GENDER ROLES IN CHILDCARE
The dogma that gender roles in childcare are genetically determined came to the fore in 1975, simultaneous with the passing into law of the Sex Discrimination Act. And by the way, whenever any of those instant history, How We Made Modern Britain-type programmes mention the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, it’s always presented as though it had just somehow slipped the gentlemen’s minds to accord women their employment rights, but no sooner were the gentleman made aware of the ladies’ desire to work than they fell over themselves to correct this unintended slight.
‘Oh, I had no idea! So you want to work, do you? Splendid, splendid. How many of you? All of you? I’m not sure you’ve thought that through. I’m not sure there’s enough florists in the entire country!’
And lo! It did come to pass that the menfolk of these islands did raise unto the heavens a mighty wail of lamentation:
“GENDER EQUALITY HAS GONE TOO FAR IN THE OTHER DIRECTION! GENDER EQUALITY HAS GONE TOO FAR IN THE OTHER DIRECTION!”
Cometh the hour, cometh the male primatologist striding from the jungles of Congo and the tropical forests of Borneo clutching evidence – gleaned from his study of baboon – to prove that gender roles in childcare are genetically determined.
‘We have observed,’ Desmond Morris or someone equally appalling would tell the BBC TV cameras, ‘that the male baboon can never be entirely sure which of the offspring he himself has fathered. Now, the reason for his uncertainty is because a very high proportion of adult female baboons are scrubbers. Therefore the male baboon’s best chance of increasing his inclusive fitness, of ensuring that his genes are the ones passed onto successive generations, is to become the dominant alpha male, with a harem of submissive females, a Mick Hucknall tour-bus scenario.’
At the end of the 1970s the first female primatologists went into the jungles of Congo and the tropical forests of Borneo, where they discovered baboon troops not organised around dominant alpha males but around female kin networks, where new males can only join the troop if they know a female member. And even then, they must serve a probationary period during which they prove their worth... how? By hunting? By fighting? By killing? No, by foster care! Specifically looking after offspring not their own, who do not share their DNA.
Now, readers I know you’re thinking:
‘Newman, you’ve got all this from some anarcho-feminist pamphlet printed with menstrual ink, and you’re about to tell us that far from being a display of aggression, when the male baboon beats his chest he’s empathising with his partner’s mastitis.’
No. Everything from the foster-care to the female kin networks comes from David Attenborough Trials of Life, Disc 1, Episode 2, Growing Up. Now it has cost me something to tell you this because I don’t want you thinking that I’ve just cobbled this book together from DVD box sets bought in charity shops. And so to prove to you that I have, in fact, been doing rigorous academic research in esoteric journals and not just cribbing all this off the telly, I should now like to cite a study that was published in a recent edition of a journal called Transactions of the Paleontological Society. It’s a fascinating study, which actually has a bearing on this very issue, because what the paleontologists did was they excavated a Stone Age quarry – they quarried a quarry, if you like – and using fossil DNA were able to build up quite a detailed picture of the day to day workings of this Neolithic quarry. And it turns out that Stone Age Man may have been using a long-necked brontosaurus as a type of crane. And when the site-foreman tugged a pterodactyl’s tail to signal the end of the shift, the crane-operator would slide down the brontosaurus’s neck, fly off the tail, hit the ground running and sprint all the way back to the cave, where he would be served a juicy T-Rex steak.
Now of course, what William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were nostalgic for wasn’t the Neolithic era, but the 1950s before Betty and Wilma went to work.
I should declare an interest in all this, which has to do with a scientific study published last year that got national news coverage. You may have heard it yourself. Scientists were claiming to have discovered that men who do an unusually large amount of childcare have unusually tiny testes. Now, I have two small problems with this theory.
In 1950s Britain the number of husbands doing equal childcare as their wives was very nearly zero. Does this mean, therefore, that the loss of Empire and heavy industry has been accompanied by the decline of bollocks? Or does it just feel that way?
