does diversity in gender expression and sexuality merit special alarm and require careful treatment?

A few years after the 1997 parade, I was still alive and still employed. I had been forced to resign from my administrative responsibilities, but found myself with more time for research and writing. I was able to revisit the questions that had flooded my mind as I walked in the parade on that lovely day. This book is the result.

I found more diversity than I had ever dreamed existed. I’m an ecologist—diversity is my job—and yet I was still astonished. Much of this book presents the gee-whiz of vertebrate diversity: how animal families live, how animal societies are organized, how animals change sex, how animals have more than two genders, how species incorporate same-sex courtship, including sexual contact, as regular parts of their social systems. This diversity reveals the evolutionary stability and biological importance of expressions of gender and sexuality that go far beyond the traditional male/female or Mars/Venus binary. I also found that as we develop from tiny embryos to adults, our genes make decisions. Our glorious diversity is the result of our gene committees passing various biochemical resolutions. No gene is king, no body type reigns supreme, nor is any template universal in a cacophonous cellular democracy.

I studied how some cultures value transgender people, found where in the Bible transgender people occur, and learned that people from various cultures organize categories of identity differently. Although all cultures span the same range of human diversity, they have different ways of distinguishing gay, lesbian, and transgender identities.

All these facts were new to me, and even now seem utterly engaging, leading to page after page of I-didn’t-know-that, wow, and really. This book, then, is a memoir of my travels though the academic spaces of ecology and evolution, molecular biology, and anthropology, sociology, and theology. My general conclusion is that each academic discipline has its own means of discriminating against diversity. At first I felt that the book’s main message would be a catalogue of diversity that biologically validates divergent expressions of gender and sexuality. This validating catalogue is indeed important. But as I reflected on my academic sojourn, I increasingly wondered why we didn’t already know about nature’s wonderful diversity in gender and sexuality. I came to see the book’s main message as an indictment of academia for suppressing and denying diversity. I now conclude that all our academic disciplines should go back to school, take refresher courses in their own primary data, and emerge with a reformed, enlarged, and more accurate concept of diversity.

In ecology and evolution, diversity in gender and sexuality is denigrated by sexual selection theory, a perspective that can be traced to Darwin. This theory preaches that males and females obey certain universal templates—the passionate male and the coy female—and that deviations from these templates are anomalies. Yet the facts of nature falsify Darwin’s sexual selection theory. In molecular biology and medicine, diversity is pathologized: difference is considered a disease. Yet the absence of a scientific definition of disease implies that the diagnosis of disease is often a value-loaded exercise in prejudice. And in the social sciences, variation in gender and sexuality is considered irrational, and personal agency is denied. Gender- and sexuality-variant people are thought to be motivated by mindless devotion to primitive gods, or compelled by farfetched psychological urges, or brainwashed by social conventions, and so on: there is always some reason to avoid taking gender- and sexuality-variant people seriously.

The fundamental problem is that our academic disciplines are all rooted in Western culture, which discriminates against diversity. Each discipline finds its own justification for this discrimination. This book blows the whistle on a common pattern of disparaging gender and sexuality variation in academia and predicts foundational difficulties for each discipline.

Although criticism is valuable in its own right, and a critic has no responsibility to suggest solutions, I do suggest improvements when I can. I offer alternatives for interpreting the behavior of animals, interpretations that can be tested and will lead ultimately to more accurate science. I suggest new perspectives on genetics and development that may yield a more successful biotechnology industry. I show that mathematical criteria for the rarity of a genetic disease point to possibly overlooked advantages for genes presently considered defective. I suggest new readings of narratives recorded from gender-variant people across cultures. I call attention to overlooked aspects of the Bible that endorse gender variation.

I do not argue that because gender and sexuality variation occur in animals, this variation is also good for humans. People might anticipate that as a scientist I would say, Natural equals good. I do not advocate any version of this fallacy that confuses fact with value. I believe the goodness of a natural trait is the province of ethical reasoning, not science. Infanticide is natural in many animals but wrong in humans. Gender variation and homosexuality are also natural in animals, and perfectly fine in humans. What seems immoral to me is transphobia and homophobia. In the extreme, these phobias may be illnesses requiring therapy, similar to excessive fear of heights or snakes.²

I also do not suggest that people are directly comparable to animals. Indeed, even people in different cultures have life experiences that may not be comparable, and comparing people to animals is even riskier. Still, parallels can sometimes be found between cultures. Rugby is a counterpart to American football but located in a different sports culture. Some aspects of American football, like the way play begins by hiking the ball, are comparable to rugby. Similarly, parallels can sometimes be drawn between how people behave and how animals behave, as though animals offered biological cultures resembling ours. I’m quite willing to anthropomorphize about animals. Not that animals are really like people, but animals are not just machines either. We make an error if we attribute too much human quality to animals, but we underestimate them if we think they’re mechanical robots. I’ve tried to strike a balance here.

