Abstract
Nature, as depicted in biological science, is a man’s world. For researchers inevitably project the visions their imaginations, and the attitudes their life experiences make available,1 and most biologists have been men. A feminist task is to reconsider patriarchal images: to understand them as reflections of a male mentality; to consider whether they even answer any questions feminists wish to ask; and to remake the image of nature in metaphors conformable to women’s reality.
. . . with the dawn of scientific investigation it might have been hoped that the prejudices resulting from lower conditions of human society would disappear, and that in their stead would be set forth not only facts, but deductions from facts, better suited to thedawn of an intellectual age . . . .
The ability, however, to collect facts, and the power to generalize and draw conclusions from them, avail little, when brought into direct opposition to deeply rooted prejudices.
Eliza Burt Gamble, The Evolution of Woman (1894)
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Notes
Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966).
Dobzhansky is discussed in note 49; Lewontin in note 20, and Hutchinson cited on p. 79.
Eugene P. Odum, typically, uses the expression in passing in Fundamentals of Ecology (New York: Saunders, 1971), p. 241. It becomes a major element in an extended militaristic metaphor developed in a recent popularization by Harvard Assistant Professor Robert Cook in Natural History magazine, ‘Reproduction by duplication,’ 89 (1980), 91: “[W]hile oaks and maples produce tall trunks and overtop other individuals, a spreading clone subverts from within — or rather beneath .... “This is how grasses gradually acquire turf, and the process has been aptly compared to guerilla warfare. At its leading edge, a large [system of runners], extensively interconnected, presents an array of advanced raiders, each provisioned by an elaborate logistical network occupying already conquered terrain. The tactical advantage of this competitive strategy depends upon the physiological capacity and duration of the supply Unes....” Cook goes on to discuss the evolution of such plants in similarly combative language (pp. 92-93): “a long, protracted combat sets in,” “many die at the front... others advance supplied from the rear”; one plant “slowly retreats,” while another is “quickly invaded and conquered,” and “they continue to skirmish, each well entrenched and none able to oust the others.” It is difficult for any reader to remember that the underlying events all this refers to are cell divisions or distensions.
R. L. Trivers, ‘The evolution of reciprocal altruism,’ in The Sociobiology Debate, ed. Arthur L. Kaplan (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). See also the bibliography compiled by Alan Miller, The Genetic Imperative: Fact and Fantasy in Sociobiology (Toronto: Pink Triangle Press, 1979), for additional sources.
Darwin had been especially impressed by the general resemblance but reduced size and slightly altered character of living reptilian species and fossil dinosaurs. He was also struck by the remarkable modifications of species which fitted them for particular habitats (for instance the specially shaped beaks of groups of finches each largely restricted in its habits to one or another island in the Galapagos archipelago, and all of them resembling a mainland type from which he deduced they had originated). In addition, he observed and collected an immense variety of previously unknown species, and saw some of the diversity of human societies (through the racist eyes of the era, which made him view native tribesmen as being closer to primates than to “civilized” man). Finally, he became imbued with a feeling for gradual change in nature over long periods of time from his acquaintance with Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian geological theories. A good introduction to Darwin’s work and life is the biography by Gavin de Beer, Charles Darwin (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1963). H. E. Gruber and P. H. Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: Dutton, 1974) is helpful on Darwin’s intellectual development during the period when he formulated his theory of natural selection. Michael Ruse synthesizes the most recent scholarship on the scientific, philosophical, religious and social context of The Origin of Species in The Darwinian Revolution — Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
Peter Vorzimmer, ‘Darwin’s questions on the breeding of animals,’ Journal of the History of Biology 2 (1969): 269–281.
George Grinell, ‘The rise and fall of Darwin’s first theory of transmutation,’ Journal of the History of Biology 7 (1974): 272. Mendel’s findings on the mathematical regularities of characteristics across generations of sweet pea hybrids impressed neither Darwin nor his contemporaries. See De Beer, Darwin, pp. 170-171.
Two of several useful studies of Darwin’s debt to Malthus are: Peter Vorzimmer, ‘Darwin, Malthus, and the theory of natural selection,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 527–542 and Peter J. Bowler, ‘Malthus, Darwin and the concept of struggle,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 631-650.
