The Story About a Man Who Turned Into a Bug = the Story About an Ape Who Turned Into a Man

Maybe this is you, too. I am slowly reading my way through the classics. Sometimes I think I already know the story because I can recite the movie by heart—like the one about the girl and her friends who go to see the wizard. Sometimes the story is surprisingly funny, enthralling, and profound—like the one about the men who hunt whales. Sometimes the story is not at all what I expected—like the one about a man who turned into a bug, which turned out to be about something else entirely, and twice over. 

By the time I finally picked up Kafka’s book, little did I know what lurked inside. A man had definitely turned into a bug, but as I turned each page, I mainly saw a sister’s trials and transformation under the shadow of her monstrous big brother. This masterpiece was hardly about poor Gregor Samsa at all. Grete’s was the real metamorphosis. 

Nobody primed me to decipher the text with a ladies’ mind. And, I don’t approach fiction by male authors with a smirk, as if daring them to exceed my lowliest expectations. Nothing of the sort. And, given what Kafka I’d already read, I expected genius from Metamorphosis. And so, it was. In my hands, there, in my lap on the sofa. Then, validated by the last line, I clapped the thing shut, jumped up, and shouted through the wall towards Kevin in the other room, “How surreal! It’s about the sister! This girl’s life is a story about a man!” 

I was unnerved, ecstatic. I simply couldn’t be the only person to see it like this. And whatever was happening in the story and, especially, to its interpretation in the zeitgeist seemed like Kafka’s design—as if he knew his story about a girl living in patriarchy would be received as one about a man, making it a work of performance art, too. 

Naturally, I headed to the library for answers. As soon as I started digging, I hit the jackpot. 

In 1989, Nina Pelikan Straus published, “Transforming Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”  In it, she quotes a fellow scholar who calls the story “a literary Rorschach  test” adding that “Kafka critics have hitherto been looking into the mirror of his works to find reflected there the images of their own interpretative attitudes.” This paper offered better insight into my mind (as a reader) than into Kafka’s, but it was a jackpot nonetheless. 

In the first six decades after its release in 1915, over ten thousand interpretations of Metamorphosis were published, spanning religion, philosophy, psychology, politics, and sociology. Nearly all the reflections in the mirror were men’s. The man who turned into a bug held the spotlight, the wheel, the sympathy, the concern, the symbolism, the gravitas, the humanity. Gregor was taken so seriously, as a sort of hero, that his sister Grete was cast as the villain. Right. Nabokov (author of Lolita) argued that Kafka intended for Grete to play the villain. So, as the whole world began to sing Kafka’s song, Metamorphosis was about capitalism, men’s alienation, oedipal fantasy, and so on.

But, eventually, because of all that interpretation, Metamorphosis developed into something else, more than the sum of those interpretations. Its truth became what Straus showed me: inkblots, a mirror, and everything that could be seen. 

The most recent example I’ve encountered is Frans de Waal’s true-to-form opening thoughts in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? To start his 2017 book, de Waal describes trying to empathize not with a man who turns into a bug, but with the bug itself. How alien to my own reading experience. 

By the late 1980s, the larger truth that Straus revealed included what Straus herself saw in those pages—a structure that hinges on Grete at least as much as Gregor, and a commentary on the gendered oppression of Grete, Gregor, their parents, their servant, and everyone living in a patriarchal society. Everyone, even the “winners” suffer in patriarchy because, as Carol Gilligan teaches us, patriarchy is the withholding of love. And as bell hooks teaches us, patriarchy is inextricably tangled up with capitalism and with European and white supremacy.

Like people the world over, Franz Kafka was disturbed by the stories we tell about sex, about what being male or female means. Grete was burdened with caring for her terrifying brother. His metamorphosis is a nightmare because so much of the family depends on him – patriarchy makes it so, burdening him because it limits what women can contribute. Women are sidelined in patriarchy. Even fictional women by readers of fiction. Grete was overlooked, diminished, or disparaged in decades of reflections on Metamorphosis. Gregor’s grotesque business overshadows the fact that his sister, too, metamorphoses and hers, too, is not by choice.

But by the time I opened the book with the story that everyone knows is about a man who turned into a bug, I knew nothing of the decades of humanity that had been shining on it. When I finally peered at the words, I only saw what I could see: a story about a girl’s metamorphosis. My own reflection felt so true that I leapt to the conclusion that my take must have been Kafka’s true meaning or purpose for the story. Not only that but the fact that the mainstream made the story about Gregor, not Grete, was even more mind-blowing: this was the very patriarchy in the story being enacted in the world! Grete was being overlooked and subordinated, as the art lived on in us. Kafkaaaaa! You dawg!

Wow. I really went wild. But can you blame me? I was shocked to the core and my response matched.

When Straus showed me the mirror, the high wore off, and I could see what I was doing. But that only freed me up for another high. Another revelation. 

I had been treating Kafka’s text exactly like people treat the facts of human evolution. I had been doing what people have long been doing to nature, to life itself, to themselves and one another.  

People look at the facts of human evolution—the fossils and artifacts, so much of the genome we share with chimpanzees, bonobos, bananas, and fruit flies—and see nature’s true meaning or purpose for themselves and one another. They see old bones and they think of death and violence or they see the same bones and they think of life, and what it takes for life to live: love. Or who knows what they see. But they don’t merely, objectively, like, ever in a million years see only old bones. When they look at the remains of our natural history, people often see what their guide (an anthropologist, a biologist, a geneticist, a science communicator, a journalist, a teacher, a professor, etc.) see. Or, they see what’s all around them. Of course they do. Of course we do. We see what we already know. 

