 It's really a delight to be here. I will try to actually get through with it in less than 25 minutes, perhaps so we can have more discussion. I wanted to thank both Gil and Carol for the invitation and also Connie and Mamie for all their incredible work in preparation. I also want to say that the best news I've taken so far myself is that any problems I might have being overweight is a result I've learned that I'm a good dad. And I want to thank you for that one. I can't wait to try that idea out on my wife, but anyway. As people may know, sales of testosterone supplements, about $2 billion in 2012, they're expected to hit about $5 billion in 2017. This is in the United States. I've been fascinated to listen to a lot of the discussion here about testosterone from people who study it biologically. What I do in part is study it socially in the sense of who uses the word testosterone, in what context, what do they mean by it and how do they explain and excuse male violence and sexuality, for instance. So what I'm going to be speaking to are some of the naturalistic remedies to social challenges like male violence, which we just heard so eloquently about. And how and why are people swayed by this? And if in fact today in the world, in certain societies for various reasons, people may be more swayed, more persuaded that biology is at the root of various social problems. And what that might say, not simply about the biology or their understanding about the biology, but more about a social climate overall. And so I'll try to speak briefly to some of these ideas. And I should add that clearly there are a lot of policy implications because to the extent that these things are innate, to that extent you can control, but you can't change, you can't transform. So I think it's quite fundamental, again, both to understand the biology, but perhaps from my perspective even more to understand people's understanding of biology because if they think it can't be changed, that's going to have an impact on what happens. This is part of a larger project, this is sort of an indication of the larger project, which is called Men Are Animals. And there's sort of a punchline that goes with it, and so are women, and then so what? So the question is not that they're not animals, we are animals, but the question is what does that actually mean? And I've learned a great deal from people here today talking about that. I want to just throw two things up here. Nine out of ten people who murder in the United States, and this figure is actually remarkably similar in several other countries, are men. And this is a fundamentally important point. We cannot overestimate the importance of this. This is also an important point. Can people see the red dot at the top? Okay, can you see it on the women? I can't, so that's an important point. But it seems to me that if we're going to explain the nine out of ten, we also need to explain what happens to the rest of these men. And why are they not murdering? I mean maybe one out of, you know, maybe there's some percentage of men in here who were murderers, and we can ask them later to explicate some of this. But what I'm looking at now is the folk biology. How people use terms like genes, hormones, testosterone, heredity, evolution. How they use this in casual everyday conversations in various parts of the world to explain what's going on. And so there are really two points that I'd like to get at. And both I'm going to try to exemplify from some ethnographic work I've done in two cities that may seem very different, but I will argue have some similarities that are important here. One is Mexico City, where I've lived and worked on and off for 25 years, and the other is Shanghai in China, where I've worked for about six years. So one of my questions is why now? Why are people doing this? So for instance, if people talk about hormones, they talk about testosterone, you can ask, did your parents talk about testosterone in the same way? Did your grandparents talk about testosterone in the same way? And one obvious answer to explain why they may not have is simply there are new discoveries scientifically. And maybe that's why everybody's talking about these things in that way. It's simply science is developing and people are learning about that science. And so one of the arguments I have is that in both Shanghai and Mexico City in contrast to the rest of their countries, kids are getting educated through high school, they're studying biology, they're studying basic genetics in high school. So they're just being exposed to these terms, they're being exposed to more ideas, and they're coming into more popular vocabulary. In addition, in both countries, as in the United States, a lot of folks who didn't even finish secondary school perhaps watched the Discovery Channel. And I can't tell you how many discussions I've had where people will say, well, I know what it's like for people because I've seen what the baboons are like and they extrapolate straight from the Discovery Channel to their own experience of what they think are the common things. And so it's very tricky to figure out what can be learned and what can't, but it's also, to me, fundamental to just acknowledge that people are picking up a lot of folk wisdom and it is having an impact on their social relationships, on what they think can and cannot be done. So this is part of an effort that Margaret Locke, the medical anthropologist, talks about in relationship to her work on epigenetics and Alzheimer's. When she says a new recognition of a molecularized social body situated in time and space, the shift moves beyond genetics and genomics and explicitly demotes a reductive agency of genes. Anthropologists, she says, are now challenged to consider the social ramifications of the shift, and so I see my work in that regard. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I also think that there are analogies to religion here and not simply that people have moved from God to DNA as an explanatory model or an explanatory framework, although I think that that has occurred in various societies in various ways. But more, I think that if, this is the second time Mark's got invoked, is getting invoked today, which I didn't expect, but Mark's in a very famous quip that people don't know the whole of, talked about religion being the opiate of the masses and all that. But if you read the fuller quote, he's actually, he's sounding very sympathetic to religion. He says religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions, it's the opium of the people. And I think that in some ways there's an analogous biological distress going on. People are trying to explain the world around them and biology or what they understand of biology is a really powerful explanatory tool they feel. Many years ago, famous French philosopher we've all heard of, Simone de Beauvoir talked about women's bodies being very important, but not governing their destiny. And so one of the questions here is, to what extent do we feel that men's bodies govern their destiny? In 1975, a seminal book was published, Sociobiology, which I think was a breakthrough and important in many ways, not the least of which was the time in which it appeared, at the end of a period of massive social movements in the United States. And if anybody thinks I'm making a link here that doesn't deserve to be made, Wilson explicitly, in his introduction, reproaches social struggle, socialism, Marxism, and members of the New Left. So he too saw this as a response to people who overestimated the extent to which you can change the world around them. So I want to shift now to one of my fun sites, and this is the Shanghai People's Park Marriage Market. On Saturdays and Sundays, rainy weather, cold weather, hot weather, this is in winter, they're all wearing coats here, thousands and thousands of parents and dozens of matchmakers appear and they put up flyers, describing their daughter or son, height, educational level, occupation. Those are the things that are common to both sons and daughters. If you start to look into the flyers more carefully, I'll give you an idea of some of the extent of these things. There are real differences in how women and men are portrayed. Women, the emphasis comes on much more looks. Men, much more do they own an apartment. Do they own a house? And I would argue that this is part of a process that's quite modern. And if you talk to the matchmakers and you say, oh, this is a long tradition in China, they'll say on the contrary, we are a product, we're here because of migration to the cities, because these kids are working 10, 12 hours a day in the offices and they can't find the time to socialize. So we're just simply introducing people and getting the ball rolling. But they're getting the ball rolling in very distinctly gendered ways. And I think that this too is part and parcel. One of the phenomena today in terms of a point of discussion, both at the marriage market more generally, is something called leftover women. In 2007, the Women's Federation of China, this is the federal level Women's Federation that was instrumental in the 1950s and getting rid of footbinding, seeing the divorce could actually happen, having women being able to own property and whatnot. The Women's Federation in 2007 announced that any woman over 27 who was not married was hereby declared a leftover woman. And it's a very contradictory phenomenon that today there's a quip that there are three genders in China, men women and women with PhDs. And so that on the one hand you have women actually achieving that, but on the other hand you see tremendous kinds of pressures on women to conform to rather conservative standards of what a woman should be if she's not married she is hereby declared a leftover woman. And this is widespread. I had a 24-year-old Chinese student in my office three days ago and we were talking about this phenomenon and I said, jokingly, is this an issue for your parents? You're 24. She said it absolutely is. This is a Brown student, you know, she's planning to get a PhD and she said, I'm having to cope with this back and forth because you have no idea the kinds of pressures that are now being implemented around these issues and in particular there's talk of it's fine for women to get PhDs but they need to leave that behind, but these women are absolutely critical for the future and the term gene pool is coming into vogue as well, that these women represent the best of the gene pool and so this is an invocation popularly and at the government level that I think is worth noting. I was talking with a one Shanghai man, his neighbors call him Teacher Li and I asked him whether there was something that you could call men's nature or women's nature and he told me and that's all I said. I didn't say anything about any of the biology and he said, listen, when a guy sees a really beautiful woman, his hormones go up, they go up, okay? And he said, I said, well, where do