Biology: Don't look to science to resolve today's culture wars
Biological and evolutionary insights suggest answers to many human health questions like these:
Why does fever occur?
Why do some women suffer pregnancy sickness?
Why do most cancers occur in older people?
Evolutionary biology provides insights into many such human health questions. It can’t, however, offer much insight into some perplexing, values-based, policy questions about human biology and behaviors. Elected state and federal legislators pose these questions increasingly.
To appreciate this, look at life cycles and sex determination mechanisms of other animals.
Remember the 2003 Disney movie, “Finding Nemo”? Fun movie; rotten biological accuracy.
Gender in real life clownfish is fluid. A real Nemo hatches into a small social group occupying one or a few sea anemones. The largest fish in the group, the only female, dominates. The next largest, the reproductive male, dominates the rest of the fish who are subordinate, non-reproductive, males.
When a clownfish female dies, the reproductive male transforms physiologically into the female. The next-most dominant or largest male becomes the reproductive male of the group. All the other males move up a notch in the hierarchy. All female clownfish are born male and transform naturally into females when fully mature.
Don’t legislate what sports teams Nema can join or bathroom she can use.
Freshwater microorganisms, rotifers, include many species where only females occur; no males. In those species, females lay eggs containing both sets of genes normally resulting from fertilization, but without all the fuss and muss of sex and fertilization.
Asking ‘when does rotiferhood begin?’ in this system is meaningless. It never ended. The unfertilized eggs were always living rotifers, just tiny.
Female aphids carry developing daughters in their ovaries. Those ovary-bound developing daughters, in turn, carry their developing daughters in their ovaries. When does aphid life begin?
Consider the sex lives of ants, bees, and wasps. There’s irony there: Most ants, bees, and wasps — the workers — can’t even have sex lives.
Reproductive “queens” mate with males. Those newly mated queens leave their home nests and start a new one, sometimes with workers, as in honeybee swarms.
Once the new colony matures, the queen produces daughters according to the familiar (mammalian) book. A sperm cell fertilizes an egg that develops into a female worker or reproductive.
Male development is weirder. Reproductive queens lay unfertilized eggs that develop into adult males, ‘drones.’ No developmental step, like fertilization, provides a convenient, definable step to declare arbitrarily the start of drone life. Male ants (bees and wasps, too) have no fathers. They are just grown-up eggs.
Should we really look to other animal species, even some without backbones, to gain insight into human policy questions?
Why not? Human health research does it all the time. Bacteria provided the first, and one of the best, models to understand viruses, virus life cycles, and human health implications.
Using a human (actually, mammalian) developmental event, like fertilization on which to base policy, might seem based on science, but it is not.
Eggs of many animal species develop into adults without fertilization.
Don’t ask, ‘When does a life begin’? Wonder, instead: “When did it ever end?’ even in sexually reproducing mammals like us.
Back to Disney: It’s The Circle of Life.
Steve Rissing is professor emeritus in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at Ohio State University.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Biology: Animal world puts culture wars in perspective
