COMMENTS

...D) While the anthropological evidence would force us to posit a physiological basis for this emotionalbehavioral differentiation even if there were no direct physiological evidence, we need not merely posit this physiological differentiation on hypothetical grounds...

...made the choice of plans, or undertakings, of journeys and winterings...

...Because the evidence for important biological differences between the races would still be hypothetical (though very convincing...

...Since Goldberg claims in his final footnote here that I quoted him out of context concerning some of his views, the section merits fuller excerpting: If one asks, "does that mean that if half the members of every society were white and half were black and all societies were ruled by whites (or all by blacks) then you would say that one race was superior at attaining power for biological reasons," the answer is, of course, yes...

...To which society does Dr...

...Likewise when the Kerner Commission reported the mortality rate of black infants as five times that of white infants, it expressed not the causes of racial oppression but the manifestations of it...

...A more intriguing refutation of Goldberg's hormonal determinism is offered by the ferocious castrati leaders from Chinese history of 91 B.C., described by the historian Schi Chi Chen...

...E. A. Ross (1906) said that owing to their deficiencies in character and intelligence, the Irish represented a tremendous burden, demonstrating financial irresponsibility of Irish families comparable to that of Bedouins...

...a of this process is not determinable...

...In fact, anthropologists have noted that male dominance and patriarchy are not culturally universal...

...3 (Male Dominance): Male and female emotions, and the values and social expectations that reflect them, associate dominance in male-female relationships with males...

...Add to these unconscious forces the recognized critical role of language in self-development, and the bestintentioned reformer cannot transcend the patriarchal consciousness of every thought and utterance...

...This harps back to a naive functionalist legacy that values whatever exists, sui generis, and would bid us accept our destinies like good women and men playing out Strindberg...

...For the sake of soundly debunking Goldberg's mythologies disguised as science, let us assume that no evidence of a nonpatriarchal human or animal society has, in fact, been found...

...Most laboratory studies of dominance measure such male activities as who copulates (or "introjects") most, and do not even note female dominance activities, so that such activities effectively do not exist in these scientific studies...

...The most serious problem for Steven Goldberg is that his parsimonious theory of the inevitability of patriarchy presupposes that no society exists or has existed without patriarchy...

...These realities are limited by a population's observations and the expectations that these observations generate...

...For the moment, researchers agree that fetal hormonalization occurs and does influence adult behavior, but the exact natu...

...All that is important is that male physiology is such that the male is more strongly motivated, by the environmental presence of a hierarchy or member of the other sex, to sacrifice whatever must be sacrificed— time, pleasure, health, affection, relaxation, family—for attainment of the hierarchical positions and occupational roles for which there is the greatest competition, and for dominance in male-female relationships...

...To others—such as the inevitable attempt to subsume all analyses mentioning physiology under one heading and attacking all for the faults of the weakest—one can say only that he does not believe that man has a "killer instinct...

...he predicted that these differencies could not be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture...

...In a world where scientific facts are self-legitimating, Goldberg's discussion rests on a patina of scientism that crumbles at critical inspection...

...Social values, socialization, and—ultimately— institutions conform to limits set by the behavioral differentiation that is rooted in the physiological differentiation...

...Below we print a comment Steven Goldberg has sent us on that review and Devra Lee Davis's response...

...For instance, there is no evidence that testosterone influences the area of thinking, namely the cortex...

...The title is meant to indicate that the development of a society that lacks patriarchy would be sufficient to demonstrate the incorrectness of the theory...

...Indeed, one can just as legitimately view this differentiation in terms of a male's having a "weaker ego" that needs shoring up by attainment and dominance...

...In fact, not long ago social scientists produced just such scientific data and policy recommendations on genetic inferiority for the sundry groups then regarded as scientifically distinguishable races...

...in the Soviet Union doctors are women while engineers, who receive the status given doctors in the U.S., are men...

...I would, however, appreciate the opportunity to comment on a few of Davis's criticisms...

...The argument that males behave more "aggressively" merely because they have been conditioned or socialized to do so merely begs the question: why does every society have expectations that it is the male who is more "aggressive...

...The contradiction here is quite flagrant—from weakness or else from strength comes an equally forceful dominance...

...It is these—and not the content of values—that provide the cue and the channel for behavior by motivating the male more strongly to manifest whatever behavior is necessary to attain hierarchical position, status, and dominance—be that behavior fighting or kissing babies for votes...

...I might, however, mention the relevance of my general argument to modern society, since Davis refers to this without giving the reader even a hint of what the argument was...

