Narrating Descent: Popular Science, Evolutionary Theory and Gender Politics

Abstract

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott has argued. This resistance arises from the fact that evolution by natural selection lacks proper narrative entities and narrative events and that it relies on two parallel narrative levels, the levels of species and organism. This paper explores how two popular science books on evolution negotiate this narrative dilemma by introducing a third narrative level. Both texts appropriate characteristics from the narrative levels of species and organism and project them on molecular and minute scales by portraying evolution as a micro-narrative that takes place in chromosomes, genes, cells and microscopic details of human organs. While this textual strategy produces a coherent and compelling narrative that for the most part succeeds in masking the structural gap between the narrative levels of species and organism, it also risks naturalizing cultural imagery. In particular, this micro-narrative tends to represent popular gender ideologies as biological truths embedded in molecular processes within our bodies.

Keywords:

• Anthropomorphism
• evolution
• gender
• narrative
• popular science

Notes

Judith Roof (2007) and N. Katherine Hayles (2001) in fact do raise questions about narrative. However, Roof's focus is on genetics, with evolutionary discourse lurking behind the iconic image of the double helix. My paper approaches popular discourses from the opposite angle, viewing genetic discourse as the cultural context through which evolutionary discourse takes shape. Roof also understands narrative in a more abstract sense as ‘a cultural, psychological, ideological dynamic’, ‘a pervasive sense of the necessary shape of events and their perception and as the process by which characters, causes, and effects combine into patterns recognized as sensical’ (Roof, 1996, p. xv). Hayles, on the other hand, makes important observations about the narrative structure in Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, which I draw upon in my discussion of evolutionary narrative. In general, however, her article is mainly concerned with metaphor and questions of agency in postmodern culture.

Some popular science writers have taken the opposite route and turned ‘life’ into a narrative protagonist, producing what might be called a ‘macro-narrative’ of the evolution of life. This kind of textual strategy is evident, for instance, in a number of texts that appear under the title ‘Epic of Evolution’. Turney (2001) provides an insightful analysis of one such text, Connie Barlow's Green Space, Green Time: The Way of Science (1997). As Turney suggests, this macro-narrative is often used to advocate environmentalist causes by underlining the close connections between different life forms and to propose a secular alternative to religion by turning a diverse field of scientific disciplines, theories, and observations into a single cosmic story. I would suggest, however, that the problem with ‘life’ as a protagonist in evolutionary accounts is that it makes a rather predictable and uninteresting narrative. Portraying evolution as a slow but constant progress toward ever greater complexity of life, such ‘evolutionary epic’ lacks the drama of danger, struggle and death associated with evolution (and narrative in general) in the popular imagination. As a narrative protagonist, ‘life’ is also difficult to conceive since it seems to include everything and yet not anything in particular. It also does not embody agency (i.e. it does not strictly speaking ‘act’) and thus makes a rather poor narrative entity. By contrast, the evolutionary micro-narrative I examine in this paper can provide narrative accounts that reflect and respond to popular ideas of what makes a ‘good story’.

Mellor makes a similar point in her discussion of ‘implied authors’ versus real authors: ‘it is important to note that it is the texts and the intertextual web, not the actors or the network they constitute, which form the interface with which public audiences directly interact’ (Mellor, 2003, p. 519).

Sykes is also the author of The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science that Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry (2001) and Blood of the Isles: Exploring the Genetic Roots of Our Tribal History (2006; published in the US and Canada as Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland).

This association of the X-chromosome with femaleness and the Y-chromosome with maleness is, of course, misleading since both men and women carry X-chromosomes. In this sense, Sykes's text echoes and appropriates the popular idea of X- and Y-chromosomes as ‘sex chromosomes’.

Londa Schiebinger (2004) has made similar observations about the use of gendered anthropomorphism in the history of botany. Tracing the ‘discovery’ of plant sexuality in the eighteenth century, Schiebinger observes how Linnaeus's classification system projected social values and conventional gender roles on the structure and functions of parts of the plant. With the introduction of plant sexuality, those parts of the plant that were considered male, such as the stamen, had to be described as playing an active role in reproduction, even if they were previously considered passive or ‘idle’ (Schiebinger, 2004, p. 21). She concludes: ‘The new botanical sciences thus went hand in hand with the making and remaking of sexuality in the Enlightenment. Sexual images were prominent in botanists’ language at the same time that botanical taxonomy recapitulated the most prominent and contested aspects of European sexual hierarchy' (Schiebinger, 2004, p. 39).

Angier is also the author of Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene (1988), The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life (1995), and most recently The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (2007).