Nature Girl.

Woman: An Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin, 398 pp., $25)

When Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson first popularized the theories of evolutionary psychology in his 1975 book Sociobiology, feminists had a fit. How could anyone maintain that differences between the sexes might not be easily erased cultural artifacts, but our very genetic inheritance, "hard-wired" through millennia of natural selection? Incredulous women fought back: They picketed and disrupted Wilson's lectures and in one famous incident dumped ice water on his head.

This book, by New York Times science reporter Natalie Angier, proves that the feminist backlash has grown more sophisticated-but not much. In her introduction to Woman: An Intimate Geography, much of which is written as though meant to be read aloud at slumber parties, Angier declares: "I'm tired . . . of being told I mustn't let my feminist, pro-woman beliefs get in the way of seeing 'reality' and acknowledging 'the facts.'" In her book, she merrily lets those beliefs get in the way of both.

Much of Woman is a straightforward, if wince-inducing, celebration of the female anatomy. Angier surely has a point that ovaries are wondrous, and so are eggs, and so is breast milk, and on and on. But it's hard to take seriously a writer who praises another book as "ovarial." (Is "testicular" the corresponding term of abuse?) And a full chapter on the anatomical feature that, as they say on Seinfeld, "rhymes with Dolores" might strike most readers as "ovarial" in the extreme.

Angier impales herself on the classic contradiction of feminism, which is celebrating female differences while also arguing that women can do everything (including being brutes) just as well as men. It is in the service of the latter impulse that Angier tries to debunk the supposed excesses of evolutionary psychology. How we should regard sociobiology is an open question (see the nr symposium, March 9, 1998, "The Descent of Man"). But it has its uses, confirming commonsense notions of a fixed human nature that necessarily entail limits on social experimentation, e.g., changing sex roles. That's why Angier resists it with every evasion, misunderstanding, and laughable counterargument she can muster.

The dynamic that, according to evolutionary psychology, shaped human development is by now familiar: Women are a scarce reproductive resource, over whom men will fiercely compete. To simplify, the fight among men for status (and hence access to women) has made them physically larger, more aggressive, and more violent than women. Also, there have arisen deep differences in attitudes toward sex: Women will be much more cautious about sex (they have to worry about carrying a child for nine months) and anxious about the quality of commitment they can get from their mate; men will be more reckless, and concerned about the youth and health of their mate (to ensure that she can indeed bear children).

The evidence in support of this theory may not be airtight, but it is close. Males are the seducers in about 99 percent of animal species (in cases that are exceptions, the male makes more of a child-rearing investment than the female). When it comes to our closest relatives, the primates, the males are consumed with competition for rank- forming alliances, beating and sometimes murdering one another-and for the sexual access to females that comes with it.

Among human beings too, of course, men are undeniably the sexual aggressors. As Matt Ridley points out in The Red Queen, in no known human society do more than a few marriage proposals originate from women. It is men who most prize casual sex, consuming pornography and employing prostitutes. And it is men who fight for the sexual favors of women: In preliterate human societies up to a quarter of men were killed by other men, most often over sexual access.

Evolutionary psychologists are sometimes accused of telling "just-so" stories. Angier tells "just-not-so" stories. Men's taste for pornography? Well, women would have it too if only given the chance (never mind that the land is full of pornographers ready to cater to any taste, yet none has managed to find a market niche among women). The tendency of young women to couple with older, higher-status men? Well, that's because an older man will be "more grateful and gracious" (tell it to Donald Trump's castoffs). Surveys showing that men are much more likely than women to accept a come-on from a stranger? Well, what girl wants to be known as a "slut"?

Whenever Angier encounters something she dislikes-like the double standard by which female promiscuity is frowned on more than male carousing-she blames it on "nurture." But nature and nurture aren't so easily distinguished; if something is universally a feature of nurture, it probably has some basis in nature. As Angier's nemesis Robert Wright argues in The Moral Animal, men are probably programmed to find a promiscuous woman less desirable as a lifetime mate (on the theory that she is likelier to cuckold him). As Wright asks, "Can anyone find a single culture in which women with unrestrained sexual appetites aren't viewed as more aberrant than comparably libidinous men?"

Angier doesn't take up the challenge. She also tries to brush aside an extensive survey of 37 cultures around the world by scholar David Buss showing that men indeed tend to look for younger, more beautiful mates, while women want older, higher-status men. Angier falls back on the hoary argument that this is a result of a woman's economic disenfranchisement. But Buss's survey shows that women's desire for a high-status mate actually increases with their own wealth.

Angier would help her cause if she could point to one instance where it is women rather than men who seek status as a means to win the favors of multiple sexual partners. Where is the female version of the Inca sun king who kept 1,500 concubines? Angier inadvertently reinforces the point when she praises the sexual aggressiveness of Monica Lewinsky. What is Bill Clinton but a male who has devoted his entire life to achieving rank he can translate into sexual conquest? Would fearless Monica have bared her thong so readily had she encountered Clinton pumping gas in a Texaco jumpsuit?

The nature of polygamy and adultery brings us to the fatal flaw in Angier's project. She is making a plea for female solidarity: "It is maladaptive for women to continue on the course of she said/she said, the yowling and mud wrestling. We need each other now. The next phase of the permanent revolution needs an infusion of Old World monkey sorority." The problem is, outside of Tri Delt, there is no such thing. As evolutionary psychologists are not the first to observe, sex can be a complicated business, a dismaying arms race of all against all, involving power calculations and deception on all sides.

If men tend to be more polygamous than women, polygamy by no means benefits all men. If high-status males are monopolizing women by the hundred, many low-status males will miss out altogether. On the other hand, the concubines of the sun king (or the mistresses of the prime minister) might well be better off than if they had married an ordinary, faithful Joe. Monogamy and faithfulness don't benefit all women equally. So much for sisterhood. Who, after all, is likelier than Hillary Clinton to want to call Monica Lewinsky a "slut"?

The accuracy of Angier's attempts to find an ancestral precedent for her vision of "you-go-girl" sisterhood-in a hunter-gatherer society in East Africa, and in the liberal's favorite ape, the bisexual, promiscuous, and pacific bonobo-can be left to the experts. Suffice it to say her brand of feminism is probably a foolish fantasy, doomed to bump up against the "facts" and "reality" she waves off so nonchalantly.

But we should have at least some sympathy for Angier's motives. Not all efforts to rein in and divert our scheming, promiscuous ancestral brains are unworthy. Evolutionary psychology may tell us much about our nature. But as Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above."