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins writes that:
‘gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour.’ 14
But no organism’s behaviour mimics how its strands of DNA go about their business. Fidgety polymers do not beget fidgety elephant seals. The dolphin’s polypeptide chains jerk in uneven spasms even as she describes a graceful arc. The pangolin’s simple life does not reflect the complex cellular machinery of her protein molecules. ‘The inference from [gene] function to overt psychology,’ as Simon Blackburn puts it, ‘is simply not available.’ Crime scene DNA does not give you motive. Only a man suffering from extreme mental illness would look down a microscope at his wife’s squiggly nucleotides and mutter:
‘So, that’s how it is! She is out to get all she can from me and then – vamoosh! Just as I suspected! Ho-ho! Well, two can play at that little game.’
Question the idea that genes control destiny, however, and you will be told that you can’t handle hard, cold reality, and are seeking more or less theological shelter. A cosy and wholly illusory universe awaits those unable to stare into the void with the fearless intensity of intellectual heroes such as Steven Pinker, EO Wilson, and Richard Dawkins.
Might I suggest that, faced with the terrifying randomness of life, an idea of genetic destiny offers its own consolation? In the face of the accidental death and arbitrary fates that await us what could be more comforting than a belief that you are born with your destiny inscribed inside you on a 2-metre long scroll of nucleic acid wrapped tight around the histone? What could be more reassuring than the neo-Darwinists’ Bourne Identity view of human nature? Plonk us down anywhere in the world, and we will still come out the same, because it is written in our genes. It’s in our DNA.
Now, before I criticise the theoretical underpinnings of the Matt Damon trilogy – The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and the Bourne Ultimatum – I should declare an interest. Readers of Screen International will already know about the severe public humiliation I suffered in connection with the Bourne franchise. For those readers who don’t know, let me bring you up to speed. Studio bosses at Universal pulled the plug on production of my original screenplay The Bourne Ontogeny, which was to have been the second in the trilogy. After just a fortnight of shooting, Universal halted production, sacked the crew and went with rival script The Bourne Supremacy. Here, in outline, are the only seven scenes we shot.
1. NIGHT. EXT. Jason Bourne floating face down in sea, rescued by Italian fishermen.
2. NIGHT. INT. Inside the boat, Bourne joins half-drowned migrants from Syria, Somalia, Eritrea, and Libya.
3. DAY. INT. Lampedusa, Immigrant Detention Pen. Finding he can speak English, Jason Bourne acts as interpreter for fellow refugees, and lands a job with a refugee rights NGO.
4. DAY. EXT. Downtown Lampedusa. Sitting at a cafe piano, Bourne finds to his delight that he plays piano to Grade 8. Troublingly, however, he seems only to know the songs of Carole King. ‘Was I thrown off a cruise ship?’ he wonders. Discovering himself also to be an unusually resourceful and tenacious man, Bourne scours junk shops and picks up a second-hand djembe, accordion, battered acoustic guitar, Casio keyboard, zukra (Libyan bagpipe) and qanum (Syrian harp). After auditioning fellow refugees Bourne forms the Immigrant Orkestra of Lampedusa.
5. NIGHT. INT. Eurovision Song Contest. Bourne’s composition Immigration Built The Nation wins for Italy!
6. DAY. INT. A courtroom in Rome. Lawyers acting for the Carole King estate allege that Bourne’s Immigration Built The Nation is lifted note for note from (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.
NIGHT. EXT. Jason Bourne found floating face down in sea.
Summoned to Universal HQ, studio bosses told me they would never have greenlit production in the first place had they known how far Ontogeny departed from Identity.
‘Aha,’ I replied, ‘but that’s where you’re wrong: ontogeny is identity! Ontogeny is your life history, and as I told Matt, but for accidents of history, you see, those immigrants could be you or me. No intrinsic properties of DNA determine who is found helplessly floating on the water and who is not. That’s the whole message of the film.’
‘We’re going with Supremacy.’
To have no truck with the credo that DNA is destiny (which Israeli professor Eva Jablonka brilliantly calls ‘genetic astrology’!) is not to deny genes a role in natural selection. In fact, among the strongest critics of selfish gene theory are those whose work first reconciled genetics and Darwinism, such as Ernst Mayr.