...This is what a theory is supposed to do.* *Devra Lee Davis quotes some sentences out of context in order to imply that I make an argument for black-white differences equivalent to that one I make for male-female differences...

...No serious research in this field asserts categorically what Goldberg does, namely that fetal hormonalization is irreversible in the matter of male dominance...

...q Devra Lee Davis Replies: However admirable the attempted economizing of thought, the parsimony of an explanation does not guarantee its validity—even if elegant in formulation...

...Lewis M. Terman (1916) had similar views, reporting consistent racial differences between Indians, Mexicans, and Negroes...

...For these are the environmental cues that activate the physiologically rooted propensity...

...To generalize from either the laboratory or natural animal observations to humans is to commit a peculiar reverse anthropomorphism, one of which Goldberg is aware but which does not prevent him from trotting along when it serves his interests, so to speak in a post hoc ergo propter hoc gait...

...COMMUNICATIONS 303...

...if such were the case we would have a society led by under-20-year-old males in the mornings when their testosterone levels are the highest...

...But one of Davis's points does have empirical implications...

...One of the curious logical contradictions is Goldberg's present contention that ethnological evidence supports the view that males dominate, either because of a weaker male ego that "needs" to dominate or a male "drive" to dominate...

...She also suggests, correctly, that physical strength is no longer of great importance without mentioning that my argument does not rest on sex differences in strength, that the physiological evidence indicates it is hormonal masculinization, not strength, that is relevant to dominance, and that observation of human hierarchies indicates motivation is the crucial factor...

...F) There is much in Patriarchy that it is not possible to discuss here...

...The question of exact causality is unanswerable...

...In 1940 Edward L. Thorndike, one of the founders of psychological testing, noted that about the only service the inferior and vicious could perform was not to beget children.' WHILE it is no longer chic to look for irreversible, immutable, genetic determinants of social inequalities between groups, Goldberg would have us acknowledge such determinants of gender differences, conceding, as he puts it in his book, that "we are what we are, and there is not the slightest shred of evidence that our most basic elements, the biologically based emotions that flow from our male and female physiologies and that guide our behavior, have changed singificantly since man first walked the earth...

...however, presumably when convincing scientific data on this point are presented Goldberg would acknowledge their validity, much as he would now have us accept the evidence that he presents for female/male genetic differences...

...But the only point in the discussion in Patriarchy was that—as even the genetic-IQ proponent would surely admit—the evidence for the sex differences I discuss is infinitely stronger...

...Doctors receive high status in the U.S...

...My point in the quoted section was that arguments over black-white differences rest on evidence from one society in which blacks are a minority, that there is no direct physiological evidence for black-white differences equivalent to the hormonal evidence, and that even if black-white genetic differences relevant to social life do exist they concern capacity rather than motivation...

...The usual explanations—such as those emphasizing physical strength, the maternal role, or technology and contraception—are disconcordant with the ethnographic evidence and ignore the physiological evidence mentioned below...

...With this revision of his book, where either weakness or strength explains dominance, Goldberg throws a sop to feminist critics but emerges more paradoxical than parsimonious...

...Rather than invoking two contradictory "physiologically rooted" psychological states as the cause of dominance, it would seem logical (and also, empirically testable) to consider an unambiguous physiological source, for instance male hirsuteness or male height...

...and the 17th-century Montagnais, where women "in nearly every instance...

...Devra Lee Davis, in her review of my The Inevitability of Patriarchy, does neither...

...While even the most primitive societies (whatever the yardstick) have the institutions I discuss, one might argue that their rudimentary hierarchy, low division of labor and differentiation, and high status attached to the maternal role males cannot fill limit the importance of the physiomotivational differentiation by limiting the necessary environmental cues in a way that the very nature of modern society precludes...

...the fact that I do not like the idea either is hardly much of an argument...

...Arguing that both anthropological and endocrinological evidence demonstrate a physiological basis for male dominance, Goldberg commits sevCOMMUNICATIONS 301 era...

...To argue that male/female differences in animal emotional behavior probably apply to human differences in emotional and other behavior is a further misconstruction of the scientific evidence on Goldberg's part...

...With his afterthought Goldberg discloses the serious link between physiological determinism of gender and that of race, however that is conceived...

...Money and Ehrhardt report that these twins, now one female and one male, exhibit "normal" gender identities...

...Reciprocally, I would not want to insult serious men scholars by failing to note the lack of insight in Goldberg's argument, its theoretical contradictions, and its uncritical faith in scientific evidence...

...doctors are men...