And so… given the male-dominated history of the science of and discourse on evolution, the story of human evolution has been narrowly focused on men, as distinctively created, to the exclusion and subordination of women. This is what those people knew already. And it’s been like this for so long that, despite massive argument among scientists and scholars, we’re still living in it. From Darwin’s superior, white, male hero’s journey, to the “killer ape,” to Man the Hunter, and all throughout sociobiology and evolutionary psychology which represents how human evolution is popularly understood, today, human evolutionary history has always been and still is a white, masculine fantasy. 

It’s “just science” or “just how we evolved” or “just human nature” that men and women are distinct in their core essences and that patriarchy rules despite societal progress. That these stories are compatible with evangelical beliefs greatly helps with their mainstream endurance. And, as long as people believe we did it, we cracked the laws of nature everybody! then we’ll have these stories. As long as people believe that arguing over plausibility is a scientific enterprise, then we will have these stories. As long as people believe that we can argue over plausibility, as a scientific enterprise, because we know enough about how evolution works, then we will have these stories. And as long as people believe we know enough about how evolution works that we earned the right to treat unverifiable stories about our ancestors, and about the supposed evolved inner essences of theirs that we carry inside of us, as scientific facts, then we’ll have these stories. Whew. So, because the zeitgeist is relying on 150-year-old, “survival of the fittest”-themed evolutionary biology (and so are lots of public intellectuals), our story is still, after all these years, and with all these products of evolution on this planet, one about an ape who turned into a Man. 

I thought my mind-blowing experience reading Kafka would help me to argue that human evolutionary stories like Darwin’s superior, white, male hero’s journey, to the “killer ape,” Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer, Man the Sexy Provisioner, the Aquatic Ape, and, our current moment’s unquestioned favorite, that we evolved to be “tribal” or “xenophobic”, are not and can never be the facts of human evolution. 

I thought my Kafka experience could help me convey that the facts of human evolution, like his text, are inkblots, mirrors, and everything else and, as a result, we’ve built up a thick layer of meaning on top of them. In this STEM-above-all world, much of that meaning is passing as science. But, no matter how beautiful or sublime that meaning might be, it is not science. And whether that “science” is offered like a cup of tea or launched like a Molotov cocktail, it’s all 100% bullshit. That includes the belief (not evolutionary fact) that war is human nature. And it’s in this bullshit about “human nature” that we’re stuck living out our bullshit-shaped lives, or … unnecessarily, tragically not.

So, because I thought it could be so helpful, I crammed a brief distillation of my Kafka revelation, complete with Nina Pelikan Straus quotes, into the end of a talk about human evolution. It was a Darwin Day event, where at least a hundred undergrad students had come to earn extra credit from the kind professors who invited me to campus. (Don’t worry. I kept all the darkness about bullshit out. I stuck to the reading experience. The inkblots.)

After the talk and Q&A were over and I was packing up my laptop, a student with handwritten questions approached me. He read the first two off his notepad. One was about gorillas. The other, bones. He was a switched-on first-year. After we chatted about both, he looked back down at his notepad and read a third thing to me, in a new, agitated tone. “I just read Metamorphosis in high school. It’s not about the sister; it’s about capitalism.” After setting me straight, he looked pleased, like he felt taller than just a moment before. Maybe because he was standing taller than before. I said, “Yes. Sure. Like I said, it’s a literary Rorschach test. So what it’s about depends on who’s looking at it.” His face soured. “It’s about capitalism,” he said, and walked away. 

A professor who had been eavesdropping suggested to me that perhaps this student did not know what a Rorschach test was. I could see how that, if true, would be a barrier to our mutual understanding. The older I get, the harder it is grasp what lingering cultural-historical touchstones I share with 18-21 year olds. Still, I had projected 30-foot images of inkblots behind me as I shared these ideas. Maybe that didn’t matter. Our eyes and ears have a penchant for closing when we encounter ideas that contradict our own. We can be so overwhelmed, or trapped in our minds and emotions that we lose our sense and our senses. Maybe we stop taking in more information to protect ourselves from the suffering it will cause. Like when something stinks and we scrunch up our nostrils which physically blocks more stinky molecules from touching our brain. That’s a bit how that student’s face looked before he walked away. New ideas stink because they force a reckoning. I imagine him processing thoughts like, despite having aced an exam on Metamorphosis, is she saying it's not possible to decipher the one true meaning of anything because no such thing exists in the universe? We make it all up? Isn’t that post-modernism? This book that I like so much might be…oh god help me…a feminist book? 

The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach test, according to Wikipedia.

Believe me when I say that I understand how literary criticism is not the typical way into human evolution, especially not on Darwin Day. And I could get out some records and listen to Pink Floyd and the Kinks and The Clash rail against the ignorance, bigotry, and anti-intellectualism that institutionalized education can cultivate and is doing in front of our eyes with its hyper-emphasis on STEM to the disparagement of the humanities and the arts. We’re being fooled into believing that data rules over critical thinking and wisdom.  

I wasn’t asking anyone to replace their interpretation of Metamorphosis. I was merely revealing that there are many ways to interpret the story.  I didn't expect that to be the obstacle! Instead, I thought Kafka would be my clever, easy way in to arguing something much more challenging. And, no, I was not going to argue that just like Metamorphosis, there are many ways to interpret the human evolutionary story. It's the opposite. Scientifically speaking, there aren’t any ways. The facts, like the fossils, are true, but they themselves don't make up a story. That's extra. And none of those stories are true, in the scientific sense, not even the prevailing patriarchal one, because evolution just doesn't work like a story, to my mind. Kafka's text and the fossil record are profoundly different things. If only more people knew what truths they both hold.