T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798] (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1970), p. 72.
Looking backward we know that Malthus was wrong in his interpretation. He had not identified a situation controlled simply or even fundamentally by laws of nature, but one resulting from political and economic motives and choices — in particular the early effects of rapid urbanization and capital accumulation. Likely as not, an increase in food supply permitted the population rise and even encouraged it, although the debate about whether “over” population related mainly to food supply, historically, continues. See, for instance, Thomas McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population (New York: Academic Press, 1976) and another view in Etienne van de Walle’s review, ‘Accounting for population growth,’ Science 197 (1977): 652-653.
Darwin did follow Malthus in worrying over the human consequences of interference with “nature” (Descent of Man I [1871], p. 168): “We civilised men ... do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment .... Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”
Discussions of the relationship between Darwin’s ideas and the Malthusian-Spencerian climate of thought in England include Ruse, Darwinian Revolution, pp. 150-155, R. M. Young, ‘Malthus and the evolutionists: the common context of biological and social theory,’ Past and Present 43 (1969): 109–145, Derek Freeman, ‘The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,’ Current Anthropology 15 (1974): 211-237, and Sandra Herbert’s remarks on these sources in The place of man in the development of Darwin’s theory of transmutation, II,’ Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 155-227 on pp. 195-196.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species [second edition, 1860] (New York: New American Library, 1958), p. 450.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species [second edition, 1860] (New York: New American Library, 1958) Ibid., p. 75.
‘Darwin’s notebooks on the Transmutation of Species,’ Part VI, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series 3 (1967): 142 [MS. p. 135].
Anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin realized the limited scope of the competitive vision when he wrote in Mutual Aid (1902) that during episodes of struggle “the whole portion of the species, which is affected by the calamity, comes out of the ordeal so impoverished in vigour and health that no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of keen competition.” Moreover, he put his finger on the narrowness of conception, the fixation upon and fetishization of a relatively infrequent occurrence: “how false is the view of those who speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims. One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a succession of war massacres. Association and mutual aid are the rule with mammals.” Still, Kropotkin’s biological ideas, which were largely ignored, would not have disturbed the essentially competitive model anyway, for he still placed mutual aid into a competitive framework as the strategy a species uses to gain the upper hand in relation to other species.
See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 167, 169, 179, 187, 189. In many social-economic situations, for instance in the workplace, the conviction of scarcity (of people, money, markets, etc.) is an artificial construct men seem to impose in order to establish a competitive and hierarchical situation (competitive against one another and against the milieu which they define as “external”). Accustomed to the rules of such milieux (or, as Chodorow or Dorothy Dinnerstein might suggest, blocking memories of childhood powerlessness in an institution which is its antithesis) they recreate competitive rules and hierarchical structures again and again.
Eleanor Vander Haegen and Michael Gross, ‘Feminist science: a vision for the future,’ in Toward a Feminist Analysis: Proceedings of the Women & Society Symposium, eds. Buff Lindan and Carey Kaplan (Winooski, VT.: The St. Michael’s College Press, 1981), pp. 21–36.
Jared Diamond cites the observations on chickadee population shifts by a Russian ornithologist who “surmised that the retreat” of one species resulted from its poorer adaptation “in the face of competition” with an expanding species from a neighboring region. “Here,” Diamond writes, “is a case where the development of niche segregation (and the refinement of reproductive isolation) was actually observed.” (‘Niche shifts and the rediscovery of interspecific competition’, American Scientist 66 (1978): 322–331 on p. 325, our emphasis) But was competition the underlying cause? Or was it an instance of a crucial change in micro-climate, or parasites, or ... ? Some evidence shows that two closely related species living in the same region differ more markedly in certain structures than the same species living in different localities. (Ibid., p. 326) The assumption is that competition exacerbates differences. But again all we see are the demographic, behavioral, or structural consequences which constitute the “evidence” for competition.
Richard Lewontin, ‘Adaptation,’ Scientific American 239(3): 213–229, September, 1978 is eloquent about the difficulties in adaptation and niche theory: such features as circularity, untestability, and unavoidable simplification of complex physiological or genetic interrelations in an organism.