...I have done so in the March '75 American Anthropologist...

...Now: Davis's response to the argument I present is to invoke irrelevancies, on the one hand, and incorrect assertions on the other...

...These castrated males, with necessarily lower levels of plasma testosterone, provided bloody aggressive leadership, according to the Japanese historian of biomedical science, Yoshikio Omura...

...Ens...

...Such a muddled attempt underlies positings of the natural superiority of women or men...

...Steven Goldberg Comments I can understand that Dissent would greet with something less than enthusiasm a work that emphasizes the physiological roots of behavior—even I would prefer that a journal of the Left underrate, rather than exaggerate, the importance of physiological differentiation to behavior and institution...

...Moreover, leaders are not, as Goldberg notes, the physically strongest or most dominant (as measured by levels of plasma testosterone...

...they have been successful in surgically and chemically changing persons born with ambiguous genitalia into "normal" males and females...

...E) The central fallacy of the sociological approach taken by Davis is the assumption that social values are to a great extent independent of—and can act as counterpoise to—the physiomotivational differentiation...

...I (Patriarchy): Males attain the overwhelming numbers of positions in political hierarchies and all other hierarchies from which they are not excluded...

...Davis acknowledges that the anthropological and physiological evidence I present is "impressive," but then proceeds to attack the concept of "natural''—as if my argument were supported by nothing more than a metaphysical invocation of "naturalness" as explanation of behavior...

...Goldberg fails to appreciate that asking questions about irreducible, natural bases of social phenomena presumes the epistemological possibility of knowing the roots of these phenomena...

...In his footnote Goldberg adds that the notion of black/white genetic differences as relevant to social life is not an "idea" he likes...

...B) Though one would not know it from Davis's review, the purpose of Patriarchy is to offer a parsimonious explanation of these empirical facts...

...This is the assertion that technology and other modern economic considerations are of sufficient importance to motivation to override the physiological differentiation...

...The point about modern society is that it is virtually defined by the hierarchy, division of labor, and differentiation of (achieved) status that are the necessary cues and channels...

...Without considerable background in developmental embryology, it is quite difficult to understand the current issues involved in the relationship between fetal hormonalization and adult dominance behavior...

...Rather it influences the subcortical, or limbic, systems, the area of emotions...

...To some of these—such as generalizations about physiology no longer being important to motivation—one can merely say, "says who...

...The members of every population base their expectations of male and female behavior on previous experience...

...A critical understanding of science and its functions in society comes into its own only when it rejects the false absolute and blind domination of naive faith in science, as exemplified by Steven Goldberg's quixotic work...

...To the extent that a society has any hierarchy at all, to the extent that it has any values of any kind, and to the extent that it does not segregate males and females, to this extent will it be unable to avoid the institutions I discuss...

...However, one of their most startling cases involved the sex reassignment of a normal male twin as a female, following a surgical mishap at the age of seven months that permanently damaged his penis...

...Experimental animal studies such as those of Rose and associates show significant shifts in level of plasma testosterone as the dominance position of male rhesus monkeys is manipulated experimentally...

...the authority system is concordant with this...

...Despite such evidence, Goldberg claims that "the boy's socialization still flows from society's acknowledging biological reality," as though society socializes people according to some primordial need...

...A) Every one of the thousands of societies on which we have any sort of evidence has manifested three institutions...

...To term something human nature under this schema is but another way of pronouncing it unchangeable, with a Lysenkoist twist to be sure...

...2 (Male Attainment): The nonmaternal roles given highest status—whichever they are in any given society—tend to be attained by males...

...To the Soviet Union (with its 96.9 percent male Central Committee), to China (in which 67 of the 72 ministries are headed by males while the other five positions are vacant), to Israel (in which 93 percent of the Parliament is male), to the United States (which, for all the brave words and clenched fists, has fewer women in Congress than it did two decades ago), or to Sweden (whose 13 ministers are all male...

...The former need not concern us here...

...As numerous researchers in the field have noted, it is easy to misconstrue the mere correlation of plasma testosterone levels with dominance behavior in animals as grounds for some presumed causal relationship between the two...

...every society's values rest on the assumption that males are more "aggressive" (i.e., manifest dominance behavior more readily and more strongly) because every society's children and adults observe that males are more "aggressive...

...Positing causality in Goldberg's assertive fashion hardly provides an answer to the question of causality, except insofar as it exemplifies the hazards of proof by assertion...

...In the epilogue to his book Goldberg describes as an "insult to serious women scholars" the tendency to celebrate feminist insight and ignore feminist theoretical contradictions...

