Support NeoGAF

[soul creator]

a joke song, but this is basically how a lot of dudes have probably felt this way at some point, lol

 

[BocoDragon]

As usual in these discussions, I am hesitant to ascribe to evolutionary imperatives things which can just as easily be ascribed to conditioning by gender roles (e.g. disprate treatment creates disparate results).

It's pretty interesting how feminist sociologists dismiss evolutionary psychology theories... and evolutionary psychology theorists dismiss feminist sociology theories.

I have no idea of the truth of the matter... but it's an interesting dynamic.

Is feminism guilty of being unintentionally anti-science? Are evolutionary psychologists guilty of making pseudo-scientific claims? Are both potentially right.. or wrong? I want to figure this out...

 

[Devolution]

It's pretty interesting how feminist sociologists dismiss evolutionary psychology theories... and evolutionary psychology theorists dismiss feminist sociology theories.

I have no idea of the truth of the matter... but it's an interesting dynamic.

Is feminism guilty of being unintentionally anti-science? Are evolutionary psychologists guilty of making pseudo-scientific claims? Are both potentially right.. or wrong? I want to figure this out...

It's not just feminist sociologists that do, just for the record.

 

[soul creator]

Sex at Dawn actually challenges a lot of "evopsych" arguments, but I think does it in a interesting (and still scientifically valid) way.

 

[shadyspace]

Evolutionary psychology has always made so much sense to me that I've struggled to understand the backlash it receives from feminist circles. I have not seen critiques of it from any other sources.

 

[Devolution]

Evolutionary psychology has always made so much sense to me that I've struggled to understand the backlash it receives from feminist circles. I have not seen critiques of it from any other sources.

Because of lot of it is "science" in reverse and backing up how things are now.

 

[shadyspace]

Because of lot of it is "science" in reverse and backing up how things are now.

I haven't done any evopsych reading. But the idea that "men quite possibly do x because of the way they evolved" has always seemed like a solid premise to me.

 

[Vermillion]

Where do those graphs come from?

And some of the evolutionary psychology arguments were covered in the post I linked to in the OP.

For instance, status vs looks:



Or propensity to accept casual sex:



Or selectivity:



As usual in these discussions, I am hesitant to ascribe to evolutionary imperatives things which can just as easily be ascribed to conditioning by gender roles (e.g. disprate treatment creates disparate results).

Dammit Mumei. Have you any idea how many dreams you just crushed with the "looks are equally important for men and women" thing?

At any rate, the evopsych vs feminist sociology is an interesting argument. I don't know the answer.

 

[IceCold]

I haven't done any evopsych reading. But the idea that "men quite possibly do x because of the way they evolved" has always seemed like a solid premise to me.

Of course, but men and women are supposed to be exactly the same remember? You are 100% the product of your environment according to many of them.

 

[Red]

News flash: Women want sex, too.

News flash: that's got nothing to do with the article.

 

[soul creator]

I haven't done any evopsych reading. But the idea that "men quite possibly do x because of the way they evolved" has always seemed like a solid premise to me.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that imo, but as mentioned, sometimes the "evopsych" field looks at things now in our current environment and try to work backwards from there. But evolutionarily speaking, our brains actually evolved in a completely different type of environment, so it doesn't always make sense to propose some biological reason for modern social norms.

 

[BocoDragon]

It's not just feminist sociologists that do, just for the record.

Emphasis on sociology, which is basically "opinions about how society works, the discipline". It's not a science, and it's inherently an arguable topic... but that doesn't mean it's wrong or right. There may be some things about society that are true that will never be revealed through experimentation, so all we can do is argue about it and some theories rise to the top through popular consensus.

And I'd say that if you were a sociologist who argued that gender is entirely constructed, etc, well that's by definition of the word pretty "feminist".

I'll just say from my experience studying psychology.. the total construction of the gender is not something that is taken for granted at all. It's highly debated. (but psychology, too, is a discipline that is pretty arguable and has its own competing theories... even though it is based on more scientific experiment than most sociology)

There's nothing inherently wrong with that imo, but as mentioned, sometimes the "evopsych" field looks at things now in our current environment and try to work backwards from there. But evolutionarily speaking, our brains actually evolved in a completely different type of environment, so it doesn't always make sense to propose some biological reason for modern social norms.

I'm sure there is a lot of it that is just lazy justifications for the way things are.

Probably the truth is in the middle. There are hard sexual differences based on our long history as different bodies and differing roles in the reproduction process.... and gender is still constructed, most of those differences don't matter as far as ability, and they can be changed anyway.

 

[A.E Suggs]

There's nothing inherently wrong with that imo, but as mentioned, sometimes the "evopsych" field looks at things now in our current environment and try to work backwards from there. But evolutionarily speaking, our brains actually evolved in a completely different type of environment, so it doesn't always make sense to propose some biological reason for modern social norms.

Our brains are evolving but our bodies really aren't and I guess this is what I guess people don't want to except.