J. Diamond, ‘Niche shifts’, p. 324.
Robert E. Ricklefs, The Economy of Nature (Portland, Oregon: Chiron Press, 1976), p. 266.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Odum, Fundamentals, p. 217 injects competition in a similarly misleading way when he describes Gause’s laboratory study of two species of Paramecium grown together, in which, after sixteen days, only one species survived. In this “‘classic’ example of competitive exclusion,” Odum reports that “neither organism attacked the other or secreted harmful substances.” The survivor species “simply had a more rapid growth rate (higher intrinsic rate of increase) and thus ‘out-competed’ “ the other species. The quotation marks around “out-competed” are important because this is a case where competition is again the assumed invisible hand behind the phenomenon, in this case, “a more rapid growth rate.” Also, in reporting the research, Odum does not tell the full story. Depending upon culture conditions, food may be the limiting factor, or the accumulation of waste products may be, and the conditions will determine the outcome, the “superior competitor.” Nor does “higher intrinsic rate of increase” as a cause of competitive victory convey the spirit of Gause’s remark that “the superiority of one species over another in competition did not simply reflect the properties of those species taken independently, but was often essentially modified by their process of interaction.” (G. F. Gause, The Struggle for Existence [New York: Williams and Wilkins, 1934], p. 112, emphasis in original)
J. J. Christian et al., “The role of endocrines in the self-regulation of mammalian populations,” Recent Progress in Hormone Research 21 (1965): 501–578.
Gause, Struggle, pp. 74-75, 89.
Ricklefs, Economy, p. 269.
Odum, Fundamentals, p. 209.
Ibid., p. 210.
Diamond, ‘Niche shifts,’ p. 330.
The literature of social psychology, in “operationalizing” a concept like competition, scarcely explores the underlying emotions or attitudes. But it does document amply that competition is a male characteristic. Of 18 studies cited in Psychology Abstracts published between 1974 and 1978 concerning competition with respect to sex differences, 11 find (elementary school and college age) males are more competitive than females. All the rest but one find no difference. (The exception is a study in which female dyads were found to be more competitive than male dyads among a college age sample.) Another four studies show that boys are more self-serving in distributing rewards gained during competition than are girls. (See especially: John McGuire and Margaret Hanratty Thomas, ‘Effects of sex, competence, and competition on sharing behavior in children,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 [1975]: 490–494, and Mark A. Barnett et al., ‘Children’s reward allocation after competition: sex differences and the effect of task structure,’ Journal of Genetic Psychology 133 [1978]: 149-150.) On the other hand, as might be expected, there is some evidence that the sex of the experimenter intersects with the results obtained in such studies. (Vincent Skotko et al.,’ sex differences as artifact in the prisoner’s dilemma game,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 18 [1974]: 707-713.) An especially interesting finding is that in conditions of artificial crowding, male college students assume a competitive posture while females behave cooperatively. (Yakov Epstein and Robert Karlin, ‘Effects of acute experimental crowding,’ Journal of Applied Social Psychology 5 [1975]: 34-53.) Finally, even though American males seem on the whole to be more competitive than females, Indian males are even more competitive than American males of the same age, according to several cross-cultural studies. This may depend, according to one research team, on “a View of the world’ that is based on scarcity and limited resources.” (Daniel Druckman et al., ‘Cultural differences in bargaining behavior: India, Argentina, and the United States,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 20 [1976]: 413-452.) For an optimistic vision of cooperative possibilities see Dee G. Appley and Alvin E. Winder, “An evolving definition of collaboration and some implications for the world of work,” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 13 (1977): 279-291.
Diamond, ‘Niche shifts,’ op. cit., p. 329.
G. E. Hutchinson, ‘Summary,’ Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 22 (1957): 415–427 on p. 419.
Diamond, ‘Niche shifts,’ op. cit., p. 327.
V. C. Wynne-Edwards, ‘Population control in animals,’ Scientific American (August, 1964): 68–74, argues specifically that territoriality is a way to insure that food scarcity never becomes the limiting factor on population size in the birds he studied — since the territory staked out for a nest is more than adequate to feed the family nesting in it.