In the 1930s and 40s the Modern Synthesis rescued natural selection from semi-obscurity by demonstrating that Mendelian genetics powerfully corroborated Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution. (Up to then, it had been thought that Mendelian genetics actually disproved Darwinism.) The leading lights of the Modern Synthesis were JBS Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, August Weissmann, Ronald “Piggy” Fisher, Sergei Chetverikov, Sewall Wright and Ernst Mayr. In 1999, Ernst Mayr gave an interview in which he said:15
Dawkins’ basic theory of the gene being the object of selection is totally un-Darwinian [...] and totally impractical. A gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype it is always in the context of other genes, and it’s the interaction with those other genes that makes a particular gene either more favourable or less favourable. In fact, Dobzhansky worked on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination but lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong.
If genetic determinism really were true, argued the great American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, then the fact that it’s ugly would be neither here nor there. ‘It would be just another of those distressing biological facts of life, like death and disease, to which we must, alas, accommodate ourselves.’ But the fact that it’s a fallacy, he says, makes it tragic that this has become the dominant mythology of our time, the fairytale we tell each other about who we are and our place in the world.
The danger of putting the wrong storyteller at the head of the table was something Charles Dickens learnt the hard way when he invited Hans Christian Andersen to come and stay indefinitely, having never met the man in his life. This is a true story, and apparently things began to go badly wrong at the very first supper of his stay with the Dickenses in Doughty Street, Bloomsbury. There was Dickens, his wife Catherine, their ten kids. Head of the table sits Hans Christian Andersen, who, at the end of the main course, says:
HANS: Pass me that sausage please.
DICKENS: I believe you’ve just had six sausages.
HANS: Yes, and now I would like that sausage, please, which will make seven.
DICKENS: Ah, bit of a problem there, you see, I was actually hoping to have that sausage for my lunch tomorrow. But perhaps I can interest you in some plum pudding and custard for desert?
HANS: So, you refuse me the sausage. Boys and girls, would you like to hear the story of the greedy old King who passed a law forbidding any of his subjects to eat sausages?
DICKENS: Have the sausage.
HANS: No, no. I tell the story. One morning the King was sitting down to his breakfast. Can you guess what it was? That’s right! A great big steaming cauldron full of piping hot sausages! Oh, said the King, dancing around with the cauldron in his arms, ‘all the sausages are mine! Nobody else can have any except for me coz I’m the King. Court Chamberlain, do you want a sausage? You can’t! It’s against the law! The sausages belong to me! I am the sausage King!’
DICKENS: Have the fucking sausage!!!
After Hans Christian Andersen had been staying with the Dickenses for six long months, host and guest were about to go for a walk across Coram’s Fields, when Dickens had to turn back at the last minute to comfort and console one of his sons Sydney, who was traumatized by a story that Hans Christian Andersen had told him. It was the story of The Wicked Little Boy Whose Eyes Were Pecked Out By Ravens Because He Wouldn’t Make Hot Chocolate For The Danish Visitor.
The moral of the story is that for the last 40 years the neo-Darwinists have been the silver-tongued houseguests at the head of the table, holding us spellbound with simplistic melodramas which, upon inspection, turn out to be mere projections of peculiarly selfish natures upon the world.
Some of the same people who champion GM foods also say they believe in evolution. Me, I don’t see how you can believe in both. One or the other, yes, but not both.
In 2010, Monsanto admitted to the journal Science that pink bollworm, a rampant insect pest, had evolved resistance to biotech’s flagship crop Bt cotton. This is cotton modified to carry a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) which was supposed to kill insects stone dead, but which pink bollworm appears to quite like, or at least not much mind.16 (Pink bollworm is a nematode and there’s a whole entry in this encyclopaedia on how fiendishly clever they are).
Since then, a study in Nature Biotechnology has found that of 13 major pest species, five have evolved a resistance to Bt corn or cotton. It’s taken them a decade.
