SEX SPECIALIZATION AND GROUP SURVIVAL

Adaptation and specialization; Reproduction a group not an individual problem; Conflict between specialization and adaptation; Intelligence makes for economy in adjustment to environment; Reproduction, not production, the chief factor in the sex problem.

From the facts briefly stated in the preceding chapters it is quite evident that the general superiority of man over woman or vice versa cannot be proven by biology. Such an idea arises from a careless and unscientific use of language. Superiority is a term which, when used to express the rather exact ideas of biology, is employed in a carefully limited and specific, not in a general, sense. That is, superiority, even if an apparently general idea like survival value is referred to, always implies a given, understood environment where such is not specifically mentioned. Wolves, for example, might be found to possess superior chances for survival over foxes, beaver or partridges in a given environment. A biologist would probably use more exact and less ambiguous terms to express such a fact, and say that wolves were the best adapted to the given surroundings. If all these animals continued to live side by side in the given environment, they could be compared only as to specific details size, strength, cunning, fleetness in running, swimming or flying, concealment from enemies, etc. Then the biologist would probably make his meaning perfectly clear by stating that one is specialized in one direction or another.

Especially is general superiority a vague idea when the things compared are different but mutually necessary or complementary. If their functions overlap to some extent (i.e., if certain acts can be performed by either), we may say that one is better adapted to a certain activity than the other. Thus it may be that women are generally better adapted to caring for young children than are men, or that men are on the whole better adapted to riveting boiler plates, erecting skyscrapers, or sailing ships. Where their activities do not overlap at all, even the word adaptation hardly applies. For example, women are not better “adapted” to furnishing the intra-maternal environment for the young, since men are not adapted to it at all. It is a case of female specialization.

Men being neither specialized nor adapted, to any extent whatever, to this particular activity, any attempt at comparison is obviously fruitless, since one term is always zero. This specialization, absolutely necessary to the survival of human groups, is either present or it is absent in a given individual. Any attempt to formulate a general proposition about superiority either attaches purely arbitrary values to different kinds of activity or is absurd from the standpoint of the most elementary logic.

From the standpoint of biology, reproduction is not an individual but a group problem, however many problems of detail it may give rise to in individual lives. Sex involves the division of the reproductive process, without the exercise of which any human group would perish very shortly, into two complementary, mutually necessary but unequal parts. (This statement applies only to the reproductive process, as obviously the male and female gametes contribute equally to the formation of the new individual). Neither part (the male or the female) of this process is more necessary than the other, both being absolutely necessary. But the female specialization for furnishing the intra-maternal environment makes her share more burdensome.

Biologically considered, not even two individuals (male and female), together with their offspring, can be more than an arbitrary “unit” as concerns sex, since inbreeding eventually impoverishes the stock. Hence outcrosses are necessary. To intelligibly consider the sex problem in the human species, then, we must always predicate a considerable group of people, with such organization and division of activities as to guarantee that all the processes necessary to survival will be carried on. Sex is a group problem. Considering the mutual interdependence and the diversity of activities in human society, to make the generalization that one sex is superior to the other is on a par with saying that roots and branches are superior to trunks and leaves. It is sheer foolishness. Yet oceans of ink have flowed in attempts to establish one or the other of two equally absurd propositions.

Since the specialization to furnish the intra-maternal environment for the young makes the female part of the reproductive process essentially and unavoidably more burdensome than the male, it results that an economical division of the extra-reproductive activities of any group must throw an unequal share upon the males. This specialization to carry the young during the embryonic period is thus at the base of the division of labour between the sexes. It is the chief factor involved in the problems of sex, and gives rise, directly or indirectly, to most of the others.

But the sex problem as a whole is one of adaptation as well as of specialization. An incident of the female specialization is a type of body on the average smaller, weaker and less well adapted to some other activities than is the male body, even when reproduction is not undertaken. A great complication is added by the fact that some women, and also some men, are better adapted than others to nonreproductive activities. This is another way of saying that the type of body associated with either type of sex glands varies a good deal, for reasons and in respects already pointed out.

The most important fact about this reproductive specialization is that beyond fertilization it is exclusive in the female. Since the males cannot furnish the intra-parental environment for the young, the entire burden must fall on half the group. If this aggregation is to even hold its own numerically, its women must have, on an average, two children each, plus about one more for unavoidable waste death in infancy or childhood, sterility, obvious unfitness for reproduction, etc., i.e., three in all. If one woman has less than her three children, then another must have more than three, or the group number will decrease. Group survival is the fundamental postulate in a problem of this kind.

