Gender, Ethology, and Evolution

Abstract

Ethology is a field of biology that studies animal behavior across species, including humans. Understood in a broad sense, ethology also covers approaches such as sociobiology, which emerged from ethology. Gender and sexuality have a central role in the ethological literature, which often links evolutionarily adaptive behaviors to mating strategies and a gendered division of work. While researchers across the natural and social sciences have emphasized the importance of recognizing the complex connections between human and nonhuman communities, three concerns around ethological and sociobiological approaches to gender have emerged. The first is the projection of cultural assumptions of gender onto nonhuman animals; the second involves the projection of observations about animal behavior onto complex human cultural phenomena; and the third concerns the ways in which gender and sexuality are conceptualized as binary and stable.