Science in literature

Nature 434, 297 - 299 (17 March 2005); doi:10.1038/434297a

Science in literature

Simon Mawer crosses the divide to explore how scientists and novelists alike grapple with an uncertain world. When people discover that I have been, for much of my working life, a teacher, they evince little surprise. A teacher of literature, they assume. It's when I confess that I am a biology teacher that they are taken aback. A novelist who is a biologist is surely a contradiction in terms. Scientists are logic and facts; writers are imagination and fantasy; and between these opposite poles lies a profound gulf. Even today it is considered unusual for someone to cross the divide. Whether such an expectation originated with C. P. Snow's famous 1959 Rede lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution I am not sure, but certainly his phrase has lodged in the collective mind almost as insistently as his other coining, the "corridors of power". Richard Dawkins would, one imagines, pronounce the "two cultures" a successful meme.

As a teenager with literary ambitions, but studying biology, this divide worried me. I couldn't see why a scientist should not have recourse to wit and imagination, or a writer to careful logic and reason. The fact that Snow himself was a physicist gave me little comfort — his writing seemed exactly what one might expect from the science side of his own perceived gulf: all facts and little fantasy. But elsewhere there were stirrings of hope, flutterings of possibility. As an undergraduate I heard the Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen start a lecture course on animal behaviour with the words, "Some people try to extrapolate from our studies to human behaviour but if you wish to learn about the behaviour of man don't ask the ethologist; turn rather to the great writers. Read Dostoevsky, read Tolstoy." I paraphrase, but the sense is right. In the event it was another Russian who caught my imagination and my feeling for nature. I was studying entomology at the time, learning about the genetics of mimicry in Papilio dardanus, the African swallowtail, and somehow I came across this:

"The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things...When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and colour, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in... I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception"1.

The author of these words (will a scientist reading this already have turned to the references to check?) was a research fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He also worked for the American Museum of Natural History and the Cornell University Museum of Entomology. As a taxonomist he named more than 20 genera, species and subspecies within the Lepidoptera and published 22 scientific papers. And yet his literary prose, dancing and dazzling and deceiving much like one of his beloved butterflies, gave birth to some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. I refer, of course, to that most remarkable of writers in the English (and, presumably, the Russian) language, Vladimir Nabokov.

The assiduous checker of references may spot that I have carefully excised from the quotation above Nabokov's denunciation of darwinian selection. His anti-darwinian views (only slightly less notorious than his anti-freudian ones) were, I suspect, more of a protest than a postulate. He was a quantum physicist of the literary world ("I confess, I do not believe in time," he wrote) and was surely reacting against the pedestrian nature of natural selection; for there is something pedestrian about Darwin's theory. Where, after all, is the thrill in the argument with which the evolutionist greets the sceptic who doubts that you and I could have evolved by an incremental process of favoured mistakes from, say, sea squirts? "Give it enough time," he insists, "just a few hundred million years." Well, yes, I agree, but wearily. There's not much fun in deserts of vast eternity, is there? Nabokov understood, and perhaps this is what drew him to literature, exactly what many a scientist has grasped — that imagination can circumvent both dull experiment and dull exposition, and deliver ideas in a flash. For this reason — the supremacy of imagination — there has always been a cross-fertilization between science and literature. You may find it in the borrowing of 'quark' from Finnegans Wake ("Three quarks for Muster Mark"), or in the research interest of a major character in a famous 1960s novel:

"Ken Whitman's field of special competence, after his early interest in echinoid metabolism, was photosynthesis; his doctoral thesis had concerned the 7-carbon sugar sedoheptulose, which occupies a momentary place within the immense chain of reactions whereby the five-sixths of the triosphosphate pool that does not form starch is returned to ribulose-5-phosphate. The process was elegant, and few men under forty were more at home than Ken upon the gigantic ladder, forged by light, that carbon dioxide descends to become carbohydrate..."2.

It is there in the image of Schrödinger's cat — a purely literary conceit — stalking through the modern imagination with a smile that suggests it alone knows whether it is alive or dead. It lies in the pulse of fear that runs through one of Ian McEwan's characters when he hears the creak of a floorboard behind him:

"Nerve terminals buried deep in the tissue of the heart secrete their noradrenalin, and the heart lurches into accelerated pumping. More oxygen, more glucose, more energy, quicker thinking, stronger limbs. It's a system so ancient, developed so far back along the branchings of our mammalian and pre-mammalian past that its operations never penetrate into higher consciousness. There wouldn't be time anyway, and it wouldn't be efficient. We only get the effects. That shot to the heart appears to occur simultaneously with the perception of threat; even as the visual or auditory cortex is sorting and resolving into awareness what fell upon eye or ear, those potent droplets are falling"3.

