“Evolution’s Rainbow” a clear case of bad science

Because Amazon keeps deleting my full review — whether due to length or because I’m sounding too un-PC, my full review of this bad-science attempt at using science to propel changes in social policy, the book Evolution’s Rainbow” by transsexual activist Joan Roughgarden, is posted below.


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A progressive says: Gender psychology/sociology prescriptions masquerade as evolutionary biology, with other mistakes & willfulness as well

A 1-star for bad science, arguably a 3/4-star for gender psychology/sociology/politics, but being presented as a work of science, ends as a 1-star

First, I put the “a progressive says” at the start of the title so nobody would think I’m conservative curmudgeon frozen in my thinking.

The rest of the title speaks for itself, as I’ll show with page citations. Research that remains open to question is always analyzed to the most envelope-pushing conclusions. Straw men are regularly set up, with beliefs about gender issues in biology that may be held by a majority of the general populace instead being foisted on stereotypical old-school evolutionary biologists.

And, Roughgarden makes clear this is part of an agenda.

Page 3: “I also wish to **destabilize** (emphasis added) the primacy of individualism.

Page 4: She calls the castrated priests of Cybele “priestesses.” (Adult castration does not normally diminish male sexual drive or identification, which she admits elsewhere. And, in light of the Attis/Cybele myth, it’s very arguable that the psychology of the castration/dedication is intended as either males, or as a “third gender,” which Roughgarden talks so much about.)

Then, when Roughgarden ventures into other fields, she shows an even greater tendency to misread, or misconstrue texts and information. For example, calling self-made eunuchs of early New Testament saintliness as “transgendered” is simply wrong. First, even if we could present these men with a modern idea of what being “transgendered” is, they would reject that this is what they were trying to become. Second, as noted above, men castrated as adults don’t lose their adult sexual drive. Since Roughgarden draws lines between “sex” and “gender” and insists on the large psychological and sociological comports of “gender,” she probably has good reason for running past this scientific evidence which shows that “eunuchs” most definitely are not “transgendered.”

And, speaking of the “sex” vs. “gender” distinction, it’s the most visible example of how she seems to be trying to play Wittgensteinian games with language, in the sense of trying to craft a new gameboard from the table of Procrustes.

So, it’s time to make some specific citations from the book.

Page 3: “Western culture discriminates against diversity.” First, this is a stereotype, of a straw man nature. Second, she doesn’t define what “Western culture” is.

Pages 19-20: She divides theories about sexual vs. asexual reproduction’s benefits into “diversity affirming” vs. “diversity repressing,” and claims the latter just doesn’t work. “A bad gene never gets going in an asexual species, and sex’s supposed pruning of the gene pool is unnecessary and mythical.” Well, “never” is pretty strong. She then goes off down a primrose path by claiming this view could eventually be used to justify discrimination. Even if that were true (which it isn’t) she commits the elementary logical fallacy of confusing “is” and “ought.”

Pages 27-28: Here’s where she lists stereotypes that may well be held by a majority of the general public as though they were held by the majority of biologists.

Those stereotypes include: An organism is solely male or female for life; females, not males, give birth; males have XY and females XX; males and females look different, etc. It’s intellectually dishonest of her, after spending her introduction tilting at the windmills of establishment biology, to not clearly spell out that she knows these are stereotypes held by the general public, not by fellow biologists.

Page 32: After having already said she specifically rejects Darwin’s theory of sexual selection lock, stock and barrel, she says of wrasses, who have large and small males: “Whether females prefer either type of male isn’t known.” Isn’t this a logical non sequitur from your point of view, Dr. Roughgarden? If you believe sexual selection doesn’t exist, how can you talk about a female preferring one type of male over another on sexual characteristics?

Pages 36ff: In talking about velvethorn male elk, and other species where she tries to insist partially intergendered males not only exist but are natural, she overlooks some HUGE alternative possibilities AND huge contraindicating actualities.

The biggest actuality she ignores? Fertilizer runoff, among other things, acting like an endocrine disruptor. Numerous field research trips have shown an alarming rise in hermaphroditic fish and amphibians in the farmland Midwest, for example. True, elk are vegetarian, but with other species, as we saw happen decades ago to bald eagles with DDT, fertilizer runoff, phthalate plastic byproducts, etc., may also be getting passed “upstream.” Beyond that, on the alternative possibilities, if you follow her logic, such anthropogenic hermaphroditism isn’t “wrong,” either.

Pages 78-79: Why not talk about “three discrete maturational stages” rather than three “genders” in looking at male sunfish? The three are all of different ages, their phenotypic differences seem to be readily explainable on an age basis, and the “gender” word here again seems Procrustean.

Here and elsewhere she talks about multiple genders per one sex, her illogical thinking rears its head again.

Sunfish have brains the size of a rifle slug with cortical convolutions per square millimeter one-thousandth of ours. They CAN'T have different genders because they don't have enough brain to have developed social learning and social structures. Ditto for other fish, amphibians and reptiles she cites as having three or more genders. ’Taint so; it’s simply impossible biologically.

