What do you say to someone who doesn't believe in feminism because "men and womens brains are wired differently"?

Gawd someone who actually says "FACT" when they are talking is a bit of a twonk by definition surely

It's not cynical at all.

I find it strange that they mentioned as an aside really near the end that the results may be due to conditioning. When to me that is easily the most obvious explanation.

Also things like this "An alternative explanation for the evolution of trichromacy is the need to discriminate subtle changes in skin color due to emotional states and social-sexual signals [9]; again, females may have honed these adaptations for their roles as care-givers and ?empathizers" - do we know for sure how early societies organised themselves?

The data seems to suggest that the differences between Chinese people and British people is greater than between men and women. But the ethnic difference is supposedly down to culture and the sex difference down to genetics.

I am going to cynically say that is because to start making out the differences between people of different ethnic groups would be perceived as racist, but everything thinks it is fine to make out that women's brains are different.

Of course it's bollocks.

Measuring how well people conform to gender role as it was prescribed in the late 60s / early 70s. Just, um, right. Useful.

SQ - I am aggressive and like babies. Clearly I will be a horrible mother.

Most tests like that are deeply irritating, aren't they?

FWIW, BEM test 'You scored 69.167 out of 100 masculine points, 55.833 out of 100 feminine points, and 51.667 out of 100 androgynous (neutral) points.'

I think it's bollocks though and put neutral on masculine and feminine because I don't identify with the terms. I know what they mean though, and should probably put feminine.

71 out of 100 masculine points
36 out of 100 feminine points
57 out of 100 androgynous points

Unfotunately it doesn't say what that means.

Stupid test though. "Are you feminine? Are you masculine? Do you like shouting at people and being logical? Do you like babies and being tender? HMMMMMM?"

Thanks NDT.

They do have a reference about colour and primate colour vision (apparently), but they say it's about seeing yellow and red.

Ok ... I gave it a fair shot but I feel happy saying 'bollocks' now.

bem sex role inventory devised in 1971...

going to take the test

Hmmm

That study doesn't look terribly conclusive to me (as a layman). Their description of it seems overblown when you look at who they actually tested.

Also does anyone know what this is?

"observers' femininity scores on the Bem Sex Role inventory "

The study looking at sex differences in color preferences is readable here:

www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2807%2901559-X

In fact I think that evolutionary pshycowhateveritis's are naturally attracted to the colour pink as they love red herrings

Wouldn't early "gatherer" types have been after loads of things - edible roots, shoots, leaves, berries (which come in a host of different colours), fungi, seaweed, shellfish etc depending on where they were in the world?

This berries thing is surely a bit silly?

They attributed the first real christmas carol to a Cromwellian soldier ... ie., a man. Whereas I suspect that some of the oldest carols must have been much to do with women, since they are lullabies.

Oh, it wasn't anything feminist-y (except in that when you replace anonymous old authors with more recent male authors, you might be erasing women).

There was a very light article about carols which said we think carols are medieval but actually none of them are as medieval carols weren't religious. Oh, and after the Reformation people didn't go for Christmas. I got defensive of my lovely medieval carols!

Now I have to know, what exactly were they being ignorant about?

We would, true.

I just like pondering. I am turning into Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells - I commented on the Telegraph earlier to correct their historical ignorance about British heritage .

I think the combination of scepticism and Talk About Old Times is having a bad effect on me.

I don't know. I've had a look on google scholar and searched for any research paper by an archaeobotanist providing evidence that in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, pink berries were abundant or that hominids had a preference for them, but I haven't found anything.

I suppose we would need to look at the evo pysch paper to find out what their sources are for the claim.

I was thinking a bit further, and it occurs to me - a lot of pink fruit is quite recent, isn't it? I mean raspberries are old, but a lot of other pink soft fruit are the result of cultivation over the last few hundred years. It'd be interesting to know what colours fruit came in thousands of years ago. No giant bright-red strawberries, for sure! OTOH, it'd be a dead useful skill to spot green apples out of green trees quickly.