Yet, perhaps it is only recently that some writers have made the scientific process the very focus of their work. This is what Carl Djerassi, author of several plays and novels as well as the oral contraceptive pill, would call 'science-in-fiction', to distinguish it from that tired and often tiresome genre 'sci-fi'. It is important not to be misled by the use of the word fiction here. Fiction does not stand as the antithesis to fact. Good fiction points towards truth, which is, after all, only where the scientist is trying to go. Thus Niels Bohr opens his front door to discover that Werner Heisenberg "stands on the doorstep blinking in the sudden flood of light from the house. Until this instant his thoughts have been everywhere and nowhere, like unobserved particles, through all the slits in the diffraction grating simultaneously. Now they have to be observed and specified"4.

And from this famous 1941 visit of one nuclear physicist to another, Michael Frayn goes on to explore the dilemmas of discovery in his play Copenhagen. I attempted something similar in my own novel Mendel's Dwarf, trying, like Frayn, to get to grips with the moral and ethical issues that we face today:

"'The molecule has the shape of a twisted ladder'," Benedict (the dwarf of the title) tells the woman who is soon to be his lover. "'A Jacob's ladder, if you like, but a Jacob's ladder that goes both ways; we may use it to attempt to ascend to the throne of God... but we can also use it to descend into the pit. So beware.'

'And which way are you planning to go, Dr Lambert?' Jean asks as she flips the errant lock of hair behind her ear"5.

Later Benedict sits at his microscope examining the embryos that he has fathered using Jean's eggs:

"He has eight embryos in eight little tubes. Four of the embryos are proto-Benedicts, proto-dwarfs; the other four are, for want of a better word, normal. How should he choose?"

How indeed? If the proper study of mankind is man, then we are bound to treat such issues through the medium of literature. But there is a great deal more to science than mere ethics: there is the whole of that imaginative construct that is the scientific vision of nature. From a textbook you get the familiar dusty story about Gregor Mendel and his peas, as though it was all a matter of logic and reason. Yet his work was one of the greatest achievements of the human intellect and imagination. It was a lifework and an obsession, a proposal that began to tease apart the very fabric of nature just as Bohr and others pulled apart the fabric of matter. Such things deserve our attention:

"Throughout each spring and summer from 1854 to 1871 the man spent hours and hours tending his plants, pollinating, scoring, labelling, harvesting, drying, putting seeds away for the next year, puzzling and pondering, counting and tallying, recording his results in leather-bound books, explaining to anyone who would listen what was going on, feeling his way into one of the greatest secrets of the natural world... You don't display obsession, not true obsession. You learn to hide it. You recognize the indifference or incomprehension that creeps into the eyes of the listener. You learn the art of self-deprecation, the art of crypsis, the art of blending, mouse-like into the background. But beneath your bland and neutral exterior, you create confections of fantasy"5

Perhaps through the medium of this passage the reader might live, for a few moments, some of those 16 years of obsession. Perhaps he might see the short, dumpy man walking in the monastery garden and thinking over his garden peas and what they might mean. This is not to miss the point of the science: it is the point. Because, just as an artistic creation lives in the mind of its creator, so too does a scientific idea. We labour under the illusion that discoveries and ideas lie somewhere out there in nature — but in truth the science is in the discoverer's head. The inherited anlage was in Mendel's mind, the uncertain particle was in Heisenberg's, the Universe is in Stephen Hawking's. That is what makes them so remarkable. There is little difference between this and artistic vision. Yes, you've got to do the experiments but that is not the essence of it. The essence is the idea and the enquiry. "What if?" is the question posed in both literature and science. What if the Thane of Cawdor were to have an ambitious wife and a fatal flaw in his disposition? What if a young Raskolnikov were to attempt the ultimate intellectual violence, the justification of murder? What if a grown man were to fall in love with a pubescent girl? Or... what if a gravitational field were to create a curvature of the space-time continuum? What if electrons were to be both wave and particle? What if God really were to play dice?

