Reclaiming (evolutionary) biology! (thinking about what Heather Brunskell Evans said)

I can’t imagine what adaptive pressures would lead to men being better at maths than women.

Well, exactly!

Materialist is right, I think. Cognitive within groups is greater than between groups, even at the level of families. There’s a greater cognitive range between two siblings of one family compared with the difference between them and another randomly chosen family. The key is randomly though. Easy to deliberately pick two different families to demonstrate the opposite.

As to kesstrel’s point, that’s probably true. I can’t inagine what adaptive pressures would lead to men being better at maths than women.

But when it comes to attracting a mate - sexual selection rather than natural selection - then size and strength are selected for and so might particular behaviours.

I’ve mentioned before that testosterone increases bevahiiut that is socially valued. In a capitalist society it might lead to competition and aggression - but that sane hormone will increase prosocial behaviour in other circumstances. The hormone which might increase the chances of men to shooting each other also leads them to carry in injured comrade through a minefield. Women have less androgens but they are still involved in behaviour that protects their families.

Yes. Whereas it's possible with a very high accuracy to tell if a pelvis belonged to a man or a woman, you can't do that for a brain (well, other than checking cells for Y chromosomes). And even where there might appear to be some differences at a population level, we don't know if they're 'hardwired' (my recollection is that differences aren't found in prepubertal children) or a result of 'programming' (socialisation, education) or developmental (hormones etc).

In re: public health epidemic of VAWG: In Russia, Feminist Memes Buy Jail Time, but Domestic Abuse Doesn’t

A year after the country decriminalized domestic violence, women feel the consequences.

The war on women in Russia:
14,000 women murdered every year.
That’s 38 women killed every day.
Almost two women every single hour.
One every 40 minutes.
...
In 2017, according to Human Rights Watch, up to 36,000 Russian women and 26,000 children faced daily violence and abuse. And most of the time—perhaps as much as 91 percent, according to 2013 data from the ANNA Center for the Prevention of Violence—the aggressor is a woman’s husband. Domestic violence is so common, in fact, that it affects one in four Russian families, according to ANNA. Two-thirds of all homicides in Russia are linked to domestic and family issues, and incidents of domestic assault on women and children increased by 20 percent between 2010 and 2015.

foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/15/in-russia-feminist-memes-buy-jail-time-but-domestic-abuse-doesnt/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

I think the innate differences between men and women are small.

I think that's been pretty well demonstrated when it comes to intellectual abilities. But what do you think about the theory that innate differences are most likely to exist or be greatest around what (for want of a better word) are called 'mating' behaviours and the related emotions and preferences? Because that's where evolutionary pressures are most likely to occur (including 'sexual selection' pressure, e.g. peacock tails)?

That makes sense to me, and also could explain some fairly common observable differences in men's and women's average attitudes to how they conduct their sex lives, for example.

PerkingFaintly Your post got me pathetically very excited , because this is something I've thought about a lot, and a couple of months I stumbled across a name for the phenomenon you describe. A quote from the article:

The truth conditions of this class of sentences, known as generics, have been the subject of much debate but little successful theorising

The article is called 'Generics: Cognitition and Acquisition' and is written by Sarah Jane Leslie, apparently a specialist in philosophy of language. It's a free pdf - if you're interested!

This "generics" problem constantly comes up in all sorts of debates, though, pushing them into sterile dead-ends, and it's so irritating when people refuse to accept that there is ambiguity to these types of sentences, and insist that the interpretation that gives them the most argumentative leverage must be the 'correct' one.

Somewhere among all this research, there was a study on impact of cosleeping ok girls and boys. It had a positive effect on boys at school age, no difference to girls.

But I wanted to find it again actually as could this be to do with undoing masculine stereotypes rather than dna? (That idea of boys being tough etc).

cosleeping.nd.edu/articles-and-presentations/articles-and-essays/

Similarly crap brain due to my own shit lungs and bf baby all night but there was some research recently on the possibility that males might be more susceptible to negative care than females (something to do with mast cells?) which would mean yes extra care for the male babies.

I do sometimes feel male humans are slightly more genetically fragile than females - more SALT referrals, OT, behavioural referrals etc.

But I often wonder if the extra care for young boys is important to undo/ vaccinate against the extreme masculinity society?

So hard to unpick it.

