Review of Paul Seabright, The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped
Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2012)
Herbert Gintis
September 2015
Modern technology and the social economic organization of contemporary advanced societies
have combined to initiate a vast and comprehensive restructuring of the social roles and cultural
values that relate the relationships between men and women. Technological changes in the
Twentieth century undermined household production of food, sanitation, education, and health
care, thus destroying the traditional division of labor between the sexes and rendering mother
and wife relatively free to explore alternative uses of her time and energy. The logical alternative
has been the workplace, where other technological changes reduced the importance of upper
body strength in the workplace, thus undercutting the previously crippling disadvantage of
women in attractiveness to employers. We are still dealing with the adjustment to a new modus
vivendi between the sexes in the advanced societies around the world.
A second seeming inexorable movement has been the development in the less developed
societies of urban areas in which technology and social structure follows a similar trajectory,
undermining the forms of patriarchal authority characteristic of the tribal, clannish, and
unaccountably authoritarian societies that have dominated human social life since the advent of
settled trade and agriculture some 10,000 years ago.
Writers and researchers of various stripes have expended huge amounts of effort to understand
this dynamical process and predict its future. Much of this effort is completely worthless, being
based on an arbitrary theological prejudice or philosophical speculation. Approaches applying
the scientific method, in particular those starting from evolutionary biology and modern
behavioral game theory, have been more promising, but even here many writers have embraced
untenable principles and thus produced unpersuasive analyses.
Paul Seabright’s new book is an entertaining, well written, highly informative, and persuasive
book is dedicated to countering the major pitfalls in the evolutionary analysis of the relations
between the sexes, and providing a balanced treatment that asserts positively what can
reasonably be asserted, and speculates creatively in dealing with the questions (there are many)
that remain unresolved.
Perhaps the two most common errors are to consider all differences in the behavior of men and
women the pure product of culture and socialization---the so-called “tabula rasa” or “blank
slate” assumption (incorrectly) attributed to the English philosopher John Locke and ably
debunked by Stephen Pinker in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
The fact is that humans are moderately sexually dimorphic, with males different from females
not only anatomically, but also is size, strength, and behavior in every society ever studied.
Seabright correctly argues that while it is possible that all behavioral differences are due to social
rather than genetic forces, the fact that there are many known differences between the male and
female brain suggest that this is not the case, although there appears to be no significant
difference in general cognitive capacity between the two. Seabright attributes this fact that in the
period of evolutionary emergence there was a marked sexual division of labor, but the challenges
were equally complex for men and women.
The second serious error is that of biological determinism. If the blank slate view is characteristic
of mindless liberalism, biological determinism is the refuge of mindless conservatism. According
to this view, there are extreme behavioral differences between men and women, and these cannot
be papered over by a veneer of egalitarian cultural ideology. Perhaps the most compelling
example of biological determinism is that women are naturally attracted to pair bonding and
sexual exclusivity while males are naturally attracted to promiscuity. This dichotomy is largely
true in many birds and mammals in which the female bears most of the cost of producing and
rearing young and is virtually assured of having her eggs fertilized, whereas males bear little of
the cost, can produce vast amounts of sperm at will, and whose major task is that of successfully
inseminating females. But, as Seabright stresses, there are many examples of sexually
adventurous females in various species, and this behavior can easily be the product of
evolutionary adaptation. I agree with Seabright that it is very likely that under the proper social
conditions, the sexual preferences of men and women may be virtually identical.
Seabright correctly concludes that there are no known biological difference between men and
women that preclude full gender equality, that the sexual division of labor is likely to become
more egalitarian for the foreseeable future, but there is no reason to believe that behavioral
difference between the sexes will ever disappear completely.
Part of the power of Seabright’s book is that he is a truly transdisciplinary behavioral scientist.
His training is in economics, but his knowledge of evolutionary biology and his acquaintance
with contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science is extensive, deep, and mature.