Darwin has brought us out of heaven and down to earth and surely it is no surprise that uncertainty — "that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things"4 — permeates modern literature and modern science alike. The unreliable particle and the unreliable narrator are two sides of the same weirdly spinning coin. And just as scientists employ thought experiments to focus their ideas, so a work of literature is a thought experiment about this uncertain human condition.

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References
1. Nabokov, V. Speak, Memory (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1967).
2. Updike, J. Couples (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968).
3. McEwan, I. Enduring Love (Jonathan Cape, London, 2001).
4. Frayn, M. Copenhagen (Methuen, London, 1998).
5. Mawer, S. Mendel's Dwarf (Doubleday, London, 1997).


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X-celling Over Men

March 20, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
X-celling Over Men
By MAUREEN DOWD

Men are always telling me not to generalize about them.

But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.
Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.

"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all.

We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."

Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.

"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."

Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural.

So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr. Willard laughs.

The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent - 200 to 300 - of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men.

As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.

"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.
Known as Mr. Y, Dr. P calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome." He's referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. "The Y married up," he notes. "The X married down."

Size matters, so some experts have suggested that in 10 million years or even much sooner - 100,000 years - men could disappear, taking Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them.

Dr. Page drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast," sitting in his favorite armchair, surrounded by the litter of old fast food takeout boxes.

"The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn't know how," he said. "He's falling apart, like the guy who can't manage to get a doctor's appointment or can't clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it.

"I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble, not as the Rodney Dangerfield of the human genome."

Dr. Page says the Y - a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females - has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males." It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-hearing-loss-"Huh" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene.

The discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

Brand USA is in trouble

Brand USA is in trouble, so take a lesson from Big Mac
Instead of changing his foreign policy, President Bush is changing the story Naomi Klein
Monday March 14, 2005
The Guardian

Last Tuesday, George Bush delivered a major address on his plan to fight terrorism with democracy in the Arab world. On the same day, McDonald's launched a massive advertising campaign urging Americans to fight obesity by eating healthily and exercising. Any similarities between McDonald's "Go Active! American Challenge" and Bush's "Go Democratic! Arabian Challenge" are purely coincidental.

Sure, there is a certain irony in being urged to get off the couch by the company that popularised the "drive-thru", helpfully allowing customers to consume a bagged heart attack without having to get out of the car and walk to the counter. And there is a similar irony to Bush urging the people of the Middle East to remove "the mask of fear" because "fear is the foundation of every dictatorial regime", when that fear is the direct result of US decisions to install and arm the regimes that have systematically terrorised for decades. But since both campaigns are exercises in rebranding, that means facts are besides the point.

The Bush administration has long been enamoured of the idea that it can solve complex policy challenges by borrowing cutting-edge communications tools from its heroes in the corporate world. The Irish rock star Bono has recently been winning unlikely fans in the White House by framing world poverty as an opportunity for US politicians to become better marketers. "Brand USA is in trouble ... it's a problem for business," Bono warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The solution is "to redescribe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values".

The Bush administration wholeheartedly agrees, as evidenced by the orgy of redescription that now passes for American foreign policy. Faced with an Arab world enraged by the US occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the solution is not to change these brutal policies: it is to "change the story".
Brand USA's latest story was launched on January 30, the day of the Iraqi elections, complete with a catchy tag line ("purple power"), instantly iconic imagery (purple fingers) and, of course, a new narrative about America's role in the world, helpfully told and retold by the White House's unofficial brand manager, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Iraq has been reframed from a story about Iraqi 'insurgents' trying to liberate their country from American occupiers and their Iraqi 'stooges' to a story of the overwhelming Iraqi majority trying to build a democracy, with US help, against the wishes of Iraqi Ba'athist fascists and jihadists."

This new story is so contagious, we are told, that it has set off a domino effect akin to the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism. (Although in the "Arabian spring" the only wall in sight - Israel's apartheid wall - pointedly stays up.) As with all branding campaigns, the power is in the repetition, not in the details. Obvious non sequiturs (is Bush taking credit for Arafat's death?) and screeching hypocrisies (occupiers against occupation!) just mean it's time to tell the story again, only louder and more slowly, obnoxious-tourist style. Even so, with Bush now claiming that "Iran and other nations have an example in Iraq", it seems worth focusing on the reality of the Iraqi example.
The state of emergency was just renewed for its fifth month and Human Rights Watch reports that torture is "systematic" in Iraqi jails. The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena's double nightmare provides a window into the pincer of terror in which average Iraqis are trapped: daily life is a navigation between the fear of being kidnapped or killed by fellow Iraqis and the fear of being gunned down at a US checkpoint.