How To (Get Free Stuff) With Holly Dunsworth

This post (about real life events that transpired some years ago) is dedicated to everyone who loved How to With John Wilson (2020-2023) and, especially, to everyone who just googled to see if there will be more seasons of it.  

First, drive your car at a high rate of speed over something hard, pull over to the shoulder, walk back, see what it is, and take it home. It’s Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel with a cracked spine. It only needs some duct tape.

You just happen to be on the road “finding yourself" while freaking out about college over winter break. This scientifically rigorous, prehistoric porno is the sign you need to change your major to anthropology. You’ve never had a class in the field, but you’re one hundred percent sure that it’s going to be better than the semester you're facing: Poultry Science 101, and a bunch of other useful, lucrative coursework.

Next, get your Ph.D. in fossil ape feet. That takes about 7 years. Then get a professor job, which means teaching a lot of courses to a lot of students who take your courses because they fit their schedules. But don't let your job get in the way of your dream: writing an anthropology-themed bestseller which could become someone else’s magic roadkill.

An editor calls. Recite your book’s preface which is your manifesto, your soul laid bare, sweaty, alive. Her response is, "you can't curse that early in the book. You have to wait until the second half to say [bleep]."  You don’t even mention the teleportation parts.

Disenchanted with the industry, you decide to finish writing the thing before talking to them again. In the meantime, build your followers on Twitter. It's called a "platform" and you've concluded, based on no evidence, that you need at least 5,000 followers to impress a publisher.

Gaining followers is pretty easy. Tweet about anthropology and science, yours and others’. Tweet the book review that you made all about you. Tweet something that John Hodgman, Katie Hinde, or Neko Case likes. Tweet a feminist pun. Tweet all your naughty little prayers. Tweet your weird syllabus. Tweet a picture of yourself 40 weeks pregnant in a cowboy hat and a bikini. Tweet your dog’s eulogy. Tweet your dog’s skeleton’s excavation. Tweet your c-section. Tweet your lactation. Tweet your melanoma. Tweet about the time you were on the BBC, Netflix, YouTube, that podcast, and larium. Tweet stuff that gets Ben Shapiro to compare you to Insane Clown Posse. Tweet stuff that gets Jerry Coyne to call you a bad writer. Tweet stuff that gets Curt Schilling to yell at you. Tweet stuff that gets Ben Roethlisberger, who you weren't even talking to, to block you. Question Charles Darwin's intelligence, in a tweet. All your tweets are authentic and sincere, but you might not stick your neck out in public if not for the need to collect 5,000 followers. This is a superior path to realizing your book dream compared to the typical ways, like, by choosing a manly pen name, knowing something icky about somebody who’s famous, or having talent. 

Once you have all the followers you need, all that’s left to do is write the book.

So, put your kid to bed, eat a special brownie, curl up on the sofa, and click on the television. There are those rich people HBO sounds. A new show is starting. Watch it. It's lovely and heartachey and hilarious and nerdy. It's wonderful. Too wonderful. Why isn't everything this wonderful? you wonder. Your mind flashes to the mountain of footage John Wilson has shot and stockpiled, and combs through to weave his wonderful stories; you know the answer to your question. 

When the show's over, head to Twitter to scroll its followers. These are your people. Retweet the show’s tweets. But you're trying to stay off Twitter so that you can write your book. Still, make sure to log in at least eighteen times a day. When you do, there's a DM from @HowToJohnWilson. They want to send you a special gift from HBO and they need your address. About two weeks later, the free stuff arrives. Now you have free stuff. 

Revisiting "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and Quitting After the Racist Prologue

The “F*ck Jared Diamond” article was circulating again, so rather than read it, Kevin and I got Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies on audiobook to try to see the issues for ourselves . Then, the plan was, we'd read the article and see if we agree.

This would be a re-read. Kevin and I already read GG&S soon after it was published in 1997. I vaguely remember GG&S's archaeological issues from grad school. But, the message Kevin and I both took from Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book was incredibly important, to our young minds, especially at the time: cultures and societies develop in context, so assuming that cultural variation boils down to human biological variation is foolish. 

But the urge to understand why Guns, Germs, and Steel still incites the f-word is strong, so I got to listening. As one does, I started at the beginning, which is the Prologue. But that is as much as I endured this second time around. It was all I needed to understand.

The point of Diamond's Prologue is to convey the origin and importance of the question that sparked him to write the book: Why is there global inequality in wealth and power? 

It's a great question and an important question and really seemed like much more of a mystery back in the 90s to two kids like Kevin and me than it does now. It was the first time we'd encountered anyone's attempt to answer it and it earned extra applause for doing so (ostensibly...ugh) while rejecting race as the answer. Diamond's book purported to answer the global inequality question with a new synthesis of biogeographic something or other. Okay. Yes! 

I suppose that whoever awards Pulitzers believed that GG&S did answer that question, at least at the time.  It's hard to disagree with the fact that biogeographic context matters to how human history unfolds. These were important lessons for white people in the 1990s who (may not have known it and certainly may not have said so, but) were living in the myth of white racial supremacy and still are.  

But now, while I'm in GG&S again all these years later, I feel the Internet's relentless irritation with the book in a way that I didn’t feel as a 22 year-old idiot back in 1999. And that's just from dipping a toe! That's just from the itty bitty Prologue!

As the book begins, right away you might notice the casual, frank way that Diamond discusses racist views (which he calls racist and that he disagrees with). The tone is off-putting (or you might say "cringe") if you sympathize and empathize at all with the people on the nasty end of those views and systems. By now, writers have developed styles with far more respect for peoples' dignity. 