you get this idea? And he actually told me that he got it from the Discovery Channel. What's interesting to me is I asked him about Galtong which is testosterone, he didn't know what I was talking about so I figured, well, okay, he didn't go to high school and I've asked high school students about the same question and I've asked college students the same question. They all know hormone, hormone is a generic category that's used to explain both male behavior but also female, it's linked in popular expressions to when women have their periods, their behavior changes because of their hormones and that's a very common way of describing it. I can guarantee you their grandparents and probably their parents never talked about hormones having that kind of link, much less a gene pool. I also asked him, oh, I'm sorry, but I asked about testosterone in these groups and people say, well, I've heard of it but I don't know what it is and so I have a theory that we can test and that is within five, maybe a few more years if you go to China and you ask about testosterone it will be widely assumed that, well, of course we know about testosterone, this is what it does and we've always believed that, we've always known that testosterone behaved this way and that way but I fundamentally think that what you will see in the United States and I'll talk about it in a second in Mexico where the term testosterone is tossed around very casually and very widely doesn't exist today in China, I would bet that it does in a few years. I also asked him a little more teacherly about the relationship between women and men and he described something which caught my attention which is that women and men are very similar to the egg and the sperm. Again, I hadn't asked him about these kinds of things, he raised egg and sperm. He said the egg essentially has to protect the sperm just like the woman has to protect the man. So these were the kinds of images that he had that he found important. These are a few more flyers. Here's teacher Lee actually. I'm going to skip over this but he gave me a lesson on, this is him showing equality between men and women. This is a guy who also likes to quote Sherman Mao a lot so he's obviously a little retrograde. All right, let me move here to a different setting but also one in which people are studying biology, they're watching the Discovery Channel and this is Mexico City and for those who read Spanish, you understand for those who don't, it says only women and kids under 10 years old. And in Mexico City, as in several other parts of the world, in fact I was talking to Marcia, you were saying you benefited from the one in Cairo and I think actually Carol, I can't remember where you were, New Delhi, yeah. So you have and you've had for 30 years separate cars at least certain times of the day for women. They in Mexico City now they're actually buses too that have sections, they don't have different cars but they have sections. And so the reason I'm interested in this is again it's not so much the policy, although I've been struck by the fact that I can't find policy on this. I've talked to all sorts of government people and they say well we just started doing it because we thought it was a good idea but we don't have any documents on the question. But more interesting to me is the fact that feminists in many parts of the world including Brazil and Mexico are dead set against this policy. Why? Mainly because they think it's capitulation. It's basically saying what are you going to do? That's just what men are going to touch women in ways that women don't want to be touched. They're just acting like men. What you can do is separate the men and the women. That's all you can do is hope to limit men's nature. And so I think that fundamentally some of the debate that goes on and I shouldn't exaggerate the debate. Mainly people are much more in favor of this than not. Mainly women are in these situations. But there is debate on the question and I think it gets down to beliefs, fundamental beliefs about men's nature sexually and in terms of violence in various ways. Before closing, I want to mention some examples. Oh, let me just mention another one that caught my attention and that was I was talking to a young man, he's 19 years old. I've known him since he was born in Mexico City. His name is Dani. And he said he wanted to study genetics and he was very interested in the relationship of culture and genes. And we were talking about various things and he told me about a neighbor whom I knew who was a single mom. And he said, look it, she's a single mom and you could think that's just cultural. You know, that would make sense. He said, but here's the thing. Her mother was a single mom. Her grandmother was a single mom. Five generations, single mom. He said, at that point, you know it's genetic. Which is funny except when it's not. This is a kid who grew up in poverty. He's seen poverty firsthand and this is a way that he explains the world around him. This is an easy catch-all. There must be a gene for single motherhood and that the evidence for him was overwhelming. But I don't want to leave the impression that this is simply a question of ignorance. I think even here we've seen some different approaches by scientists, by biologists, to the question of testosterone, to the substance and the implications. And I think that there are certainly debates in the sciences to University of Connecticut. Do you remember who this guy was? Everybody? No? He