Gina Bari Kolata, ‘Primate behavior: sex and the dominant male,’ Science 191 (1976): 55–58 provides an entry into the main findings of recent research. See also Lila Leibowitz, Females, Males, Families (Bound Brook, CT.: Duxbury Press, 1978) and Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff and Frank E. Poirer (eds.) Primate Bio-Social Development (New York: Garland, 1977), especially Gershon Berkson, ‘The social ecology of defects in primates,’ (pp. 189-204) and Linda M. Fedigan and Laurence Fedigan, The social development of a handicapped infant in a free-living troop of Japanese monkeys,’ (pp. 205-222) which show that monkeys in the wild and in laboratory settings care for handicapped members of the group (“fitness” and “selective advantage” notwithstanding), and also the review article by Richard C. Savin-Williams and Daniel G. Freedman, ‘Bio-social approach to human development,’ (pp. 563-601) which reports (but plays down or tries to explain away) inconsistencies among various measures of dominance applied to the same group of children, disagreements between sociometric and behavioral ratings of dominance, and complexly intransitive dominance relationships (rather than linear hierarchies) among those “at the top.”
Eighteenth and early nineteenth century naturalists did worry about some of the specifics of the story: What about fossils of animals which manifestly no longer exist? When or how often did the Deluge come? But essentially the picture was one that had first been painted by Plato: the “Good” (i.e. God) conceived of the entire plan of creation, including all living forms, which follow a hierarchical chain from the slime up through man to the angels. Succeeding centuries of thinkers complicated the story by replacing a single hierarchical sequence with a group of hierarchies for particular categories — plants, invertebrates, vertebrates. (Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being [Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1964] ) Eighteenth century thinkers did recognize some competitive interactions in nature — usually in a rather aristocratic form, in terms of a chivalrous competition among stags for a female, for instance. But even where they did recognize competition, they did not see it leading to change but instead to promoting stability: eliminating the damaged or weaker members of a species kept it true to type.
Historical perspective is provided by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday-Anchor, 1978) and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Adrienne Rich, Of Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) succinctly describes the current situation (p. 270): “A male-dominated technological establishment and a male-dominated population control network view both the planet and women’s bodies as resources to be seized, exploited, milked, excavated, and controlled. Somehow, in the nightmare image of an earth overrun with starving people because feckless, antisocial women refuse to stop breeding, we can perceive contempt for women, for the children of women, and for the earth herself.” Susan Griffin explores these ideas on a more metaphorical level in Woman and Nature (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein sees the same connections through psychoanalytic theory in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); and the ethical and political dimensions are explored in H. B. Holmes, B. B. Hoskins and M. Gross (eds.) Birth Control and Controlling Birth: Women-Centered Perspectives (Clifton, N.J.: Humana, 1981). On hysteria, see Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday, 1972)
Others who have contributed so far to this analysis include Griffin, Woman and Nature, Donna Haraway, ‘Animal sociology and a natural economy of the body politic, parts I and II,’ Signs (Autumn, 1978): 21–60; Ruth Hubbard, ‘Have only men evolved?’ in this volume;and Evelyn Reed, Sexism in Science (New York: Pathfinder, 1978). Discussing the history of theories of animal behavior, Donna Haraway observes (The biological enterprise: sex, mind and profit from human engineering to sociobiology,’ Radical History Review 20 [1979]: 206-237 on pp. 232-233): “Nature, including human nature, has been theorized and constructed on the basis of scarcity and competition. Moreover, our nature has been theorized and developed through the construction of life science in and for capitalism and patriarchy. That is part of the maintenance of scarcity in the specific form of appropriation of abundance for private and not common good. It is also part of the maintenance of domination in the form of escalating logics and technologies of command-control systems fundamental to patriarchy. To the extent that these practices inform our theorizing of nature, we are still ignorant and must engage in the practice of science. It is a matter for struggle. I do not know what life science would be like if the historical structure of our lives minimized domination. I do know that the history of biology convinces me that basic knowledge would reflect and reproduce the world, just as it has participated in maintaining an old one.”
