In NewScientist (12 March 2022, paywall), Lucy Cooke recounts the natural history of female animals sleeping around, and then misinterprets the bigger picture:
When Patricia Gowaty began doing DNA paternity tests on songbird eggs in 1984, she discovered that each nest frequently contained multiple fathers, despite the apparent monogamy of their parents.
Members of the male ornithological establishment responded by insisting the females had been “raped”. But radio trackers subsequently revealed females actively seeking sex with neighbouring cocks. Since then, a polyandry revolution has revealed that multiple mating is the norm for females, from lions to lizards. The reason is quite obvious: don’t put all your eggs in one basket – greater genetic diversity means healthier offspring.
Gowaty, like me, has never tried to hide her politics. She believes in equal representation of both sexes. But, as Darwin’s Victorian values show us, science is always political. A feminist perspective is urgently needed to topple centuries of androcentrism and rebrand female sexual agency, in lionesses or songbirds, from unexpected to a winning maternal strategy.
Not political, but culturally biased. The intellectual error of projection, of anthropomorphism, is a well-known problem in science, from physics to natural history, by which I mean the study of animals’ social structures. Early scientists grew up in societies in which females were nominally monogamous. This is a cultural tradition. They made the mistake of applying cultural mores to turtles, and that just doesn’t fly.
Politics is about governance. Science is about reality, wherever that may lead. Her ornithologists were using bad assumptions. But to call it politics is just wrong.
But I think what we’re seeing here is the influence of the far-left’s view that everything is politics, particularly if someone’s feeling offended by it. Call it politics, turn the weapons du jour upon all those who happen to hold such a view, and pull the trigger.
It’s crude, it’s intellectual bullying, and, unlike in many areas, it doesn’t really get the job done. Science depends on studying reality and coming to conclusions based on evidence, not imposing a conclusion and then twisting the evidence to match. That disastrous approach has been tried a time or two before, most notably by Soviet scientist Lysenko.
Call it misapplication of cultural mores and be done with it. Call it politics and end up paying for that mistake for decades.