Once a pest has figured out how to pick a crop’s genetic lock, they can wipe out whatever you plant. This is a particular weakness for GM crops because they are monocrops, planted in vast single stands, which makes them more – not less – vulnerable to pests. As such, genetically modified crops are, I would argue, a major threat to food security.
A review of 15 years of biotech agriculture published in the journal Progress in Physical Geography declared that: ‘current GM approaches are relatively transitory as a means of combating pests.’ Meanwhile biotech is winging it with desperate stopgap measures such a releasing swarms of sterile insects into the air in the hope that they will mate with resistant crop pests and check their proliferation. Not all farmers can afford to do this. Even those who can must ruefully reflect, when they’re standing on a tractor trailer in a field of manky cabbage next to a crate of aphids eunuchs, how far they’ve come from those hi-tech graphics of a modified gene being spliced into RNA sequence as colourful as a row of beads.
The arguments for GM foods are like the arguments for high-rise flats and inner-city motorways in the 1950s. Merrily bulldozing half-timbered Jacobean alms-houses to make way for town-centre flyovers, 1950s architects and town councilors were dismissive of the outdated human-scale make-do-and-mend approach. These were all to be ploughed under and replaced with the ‘modern’. Decades later, we are still spending billions to repair the damage that sci-fi modernism did to town and city-centres. But it won’t be nearly so quick and cheap to put the superbugs, superpests, and superweeds back in the bottle, once we’ve poisoned the once-rich diversity of birds and insects.
Bent on sowing the Southern Hemisphere with GM seeds, Bill Gates is the King Canute of the paddi-field, thinking he can stop natural selection with a few well-aimed transposons and patented petro-chemical inputs. But nothing stops natural selection.
From China comes a cautionary tale of what happens when you kill off all the pests in favour of farming monocultures. Sparrows eat rice grains, and so in 1958, Chairman Mao launched his Kill A Sparrow campaign as part of the Great Leap Forwards. Millions of citizens set about catching and exterminating sparrows. Within a year the only sparrows left in China were disguised as parakeets and living under assumed names on the Kazakhi border. Killing all the sparrows, however, led to a plague of locusts and a catastrophic collapse in rice harvests. The Kill A Sparrow campaign was abandoned in 1960.
Still, no-one would ever let a lone megalomaniac impose his parascientific vision on millions of hectares again, right?
Non-GM successes, meanwhile, never get any coverage, so let’s hear it for: allergen-free peanuts, salt-resistant wheat, heat and drought resistant beans, and virus-resistant cassavas. Not long after farmers start swapping and sharing these seeds, all these new hybrids become common property.
But where’s the profit in that?
In 1776 Benjamin Franklin told the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia:
‘We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’
Expressed in terms of evolutionary biology, Franklin’s insight goes like this:
‘Social cooperation among its members increases a group’s fitness above the arithmetic mean of the individual members’ fitness.’17
Charles Darwin held it to be self-evident that group selection is a strong force in evolution, but nowadays the Church Scientific condemns as heresy the idea that nature selects for mixed-ability groups rather than just successful individuals. According to current dog-eat-dog dogma, heavily influenced as it is by Thatcherite No-Such-Thing-As-Society doctrine, group selection shouldn’t happen in theory and so doesn’t happen in practice. But that hasn’t, of course, stopped it going on just as vigorously as ever.
Take a colony of red harvester ants for example. The individual ants don’t make more ants. The colony makes another colony. That’s because, strictly speaking, it’s not a population, it’s a collection of sterile sisters.18 Yes, I grant you, they do keep a couple of males in a wall-cupboard and they bring them out every few years when they want to make another colony. You can recognise the male red harvester ant by his tiny head – he’s only going to live for two weeks which isn’t long enough to eat so he’s got no jaw musculature. The other reason for his tiny head is he’s only got a tiny brain, because all he has to do at the end of that two weeks is mate with the queen. As he withdraws, his entrails are ripped out of his body, and, with his last gasp, you can just hear him say:
‘Gender equality has gone too far in the other direction!’