I’ve borrowed the word rainbow for the title of the book and use it throughout. The word rainbow signifies diversity, especially of racial and cultural minorities. The Reverend Jesse Jackson ran for president with the Rainbow Coalition. The rainbow also symbolizes gay liberation.

You probably work with or supervise biologically diverse people. You may be the parent or relative of an unusual child. You may be a teacher, Scout master, coach, minister, legislator, policy analyst, judge, law enforcement officer, journalist, or therapist wondering why your colleagues, clients, or constituencies are so different from the norms we were indoctrinated with as children. You may be a student in college or high school trying to understand diverse classmates. You may be taking a deep breath before coming out yourself, or you may have come out years ago and wish to connect with your roots. You may be studying gender theory and wondering where science fits in, or you may be a woman scientist wondering how to contribute to feminist theory. You may be a conservation biologist wondering how to make biodiversity more relevant to human affairs. You may be a medical student with a professional need for more information about diversity than medical school teaches. You may belong to a discussion group in your place of worship trying to understand how to be inclusive. You may be a young doctoral student shopping for a thesis topic. This book is for all of you.

In Part 1, Animal Rainbows, I begin with my own discipline of ecology and evolution. I’ve written previously on the evolution of sex: why organisms have evolved to reproduce sexually rather than simply by budding, fragmentation, parthenogenesis, or some other nonsexual means.³ Reproduction that uses sex rather than bypassing it is better because species need a balanced portfolio of genes to survive over the long term, and sex continually rebalances a species’ genetic portfolio. Yet, even though this benefit of gene pool mixing is universal, the means of implementing sexual reproduction are incredibly diverse, spanning many styles of bodies, family organizations, and patterns of bonding between and within sexes, each with its own value and its own internal logic.

Part 1 reviews the body plans, genders, family organizations, female and male mate choices, and sexualities of animals, leading to the conclusion that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is false. I find that competitive tooth-and-claw narratives about nature have been greatly exaggerated, that all sorts of friendships occur among animals, many mediated by sexuality, and that many social roles are signaled by gendered bodily symbols. The great difference in size between an egg and a sperm (a ratio in mass of usually one million to one) is not present to the same degree at the levels of body, behavior, and life history. When a gender binary does exist, the difference is usually slight and sometimes reverses gender stereotypes. Furthermore, there are often more than two genders, with multiple types of males and females. This real-life diversity in gender expression and sexuality challenges basic evolutionary theory.

Darwin is known for three claims: that species are related to one another by sharing descent from common ancestors, that species change through natural selection, and that males and females obey universal templates—the males ardent and the females coy. This third claim results from Darwin’s theory about sexual selection, and this claim, not the first two, is what is specifically under challenge. The picture conveyed by Darwin’s sexual selection theory is both inaccurate in detail and inadequate in scope to address real-world animal diversity. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is perhaps valid for species like the peacock, whose males have showy ornaments directly used in courtship, but it isn’t a general biological theory of gender roles. Twisting Darwin’s original theory to conform with today’s knowledge renders the theory a tautology. Instead, I submit that the time has come to acknowledge the historical value of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and move on.

I’ve suggested a new theory that I call social selection. This new theory accommodates variation in gender and sexuality. It envisages animals as exchanging help in return for access to reproductive opportunity, producing a biological labor market for mutual assistance by employing reproductive opportunity as currency. This theory proposes that animals evolve traits that qualify them for inclusion in groups that control resources for reproduction and safe places to live and raise offspring. These traits, called social-inclusionary traits, are either possessed only by females and unexplained by any theory, such as the penis of female spotted hyenas, or possessed only by males and interpreted as a secondary sex characteristic even though they are not actually preferred by females during courtship.

Part 2, Human Rainbows, deals with the areas of biology focused on human development. I tell the story of human embryogenesis as a first-person narrative (when my sperm part met my egg part) to emphasize that agency and experience function throughout life, before birth and after. I also wish to destabilize the primacy of individualism, to emphasize how much cooperation takes place during development, from the mother who chemically endorses some sperm and not others as competent to fuse with one of her eggs, to genes that interconnect to produce gonads, tissues that touch each other and direct each other’s development, and hormones from adjacent babies in utero that permanently influence each other’s temperament. Therefore, what we become arises more from our relationships than from our atomic genes, just as a piece of coal’s atomic bonds differ from a diamond’s, even though both consist solely of carbon atoms.

