Los Angeles Times Book Review

Sunday, April 29, 2001

Sex, Science and the Vanity of the Species

EVE'S SEED. Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History By Robert S. McElvaine McGraw-Hill: 454 pp., $27.95

By JOYCE APPLEBY

"Eve's Seed" is a bestseller waiting to be discovered: a package of sex, science and species' vanity nicely wrapped in sparkling prose. In this provocative study, Robert S. McElvaine weighs the competing claims of nature and nurture in the shaping of human beings. Although the popularity of culture as an all-purpose explanation for our behavior has given a boost to the nurture side in this contest, nature has made a stunning comeback in the last two decades, thanks in part to the genome project. And if this weren't enough to invest an old question with fresh interest, a team of evolutionary psychologists has caught the public's attention by claiming that rape can be traced to an evolutionary strategy.

McElvaine takes a dim view of assertions that dating habits, philandering and rape can be linked to evolution, but he agrees with the nature team that an understanding of how sex has played out through the last 40 millenniums is indeed relevant today. What is provocative about "Eve's Seed" is McElvaine's refusal to take for granted male convictions of superiority over females; what is original is his search for the origins of this pernicious contemporary trait in thepre-linguistic past. His research points to three events in the development of misogyny in Western culture: the adoption of agriculture, the novel view of reproduction that made women passive vessels and the emergence of beliefs that only men were created in God's image. This triple whammy, he argues, ensured that human cultures would depict women as lesser beings.

McElvaine's conviction that evolution has something to teach us sets him apart from the culture-is-all crowd (he criticizes them for their dogmatic faith in John Locke's dictum that babies are born with blank minds). Moderating the stiff brew that absolutists of the opposing culture and biological outlooks would force us to drink, he builds his argument on historical choices. A scholar with a voracious intellectual appetite, McElvaine wants to abolish the distinction between prehistoric and historic times, conventionally marked by the introduction of writing. His colleagues, he thinks, ignore at their peril what that premier sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson, has termed the "deep history" of humanity that is also responsible for our present biological development. In other words, those who only know human history through written records don't know it very well.

Women, McElvaine argues, undid themselves about 8,000 years ago when they introduced agriculture to their tribes of hunter-gatherers. Giving up the hunt hit men in their psychological solar plexus, even as they seized control of farming. Doubts about their role in the grand scheme of things assailed them when they ceased to be the sole providers of the tribe's food supply. But, McElvaine shows, subsequent developments worked to their advantage. The turn to crop-raising also laid the basis for dense, complex, sedentary societies that gave rise to hierarchical authority that put men on top.

Eager to reestablish his pivotal place, McElvaine writes, man-the-farmer analogized from seeds and soil to semen and womb and came forward with the flattering notion that men alone had the power to create life. When men began to cultivate fields, they started to cultivate women also as never before, and the split between reproduction and production took on new cultural meaning. For McElvaine, this "conception misconception" of women's contribution to procreation wiped away the relative parity that women had earlier enjoyed. One giant step forward for man, two steps back for his female partner. As the tribes seized the plough, better food production led to population growth, written records and religions of the book, all of them working against the status of women.

'Eve's Seed" posits that an even more portentous connection between agriculture and male domination came with the emergence of the so-called great religions, each giving a version of human origins partial to men, as does the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. More ominously, the religions taught that men had been created in God's image. "If it is believed that God is male," McElvaine explains, "and that humans are created in His image, the conclusion seems necessarily to follow that men, who ... more closely resemble God, must be closer to perfection than women are."

With the invention of writing, a permanent structuring of male dominance through law, literature, institutions, religion and popular culture also followed as civilization developed. Then the "male-is-superior-to-female symbolism" became the master metaphor of human history. Images of men planting seeds in women have been ubiquitous ever since, and McElvaine, a man with an excellent ear, hears echoes of this ego-inflating notion everywhere, including amusing examples from the movies "The Big Chill" and "Raising Arizona" and a "Cheers" TV episode.

