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Review of Paul Seabright, The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2012)Herbert GintisSeptember 2015Modern technology and the social economic organization of contemporary advanced societies have combined to initiate a vast and comprehensive restructuring of the social roles and cultural values that relate the relationships between men and women. Technological changes in the Twentieth century undermined household production of food, sanitation, education, and health care, thus destroying the traditional division of labor between the sexes and rendering mother and wife relatively free to explore alternative uses of her time and energy. The logical alternative has been the workplace, where other technological changes reduced the importance of upper body strength in the workplace, thus undercutting the previously crippling disadvantage of women in attractiveness to employers. We are still dealing with the adjustment to a new modus vivendi between the sexes in the advanced societies around the world.A second seeming inexorable movement has been the development in the less developed societies of urban areas in which technology and social structure follows a similar trajectory, undermining the forms of patriarchal authority characteristic of the tribal, clannish, and unaccountably authoritarian societies that have dominated human social life since the advent of settled trade and agriculture some 10,000 years ago.Writers and researchers of various stripes have expended huge amounts of effort to understand this dynamical process and predict its future. Much of this effort is completely worthless, being based on an arbitrary theological prejudice or philosophical speculation. Approaches applying the scientific method, in particular those starting from evolutionary biology and modern behavioral game theory, have been more promising, but even here many writers have embraced untenable principles and thus produced unpersuasive analyses. Paul Seabright’s new book is an entertaining, well written, highly informative, and persuasive book is dedicated to countering the major pitfalls in the evolutionary analysis of the relations between the sexes, and providing a balanced treatment that asserts positively what can reasonably be asserted, and speculates creatively in dealing with the questions (there are many) that remain unresolved.Perhaps the two most common errors are to consider all differences in the behavior of men and women the pure product of culture and socialization---the so-called “tabula rasa” or “blank slate” assumption (incorrectly) attributed to the English philosopher John Locke and ably debunked by Stephen Pinker in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. The fact is that humans are moderately sexually dimorphic, with males different from females not only anatomically, but also is size, strength, and behavior in every society ever studied. Seabright correctly argues that while it is possible that all behavioral differences are due to social rather than genetic forces, the fact that there are many known differences between the male and female brain suggest that this is not the case, although there appears to be no significant difference in general cognitive capacity between the two. Seabright attributes this fact that in the period of evolutionary emergence there was a marked sexual division of labor, but the challenges were equally complex for men and women.The second serious error is that of biological determinism. If the blank slate view is characteristic of mindless liberalism, biological determinism is the refuge of mindless conservatism. According to this view, there are extreme behavioral differences between men and women, and these cannot be papered over by a veneer of egalitarian cultural ideology. Perhaps the most compelling example of biological determinism is that women are naturally attracted to pair bonding and sexual exclusivity while males are naturally attracted to promiscuity. This dichotomy is largely true in many birds and mammals in which the female bears most of the cost of producing and rearing young and is virtually assured of having her eggs fertilized, whereas males bear little of the cost, can produce vast amounts of sperm at will, and whose major task is that of successfully inseminating females. But, as Seabright stresses, there are many examples of sexually adventurous females in various species, and this behavior can easily be the product of evolutionary adaptation. I agree with Seabright that it is very likely that under the proper social conditions, the sexual preferences of men and women may be virtually identical. Seabright correctly concludes that there are no known biological difference between men and women that preclude full gender equality, that the sexual division of labor is likely to become more egalitarian for the foreseeable future, but there is no reason to believe that behavioral difference between the sexes will ever disappear completely.Part of the power of Seabright’s book is that he is a truly transdisciplinary behavioral scientist. His training is in economics, but his knowledge of evolutionary biology and his acquaintance with contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science is extensive, deep, and mature. ................
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