I’ve coined the term genial gene to distinguish my conception from the popular notion of the selfish gene, which is imagined to single-handedly control development for its own ends. Instead, I emphasize that genes must cooperate lest the common body they inhabit sink like a lifeboat filled with squabbling sailors. I dwell at length on genetic, physiological, and anatomical differences among people. We are as different from each other under the skin as we are on the surface. Although biological differences can be found between the sexes and between people of differing gender expression and sexuality, biological differences can also be found between any two people. For instance, musicians who are string players have been discovered to have brains that differ from those of people who don’t play strings. Part 2 shows how medicine seizes on the often tiny anatomical differences between people, and on differences in life experience, to differentiate them from an artificial template of normalcy and deny a wide range of people their human rights by defining them as diseased. Meanwhile, in our society we face not only persecution of people with diverse expressions of gender and sexuality, but also the prospect of doing permanent harm to the integrity of the gene pool of our species, thereby damaging our species for posterity. Part 2 concludes with a summary of the dangers inherent in attempts by genetic engineers to cleanse diversity from our gene pool.

In Part 3, Cultural Rainbows, the book progresses from biology to social science, offering a survey and new reading of gender and sexuality variation across cultures and through history. Many tribes of Native Americans accommodated gender and sexuality variation by identifying people as two-spirits and including them within social life to an extent that is inspirational to those persecuted in modern society. In Polynesia, the mahu, comparable to the Native American two-spirits, are experiencing cultural tension as a result of the introduced Western concept of transgender. Across the globe in India, we find a large castelike group of transgender people called hijra; there are over one million hijra in a total population of one billion Indians. The hijra enjoy an ancient pedigree and provide an Asian counterpart to the European history of gender variation that extends from Cybelean priestesses in the Roman empire to the transvestite saints of the Middle Ages, including Joan of Arc (called here Jehanne d’Arc), a transgender man. Early transgender people in Europe were classed as eunuchs, a large group similar to the hijra, with whom they may share a common origin. The Bible, in both Hebrew and Christian testaments (including a passage from Jesus), explicitly endorses eunuchs for baptism and full membership in the religious community. Gender variation was recognized in early Islamic writings as well.

Early Greece enforced a gender binary for techniques of sexual practice: certain practices were considered appropriate for between-sex sexuality and others for same-sex sexuality. Approved practices were called clean and those disapproved called unclean. The Bible is relatively silent on same-sex sexuality, in spite of the centuries-old belief that the Bible condemns homosexuality. I suggest the Bible’s clear affirmation of gender variation and its relative silence on same-sex sexuality reflect different ages of gender- and sexuality-variant categories of identity. The category of eunuch extended to the time of Christ and beyond into prehistory, whereas homosexuality as a category of personal identity originated relatively recently in Europe, during the late 1800s. Thus, when the Bible was written, there existed a language for categories of gender variance but not for categories of sexuality variance.

My focus then shifts to anthropologists working in Indonesia, who describe coming reluctantly to acknowledge a legitimate element of masculine gender identity in lesbian expression, although they at first believed that lesbian sexual orientation should not include a masculine presentation. In contrast, an investigator studying Mexican vestidas (transgender sex workers) never moves beyond pejorative descriptions. Also, an interesting situation has occurred in the Dominican Republic, where enough intersexed people lived in several villages to have produced a special social category, the guevedoche. I wind up the cultural survey by returning to the contemporary United States to discuss the politics of transgender people and their growing alliance with gay and lesbian organizations, and conclude by stating a political agenda for trans-gendered people. Part 3 demonstrates that our species manifests the same range of variation across cultures and through time, but shows great variation in how we package people into social categories.

In Part 3, I’ve discussed affirming diversity from a religious standpoint. I believe that ignoring religion, and the Bible specifically, is to work with tunnel vision. Regardless of what science tells us, if people believe that the Bible disparages lesbian, gay, and transgender people, then the cause of inclusion is jeopardized because many would choose religion over science. In fact, I find that the Bible is mostly silent about sexual orientation and that the passages about eunuchs that directly affirm trans-gender people have been largely ignored. Overall, the Bible gives no support to the religious persecution of gender and sexuality variation. Moreover, the well-known story of Noah’s ark imparts a moral imperative to conserve all biodiversity, both across species and within species.