A few representative items in this controversial literature include: Alice T. Day and Lincoln H. Day, ‘Cross-national comparisons of population density,’ Science 181 (1973): 1016–1023; Patricia Draper, ‘Crowding among hunter-gatherers: the !Kung bushmen,’ Science 182 (1973): 301-303; and Orner R. Galle et al., ‘Population density and social pathology: what are the relations for man?’ Science 176 (1972): 23-30.
Sharon Shepela, ‘Feminism as the defining concept for feminist disciplines,’ paper presented at ‘Women and Society: Past, Present and Future — A Symposium,’ (St. Michael’s College, Winooski, VT., March, 1979). Also see Mary Daly’s brilliant and wide-ranging radical feminist analysis of conventional patriarchal disciplines in Gyn/ Ecology (Boston: Beacon, 1979).
Elizabeth Fisher, Women’s Creation (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1979). Also, Leibowitz, Females, males, families; Reed, Sexism in Science; Hubbard, ‘Have only men evolved?’ and Haraway, ‘Animal sociology.’
The entire notion of uncontrolled fecundity, associated with women, in the process of reproduction, needs further qualification. The historical evidence on human societies suggests that women have long used a number of family limitation practices from herbal abortifacients to infanticide. Social and dietary patterns seem also to have played a role in regulating fertility. Women’s fecundity has therefore never been “out of control” except when catastrophically disrupted by colonialism, by the unbalanced exportation of western medicine without the corresponding pattern of economic and social organization. See Susan George, How the Other Half Dies (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1977), and F. M. Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977). Similarly, as noted earlier, even under the artificial conditions of laboratory investigations, rodent populations are self-limiting with respect to population density. In short, we should probably look elsewhere than at unbridled fecundity constrained only by competition to find the order underlying evolutionary change.
Field studies of “adaptive radiation” — the process through which “a group of organisms with a common ancestor evolves and speciates to fill many of the adaptive zones in the environment” — exemplify the difficulty with using a concept of rigidly-defined species in relation to a historical process of evolution. In Elizabeth C. Dudley’s study of this process in relation to plant variations at diverse altitudes (‘Adaptive radiation in the Melastomataceae along an altitudinal gradient in Peru,’ Biotropica 10 (1978): 134–143) “species” reduces, in terms of the practical collection of data, to a collection of measurements of such factors as leaf length and width, shape, surface, texture, petiole and internode lengths, etc. Some of these vary with respect to altitude. But instead of considering the evolution of distinct species — which is what the theory is about — this research correlates variations in plant characters with continuous variations in factors like altitude, climate, soil type. Genotype — the genetic make-up which constitutes the basis for evolutionary change — is not studied directly but only indirectly in terms of phenotype — the actual expression in plant morphology of the interaction between genes and environment. A further reason why genotype is not being investigated is related: the phenotype which a given genotype may produce varies greatly in response to environmental factors (“phenotypic plasticity”). But even careful studies of phenotypic plasticity are not very informative about genotype, which is what distinct species are defined by. For instance, when four samples of a species of columbine growing in four diverse habitats in western Massachusetts are studied carefully it remains difficult to assess whether one of the populations “either did not have genes to allow plasticity ... or ... if present, they were unable to express significant differences in the environments present”. The same author further concludes that “none of the characteristics studied were under strong genetic control” and that significantly varying characteristics (with respect to environment) are “under strong environmental control and have a high degree of plasticity.” In particular, “no consistent pattern emerged in the expression of the various characteristics suggesting that different sets of genes were operating on different characteristics in the different environments.” It becomes essentially an arbitrary imposition to apply such categorical concepts as species, race, variety on the immense variability of such an organism in its several environments. (Germain LaRoche, ‘An experimental study of population differences in leaf morphology of Aquilegia canadensis L. (Ranuncu-laceae),’ American Midland Naturalist 100 (1978): 341-349. The study reveals typical methodological problems: misapplication of statistical methods, and a failure to use a procedure which might avoid experimental bias. These methodological difficulties do not disturb the validity of our observation of the arbitrariness of taxonomic categories.) As for adaptation, a study of two bumblebee species’ foraging behavior on two species of flower shows that any attempt to study adaptive relationships must be enormously complicated. Although the purpose of this study (David W. Inouye, ‘Resource