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C H A P T E R 6 Selective History: Writing Female Choice into Organismal Biology In a way the impact of biology has had a curious set-back as a result of the magnificent victories of molecular biology. To the outsider they suggest that physics and chemistry is the A[lpha] and O[mega] of all science. We will have to make a double effort to restore the influence of organismic biology and to make better known the evolutionary trends that culminated in that unique psycho-social organism Man. —Ernst Mayr to Julian Huxley, October 3, 1967 By the 1960s, biologists could no longer say with certainty that only humans used tools, or could learn to communicate through language, or behaved according to rational rules. Jane Goodall’s discovery that chimpanzees used and manufactured tools surprised the scientific community. On hearing the news, anthropologist Louis Leakey, one of Goodall’s mentors, remarked: “Now we must redefine tool, rede- fine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.” Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Goodall’s work received wide circulation through her articles in National Geographic magazine, the documentary Miss Goodall and theWild Chimpanzees, and her best-selling book In the Shadow of Man. Goodall was young, white, beautiful, and feminine. According to feminist historian of science Donna Haraway, in the eyes of eager watchers, Goodall symbolically mediated the gap between white Western civilization and the primitive beasts of the Dark Continent. Goodall’s movie and associated articles in National Geographic magazine were a huge success. Science bridged the connection between human and animal as Goodall traipsed through the trees and over the hills of African woodlands, a thin sprite at home in her tropical Eden. More exciting news came in 1969, when primatologists R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice T. Gardner described in Science how they had taught a young female chimpanzee named Washoe to communicate using American Sign Language. The 136 Looking for a Few Good Males rising popularity of animal behavior research in the popular media, and the success of animal stars in the movies and television shows of the 1960s and 1970s, also facilitated an easy slippage between human and animal social and sexual behavior. Then, in the 1970s, theoretical biologist John Maynard Smith and geneticist George R. Price published a series of papers, including “The Logic of Animal Con- flict.” They mathematically described the evolutionary success of retaliation, escalation , and conflict avoidance in long-term warfare scenarios in which animals could learn from their past encounters with other participants. Maynard Smith and Price dubbed the unbeatable animal strategy for each set of conditions the “evolutionarily stable strategy” for that “game.” Evolutionary biologists quickly adopted these analytical tools, calling them “evolutionary game theory.” Animals’ choices in these games were determined by their genetically preprogrammed strategies. Animals with better strategies survived and produced more offspring. The rise of game theory in biological circles gave biologists new license to discuss apparently rational behavior in animals, especially choice-based behaviors, without the anthropomorphic connotations of aesthetic or cognitive evaluation and decision-making. By 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins hailed Maynard Smith and Price’s paper as one of the most important contributions to evolutionary theory since Darwin. All told, these developments removed tool-manufacture, sociality, the mental capacity for language, and even apparent rationality as physical or behavioral signals demarcating a hard and fast boundary between human and animal. These developments were especially important for biologists whose research centered on levels of biological organization higher than subcellular processes—in effect, those biologists who worked with whole organisms and populations. Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote to a friend that “organismic biology is fundamental for the understanding of man, while molecular biology is more important for the understanding of his ailments, and for finding a cure against colds.” The hostility in his letter reflected a general concern among organismal biologists about molecular biology’s rising authority as the final frontier of biological research. Ernst Mayr, for example, agreed that insights into the human predicament made organismal biology as important as molecular biology: “in addition to that wonderful field of molecular biology, we have an equally wonderful field of organismic biology, a field which is becoming increasingly important for the understanding of man and the planning of his future.” Female choice once again made news in the popular press in the context of organismal biologists’ research on sexual selection as applied to animals and, ultimately, humans. When...

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