But anyway, that's just me wondering things, but what I do find slightly bizarre is that this whole argument seems to be saying both that we might as a species or a sex have developed a sensitivity to pink, and that pink and red are pretty much the same thing (and I have to wonder how much that is simply an argument of convenience because there are far more red berries than pink). But surely sensitivity would mean we'd distinguish more carefully between shades, not that we'd identify them?

I agree with LRD. Where is the actual evidence that pink berries or berries with pink shades in them were more abundant than fruit and food of other colours? Where is the actual evidence that cross culturally, women prefer pink?

It actually makes no sense in evolutionary terms because berries are very small and so would require more energy to pick for little energy gain. It would make more sense in evolutionary terms to be attracted to the colour of larger fruit items. It would make even greater sense in evolutionary terms to not have any colour preference, because the colour of the fruit has no bearing on its energy gain or other nutritional value when considering the range of food available in a range of different but similar environmental circumstances that we evolved within, so having no colour preference would allow people to behaviourally adapt to a range of different environmental circumstances more easily in which different ranges of food items were available.

I don't think it has anything to do with LRD's understanding. I simply think that Himalaya is arguing for a certain interpretation of evolution that most biologists don't argue for. Evolution isn't that complicated. It is just detailed, so takes a while read up on. There isn't a 'debate' within science over evolutionary psychology; it is just pretty much ignored by related scientific fields. An explanation of what evolutionary psychology is and why it isn't widely accepted is explained here:

plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/

FWIW, I would rather people stop associating any colours with gender - the problem IMO isn't with pink, it's with people saying pink is for girls. Pink is a perfectly nice colour in and of itself.

I do think that a lot of crap is advanced about 'gender differences' that simply would not be published in mainstream media about, say, race, because if it were said about race it would sound racist. This doesn't necessarily mean no-one should research the effects of race or sex, of course, but does mean that sometimes people writing for the mainstream media don't have the knowledge, and don't have the knowledgeable audience, to avoid coming across as offensive.

Himalaya - I think I'm getting more sceptical, not less. I do appreciate you trying so patiently to explain. It may well be that my non-scientific background is too much of a problem here.

The pink thing - the reason people mention blue in Victorian England is, as I understand it, because the researchers thought they'd demonstrated an underlying truth that happened to show that the current marketing strategies weren't just a modern fad but an ancient indicator of underlying preference. Had they bothered to acknowledge the earlier preference for blue (which does come from somewhere - it's not just imposed on children, it's imposed by a society who associate blue with the Virgin), they'd have sounded less silly. But you are giving them too much credit - they simply didn't know of the earlier trend and thought they had demonstrated something that had been a social trend for much longer.

The second point about pink is that it is that most berries aren't pink, though many are red, and many are blue, purple, black or green. Many poisonous berries are red, too - more than any other colour I can think of. It could well be that sensitivity to the shades of this colour were useful evolutionary adaptations. But ... so what?

Simply making the suggestion that there may be a small innate female preference for pink and this may have to do with some small amount of the food humans once depended on, to me at least, is not science, it's a guess that could not possibly be supported. It's interesting to suggest, but how could any stronger case ever be made?

FWIW, I don't think I ever said acuity for pink could have nothing to do with picking berries - I'm not going back over my posts to check and if I did, sorry. What I have said several times is that an innate preference for pink explains very little since few berries are actually pink and many are of other colours.

In the absence of any stronger evidence than 'hmm, some berries are pink', it's just a guess. And you have not provided any stronger evidence.

The bit of evolution that, for me, was taught at primary school, was that things we and animals eat, evolve to suit us and the animals. I don't quite follow how this requires knowledge of genes, but maybe it does?

I was taught it in quite a simple way though - we just read about lots of examples and listened to David Attenborough a lot. But you are right that perhaps I'm missing the more complex explanations and maybe if I understood these, I would understand more.

Are you holding back from giving any evidence other than 'well, some berries are pink' for the theory above because you know the science is too complex for me? I'd suggest others might want to know if there is anything to be said, there are loads of proper scientists on here.