As an appendix, I offer concrete policy recommendations. I suggest strengthening the undergraduate curriculum in psychology and improved education for premedical and medical students to prepare them better to understand natural diversity. I propose new institutional processes to prevent continuing medical abuse of human diversity under the guise of treating diseases. I demand that genetic engineers take an oath of professional responsibility and that they be licensed to practice genetic engineering only after having passed a certifying examination. Finally, I float the idea that our country should construct a large statue and plaza, called the Statue of Diversity, which would be to the West Coast what the Statue of Liberty is to the East Coast.

This book is my first trade book, a term publishers use for books intended for a wide audience rather than specifically for classroom use—my previous books have been specialized textbooks, monographs, or symposium proceedings.⁴ In this type of book I’m free to express opinion and to adopt an informal style. In this book, I freely declare where I’m coming from. Being up front about my position automatically raises the question of objectivity; I’ve told the truth, and the whole truth, as best I can. Yet I offer my own interpretation of the facts, as if I were a lawyer for the defense opposing lawyers for the persecution. You, my readers, are a jury of friends and neighbors, and you will make up your own mind. Please consider that everyone writing on these topics is writing from a particular perspective and with a vested interest. Some benefit from the biological excuse for male philandering that Darwin’s sexual selection theory provides. Others find validation in Darwin’s reinforcement of their aggressive worldview. Still others enjoy the genetic elitism of sexual selection theory, confident that their own genes are superior. I find that refuting sexual selection theory imbues female choice with responsibility for decisions about power and family far more sophisticated than what Darwin envisioned, and empowers varied expressions of gender and sexuality.

At times I’ve loved writing this book; at other times I’ve felt afraid of what I have to say. The view of our bodies, of gender and sexuality, that emerges is strikingly new. But I’ve carried on because I’ve found the message to be positive and liberating. I hope you enjoy this book. I hope it betters your life.

I thank the staff of the Falconer Biology Library at Stanford University for extensive help with research. I am deeply grateful for reviews from Blake Edgar, Patricia Gowaty, Scott Norton, Robert Sapolsky, and Bonnie Spanier, together with editorial improvements from the staff of the University of California Press, especially Elizabeth Berg and Sue Heinemann. I’ve been blessed by love from my closest friend, Trudy, and my sisters at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, especially Terry.

PART ONE

ANIMAL RAINBOWS

1

Sex and Diversity

All species have genetic diversity—their biological rainbow. No exceptions. Biological rainbows are universal and eternal. Yet biological rainbows have posed difficulties for biologists since the beginnings of evolutionary theory. The founder of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin, details his own struggle to come to terms with natural variation in his diaries from The Voyage of the Beagle. ¹

In the mid 1800s, living species were thought to be the biological equivalent of chemical species, such as water or salt. Water is the same everywhere. Countries don’t each have water with a unique color and boiling temperature. For biological species, though, often each country does have a unique variant. Darwin saw that finches change in body size from island to island in the Galápagos. We can see that robins in California are squat compared to robins in New England, and lizards of western Puerto Rico are gray compared to the brownish ones near San Juan. Darwin recognized that the defining properties of biological species, unlike physical species, aren’t the same everywhere. This realization, new and perplexing in the mid 1800s, remains at times perplexing today.

In Darwin’s time, the Linnaean classification system, which is based on phyla, genera, species, and so forth, was just becoming established. Naturalists mounted expeditions to foreign places, collecting specimens for museums and then pigeonholing them into Linnaeus’s classification system. At the same time, physicists were developing a periodic table for elements—their classification scheme for physical species—and chemists were classifying recipes for various compounds on the basis of chemical bonds. But the biological counterpart of physical classification didn’t work very well. If Boston’s robin is different San Francisco’s, and if intermediates live at each gas station along Route 80, what do we classify? Who is the true robin? What does robin mean? Biological names remain problematic in zoology and botany today. Biological rainbows interfere with any attempt to stuff living beings into neat categories. Biology doesn’t have a periodic table for its species. Organisms flow across the bounds of any category we construct. In biology, nature abhors a category.

Still, a robin is obviously different from a blue jay. Without names, how can we say whether it is a robin or a blue jay at the bird feeder? The work-around is to collect enough specimens to span the full range of colors in the species’ rainbow. Then specialists in biological classification, taxonomists, can say something like, A robin is any bird between six and seven inches in length with a red to orange breast.² No single robin models the true robin all robins are true robins. Every robin has first-class status as a robin. No robin is privileged over others as the exemplar of the species.

DIVERSITY-GOOD OR BAD?

Rainbows subvert the human goal of classifying nature. Even worse, variability in a species might signify something wrong, a screwup. In chemistry a variation means impurity, a flaw in the diamond. Doesn’t variability within a species also indicate impurity and imperfection? The most basic question faced by evolutionary biology is whether variation within a species is good in its own right or whether it is simply a collection of impurities every species is stuck with. Evolutionary biologists are divided on this issue.

Many evolutionary biologists are positive about the rainbow. They view it as a reservoir of genes that can come to the forefront at different times and places to guarantee a species’ survival under changing conditions. The rainbow represents the species’ genetic assets.³ According to this view, the rainbow is decidedly good. This view is optimistic about the capability of species to respond to ever-changing environmental conditions. This view affirms diversity.

Other evolutionary biologists are negative about the rainbow, believing that all gene pools—even our own—are loaded with deleterious mutations, or bad genes. During the 1950s, studies claimed that every person has three to five lethal recessive genes that would surface if they chose the wrong marriage partner, causing their children to die.⁴ This view is pessimistic about the future, suggesting that evolution has already reached its pinnacle and all variation is useless or harmful.⁵ This school of evolutionists believed in a genetic elite, advocating artificial insemination from sperm banks stocked with genes from great men. This view represses diversity.

Darwin himself was ambivalent on the value of rainbows. Darwin argued that natural selection is the mechanism that causes species to evolve. On the one hand, because natural selection depends on variation, Darwin viewed the rainbow as a spectrum of possibilities constituting the species’ future. A species without variability has no evolutionary potential, like a firm with no new products in the pipeline. On the other hand, Darwin viewed females as shopping around for mates with desirable genes while rejecting those with inferior genes. This view demeans the variation among males and implies a hierarchy of quality, suggesting that female choice is about finding the best male rather than the best match. Darwin both affirmed and repressed diversity at different times within his career.

The philosophical conflict over whether to affirm or to repress diversity is still with us today, permeating everything from the way biologists interpret motives for an animal’s choice of a particular mate to how medical doctors handle newborn babies in the hospital.

THE COSTS VERSUS THE BENEFITS OF SEX

How, then, are we to decide whether rainbows are good or bad? Who is correct, the diversity affirmers or the diversity repressers? To answer this most fundamental question of evolutionary biology, let’s compare species with full rainbows to species with very limited rainbows. Species who manage to reproduce without sex have limited rainbows. By sex, I mean two parents mixing genes to produce offspring. Lots of species propagate without sex. In such species, everyone is female and offspring are produced without fertilization. In addition, in many species offspring may be produced either with or without fertilization, depending on the season.

If you go to Hawaii, look at the cute geckoes on the walls. You’re seeing an asexual species—all these geckoes are female.⁶ Females in all-female species produce eggs that have all the needed genetic material to begin with. In sexual species, like humans, an egg has only half the genetic material needed to produce a baby; a sperm has the other half, so combining these yields the required material. In addition, eggs from an all-female species don’t need fertilization by a sperm to trigger the cell divisions that generate an embryo. Females in all-female species clone themselves when they reproduce.

The Hawaiian all-female geckoes are locally abundant and widespread throughout the South Pacific, from the lovely Society Islands of French Polynesia to the Marianas Islands near New Guinea. More all-female species live in Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas—all varieties of whiptail lizards These small, sleek tan and brown-striped animals dart quickly along the ground looking for food. The all-female species of whiptail lizards live along streambeds, while sexually reproducing relatives typically live up-slope from the streams in adjacent woods or other vegetation. Every major river drainage basin in southwestern North America is a site where an all-female whiptail lizard species has evolved. More than eight all-female species are found in this area. Still more all-female species of lizards are found in the Caucasus Mountains of Armenia and along the Amazon River in Brazil. All-female fish occur too. Indeed, all-female animal species are found among most major groups of vertebrates.⁷

Also, some species have two kinds of females: those who don’t mate when reproducing and those who do mate. Examples include grasshoppers, locusts, moths, mosquitoes, roaches, fruit flies, and bees among insects, as well as turkeys and chickens.⁸ Fruit flies grow easily in the laboratory and are especially well studied. Over 80 percent of fruit fly species have at least some females that reproduce entirely asexually. Although the majority of females in these species reproduce through mating, selection in the laboratory increased sixtyfold the proportion of females not needing to mate, yielding a vigorous all-female strain.⁹

Thus all-female species are well known among animals. So why don’t even more all-female species exist? Indeed, why aren’t all species all-female? To answer this question, let’s look at the costs and benefits of reproducing with and without sex.

