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

[LittleWhiteWolf]

I can't get my head around it. The friend in question is intelligent and educated and not stupid at all, yet spouts this as the reason why feminism, why equality doesn't work. Where she sees scientific and historical evidence to support this, I just see opinions. Apparently because men are the typical hunter gatherers and women the nuturers, we should just accept that. I'm just getting so sad listening to this.

Anyone got any tips one what one says to someone so mired in this belief???

LRD, Edam

I don't think the "pink question" is all that significant. But it is symptomatic of the mess these discussions get into.

We all agree I think that kids should be able to wear whatever colour they want, and that the whole pink marketing thing is horrible and pushes girls into thinking about themselves and their options in a narrow box.

This is true regardless of whether there is a small difference in girls and boys inate colour preference or not.

I have no idea if there is or not. All I said is that if there is it is not necessarily utter nonsense that this might be something to with berries.

You Edam said (and many others on MN) have said that because Victorian/Edwardian girls wore blue this shows categorically that the berry connection must be nonsense. This just doesn't follow.

Kids in Victorian England didn't choose their own clothes, so what they wore says nothing about their colour preference. Neither does it shed any light on the colour preference of kids in China, India, Africa etc... It is just one data point.

LRD - I don't think that evolution and how it plays out through biological adaptation is taught in primary school (it requires full knowledge of sexual reproduction, cells, genes etc... first) It is part of the GCSE curriculum and is hugely surprising and a complete mind blower if learnt about properly. It is not at all obvious and it changes the way people understand the world (just as it did when it was first discovered). Earlier on you were saying that acuity for pink couldn't have anything to do with picking ripe black berries, now you are telling me its obvious and any primary school kid knows?

SQ - As you said, it's helpful to lay out where we are coming from, so here is where I'm coming from:

I believe in human rights - an end to discrimination and oppression, the right to survive and thrive for all people. This is a moral ideal and non-negotiable.

I think the world is governed by natural forces and that all species evolved through natural selection. This is unavoidable, but not the basis for morality.

To better understand ourselves and our societies (and change them) we need to understand the biological basis of human behavior,

This is NOT the same as the same as the idea that nature provides a moral template for how we should be. 'Natural' does not mean good.Nor is it biological determinism. We don't have to live as our stone age instincts tell us.

While there is a conflict between the species we evolved to be, and the people we want to be, I don't think there is a conflict between studying and understanding humans as an evolved species and wanting to achieve equal human rights.

There is nothing that science can tell us about the relative tendencies of men and women that would justify harrassment, discrimination or abuse of anyone.

The conservative idea that men and women are completely different and suited to different roles in public and private spheres is clearly a crock of shit. For any task - domestic or public there are men and women who could do it, and where there are measurable differences in the spread of abilities they are marginal and not enough to explain male dominance of the public sphere.

So there is nothing to fear in studying differences robustly and nothing odd or ideologically suspect - since sexual selection is such a HUGE factor in human evolution. (other than people leaping to the wrong conclusions or using science to shore up predjudice - but this is not a reason not to study this stuff - just a reason to understand it better).

relatively minor inate differences can be amplified by social structures and attitudes. One of the most important inate differences I think is men and women's relative willingness to step out of public life (whether we are talking hunting for food or running for president) in order to care for their children when young.

From an evolutionary viewpoint this makes sense -- when two people have a child together the male has more to gain by continuing to hedge his bets putting effort into gaining public status (to win more women, more resources, more children in the future) and the female has more to loose unless she puts every effort into protecting the survival of the child she already has (it is definately hers, and she has already invested 9 months and risked her health to have it).

We still see the same trends today in that women tend to marry older men with greater status than them (higher earning) and then take a greater share of domestic responsibility after children.... and all the consequences of that...

These kind of biological urges made some sense in our prehistoric past when survival and paternity were uncertain. But they don't work anymore. Understanding that they are natural doesn't mean giving into them or giving up on feminism.

Happy Xmas one and all!

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.

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.

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/

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 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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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?

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

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

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

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 "

bem sex role inventory devised in 1971...

going to take the test

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.

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?"

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

It's not cynical at all.