A short four years after Darwin published The Descent of Man , Antoinette Brown Blackwell politely questioned the author s objectivity in her own book, The Sexes throughout Nature . Blackwell admitted that Darwin had elegantly traced the evolution of masculine traits, like a peacock s rainbow of feathers or a mandrill s protruding canines. Blackwell s critique went largely unnoticed for decades. Indeed, throughout the past century, the female animal time and again has been described as passive, even coy, in popular magazines and academic journals alike. The scientific basis for these presentations, however, has been stretched thin to cover preconceived notions of gender.
Behaviorists can t escape the demons of subjectivity.
Take your average cop. According to one study, police officers using radar flag male drivers 50 percent more often than female drivers. Yet when officers judge speeding with the naked eye, they pull over men 250 percent more often, the valid trend becoming quintupled through stereotyping. Now consider your noble primatologist, lying on her back in the leech-infested underbrush of some festering jungle. Her binoculars are getting increasingly heavy to hold, the crick in her neck ever sharper, as she strains to discern the soap opera playing out in the branches 50 feet above.