170ff: She again trots out the straw man, in trying to demolish sexual selection. No. 5, she says, ”Females do not choose ‘great genes.’” If male altruism, nurturing, monogamy, etc. does contribute to the perpetuation of his genes (and therefore hers), the genes which cause tendencies toward this behavior are, by definition, “great genes,” and are certainly chosen for. No. 7, she says, “Social deceit is not demonstrated.” Oh, really? It’s been clearly demonstrated with both other primates and with corvids. Now, in those cases, the deceit hasn’t been sex-specific, but, if it enhances survival and therefore fitness, it will be selected for.

Pages 280ff: She then castigates modern medicine while also trying to make some of its definitions fit her Procrustean bed. She seems to believe that modern medicine hates diversity and wants to quash it, like some group of Nazi-like doctors, and therefore is all too ready to label diversity disease. Following on this, she takes a very strict view of population genetics and mutational frequency to ask whether “diseases” (her theoretical scare quotes, not mine) which occur with less than 1 in 10,000 or so frequency shouldn’t be relabeled as “diversity. I’m sure sufferers of muscular dystrophy, for example, wish their disease, and its symptoms, were just “diversity,” but sadly, that’s not the case.

Next, she goes on to fudge medical statistics, and the calculation of them, to increase estimates of the number of transsexuals in the U.S. and the U.K., and by extension, in population worldwide. She counts the number of male-to-female reassignment surgeries over a multiyear basis and then sums them up. She then divides by the number of adult males in the U.S. or U.K. at any one time, without making allowance for the number of new males entering the population from year to year. Now, this wouldn’t throw her estimates off by a factor of 10, but, it probably would do so by 50 percent or so, maybe 100 percent.

Then, she commits the “is”/”ought” fallacy throughout this particular chapter, assuming that identifying something as a genetic defect automatically labels it morally wrong.

Now, let’s look at her re-reading of the Jewish and Christian testaments.

Page 370: She seems to claim that Ruth and Naomi were lesbian, although the use of the phrase “loving partnership” is, at bottom, weasel language. Even gay rights activists, etc., who have claimed David and Jonathan were gay haven’t normally invoked Ruth and Naomi. (Of course, I’ve probably read more on gay studies than lesbian studies, but still, the point is — that’s a horrible misreading of the story.)

And, speaking of D & J …

Page 371: They’re gay, of course, in her reading. She also refers to the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew of I Samuel, which doesn’t always follow closely, and gives a forced reading of it, to try to justify her point. Besides, with her references to classical Greece elsewhere, she should know that the story of Damon and Pythias illustrates just as great a degree of fraternal love with even less sexual implication.

Finally, she basically tries to do an end run around the passages of Leviticus and Romans.

With Leviticus, she first implies that because Greek pederasty didn’t always involve penetration (though she may overstate that case too), that Hebrew homosexuality was exactly the same. Again, no proof, just a leap forward.

In jumping to the New Testament, she first says, Well, Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality, so it must have been OK by him. But there are other interpretations. Perhaps it was such an abomination to him that he refused to mention it. Or, it was such an abomination in the Jewish mind in general that he knew it didn’t need mentioning as an abomination “coming out of the heart.”

Page 374: Finally, Paul in Romans talking about surrendering to unnatural acts.

First, Roughgarden engages in more linguistic semantics, insisting that acts don’t equate to relationships. Sure they do, when performed repeatedly with the same person. Now, people such as gays having sex on the “down low” would like to believe exactly what Roughgarden is saying, but somewhere inside, they know it’s not true.

Then, she pulls out a philosophical, and philosophy of science, laugher. “Followers of the Stoics, **the ancient counterpart of scientists,** state that nature functions according to ‘laws.’” It seems like she’s trying to gore two or three straw men at the same time, with this. First, there were ancient scientists, or close to it. They were called the Atomists. In traditional philosophical schools, the Skeptics, especially the Pyrrhonics, would have much more right to claim the mantle of “scientist” than would Stoics. The Cynics and Epicureans would have at least as valid a call on it as Stoics, for that matter.

Finally, she has certain philosophical assumptions about evolutionary biology that I don’t think are warranted. Above all is her total rejection of the “neutralist” position on mutations. Instead, she assumes mutations HAVE to be adaptive, not just neutral, else they wouldn’t remain in the population. Between this philosophical stance and her use of bad statistics to up the estimates on transsexual rate in the general population, she **insists** transsexualism has to be adaptive and will soon be proven so. Finally, she rejects the idea of evolutionary spandrels.

In sum, I view Dr. Roughgarden, a transsexual, or transgendered, if you prefer, with being hoist by her own petard. Although she never uses the phrase “dead white male,” or even “dead male,” in her diatribe against Darwin in particular and the majority of evolutionary biologists in general, it lies behind this book and around every corner of a page about to be turned.

She seems to have the evangelistic fervor of the recently converted, or in this case, the recently sexually reassigned. In addition to that, she has a Roussean (at least) view of the noble savage in most all multicellular species on Earth outside Homo sapiens, subspecies vir heterosexualis mortuus. Her assumptions about the degree of cooperativeness among animals, the lack of deceit, the fail-safe-ness of insemination producing fertilization, etc., are just the tip of the iceberg in evidence of this, this naiveté, willfully adopted, that she presents. That naiveté alone would disqualify this book from serious attention.

Does the book have good points? Yes, primarily in pointing out the varieties of diversity within sexual acts, intergendered and transgendered outside of Homo sapiens, and the isomorphism within male and female sex of many species. However, you can find much of this in other modern evolutionary biology books.