Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner Read Free Book Online Page B

non-schizophrenic people who are adopted at the same early age by parents with schizophrenia. The same can be said of many different illnesses and many human traits within the normal range. This includes, by most definitions, masculinity and femininity, and it certainly includes lifelong sexual preferences, which are in many ways independent of other aspects of gender psychology and behavior.
    The point is that genes matter a lot. Experience, learning, culture, and environment also matter a lot. But we all accept that. Take two identical twins and give just one of them piano lessons, and you will end up with a big difference in piano playing. But give them both the same lessons, and they will likely end up more similar in ability than two nonidentical twins who also both get the same lessons. Six or seven thousand languages are spoken in the world, and the differences among them are all due to learning. Women in New York once thought it was unacceptably sexual to show their ankles,and millions of women elsewhere today think the same about their hair, while currently on New York’s beaches women wear only the skimpiest of bikinis, and on the Riviera they don’t bother with the tops. Almost all modern women sometimes or often wear pants—unthinkable and even punishable not so long ago.
    All of these differences and countless more are cultural and historical, contingencies of collective beliefs and experience in particular human settings. Any one of them may change again tomorrow, just like the historical fluctuations in skirt, hair, and beard length—at this writing, big fluffy beards are popular in Major League Baseball, a sport that in my youth was conspicuously clean-shaven. We know all this, and it tends to make us think that genes don’t matter, but they do. What has to be specified is where and how they matter. The things just mentioned are among the myriad ways they don’t. But if you have an identical twin with schizophrenia, you unfortunately have about one chance in two of getting it, while your sibling adopted at birth, who grew up in the same environment as you and your identical twin, has less than one chance in a hundred. This leaves ample room for environmental influences—you have a 50 percent chance of not matching your identical twin in schizophrenia—but it’s still a huge difference.
    It is now clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that for some differences between men and women, genetic influence is much higher than for others. Put another way, men and women differ in their genes, and these differences explain a few—just a few—of the gender differences that many of us have attributed to learning. Culture is powerful, but it is not all-powerful.
    Let’s try an extension of the game we played before. I’m going to pick a person at random out of an online telephone directory—from any city or town in the world—and download a lot of information about them. Then I’m going to tell you one fact about that person, and you are going to guess whether they are male or female. If youare right, I will pay you fifty dollars. If you are wrong, you will pay me the same. Or you can decide not to guess and move on to the next candidate. It’s up to you. Don’t forget: I pick the person at random, and only then do I find out the fact in question about the person. No manipulations or tricks.
    Suppose we start with something trivial. I tell you the person has a penis. Now, you are smart enough to know that this does not guarantee a right answer, but it comes so close that you would have to be the least betting person on the planet to refuse to guess on this one. You are almost certainly fifty dollars richer.
    We pick another name and investigate the new person. I say that this person, growing up, liked to play with dolls and now likes to wear dresses to parties. Well, you’re not quite as certain as you were last time, but you’ve got a new fifty-dollar bill in hand, and the chances are still overwhelmingly