The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture

By Roger N. Lancaster
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003
442pp., 35 b/w illustrations. Trade, $55; paper £15.95.
ISBN: 0-520-20287-2; ISBN: 0-520-23620-3.

Reviewed by Pia Tikka
Researcher in University of Art and Design
Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 Helsinki, Finland

Pia.Tikka@uiah.fi

If there is any "trouble" with nature, it must be a cultural phenomenon conceptualized by human beings only. In the vivid, sharp, and fun-to-read study, anthropologist Roger Lancaster describes his "trouble" from the perspective of social constructionism. His criticism points out that the popularized pseudoscientific claims about nature and laws of evolution applied to the social life sustain identity politics that tend to be conservative, and even harmful, where they ought to be "as radical as reality." Lancaster is concerned about what he calls "genomania" - the rise of naturalizing tendencies in society, shaped by socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, and put forward by short-sighted media. These tendencies nest reactionary attitudes, giving "natural" explanations to unjust institutions, e.g. gender inequalities, racism, class stratification, war, even genocide. According to Lancaster, they ultimately derive from the maximalist logic of "genetic competition" and heteronormativity, thus, undermining the progress in acknowledging rights of sexual marginal groups as well as squeezing a range of other real-life diversities to the edge of socio-political "normalcy".

The book includes a wide range of examples from the popular culture, carefully analyzed and exposed with witty irony by Lancaster. Along the process of reading, I started to pay attention to how the views of socio-biology and evolutionary psychology invade my everyday communication channels. In one of the cases, a personal e-mail to a group of female friends casually cites in length the research by Laura C. Klein et al. [1], which suggests that in stressful situation, instead of male fight-or-flight response, the hormone oxytocin released in woman, encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. In an other case, International Herald Tribune columnist celebrates the fact that particular scientific book supports his intuition about the difference between male and female brain: "Men – because of a tragic genetic flaw – cannot see dirt until there is enough of it to support agriculture" [2]. These extracts, from both private and public media, taken more or less seriously, can be seen to implicate, what Lancaster is most critical of - the idea of heteronormality as the dominant sociocultural (and assumed ancestral) environment.

Before getting Lancaster’s book in my hands I read an extensive approach to human evolutionary psychology [3], in which I was amazed to find research questions like "Why do women live after menopause?". So, I agree with Lancaster’s notion that evolutionary psychology seems to reduce some of the socio-cultural complexity into simplicities. Women are genetically oriented to social communication, household and children, while men are for fighting, football, and other goal-directed aggressions. All other social gender diversities are recognized only in relation to these evolutionary necessities.

Lancaster’s criticism is aware that the ossified sexual identities embodied in reproductive goals, combined with the idea of unchanging human nature drawing form imaginary ancestral life’s form, are not the "trouble" of natural reductionism only, but also appear as a pitfall for lesbigay studies, queer theory, and related forms of critical culture studies. He reminds that if the alternative views are established on the domain regulated by these pre-conceptual premises, there will be no real possibility for flux of radical changes.

According to Lancaster, the "natural" or "necessary", or the point where biology and culture meet, can’t be determined by genetic algorithms adapting to the environmental survival game. Instead it confirms the biological consequences of actual social arrangement –the cultural plasticity relating sexuality, gender, and the family. From my point of view this is not in direct conflict with the evolutionary psychological view, which suggests the phenotypic plasticity. The complexity of human behavior, based on organism’s ability to learn from experience, derives from wide range of demographic, ecological and social environments. Maybe all the "trouble" is reflecting the need of dialogue for emergence of novel cross disciplinary perspectives, and even more so, if it is about learning to be, in Lancaster’s words, "as radical as reality".


[1] Citation refers to research by S.E. Taylor, L.C. Klein, B. P. Lewis, T.L. Gruenewald, R.A.R. Gurung & J.A. Updegraff, "Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight," Psychol Rev, 107(3), pp. 41-429.

[2] D. Barry, "True fact: guys brains really are different," International Herald Tribune, No. 37545, p.22, (Nov. 22-23, 2003). Barry refers to the book by M. Gurian, What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works? (St. Martin's Press, 2003).

[3] L. Barrett, R. Dunbar, J. Lycett, Human Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Palgrave Publishers Ltd, 2002).