partitioning in bumblebees: experimental studies of foraging behavior,’ Ecology 59 (1978): 672-678) is to test the hypothesis that “if bumblebees are indeed competing for food resources, there should be observable changes in foraging behavior (i.e. a niche shift),” it illustrates that the simple relationship between the length of a bumblebee proboscis and the depth of the corolla tube from which it gathers nectar is very complex. For the effective depth of nectar in the corolla is not determined simply by corolla length but also by the frequency and legnth of bumblebee visits, time of day, shifts in division of labor in the hive, age of the bees, time of season, and probably also such climaticvariables as temperature and rainfall. In short, a static relationship of bumblebee and flower morphologies belies the actual subtlety of the processes of bumblebee and flower behavior and consequently questions arise about the supposed examples of adaptive “closeness of fit.” (The paper, by the way, does indeed demonstrate that shorter proboscis bees will forage on a long corolla flower when long proboscis bees are removed, and — unsurprisingly — concludes that “the results of my study imply the action of competition between bumblebees in montane environments.” Then, typically, it redefines competition to mean consumption: “interference competition was never observed during the study, and I have never observed aggressive interactions between bumblebee species in the East River Valley. Competition for nectar probably occurs through direct depletion of resources.” [pp. 676-677])
Although it would be presumptuous to suggest here how to construct an alternative evolutionary theory, two biological mechanisms deserve some consideration: pre-adapta-tion and isolation. Isolation may play an important role in the formation of new species without requiring that competitive pressure be involved. “Pre-adaptation” shifts the emphasis in the development of new adaptations from differential reproduction to the production of the innovation in the first place. T. Dobzhansky discusses evolution in relation to these factors and manages to avoid the term “competition.” (Yet he retains the concept in his ideas about fitness: “gene constellations that fit the environment survive better and reproduce more often than those that fit less well.” [Genetics of the Evolutionary Process (1970), p. 431]) Preadaptation — the fortuitous acquisition of a characteristic which happens to suit the variant for a slightly different environment or somewhat alters its behavior — may itself serve as an isolating mechanism; if so, the need to invoke competition to account for the differentiation of species is further diminished. Moreover, any pre-adaptation which significantly alters form, geographical range, or behavior may shift the variant slightly outside the accustomed range of its major predator(s), thereby further promoting a prompt increase in its population.
Lynn White remarks (‘Historical Roots of our ecological crisis,’ Science 155 [1967]: 1203–1207): “by destroying pagan animism Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” Here we can make a psychological connection to patriarchal structures of thought and feeling. Deriving from the social structure of the family — with the father as toiler in the world and the mother as primary care-giver in the family — is the psychological contrast between the instrumental, goal-directed, manipulative tendency of men, and the interpersonal, empathic, relational style of women. (Chodorow, Mothering [see note 17 above]) William Leiss (The Domination of Nature [Boston: Beacon Press, 1974], p. 34) qualifies White’s statement with the observation that “Christian doctrine sought to restrain man’s earthly ambitions by holding him accountable for his conduct to a higher authority,” but notes further (p. 35) that as the conflict of religion and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century shed the sense of man’s subordination to God, it maintained and extended the vision of man as “lord of nature.” (Leiss also notes two other sources fostering an attitude of control and domination: the ambivalent notions of fear and loss of control alongside desire for benefits which attach to instruments of manipulation (pp. 27-29); and the intense interest in nature and its operations as embodied in Renaissance magic. Again there are strong sexual identifications in the relation of woman and nature as entities to be “penetrated” for their “secrets” in the attitudes of the Renaissance alchemists. [See Sally Allen and Joanna Hubbs, Outrunning Atalanta — an investigation of the feminine image in alchemical transformation,’ Signs 6 (1980), 210-229.]) Thus an exploitative attitude toward nature conformable to patriarchal psychology was intrinsic to Christian doctrine and, as Judeo-Christian belief gave way to exclusive faith in science and technology, that attitude of mastery and domination persisted and strengthened, now uninhibited by any wider ethical framework from religion.
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Gross, M., Averill, M.B. (2003). Evolution and Patriarchal Myths of Scarcity and Competition. In: Harding, S., Hintikka, M.B. (eds) Discovering Reality. Synthese Library, vol 161. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0101-4_5
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