Today I Learned...

You know, I criticize the yokels for not understanding the difference between homosexual and transsexual, but then scientists discover an apparently male skeleton with female burial accoutrements and the media is all gay caveman found.

Sex at Dawn has been a shining example of why one should withhold criticism until one has read the book question. I may be jinxing the hell out of it by writing this halfway through. Anyway, it's by no means perfect, but it's not nearly as stupid as Dan Savage made it sound. It appears Savage may have selectively read and promoted the parts of the book that agreed with his existing worldview while disregarding nuance. I know, I was shocked too. One of the authors went along with it in web and podcast interviews, but if my choices were "selectively emphasize and overextrapolate from certain parts of my book, huge amounts of media coverage" or "stick to the exact truth as written, no media coverage", I would probably say what the columnist with an agenda wanted to hear as well.

Which is not to say the book is entirely correct, either. It's a little hard for me to judge because this is related to what I studied at college, so there's an abundance of things they've simplified that I know more about (or simply don't know much about- the authors are a psychiatrist and a psychologist, and it's clear their knowledge of biology doesn't extend past apes, birds, and prairie voles, the species that come up most in pop evopsych). And a few things where I know they're not outright lying, but where the evidence either doesn't support or in toto runs directly counter to the point they're trying to make.* And a few more things that I don't know much about but don't pass the smell test: they heavily imply that because jealousy is considered shameful in certain societies, no one feels it. And it killed my inner biologist to see them cite societies where a woman's brother is a primary caretaker (in place of the genetic father) as evidence that genetic relatedness as unimportant.**

This is perhaps typical of the minor strain of exotification running through the book. For a book that's about calling modern sexuality stupid, and takes pains to criticize anthropologists who constantly phrase their analysis of cultures as arising from the choices of men, it seems weird to see sentences like "During [Darwin's] circumnavigation of the glove on the Beagle, the young naturalist appears never to have gone ashore in search of the sexual and sensual pleasures pursued by many seafaring men of that era.", which appears to me to be treating the native women like especially awesome vending machines. Not to mention all the times they talk about rituals and protocols designed to combat jealousy that appear to boil down to "you have no right to say no," but don't actually say that outright.

The truth is, I went into this book with my mind made up: humans are capable of a wide variety of behaviors, and they adapt those behaviors to the circumstances. Either they do it consciously, or the ones people who naturally do the now-advantageous thing have more babies.*** The evolution of sexual possessiveness in response to the emergence of the importance of property isn't humans being stupid, it's fascinating. And there's still room for the book I really want, which is an exploration of how different resource distributions lead to different bonding and parenting concepts.

*They state it's a widely accepted fact that Homo erectus lived in single-male, multi-female harems, like gorillas. I can't prove they're wrong because very few cave man pre-nups survived into the present day, but I can mention that, to the best of our knowledge, H. erectus does not display the sexual size dimorphism typical of harem-keeping species.

They're not so great at anthropology either: they conflate partible paternity- the belief that a baby can have more than one father- with the more specific belief that babies are made of accumulated sperm. I have the distinct feeling that if I knew more anthropology I'd be less impressed with the book.

**Biology primer: caring for your sister's children, rather than your non-exclusive sexual partner's children, is a sign that you do care (in an evolutionary sense) about how genetically close you are to the children you're investing in, seeing as you're choosing to save your resources for children you know you're related to.

***In brief: in small tribes where resources are held nearly-in-common, it's not a big deal if you don't know if a kid is yours, or if you fall out of favor with your kid's father, because it doesn't change the transfer of resources from father to child much.