Sexual reproduction cuts the population’s growth rate in half—this is the cost of sex. Only females produce offspring, not males. If half the population is male, then the speed of population growth is half that of an all-female population. An all-female species can quickly outproduce a male/female species, allowing an all-female species to survive in high-mortality habitats where a male/female species can’t succeed. (This result is also true in hermaphrodite species, in which the fifty-fifty allocation of reproductive effort to male and female function reduces the female allocation used to make eggs by half.)

The potential for doubling production in an all-female species hasn’t escaped the attention of agricultural scientists. In the 1960s, turkeys and chickens were bred to make all-female strains.¹⁰ Indeed, the cloning of a sheep in Scotland reflected a fifty-year-old aspiration to increase agricultural production by taking the sex out of reproduction. However, despite the big advantage in population growth rate that all-female species enjoy and the many examples of all-female species that do occur, clonally reproducing species remain a tiny minority. Far and away most species are sexual. Nature has experimented many times and keeps experimenting with clonal species, but with little success. Sex does work. Why?

The benefit of sex is survival over evolutionary time. Lacking sex, clonal species are evolutionary dead ends. On an evolutionary time scale, almost all clonal species are recently derived from sexual ancestors. On the family tree of species, asexual species are only short twigs, not the long branches.¹¹ The advantages of sex are also demonstrated by species who can use sex or not, depending on the time of year. Aphids (tiny insects that live on garden plants) reproduce clonally at the beginning of the growing season, switching to sexual reproduction at the end of the season. Aphids benefit from fast reproduction when colonizing an empty rose bush, but the anticipated change of conditions at the end of the season makes sexual reproduction more attractive.¹²

Clonally reproducing species are weeds—species specialized for quick growth and fast dispersal, like plants that locate and colonize new patches of ground. The common dandelion of North America is a clonal reproducer whose sexual ancestors live in Europe.¹³ Weeds eventually give up their territory to species who are poorer colonizers but more effective over the long term.¹⁴ The geckoes who colonized the South Pacific and the whiptail lizards of New Mexico streambeds make sense in these contexts, where dispersal is at a premium or the habitat is continually disturbed.

Clonal reproduction is a specialized mode of life, not recommended for any species that fancies itself a permanent resident of this planet. But we haven’t answered why sexual reproduction is good over the long term. Two theories have been offered for why sex benefits a species, one diversity-affirming, the other diversity-repressing. Both theories agree that asexual species are short-lived in evolutionary time relative to sexual species and that sex guarantees the longer species survival. Both theories therefore agree that sex is beneficial to a species. Both theories also agree that the purpose of sex isn’t reproduction as such, because asexual species are perfectly capable of reproducing. But the theories have different perceptions of why sex is good. The diversity-affirming theory views diversity itself as good and sex as maintaining that diversity. The diversity-repressing theory views diversity as bad and sex as keeping the diversity pruned back.¹⁵ Let’s start with the diversity-affirming theory.

THE DIVERSITY-AFFIRMING THEORY

According to the diversity-affirming theory for the benefit of sex, sex continually rebalances the genetic portfolio of a species. Think of a savings account and jewelry—a rainbow with two colors. How much can both colors earn together? When demand for jewelry is low, one can’t sell jewelry, even to a pawnshop, and earning 2 percent from a bank account looks great. When jewelry is hot, interest on a bank account looks cheap and selling jewelry turns a good profit. The overall earnings are the total from both investments.

A species earns offspring instead of money from its investments. The long-term survival of a species depends on being sufficiently diversified to always have some offspring-earning colors. Although biologists may talk about the rainbow as a source of genes for new environments, it is in fact more important for surviving the regular fluctuations between hot and cold, wet and dry, and the arrival and departure of new predators, competitors, and pathogens like the bubonic plague or AIDS.¹⁶

The social environment within a species is always changing too. Concepts of the ideal mate change through time. Among humans, men have sometimes preferred the amply proportioned Mama Casses among us, at other times the skinny Twiggys, as recorded in the portraits of women from art museums. Other aspects of our social environment have also changed over the centuries, like the fraction of time spent with others of the same sex or the opposite sex, or the number of sex partners a person has. Changes in the social setting within a species, as well as changes in the ecological and physical environment, all affect which colors of the rainbow shine the brightest at any one time.