And then, there's the way he paints some contemporary peoples/cultures as isolated, atomized, and frozen in time, untouched by others. “Still” hunter-gatherers, he says, about people who have had complex histories including complex social hierarchies which he seems to only grant to “modern” civilizations. The wording, the tone, it’s all anthropology’s territory and yet he’s talking more like an anthropologist from the beginning of the 20th century than one from end of it. No wonder my professors were pissed off. And to read it now, his anthropology feels categorically further away from the anthropology of the 21st Century.

But what got me to give up after the Prologue was the racism. Yes. On the pages he says he is against racism. But, also, on the pages he says he believes that different populations are inherently more or less intelligent than others, genetically. That is racism (and so, to him, "racism" must mean discrimination or hatred). American science had not, by the 1990s, figured out that race is the meaning people make of biological variation. Instead, they frequently (if not typically) equated race to human biological variation. You could be against racism and still be racist without knowing it. You could believe that people could be good and fair and just (that is they could be not racist), but still call skin color variation "race" or still believe that people are born white or born Black. [Please click on that hyperlink just up there, or here, if this is not making sense to you, yet. I totally understand. That's why I put the link there.] Now, I hope things have improved. I think they have? I think that, now, fewer scientists hold that racist perspective. We know that you aren't born with a race, you're born into race. There's human biological variation and then there's race, which is a human invention with real-life power that, in America, includes the myth that it's not a human invention (high-five, Pirsig)! 

So what do I mean that Diamond does racism in GG&S? He first decides that people from Papua New Guinea are smarter than his people. And then he walks us through a little thought exercise that becomes an argument complete with genes for intelligence being more naturally selected for in PNG peoples' ancestors than in his peoples'. This racism, even when it’s to benefit non-white people, is still racism. How jaw-dropping, literally, to read Diamond wield the logic of race/ism even though his book is supposed to be an anti-racist explanation for global inequality and wealth! 

Here’s another white guy applying the "scientific logic" of the myth he's enacting to support his feeling that his PNG friends are smarter than his white friends. If Diamond thinks he can just what-if his way around PNG intelligence, without any self-deprecation or humility about his musings, any self-awareness about these habits among scientists that are the same habits of racists, without even a wink to the reader, then we have to take him literally. So, he literally thinks he’s arrived at support for his belief in superior PNG intelligence.  But there is no revelation about how these musings are just that. (That doesn't give a reader confidence in any of the arguments of the entire book to follow!) There is no revelation about the storytelling game that scientists, scholars, and writers play as if it’s the way to the truth. Instead, he actually expects us to be persuaded by his story, as if it’s a good, scientific argument. There is no understanding or realization, at least not in print, that what he just did invalidates the entire enterprise that allows for what he just did! 

It's the exact same logic that goes into the racist claims that put white people on top. It’s the myth controlling his mind. It’s the same mind-controlling myth that's got a hold of Harari in Sapiens. In it, he reveals the fictions of biological race, sexuality, and gender (yes!), but other evolutionary fictions, that are just as fictitious, are wielded as fact. One of the most egregious is our supposedly evolved tribalism/xenophobia--the myth of which, upholds the myths of evolved race, sexuality, and evolved gender, so he's totally undermining his arguments against them! 

Whew. A bazillion copies of both GG&S and Sapiens all over this Earth.  

I do believe people change. I sure have changed over my lifetime. Lots. But by the sounds of “F*ck Jared Diamond” he still hadn't by 2013. Life is long, though.  

P.S. If you are looking for a different perspective, like an argument for the crucial role of beliefs in peoples'  fates, then check out The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. 

The Evolution Files

If you search the Epstein dump, you'll get 2,023 results for "evolution". Granted many of the documents are duplicated. But what do we find if we narrow our search? 

Evolutionary psychology appears 44 times. And that doesn't include all of Epstein's interlocutors who take that perspective.  Epstein was a fan of evolutionary psychology and of anything adjacent to it, like "cultural evolution", "the evolution of cooperation", and sociobiology.  

One correspondence in the Epstein dump that stood out to me (even more than what different stars of the field, like Trivers, were writing to him) was the communication with the head of Nautilus magazine. 

I've noticed over the years something about Nautilus that I just don't see in, say, Scientific American or American Scientist as much: evolutionary psychology. Here's an example: Nurture Alone Can’t Explain Male Aggression.

What was alarming about that exchange between Epstein and Nautilus was the goal to get the magazine into high schools. Maybe they succeeded. I have no idea. And the interest in schools was not isolated to the Nautilus exchanges: Epstein and his friends were intent on improving science education and especially evolution education. Given their "view of life" and their powerful wealth, well, that's just another horrifying facet to uncover in this horror story. 

An evolutionary view of life rooted in sociobiology and/or evolutionary psychology is far more likely to be sexist and racist. What evidence do I have? I'm alive right now. I live in this world. I live in these dominant myths that people believe and enact. Evolution is true, but evolutionary psychology is not a necessary part of that truth. Not even close.

Sociobiology/ evolutionary psychology is the only evolutionary perspective that can offer up evolutionary explanations for old men's attraction to girls under eighteen. And people believe it as "just how humans evolved... whatdya gonna do? It's science. And science doesn't care about what you think." 

Unfortunately evolutionary psychology is the mainstream view of human evolution in the zeitgeist. And that's not just because of magazines like Nautilus. Who do you think thought it all up in the first place? Who do you think gives it its enduring authority? Professors. And they attract thousands upon thousands to their lecture halls each year.

