4 - Sex and science

Summary

As coherent ways of understanding who we are, our racial identities are historically rooted and situationally limited. Yet, the analogous idea for our identities as women and men seems to be quite implausible. We have seen that the features that determine which sex one is can be as arbitrary as the features that determine which race one is. Nevertheless, since the division of human beings into two sexes is at the root of our form of sexual reproduction, that division would seem to be less arbitrary than the division of human beings into a set of races. Indeed, insofar as human history has the reproduction of the species as its prerequisite, sex identities would seem to be quite different from identities and identifications that result from history, such as racial or national identities. Instead, sex identities would seem to form the condition for our having a history at all.

Furthermore, if evolutionary psychology, one branch of behavioral ecology that studies human beings, is correct, the role that sexual reproduction plays in human evolution means that the characteristic traits and proclivities of the two different sexes just follow. Hence, gender as well as sex is arguably less situational than other identities. Race cannot be found in our genes even if, as Armand Marie Leroi insists, groups can be distinguished from one another insofar as they each possess a set of genetic variants in common that “are collectively rare” in the other groups.