A clonal species can accumulate diversity through mutation, or it may have multiple origins, thereby starting out with a limited rainbow. In fact, several genetically distinct clones have been detected among the South Pacific geckoes and dandelions. Still, these mutation-based and origin-based rainbows are nearly monochromatic.¹⁷

Furthermore, even the limited rainbow of a clonal species is continually endangered. The colors that shine brightly are always crowding out the colors that don’t, causing diversity to contract over time. Recall the jewelry and the savings account. If diamonds are valuable for a long time, their value grows and comes to overshadow the savings account. If profits are automatically reinvested in the most immediately successful venture, the portfolio gradually loses its diversity. Then when the demand for jewelry drops—say because a new find of diamonds floods the market—the portfolio takes a big hit. This progression is similar to that of the clonal reproducer, which courts danger by concentrating on only a few investments. Instead, one should redistribute some earnings each year across the investments. If jewelry has a good year, sell some and put the proceeds in the savings account. If interest is high one year, then withdraw some funds and buy jewelry. Shuffling money across investments in this way maintains the portfolio’s diversity, and a bad year for one investment doesn’t cause disastrous losses in the portfolio. Wall Street investors call this shuffling rebalancing a portfolio. This is the strategy of the sexual reproducer. Every generation when sexually reproducing animals mate, they mix genes with one another and resynthesize the colors in short supply. Thus, according to the diversity-affirming theory, sex serves to maintain the biological rainbow, which conserves the species.¹⁸

THE DIVERSITY-REPRESSING THEORY

According to the diversity-repressing theory for the benefit of sex, sex protects the genetic quality of the species. The diversity-repressing theory envisions that asexual species accumulate harmful mutations over time and gradually become less functional, as though asexual lizards gradually lost the ability to run fast or digest some food. Sex supposedly counteracts this danger by allowing family lines that have picked up harmful mutations to recombine, producing offspring free of bad mutations. According to this theory, some offspring will possess both families’ mutations and will die even more quickly, but other offspring will have none of the mutations, and will prosper on behalf of the species. According to this theory, without sex each and every family line inexorably accumulates mutations, leading eventually to species extinction.

ENDING THE DEBATE

Although both the diversity-affirming and diversity-repressing views have a long history, the time has come for closure. The time has come to reject the diversity-repressing view as both theoretically impossible and empirically vacuous. The scenario envisioned by the diversity-repressing theory can’t exist. In an asexual species, when a bad gene arises, the line where the mutation originated is lost to natural selection, whereas the lines without the mutation prosper. The entire stock never deteriorates, because natural selection doesn’t look the other way while a bad gene spreads. Instead, natural selection eliminates a bad gene when it first appears, preserving the overall functionality of the species. No evidence whatsoever shows asexual species becoming extinct because of a progressive accumulation of disabilities and loss of functionality. A bad gene never gets going in an asexual species, and sex’s supposed pruning of the gene pool is unnecessary and mythical.

On the other hand, the environment does change from year to year, and individuals who don’t do well one year may shine when conditions change, and vice versa. Butterflies whose enzymes work at cold temperatures thrive in dark, damp years, while butterflies whose enzymes function best at hot temperatures do better in sunny drought years. All butterflies are perfectly good butterflies, even if the abilities of some don’t match the opportunities currently supplied by the environment.

I don’t see any grounds for dignifying the diversity-repressing view for the benefit of sex as a viable alternative to the diversity-affirming view. To be agreeable, one might say both theories are valid. But this compromise isn’t true. Conceding, even slightly, that one function of sex is to prune diversity puts forth a view that hasn’t earned its place scientifically. Accepting a diversity-repressing view of sex simply to be polite admits through the back door a philosophical stance that may later be used to justify discrimination.

Therefore, I accept as a working premise that a species’ biological rainbow is good—good because diversity allows a species to survive and prosper in continually changing conditions. I further accept that the purpose of sex is to maintain the rainbow’s diversity, resynthesizing that diversity each generation in order to continually rebalance the genetic portfolio of the species. I reject the alternative theory that sex exists to prune the gene pool of bad diversity.

Darwinists have to take a consistent stand on the value of diversity. They can’t maintain on the one hand that most variation is good because it’s needed for natural selection and on the other hand also maintain that females must continually shop for males with the best genes as though most genes could be ranked from good to bad. Instead, I argue that almost all diversity is good and that female choice is more for the best match than for the best male.

How then should we assess the rainbows in our own species? We should be grateful that we do reproduce sexually, although we probably take this gift for granted. I feel too that we should conserve and embrace our rainbows. Affirming diversity is hard, very hard. We must come to accept ourselves and love our neighbors, regardless of color in the rainbow.