You don't have to react against any of evolutionary psychology's racist, sexist, or pedophilia-related outcomes that I listed above to reject it as an evolutionary view. You just have to dig a little into what is known in biology and what is unknown. Once you do, then you can appreciate just how "theoretical" evolutionary psychology is. 

It has the same problem that less politically salient aspects of evolutionary biology have: adaptationism. Evolutionary psychology can also be essentialist. And out here in the zeitgeist, adaptationism (combined with all kinds of outdated impressions of evolution) continues to trick so many people into believing that what has been completely made-up about the human evolutionary past is, instead, the facts derived from the laws of nature. 

I have yet to see evolutionary psychology make good scientific sense to my mind. And that's why I absolutely loved this paper by Subrena E. Smith: Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible? Her answer is no. 

Over the years that I spent working with the physical remains of our evolutionary history, I have come to see that so much evolutionary thinking as it pertains to behavioral and psychological evolution is not verifiable, testable, or falsifiable, and falls prey to the temptation/habit to reduce complex phenomena to simplistic, imaginary, or all-out black-boxed biology. And that problem extends to the simple act of theorizing natural selection and sexual selection in the past, both of which involve so much imaginary behavior that can never ever be known. 

If you really want to know how evolution works, and what we are capable of knowing about how it occurred in the distant past, then you've got to read some difficult things, which are no where near as juicy as books on evolutionary psychology!

I recommend going to town on these ... 

Ball, Philip. How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

DeSilva, Jeremy (editor). A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution. Princeton University Press, 2021.

 

Fodor, Jerry and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. What Darwin Got Wrong. Picador, 2011.

Kamath, Ambika and Melina Packer. Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior. MIT Press, 2025.

Kauffman, Stuart A. Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Basic Books, 2008.

**

Wriggling free of the dominant, yet unscientific view of human evolution is hard work.  And the dogma has only grown more powerful with time. But...

What if wanting to distance ourselves from Jeffrey Epstein will finally spark an evolution revolution?

You Said ‘Race’, but Are You Actually Talking About Race?

It was 2020 or 2021. I was listening to NPR. The host was chatting with a physician who was discussing possible genetic factors that could impact how well (or not) peoples' bodies react to COVID. But the doctor called that "race." So when I got to work, I made this flowchart and put it up on Twitter. 

Then my neighbor, who runs an online magazine, saw it and asked me to write about it. So I did: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/you-said-race-but-are-you-actually-talking-about-race/ . And the flowchart is posted there, as well.* (Update: I pasted the article below.)

Race is the MEANING people have made, through history, of human geographic variation; it is not the variation itself.

I can't help but believe that if people—especially lefty, white anti-racists—change their common sense about "race" then we will see progress.

Tolerance and kindness are not cutting it. Society must enact new common sense.

*If you'd like a not-blurry version of the flowchart, I'm happy to share! Just look up my email and send me a message.

**

You Said ‘Race’, but Are You Actually Talking About Race?

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/you-said-race-but-are-you-actually-talking-about-race/

June 14, 2021 - Holly Dunsworth, Professor of Anthropology, University of Rhode Island, @hollydunsworth

Question from reader:

I don’t understand what people mean when they say that “race is not biological, it’s a social construct.” Skin color differences are biological and they are obviously real, not just something that society made up. What am I missing? I want to be anti-racist, but I am struggling to even get out of the gate on this issue.

Answer from author:

There are so many people in your shoes and I was one of them. Until I became an anthropologist, I thought that race was just patterned variation in human biology that points to a person’s recent geographic ancestry. My poorly melanized skin, grayish eyes, and dirty blond hair make it easy for anyone to guess that lots of my recent ancestry came out of Europe, and to see that I’m white. To me, all that was just race.

No, I wasn’t completely naïve about white supremacy before I got into anthropology (though, in my Florida childhood, I was taught the lie that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights and not slavery). And no, I never believed that there were distinct, natural “kinds” of humans as if we’re living some Tolkien or Star Trek mythology here.

Still, before I became an anthropologist, I didn’t grasp the important distinction between human biological variation, “race,” and race. And that’s probably got a lot to do with my whiteness. And it’s also because of the power of the myth/lie that is “race.” 

My wrongly believing that race was skin color variation made it challenging for me to also know that race is an arbitrary made up label, a social construct like money. For some time, I felt like I was holding two separate truths, until I finally got the message about “race” and it all made sense. That is, I had to lose common sense about “race” to start to make actual sense of race.

What really helped was shifting my mental conception of race to always include racism¹. Then I could no longer imagine using the term “race” as a stand-in or substitute for whatever I was really talking about, like the evolution of geographic variation in skin color or disease resistance, etc. Race isn’t some sort of neutral, natural trait of a person, inherent in their ancestral or inherited biology. Instead, race is a societal system, a force that is projected onto a person.

Making the mental shift from “race” to race/racism is easy once you learn the history of “race” science—by which so many 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th Century European and American men naturalized existing beliefs about the hierarchical ranking of separate human “races.” “Race” science was never an objective approach to explaining human diversity; it was never an innocent project. It justified a political and economic hierarchy, a colonial settler mentality with “superior” humans reigning over, oppressing, enslaving, and exterminating “inferior” ones. “Race” science, which was the earliest science of human biological variation and its evolution, parlayed visible differences in traits like skin color and head shape into ipso facto evidence for invisible ones like intelligence. “Race” science was responsible for eugenics and its uptake by Nazis. “Race” science supported (with no evidence) “anti-miscegenation” laws into the 20th Century. Unfortunately, by the21^st Century, that “science” isn’t ancient history. 