...But even if all societies had populations evenly divided between the races and even if all societies were ruled by whites (or blacks), the evidence supporting the existence of relevant genetic differences would not be nearly as strong as it is for sexual differences...

...for example, the question of the ways in which social values exaggerate the importance of the physiological by making qualitative, discrete, and absolute that which is—on a physiological-behavioral level—quantitative, continuous, and statistical, and the argument that all stereotypes are "true" in that they reflect a reality (whatever the etiology of the reality...

...The very attempt to search for presumably immutable genetic 302 COMMUNICATIONS characteristics (contemporary geneticists employ no concept of immutability) of any group of people is itself reflective of an• ideological glorification of human nature...

...One part of the crisis of social theory relates quite directly to its failures to attack the mythic scientific respect of science for science...

...He still does not understand that the decision to collect certain kinds of data itself reflects definite interests and assumptions about science...

...when we refer to Abe Beame as "an 'aggres300 COMMUNICATIONS sive' man who will get to the top" we are not talking about physical strength...

...The strongest evidence that there are not "irreversible differences in the CNS," which Goldberg refers to in his book, is provided by the pioneering studies of Money and Ehrhardt who have worked with gender identity changes...

...In the U.S...

...More important are the incorrect assertions...

...and relatively lower status in the Soviet Union...

...Current studies of rocking of newborns in our society demonstrate unconscious parental differences in cuddling of female and male infants...

...I titled the book The Inevitability of Patriarchy because it behooves anyone proposing a theory that claims to be scientific to specify the conditions under which the theory would be shown to be incorrect...

...C) Even if we had none of the physiological evidence, the anthropological evidence alone would be sufficient to force us to posit a physiologically rooted motivational differentiation, such that males are more strongly motivated toward whatever behavior is necessary for attainment of hierarchical position and status...

...formal logical fallacies, as well as substantive scientific errors...

...An area where Goldberg commits errors in both logic and science is one that easily baffles the layperson...

...Leacock's note in the American Anthropologist, March 1975, refers to two groups without male dominance and patriarchy: the Paliyans of India, where "neither spouse can order the other, and neither, by virtue of sex, or age, is entitled to great voice in matters of mutual concern...

...On its own terms, then, Goldberg's univeralistic theory is "incorrect...

...Davis refer when she claims the importance of technology...

...The lack of universality of patriarchy and male dominance falsifies Goldberg's claims for a physiological primum movens for patriarchy, since these phenomena vary culturally...

...The very point of Patriarchy is that the institutions discussed are present regardless of changes in any other technological, economic, or social variables...

...I cannot, in this short space, review the argument presented in Patriarchy in sufficient detail to demonstrate all of Davis's confusions...

...Another problem area in this respect is provided by the natural observations of Esser and his colleagues of a group of gibbons (Hylobates Iar) which exhibit coequal dominance between females and males (when dominance is measured in terms of who leads to the water, etc...

...What then of the apparently ordered scientific objections that Goldberg offers...

...Goldberg's scientific error in this field is a subtle one, also reflecting his tendency to cross species when convenient, in search of evidence for critical fetal hormonalization...

...THE ABOVE logical and scientific errors are by far not the most insidious aspect of Goldberg's analysis...

...I do not know whether genetic differences are relevant to racial IQ differences...

...That would mean attempting to explain what is basic in terms of what is based on it...

...But I do think that an author has the right to expect that a reviewer will at least provide the reader with a summary of the author's argument and attempt to counter that argument (rather than a series of silly assertions that the author never made...

...Thus, when Ashley Montagu observes that women are healthier than men he is describing the expressions and not the causes or bases of gender differences...

...Rose Laub Coser has warned us to be very suspicious about what people toss off as asides or trivia, for in such minimizing efforts they often betray major weaknesses...

...The emotional-behavioral differentiation that is a result of the male-female physiological dimorphism can be conceptualized as either a greater male "drive" toward dominance in hierarchies and male-female relationships or as a greater male "need" for such dominance...

...q In a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Mental Health (1I1:4), these early scientific analyses of racial differences are discussed by Milton Schwebel, "The Inevitability of Ideology in Psychological Theory...

...The evidence provided by the role of hormones in human behavior and by controlled medical and scientific studies of other mammals conclusively demonstrates that the testicularly generated fetal hormonalization of the male CNS promotes earlier and more extensive maturation of the brain structures that mediate between male hormones and outward behavior, thereby rendering the male hypersensitive to the presence of the hormones that energize dominance behavior and sensitize for dominance response...