Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

52 | HOW THE MIND WORKSnity ward, the circle would be complete and irrevocable. Culture wouldcondemn women to inferiority, and we would be enslaved to the bondageof cultural pessimism, disempowered by self-doubt from undertakingtransformative tasks.Nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should liveour lives. Some feminists and gay activists react with fury to the banalobservations that natural selection designed women in part for growingand nursing children and that it designed both men and women for heterosexualsex. They see in those observations the sexist and homophobicmessage that only traditional sexual roles are "natural" and that alternativelifestyles are to be condemned. For example, the novelist Mary Gordon,mocking a historian's remark that what all women have in commonis the ability to bear children, wrote, "If the defining quality of being awoman is the ability to bear children, then not bearing children (as, forinstance, Florence Nightingale and Greta Garbo did not) is somehow afailure to fulfill your destiny." I'm not sure what "the defining quality ofbeing a woman" and "fulfilling your destiny" even mean, but I do knowthat happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selectiondesigned us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for usto determine. In saying this I am no hypocrite, even though I am a conventionalstraight white male. Well into my procreating years I am, so far,voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources readingand writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and joggingin circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. ByDarwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not oneiota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But Iam happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jumpin the lake.Finally, what about blaming bad behavior on our genes? The neurbscientistSteven Rose, in a review of a book by E. O. Wilson in which Wilsonwrote that men have a greater desire for polygamy than women, accusedhim of really saying, "Don't blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies,it's not their fault they are genetically programmed." The title of Rose'sown book with Lewontin and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, is an allusion toJulius Caesar: