BoysToys

"If we find something in the hard wiring of a modern monkey that is very similar to humans we can infer that it has been there for a very long time"

Yes but you can't infer that it's still there can you? Humans have evolved under very different circumstances to monkeys. They're not our ancestors but our "cousins".

Also all this talk of "hard-wiring" is a bit misleading as it isn't as rigid as people tend to think it is. I'm not arguing for the "blank slate" theory, far from it, but people's mating preferences (something that evo psychs tend to think of as fixed) change amongst more "gender-equal" societies.

Sorry, back to the monkeys. It's not so much the "boy monkeys prefer wheely toys" that bothers me but more the "boy monkeys prefer wheely toys so we shouldn't offer them equally to girls" or the "boy monkeys prefer wheely toys which explains why there are so few women in STEM" statements that bother me. They ignore huge social factors and are proscriptive in a regressive reductionist way.

Dawkins himself has always asserted that whilst he believes Darwinism to be a true explanation of how we got here, any society based on Darwinian principles would be a hideous disaster. So you may believe that boys and girls innately gravitate to different toys but that doesn't justify the kind of Mars/Venus indoctrination that we have going on at the moment.

Slow

If females brains have evolved differently to mens, then it follows that men who are good at things because their brains have evolved to be good at it, cannot pass those evolutionary advantages on to their female offspring, because their brains are "wired" differently. Do you think that this does or does not happen, and if you think it does, could you provide an example of a trait that is not inherited by female offspring but is by males ?

If we find something in the hard wiring of a modern monkey that is very similar to humans we can infer that it has been there for a very long time

Actually, no.
Comparison with "a" monkey [species] tells us nothing. Both could have evolved later. And as pointed out each monkey species had evolved exactly as much as we did since separation.

You'd need a large sample of monkey species, preferably apes, and some complex studies.

But I've explained all this earlier.

If we happened to want to see if there was a difference between sexes in humans in relation to infantile face shapes, we'd have to test in humans, certainly.
If there was, we could ask ourselves if it was innate or environment. We could start by testing in babies. But what if it was a difference that developed only in puberty? It might require a series of complex and we'll designed studies to separate the biological from the environmental.

We could test in MANY monkey and ape species. But we would still have the same problem of adults vs young.

What might be interesting would be to see if different mating systems and care for the young in related species correlated with differences or not in perception of young faces between sexes. But we still wouldn't know if that was cause or effect.

Why the hell would there be a good reason to study something like that? You can look at things like fear and reward through brain imaging techniques and observe some behaviours, but how would you test whether a picture appealed to a monkey, let alone why?

One of the reasons why so much evolutionary psychology is dismissed as bollocks is because such stupid things are picked for studies and such enormous leaps of judgement made on very very slim findings. As in the very first study cited on this thread that let's remember you picked out OP.

Testing something in a modern monkey tells you nothing about how a feeling or thought might have evolved in people. Monkeys aren't unevolved humans.

Slow - can you design a non-kooky evo psych study?

• can you even find a non-kooky evo psych study?

slow - I don't think that anyone is arguing that our brains haven't evolved are they ? What they are saying is that it is silly to claim boys like to play with wheeled toys more than girls because of the way the different sexes brains evolved.

What happens when a man who is an incredible gift for music has a girl, is it not likely that she would inherit whatever it was that her dad had that made his brain understand music in a special way ? Or are you saying that she wouldn't inherit it the same way a boy would ? I'm a bit lost.

This is a bad example:
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/

Where they take one observation (in adults), that men and women see colours differently, and propose an evolutionary explanation, that it was selected for by different roles between genders, without taking into account how much it has been shaped by use and disuse when growing up, for example. Or if testosterone level correlated with any differences.

What they proposed should have been controlled for confounding by testing if any differences are inherent to males and females, or if life history made a difference. (I haven't read the actual research paper, though).
Or it could simply be an undesirable byproduct of testosterone, and one that could possibly be at the origin (not consequence) of behaviour such as preferring to hunt than gather.

Can't think of a way to tell the difference.

was also just thinking of the threads you often see on MN e.g. "would you date a man who is shorted than you?" the general consensus is No....so why do females prefer taller men if that is indeed the case, one assumption would be because taller men are more successful - but at what exactly ? physical stuff ?

There is no inherent preference for pink, afaik, except in modern times and western society.

Not a proper study, but interesting: www.techi.com/2011/03/beyond-pink-and-blue-a-look-at-gender-colors/
It says men and women both prefer... blue!

The purple thing is probably due to culture pressure.

And
www.livescience.com/22037-pink-girls-blue-boys.html
"It wasn't until after the Second World War that the modern convention (pink for girls, blue for boys) started to dominate, and even so, it didn't "gel" until the 1980s, she said."

It's simply a convention.