Meanwhile, the ongoing wrangling over who will form Iraq's next government, despite the United Iraqi Alliance being the clear winner, points to an electoral system designed by Washington that is less than democratic. Terrified at the prospect of an Iraq ruled by the majority of Iraqis, the former chief US envoy, Paul Bremer, wrote election rules that gave the US-friendly Kurds 27% of the seats in the national assembly, even though they make up just 15% of the population.

Skewing matters further, the US-authored interim constitution requires that all major decisions have the support of two-thirds or, in some cases, three-quarters of the assembly - an absurdly high figure that gives the Kurds the power to block any call for foreign troop withdrawal, any attempt to roll back Bremer's economic orders, and any part of a new constitution.
Iraqi Kurds have a legitimate claim to independence, as well as very real fears of being ethnically targeted. But through its alliance with the Kurds, the Bush administration has effectively given itself a veto over Iraq's democracy - and it appears to be using it to secure a contingency plan should Iraqis demand an end to occupation.

Talks to form a government are stalled over the Kurdish demand for control over Kirkuk. If they get it, Kirkuk's huge oil fields would fall under Kurdish control. That means that if foreign troops are kicked out of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan can be broken off and Washington will still end up with a dependent, oil-rich regime - even if it's smaller than the one originally envisioned by the war's architects.

Meanwhile, Bush's freedom triumphalism glossed over the fact that, in the two years since the invasion, the power of political Islam has increased exponentially, while Iraq's deep secular traditions have been greatly eroded. In part, this has to do with the deadly decision to "embed" secularism and women's rights in the military invasion. Whenever Bremer needed a good-news hit, he had his picture taken at a newly opened women's centre, handily equating feminism with the hated occupation. (The women's centres are now mostly closed, and hundreds of Iraqis who worked with the coalition in local councils have been executed.) But the problem for secularism is not just guilt by association. It's also that the Bush definition of liberation robs democratic forces of their most potent tools.

The only idea that has ever stood up to kings, tyrants and mullahs in the Middle East is the promise of economic justice, brought about through nationalist and socialist policies of agrarian reform and state control over oil. But there is no room for such ideas in the Bush narrative, in which free people are only free to choose so-called free trade. That leaves democrats with little to offer, but empty talk of "human rights" - a weedy weapon against the powerful swords of ethnic glory and eternal salvation.

But we shouldn't be surprised that the Bush administration, despite telling stories about its commitment to freedom, continues to actively sabotage democracy in the very countries it claims to have liberated. Rumour has it McDonald's also continues to serve Big Macs.

Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers

Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers

Donald MacLeod
Tuesday March 8, 2005

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual - no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands - but they regularly indulge in "attempted rape flights" when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. "Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards," explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. "I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer)."

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. "When one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback - well, didn't get any feedback," he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest - especially in Britain for some reason - but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