killed 20 kids and I think seven adults in Newtown Connecticut. So University of Connecticut geneticists asked to get Adam Lance's brain because they wanted to look at it and they said that they were going to discover the biological clues for the violence that had taken place. I think this is a big policy issue. If we hear on the news that somebody has shot a bunch of people, what are we going to assume in the United States? Young, male, white, mental health, we'll hear about too, but we'll hear about these things. So you could even say, well, maybe certain things happen with men, some things happen with the youth, but white? And why more now than 20 years ago? There's not more guns per se. There's not so many more guns. It seems to me you have to look at social conditions and not be quite so comfortable looking at brain dissection as the clues to what is a major social issue out there. Another example, this one a little closer to home. Some students at an unnamed university were concerned about a biology class they were taking and they sent me some slides which I'm going to share and this was one of them, this was another, and this was the third, the back two. Essentially this was the punchline that we are pretty much of a piece and that the males in the room pretty much go through life saying yes, yes, yes, yes, maybe yes, yes, yes, and the women, no, no, no, no, no, maybe yes, no, no, no, no, no, etc. And again, I'm not trying to deny the biology here whatsoever, but I think the casual parallels between these groups is problematic just as I think that references to baboon harems, hummingbird prostitutes, I talked about that in a class of mine and a student came in and said, well actually I just learned today about gangbanging bacteria and this was not a joke, they were being taught and I can say Brown University, they were being taught about gangbanging bacteria. Now I'm sure that's a catchphrase that will stick in people's heads and you can kind of get the hit about what it's saying, but I would argue that is dangerous talk that implies certain things. It implies a whole lot of things and it's a problem. So what I'm trying to understand is why these things may be emerging today, these casual references to biology in different ways in Shanghai and Mexico City and Los Angeles and when casual talk about things being innate or instinctual actually lead people to certain kinds of behavior and certain kinds of expectations and certain kinds of lack of expectations about what can happen. Social Darwinism as people who studied the United States has had a very powerful history at various times. Richard Hofstadter who studied it, one of the things he noticed was that in the early 20th century he wrote about so authoritative, did their biological data seem and that this helped give rise. So I guess this is a call on biologists here to be even more sensitive to the language we use in describing things and the impact that it can have socially. This is from my mother-in-law who says men are pigs. 40 years ago an anthropologist near and dear to many of you here now at UCLA, Sherri Orkner, talked about cross-culturally and through history she thought that men were often associated more with culture and women with nature. She wasn't supporting this, she just said this is a phenomenon all over the place. She came out with a paper later saying this wasn't actually intentional, this happened by accident because of divisions of labor as they arose. But nonetheless she believed that to be true. I guess what I'm doing in some ways is flipping that and asking whether in certain respects, popularly speaking, men are not considered closer to nature and almost they need to be controlled by others. And if this is not a certain kind of fatalism that is dangerous for all of us because if we're talking about war, if we're talking about shootings, if we're talking about rape and we can talk about the debates on the natural, what people argue is natural about rape, whether it's good or bad. These are major debates and important debates to be having and a lot of them do rest on what some regard as innate characteristics. And if they're innate, they're much more difficult to transform and change. And it seems to me that these are some important things to do, just quoting another well-known anthropologist, Marshall Solans, who wrote also almost 40 years ago. Since the 17th century we seem to have been caught up in this vicious cycle, alternately applying the model of capitalist society to the animal kingdom, then reapplying this bourgeoisified animal kingdom to the interpretation of human society. I think the expression in English, boys will be boys in Spanish, we would say, I see some, what are you going to do about it? That's just the way they are. China has been a little more varied. You have zealous red guards at one point, you have the search for the ideal man at another point, and now you have the wily capitalist entrepreneur. But a lot of these are rooted in certain beliefs about naturalizations about men. I think that some of this can really fuel the backlash against feminism and gender equity and that if we don't speak specifically to some of the problems of some of the uses that we're going to be contributing to the perpetuation of some of these problems. Tom Laker, the historian, and I'll close here, has described a situation that he says is a novel construal of nature that comes to serve as the foundation of otherwise indefensible social practices. Thank you.