Evolutions Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden

Evolutions Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People Reviews

• 
  Alok Vaid-Menon

  People weaponize nature to justify homophobia and transphobia. They say that being LGBTQ is “against nature” because many of us don’t reproduce. But LGBTQ people aren’t faulty aberrations. We are fundamental to species and ecosystems. We should always question who gets to speak for nature. Often times the only stories we learn about nature are filtered through a patriarchal lens.
  
  Biology has incorrectly been leveraged as a vehicle to enforce rigid universals. Nature actually templates a plethora of possibilities of ways to express, cohabit, and live. Nature continually exceeds any attempts to be divided into neat categories. “Organisms flow across the bounds of any category we construct. In biology, nature abhors a category” (14). In fact, so-called “normal” people are actually as “genetically diverse as snowflakes” (215). When it comes to nature, diversity and complexity are the norm. That’s what makes a species stronger and more adaptive.
  
  Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Dr. Joan Roughgarden reminds us that biology is in fact a profound argument for natural gender and sexual diversity. She is an adaptionist biologist meaning she holds that “all behaviors and traits benefit organisms” and that the job of scientists is to “figure out how” (145). From this perspective: it’s not that LGBTQ expression is faulty. Rather, it requires us to ask more expansive questions. How might we expand our understanding of reproduction beyond the sex act to acknowledge all the ways that life is sustained? What role does LGBTQ expression play in community formation? The narrowing of gender and sexual diversity to the binary is what’s unnatural, not LGBTQ people.
  
  Roses, sunflowers, mangos, daffodils, pumpkins, lilies…The most common body form among plants is intersex (containing both ‘male’ and ‘female’ reproductive organs). Almost half of the animal kingdom is intersex. Clownfish, leopard slugs, red kangaroos, Vanuatu pigs, wallabies, and hyenas. The bluegill sunfish has three male genders, each reproduces in a different way. White-throated sparrows have two kinds of males and two kinds of females. They are many species where females are larger than males, where sex changes routinely occur, where males give birth, where organisms engage in non-reproductive sexual practices, and where organisms don’t directly reproduce. In many species, “males, not females, tend the nest” (27).
  
  These naturally occurring expressions are often dismissed by researchers. Historically when scientists have noted these expressions they tend to describe them negatively as “cross-dressing” or “deceptive.” Dr. Roughgarden argues that when we ignore this variation, we simplify the story of evolution and neglect how nature adapts. A thorough investigation of animal and plant life reveals that actually by and large bodies and genders do not conform to a binary model, that sex roles are often reversible, and that secondary sex characteristics have other functions than just heterosexual mating.
  
  For so long biologists have superimposed their own cultural standpoints on nature by viewing species diversity as hierarchal and establishing that conflict over control of females is a universal dynamic among species (against all evidence otherwise). This ignores the profound examples of collaboration that exist across species and reduces the complexity of kinship formation. In his earliest work Darwin actually viewed diversity as a positive asset for ecological community. His work has since been instrumentalized in the service of naturalizing eugenics and inequality.
  
  “Biology need not be a purveyor of essentialism, of rigid universals. Biology need not limit our potential. Nature offers a smorgasbord of possibilities for how to live” (180).
  
• 
  Alok Vaid-Menon

  Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden (who happens to be a trans woman) challenges Darwin’s theory of sexual selection by exposing how human-centric conceptions like heteronormativity and the sex binary have caused scientists to misapprehend both gender and genetic diversity across species. In doing show, she presents a powerful and refreshing approach to biology which understands science as a profound argument for the power and dynamism of natural diversity.
  
  Biology has incorrectly been weaponized as an instrument to enforce rigid universals, but actually nature templates a plethora of possibilities of ways to express, cohabit, and live. People are not homogenous, they are genetically diverse. Nature continually exceeds any attempts to be divided into neat categories. Dr. Roughgarden highlights a vibrant host of plant and animal species that challenge the conventional association of “nature” with heterosexuality and sex binary. The most common body form among plants and in almost half of the animal kingdom is intersex: many species make both small and large gametes during their lives. There are many species where females are larger than males, where sex changes routinely occur, where there are multiple sexes, where males give birth, where organisms engage in non-reproductive sexual practices, and where organisms don’t directly reproduce. These expressions are often deliberately ignored or dismissed by researchers.
  
  Dr. Roughgarden critiques Darwin for superimposing his particular sociocultural standpoint on nature by viewing species diversity as a hierarchy and by establishing that conflict over control of females is a universal dynamic among species. This reading deliberately neglects the profound examples of collaboration that exist across species and willfully reduces the complexity of collective reproductive and kinship formations. She reminds us that in his earlier work Darwin viewed diversity as a positive asset for ecological community, but that a particular rendition of his work has been deputized in the service of naturalizing patriarchy, eugenics, and other genocidal practices. Dr. Roughgarden presents several well-researched interventions including that bodies and genders do not conform to a binary model, that sex roles are reversible, and that secondary sex characteristics are not just for heterosexual mating.
  
  Dr. Roughgarden shines when talking about bio-diversity, but her sections on religion and indigenous gender formations are troubling and unnecessary.
• 
  Brownbetty

  This is an entertaining, educating, and fairly persuasive book. Roughgarden is very deliberately writing this book primarily to make an argument, and secondarily to educate. This is sometimes a slightly infelicitous mix; she uses general, rather than scientific vocabulary, most of the time, sometimes to the detriment of the argument she is making.
  
  Roughgarden is an evolutionary biologist, and some of the arguments she is making are are far more relevant to the field than to the layperson, so I may be misunderstanding her somewhat, but I believe she is arguing, basically: 1) Diversity is the engine of evolution, and when we classify diversity as deviance, we are, in the best case scenario, missing the point, and in the worst case scenario, doing actual harm to ecologies, species, and people. Specifically, we are misunderstanding sexual and gender diversity, because of our ideas of how gender works in humans.
  
  Her second disagreement with the field is, as I understand it, that 2) sexual selection is not even a thing. This point was much more fuzzily caught by me, because my understanding of this part of the theory is pretty surface. She seems to be arguing that, firstly, we should understand reproduction of sexed species to be a cooperative, rather than competitive endeavour, or at least, not discount cooperative theories of animal behaviour, just because we expect to see a competitive one. And secondly, sexual selection theory produces a lot of evo. psych. douchebaggery, so really, why keep it? (I'm going to be as up front as possible: I'm pretty sure her argument is better than I am representing it here! But I missed out on a lot of it.)
  
  I think Roughgarden is on her strongest ground when she argues that gender diversity in nature is far broader than even science usually represents it as. Anyone familiar with
  Humon's comics knows that nature has a lot of ways of doing gender, but Roughgarden goes further. In cases such as the
  side-blotched lizard, which in Humon's comics is described as having two male 'types', Roughgarden argues that as these male types demonstrate distinct reproductive behaviours, and distinct phenotypes, does it not make sense to speak of them as being different genders? If clownfish are born male, and may later become female, then really, does it not make more sense to say there is only one gender of clownfish?
  
  A note on vocabulary: Roughgarden is usually speaking of gender, but she sometimes refers to "biological sex" by which she means something highly specific: the property an organism has of producing large or small gametes. She doesn't care about your gonads, your hormones, your gender presentation, or your plumbing when she speaks of biological sex; she only cares about your gamete size. That is, she is a trans woman, and she would consider herself "biologically male." I would not generalize from this to make any assumptions about how any other trans folk might consider themselves, and in the common parlance, "biological sex" is usually used to make essentializing assumptions about gender. That is not how Roughgarden is using it. She means gametes. This obviously has nothing to do with how we deal with gender socially, since most people who have not given birth are simply assuming we have the gametes associated with the gender we were assigned at birth.
  
  Roughgarden argues that because we assume that animals are bi-gendered, bi-sexed, and 'naturally' heterosexual, we (by which she means both the population at large, and the scientific community) miss or misrepresent what is actually going on. She provides quite a few charming examples. One, that of the bighorn sheep, illustrates a problem I have with her vocabulary: she occasionally sacrifices accuracy for accessibility in ways that I think confuse the point. She delightfully describes the typical male bighorn sheep: he spends most of his life in an all male society, engaging in plenty of sexual activity with the other males. He only engages in sex with females during the rutting season, and only during the three or so days when a given female is receptive/permits it.
  
  Some males, however, are not interested in hot ram-on-ram action. These males live with the females year round, and adopt some female behaviours, like squatting to pee. Roughgarden points out that, rather hilariously, these males are considered aberrant, and somewhat 'effeminate.' And here is where it gets confusing. She says: "The 'aberrant' ram is the one who is straight—the lack of interest in homosexuality is considered pathological. [...] According to the researchers, what's aberrant is that a macho-looking bighorn ram acts feminine! He pees like a female—even worse than being gay!"
  
  And while she makes her point about the incredibly confused state of affairs that occurs when we try to impose our gender roles on animals, I find that the use of 'gay' and 'straight' and even homosexual and heterosexual, to a lesser degree, really confuse the issue. For one thing, it's not clear to me that the rams who don't have an interest in other rams are actually interested in ewes, and for another, 'male-oriented except for reproductive purposes' is not how we usually understand the term 'gay,' either. (I have no doubt that a non-zero, and perhaps substantial? number of gay men would be perfectly happy to have intercourse with a woman for a brief period, if the outcome was a child, and there was a socially supported mechanism for doing so, but that's not how the identity is constructed.)
  
  Which leads me to simultaneous frustration that Roughgarden does not go into more detail in her cases (Do the ewes engage in ewe-on-ewe? Does ram-on-ram decrease during mating season? SO MANY QUESTIONS) and also perfectly illustrates the problem with trying to impose human sexual orientations onto animals.
  
  (Pages 139-40 includes a hilarious account of agricultural science attempting to determine the genetic origin of gayness in sheep. Recommended universally.)
  
  Roughgarden also argues that a lot of same-gender animal sexual activity which is understood as either deceptive or occurring because the animal is too dumb to realize they are mounting another of their gender, is either because, a) the animal knows perfectly well what gender they are mounting, and prefers it that way, or because b) sexual activity can have survival benefits beyond propelling one's gamete's into the crucible of genetic recombination; it can be fun, promote social bonding, or be an exchange of favours. (I think this has something to do with her sexual selection argument, again, but I am SUPER NOT CLEAR ON THAT PART.)
  
  Roughgarden is skeptical-to-hostile to most forms of genetic engineering, cloning, etc., both because she distrusts capitalism's motives in interfering with the genome, and because, once again, it is a counter-diversity force. Fair enough on both points, lady.
  
  I found Roughgarden fairly persuasive, although she lost me when she got into the extreme biological nerdery. She goes into a level of chromosomal detail that was frankly quite wasted on me. She was most convincing (and in fairness, entertaining, so in all likelihood, my own level of interest played a part) when she discusses different animal models of gender and sexuality. She's least convincing when she leaves her area of expertise. In the opening of her chapter, "Psychological Perspectives" she says, "some reviewers felt a purely biological account of gender and sexuality was incomplete and needed to be rounded out with psychological perspectives. Reviewers felt that transexualism in particular needed more discussion. Well, okay."
  
  I think the aforesaid reviewers should consider the resulting chapter to be their punishment.
  
  (I also think she makes an error discussing the naked mole rat. She seems to imply the queen actually gains vertebrae during pregnancy, but my googling and wandering around in various databases suggests that the vertebrae themselves elongate. THIS IN NO WAY AFFECTS HER ARGUMENT BUT I CAN'T LET IT GO.)
  
  Those caveats aside, this is a well written and well argued book.
  
  The book closes by arguing that human gender and sexual diversity should, by and large, be understood as part of 'evolution's rainbow', rather than pathologised, and she advocates spreading this idea as widely as possible. I think this would be beautiful.
• 
  Prithvi Shams

  This book seemed a bit unpalatable at first as I was not used to seeing gender and sexuality as something that defies rigid categorization. The merit of this book lies in convincing the reader that gender is not necessarily affixed to sex, that gender need not be a binary phenomenon. Transgendered, intersexed, bisexual and homosexual people are not "diseased" merely because they're different from the heterosexual norm; these people are just different colours on the rainbow of gender and sexuality. A significant portion of this book is dedicated to breaking down the gender and sexuality binary in the animal world. While I have some reservations regarding the scientific vigor of these chapters, I do feel the writer has made her point about the diversity of gender and sexuality.
  
  What's most important - my views have diverged a lot from before I read this book. A book can not have more to its credit.
• 
  Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides

  I mostly read/flipped through this in a systematic fashion, hunting for information on specific topics (hermaphrodism and sexed/gendered division of reproductive labor). The rest of this though ... argh. Keep your politics out of my science please? (Even though in general I likely agree with the author's basic perspective.) And stop stretching things and inaccurately applying your paradigms to make points, even if they're points I agree with?
• 
  Rachel

  I LOVED the first two-thirds of the book. The author made a wealth of scientific information not only readable but fascinating. Her arguments for modifying evolutionary theory are convincing. As she points out, theories are affected by cultural assumptions. Looking at biology and animal behavior through a lens of cooperation for mutual benefit, rather than one of domination and trickery, gives rise to many interesting possibilities, some of which seem to be a better fit with reality. I also love her spirited advocacy of gender diversity in the scientific community and the overall culture.
  
  However, the later part of the book, when she admittedly ventures outside her areas of expertise, was riddled with unreliable information and dubious opinions. Two examples: the section on genetic engineering didn't seem to belong in the book, and interpretations of biblical passages seemed pretty unlikely. I wish the publisher had loosed a more stringent editor on it. A copy editor too--honestly, misspelling Astarte?
• 
  Kimia

  The book gave no explanation about reasons and mechanisms. It was just a loooong handbook of examples.
• 
  Nathan

  A very fascinating read all around - the first third has a lot of technical information, which I actually appreciate, even if I don't completely understand what is being said about the effects of chromosomes and genes and their interaction, or if I have a hard time digesting statistical data. This aspect of the book might turn off a layperson, but it is balanced out with well-written anecdotal explanations.
  
  The book is split into three parts - the first describes and illustrates diversity in nature, especially cases of multiple genders, social organization, and sexuality. The entire book contests the Darwinian theory of sexual selection, as well as modern medical and psychological approaches to gender and diversity in general...
  
  The second part investigates human biology and genetics and sexuality, and deals with such issues such as the search for the elusive "gay gene" or "trans gene," and the ways that society has dealt with these things (as well as inter-sexed individuals)...
  
  The third part discusses human culture and how "differently gendered" people have been accepted or understood or interpreted in various cultures throughout time. This includes what the ancient Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and early Christians had to say, taken in context of the time, as well as contemporary examples from cultures worldwide today.
  
  All in all, a fascinating book - it was very enlightening, even with skimming through the technical parts ;)
• 
  Nathan Cottrell

  This is not science. While it's good to see that someone is trying to dispel myths about human sexuality and encourage acceptance of all people, to make the claim that this is science is beyond understanding.
  
  The author claims that she has "disproved" Darwinian Sexual Selection, but this is not the case at all.
  
  Does anyone really believe that one "gender" of bullfrog is an immature non-mating male and another "gender" of bullfrog is the same male as an adult???? Ridiculous. This isn't shifting genders but rather MATURING, much like all other animals do.
• 
  Caitlin H

  I really was hoping to Like this book, with a capital L. And while there's a lot of legitimately interesting things to learn in here, there were things that, ultimately, made me side-eye the author, as well as feel flat-out angry.
  
  I found the first part, detailing gender & sexual variance in animals, the most interesting. I'm not a biologist, but there i did feel Roughgarden made valuable points for throwing out theories based on animals supposedly deceiving each other. It makes sense to me that an animal that relies on observation in order to survive wouldn't be "deceived" by a female-presenting male of its kind into thinking it was a female. I also found it interesting when the author stated that natural selection, & how animals choose mates, is not how it's been presented to us laypeople, nor necessarily how it's been perpetuated in Western culture. This all was really what interested me: the different ways animals are, & the naturalness of it, even if no one knows the strictly scientific "why" of things.
  
  Of course, it's very much full of scientific jargon, with no visuals to help us laypeople. A lot of the time i admittedly felt a parade of unfamiliar statements was passing in front of my eyes, versus me taking in information.
  
  I was hoping for a similar approach when Roughgarden began discussing humans. At first, it was, pretty much. Although i guess she wrote the book before neuroplasticity became a thing, hence certain statements that imply that a person who does X does it because it's how their brain is wired. The example Roughgarden uses is a string instrument musician, & the impression i got was that she was saying "the musician's brain is inherently different here; hence, they are a string musician." I could be wrong. The book was also originally printed in 2004, & i don't know when neuroscientists began discussing neuroplasticity. I took a similar approach regarding the fact that genderqueer & gender neutral people weren't brought up. I'm only guessing that these ways of IDing weren't well-known in '04, however.
  
  A quick disclaimer: i was not expecting this book to be apolitical. Nor was i looking for an apolitical book.
  
  However, in part two, when discussing human variance in sex & gender, at some point Roughgarden brings up therapy & mental illnesses. And that was when she lost me.
  
  I am fully aware that many queer people have suffered at the hands of therapists & psychology overall. I am not stating that psychology has never committed any wrongs, nor that it doesn't still have problems. I am fully aware that until the 1970s, the DSM included homosexuality; i am equally aware that the DSM V still lists "gender identity disorder" as a mental illness & that trans people are "diagnosed" with it. Psychology isn't sacred, isn't without faults, isn't without grievous wrongs.
  
  However, Roughgarden's statements on the whole regarding therapy, psychology, & psychiatry are wrong. She is perpetuating misinformation based off her own bias, which is dangerous, & incredibly disappointing for a scientist to do.
  
  She paints psych meds, as well as ECT, as "maiming". It's known that there have been people who have been given meds & ECT against their will, & without being told possible side effects, & this absolutely is horrible. But these days, no one can force you to take a medication, or to do ECT. Roughgarden also perpetuates the social stereotype of ECT as something carried out while someone is awake, that they convulse violently while steaming all over. As someone who has actually willingly done ECT, this kind of misinformation frankly pisses me off. The author also refers to "POW-type behavioral modification tactics" that therapists "torture" patients with, whatever that means (pg. 263).
  
  She claims that psych meds change behaviors, which is flat-out untrue. If that were the case, i wouldn't have to go to therapy; we would've found the miracle drug that makes CBT & DBT & all other behavioral therapies obsolete. Medication ideally allows for better functioning, helping a person to not feel depressed, manic, suicidal, psychotic, etc. From that point, it's on the person to change their behaviors. There is no such thing as a medication that changes behavior. I only wish.
  
  She continues in this line, however. Later, when discussing the profits of pharmaceutical companies, instead of bringing up how horrendous & unethical price gouging is for those of us who need medications (yes! there's those of us who need them, imagine that!), she states, "the drug companies have a staggeringly huge incentive to convince everyone that they're sick" (pg. 304). Because Roughgarden thinks we're making "everything" a disease. A page earlier, she claims, "[e]ven being shy is a disease", in reference to social phobia (pg. 303). I'm sure anyone with social phobia would be pissed to read anything claiming their struggles are just shyness. I guess that my Major Depression is "just being down", then, right?
  
  Roughgarden continues to believe that psych meds alter behavior: "Today's smorgasbord of personality-altering drugs is sometimes thought to legitimize mental diseases by implying a biological basis. On reflection, though, whether a behavior can be changed with a chemical is irrelevant. Behavior can always be changed with chemicals-- one need only think of alcohol" (pg. 304).
  
  Again, this is blatant misinformation. Psych medications do not change one's behaviors or personality. Further: "implying" a biological basis? And that it "legitimizes" illnesses? Remember, i know this was written in '04, but there's plenty of work done & being done to show there are biological basis for mental illnesses, along with things that a person goes through. Clearly, Roughgarden doesn't believe any of this, as the "legitimizes" statement clearly shows. She obviously has never dealt with a debilitating mental illness (or more than one) before, has never experienced what it can be like to then be on the right meds. Her insinuations-- that we're all "not really sick", that drug companies just want us to believe that, & oh suuuure they'll claim a biological basis to "legitimize" it-- are downright insulting.
  
  She claims: "Too many conditions, both physical and mental, are branded as diseases without sufficient contextual research" (pg. 304). Really? She provides no proof. She also states that we, as a "human community" need to "assume more responsibility for each other" instead of "pass[ing] the buck to health care professionals" (pg. 304). Which would be fine well & good, if the author wasn't demonizing therapy & medication, ignoring that, while a support system is invaluable to people suffering, it's only a part of the equation. Without medication & therapies to work on lightening the load of someone's mental illness(es), a support system can mean nothing. I have personal experience with this.
  
  Roughgarden thinks we should all "take a stand" & proclaim ourselves healthy, which would be fine & great if that statement wasn't on the heels of all this. Great that she thinks we're making up illnesses were there is actually "diversity"… except that this mindset hurts real people, including queer people. It's not enough that the author seems to not understand how psych meds work, but this claim that we're attacking diversity, regarding mental illnesses, is misguided & wrong. My mental illnesses don't make me feel like i'm ~part of diversity~, they make me miserable. They make me want to hurt myself. They make me want to kill myself. There's other queer people who also have mental illnesses, who also suffer from them, & who also seek out queer-affirming therapists & take psych medications.
  
  It's one thing to point out what psychiatry & psychology have done wrong in the past, & the historical demonization of homosexual & gender variant people. It's one thing, as well, to request psychiatry do better. That it acknowledge not just sexual, but gender differences, as well, as valid & healthy, that any problems that come from it are due to the judgement & intolerance in society. But Roughgarden's bias instead leads her to perpetuating unhelpful, even dangerous misinformation that completely ignores what us mentally ill people go through & what helps us. Instead of insisting that psychology make itself welcoming & affirming of us queer people, she completely condemns it as a whole. In doing so, she actually does something she rightfully accuses many anthropologists of doing, which is not listening to the people who are actually living the lives she is discussing.
  
  After this point, i felt i could no longer take Roughgarden at her word. I wanted to finish the book just to finish it, as i felt incredibly disappointed.
  
  Another point came when Roughgarden brings up stem cells. She sets up a hypothetical situation of having cells taken from the reader in a lab, & having them kept in storage while the reader is put back in the uterus to grow. She says the cells taken can "become cells of any tissue type", then asks the reader, "How do you feel about this?"
  
  She then gets absurd: "These cells sitting in a laboratory somewhere could have been implanted in your mother's uterus when you were. If they had been, you would have had an identical twin brother or sister to grow up with. Instead, your identical brother or sister is being grown to supply you with spare parts…. This partial-person cloning is called 'therapeutic cloning' to mask the reality that a potential person os being farmed to provide body parts for another" (pg. 311).
  
  I would laugh, if i wasn't so disappointed that a scientist, & one of biology-- a professor, to boot-- was saying this. I would laugh, if it didn't smack of the same rhetoric as that of pro-lifers.
  
  They are cells. They are not a person. As Roughgarden, of course, points out, had they been put into the womb, they would have grown to become a person. However, they are not. The key words here are "would have". They are simply cells. There is no "farming" of a person taking place. There is no identical twin. There are only your cells, taken before they became specialized cells, being used to create specialized parts. The author's statements here are purely absurd, & dangerous, as well.
  
  Overall, i'm disappointed. For others, it may seem like i'm throwing babies out with bath water & all that, but i feel these are very important points. Especially considering the language Roughgarden uses, & how it can be weaponized against people. The author's bias is overwhelming, to the point that it leads her to espouse blatant misinformation that can harm & alienate people. Those of us with mental illnesses already have to fight people to be taken seriously. It seems that, in trying to fight for sexual & gender variance to be taken seriously, Roughgarden has decided to throw us mentally ill people under the bus. Including those of us who are queer. Her attitude is why i read her "Policy Recommendations" with a very skeptical mind.
  
  Also, as others have pointed out, her reach goes too far, & very obviously into territory with which she seems to really have no experience or knowledge. I find myself wishing she had stuck with biology, & all the fascinating ways sexuality & gender can present in organisms, even if i don't understand all the lingo. I was very excited to read this book, & i feel sad & disappointed that Roughgarden's biases got the better of her & the writing.
• 
  Adam

  Progressive discourse about gender online has become so bold and ubiquitous that it's easy to assume we've come to some kind of consensus about what it is and where it comes from. But if take all of the standard talking points and try to put them together into something coherent, it quickly becomes apparent that they're either misunderstood (gender is a social construct) or simply a repudiation of old concepts (sex is a spectrum, trans, nb, and intersex people are valid, gender can't be assigned at birth, etc). The combination of the ethical rightness of these positions with the intellectual bankruptcy of the ones we're rejecting makes it feel like a complete platform, when really it's only halfway there. We're thrown out a conceptual framework that both fostered and excused injustice and failed to answer our questions, and only resolved the first problem.
  
  Evolution's Rainbow came on my radar a few years ago, but I didn't read it then because I assumed it was basically superfluous. It was only recently, when I started to probe the things I assumed I already knew it would say, that I realized it might actually be exactly what I was looking for. The thing that convinced was simple. I had made the assumption a few years ago that it was reasonable to say animals have "genders" when they have the same kinds of traits as human gender, like outwardly displayed symbolic anatomy and behavioral roles not intrinsically linked to reproductive biology. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone explicitly deny this, but I see people say "only humans have gender, animals only have sex" all the time, because that's the logical conclusion you'd come to if you believe gender is purely cultural (and believe animal culture isn't capable of supporting such a framework). Anyway, I came across a short piece by Roughgarden that makes that same point, which made me think there was a good chance her book would develop that idea toward the coherent account I was looking for. As it turned out, I got more than I was expecting, though less than I might have hoped for.
  
  The first part of the book focuses on more or less what I'd expected from the book jacket summary. It presents examples of homosexuality, sex changes, third genders, polygamy and polyandry, etc, in nature, thus proving that none of these things are unnatural in humans. This is exactly the argument I felt was superfluous. The question of whether any human behavior is "natural" is borderline nonsensical and politically irrelevant, and I knew the short version already anyway. And the version in the book does end up being a fairly dull catalog of ecological phenomena. But what redeems it is that Roughgarden doesn't stop at cataloging what animals do. She gives an adaptationist explanation for all of them, and weaves them into a unifying theory not just of sex and gender but of selection in general. Her target is far more ambitious than "homosexuality is unnatural." She's trying to debunk the entire concept of sexual selection.
  
  A substantial part of her case is that sexual selection theory requires increasingly elaborate and unlikely assumptions in order to explain gendered animal behavior. Homosexual sex is a mistake, not a preference. Feminine males are successfully deceiving other birds about their sex. Monogamous males permit cuckoldry because they're too stupid to notice. Rejecting these assumptions was middlingly convincing to me overall. In some cases, it seemed clear that the assumptions authors needed to make to fit their observations and the sexual selection framework were utterly implausible. But in others, it felt like Roughgarden was giving animal intelligence the benefit of the doubt more out of courtesy than scientific judgment. The fact is that animals are successfully deceived in many cases, and all of the ones she questions could and should be evaluated empirically.
  
  The case against sexual selection also goes into some areas of evolutionary theory I felt were unclear and poorly argued. For instance, she seems to reject the idea that gamete size is a fundamental driver of the cost-benefit equations shaping anatomy and behavior. Her main logic, as far as I understood it, was that investment becomes equal as a result of total parental care. This is obviously not true in plenty of species, but even if it is, the difference between the kinds of investments male and female parents can make still fundamentally shapes their evolution. Other ideas seem even more farfetched, like the suggestion that peacock tail traits are markers of socially prominent lineages rather than female desirability per se.
  
  Fortunately, I think rejecting sexual selection is far less important to Roughgarden's contribution than she thinks it is. The alternative she proposes to take its place seems revolutionary whether it's a replacement or a complement to sexual selection. It's called social selection, and it offers parsimonious and compelling explanations of gender and sexual variation in nature. The idea is that sex and symbolic anatomy provide ways for individuals to access to resources possessed by other individuals. Sexual pleasure can help to form coalitions. Dominant males can trade access to mating opportunities for help in obtaining mates in the first place. Males can trade access to their monagamous partner for the chance that other males might raise their offspring if they died.
  
  In other words, sex and parental investment become commodities in a biological market, and gendered anatomy and behaviors become signals used to negotiate trades in that marketplace. I happen to think that biological market theory is the leading candidate for a unifying framework that can explain human history as an expression of ecology, so this got me really excited. If the same idea is independently derived as an explanation of gender, that speaks to its potential universality. It also offered the enticing possibility that, in the parts of this book about ethnography, Roughgarden would in fact extend this framework to explain gender in humans.
  
  And I do get the impression that this theory was independently derived. Biological market theory was proposed in the early 90s, and one of the first examples was exactly the kind of mating system Roughgarden discusses. It would be easy to imagine she had read those papers. But the way she talks about it makes me doubt that. She is dead set on the notion that are cooperative, not competitive. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in ecological writing, and I was hoping to give her the benefit of the doubt, to assume all she was saying is that animals do not believe themselves to be deceptive and conniving, that their positive feelings toward their partners is genuinely felt. But no; she goes out of her way to explicitly reject the obviously correct interpretation that apparent cooperation is driven by underlying competition. It baffles me and I don't know quite what to make of it in a professional evolutionary biologist. How can a self-avowed adaptationist not realize that if animals are “genuinely�� cooperative, it’s only because that trait outcompeted the alternative? Nonetheless, it seems to prove that for her, this is a very different theory than one driven by market mechanisms and competition, regardless of whether she's right about that.
  Either way, it’s a strong theory and I think it’s a great starting place for an explanation of gender in humans. What's sort of ironic, though, is that once you've introduced an adaptationist explanation, the "there are gay sheep" rhetoric becomes a bit fraught. Roughgarden frames everything in this very liberal gloss, all hooray for diversity and cooperation, but each of her example shows that non-cishet expressions in nature occur only to the extent that they're selectively advantageous in that particular niche and no farther. They come from a natural range of variation, and Roughgarden wants to push the idea that this is what diversity means, the raw material that natural selection works on. But what it's really talking about is the diversity of shapes selection forms from the material. It's a subtle distinction but collapsing it really messes up how the rest of the book flows from this foundation.
  
  Because the implication is that if natural selection conjures up third genders and sex changes and homosexuality and animals to meet particular adaptive purposes, then those things are all only biologicall "validated" if we can show the same is true in humans. If one species of fish has a functional third gender, that's not a free-for-all. It's a gender trinary just as rigid as the purported human binary. If high rates of homosexuality in one kind of sheep are selectively advantageous, that means that sheep with lower rates are maladaptive in exactly the way scientifically justified homophobia always claimed. In an abstract, political sense, I don't think this response is especially damning. But the way that Roughgarden's argument is constructed backs her into a corner that pins all human gender variation on functional explanations that will almost inevitably fail to encompass the range of expressions we want to support politically.
  
  By the time she does get humans, she's completely abandoned the functionalist framework. Instead, she switched gears to the "diversity is good because it makes up adaptively flexible," approach, which addresses none of these concerns. The ethnographic portion of the book is simply a theoretically neutral exposition of gender and sexuality variations in world cultures. That's fine, and I learned a few interesting things, but it leaves the interesting work of finding adaptationist explanations of human gender biology and cultural categories on the table.
  
  There's a lot of other crap in here, too. That same diversity sleight-of-hand let's her justify putting an egregious polemic about genetic engineering into a book that is very much not about that otherwise. There's also an extensive chapter about how Christianity is actually not homophobic or anti-trans, which only makes sense when you realize she's writing from a Christian perspective (and cast a similar light on the GMO chapter, for that matter). Another section summarizes testimonials and coming out narratives from American trans people, which is, again, fine interesting, but certainly only seems to belong here because trans books in general were so rare that they couldn't afford to specialize in 2004.
  
  Reading this from 2019, from the perspective shaped by an online trans community that is far more radical, both in the assertion of its own validity and in its politics, it often feels pretty dated. The word cis, remarkably, never occurs in it. Roughgarden engages with positions that are dismissed as bad faith ploys today. There is a certain defensiveness to it, a now-quaint sense that she feels the need to justify and normalize transness for an unaccepting audience. On the other hand, it does feel flexible and uninhibited by views that seem to have become consensus more recently. For instance, I kind of cringed when she conceded that a small subset of trans people really are just in it for the auto-erotic experience. I haven't seen anyone advocate for the validity of that particular group lately.
  
  More than anything, though, it's just a very corny book. The peak is when she writes a whole chapter from the point of view of the sperm and egg defused and became her, as a way to explain human developmental biology, but it's omnipresent. She makes awkward, far-fetched, superfluous analogies. Her humor is painful. But the worst is that she is just so earnestly liberal. Toward the end of the book, she tells a story about how she ran for some minor public office in San Francisco, and one of the planks of her campaign was that she would build a "Statue of Diversity" in the Bay to match the Statue of Liberty. It's not like I was expecting an "Arm Trans Women" meme in a book like this but there's something so anodyne about making a proposal like that shortly after describing reports of the brutal murder of trans people.
• 
  Becca

  I had some extreme ambivalence about this book. Ultimately, it is an extremely ambitious book with a broad scope, aiming to be one of the major pieces of gender and sex literature for several groups, including biologists, educators, trans, intersex/people with differences in sexual development and genderqueer individuals, queer groups debating whether to include trans issues, politicians and doctors. So the fact that it was a little weak on some of these fronts was to be expected and cannot be said to detract from the overall groundbreaking nature of the book.
  
  The book is organized into three parts: gender, sex and sexual orientation in animal organisms; gender, sex and sexual orientation in people, and finally, the history of gender variation in human societies.
  
  Not surprisingly, given that Dr. Roughgarden is an organismal biologist, the first part is by far the strongest. And it's not just strong relative to the rest of the book, it is truly a superlative work. It explores first the biologic definition of sex and speculates about species in which there could be more than two sexes on the basis of diversity of gamete size in several known species. She then goes on to discuss hemaphroditism (sequential and simultaneous.) I didn't find much of this novel, probably because I consider myself somewhat of an amateur ichthyologist, and most of these early examples involved reef creatures I was already familiar with, but Roughgarden still presents it in a way that it is compelling and flows well with the earlier portion of the book on sex. The absolute best part of the book is about gender in animal species: Roughgarden explores several species (mainly birds, lizards, fish and insects, initially) looking at the diversity of gender roles and family structures that exist in different species. She speculates as to the evolutionary advantages of having a diversity of gender roles, in that it allows for rapid response to shifting environmental factors, and argues that it provides an increased chance of offspring survival in other cases. Finally, looking at mostly primates, Roughgarden discusses same sex relationships in the animal kingdom, again arguing that same sex relationships fill an evolutionary niche, by helping negotiate alliances that increase the chance of offspring survival. Importantly, in all of this, Roughgarden is very clear that exploration of gender, sex and sexual orientation variance in animals is important for our understanding of diversity, but she does NOT argue that LGBT people should be supported BECAUSE of the occurrence of parallel traits in animals, but rather just because it's moral to support them. She explicitly states that much of animal behavior should not be accepted in humans and much of human behavior that is valuable is not found in animals. I think warning people of how easy the naturalistic fallacy would be here and actively discouraging her readers from failing for it was both courageous and intellectually honest.
  
  So ultimately, I have only two gripes with this entire first part, and both are completely semantic. One is that she continually refers to her idea of the "genial gene" (genetic traits that have evolved to encourage interorganism cooperation so as to encourage survival of offspring and thereby increase individual reproductive fitness) as being in conflict with the Dawkinsian idea of the "selfish gene" (genes evolve to increase survival of themselves.) These are not at all in conflict. They are both consistent with evolutionary biology as it is currently understood and the "selfish gene" hypothesis supports the evolution of genetic traits that are "altruistic" in behavior if that supports the expansion of the gene in the population. The second is that Roughgarden insists on referring to genetic diversity as a "genetic rainbow." In the middle of a narrative that is otherwise talking about gametes, alleles, and other complex biologic topics, all of a sudden using "rainbow" as a scientific noun is jarring and undermines Roughgarden's credibility. I know that she wanted to increase readability, but honestly, anyone who gets through this first section has the reading comprehension to understand the word "diversity."
  