Due in large part to “race” science, and also due to political and religious traditions that have long converged on the same baloney, many Americans believe the myth/lie that is “race.” They think they know what race is, but they’re thinking of “race.”

Before (or without) doing the readings, I often hear some of my students say things like, “we may be different races but we can eradicate racism” or “so what if we’re different, we can be kind!” And these are wonderful, hopeful sentiments, but they’re broadcasting their ignorance about race.

They believe that if we all just decide that different “races” are equal, then racism will end. But, believing the former prevents the latter because believing the former is racist. I know that sounds overly harsh to people who don’t yet understand, but it is the truth. No matter how kind or fair you behave towards people, if you believe the myth/lie of “race” then you are doing racism.

About this phenomenon, author Ibram X. Kendi writes, "Biological racism rests on two ideas: that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value. I grew up disbelieving the second idea of biological racial hierarchy, which conflicted with the biblical creation story I'd learned through religious study, in which all humans descend from Adam and Eve. It also conflicted with the secular creed I'd been taught, the American creation story that 'all men are created equal.' My acceptance of biological racial distinction and rejection of biological racial hierarchy was like accepting water and rejecting its wetness [emphasis added]. But that is precisely what I learned to do, what so many of us have learned to do in our dueling racial consciousness. Biological racial differences is one of those widely held racist beliefs that few people realize they hold—nor do they realize that those beliefs are rooted in racist ideas." (from How to Be an AntiRacist)

A crucial component of anti-racism is countering the myth/lie of natural, biological “races.” Knowing that biologically-based, or natural, “race” is a myth/lie is not to deny the reality of biological variation that patterns roughly according to the geography of our recent ancestors. But race is not biological variation.

Race is a system of oppression and so it causes biological variation due to its negative impact on people’s health and development. Skin color is not a system of oppression, neither are genes, ancestry, or ethnicity. Race is not synonymous with skin color, genes, ancestry, or ethnicity because race is a societal system of unequal power and oppression.

Race functions to justify a “natural” hierarchy of groups of people.  American culture uses a similar myth/lie to naturalize gender and class inequities. These myths/lies entice us to be passive instead of making the cultural changes to bring justice and freedom of opportunity to all of us.

In Between the World and Me (which was made into a film), Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates says “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.” I work his quote into my teaching on race because it bridges history with the present. It’s just two short sentences, but Coates helps us understand why race in America is the same thing as white supremacy. He helps us understand why people call our current society a white supremacist one and a racist one despite how kind people are to one another. Most importantly, Coates’ words affirm the experiences of people of color in this society: Black pride, Latino/Latinx pride, Indigenous pride, Asian pride, etc are not racist.

Race is the myth/lie that populations are biologically distinct, which leads us to believe that social, political, and economic inequities that pattern with race are just the natural consequences of differences in biology, which discourages us from changing the social and economic policies that perpetuate racial inequity. We must change our conception of race away from mere human biological variation towards a system of oppression. If we do, then it will be impossible to look away, and “moving on” from our history will be understood as actively changing the current social, environmental, educational, medical, and economic policies that perpetuate racism.

1 Shay-Akil Mclean (@hood_biologist) uses the term race/ism to convey their interconnection. From Rachel Watkins, I learned that McLean is doing so "in the DuBoisian tradition."

 

What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height?

Over at ProSocial World's magazine This View of Life, I've got a piece that I'll paste here (though the formatting is better there). It's part of a series Sex, Gender Diversity & Evolution, with editors Joan Roughgarden, Justin Garcia, and Nathan Lents. Thanks to editor Eric Johnson for his stewardship of this piece.

What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height?

Why men are taller than women may have nothing to do with testosterone—or sexual selection.

No matter where you are on this planet, human males are, on average, taller than human females. Sex-patterned differences in long bone length—specifically the tibia and femur (a.k.a. the shinbone and thighbone)—explain those height differences. Slight differences in skull size, vertebral thickness, and heel height add to height differences, as well. Our great ape relatives share our pattern. Chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and orangutan males are bigger boned than females, though the degree of the sex difference varies by species. So, men’s greater average height is best understood through an evolutionary perspective. But how we might reasonably apply an evolutionary perspective to this phenomenon may come as a surprise to most readers. Not to be annoyingly coy, but let’s just say that the answer to the question about sex differences in height that you’re probably thinking of might not be up to 2025 snuff.

Back in 1871, Darwin fleshed out his idea of “sexual selection” with “the strongest and boldest men… in contests for wives”.1 Since then, competitive, dominant males winning the most mating bouts with choosy females, and creating more competitive dominant males in the process, has become the prevailing answer to the question of sex differences in size, including height. And it seems to be the preferred explanation for all sex differences. Evolutionary psychology being the popular, mainstream perspective on human evolution has certainly helped with that.

According to leading evolutionary psychologist David Buss, “sex differences in reproductive biology have created selection pressures for sex differences in sexual psychology that are often comparable in degree to sex differences in height, weight, upper-body muscle mass, body-fat distribution, testosterone levels, and estrogen production.”2  It seems the only way to apply sexual selection to human evolution is to assume distinct, evolved male and female psyches. In this popular paradigm,3 masculinity and femininity seem to be as inherited as curly hair. And so, it’s those essences, roles, or personas, if you will, of Man and Wife, that caused human height differences and whose very existence is evidenced by the fact that men are, on average, taller than women.

But Darwin’s Descent of Man came before much was known about bone growth biology, and even predated the word “hormone”.4  So what is the current understanding of bone growth and its sex-patterned variation?

