Commentary: Mating Types and Human Sexuality

Abstract

tured and organized by contingent goals. The results of scientific activity are then used to bolster particular theological, ethical, or political assumptions. Several historical examples could be cited: Harvey vs. Descartes, Pasteur and Pouchet, and the nineteenth century dispute on the use of animals for experimentation. Only the first of these has failed to resurface repeatedly as an issue. Experimental work since the 1950s, associated with the names of Urey and Miller, Oparin, and others, have produced fresh polemics on the nature of spontaneous generation, no more resolved than in Spallangni's time. The animal rights movement continues to inveigh (with increasing success) against animal experiments. Only the nature of the heartbeat fails to excite. The controversies surrounding human sexuality, however, differ fundamentally from these examples for the reason that they are not scientific debates, nor even epistemological ones, but primarily political, where becomes tangentially involved only because the antagonists appeal to scientists to justify one or another position. Indeed, even those appeals are often misdirected to clinicians whose claim to competence in the methodologies of empirical science are tenuous. But could sexuality be studied and adjudged objectively? This, of course, would not end the scientific aspects of the controversy. My suspicion has been all along that scientists treat debates as kittens do a ball of yarn; they are as loath to abandon them. If a scientific study were possible, however, some of the irrelevant arguments might at least be removed from the political debates.