BoysToys

"But if they prefer blue because it's like male genitalia...shouldn't blue attract female monkeys?..."

I presume, like the colourful bits of males in many other species it's also about males signalling to other males. I seem to recall reading somewhere that less dominant males were less blue in the groinal region.....So, males need to keep an eye out for more-blue males, something that will go on all year round, whereas whatever visual signals (I don't know about vervets, but I think female chimps get very swollen and pink downstairs when in heat!) females use will be different?????

Sorry, I'm just a bit pre-occupied with the idea that if we had evolved from a more-vervet like ancestor, men would have invented see-through pants and that first-eyeshadow shade of blue spraypaint cosmetic for their plums..............

None of which quite explains why male vervets seem to prefer trucks and know what wheels are for..................

Crappy - I like that way of describing it - there is a very 'just-so' way about so many of them.

If, these evo psych people started out just looking, rather than with a theory to prove (well disprove - the whole null hypothesis thing is such a logic fail - and I just think dishonest), then it wouldn't be so much bollocks.

If they were, I don't know... looking at the stuff around seeing in colour, or noticing movement out the corner of your eye, then I can see how these things evolve, and will have an effect on world experience, and therefore psychology.

But starting with something as high level as wheels and frying pans? Tying that back to evolution millions of years ago - how can anyone say with a straight face that that isn't just totally ridiculous?

i would feel a lot more confident in accepting the hypotheses of ego psych if they came with data, mechanisms, and were falsifiable

As it is, rudyard kipling style just-so stories aren't quite robust enough for this little agender internet pixie I'm afraid

How do we even know that the children who preferred the wheeled toys/weapons identified as boys?

Quite possibly they identified as girls, or agender.

Similarly the primates referred to - has anyone been able to work out their gender identity?

has this been established?

It really depends on what aspects are being considered.

Our brains have certainly evolved to maximise our survival and reproduction.
Instead of things like colour preference, I'd, for example, hypothesise that we prefer to have clear differences between genders and seek to identify with one early on.
It really depends on the question asked.

I think it's a product of nature and nurture. Nature I suppose must be somehow intertwined with evolution - but I just don't think it's in anyway as simple as people with these studies try to suggest, and I think that's easily disprovable just using the current population of the world with their infinite variety of behaviours (many of which the populations concerned consider innate), no monkeys involved, no dodgy theorising, no retroactively fitting behaviour to experimental outcomes.

I don't think that my ancestors searching for berries influences my colour preference (although I'm willing to be proved wrong should someone manage to figure out how the hell to test that) for instance. I could be more convinced of an innate fear of snakes.

Well, I don't believe that my psychology can have evolved millions of years ago for me to prefer something that was only invented in the last 100 years.

What aspects of psychology do you mean?

Slow- astrology, phrenology and alchemy were all considered perfectly reputable schools of thought in their day and had to jump through all the hoops you describe as do many other psuedosciency things these days. I have no doubt evolutional psychology papers are peer reviewed by other evo-bollockists and published in evobollocks journals and New Scientist. Thats only touching the surface of the larger epistemological questions your post raises but I'm going to leave all that aside I think!
My view is that psychology is likely to be subject in some aspects to evolution but how do you design an experiment to disprove a null hypothesis on anything in it?
Others have already answered your question about correlation and causation - both the study authors and you both in realation to the study and some of your other points are absolutely implying causation based on wild speculation from small numbers, in a small, badly designed study. All this without taking into account the massive and obvious confounding factors and bias the degree and strength of which is 'provable' in a much more satisfactory and robust way.

It's like that joke about a woman asking for something, getting half of what she asked for and being told to share it.

Boys have blue - baby blue to indigo.

Girls don't even get a whole colour, they just get part of red and everything is pasted with it.

Maybe they were gay monkeys.

Still, 100 years ago pink was for boys and blue for girls, in the UK. Reportedly.
Why is it now the reverse?
And why pink and not green or yellow? It looks pretty arbitrary to me.

But if they prefer blue because it's like male genitalia...shouldn't blue attract female monkeys?...

SomeDyke definitely needing a like button for that post.

'utterly amazing bollocks'. Perfect.

"The males have strikingly blue genitalia." Testicles! :-) They really ARE amazingly bright blue! But did they become blue because vervet boy brains already preferred blue? Male mandrills have an even wider range of colours, described as "red, pink, blue, scarlet, and purple"!

I think that all qualifies as utterly amazing bollocks!

But do rhesus monkeys have blue balls too?

And the whole trucks versus dolls thing -- I can accept that a doll, that looks more like an infant monkey, might be more interesting to one sex than another, depending on whether care of infants is shared or not in that particular species, BUT, how do monkeys KNOW what wheels do, or that a wheeled toy is 'active' and 'masculine'? Is it just NOT baby-monkey like (hence interesting to those who sit around scratching their blue balls rather than helping bring up baby), or is it just the colour (since I sadly assume stereotypical masculine toys will tend to be blue rather than pink!).

Blue wheels look like my bollocks? Interesting! My utter bollocks hypothesis! :-)

How does someone/some monkey know a frying pan is for cooking, if they've never been in a human's kitchen, used fire or been shown how to use it? I doubt they picked it up and cracked an egg into it. More likely they'd have banged it and found it made an interesting sound, or if it were new, maybe they noticed reflections in it, or they used it to hit things with or hold things with. But not "get me to a kitchen now!"

I can believe vervet monkeys would think of blue as a male colour, though. The males have strikingly blue genitalia.

"but is it common or acceptable (from a style point of view) to refer to an entire branch of science as "bollocks"."

As a scientist.........YES! :-) The phrase 'utter bollocks' though is usually reserved for pseudo-science, astrology, or some parts of the arts..................

The arts/science divide is alive and well, and gives many scientists a few minutes of quiet amusement aimed at their colleagues in other faculties. Although it may cause more than amusement if you find out (as some people at the University of Wales and Bath Spa University did), that a course is being offered in cultural astronomy and astrology. And given that at least one of the tutors: "... also works as a professional astrologer", are you surprised? I think I would safely describe THAT as UTTER bollocks. I could witter on about chemistry departments employing alchemists, but then I would trip up on the inconvenient fact that Newton was also an alchemist................

I take that back. I'm not sure it shows that more men than women are more likely to have a higher EQ than SQ, but I think it shows that lots of women don't have a high EQ.

A quick look at the relationship pages of MN would provide additional data to support the view that more women than men are likely to have a higher EQ than SQ.

Really? I think the relationship board shows the opposite of this to be true.

To my knowledge the researchers in the toy study or the E/S study ever claimed to have proven causation.

Back to that abstract again:

The results suggest that sexually differentiated object preferences arose early in human evolution, prior to the emergence of a distinct hominid lineage. This implies that sexually dimorphic preferences for features (e.g., color, shape, movement) may have evolved from differential selection pressures based on the different behavioral roles of males and females, and that evolved object feature preferences may contribute to present day sexually dimorphic toy preferences in children.

Yep, that's what they're saying - they're saying that their study does indeed suggest that sexually dimorphic object preferences are baked in - ie caused - by our evolution.

I feel bad for the people doing this study - it's not the be all and end all, there are plenty more that are just as dodgy when it comes to this area of study

If you look back OP, I was asking a question about your feelings.
Is your original language not English perhaps?