The Nature-Culture Divide; or, Transdisciplining Diversity

Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Joan Roughgarden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 474 pp.

Joan Roughgarden's expansive study works through webs of associations, beginning with animal physiologies and behaviors, moving on to human embryogenesis and developmental psychology, and ending with cultural and historical examples of gender and sexual variation, which she calls "cultural rainbows" (7). The book is truly a grand transdisciplinary endeavor. Like most scholarly cross-pollinations, however, Evolution's Rainbow is marked by all the rewards and struggles of bringing seemingly divergent knowledge practices into conversation.

With great passion Roughgarden introduces her reader to such gender and sexual differences as "lesbian lizards," female masculinity among damselflies, "four distinct genders" among bluegill sunfish, and gay male swans who even raise offspring together (129, 78). We read about intersexed hyenas that mate and give birth through the tips of their penises. We meet "hamelets, which are small coral reef basses, [that] don't have to worry about choosing their sex: they are both sexes at the same time" (33).

Roughgarden teaches us that animal species' genders, sexualities, and sexes are multiple, fungible, and part of evolutionary history. Her basic tenet is that the "rainbow" is grounded in biology, an adaptive product of evolution; she posits that gender and sexual diversities act as "cooperations" in a broader ecological context. She calls for a new theory of social selection to take the place of Darwin's sexual selection theory. Rejecting the familiar "competitive tooth-and-claw narratives," she suggests that animal species "interact socially to acquire opportunities for reproduction" (168). "Overall," she argues, "sex is essentially cooperative—a natural covenant to share genetic wealth" (21). Social selection takes into account the vast networks between members of a society who support kin selection rather than individual reproduction. But does all sexual selection have to be dismissed in order for it to be revised? Might not social selection refigure key elisions and tenets of sexual selection—such as sex or sexual diversity and cooperation—rather than replace them altogether?

Relying on her theory of social selection, Roughgarden then reviews developmental biology and the psychology and physiology of sex and gender diversity in the human "rainbow." This shift in focus, from nonhuman to human, creates a tricky juxtaposition. What does it mean to be a "lesbian lizard"? Certainly, humans are vertebrates, hominids, animals, but how do we as transdisciplinary thinkers hold on to species specificity when we use the lifeways of nonhumans to illustrate the complexities of human physiologies and cultures? If the products of human cultural evolution can not easily be made parallel to nonhuman evolutionary events, how do we seriously engage the interactions, intimacies, histories, and stories between humans and nonhumans, as Roughgarden encourages us to do?

Thinking about human development, Roughgarden writes: "Developmental biology . . . assumes that one master template is the norm, and that variety reflects a defective deviation from that ideal norm" (185). Partnership between genes is the stuff from which we are made. Genes, gonads, hormones, and brain anatomy are interconnected to produce a complex narrative of sex. Rather than selfish biology, Roughgarden argues that "genial" biology defines our physiological experience. She refers to the fact that disease does occur but contends that "the disease model of diversity fundamentally misrepresents human nature" (185–86). Certainly, disease should not define all variation, yet might it not be part of variation? If biology is genial, how can we account for the many body troubles that gravely shape and reshape the human experience? Isn't disease part of the rainbow?

In her chapter on psychology, Roughgarden proposes that most "psychologists operate with a medical model that pathologizes diversity" (262). Her account rests primarily on the transgender experience. Toggling between transgender self-narratives, samplings by therapists, and biological influences, she produces an analysis poised between identity variation and unifying identity formations. Transgendered people might have varying...