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Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

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Finches Will Be Finches

By Jonathan Weiner
Posted Monday, Feb. 21, 2000, at 4:39 PM ET

Natalie,

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I read your review in yesterday's Times. I'd heard about the case--that horrible story about the boy who lost his penis during a botched circumcision and whose parents tried to raise him as a girl. It's fascinating that from his first years the boy insisted on acting "like a boy," standing up in front of the toilet, etc. A story like that has to make you wonder whether much of our instinctual equipment is inherited along with our physical equipment. We inherit the tools and also the cunning to use the tools, or to learn how to use them. As Blake put it, "Tools were made, and born were hands/ Every farmer understands." So does every boy and girl.

We inherit the hair, and do we maybe we inherit some of the vanity over hair?

To me there's no doubt that we do inherit all kinds of instincts and personality quirks, and there's also no doubt that these are more filigreed and varied than our simple gender-stereotypes allow for. You asked me, "Does a boy who is low-key and unathletic, who likes art, books, and stuffed animals, feel any less like a 'boy' than does the boy who plays stickball and 'Let's pretend we're invading Cuba'?" Well, I was usually picked last at softball, I liked art, books, and animals (though not stuffed animals), and I felt just as much like a boy as the heroes on the playground, though I could hardly see them from out in left field. Of course, I also played private, heroic games with army men, G.I. Joes, firecrackers, and slingshots and homemade catapults--and my kid brother and I knew that the game of Risk sanctioned nightlong invasions of every nation from Peru to Yakutsk. Now I have two boys, 14 and 11, and whenever I pass their game room they are sitting in front of the computer with their hands on their joysticks, saving the universe by destroying it.

Over Christmas and New Year's I had the chance to take them to the Galapagos Islands. On Isla Santa Cruz I looked up two old biologist friends. They told me a story about a woodpecker finch they'd raised from a chick a few years ago. In the wild, the woodpecker finches are among the very rare animals that make and use tools--they shorten or sharpen twigs and cactus spines and use them to pry bugs from bark. This particular baby finch grew up out of sight of all woodpecker finches and in fact of all finches. But as it got older, and my friends put leaf litter etc. in its cage, they watched it begin to pick things up and experiment until it had re-invented the wheel and begun to behave like a full-fledged toolmaker. That's just an anecdote, just a single case, like--I guess--the boy who was raised as a girl. But interesting.

So hard to talk about this stuff without, as you once put it, "getting mired in the sludge of biological determinism." But how can we not talk about it? It's too interesting, and science is finally almost catching up with our curiosity. I'm in New York City today at Rockefeller University, where more and more biologists are looking at the human genome and trying to figure out how the genes work together in concert, in the new sciences they call genomics and proteonomics. We're going to be learning a lot about inner as well as outer nature as scientists read our genomes, and maybe chimp and bonobo genomes, and start scrutinizing the likenesses and the differences. Eventually we may even learn how to frame these questions properly, because they're so intense and close to home that we get lost the minute we try.

Lots more to say,
Jonathan