 

[Devolution]

Emphasis on sociology, which is basically "opinions about how society works, the discipline". It's not a science, and it's inherently an arguable topic... but that doesn't mean it's wrong or right. There may be some things about society that are true that will never be revealed through experimentation, so all we can do is argue about it and some theories rise to the top through popular consensus.

And I'd say that if you were a sociologist who argued that gender is entirely constructed, etc, well that's by definition of the word pretty "feminist".

I'll just say from my experience studying psychology.. the total construction of the gender is not something that is taken for granted at all. It's highly debated. (but psychology, too, is a discipline that is pretty arguable and has its own competing theories... even though it is based on more scientific experiment than most sociology)




I'm sure there is a lot of it that is just lazy justifications for the way things are.

Probably the truth is in the middle. There are hard sexual differences based on our long history as different bodies and different roles in the reproduction process.... and gender is still constructed, most of those differences don't matter as far as ability, and they can be changed anyway.

Evo psych is basically confirmation bias distilled. The idea that it's only feminist sociologists who have a problem with this line of work is hilarious.

 

[BocoDragon]

Evo psych is basically confirmation bias distilled. The idea that it's only feminist sociologists who have a problem with this line of work is hilarious.

So you say....

Doesn't sound scientific.

 

[dinazimmerman]

Evo psych is basically confirmation bias distilled. The idea that it's only feminist sociologists who have a problem with this line of work is hilarious.

I can play this game: "Feminist sociology is basically confirmation bias distilled." The idea that it's only sexists who have a problem with this line of work is hilarious.

 

[RoboPlato]

I always love a good Jezebel article. Thanks for this.

 

[A.E Suggs]

Dammit Mumei. Have you any idea how many dreams you just crushed with the "looks are equally important for men and women" thing?

I don't know how any dreams were crushed just from knowing looks are important to both male and female. I would think that going through high school would teach ya that much.

 

[lawlohwhat]

There's nothing inherently wrong with that imo, but as mentioned, sometimes the "evopsych" field looks at things now in our current environment and try to work backwards from there. But evolutionarily speaking, our brains actually evolved in a completely different type of environment, so it doesn't always make sense to propose some biological reason for modern social norms.

This isn't necessarily true. We are 'evolving' very quickly, as our cultural values themselves impose very strong selection biases that didn't exist tens of thousands of years ago. There is not much of a primal evolutionary advantage to devoting surplus resources toward disabled persons, for example.

Though, contrary to that point, someone like georges battailes might argue that the devotion of excess resources to the unfortunate is economically [ie societally] advantageous because it prevents squandering those resources on sacrifice such as war, but that is another topic altogether.

There is a bevy of scientific evidence that suggests evolution occurs on very small scales and in very small time periods.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

There is not much of a primal evolutionary advantage to devoting surplus resources toward disabled persons, for example.

The cultural changes that have taken place over the last 10,000 years have been to remove selection pressures, rather than add new ones.

In the end, evo psych is always explanatory and rarely if ever predictive. Since humans did evolve, finding evolutary reasons for why certain aspects of our psychology exists is valid, but the trap is always when you become too specific with your attributions. Being protective of your child is definitely evolved, thinking that women belong in the kitchen is culturally acquired (not suggesting you're proposing that, just an example). In many cases, traits are culturally acquired but may have non-arbitrary roots originally (that are usually no-longer applicable, and pointing out that it may have had some important function in our past only tells us what "was" or "is", not what "should be"). The whole discussion is a goddamn minefield though.

 

[BocoDragon]

The cultural changes that have taken place over the last 10,000 years have been to remove selection pressures, rather than add new ones.

In the end, evo psych is always explanatory and rarely if ever predictive. Since humans did evolve, finding evolutary reasons for why certain aspects of our psychology exists is valid, but the trap is always when you become too specific with your attributions. Being protective of your child is definitely an evolved, thinking that women belong in the kitchen is culturally acquired (not suggesting you're proposing that, just an example). In many cases, traits are culturally acquired but may have non-arbitrary roots originally (that are usually no-longer applicable, and pointing out that it may have had some important function in our past only tells us what "was" or "is", not what "should be"). The whole discussion is a goddamn minefield though.

I think we can all agree on that!

 

[Mumei]

I haven't done any evopsych reading. But the idea that "men quite possibly do x because of the way they evolved" has always seemed like a solid premise to me.

I actually agree that it sounds like a solid premise (humans evolved; perhaps men and women faced some different pressures and perhaps this explains some of the differences we see between men and women), but there are a great number of problems with the premise.

New Yorker had an article about the subject called It Ain't Necessarily So that examined some of the problems with it:

Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from Western, industrialized countries, mostly of college age, and very often students of psychology at colleges in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate for evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to find universal features of our species. American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens. The relatively few experiments conducted in non-Western cultures suggest that the minds of American students are highly unusual in many respects, including their spatial cognition, responses to optical illusions, styles of reasoning, coöperative behavior, ideas of fairness, and risk-taking strategies. Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia concluded recently that U.S. college kids are “one of the worst subpopulations one could study” when it comes to generalizing about human psychology. Their main appeal to evolutionary psychologists is that they’re readily available. Man’s closest relatives are all long extinct; breeding experiments on humans aren’t allowed (they would take far too long, anyway); and the mental life of our ancestors left few fossils.​

 

[pigeon]

Evolutionary psychology has always made so much sense to me that I've struggled to understand the backlash it receives from feminist circles. I have not seen critiques of it from any other sources.

Is the New Yorker a "feminist circle?"

Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labelling any trait an evolutionary adaptation—that is, one that spread through a population because it provided a reproductive advantage. It’s a concept that is easily abused, and often “invoked to resolve problems that do not exist,” the late George Williams, an influential evolutionary biologist, warned. When it comes to studying ourselves, though, such admonitions are hard to heed. So strong is the temptation to explain our minds by evolutionary “Just So Stories,” Stephen Jay Gould argued in 1978, that a lack of hard evidence for them is frequently overlooked (his may well have been the first pejorative use of Kipling’s term). Gould, a Harvard paleontologist and a popular-science writer, who died in 2002, was taking aim mainly at the rising ambitions of sociobiology. He had no argument with its work on bees, wasps, and ants, he said. But linking the behavior of humans to their evolutionary past was fraught with perils, not least because of the difficulty of disentangling culture and biology. Gould saw no prospect that sociobiology would achieve its grandest aim: a “reduction” of the human sciences to Darwinian theory....
A larger difficulty vexes evolutionary psychologists’ sexual speculations in general. Especially on this topic, work in psychology can unwittingly accommodate itself to the folk wisdom and stereotypes of the day.
Darwin built the prejudices of Victorian gentlemen into his account of the evolution of the sexes. He wrote that man reaches “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands,” and he looked to the struggle for mates and the struggle for survival to explain why. He also noted that some of the faculties that are strongest in women “are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”
These days, what evolutionary psychologists have mainly noted about the sexes is that they look for different things in a mate. The evolutionary psychologists have spent decades administering questionnaires to college students in an effort to confirm their ideas about what sort of partner was desirable in bed before there were beds. “Men value youth and physical attractiveness very highly, while women value wealth and status (though they don’t mind physical attractiveness too),” Dario Maestripieri, a behavioral biologist at the University of Chicago, bluntly summarizes in his new book, “Games Primates Play.” It is also said that men are much more interested in casual sex; that sexual jealousy works differently for men and women (men are more concerned with sexual fidelity, and women with emotional fidelity); and that all these differences, and more, can be explained as the traces of behavior that would have enabled our distant ancestors to leave more descendants. Many such explanations arise from the idea that males have more to gain than females do by seeking a large number of mates—a notion that is ultimately based on experiments with fruit flies in 1948.
It’s not inconceivable that in a hundred and fifty years today’s folk wisdom about the sexes will sound as ridiculous as Darwin’s. It will surely look a bit quaint. Sexual mores can shift quickly: American women reared during the nineteen-sixties were nearly ten times as likely as those reared earlier to have had sex with five or more partners before the age of twenty, according to a 1994 study. As for women’s supposedly inborn preference for wealth and status in a mate, one wonders how much can be inferred from behavior in a world that seems always to have been run by and for men. Although it is, in some places, now easier than ever for a woman to acquire power without marrying it, economic inequality has not disappeared. Even in the most egalitarian countries, in Scandinavia, the average earnings of male full-time workers are more than ten per cent higher than those of their female counterparts; and more than ninety per cent of the top earners in America’s largest companies are men.
A study of attitudes toward casual sex, based on surveys in forty-eight countries, by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois, found that the differences between the sexes varied widely, and shrank in places where women had more freedom. The sexes never quite converged, though: Schmitt found persistent differences, and thinks those are best explained as evolutionary adaptations. But he admits that his findings have limited value, because they rely entirely on self-reports, which are notoriously unreliable about sex, and did not examine a true cross-section of humanity. All of his respondents were from modern nation-states—there were no hunter-gatherers, or people from other small-scale societies—and most were college students.
Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from Western, industrialized countries, mostly of college age, and very often students of psychology at colleges in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate for evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to find universal features of our species. American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens. The relatively few experiments conducted in non-Western cultures suggest that the minds of American students are highly unusual in many respects, including their spatial cognition, responses to optical illusions, styles of reasoning, coöperative behavior, ideas of fairness, and risk-taking strategies. Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia concluded recently that U.S. college kids are “one of the worst subpopulations one could study” when it comes to generalizing about human psychology. Their main appeal to evolutionary psychologists is that they’re readily available. Man’s closest relatives are all long extinct; breeding experiments on humans aren’t allowed (they would take far too long, anyway); and the mental life of our ancestors left few fossils.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/09/17/120917crbo_books_gottlieb?currentPage=1

edit: MUMEIIIIIIIII

 

[BocoDragon]

So evolutionary links are hard to study and inaccurate conclusions are often drawn from them. But that does not imply that there are no sexual differences conferred by evolution, it implies that we don't know for sure what, if any, they are.

