Male and female
From Professor T. E. Rowell
Sir: Linklater is mistaken. The steroid hormones are common not only to all mammals but to all vertebrates, and so must have evolved at least 400,000,000 years ago. His argument for an inevitable correlation between these hormones and sex-typical behaviour is somewhat weakened by the image of the "receptive, passive, gentle and emotional" female codfish or crocodile, whose reproductive behaviour is just as surely mediated by oestrogens and progesterone. Male rats and human beings may be more aggressive than females; male hamsters and talopoin monkeys are less so. Female adders and red deer care for their young, and male sea horses and marmoset monkeys do so. So what? Actually, infant-rearing is a joint project for many mammals, fish, and birds and neither parent is likely to be successful alone.
Dr Linklater says "it would be a crazy society which allowed its mores to be dictated by the exception ... " I suggest it would be an even crazier species which, depending for its success on increased intellectual powers (in both sexes) demanded that half of its members deliberately restrict such prowess to pander to the fragile self-esteem of the other half. In such totally non-reproduction related activities as playing games with computers or passing exams in medical school (the subject of an experiment with very similar results to those of Dr Mack) we should like to be trained and judged according to our interests and abilities and not according to the colour of our-receiving blanket or our skin.
Dr Linklater's womanly women, who do not of course limit their breeding, would produce a baby a year in the ten years he would like them to devote to reproduction. One fifth of societies' women behaving like that would be sufficient to maintain the population at its present dangerously inflated level., knd some of us, without much hair on our faces, find we can actually rear quite nice children at the same time as we aggressively compete. _
T. E. Rowell
2301 Rose St, Berkeley, California 94708
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