Overall, sex is essentially cooperative—a natural covenant to share genetic wealth. Sexual reproduction is not a battle.

2

Sex versus Gender

To most people, sex automatically implies male or female. Not to a biologist. As we saw in the last chapter, sex means mixing genes when reproducing. Sexual reproduction is producing offspring by mixing genes from two parents, whereas asexual reproduction is producing offspring by one parent only, as in cloning. The definition of sexual reproduction makes no mention of male and female. So what do male and female have to do with sex? The answer, one might suppose, is that when sexual reproduction does occur, one parent is male and the other female. But how do we know which one is the male? What makes

Reviews for Evolution's Rainbow

[setnahkt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very mixed feelings about this one.
Biologist Joan Roughgarden (who used to be Jonathan Roughgarden and who therefore has some personal insight into the situation), probably annoyed at being preached at for being “unnatural”, has compiled a detailed and meticulously documented list of “unnatural” behavior in nature, including multiply-gendered sparrows, adulterous blackbirds, sex-changing fish, lesbian geckoes, bonobo prostitutes, and butch hyenas. A lot of this stuff is just fascinating. We’ve had a thread about intersex fish, with pesticides, “endocrine disruptors” and so on blamed for their “unnatural” condition. Well, Roughgarden documents lots of fish have such “conditions”, changing sex one or more times during their lives.
Similarly, Roughgarden describes in fine detail exactly what goes on during the gender development of humans, from egg and sperm on up, and various places where this can go “wrong”, aka "different".
Finally, although it’s outside her field, Roughgarden has an anthropology section discussing various human groups with different attitudes toward gender roles, such as the “two spirit” Plains Indians. This is a little weak compared to the other sections, although I don’t think that’s Roughgarden’s fault; the problem is that the anthropological literature is weaker and also prey to political interpretations. Nonetheless it’s interesting and a starting point for more research.
If that was all there was to the book, it would be outstanding. Unfortunately, Roughgarden gets carried away with what are clearly hot-button issues with her. The first is sexual selection theory (the subtitle is “Why Darwin Was Wrong About Sexual Selection”). In case you’re not familiar with the concept, “sexual selection” was Darwin’s explanation why certain animals (usually only the males) have apparently non-adaptive characteristics (such as the tail plumage in a peacock). Sexual selection theory suggests that peahens that select males that make the proudest display will be favored, because any peacock that can carry that much extra baggage around and still escape from predators must be a good specimen. Roughgarden doesn’t like this (in fairness, she’s not anti-Darwinian, just anti-sexual selection). She never really fully explains why, at least not enough for me to understand. However, it’s a little puzzling that someone who did such a thorough literature search for her gender diversity examples doesn’t mention some of the experiments supporting sexual selection.
Finally, in her appendix, Roughgarden just leans back and lets political correctness take control. The appendix is entitled “policy recommendations” and includes the following, presented without any comment – it would be superfluous:
*Premed curricula have required course on biological diversity.
*Medical curricula have required courses on human sexuality
*The FDA should maintain an official list of “diseases”
*The FDA should regulate surgical and behavioral therapies
*Biotechnologists should take an oath to “protect the human gene pool” and to “use biotechnology for peace”.
*Biotechnologists should be licensed
*Biotechnology companies should be required to commit to “protecting the human gene pool” and “pursue peace”.
*There should be “epidemiological impact reports” for new therapies similar to environmental impact reports.
*There should be a common code for ecological and environmental impact reports.
*And, lastly, there should be a “Statue of Diversity” in San Francisco similar to the Statue of Liberty in New York.
Well, I said I had mixed feelings about it. I haven’t read a book in a long time where the desire to jump out and shout “This is great!” alternated so frequently with the desire to hurl the thing against the wall.

[Obwurst Dackel · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Load of bovine faecal compaction grasping at exclusions which by doing. unknowingly, the authoress hath proveth the rule.

[marthajeanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a transgendered woman, the author has a different take on the issues of gender and sexuality from most biology professors. Very interesting. I'm not sure I agree with all of her conclusions, but much of the time she makes a lot of sense.

[dj_cliffe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating book. Roughgarden suggests and examines how we can see beyond the traditional binary gender world view. The book has two main drawbacks: It is betwixt and between being a popular science presentation and being a textbook, and Roughgarden (herself a MTF transexual) has an obvious viewpoint in examining the data. Still, it's definitely worth reading.