It certainly doesn't imply that men and women's behaviors are certain blank slates.. Onto which we can assert whatever sociological theory we like through sophistry.

 

[AKingNamedPaul]

Do I want to live the life of the guy who hooks up with tons of women and doesn't have a great relationship with any one woman? not really. Do I want to have sex with every hot woman I see? yes. I want the freedom of sex with many and the intimate friendship that you can only have with a woman. So basically I am fucked.

 

[pigeon]

It's pretty interesting how feminist sociologists dismiss evolutionary psychology theories... and evolutionary psychology theorists dismiss feminist sociology theories.

I have no idea of the truth of the matter... but it's an interesting dynamic.

Is feminism guilty of being unintentionally anti-science? Are evolutionary psychologists guilty of making pseudo-scientific claims? Are both potentially right.. or wrong? I want to figure this out...

So evolutionary links are hard to study and inaccurate conclusions are often drawn from them. But that does not imply that there are no sexual differences conferred by evolution, it implies that we don't know for sure what, if any, they are.

It certainly doesn't imply that men and women's behaviors are certain blank slates.. Onto which we can assert whatever sociological theory we like through sophistry.

You need to choose a side here. If you're really curious as to whether evo psych is pseudoscience, well, "inaccurate conclusions based on bad evidence" is pretty much the definition of pseudoscience. But you seem to have decided already that feminism and sociology are "sophistry." So why pretend otherwise?

 

[Mumei]

And Boco, you are presenting a strawman when you act as if the side which is skeptical about evolutionary psychology due to its lack of evidence is interested in "asserting whatever sociological theory we like through sophistry." It's rude, at best. The fact that we do not know what, if any, are the differences conferred by evolution is precisely the point; proponents of evolutionary psychology should stop presenting their as fact because they sound plausible (Just-so stories).

And for what it's worth, we don't actually see many differences in the real world; most of the claimed differences are either a) myths or b) can be explained by controlling for other factors. A lot of evolutionary psychology claims are addressed in that article I linked earlier (before the New Yorker article), as well.

edit: MUMEIIIIIIIII

I'm in your head, Charles.

You might find this amusing, by the way.

 

[BocoDragon]

You need to choose a side here. If you're really curious as to whether evo psych is pseudoscience, well, "inaccurate conclusions based on bad evidence" is pretty much the definition of pseudoscience. But you seem to have decided already that feminism and sociology are "sophistry." So why pretend otherwise?

Well I've been through sociology studies. It's basically person A says this, person B says this, and here's person C. Who do you agree with? What's your own theory? It is argued through sophistry, even though it doesn't mean that they're all wrong.. But they're all debatable. Gender theories are just that: theories.

Evolutionary psychology is also supported through sophistry too. It potentially has scientific evidence to back it up, but it's prone to opinion too.

Why would I choose a position when I don't know the right answer? But I do know that this is a very debatable subject... And anyone who comes into this thread and tries to aggressively make this or that theory true through force of sheer will? Naw. It's all yet to be proven.

 

[Karakand]

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

I've never read a sociological tract that has convinced me of the premise that gender roles, in a broad sense, are culturally constructed. The specific manifestations of gender roles (i.e. pink=girls, women wear jewelry, etc.)? Sure. But even far-ranging and broad studies have never been able to show convergence I recently read Kimmel's "The Gendered Society", for example, and while the book was more evenhanded than I expected and features a few interesting studies, it was also FILLED with frustrating sophistry and confirmation bias, which are the very same things he accused the opposite side of. And this problematic manner of argumentation is RAMPANT across every sociological tract I've ever read. Evolutionary psychology is problematic due to the problem of separating valid theories from Gould's "just so stories", but it starts from a more solid premise - namely, that much of human behavior is innate and universal due to our common evolutionary heritage.

 

[soul creator]

I always like to plug it, but I definitely recommend reading Sex at Dawn, if only to see something different from the usual "women like men with resources! men want to protect their paternity!" approach to questions of sexuality.

As mentioned earlier, a lot of current assumptions about sexuality come from things like studying college students in modern societies, which obviously has nothing to do with hunter-gatherers from thousands of years ago (where humans first came about, and what I meant earlier by how our brains first evolved). The book actually approaches things from looking at our closest evolutionary relatives (other primates) and current societies that live most similarly to our earliest ancestors.

Granted, that may not provide a 100% correct answer either, but it seems like a far better methodology to use if one is trying to find an evolutionary basis for something.

 

[Vermillion]

I don't know how any dreams were crushed just from knowing looks are important to both male and female. I would think that going through high school would teach ya that much.

No, I know that, but people are always saying differently, lol.

The cultural changes that have taken place over the last 10,000 years have been to remove selection pressures, rather than add new ones.