The above figure is for civilized society. In primitive groups, the terrific wastage makes a much higher birth-rate necessary, several times as high in many cases. If we suppose such a group, where child mortality, lack of sanitation, etc., necessitates an average of eight children per woman (instead of three), the biological origin of the division of labour between the sexes is much more clearly seen than it is in civilized societies.

If men are better hunters or fighters than women, the latter could nevertheless hunt and fight it is a question of superior or inferior adaptation to particular activities. But it is more than that. Only the women are biologically specialized to the chief reproductive burden (intra-parental environment and lactation). If half the women should withdraw from child-bearing, the remainder would be obliged to average sixteen apiece. But even this is not all. Unfortunately, the half of the women who would be found best adapted to hunting and fighting would be the more vigorous half. The new generation would thus be born from the leftovers, and would be poor quality. Such a division of labour within a group would be fatally foolish and entirely uncalled for since there are plenty of men adapted to hunting and fighting, but entirely unspecialized to child-bearing and nursing.

Group survival being the fundamental thing, the group is obliged to develop a division of labour which directs the activities of the individuals composing it to providing for its necessities, regardless of any interference with their own desires. That is, if group survival requires that woman use her specialization to child-bearing instead of any adaptation she may possess in other directions, one of two things inevitably result: (1) Either the group finds or evolves some social control machinery which meets the necessity, or (2) it must give way to some other group which can do so. In either case, the result is a division of labour, which we see more clearly in primitive peoples. The less efficient group is not necessarily exterminated, but if it loses out in the competition until some other group is able to conquer it and impose its division of labour the result is of course the extinction of the conquered group as an integral part of society. This is simply natural selection working on groups. Natural selection works chiefly in this manner on the human species, because that species lives in groups. Such group control of the component individuals as has been described has led to a division of labour between the sexes in every primitive society. All this means is that the group adopting such a division has greater survival value, and hence is more likely to be represented in later ages.

It must not be supposed that such systems of control were always logically thought out or deliberately planned. Even animals which live in herds or colonies have divisions of labour.

Through an infinite slaughter of the least fit, such groups arrive at some kind of instinctive adjustment to produce and protect the young. The crudest human intelligence must have eliminated much of the waste involved, by comprehending obvious cause-and-effect relations which animals have to arrive at through trial and error methods.

For example, an intelligence capable of employing artificial weapons is also able to see that the wielder of these for group defence cannot be encumbered with baggage or children when the group is in movement. Hence women became the burden bearers, and took care of the children, even after the nursing period. War parties could not generally be mixed, for the obvious reasons that such women as did not have young children would be pregnant a good deal of the time, or likely to become so. Moreover, a hunter and fighter must not have his courage, ferocity and physical initiative undermined by unsuitable employments and associations.

In a semi-settled group, the hunter and warrior cannot be relied upon to keep hearth-fires burning or tend crops, even though he may occasionally have time for such activities. These duties are therefore relegated to the women, whose child-bearing functions impose upon them a more sedentary existence. Women must reproduce practically up to their full capacity to fill up the gaps made by war, accident and disease as well as death from old age. To this biological service which they alone can perform are added those which lie nearest it and interfere least with carrying it out.

We must therefore keep in view all the activities of any group in which the sex problem is being studied. There is a certain tendency to disregard the female specialization to child-bearing, and to regard the sex question as one merely of adaptation to extra-biological services. In every group which has survived, some machinery a “crust of custom,” reinforced by more arbitrary laws or regulations has sought to guarantee reproduction by keeping women out of lines of endeavour which might endanger that fundamental group necessity. Primitive societies which got stabilized within a given territory and found their birth-rate dangerously high could always keep it down by exposing or destroying some of the unfit children, or a certain per cent of the female children, or both.

In primitive groups, the individual was practically nil. But modern civilized society is able to survive without the rigid control of individual activities which the old economy entailed. Man comes to choose more and more for himself individually instead of for the group, uniformity weakens and individualism becomes more pronounced. As control of environment becomes more complete and easy, natural selection grows harder to detect. We turn our interests and activities toward the search for what we want and take survival largely for granted something the savage cannot do. Natural selection becomes unreal to us, because the things we do to survive are so intricately mixed up with those we do for other reasons. Natural selection in gregarious animals operates upon groups rather than upon individuals. Arrangement of these groups is often very intricate. Some have territorial boundaries and some have not. Often they overlap, identical individuals belonging to several. Hence it is not strange that natural selection phenomena often escape attention.

But this must not lead us to suppose that natural selection is wholly inoperative in civilized society. We see some nations outbreeding others, or dominating them through superior organization. Within nations, some racial and religious groups outbreed others and thus gradually supplant them for the future is to those who furnish its populations.