Because height is an important part of what makes a man a man in American culture (and countless others around the world), and because testosterone is too, it’s taken for granted that men’s height is caused by testosterone. The most recent high-profile example I’ve seen is Scott Galloway’s book Notes on Being a Man.5 I have only listened to the audio version, so I do not know if he provided references. Though I doubt he included any for testosterone and male height. Why should he? He’s just talking common sense, even among many scientists.6 But is common sense correct? Is testosterone the reason that men are taller than women?

No. For all we know—which isn’t everything, but isn’t nothing, either—testosterone is not part of the reason that men are, on average, taller than women. And that causes problems for the sexual selection explanation and, by extension, some basic assumptions in evolutionary psychology. Before we reckon with that, let’s look at the actual facts of long bone growth.

Kids grow their bones like kids until puberty, at which point sex differences set in, and females stop growing sooner than males do. In the U.S., after nearly the same growth trajectory from two years of age, both males and females at 13 years are roughly 5’2” (or 157 cm) tall.  After that, the female growth curve flattens out to reach the average final height of about 5’4” (163 cm). In males, the growth curve continues on roughly the same trajectory as childhood, for at least 1.5 more years, until it eventually flattens out to reach the average final height of about 5’10” (178 cm). This is an additional 9% of growth in males compared to females.7 What causes it?

Continued male growth at puberty, past the point when females stop, is due to estrogen’s effects on all human long bone growth and growth plate fusion. Estrogen is biphasic, causing long bones to lengthen (phase 1) until its levels increase enough to cause long bone fusion (phase 2), which is the end of growth. Because of their greater estrogen at puberty, females stop growing in height not long after the onset of menstruation. Without that surge of estrogen, males’ long bones stay in the growth phase for longer, before eventually experiencing growth plate fusion.8 Of course, many more factors than estrogen are involved in long bone growth and its cessation, but testosterone is not one of them. Without males’ greater levels of testosterone being the cause, sexual selection is harder to square as an explanation for their greater height.

Ever since Darwin, it’s been believed that men are, on average, taller than women because of ancestral, combative males attracting more females, winning more opportunities to reproduce, and, therefore, pushing their tall genes into the future more than the smaller losers did. Just another episode of “survival of the fittest” starring our ancestors’ evolved male and female psyches. But our mainstream Darwin-inspired story has got its work cut out for it if it’s to remain viable.

Different levels of estrogen in typical male and female bodies are due, in significant part, to sex differences in evolved reproductive physiologies involving differently functioning gonads and genitals. In all human bodies, fertility depends on a delicate balance of estrogen, not too much, not too little. Estrogen is as involved in males’ business as it is in females’ (not to mention all the non-reproductive business estrogen is always up to in everyone, as well). Sex-patterned estrogen levels in our sexually reproducing species are working well for existence (as opposed to extinction). But would they still work if selection for tall males—ratcheting up their height compared to females—were happening? To go the estrogen route would mean reducing it so long bone growth could occur for longer, but lower estrogen could diminish or eliminate fertility (by, for example, impacting sperm production and erectile function). And such an evolutionary route to taller males could also affect female estrogen and, hence, fertility as well. It’s worth noting that underneath all the factors that explain human height variation, there are millions of ways genetics can impact it.9 And, as of yet, there are no identified female- or male-specific genes for female- or male-specific biology of height.10

So, how are we supposed to jibe long bone biology with sexual selection? Maybe the more important question is, do we have to? Male-male competition causing male height is a story that we learned from Darwin and have recounted for over 150 years, but that’s not reason enough to keep telling it. What if we face the facts? For now, given all we know and don’t know about how bones grow, sex differences in height are reasonably explained as an accident or a by-product of estrogen’s role in our evolved reproductive system. This amount of human variation in height certainly works fine for human existence. And there’s no need to rely on theorized evolved psyches to make sense of it.

Of course, even if sex differences in long bones are only an accident, they can still have profound consequences. In mammals where males are larger than females, male harassment can inspire females to aggregate in response, as a way to counteract male behavior. And that female behavior, in turn, allows for single, or a few, males to monopolize a group of females and defend them (or at least appear to, as this could be about how males feel about males).11

The behavior we see in male gorillas and in other male mammals need not be theorized to be entirely inborn. Rather, one can remain an evolutionary thinker and appreciate the power of development in context. What if “male” behaviors can develop in species where males grow to be larger than females and, thus, where physical power is imbalanced between the sexes? Context like that, alone, can create some sticky social situations. So, do we really need to include theorized, evolved sexual psyches in the mix? Instead, maybe we should consider the possibility that males and females develop their minds and behaviors according to how their bodies develop in relation to one another and the rest of their world.12  

How can we know whether sexual selection or the by-product story is the truth about men’s height? We cannot. Evolution is true, but we don’t have any way of verifying the sexual selection perspective on long bone growth differences in male and female humans or apes. We cannot whittle a man’s evolutionary “fitness” down to his height. Even in a world that swipes for height, there is no way to control for height, let alone to parse its true role among all the factors that contribute to a person’s survival and reproduction. To that, add the impossibility of knowing sexual selection for male height over deep time in our hominin ancestors. We cannot demonstrate that competitive males caused the evolution of male height, nor can we falsify it. That is, we also don’t have any evidence that sexual selection is not the truth. And, what’s more, we don’t have any evidence that sex differences in long bones are merely a by-product of reproductive physiology, as the estrogen biology seems to be demonstrating.