In the end, evo psych is always explanatory and rarely if ever predictive. Since humans did evolve, finding evolutary reasons for why certain aspects of our psychology exists is valid, but the trap is always when you become too specific with your attributions. Being protective of your child is definitely evolved, thinking that women belong in the kitchen is culturally acquired (not suggesting you're proposing that, just an example). In many cases, traits are culturally acquired but may have non-arbitrary roots originally (that are usually no-longer applicable, and pointing out that it may have had some important function in our past only tells us what "was" or "is", not what "should be"). The whole discussion is a goddamn minefield though.

So is criminology, to be fair.

 

[Blearth]

The birds and bees talk should be one sentence long.

Always use protection and never hook up with a crazy person if they know where you live and/or work.

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

Sex at Dawn has been largely dismissed by most biologists and scientists with experience in the field. In fact, there's a book-length refutation, "Sex at Dusk," available.

 

[Blearth]

That's ironic, cause I've never been violent, until I'm with the homies.

Just ridin'
Just ridin'

 

[Dude Abides]

Evolutionary psychology has always seemed so similar to the scientific racism of the turn of the 19th century both in style of argumentation and political deployment that I think it best to take its claims with a large grain of salt.

 

[dinazimmerman]

You need to choose a side here. If you're really curious as to whether evo psych is pseudoscience, well, "inaccurate conclusions based on bad evidence" is pretty much the definition of pseudoscience. But you seem to have decided already that feminism and sociology are "sophistry." So why pretend otherwise?

Evolutionary psychology is not a unitary field. There is general agreement over broad principles, but different evolutionary psychologists take different approaches. There is bad research done in evolutionary psychology as there is in all scientific fields. And some evolutionary psychologists make exaggerated claims about the conclusions one can draw from their findings. However, most research in evolutionary psychology is helpful in improving our understanding of human behavior and is undoubtedly scientific.

 

[Mumei]

Evolutionary psychology has always seemed so similar to the scientific racism of the turn of the 19th century both in style of argumentation and political deployment that I think it best to take its claims with a large grain of salt.

This is a rather large part about what bothers me about it, actually.

Evolutionary psychology is not a unitary field. There is general agreement over broad principles, but different evolutionary psychologists take different approaches. There is bad research done in evolutionary psychology as there is in all scientific fields. And some evolutionary psychologists make exaggerated claims about the conclusions one can draw from their findings. However, most research in evolutionary psychology is helpful in improving our understanding of human behavior and is undoubtedly scientific.

I'm frankly not personally aware of any respectable evolutionary psychology, but people who know more than I do about the subject say there is some... so I suppose maybe there is. I haven't read it, though.

There were a couple posts on Pharyngula (if you're unfamiliar, it's a blog by a biology professor / atheist curmudgeon) on the subject:

I have to take one more slash at evolutionary psychology, and then I’ll stop for the day. But first, maybe I should give you the tells I use to recognize good evopsych from bad evopsych (oh, dear, I just admitted that there’s some respectable evopsych out there&#8230.

Here’s an easy indicator. If it’s a paper that presumes to tell you the evolutionary basis of differences between the sexes or races, it’s bullshit. That means the author is going to trot out some prejudice about how sexes or races differ before building some feeble case from a collection of poorly designed surveys or sloppily analyzed statistics to make up a story. Unsurprisingly, those differences always fit some bigoted preconception, and always have, from Galton’s determination of the ‘objective’ degrees of feminine beauty between races to Kanazawa’s, ummm, determination of the ‘objective’ degrees of feminine beauty between races. There really hasn’t been a lot of creativity in this subfield.

If it’s a paper that compares the behavioral psychology or cognitive abilities of different species, there’s a chance it might have something interesting to say. At least there’s a possibility that the crude kinds of essays for examining the workings of the brain might be able to detect a difference of that magnitude. But don’t forget that 90% of everything is crap, so don’t assume that just because the author is discussing chimpanzees vs. humans that it’s necessarily good work.​

Sounds familiar, no?

I've never read a sociological tract that has convinced me of the premise that gender roles, in a broad sense, are culturally constructed. The specific manifestations of gender roles (i.e. pink=girls, women wear jewelry, etc.)? Sure.

But those specific manifestations (as well as other differences you might have named such as who is expected to support whom or who is expected to express different kinds of emotions) is precisely what is meant by "gender roles." What exactly do you mean by gender roles, then, if not those things? And why you think that they are biologically determined?

But even far-ranging and broad studies have never been able to show convergence. I recently read Kimmel's "The Gendered Society", for example, and while the book was more evenhanded than I expected and features a few interesting studies, it was also FILLED with frustrating sophistry and confirmation bias, which are the very same things he accused the opposite side of. And this problematic manner of argumentation is RAMPANT across every sociological tract I've ever read.

Can you give examples of frustrating sophistry? It is difficult to rebut (or even necessarily disagree with) a cipher.

And convergence between what? You might have said this, but I have poor reading comprehension or something.

Evolutionary psychology is problematic due to the problem of separating valid theories from Gould's "just so stories", but it starts from a more solid premise - namely, that much of human behavior is innate and universal due to our common evolutionary heritage.

