Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

LeeMoore has finally touched on it, but I do think sexual selection plays a part in this in that the optimal life strategies for men and women differ quite a bit.

Women, on average, across different cultures, tend to choose the men with the highest 'cultural success' available to them (where cultural success is an amalgamation of social status and material resource). We can all scoff and point to exceptions, but this is measurable, observable, and cross-cultural. It's one of the reasons the average age difference between couples is around 4 years.

In biological terms, men don't choose - they compete to get chosen.

The glaringly obvious result of this is that, in evolutionary terms, the reproductive returns to men for achieving 'cultural success' are very much higher than they are for women. Whereas a lack of status does not generally prevent a woman from attracting a partner.

I'm sure CN will be along shortly - "So you're saying evolution means women have no ambition?"

Nah. I think men are more worried that other men will kill them. Which they do. In huge numbers.

So does this really boil down to that quote by Margaret Atwood

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

For a structure not designed to oppress women, the phrase "females are prizes' is pretty oppressive. I know you mean that women get to choose the best man from the top of the hierarchy, but still.

As women completely control who they reproduce with, it's in the power of women to change society. We just need to learn not to prefer men that are currently considered "high status", is that right? What sort of alternate hierarchies ought women to consider?

maybe I could be arsed to wonder what lobsters can teach us about our Inner Lives.

Well I have been feeling a little sad about the lobsters, and I've killed a fair few in my time. Didn't know we were related

That was a typo.

AssassinatedB : "So this is innate biology, inescapable. Hence male dominated hierarchies are inevitable and pointless to try and alter."

1. It's not "male dominated hierarchies" it's "male dominance hierarchies" - ie its a way of males sorting themselves out to find out who's No.1 lobster. It's the mechanism for males competing with other males for females. Not a structure designed to oppress females. Females are prizes not players. Depending on the species, females are either willing or unwilling prizes.

1. Female animals do have their own dominance hierarchies but they tend to be weaker and less relevant to mating opportunities. More related to resources. But human female participation in the dominance hierarchies in which males compete is a new thing evolutionarily and we don't know what the effects are going to be. Come back in 20,000 years and see.

1. One reasonably early observable effect of female participation in male dominance hierarchies is the difficulty successful females have in finding a mate. A mate who they are content with I mean. The problem being that females are looking for equal or higher status men, and they seem to measure equal by reference to their own status. Hence the higher up the totem pole a woman gets, the fewer men there are at that altitude. A solution seems to be to go for a guy who's a few years older than you, so that although your potential is as high as his, his current status is above yours because ehe's been scrabbling up for longer. There are studies btw of households with a high status woman and a lower status man, eg where an able ambitious woman falls in love with an agreeable, non ambitious man, and he then becomes the "househusband" (albeit that he may also have a lower track career than his wife.) It turns out that after a while there is less sexual activity in such relationships than in relationships where the man has higher status, and the woman is more likely to have affairs outside the relationship, than similar women with a higher status spouse. The inference is that these women actually begin to find their lower status mates less sexually attractive, because they are low status. ie common sense about how to structure a relationship in the modern word has been defeated by the animal brain. (On average.)

1. When you say "male domin[ance]" hierarchies are inevitable" yes - they are. Or we're going to have to pack in quite a lot of evolution to breed that out. But while a male dominance hierarchy is inevitable the particular form of the male dominance hierarchy is not determined by evolution. That is highly malleable by society. You just need to give the guys a hill to climb, and they'll climb it. And because humans are (mostly) a species in which females have mating choice, females (in aggregate) have the power to determine which areas of male success they're going to pay attention to. If all women ceased to be interested in which males came top of the sporting hierarchy, pretty soon men would stop competing at sports.

I know pasting from google is the HEIGHT of laziness, but this amused me

Clownfish, wrasses, moray eels, gobies and other fish species are known to change sex, including reproductive functions. A school of clownfish is always built into a hierarchy with a female fish at the top. When she dies, the most dominant male changes sex and takes her place

Actually, maybe this isn't that amusing...

Haven't RTFT but if I wanted to explore human behaviour, I'd not reach for some lobsters.

Perhaps when lobsters conduct steering committee meetings, organise space travel, make complex medical ethical judgements, then maybe I could be arsed to wonder what lobsters can teach us about our Inner Lives.

Is this male hierarchy seen in the "multi-gendered" clownfish, i wonder?

And why are the animal examples chosen always the ones that behave like Wolf of Wall St? Rather than lovely puffins who mate for life and return to the same nesting site year after year

Anyway, it's an argument worth having as it seems a popular idea these days

Can't believe people are seriously defending the stupid man's smart person!

Absolutely. And assertive training is really a key life skill. It's very difficult to practice if you aren't naturally assertive.

and it may be in your interests to practice being disagreeable.

I would say that if there was no reason to fear male violence women would be much more assertive than they are. So maybe it's in men's interests to practice being more agreeable

So would Peterson agree that society as a whole shouldn't place value judgements on traits?

i don't think...' is not a valid basis on which to dismiss the argument

Just as well i wasnt trying to dismiss the argument then.

Though actually thinking about it...i do believe that bigger and stronger usually (not always) means dominance. So thats innate biology isnt it

Thanks Lee, yes, I was fishing for a better word than weak - I didn't think it was a deficiency. I couldn't remember how he'd phrased it.