The unconscious bias tests are another one of those dubious social psychology tests, I’m afraid. They are not reliable on individuals as you will score differently each time you take it. They’re different from, say, IQ tests where you will score approximately the same each time you take it, bar hangovers or whatever. They are fine for testing populations but not individuals.

I think the innate differences between men and women are small.

I also think you can’t tease apart nature and nurture any more than you can say what ‘makes’ a cake a cake - the ingredients or the baking process?

You can’t make a cake from a chicken (though I bet Heston Blumenthal has had a crack at it) but you can do a botched job even if you’ve measured the right ingredients exactly.

If innate differences are truly minor then, once we had eliminated gender education, would it Be worth the brain storing sterotypes? Would that mean that we know we have achieved feminsit goals when unconscious bias tests do not detect such bias?

What we do, who we are, our talents and almost everything about us are a mix of genes and environment. The way the brain is shaped by experience means (for me) the debate about nature/nurture is no longer very interesting. If men are better at maths (and worse too) then the question if they were born that way or socialised into it is not interesting. What is interesting is to ask the question: if women are given a similar environment to men (support and positive messages etc), where will that lead women?

I've never seen the nature/nurture as a conflict to my feminism. I'm quite happy to accept that women have evolved behaviours that are different to men - for FFS we've got different genes so it would hardly be shocking. But, as Cordelia Fine is fond of repeating, so often these differences are exaggerated for other reasons (political, social or religious agendas), or not there at all.

Outcome of equality should be not the whole point of feminism, but we need to measure these things somehow so it seems legitimate to look at pay gap and so on. However, socially engineering outcomes should still have a role for many good reasons given on this thread: to have managers that reflect their workforce and clients, who have different skills and lived experience to bring to the job.

The upside of the trans movement is the importance of biological differences between men and women and what that means for feminism is finally coming to the fore. Not only do uterus-bearers get raped, they also have very different lives because of their biology. That experience changes behaviour (or maybe the behaviour is innate, I don't care which, see my first point) thus women become primary carers, sacrifice careers and so on. Look at the numbers of men who have nothing to do with their offspring - women are just not the same and even the courts accept this 'unconditionality' of motherly love/bond.

Being a woman starts XX chromosomes but the biological implications goes far beyond.

Maybe it's something like, equality at an individual level, equity at a population level?

What does the feminist utopia look like? Does it lead to equality of outcome for men and women, or does it lead to them continuing to play different roles, but now equally valued?

My feeling is with us being amazingly adaptable as a species and our brain plasticity will make it pretty impossible to delineate between what is 'natural' and 'unnatural' as sex classes.

Our feeling of what is 'unnatural' in our socialisation and environment is only really known by what aspie describes. If we meet with too much aversive stimuli we feel our lives are unnatural and become depressed.

Does it feel unnatural and oppressive because of gender, because of where we sit between NT-AS or being extrovert, introvert, etc? All we can say is that it just feels fucking unpleasant and makes you want to scream if you are forced into living a life where too many experiences are aversive.

We are adaptable and I would argue that the prevalence of maternal death in childbirth and whole groups of men bumping each-other off in battle means that men have always had to adapt and pitch in and help with 'woman's work' and women have had to adapt and pitch in with the 'men's work' for the best chance of group survival.

The important thing is removing barriers for one group and preventing the hoarding and abuse of power by the other.

Trying to pin down traits is going to lead to the unbearable suffering of those who don't fit the norm.

An important question is whether feminism is about the equality or equity model of fairness. What does the feminist utopia look like? Does it lead to equality of outcome for men and women, or does it lead to them continuing to play different roles, but now equally valued?

The issue of biological differences is contentious because it seems to inevitably push feminism towards one of those two options. If there substantial innate differences between the sexes (even if these are only expressed as group trends) then equality of outcome seems a hopelessly unrealistic aim. On the other hand if the innate differences between the sexes are minor, the accepting a 'different but equal' outcome seems to entrench the very sexism that feminism is meant to oppose.

But that’s just not true. We’ve evolved in a way that we can cope with dairy for example.

More so in Europe. The fact this is a recent adaptation is a reminder we haven’t stopped evolving and there’s no reason to suppose an adaptation that was advantageous (pre)historically will continue to be so.

I agree Aspie. There are far too many management roles, and many of them are overpaid. It is a culture of valuing hierarchy over expertise.