  The next two parts are rockier. I had the hardest problem with the middle part, in which Roughgarden makes several diversions. One is to criticize American medicine for overpathologizing people especially with genetic conditions. She makes an argument that if a trait has a certain population frequency, it must not be that pathologic. This argument is technically true: for a given allele frequency, there is a bound on the effect on reproductive fitness, given a limited de novo rate of mutation. However, this argument ignores the possibility of heterozygote advantage, given that many (most?) of the conditions that she argues therefore must be beneficial or neutral are autosomal recessive. In addition, the discussion of reproductive fitness is not a value judgement -- one of the conditions that she agrees must be the most deleterious to reproductive fitness, complete androgen insensitivity, is a condition that I would strongly argue should not be pathologized: people (usually women) with complete AIS require the use of advanced reproductive technology to have biologically gonads, because they have sperm-producing gonads, female genitalia and usually identify as women. That's a huge reproductive hit, but an otherwise normal person. On the other hand, she argues that salt-wasting congenital adrenal hyperplasia is overpathologized, and as a medical geneticist, I'm going to defend my right to pathologize genetic conditions that kill infants. She then extends herself to genetic conditions in general (not just differences in sexual development) and generalizes that the risks of genetic engineering, as well as the ethical risks of selective reproductive technology outweigh any benefit to treating these patients, whom she claims are overpathologized. Again, I'm sensitive, because this is my job, which I have a doctorate and extensive postdoctorate training in, but I see children die because of their "genetic trait, which is not necessarily a disease" and it is extremely sad. I have helped couples select embryos that do not carry the genetic condition that their sibling died of and I'm not sorry.
  Dr. Roughgarden recommends at the end that the FDA certify whether a condition is a disease before a doctor can treat it, and I think this argument really showcases ignorance of the medical bureaucracy and the issues involved: FDA approval is an extremely slow process, even now, sticking to Food and Drugs, which there are clear processes for. The number of just human genetic diseases is in the thousands. She herself uses examples of allelic conditions where at one end there is clear disease and the other end is more a variant of normal (such as AIS and CAH above.) I daily see patients with alleles that have never before been reported. If I needed FDA approval to see a patient in my clinic based on their individual allele, it would probably take a decade for each patient to be approved! I wish that Dr. Roughgarden had been given an opportunity to attend a medical genetics clinic. I think modern medical geneticist are by and large thoughtful and avoid unnecessary pathologizing. I suspect that this is simply a case where Dr. Roughgarden, brilliant as she clearly is from the first chapter, is not as up to date on medical genetics. To be clear: I agree with her completely that patients with DSDs were historically overpathologized and were victimized by poorly considered operative strategies, and I understand that given her expertise in gender and sex she would be suspicious of the rest of the field.
  
  I liked other parts of this chapter: Dr. Roughgarden thoroughly debunks the idea that there are substantial gender differences in humans. She then reviews the gender differences that have been reported and puts them into context for the reader. I wished she would have gone even further into rejecting the idea that there is scientific scaffolding for meaningful gender dimorphism in humans, but she does discuss this a little in part three, where she explores several cultures that have had a third gender as a category for either people with DSDs or people who are trans. This part is a little rocky, because at times, she imposes her categories on the narratives of the people she is summarizing. Although she is careful, she sometimes uses pronouns or nouns that are gendered differently than what the person used, claiming that the person would have identified as fe/male had that society allowed it. On the whole, I found it relatively interesting to look at the historic and geographic span that gender variation has occupied and encouraging to look at societies that were largely accepting of gender variation.
• 
  Cheryl

  I know that evolutionary biology and gender studies are both rapidly developing fields, and so I wasn't sure that I wanted to read this book that's almost two decades old. But omg the Introduction alone is worth reading, just to get an idea of all the provocative ideas she's going to develop in the book proper. Clearly we're still not studying ourselves and other animals accurately, free of the bias of traditional binary roles of 'passionate male and coy female.' And clearly there's a lot of work to be done before we're all allowed to live our best lives.
  
  I'm excited to read this rich work that promises to cover so much ground.
  ---
  Very carefully written. Requires attentive, careful reading. I only have time to read the first part right now, unfortunately, but plan to find it at my next library to finish it.
  
  The first part is the most important, imo, though, because of how relatively old the book is. Biologists and biology educators are still all too stuck on "passionate male and coy female." In humans, however, a lot of progress has been made, even to giving gay people the right to marriage in the US, and to picture-books about transgendered children.
  
  So, this very provocative statement probably isn't as necessary as it was when Roughgarden wrote it:
  "What seems immoral to me is transphobia and homophobia. In the extreme, these phobias may be illnesses requiring therapy, similar to excessive fear of heights or snakes."
  ---
  Other bits from the first part, that focused on 'animal rainbows:'
  
  "... sex is essentially cooperative--a natural covenant to share genetic wealth. Sexual reproduction is not a battle."
  
  "Neutralists have often squared off against adaptationists in evolutionary biology." Is homosexuality in different species and therefore not evolved out, or is it adaptive?
  
  "Mating is one component of fitness, but a preoccupation with 'mating success' has led to an emphasis on mating to the exclusion of other components of fitness. In reality, female choice considers the overall production of offspring, keeping mating in perspective." " I argue that almost all diversity is good and that female choice is more for the best match than for the best male."
  
  "The problem with female mimicry is not that it is bizarre; the problem is that female mimicry is a myth."
  
  "Deceit theory is a trap. Deceit theory forces scientists to take sides on who is smarter--in this case (that of European kestrels), claiming that females are smarter than males."
  
  "I believe scientists have failed to publicize effectively that the notion of a tooth-and-claw struggle for existence was discarded over 50 years [70, now] ago, What actually happens in nature is much kinder than people have been led to believe."
  
  "As ever-increasing similarities between animals and humans are revealed, do animal societies become more relevant to human societies than previously believed? Should political science and sociology, basic subjects in the human social sciences, be widened to include investigations of how animal societies function? I think so."
  
  "Biology need not limit our potential. Nature offers a smorgasbord of possibilities for how to live, and an endless list of solutions for every context...."
  ---
  Btw, a lot of other reviewers miss the points. For example, one scolded the author for socio-political commentary... apparently they had read neither blurb nor introduction. Another said the author over-reached... apparently they missed all the times that she said she was theorizing, and that she was exploring ideas, and that she was suggesting avenues of research.
  
  Bottom line, I do recommend the book and give the intro. and first section (especially the last chapter of that section, Chapter 9, "The Theory of Evolution") 4 stars.
• 
  Danika

  This book is more engaging for what it could be than what it is. It skims wonderful ideas, but tries to take on too much, encompassing gender and sexuality in culture, zoology, and human biology. This is an impossible task for one book, considering that more than a dozen books have been written about Two Spirited people, for example, which is just one cultural take on gender. I found the author slightly unreliable, especially when it came to the cultural aspects of gender.
  
  That being said, I think that everyone should read the zoology sections. This is where the book shines and accomplishes exactly what it needs to accomplish. It shows a brief overview of the truly amazing rainbow of what sex and gender can mean in nature, which can give a bit of perspective on how seriously we take gender identities. For me, it soothed my gender queer parts, showing that they were not freakish, in fact, they were hardly strange at all in the bigger scope of things.
  
  I would never take this book as the word on gender and sexuality, but rather a selection of interesting ideas, tiny tastes collaged to create a valuable sense of possibility.
• 
  Roxanne

  This is a very ambitious, yet readable, work. Roughgarden takes on the binary in sex, gender and sexuality. She takes to task Darwin's sexual selection theory, evolutionary biologists, social scientists, psychologists and physicians.
  
  She spends a lot of time at the beginning laying out dozens of examples of non-binary social and sexual arrangements in nature. This could get tedious, but I suggest sticking it out as best you can; she makes a convincing argument for reworking the sexual selection theory, and for casting a critical eye at the way biologists interpret what they see.
  
  Roughgarden looks at sex and gender in human societies, and tackles Judeo-Christian history and the way it has shaped modern religious views of gender-variance.
• 
  Juan Manuel Cafferata

  Expone miles de sesgos en la biología, la psicología, la genética y la medicina. Derriba mitos, propone correcciones a teorías. Qué plomo intentar ajustar la diversidad sexual a categorías tan erróneas. Basta. Lean a Joan.
• 
  Sarah

  Unapologetic and courageous.
• 
  Paige McLoughlin

  popular and scientific books on biology are mostly products of majoritarian and dominant groups. Science is awesome and the best method for understanding the world. However dominant groups often bleed what passes for common sense into narrative accounts of biology. Of course, metaphorical descriptions, especially in popularization, reach for stereotypes of the dominant culture to make a point about animal behavior and it has been going on since Darwin. This bias that leaks into biology can color the theories (especially in lesser understood areas) to whatever the culture thinks is "normal". This happens in reproduction and mating behaviors and in other areas with the LBGTQIA community. The cisgendered and heterosexual mores are the lenses of these accounts are couched in and it colors the science. I am not arguing for relativism so much as fallibilism and the fact that people bring their own baggage to any endeavor and messy sciences like Bio or psych can be distorted by ordinary assumptions of actors involved in it. A fascinating book that looks through bio from an LBGTQIA lens. Nice corrective to mainstream myopia.
• 
  Natik

  This is a very rigorous scientific book that's definitely a step above in complexity compared to most "pop sci" books. Nonetheless, she does give enough background that a non-biologist could make sense of things (probably with some extra Internet searches).
  
  The main argument here really rams home that animals (and people) WITHIN one species can be drastically different. We then no longer think of "the rule" and some weirdo mutant "exceptions" but start really appreciating the full range of variations. Did you know that some kinds of fish have 3 very distinct type of male within the same species? They are even different sizes and colors! Neither one of these males is "the best" or is preferred by all females, rather each one wins and loses in his own way.
  
  Reading it will have you start thinking about sexual diversity in our world, but I think her last section on human politics was very out of place. The tone throughout the entire book makes her political opinions very clear. Even if you agree with them, it is still off-putting. I just don't think that is a good mix with a rigorous science book.
  
  After you have read this book, you will feel a lot better the next time an annoying "Men do X! Women do Y!" study comes out because you know their generalizations mean little if we have some multi-peaked or flattened curves going on in the data!
• 
  Sidewalk_Sotol

  Stanford researcher and biology theorist Joan Roughgarden boldly challenges the core tenets of evolutionary biology, dispelling generalizations about intraspecies interactions for sexual reproduction. She persuasively heaps evidence against assumption after misguided assumption, building her case ultimately to question the key tenet of evolutionary biology: competition drives change over long periods of time. Rather, Roughgarden argues that cooperation - whether between organelles of a cell, between cells of an organism, or between different individuals of an animal community - is the basis of both growth and change.
  
  Evolution's Rainbow is best when Roughgarden uses her training as a scientist to demystify sex and gender. Unfortunately, she also chose to devote more than half the book to discussing sex and gender in human societies, where she starts conjecturing, writing "from the zygote's" point of view, and overgeneralizing about the nonbinary genders in pre-scientific/non-Western societies. The extreme changes in tone, texture, and use of supposition dampen the credibility that she built up in the initial chapters that focused on animal studies.
• 
  Danni

  Roughgarden is incredibly biased, and she admits as much from the get-go. Nonetheless, there were many moments during this book that her clear sense of bias made me question the validity of the claims she was making. Some chapters in particular seemed to be included so that she could share her opinions on a given topic that didn't necessarily feel as if it contributed to her overall arguments.
  
  This book is dense and she covers a lot of ground. It's a good read, but be sure to get a degree in biology first. Some of the information in here and really important and I hope that someday a more accessible version of this material is published.
• 
  Joshua Black

  This book is 1 part cool biological things and 2 parts biological justification for queerness. Queerness needs no justification, so it seems ⅔ of the book is useless to me.
  
  The author took a fascinating subject and turned it into her soapbox to justify her "transgender-ness." Every other sentence justifies why it's ok to be non-human-normatively gendered. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR GENDER or the fucking social acceptability of it!!!!!
  
  I just wanted to read about cool nature shit.
  
  This book is probably ideal for struggling queer people and homophobes. They may benefit from the author's argument. She was preaching to choir too much for me.
• 
  Empanadani

  Didn't actually have time to finish reading it. The science still isn't there, but she raises incredibly good questions and had a very good analysis. My professor might not like her, but I think she raises important questions that need to be investigated.the second portion delves more into sociology and such which was interesting, but not my focus was on the evolutionary biology portion. The cell developmental bio was odd. I like how she was very open about her motivations and unafraid of being called biased or whatever.
• 
  Natasha

  The author did a lot of research, which allows the reader to learn a lot about diversity of gender expression and sexuality in animals and humans. I especially enjoyed learning more about the animal world. I didn't enjoy how opinionated and biased the delivery is throughout the book. I would have appreciated it if the author indicated what her opinion is, but left room for the reader to maker their own conclusions. I think this book might have had a stronger impact among a broader audience if it didn't come across as so opinionated from beginning to end.
• 
  Amirography

  It was not a book that I agreed with all the way, but the parts I agreed with, was from my opinion more than awesome. And It is a book in need of attention more than it has right now. I strongly suggest this book to any and all scholars out there.
  I shall reread this book in the future.
• 
  Jessica

  Ariel, I will try to read this book even though the title makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
• 
  Mortalform

  If you have not read this book you are missing out on a vital debate
  
  
  
  I have found very few non-fiction books that are so readily gripping. Not only is Roughgarden addressing a fundamental issue that affects us and all creatures, but she is presenting an extremely important argument against one of the founding principals of our societies. A pleasure to read, a pleasure to pause and muse on what was just read and a pleasure to resume.
  
  This book is organized in an incredibly efficient way, the way I was taught to write persuasive essays. Roughgarden presents her subject and arguments with in the first few pages and each of the subsequent chapters deals with one element of her beautiful theory, reviewing examples that support it, addressing clearly the opinions of her opponents and tidily proving why they are erroneous.
  
  How does biology account for such a huge population that doesn’t match the template science teaches as normal? p 1
  
  The fundamental problem is that our academic disciplines are all rooted in Western culture, which discriminates against diversity. Each discipline finds its own justification for this discrimination. This book blows the whistle on a common pattern of disparaging gender and sexuality variation in academia and predicts foundational difficulties for [the] disciplines of [ecology and evolution, molecular biology and medicine as well as the social sciences]. p2
  
  [Joan Roughgarden] suggest[s] a new theory that [she] calls ‘social selection’. It envisages animals as exchanging help in return for access to reproductive opportunity, producing a biological ‘labor market’ for mutual assistance by employing reproductive opportunity as currency. This theory proposes that animals evolve traits that qualify them for inclusion in groups that control resources for reproduction on safe places to live and raise offspring. P6
  
  Darwin is known for three claims: that species are related to one and other by sharing decent from common ancestors, that species change through natural selection, and that males and females obey universal templates-the males ardent and the females coy. This third claim results from Darwin’s theory about natural selection, and this claim, not the first two is specifically what is under challenge...I’ve suggested a new theory that I call “social selection.” This new theory accommodates variation in gender and sexuality. It envisages animals as exchanging reproductive opportunity as currency. This theory proposes that animals evolve traits that qualify them for inclusion in groups that control resources for reproduction and safe places to live and raise offspring. These traits, called social-inclusionary traits, are either possessed only by the females and unexplained by any theory, such as the penis of female spotted hyenas, or possessed only by males and interpreted as secondary sex characteristics even through they are not actually preferred by females during courtship. P 6
  
  Part 2 shows how science seizes on the often tiny anatomical differences between people, and on differences in life experience, to differentiate them from an artificial template of normalcy and deny a wide range of people their human rights by defining them as diseased. p7
  
  I find that refuting sexual selection theory imbues female choice with responsibility for decision about power and family far more sophisticated than what Darwin envisioned, and empowers varied expressions of gender and sexuality. p 10
  
