Pharyngula: Feminism is undermining human evolution!
Pharyngula has simply got to be my favorite blog. In this post, PZ Myers refutes an annoying pseudo-expert, William Tucker, who spews a lot of bogus biology on his roundabout way to bashing feminism.
Here’s a sample of Tucker’s article:
It is precisely because females play a dominant role and males are so passive and unambitious that bonobos did not produce an evolutionary line that led to human beings. . . feminism, in its most obviously primitive forms, is undermining human evolution. Everywhere in the Western world, the emancipation of women has initially led to rising divorce rates and plummeting births.
If PZ hadn’t already ripped this idiot apart, I’d get really mad. Tucker seems to claim that the differences between the human Y chromosome and chimp Y chromosome are the root cause of our species’ divergence – basically, everything important that separates humans from chimps is male, because women don’t have a Y chromosome. Tucker doesn’t seem to understand that the unpaired Y, unlike the paired X, is more vulnerable to picking up accidental garbage during cell division – changes that are most likely evolutionarily meaningless. In fact, over time the Y is losing little bits here and there: it’s shrinking! If, by undermining evolution, feminists are actually slowing shrinkage of the sacred Y, maybe Tucker should thank them?
Best of all, Tucker doesn’t seem to think “humanity” is evenly distributed between genders. If the Y is so essential, then it does follow that Y-deprived women wouldn’t be very advanced:
In other words, what differentiates us from our mammalian relatives is changes that have occurred in the male of the species. . .
As far back as 1972, Elaine Morgan, a feminist, writing in The Descent of Woman, noted that in fact the role of females hadn’t changed much from chimp to human. Mothers nurse and care for their offspring in basically the same way chimps do. In terms of social role, there really isn’t much difference between human females and other animals.
I’m not even going to get into the way he’s misusing Morgan’s words. This guy is, bluntly, a moron. I’m so glad PZ got to him first, and much more effectively than I could have. As it is, I’ll just conclude that people who don’t understand biology should refrain from invoking it to justify their politics. The real biologists tend to get offended.