McElvaine gathers an astonishing range of evidence as he explains the persistence and permeation of misogynistic themes in our culture. He canvasses the tenets of every major religion; interrogates philosophers ancient and modern; and presents a modern rogues' gallery of misogynists stretching from Karl Marx to Bill Clinton. Rambo and Rocky, Promise Keepers, men's room graffiti and Rolling Stones lyrics are all subpoenaed to testify to the "notawoman" desperation that pervades the male psyche. Neologisms, puns and parodies serve McElvaine. He says that Sigmund Freud indulged in pathetic phallasies. He spoofs John Gray's "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" with a chapter entitled "Men Are From New York, Women Are From Philadelphia" and "Darwin Made Me Do It" is his flip characterization of rationales offered by scholars who link contemporary sexual mores to evolutionary imperatives.

'Eve's Seed," as the title implies, seeks to show the way toward restoring to women the respect and power that they enjoyed before the agricultural revolution. To do this, McElvaine constructs a narrative of events that challenges religious doctrines, undermines the bases for gender differentiation and discredits the biologists who have linked human destiny to the presumed proclivities of primates. He energetically defends his account against all comers in the nature and nurture camps, wielding the weapons of incriminating quotations, astute ripostes, clever neologisms and apposite evidence from sitcoms, rock songs, contemporary novels and movie scripts.

It is surprising, however, that in a book so centrally concerned with human evolution, McElvaine doesn't provide an explanation of the Darwinian mechanisms for speciation. Nor for that matter does he present the intellectual footings for the nurture concept, instead focusing on a 17th century epistemological breakthrough--Locke's tabula rasa--as though no one had written on the subject of culture since then.

McElvaine writes from firm convictions about the historical implications of human sexuality, but those in the laboratory trenches of biology, psychology and anthropology are engaged in battles that are far from reassuring to the layperson. Evolutionary psychologists continue to discover new legacies for humans that stem from the struggle for survival, enlivened by such catchy terminology as "mean genes" and "kamikaze sperm." Feminist biologists and science writers have shot back with charges of seek-and-ye-shall-find research. Pointing to the sexist ideology underpinning much of the work on human evolution, critics claim that long-discredited theories of sex differences have been mated with ecological misinformation to produce an updated pseudoscience of human nature. For McElvaine, all this is "best understood as the latest battle in a proxy war that has gone on throughout recorded history, in which men have been using women as scapegoats for their grievances against an economy that was new around 8000 BCE."

Steering his thesis between the Charybdis of biological determinism and the Scylla of culture power, McElvaine plunges headlong into the Bermuda Triangle of reductionism. This flaw is surprising considering the moral passion packed into "Eve's Seed." A full third of the book is devoted to exposing the shallowness of our hyper-individualism, interrogating all its intellectual champions from Emerson and Thoreau to Nietzsche and Sartre. McElvaine prefers to think of our present intellectual predicament as ironic. We rely upon culture to explain human values while denying the powerful truth that evolution has decisively limited our behavioral options. But the irony in his criticism of the antisocial conclusions of evolutionary psychologists eludes him. "Because many of our inbred tendencies are no longer adaptive," he writes, "there is absolutely no reason to classify them as 'good' or 'right."' By seeking a "scientific" counter-interpretation to the evolutionary absolutists, he is reinforcing the idea that the thinking, feeling, choosing, ruminating, fantasizing and responding that we 21st-century humans do remain tethered to our prehistoric ancestors.

And this is why McElvaine's convergences are too neat, his proof too scattered, his causal connections too tenuous and his explanation for the vexed relations between the sexes too simplistic. Yet--and it's a very big yet--one cannot come away from reading "Eve's Seed" without being astounded by the omnipresence of misogynistic themes in our culture and our almost casual acceptance of them.

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Joyce Appleby is the author, most recently, of "Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans" and is a professor of history at UCLA.