ThisisAStory ; "What I was struck by was that JP didn't ascribe a value judgment personally to someone's traits - they just are, and you have to deal with what you have and then try to develop the ones that are weak."

I touched on this in an earlier contribution. JP's views are that you shouldn't ascribe a value to a person's traits because sometimes one particular position in a trait distribution may be best, but another time another position may be best. Or different traits in different people may be complementary in a co-operative enterprise. (So a fairly agreeable woman may be good at caring for her babies, while she may have a more disagreeable mate who is good at insisting on a good spot in the cave for his family, and/or spearing wild pigs. Moving each of them towards an equalised centre position in the agreeableness-disagreebleness distribution might not improve their children's chances of survival.)

So nowhere in the agreeableness-disagreeable distribution is "weak" per se. It's just that if you happen to be at the very agreeable end, you personally are weak at being disagreeable, and it may be in your interests to practice being disagreeable.

Apparently it's an uncontested tenet of evolutionary biology. So it surely must be something accepted by science generally.

by. not but.

Rufus - on what basis do you not think that?

That the biology of animal dominance structures is incorrectly observed?
That the process / causation in in the observed behaviours is incorrectly explained?
That the similarity between the biology in the animal behaviours (lobsters specifically in his example) is not an accurate indicator of human behaviour?
Something else?

If I'm convinced of anything but this farrago, it's that 'I don't think...' is not a valid basis on which to dismiss the argument.

Dr Peterson was brilliant and made a lot of sense. Cathy Newman was just embarrassing.

I had to spell check virtually every word in that post

I dont think its innate biology

Its very handy for a male dominated hierarchy to claim that though

So this is innate biology, inescapable. Hence male dominated hierarchies are inevitable and pointless to try and alter.

Is there evidence of the similarities between lobster brains and human brains, to see where this hierarchy lies? Can it be observed reliably yet on brain scans, or identified in other ways? Or is it not that simple?

These hierarchies will presumably always reassert themselves even if men try to actively avert them as it's a very fundamental aspect of all creatures that share a common ancestor.

I made it to the end! Thanks to Les and Yippee and many others for contributing. The challenge that JO provides to people's views is one that many revel in and react with interest and an open minded desire to learn more as some have said here. Even if the hey want to learn more to prove JP's wrong they engage in the discussion.

The pointless name calling of "fascist" and "racist" and "alt-righter" are just showing how poor the foundations of the views of those doing to calling are. As I say to my children, "don't just complain it's unfair tell me why?"

AssassinateB : "Did he not attempt to say why men do that and women don't?"

"That" being "work crazy hours with crazy stress to scrabble to the top of the heap. And yes, he does give his explanation in his lectures and I also gave an explanation earlier in the thread.

In substance it's related to his lobster story. There's a male dominance hierarchy in all social animals. In lobsters (and most animals) it's essentially about size, power and fighting strength. In humans there's a bit of that pure power thing, but since we're complicated cretaures with big brains, the male human dominance hierarchy is multifaceted. You can scrabble to the top of the heap as a political dictator, by force. Or you can be Bill Gates, or a top corporate manager. Or banker. Or lawyer. Or you can be Picasso. Or Mick Jagger. Or Woody Allen. Or Michael Jordan. Or Niels Bohr. Or Pasteur. Or Tolstoy. Or Sartre. And so on. There are lots of human heaps you can scrabble to the top of - if you are very intelligent, very conscientious, possibly creative, very hard working, very single minded, and very willing to sacrifice the rest of your life to scrabbling to the top. Or as near the top as you can manage.

If you get near the top you win status. Like the lobster who wins his fights. And with status comes extra nookie. In animals where it's just a fight, you get extra nookie because you chase off the little guys, and the gals have no choice but to mate with you. In humans, where the gals get a choice of who they're going to mate with gals - on average - go for men who are equal to them in status, or higher. Hence the higher up the status pole you are, the more gals will be interested in you. So if you're a man, the reward for sacrificing your life to scrabble up the pole is extra gals who are interested in you, extra nookie, and so extra descendants.

So why do a small percentage of men spend their lives scrabbling to the top ? Evolution. In the past, human males who scrabbled to the top left more children than men who didn't scrabble to the top. There is no corresponding dynamic for females, because the number of children a woman has is not affected by how many mates she has. Her chances of leaving more descendants are increased not by more mates, but by having a mate with high status - one who can provide her with resources and protect her. Hence evolution wasn't telling her female ancestors to hunt for more mates, it was telling her ancestors to hunt for a mate with status. Or if she's going to have a bit on the side, and mate with a man who isn't going to provide any resources or protection, it's better to mate with a high status male than a low status one. Because your male descendants will then acquire better genes and so will get higher status and pass your genes on through their mating success.

Evolution, of course, does not have to plant its instructions in our conscious minds. Very able men can scrabble to the top just thinking " I wanna be on top" without explicitly calculating the nookie reward. And women have always fancied the top dog without consciously calculating that there's a pay off in terms of protection for them and their children.

btw this is not an idiosyncratic Peterson flight of fancy. It's evolutionary biology 101.

• I throw in Woody Allen and Sartre as illustrations of the fact that if you have high status, you can pull a lot of really good looking birds without being an oil painting. I could have mentioned Henry Kissinger but I didn't want to cause any seizures. .