CENSUS BUREAU data show that four in ten American children live in a household in which their mother is the primary breadwinner. In 1960 women brought home most of the bacon in just 11% of households with kids. Another benchmark in the grinding struggle for women's equality? Not according to the indignant panelists in this glorious Fox Business segment, led by the professionally choleric Lou Dobbs:

Juan Williams fears the worst. In the rise of lady-led households, Mr Williams says, "you're seeing the disintegration of marriage... You're seeing, I think, systemically...something going terribly wrong in American society, and it's hurting our children. And it's going to have impact for generations to come. Left, right—I don't see how you can argue this!" I suggest empiricism. Elspeth Reeve of the Atlanticdigs up a few facts:

What is going terribly wrong in American society? Crime rates are at historic lows. So are teen pregnancy rates. Worker productivity is high. Dobbs mentioned the high dropout rate, but it's declined from 12.1 percent in 1990 to 7.4 percent in 2010. He said we needed to "teach our kids to read and write," but the literacy rate is 99 percent. Very few people even smoke anymore. America is kind of awesome, actually, despite all these terrible working women.

Mr Williams's co-panelist, Erick Erickson, a fellow advocate of the scientific method, condemns the trend on biological grounds:

I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.

One admires at least the aspiration to science.

There is, in fact, stupefying variety in the animal kingdom, so it's hard to say what is typical. The species genetically closest to our own are bonobos and chimpanzees. Chimps are an aggressive, "male dominant" species, but peaceable bonobos dwell in "female dominant" groups, in which the females, tightly bonded through frequent mutual masturbation, gang up to suppress and subdue male aggression. Bonobos surely find the non-genital nature of ritualised human greeting bizarrely cold, if not outright unnatural. I doubt Mr Erickson wishes to suggest that this somehow implies that human advocates of the handshake, curtsy, or bow are "anti-science". Moreover, whether we look to chimps or our sexy bonobo cousins, it's challenging to identify anything resembling the Census Bureau's notion of a "household", nor is it easy to come by income data for chimp and bonobo labour-market participants. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that non-human primates do not, as far as we know, function within an extended market order characterised by a refined division of labour and the exchange of money for goods and services.

Actually, human hunter-gatherers don't participate in modern economies, either, so it's hard to know how to use even the primeval behaviour of our own species as a norm for evaluating the alarming trend in the earning power of moms. In any case, my understanding of the relevant bits of anthropology is that hunter-gatherer women generally specialise in reliable food-gathering, while men generally specialise in unreliable hunting, and it is by no means unusual for women to contribute more than men to their group's caloric budget. According to one theory, hunting gives men an opportunity to display their genetic mettle, so they do it to attract mates as much as to bring home the wild-boar bacon. What's natural to men is not a "dominant" economic role within the modern, nuclear family unit, but a habit of posturing—often wastefully, often pathetically—meant to secure social status and impress women. In this sense, Lou Dobbs and his guests defend through their manner more than their words the prerogatives of men.

On Wednesday, I speculated about the sometimes fanciful liberal tendency to see themselves as drum majors of history. Mr Erickson's appeal to the natural order points to a matched conservative folly: the tendency to imagine the familiar, recent past in especial accord with timeless human nature. Once one considers how far we've come since the Pleistocene—what with all our capitalism, nation-states, dentistry and cable news—this sort of biological essentialism seems unbecoming of conservatives who, if they are about anything worthwhile, are about the defence and advancement of civilisation. The defence of atavistic privilege, which invariably proceeds on the basis of specious claims about natural hierarchy, is the hardy, incivil part of conservatism. Gentlepersons left and right will leave this nastiness behind, and cheer the ongoing economic achievements of the fairer and not-yet-equal sex.