CHAPTER IV
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.