But the idea that much of human behavior is innate and universal is not something that is disputed here (it's sort of central, really); it's the idea that the differences we observe between men and women are primarily the result of biological differences that were caused by evolutionary imperatives that is disputed.

 

[Jado]

Men are dogs. Guys only want one thing. The human male evolved to be promiscuous. From Charlie Sheen to David Petraeus, our cultural landscape is littered with seemingly endless examples of men who in one way or another live down to these low expectations. Perhaps men are just hardwired to disappoint, and the sooner we all accept that grim reality, the more inured to heartbreak we'll all be.

Dogs. Live down to low expectations. Disappointing. Grim reality.

I'm more disturbed by the implication that a man who desires sex with more than one partner, and doesn't settle down into a single traditional relationship, is somehow a disappointing scumbag because of the prudish and antiquated views of society. Would the author have started the article that way if (edit) he were describing a sexually liberated woman who enjoys frequent casual hookups? The general tone of the article stinks. 'It's okay guys, not all of you are horny dumbfucks. Most of you are normal and just wanna settle down."

Saw this in the comments:
"You know what this sounds like? A human being. Women want good regular sex (not a variety of partners also)"

There are many, both men and women, who don't conform to this so-called ideal. Apparently, that makes you simple, not (mentally) complicated, messed up, not a normal human being, etc.

 

[Ether_Snake]

.

 

[lawlohwhat]

The cultural changes that have taken place over the last 10,000 years have been to remove selection pressures, rather than add new ones.

In the end, evo psych is always explanatory and rarely if ever predictive. Since humans did evolve, finding evolutary reasons for why certain aspects of our psychology exists is valid, but the trap is always when you become too specific with your attributions. Being protective of your child is definitely evolved, thinking that women belong in the kitchen is culturally acquired (not suggesting you're proposing that, just an example). In many cases, traits are culturally acquired but may have non-arbitrary roots originally (that are usually no-longer applicable, and pointing out that it may have had some important function in our past only tells us what "was" or "is", not what "should be"). The whole discussion is a goddamn minefield though.

I agree that evolutionary psychology is a tremendously problematic field of study, and I'm not defending it. But I think you are mistaking what selection pressures actually are, as they can arrive via natural changes in environment, genetic drift and slippage, predator/prey disequilibrium, or more often than not - manmade pressures. Just because it is a cultural pressure, it does not hold true that the pressure won't tend to produce an adaptive response.

Take for example the migratory patterns of human beings and the effects on the genome of foundation events. With every move from africa -> mesopotamia -> eastern europe, etc, there has been a subsequent decrease in heterogeneity in the human genome. This migration probably has some amount of cultural influence, though who knows to what degree. With a loss of heterogeneity in the genome, new pressures are introduced and the subsequent generations become more dissimilar.

While you are right that culture does create barriers to selection pressures, it also introduces new ones, and my original response was specifically directed at the implication that evolution has somehow stopped because of our culture when we are in fact evolving every day.

EDIT: and if this thread isn't full of gray names in the morning then I'll be disappointed. For the record, I have no opinion on the matter, and I'm only interested in the topic of evolutionary biology!

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

But those specific manifestations (as well as other differences you might have named such as who is expected to support whom or who is expected to express different kinds of emotions) is precisely what is meant by "gender roles." What exactly do you mean by gender roles, then, if not those things? And why you think that they are biologically determined?

1) Humans are more androgynous than gorillas but less androgynous than, say, bonobos. The former is a species with SHARP, evolutionarily-selected sex differences (including violent male competition over access to females), while the latter species sees few sex differences and a social currency of freely accessible sexual activity. From this, it has always struck me as eminently reasonable that humans are biologically predisposed to a level of gender differentiation somewhere between these two species.

2) Perhaps "gender traits" would have been a better phrase than "gender roles". The specific manifestations of such are, obviously, culturally determined, but I think that there are deeper tendencies and patterns of thought that differentiate men and women from one another. I don't think that these differences are vast or insuperable, or that every man and woman will or MUST conform to them, but I do think they exist, nonetheless. Even in cultures more egalitarian than our own in terms of female freedom, males are responsible for the vast majority of violence and crime, and I think this stems from something deeper than cultural conditioning. After all, behaviors like pecking order, territorialism, and violent masculine conflict are common to a NUMBER of species, particularly mammals, and things like male bravado and competition are pretty culturally universal, as far as I'm aware. The highest levels of externally competitive fields (math and science, for example) also tend to be very male-dominated, and even accounting for institutional prejudice/stereotyping and the boys' club mentality, I don't think culture adequately explains this disparity. An author friend of mine put it well, I think, when he said that men have a drive to "push and pull the world like taffy", and I think this is a simple and elegant way of explaining a number of masculine behaviors, as well as why men in pretty much every culture have had a tendency to subjugate women in some way, even if in differing degrees in disparate societies. Does that mean that women DON'T have such a drive? No, of course not. But I do think it's definitely more pronounced in men, and I think that internal competitive drive is at least part of the reason why men tend to have much barer social networks.