And while boys and girls start to identify with gender, they follow the conventions around them. Although, still, not all of them.

To change tact a little since this conversation appears to be headed nowhere fast....

I think that it is not unreasonable to look at other mammalian species and note the presence of a dominant male. I've probably bored others on here before with such half baked theories, but it seems to me that much of male (and female behaviour) can be explained in such terms. Male aggression is correlated with sexual success, it has been used in the past to coerce unwilling females into unwanted sex, that much is not up for debate. Furthermore females tend to rather like men who are big and "make them feel safe" - is all this just socialised behaviour ? I am not at all sure it is.

Perhaps I am not living up to my user name, but a system whereby men agree to police and arrest/imprison each other for threatening or being violent to women is rather the same as a lower primate killing anyone who threatens to mate with their female.

I don't see what this has to do with a preference for pink however.

Some aspects will be conditioned by evolution, yes. But not all.

What most people are commenting on is about methodologies of study. And how much it is relevant for people.

An example.

It seems that people tend to choose mates that resemble them somehow, or their relatives. Let's assume it is a theory that hasn't been disproved and there is lots of evidence for it. It may give us some information about population dynamics. But it still won't predict my personal choices.

In a parallel to the study mentioned earlier, a similar study in monkeys would give us very little inkling if that would be true in humans, although it could lead us to make an hypothesis for testing.
But, if there were many studies in related species showing it happened in all of them, it would suggest that at the basis of our reproductive behaviour there would be the same drive.

Another problem is trying to use any of those observations as guidance for our behaviour or our society.

Imagine it had been shown that boys inherently prefer moving toys and girls nurturing toys. That would be on average anyway. Could we conclude that it was ok to restrict wheels to boys and dolls to girls? Or that a girl liking wheels meant she was gender confused? Certainly not.

I remember once reading an April fool's article (...) saying that human beings' arms were getting longer as a result of evolution. Now that so many of us work in offices, we're having to lean over to get papers etc. and it's making our arms longer. The next generation of human beings will have arms down to their knees, to make it easier to reach for the paper next to the photocopier.

BTW, that would be lamarckian evolution, not darwinian.

Slow, considering psychology's greatest advances have been in the last century, even I wouldn't quote Darwin.

It would be similar to quoting him on how traits are transmitted, as he didn't know about Mendel at the time.

And he was talking about mental capacity and power, which is a bit more quantitative than behaviour.

I don't agree, btw, that evolutionary psychology as an area of study is bollocks, as such. But we should certainly be very cautious about interpreting results and with any studies. And I'd probably agree that many studies done within it are severely faulty in many ways, based on the little I know about it.

A while back, I read Guy Deutscher Through the Language Mirror. One of the chapters in there looks at colour perception as reflected in the number of words for particular colours in a culture, as reflected in its language. They looked at some remote tribes, as well as our own culture and also Greek and Roman literature. (There's some quote about Homer or someone similar, writing about purple skies.)

Most cultures perceive red easily - it tends to be the first colour that gets recognised. There's much more variation down the other end of the spectrum - the number of words for shades of greens can vary massively, and there was an example of one tribe which was able to distinguish (and name) significantly more shades of green than a European could - partly because they were brought up to it, because when you spend your days hunting in the jungle or across the savannah or whatever their environment was, there is a lot of green, and it's more important to your survival.

Blue is interesting because it just doesn't feature in some languages at all - it's a form of green. It's usually the last colour to be separately defined. Deutscher recounts an anecdote from when his daughter was learning to speak, and he asked her what the colour of the sky was - and she couldn't work it out. I think it was a blue sky day, rather than grey and cloudy- but looking out at today's sky, it's neater white on the horizon in the direction of the sun, it's only a definite blue right overhead.

There was also some discussion of rods and cones and colour blindness and so on, but I don't remember the details.

So while I think blue might be important to some monkeys (and it would be interesting to know about differences in ocular biology and what wave lengths of light can be perceived,) I don't know it is as important a colour to humans (biologically, anyway - culturally, it used to be high status, as it's a comparatively rare pigment, so having a large painting of the Virgin Mary dressed in blue is showing off your wealth, not just your piety.)

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

This is hilarious it really is.

So patriarchy has existed for no more than 10,000 years maximum, probably less (maybe 6,000, maybe slightly less, maybe slightly more)

I remember once reading an April fool's article where papers printed this article saying that human beings' arms were getting longer as a result of evolution. Now that so many of us work in offices, we're having to lean over to get papers etc. and it's making our arms longer. The next generation of human beings will have arms down to their knees, to make it easier to reach for the paper next to the photocopier.

Yes, yes he did.

Note theory postulate - things that are then supported or not via experimentation.

I contend that Evo Psych as it is practised today has very little to do with Darwin's vision for psychology and evolution.

Give me an example of a good evo psych experiment.