  Sexual reproduction cuts a population’s growth rate in half – this is the cost of sex. Only females produce offspring, not males. If half the population is male, then the speed of population growth is half that of an all-female population. An all-female population can quickly out produce a male/female species, allowing an all-female species to survive in high-mortality habitats where a male/female species can’t succeed...the benefit of sex is survival over evolutionary time... the advantages of sex are also demonstrated by species who can use sex or not, depending on the time of year. p 17
  
  Butterflies who’s enzymes work at cold temperatures thrive in dark, damp years, while butterflies who’s enzymes function best a hot temperatures do better in sunny drought years. All butterflies are perfectly good butterflies, even if the abilities of some don’t match the opportunities currently supplied by the environment. p 21
  
  Biologists call the ratio of receptive females to willing males the “operational sex ratio.” The operational sex ratio isn’t fifty-fifty because the sex with the higher parental investment is occupied with raising the offspring and is relatively unavailable for mating compared with the other sex. p 46
  
  The evolution of the mammalian placenta and pouch is usually presented as a psychological advance, an adaptation for nurturing embryonic development in a climate that had cooled globally since the time of dinosaurs. Alternatively, the evolutionary force behind the placenta and pouch may have been for females to assume control of their offspring. A side effect is that males then acquire incentive to control females. p 48
  
  Presenting mate guarding as a tactic by which males protect their investment ignores the female perspective. Females are viewed as land in which males plant seeds and which they guard if necessary. Yet females are probably active players in whether they are guarded or not.
  The Idaho and Belding’s squirrels may have evolved to experience pleasure differently. A female Idaho squirrel may like being squeezed into a burrow, a male may enjoy having a female behind him as he stuffs the burrow’s entrance, like a guy taking a girl for a spin in his red convertible- fun for both. Yet for a females Belding’s ground squirrel squeezing into burrows could be a total turnoff an the reason she doesn’t permit the guarding. Species differences in how power is eroticized make it difficult to discern whether animals have freedom of choice during mate selection and in their family lives. p 52
  
  The record-holders for male sexual coercion are the orangutans, in which most copulations by subadult males and nearly half of all copulations by adult males occur after a female���s fierce resistance has been violently overcome. Other primate species showing lots of male aggression against females include white fronted and wedged-capped capuchins, black spider monkeys, and brown lemurs. Females’ counterstrategies include avoiding areas where males are found, joining a male’s territory or harem to gain his protection, and forming coalitions to fight off the males. P53
  
  [The male] has two directions in which he can invest social effort. Within-sex effort involves competing with other males and/or building coalitions with them to access females. Between-sex effort involves ‘coalition-building’ with a female to raise offspring together. Whether a male winds up with more offspring overall from within-sex or between-sex coalition-building depends on circumstances. This is the animal equivalent of balancing career and family.
  Monogamy then emerges when (a) building relationships with a female is more advantageous to a male’s reproductive success than building relationships with other males, and (b) building a relationship with a male is more advantageous to a female’s reproductive success than raising young by herself or in conjunction with other females. In general, different mating systems emerge from different optimal allocation of social effort to between-sex and within-sex relationships. P56-57
  
  
  Mating is ...more about maintaining the between-sex and same-sex relationships needed to provide food and safty for the young than about sperm transfer as such. p 176
  
• 
  Ike

  As a transgender science lover, I wanted to love this book so bad.
  
  Something that is not to be neglected about this book is her observation that thus far, in the biological-academia sphere, animals who show cross gender behavior are labeled as species who undergo processes of mimises. Meaning that they are mimicing the opposite sex instead of doing their own animal-style version of transitioning. Though I belive that these are the same people who talk day-in-day-out about the ultimate and proximate cause of behavior (i.e., cross gender behavior may ultimately benefit the individual in the guise of mimicry, but from the proximate POV, that fish/mammal/etc is changing sex/gender/gender roles all together!).
  
  An interesting book about zoological sexual diversity, human sexual diversity, and trans rights. Roughgarden makes a few awkward, grandiose claims about how these examples of sexual diversity in nature may be translated to humans (speficially overgeneralizing and making claims about what should be the norms in how we ought to regard sex & gender). There’s a lot of fish talk, which I think is difficult line to draw since the environmental pressures of the ocean are so different than what mammals face.
  
  Often in evolutionary psychology (/biology) we are so interested in averages & universals. I like learning about these, but what about the rest of us? People and animals and the end of bellcurves deserve explanation too! In this regard, Roughgarden is WAY ahead of her time. Not everything I want to see in this arguement, but by god, it’s the start we’ve needed so badly.
  
  As someone who generally enjoys the ideas involed in evolutionary psychology, i found her point about some scholars being “addicted” to sexual selection theory to be an interesting point. Though I think should could have focused on more prominent figures in the field like Pinker or Tooby/Cosmides instead of.. Geoffrey Miller? Is that rude? Esp since the theories from evo psych she was supposedly pwning seem to be Miller kicking the can around.
  
  Such great ideas. Needed better execution. In the sense that this is a BRAVE book, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a nearly one woman show, it was great. But when held up to it’s competitors, it just doesn’t sway. Creates questions, but doesn’t answer them, which is valuable, too.
  
  You can tell I’m conflicted. Regardless, saultes to you, Joan.
  …
  
  “Sometimes I think we know more about the diversity of the deep sea than we do about ourselves.” (pg. 330)
• 
  Tizha

  My review is harsh, but I do think “Part One: Animal Rainbow” is definitely worthwhile. Roughgarden proposes an interesting alternative to Darwin’s sexual selection and valid criticism to how biologists interpret their observations, which mostly leave out how social dynamics affect morphology and behaviour. I just wished she delved more on that instead of trying to cover “everything” through her meager takes.
  
  My overall criticism is that the book was too ambitious and needed more coherence. The first part shows Roughgarden’s strong suit, and the second and third part just takes away any credibility. It becomes a biologist dabbling with social and developmental psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, politics and—bible interpretation—without enough insight. At many points she was straight up stating misinformation and bad takes which makes me wonder how any scientist would take it seriously, since they seem to be her intended audience.
  It gets increasingly painful to read, specially when she tries to talk about gender/sex non conforming expressions in other cultures, criticizing social scientists without realizing the irony.
  
  Throughout the book there’s unfinished points and disjointed facts or opinions thrown around out of nowhere. Sections end abruptly concluding with one sentence, and subjects that deserve way more explanation get glossed over in a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes she mentions a topic seemingly to add to her point but is just to criticize a specific study/author. In Part Two there’s a whole chapter on genetic engineering and cloning that is only tangentially connected to gender/sex diversity (which I just remembered even existed). Feels like she just gathered as many examples as she could from a superficial research and included only the ones that she could compare or had strong opinions of even if they didn’t contribute to the overall text.
  
  I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn’t finish it without venting every couple of chapters. Maybe I should be glad that the discourse has come so much farther since 2004.
• 
  Susan

  Good book for everyone who's ever heard the "but that's just not NATURAL" argument and excellent reference for sci-fi writers who want to do something more creative than the same heteronormative humanoid tropes for their sentient alien species. Unfortunately for me though, I'm not the type who enjoys reading reference books from cover to cover. Which isn't to say the writing style is like a dictionary or even a text book -- it's fairly accessible writing (I'm actually a little uncomfortable with how much anthropomorphism is happening, though I do understand that the author is making a justifiable point with that). It's mostly the structure of "here is one version of non-heteronormality, here are all the cases where it happens in nature, here is how traditional biologists interpret it, and here is how it can ALSO be interpreted" repeated for each version. Excellent source material, but I find it hard to stay focused especially when the examples start to feel list-like.