To think men and women are actually programmed differently?

I didn’t count them. I didn’t receive any stereotypical gifts at all, or buy any. I’m not a cliche surrounded by cliches.

It's practised incompetence! If they actually did it efficiently or effectively you may leave it to them .. which they aren't payed for or preferred to do as you'll do it for them ... 'for free'. Have you notice that act like they want home cooked meals.. until they have to do it themselves.. then a take away menu comes out !

Seriously if men had to work & bring up children alone they'd hire help .. we my friends are that hired help !

@midgetastic Yes, I think we largely actually agree.

However on your penultimate paragraph, I think the better approach is to 'de-fang' nature arguments by making clear that they don't straightforwardly mean we should behave a certain way. I think the alternative risks storing up worse problems (the reluctance of so many insitutions to say no, actually, women have specific needs that deserve protection in law is, in part, I think, a fear of having to say that men and women are different in ways that are deeper than culture).

(We reject, after all, the position that "it's our tradition" is a defence against injustice. "It's our nature" should be no different. I don't read those people who defend a culture explanation as defending the worst excesses that culture has been used to justify. Nor should people read a nature explanation as defending the worst excesses that that position has been used to justify. Both have been used to justify monstrosities).

In some closely related animals , killing of the offspring of other males is very commonplace - that would be one evolution path for us

Whilst I agree that there is probably a balance to be had between the nature and nurture position , so often I have seen nature used as a means to shut women up, treat them poorly , to treat women as a homogenous group rather than respect their individuality, to ignore the strengths of individual women

and so often I have seen stuff promoted as "natural " and "evolution " which is clearly bollocks . Men can be excellent caregivers- we shouldn't take that away from them under the banner of "nature"

that my current position is "society isn't ready to consider what nature might be telling us and how we should incorporate that into life "

and I also don't believe that we should be victims of our nature - we should fight against racism for example ( which is a natural inbuilt response to seeing differences ) and we should fight against sexism in the same way

Here here 100%

I see this rise in regressive misogyny as really disturbing.

As I said earlier a lot of this conversation is really about indoctrinating women to accept mediocre partnerings and uneven workloads as “genetically defined.”
Like you I am out of the game and would only re-enter if a fully equal partner came along.

I agree with pretty much all of that.

What matters is what's true. Culture/nurture is a very powerful force (nature is not destiny). Morality is different again. We must be careful not to read "Just So" stories from our present. And it's complicated.

(The one bit I disagree with is that males killing others’ offspring means that there can be no nature component to child-rearing roles. If that's indeed your claim. I wasn't clear).

My position is basically that "it's almost certainly some mix of both nature and nurture". Mine is not the extreme position being argued here. The extreme position is that nature must be 0%. (100% is another extreme position that I dispute, but no-one’s saying that here).

Not true at all. The descendants of your descendants are all the same genetic information being passed on, so it's absolutely in your interest to ensure your own children survive. Why else do grandparents love their grandchildren?

There are two broad strategies in nature - first is to spend no energy taking care of babies, but pump them out by the gazillion so some will survive based on pure numbers. Humans do not do that. We have relatively small numbers of babies, that take a lot of time and energy to gestate, and then put a lot of effort into making sure these few precious children survive. Maths will be able to tell you the more complex theory of this, but it would seem evolution has 'decided' that for us it is worth the trade off to have fewer children overall. It is also well evidenced that women, when logically choosing partners, choose those with characteristics that would suggest they would be caring fathers, as this helps with our strategy.

It's when people say "this must be the result of evolution " that you have to ask questions

1. is that actually true ; is the evidence strong? - there are many traditional societies where the male and female roles are very different to that usually proposed in the west - including societies that share childcare across the sexes - so that suggests one simple evolution path is a false concept in regards to childcare. We know historically that men would kill children not their own... they want to favor their own genes - that isn't consistent with leaving the chikdcare to the women and fucking off elsewhere because your children would be killed in your absence

2. how beholden should we be to our evolutionary past? Evolution favoured those who were slave traders rather than slave ?

3. Evolution is messy and none linear

@MistressoftheDarkSide

In your view, is the claim that our psychology is subject to evolutionary forces false, or that it's true but should not be said?

If it's the latter, I think that's wrongheaded.

As you say, all sorts of societies throughout history have been oppressive and misogynistic. It did not require a theory of evolution to permit that. Opposing that should not require rejection of evolution either. I think it's unhelpful to maintain that it does.

In the world today, some of the most oppressive/regressive societies are ones that reject evolution (I acknowledge the causal story is not straightforward though: e.g. we have had some pretty awful atheistic regimes that accepted evolution).

The truly enlightened position, in my view, is to accept science as one domain and try to learn what we can, without putting any findings out of bounds on political grounds. And to take society and values as a separate domain, informed by our understanding of the world but not shackled by it.

To make a parallel: I'm dismayed by how casually institutions have bodged the science in the service of the destruction of sex-based rights (in the belief they are being progressive, too). I extend that same principle more widely: I'm anti-science-bodging in general. (Doesn't mean I can't be wrong. But it's an argument on the science that is needed, not an argument that only bad people think X so I shouldn't think it)

Urgh.

Cannot believe how regressive things are getting in the sex wars these days. We're in "evolutionary psychology" quackery territory here, which is espoused by a certain Canadian psychologist using big words at one end, and a misogynistic woman trafficking thug at the other. Plus the "tech bros" advocating for trad wives to rear "the right kind of kids" to swell the population and benefit the economy.

Claiming "genetic predisposition" allows oppression and manipulation of both sexes and the motivation, as far as I can see is often economic and power driven.

As PPs have mentioned, women have been put in and out of various boxes to suit the interests of society and have proven their capability and ability to learn and adapt over and over again. Men are just as capable, but it's not as encouraged, and they get "excused" from "women's work" which us routinely devalued.

As with most things in the modern world, follow the money. That motivates most alleged "progress", not the well-being of individuals or the community in general.

I'm so glad I'm old and out of the game.

Interesting. Because they have adapted an unusual strategy to have other species raise their children.

Do you think that’s an instinct, or a purely learned behaviour on their part?

(And how common is that strategy amongst birds, let alone amongst animals closer to humans? This feels like a clown-fish argument to me.)

Why aren't cuckoos extinct then?

@LoremIpsumCici

Your idea that a capable and caring parent, essentially, adds nothing for the survival chances of its offspring (because others will always pick up the slack) is bizarre to me. Is that something you have read?

Also the idea that child-raising is 100% learned behaviour and 0% instinct. Is that what you observe in non-human animals? (Eg does a mother cat have an instinct for caring for her kittens?). Who are those cats learning from? If your ideas is that the mother has remembered it all from when she herself was a tiny kitten, how plausible do you think that is? How much do you remember of your own babyhood?

If you see it in non-human animals, why do you think humans are completely different? Do you agree we are the product of evolution just as they are?

Natural selection only applies to natural traits up to the point of childbirth for females. Because other humans will raise the baby.

You only need to be live long enough to carry a baby to term as a woman or long enough to impregnate a woman as a man to have successfully passed your genes on to descendents. For humans, the better you are at child rearing, the fewer children you have…sorry but it’s true, the woman with eight kids isn’t as good as a mum with two kids. The man who is a serial rapist or sperm donor isn’t a good dad.

Good child rearing skills are a) not natural so cannot be a trait of natural selection and b) provide no advantage towards generating more descendants

I don’t think that’s correct. The important thing is whether a trait tends to lead to more or fewer descendants. Being seriously bad at child-rearing clearly tends to lead to having fewer descendants.

Darwin’s natural selection doesn’t apply to the raising of progeny, it applies only to whether or not young animals reach adulthood to successfully reproduce. So once mum has given birth to a live baby, she is done as far as natural selection is concerned. She has successfully reproduced. The raising doesn’t matter as that is a learned behaviour, not force of nature causing selection for or against certain genes. This is especially true for social species where orphans are raised by other adults.

A mum that dies in a childbirth is the worst mum by your measure because she does 0% of childrearing. However, the baby doesn’t die, the baby is then raised by other humans in the family, clan or tribe. The baby’s aptitude for raising their own children is fully 100% learned. Which also means that the genes of the mum who did 0% of child rearing still get passed on.

There is no innate nature for child rearing.

I think that if you drew graphs of the innate traits of males and females, you would get lots of overlapping bell curves. Some don't overlap that much, such as sexual aggression. For the ones that do have a large overlap, or where it's unclear whether the difference is innate or learned, such as being nurturing, exaggerating differences between the two populations almost always disadvantages women. In general, the "male" end is valued and the "female" end is not. Look at the value placed on paid caring roles vs construction work. Look at who did computer programming when it was seen as a job related to typing, and how being a bank clerk became much more lowly paid when it became a job done by women.

Yes! It was fascinating! I know I have subconsciously done this and it really changed my perspective on things. The one thing for me though is that I would buy a daughter any of the ‘boy’ clothes, but wouldn’t buy a boy any ‘girl’ clothes, like a dress etc. Dresses don’t give any benefit for toddlers or young children, it’s just a longer jumper in effect. You still need something underneath. I wouldn’t buy a dress for either, but I wouldn’t put them in a dress unless they asked for one (which a baby can’t do). So when do we differentiate, it’s not the child’s choice initially, it’s the parents. When my son asked for nail varnish, I said yes as he’s seen me do it. If he asked me if he could wear a dress, I would think about it, and say yes, but I’d have to think, where I wouldn’t have to think for a girl. It seems a big deal to put a boy in a dress and that the parents are making a statement, but surely they are doing that for girls at that age too?

So I know things are definitely social pressure and conformity and I am feeding into it. Back in the day men wore skirts. Now, they don’t. It’s not nature, it’s nurture.

So...I have a husband who is a gem. He did all the childcare stuff I did. We are all awkward at first. My husband actually outdid me in the kid department. He was better at giving baths, equal in nappies, better at being patient and playing Legos, etc. It's not a gender thing. It's a practice thing. Most likely you were given dolls and maybe even child care duties as a young girl, and he wasn't. My husband had a younger brother and cousins he cared for. I was an only child who saw my cousins only occasionally.

Yes, and they encouraged the 'boy' to play with cars and handed dolls and teddies to the 'girl'.

I thought that the argument in the book was that there is no evidence of difference (or otherwise). Ie it is inconclusive

No convincing evidence of innate difference, absolutely heaps of evidence for plasticity - which was the claim made above.

@NoBinturongsHereMate I thought that the argument in the book was that there is no evidence of difference (or otherwise). Ie it is inconclusive

Didn’t the behaviour of the adult change too? Such as being more gentle with a baby dressed like a girl and more rough and tumble with a baby dressed like a boy?

Yes there have been loads! There’s a great one where the adults perception of the toys the children are playing with changes according to the sex they think they are (spoiler alert, they dressed the girls as boys and the boys as girls). It’s fascinating. I highly recommend you check it out and all the other studies!!

There's a lot of research to back it up. Try Gina Rippon's The Gendered Brain for an overview.

But I guess the question is, what do those biological differences mean?

There are people on this thread (and others) that suggest those biological differences mean that men aren't capable of being as nurturing as women, that they aren't as capable parents and that buying thoughtful presents are beyond their capabilities.

I just don't buy into that.