In
The War of the Sexes: How conflict and cooperation have shaped men and women from prehistory to the present (Princeton University Press, 241 pages), economics professor Paul Seabright argues that the so-called war of the sexes is a strategic game in which the male, whether human or insect, evolves with a drive to score at all costs while the female discerns all along that the real stake is viable offspring—but that both sexes are actually unconscious vehicles for such behaviors. At any rate, Seabright says, species that happen to play this game exceptionally well produce descendants better suited for survival in the evolutionary struggle.
Seabright explains that this war of the sexes often becomes a decidedly sordid affair, such as when the female praying mantis bites the head of her mate just as he is delivering his sperm and consumes the rest of him when he’s done, or when the male scorpion, having evolved a special toxin-lite, uses it to weaken and subdue the female scorpion so he can have his way with her. And Seabright points out that the male strategies and female strategies for “scoring” with a desirable mate can also be so wasteful and intense and unending. Indeed, he likens the essence of the sexual struggle to cocktail party dynamics: “Like a conversation at a party with someone who cannot restrain himself from looking over your shoulder to see who else there might be to talk to, sexual relations in almost all species are clouded by the possibility that either partner might be better off with someone else now or in the future.”
Read Jonathan Rée’s review of Paul Seabright’s The War of the Sexes in The Guardian of UK now!Read Michele Pridmore-Brown’s “War between the sexes,” a review of the book, in The Times Literary Supplement now! THE PAGE FOR THIS REVIEW IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE ON THE WEBABOUT THE AUTHOR:Paul Seabright is a professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics and has been a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, and Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life. His current research focuses on microeconomic theory, development economics, industrial policy in transition economies, and state aids to industry.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science,” a retrospective that came out in the August 19, 2012 issue of
The Observer in UK, John Naughton says that 50 years ago, Thomas Kuhn, an unknown physicist who graduated
summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1943, published
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a work that became one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
In that book, Kuhn came up with the term “paradigm shift,” using it to describe the great conceptual breakthroughs or “revolutionary phases” from the “normal” phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. Says Kuhn: “It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it.”
Read John Naughton’s retrospective on Thomas Kuhn in The Observer of UK now!