Can you give examples of frustrating sophistry? It is difficult to rebut (or even necessarily disagree with) a cipher.

And convergence between what? You might have said this, but I have poor reading comprehension or something.

It's been over a month since I finished it, and unfortunately, I don't have it here in front of me. But one thing that stuck in my craw a bit was his citing of studies of the effects of testosterone on chimps, wherein it was indicated that chimps would only become violent toward those who were lower in the pecking order than them. Aside from the fact that this is the same side that tends to argue against using observations of animal behavior as a way of postulating innate human tendencies, I also think it's disingenuous not to acknowledge that human pecking order is more complicated than that of chimpanzees, or to not address, say, "roid rage", an attested human behavior that would seem to indicate that high levels of testosterone do indeed induce violent and aggressive behavior in humans, giving lie to the thesis that the difference in testosterone levels cannot adequately account for differences in behavior between men and women.

This was frustrating throughout the book - for every study, there was a pat explanation tying into his overall thesis, without much attention given to competing explanations or why he feels his analysis is the preferable one. It was especially frustrating since, in the early chapter on biology, he attempts to posit an alternate analysis of human sexuality within the evolutionary psychology/biology framework, one that he says fits the evidence "just as well", but his explanation is severely lacking compared to the one he's trying to refute. That's a major point of contention I had with the book - his attempt to refute biological arguments is rather lacking, which nags at the brain throughout the rest of the work.

As for convergence - even that article you posted earlier mentions that freer societies don't see a convergence in male and female sexual attitudes, which is what I'm referring to. Even if the separation between men and women is not as wide as we might assume, it does, nevertheless, seem to exist in most things.

But the idea that much of human behavior is innate and universal is not something that is disputed here (it's sort of central, really); it's the idea that the differences we observe between men and women are primarily the result of biological differences that were caused by evolutionary imperatives that is disputed.

I understand that, but my point is that while specific gender roles might be culturally selected, that doesn't mean they don't stem from biologically-selected patterns of thought and behavior.

Edit: I think an examination of the sexual tendencies of the gay and lesbian communities is also revealing. Generally, gay couples tend to be the most sexually active, and lesbians the least - that is, if I'm recalling the studies correctly. And gay men in general are by FAR the most sexually active and promiscuous. I think this is pretty strong evidence that there is a marked difference in the sexual drives of men and women, for, as Steven Pinker put it, it is in homosexual relationships that you see the "purest" manifestation of male and female sexualities, given that the two partners are of the same sex and will therefore likely view the sexual act from similar perspectives. This is understandable, given that it's the sex chromosomes where there is an indisputable biological difference between men and women. The extent of this difference in other areas is debatable, but I've also found sexuality to be a very "liquid" aspect of our identity, reaching into other behaviors and endeavors in unexpected ways. After all, how many times have you found yourself doing something out of character in the hopes that you might get laid, or realized after the fact that the desire for sex was underlying some action or other that you took? I'd say many people, man or woman, could attest such instances in their own past.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

While you are right that culture does create barriers to selection pressures, it also introduces new ones, and my original response was specifically directed at the implication that evolution has somehow stopped because of our culture when we are in fact evolving every day.

You may be right that it introduces different ones, but I would suggest that they are typically weaker and often temporary. The further forward in time you go, particularly in the last few hundred years, the weaker selection pressures become, to the point where these days you're much more likely to die as a result of something entirely random than you are because you were "unfit" for your environment. The ugly, the stupid, the poor, the sick and so on still have a pretty solid chance of finding someone and having kids, if they want them. Not to say that there's no selection going on, but I'm sure you follow.

EDIT: and if this thread isn't full of gray names in the morning then I'll be disappointed. For the record, I have no opinion on the matter, and I'm only interested in the topic of evolutionary biology!

It's a sensitive topic for sure, but hopefully it will stay civil.

 

[lawlohwhat]

You may be right that it introduces different ones, but I would suggest that they are typically weaker and often temporary. The further forward in time you go, particularly in the last few hundred years, the weaker selection pressures become, to the point where these days you're much more likely to die as a result of something entirely random than you are because you were "unfit" for your environment. The ugly, the stupid, the poor, the sick and so on still have a pretty solid chance of finding someone and having kids, if they want them. Not to say that there's no selection going on, but I'm sure you follow.




It's a sensitive topic for sure, but hopefully it will stay civil.

Well, it all depends upon semantics, I guess. I mean, you could say that the chinese have a higher level of fitness than americans because their population is so large, but how is the life of an average chinese citizen compared to that of his american counterpart? The definition of fitness is itself a huge debate amongst biologists, and that's for less complex species than humans! That's what makes this topic so difficult. It involves feminist philosophy, sociology, psychology, biology, economics, etc.

I think there is an opportunity to find some common ground, though, in saying that there is at least a subset of men in america who aren't buying the western ideal of the promiscuous man. I think this is both a healthy thing (in that it challenges an established narrative), and probably partially a product of the modern feminist movement.

