34 TABOO AND GENETICS 



biology the opinions of two decades ago about 

 sex literally belong to a different age, some of 

 them have been so persistent in sociological 

 thought and writings that they must be briefly 

 reviewed in order that the reader may be on 

 his guard against them. Books which still have 

 a wide circulation deal with the sex problem 

 in terms of a biology now no more tenable than 

 the flatness of the earth. 



On the one hand were the ancient traditions 

 of male predominance in inheritance, reinforced 

 by the peculiar emphasis which animal breeding 

 places upon males. On the other hand, biologist 

 like Andrew Wilson (5) had argued as early as 

 the seventies of the past century for female 

 predominance, from the general evidence of 

 spiders, birds, etc. Lester F. Ward crystallized 

 the arguments for this view in an article entitled 

 " Our Better Halves " in The Forum in 1888. 

 This philosophy of sex, which he christened the 

 " Gynsecocentric Theory," is best known as 

 expanded into the fourteenth chapter of his 

 " Pure Sociology," published fifteen years later. 

 Its publication at this late date gave it an 

 unfortunate vitality long after its main tenets 

 had been disproved in the biological laboratory. 

 Germ-cell and body-cell functions were not 

 separated. Arguments from social structures, 

 from cosmic, natural and human history, much 

 of it deduced by analogy, were jumbled together 