For the evolution of seemingly everything under the sun—from bipedalism, to big brains, to sex differences in height—debating the plausibility of evolutionary scenarios and choosing the winner has been, and continues to be, the only road to the truth. But is the most plausible truth the truth? If Darwin were not so fanatically revered, if scientists and the science-minded were not stuck in defense-attack mode against creationists, and if beliefs about evolved masculinity were not on the line, then it would simply be good science to ask whether an old idea about men’s height is still relevant to human evolutionary biology. 

Moving forward, what are we to make of the belief that the evolved, competitive, dominant, aggressive, combative male psyche, and the evolved female psyche’s preference for it, exist, period, let alone that they caused the evolution of height differences or anything else about us? This seems like a good place to note that in 2019, philosopher Subrena E. Smith published a paper in Biological Theory titled “Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?”13 Her answer is no.

References: 

[1] Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex. John Murray. https://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Freeman_TheDescentofMan.html

[2] Buss, David. 2021. When Men Behave Badly. Little Brown Spark.

[3] A paradigm is a philosophical or theoretical framework for understanding or explaining things. Often, when something is referred to as a paradigm, it is the prevailing lens for making sense of something at that time in history.  Roughgarden (2007) calls sexual selection a tautological system that morphs but never dies in the face of new evidence or thinking. (Challenging Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Daedalus 136 (2): 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.23) This is the danger of scientific paradigms, like sexual selection. They can become immune to scientific progress. That’s because paradigms aren’t always overthrown with new evidence. It often takes a new perspective on, or attitude about, the evidence to overthrow a paradigm. For a pathway into this discussion, see Feminism in the Wild by Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer (2025; MIT Press).

[4] Testosterone and estrogen continue to be called “male” and “female” hormones and also “sex hormones,” even by scientists. But all human bodies require sufficient levels of estrogen and testosterone for a multitude of functions, including those beyond sexual behavior and reproduction, many of which run all human bodies, not merely half of them. For a terrific review of these issues and more, see Williams et al., 2023, “Considering hormones as sex- and gender-related factors in biomedical research: Challenging false dichotomies and embracing complexity. Hormones and Behavior 156: 105442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2023.105442.

[5] Galloway, Scott. Notes on Being a Man. 2025. Simon and Schuster Audio.

[6] Here is a letter in Journal of Human Genetics (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12552116/) which assumes an androgen (including testosterone) explanation for men’s greater average height.

[7] Bogin B, Varea C, Hermanussen M, Scheffler C. Human life course biology: A centennial perspective of scholarship on the human pattern of physical growth and its place in human biocultural evolution. Am J Phys Anthropol. 2018; 165: 834–854. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23357

[8] For a lengthier treatment, see Dunsworth, H.M. 2020, Expanding the evolutionary explanations for sex differences in the human skeleton. Evolutionary Anthropology 29: 108–116. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21834

(To read it for free, without subscription: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=soc_facpubs)

[9] See Chapter 9 in She Has Her Mother’s Laugh by Carl Zimmer (2018; Dutton), especially his discussion of Pritchard’s 2017 work (An Expanded View of Complex Traits: From Polygenic to Omnigenic. Cell 169 (7): 1177-1186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.05.038).

[10] But there is some recent literature about the investigation of the genetics underneath sex differences in height. Again, here is that letter in Journal of Human Genetics (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12552116/) which assumes an androgen (including testosterone) explanation for men’s greater height and which discusses a 2025 paper in PNAS that digs into height among people with sex chromosome aneuploidies (https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2503039122). The latter reports that average height increases across these genotypes in this order: X, XX, XXX, XY, XXY, XYY. Oddly, any effects on estrogen’s role in long bone growth and growth plate fusion are not considered in the authors’ interpretations of and speculations about these phenomena.

[11] Cassini, M. 2020. A Mixed Model of the Evolution of Polygyny and Sexual Size Dimorphism in Mammals. Mamm Rev 50 (1):112–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/mam.12171

[12] Dunsworth, H. & L. Ware. 2025. How can gender/sex entanglement inform our understanding of human evolutionary biology? In: Sex and Gender: Transforming Scientific Practice, edited by L. Z. DuBois, A. K. Trujillo, and M. M. McCarthy. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 36, J. R. Lupp, series editor. Springer-Nature. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-91371-6

[13] Smith, S.E. 2019. Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible? Biological Theory 15 (1):39-49. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-019-00336-4 

A Letter From A Friend

Anne,

Thank you for having the love, strength, and courage to write this blog post about Ken. It is powerful, devoted, and could be of great help to others whose husband/spouse/partner is afflicted with this terrible disease.

As Anne acknowledges, and I know, Ken was one of the best and brightest human geneticists and biological anthropologists of our generation. I began to recognize signs of memory loss at least a year or two before they moved from State College to Massachusetts but did not think much of it at the time, after all, we are both "of an age"; It quickly became apparent that it was more than the normal range of memory loss and Anne confirmed the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. We have observed the steady, rapid, and dramatic decline over our time together, we see Anne socially almost daily, and visit Ken at the memory care unit from time to time.

To observe this decline is heartbreaking for Anne, and heart wrenching for us. No more sitting around the table with Ken in the evening with a glass of wine, talking about travel or a wide range of other topics. No more diner breakfasts, no more hikes or bike rides. No more of Ken and I talking about evolution or biomedical research. He cannot even remember his profession.

There is nothing I can add here to what Anne has chronicled and candidly shared. I can only witness and affirm everything of which she has spoken and experienced. Ken looks the same but much older, somehow still manages his kind demeanor, but absolutely cannot function without 24-hour care and supervision. It is so hard to mourn the loss of a dear friend when that friend is still living.

Alan Swedlund