chances for survival over foxes, beaver or partridges in a
given environment. A biologist would probably use more exact and less
ambiguous terms to express such a fact, and say that wolves were the
best _adapted_ to the given surroundings. If all these animals continued
to live side by side in the given environment, they could be compared
only as to specific details--size, strength, cunning, fleetness in
running, swimming or flying, concealment from enemies, etc. Then the
biologist would probably make his meaning perfectly clear by stating
that one is _specialized_ in one direction or another.

Especially is general superiority a vague idea when the things compared
are different but mutually necessary or complementary. If their
functions overlap to some extent (i.e., if certain acts can be performed
by either), we may say that one is better adapted to a certain activity
than the other. Thus it may be that women are generally better adapted
to caring for young children than are men, or that men are on the whole
better adapted to riveting boiler plates, erecting skyscrapers, or
sailing ships. Where their activities do not overlap at all, even the
word adaptation hardly applies. For example, women are not better
"adapted" to furnishing the intra-maternal environment for the young,
since men are not adapted to it at all. It is a case of female
_specialization_.

Men being neither specialized nor adapted, to any extent whatever, to
this particular activity, any attempt at comparison is obviously
fruitless, since one term is always zero. This specialization,
absolutely necessary to the survival of human groups, is either present
or it is absent in a given individual. Any attempt to formulate a
general proposition about superiority either attaches purely arbitrary
values to different kinds of activity or is absurd from the standpoint
of the most elementary logic.

From the standpoint of biology, reproduction is not an individual but a
group problem, however many problems of detail it may give rise to in
individual lives. Sex involves the division of the reproductive process,
without the exercise of which any human group would perish very shortly,
into two complementary, mutually necessary but unequal parts. (This
statement applies only to the reproductive process, as obviously the
male and female gametes contribute equally to the formation of the new
individual). Neither part (the male or the female) of this process is
more