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COMMENTS AND REPLIES*
Comment on Udry, ASR, June, 2000
Udry (2000, henceforward Udry), claims to have established that sex dimorphic behavior is produced by prenatal exposure to varying levels of testosterone. He concludes that if societies "depart too far from the underlying sex-dimorphism of biological predispositions, they will generate social malaise and social pressures to drift back toward closer alignment with biology" (p. 454). Udry's work is part of a long scientific tradition-that of biological determinism, which seeks to anchor patterns of gendered behavior to immutable biological roots. These roots have changed over time, but the conclusion-"that shared behavioral norms, and the social and economic differences between [women and men] arise from inherited, inborn distinctions" (Gould 1981: 20)-remains unchanged.
A brief overview of the determinist tradition in Western science is instructive. In the late seventeenth century, anatomists who compared male and female skeletons advanced the idea that sex differences involved "every muscle, vein and organ attached to and molded by the skeleton" (Schiebinger 1992:114). In the nineteenth century, craniometrics (the science of skull size) was in vogue. Durkheim ([1893] 1964), an adherent of craniometrics, claimed that functional differentiation between men and women was revealed in differentiation in skull capacity-and hence intelligence: "[W]ith the advance of civilization the brain of the two sexes has increasingly developed differently .... [T]his progressive gap between the two may be due both to the considerable development of the male skull and to a cessation and even a regression in the growth of the female skull" (p. 21). Even before hormones were discovered in the 1920s, scientists had replaced craniometry with the proposal that sex differences arose from physiologically active substances. Weininger (1903) claimed that both the agitation of feminists and the talents of remarkable women were based on unusually high levels of masculine "plasm" (p. 2). Similarly, Heape (1913) theorized that men and women had different "physiological organizations" that destined women for childrearing, emotionality, and domesticity, and men for competition, politics, and commerce (p. 38).
NEUROENDOCRINOLOGICAL DETERMINISM
Udry's presentation of neuroendocrinology is evocative of these earlier framings of the subject. While Udry focuses solely on the effects of testosterone rather than estrogen, his assertions are similar to those in the following naive text, written in endocrinology's youth:
A woman who...