 

[kirblar]

But those specific manifestations (as well as other differences you might have named such as who is expected to support whom or who is expected to express different kinds of emotions) is precisely what is meant by "gender roles." What exactly do you mean by gender roles, then, if not those things? And why you think that they are biologically determined?

I'll start off with the blatant one- Men are physically dominant. There was a thread earlier today about "Why do women always have Bows?" And the answers simple: because sending them into close quarters combat with men would be a recipe for disaster. One of the reasons the best spies are women is because women have to learn to watch out for and avoid danger, due to that power differential. As a guy, I've never really had to worry about walking out to my car at 1am. Never given it a second thought. Worst that can happen is a stolen car and wallet, right?

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

2) Perhaps "gender traits" would have been a better phrase than "gender roles". The specific manifestations of such are, obviously, culturally determined, but I think that there are deeper tendencies and patterns of thought that differentiate men and women from one another. I don't think that these differences are vast or insuperable, or that every man and woman will or MUST conform to them, but I do think they exist, nonetheless.

It's possible, certainly, that there are underlying traits, varying between gender significantly, which culture exaggerates or suppresses to produce a gender identity and societal expectations. It's also possible that there aren't, or that there are traits but they are very small, to the point where individual differences outweigh between-groups differences massively. But we would want evidence for it, naturally, and evidence is very difficult to come by for such things as these.

It involves feminist philosophy, sociology, psychology, biology, economics, etc.

It also involves politics, which is often why discussions turn so intense.

I think there is an opportunity to find some common ground, though, in saying that there is at least a subset of men in america who aren't buying the western ideal of the promiscuous man. I think this is both a healthy thing, and probably partially a product of the modern feminist movement.

They definitely exist, although I can't say whether it's new or not. When you go back to a time before Feminism had a lot of traction, they also tend to encourage the suppression sexuality.

I'll start off with the blatant one- Men are physically dominant. There was a thread earlier today about "Why do women always have Bows?" And the answers simple: because sending them into close quarters combat with men would be a recipe for disaster.

Historically, bows have been physically demanding weapons, more so than a short sword or something like that, so if this is "the reason" we see them using it in fiction then that is only a reflection on the authors, not reality.

One of the reasons the best spies are women is because women have to learn to watch out for and avoid danger, due to that power differential.

I would be careful making generalizations like this, since it's unlikely that any of this could be backed up by data.

 

[lawlohwhat]

It's possible, certainly, that there are underlying traits, varying between gender significantly, which culture exaggerates or suppresses to produce a gender identity and societal expectations. It's also possible that there aren't, or that there are traits but they are very small, to the point where individual differences outweigh between-groups differences massively. But we would want evidence for it, naturally, and evidence is very difficult to come by for such things as these.



It also involves politics, which is often why discussions turn so intense.



They definitely exist, although I can't say whether it's new or not. When you go back to a time before Feminism had a lot of traction, they also tend to encourage the suppression sexuality.

Ah, well sometimes I take for granted that the political is the social application of all of those other topics.

By surpression, are you talking about aquinas, kant, et al? I guess that would be a very strong case for the sociopolitical basis of gender roles, as the greeks were very much in opposition to such ideals.

 

[kirblar]

I would be careful making generalizations like this, since it's unlikely that any of this could be backed up by data.

It's obviously not the sort of thing that you can back up in data beyond a large selection of anecdotal quotes, but it's come up repeatedly in interviews recently with various CIA/Mossad staffers. (Thanks, Homeland!)

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

By surpression, are you talking about aquinas, kant, et al? I guess that would be a very strong case for the sociopolitical basis of gender roles, as the greeks were very much in opposition to such ideals.

The Christianization of the Roman Empire seems to mark the point where the zeitgeists shifts from "we don't approve of all this raunchy behavior officially, but it's tolerated and it happens a lot" to actually cracking down on it. Theology introduces chastity as a virtue, and makes premarital sex a sin, etc etc. Not that it stops it, but the reason that society could undergo a sexual liberation in modern times is because it was once actively suppressing such things, if not legally then just with cultural pressure.

We're straying into "thoughts I haven't made coherent because they've been sitting at the periphery of my brain" territory, so for that I apologize.

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

It's possible, certainly, that there are underlying traits, varying between gender significantly, which culture exaggerates or suppresses to produce a gender identity and societal expectations. It's also possible that there aren't, or that there are traits but they are very small, to the point where individual differences outweigh between-groups differences massively. But we would want evidence for it, naturally, and evidence is very difficult to come by for such things as these.

This is fair, but considering that there has NEVER been a truly egalitarian (recorded) culture, in terms of gender, despite the fact that such would certainly be possible were the gender gap merely culturally constructed, it'd be a very tall order to overturn conventional wisdom on these matters.

Edit: Either way, America's culture of sexual repression, even in the present day, is ridiculous and harmful. I think we can all agree on that.