March 9, 2005 Feminism's hits and misses
By Andy Ho
THAT there is an International Women's Day at all shows how mainstream the feminist agenda has become. In fact, today, men more than women would label themselves feminists. If you agree that men and women should be economically, socially and politically equal, you may consider yourself a garden-variety feminist, whether you are male or female. These days, that would seem quite unexceptional.
What is exceptional is that although there are many varieties of feminism, one defining element remains: Feminism posits that the female or feminine is always disadvantaged, or subordinate to the male or masculine. The circumstances of women are unjust in significant respects and ought to be improved. Hence feminism's raison d'etre: To right that wrong through political action - which has led to some excesses, especially in the West.
An example of this political action was a fundamental move by early feminists to distinguish between sex and gender: While sex - male or female - was taken to refer to what was physically different between the sexes, gender - masculine or feminine - was supposed to refer to behaviour, demeanour and matters psychological. The latter, feminists argued, were the outcome of the way people were brought up, acculturated into and conditioned to believe.
In trendy jargon, the differences between males and females were merely 'culturally constructed', which implied that they were arbitrary, rather than grounded in biology. Hence, it was argued, men and women must be freed to the greatest extent possible from their narrowly defined gender roles.
If gender differences were abolished, men and women could live similar lives, perhaps even look quite the same with 'unisex' sartorial fashions. Though feminists have not succeeded in getting the mainstream to accept gender ambiguity, the fact that the term 'gender' has all but supplanted the word 'sex' - except perhaps when there is a need to refer directly to sexual activities - indicates how much they have succeeded.
And here is another index of how successful feminism has been in changing mindset: Younger women now espouse feminist ideas while denying being feminist, and may even find the bra-burning feminism of old to be embarrassing. There is a whole new generation of women that has learnt to adroitly justify what they do non-sexually - and sexually - with feminist terms like 'liberation', 'empowerment' and 'choice', even if they reject the feminist label themselves.
Perhaps that is why sexually themed television shows like Sex And The City and Desperate Housewives, where women are the aggressors in the gender game, are watched mostly by women. These women choose their porn too: Women make up 30 per cent of all online porn visitors. But as one branch of feminism set out to liberate female sexuality, this is not that surprising.
Perhaps this generation of women represents a female backlash against the excesses of the old feminism. Many even wonder why feminism was such a force in the 1970s, when it was not merely anti-male - everything men did was due either to privilege or pathology - but also stood resolutely against marriage, children and family.
The old-time feminists considered the triad to be so burdensome as to approach slavery. Home life was an idiocy the enlightened woman should not be interested in. Betty Frieden, one of the earliest leaders of the feminist movement and well known for her l963 book, The Feminine Mystique, famously pronounced the housewife a 'parasite'. In contrast, a career outside the home was deemed to be a woman's liberation.
Gloria Steinem, another major feminist leader from the late 1960s, came from a dysfunctional family. Her father divorced her mother, who later became mentally ill. Unsurprisingly, Steinem could not see how marriage or family might be good, which led to speculation about life without families.
But most people then, as now, regarded the family as something fundamental to a fulfilling life. Few men went to work for self-fulfilment; few males were doing something necessarily interesting. Men worked to support their families, to pay the bills.
This was because, for men, then as now, the family was always the centre of a meaningful life: One's life was devoted mainly to the building of a unit comprising one's closest relatives. Everything else just worked itself into this purpose. So work was just a means of earning an income for the family.
Yet when feminists came along, they lamented how women had to give up their careers or to sacrifice their earning power in order to have children. Thus the idea of a 'mummy tax', by which was meant depressed job opportunities and salaries for mothers - whose predicaments were not appreciated by other working women.
Yet there was always the 'daddy tax'. Because males worked outside the home, they spent less time with their children. There is no gainsaying whether it is better to pay the mummy tax or the daddy tax. The decision must depend on the jobs and personalities of both parents - not gender.
Yet another measure of how far feminists have come is a legal regime which they promoted in the West. In the 1980s, feminists argued that the law's formal equality effectively masked a woman's disproportionate role in childbearing and childrearing. For true equality, they argued, women required 'special treatment' in such matters as hiring, pay, workplace accommodation and public benefits.
Although the original feminist demand was that a woman should be allowed to do anything she is qualified or able to do, this has slowly shifted to an entitlement mentality that involves attenuating standards to get more women to qualify for a profession. For example, although women only have about 52 per cent of the upper body strength of men, both soldiering and firefighting in the United States have separate physical standards or training to make sure there are more women soldiers and firefighters.
If that is wrong and something the rest of the world should not imitate, the feminist push to change the perception of sexual harassment from a workplace hazard to a form of discrimination (based on gender) is to be applauded. The notion of sexual harassment - that sexual overtures by men towards women in the workplace, including unwelcome sexual speech, are actually hostile acts - is now something firmly fixed in law in most places. But it was Professor Catherine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who first argued that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination (on the basis of gender).
After this was recognised in US law in 1980, the notion of sexual harassment spread to the European Union and, in 1992, Japan decided its first sexual harassment case using US case law.
For Prof MacKinnon, however, it went even further. She argued that sexual harassment was not just about the exploitation of women's inferior status in the workplace, but sat at the very core of the whole structure of the male-female relationship. This was exemplified in pornography and she is forever tied (with another feminist, Andrea Dworkin) to the argument that all heterosexual intercourse, in a male dominated world, is indistinguishable from rape.
That clearly is over the top. So, like most movements, feminism has not been an unalloyed good. For all the good it has wrought in getting more women into the workforce and rendering them financially independent, feminism has had its fair share of mistakes.
Happily, women and men are now more realistic about their similarities and differences. After all, there is accumulating evidence that differences in behaviour and psychology between the sexes do have a biological basis.
If it is not all nurture, there is some nature involved as well. It serves men and women better to recognise such differences and work with them for our collective benefit.