I really like my manager. She has been very supportive. But even she will admit that most of her job is feeding information upwards and passing instructions down. I suspect we have whole layers of middle managers who exist just so that senior managers have someone to blame if something goes wrong.

I get what you mean, (and paleo is evo biol marketed not psychology marketed) but paleo IS marketed with evolutionary biology. There’s a kernel of good stuff in it (eat stuff that’s not been fucked around with is a sensible idea) but the marketing is very much ‘this is the natural/original way to eat.) they’ve picked the meat heavy diet (too meat heavy for most hunter gatherer populations) because the idea was that eating meat led to the increase in our brain capacity etc and that we somehow stopped evolving at that specific point so out vodies can’t cooe with what we eat now.

But that’s just not true. We’ve evolved in a way that we can cope with dairy for example.

TLDR; we live in a society that values management skills over either technical or care skills.

The higher up the ladder you get the further you are from the reason you joined that organisation in the first place.

If you became a doctor or a teacher because you care about people then that’s going to deter people who joined that field from seeking promotion.

On the other hand it’s not going to deter people who see their job as just an instrumental means of earning money.

And whether it’s innate, or due to socialisation, I think this is leading to more men at the top. It’s not unusual for a school where almost all the teachers are women to have a male head.

I agree Aspie. There are far too many management roles, and many of them are overpaid. It is a culture of valuing hierarchy over expertise.

I'm not a great fan of evolutionary psychology, but the 'paleo diet' has about as much to do with evolutionary biology as 'flat earth theory' has to do with geology. Using it is a bit of a blatant straw man.

Some companies solve this quite well by having different career 'ladders'

I wish that were true where I am. I do most of the IT in my office. In order to get a promotion I’d have to become a manager - in which case I’d be doing a management job, not an IT job: I might just as well becone a manager in the personnel department or the estates management department.

There’s simply no career progression in my department that leads from an IT job to a better IT job.

Anyway, sorry about the derail, though I suppose it might be relevant. Say you are a great teacher. You love working with kids. But the only way to progress your career is to become head teacher - and you’ll no longer be teaching kids. You might as well get a bank manager or a supermarket manager.

We don’t bat an eyelid if a film star is payed more than their director. We don’t think it’s ludicrous if a footballer earns more than their manager. Not all pay structures reflect management and organisational skills.

Of course, I’m biased, having the people skills of a bonobo.

As an aside, a comment on the 'paleo diet' ... and what was their life expectancy? How many ancient human remains show signs of malnutrition, parasites.....

Why is being in charge of someone who does something you can’t do better rewarded than being the person who does that thing you can’t do?

Some companies solve this quite well by having different career 'ladders' - in my company we used to have a management ladder and a scientific ladder, for instance - so an expert could be appropriately valued, but might report to a manager lower on the management ladder. Since being bought by a larger company, we don't have this any more so I'm now graded as a 'senior manager' (same as my manager) - despite having zero management responsibilities.

I guess this helpful model may exist more in science where (historically, at least) there would be a much higher m:f ratio on the science side than the admin, FA/HR side...

Oh people are saying things much better than me. The above chimes with what I've recently realised about the way language often fails to make statistics transparent.

Sorry, this isn't very articulate, but let me chuck it in anyway and hope it makes some sort of sense.

The following sentences look the same:
a) Men have penises
b) Men are better at maths than women
c) Men are rapists

But sentence (a) refers to almost 100% of men (or did uncontroversially till recently – but leave that aside).

Sentence (b)... Well, on a recent thread a male poster was defending this or a similar proposition with a graph showing two bell curves which overlapped except for the 0.1% at either extreme.

Supposing this graph were correct, and that it did indeed reflect biology not some other biasing factor, that would still leave ability in maths not having any correlation with sex except in some tiny proportion of the population (which NB blatantly didn't include that particular male poster!).

Sentence (c)... Blokes line up to yell NAMALT about that one. Though not so much about (b).

In (a) "men" = "all men".
In (b) & (c) "men" = "a tiny minority of men".

It's struck me that the language enables someone to say, "I'm a man so I have a penis; I'm a man so I'm better at maths than women," without experiencing any jolt as they shift from one assertion to the other.

Adding NAMALT occasionally doesn't seem to dislodge this mental elision of the two different uses of the word "men" from the discourse.

(And obviously the same is true of the word "women" and of any other word for a group.)