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???

Just wanted to pop back to say, apologies for having been a slack OP. I hadn't seen how this thread had developed! I have been busy lately, but I've just sat and read everything, thank to you all for contributing.

The friend in question has a way of forcing a point and making opinions sound like fact, and sometimes I end up feeling a little stupid in comparison. This thread has helped me to remember that as many times as she throws science into the debate and punctuates her statements with "Fact." it doesn't make it so.

Good tips on the reading material. I will search out Delusions of Gender for myself.

Gawd someone who actually says "FACT" when they are talking is a bit of a twonk by definition surely

Whitewolf - I would also recommend reading Stephen Pinker's 'The Blank Slate" which also addresses your friend point in a different way than Cordelia Fine.

Your friend says that because there are inate differences between men and women in the way they behave that we should give up on the quest for equality.

Cordelia Fine says the evidence is not yet clear on whether there are instead differences and therefore it is premature to give up on equality.

Stephen Pinker says there are good reasons to think that there are inate behavioural differences (on average) between men and women that mean that strict 50/50 equality of representation in every walk of life is unlikely to be achieved -but this is no reason to discriminate, abuse or oppress.

MillyR - " 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."

You could also consider that human beings come from a line of organisms in which it is estimated that sexual reproduction has been going on for over a billion years (sexual reproduction developed long before brains did). Different ethnic groups branched off from each other something in the order of two million years ago when human beings already recognisably like us left Africa and started to face different environments, that shaped their evolution. In other words males and females have been experiencing differential evolutionary pressures about 500-1000 times longer than different ethnic groups have.

While racial and sexual equality are rightly parallel concepts in law - because all individuals have the same human rights, it does not follow that race and sex are parallel concepts in biology.

Well, yes, that's obvious. There's no such thing as race in human biology.

That doesn't explain the methodological issue of assigning ethnic differences in results as being cultural and sex differences as being genetic when they have no way of knowing which is which.

Unless of course you have already decided that as there have been different evolutionary pressures on the sexes for so long that sex differences in the brain are inevitable, in which case, there's no actual need to do the research in the first place. It's a circular argument really.

millyr's post

and goes to bed

Happy xmas all

MillyR - I'm not convinced by the colour preference study and the conclusions it draws so I'm not going to defend it.

But I am not so sure that it is 'obvious' that sex and ethnicity are quite different things in terms of evolutionary time. Why would it be?

Milly - as I've said I have no idea if there is inate colour preference or acuity differences by sex...
But I think it is completely uncontroversial that human ability to see in colour in the red-purple range (and to find reds and pinks particularly attention grabbing) is an adaptation - this must have been good for something.

Fruit finding seems like the obvious candidate since colour vision appears to be not useful to carnivores, while fruit bearing plants actively use colour to make themselves attractive and signal ripeness.

(If there is a link between fruit finding and colour vision this suggests men and women both gathered fruit by the way....)

But since you are adamant colour vision and preference couldn't possibly be related to fruit I wonder what you think was the evolutionary advantage? I wonder how you think evolution works at all to be honest.

" 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."

If plants create fruit/berries that are too small to be worth eating they won't be eaten, and so they won't be spread and these individual plants will loose out to other variants that give a bigger pay off. So fruit in the wild are just big enough, sweet enough and abundant enough to be worth eating (think crab apples, wild plums, wild strawberries, brambles etc...). There would have been no alternative plants offering a free lunch by putting more of their resources into large, succulent fruit of the kind we now breed.

"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."

We can always say something else would have been a better adaptation. But you have to look at what is actually there and consider how it conferred advantage. Evolution doesn't work to produce the best of all possible options considering the range of situations, it just propagates the ones that proved most sucessful in the specific environment they found themselves in.

The colour of wild fruit is not artitrary and irrelevant to fruit eaters. It does have bearing on nutrition. Fruiting plants often produce anthocyanins (red/pink/blush hues) to signal ripeness. They invest in bright colours to attract fruit eaters. Why would they bother if there was no colour preference?

Re: colour preference - i'm actually a bit colourblind.
(Like my dad).
Lots of people say 'only men can be colourblind' but several opticians have confirmed i am too. Er, anyway... my point is that there are many men & women who do not think, act or behave in just a stereotypically 'male' or 'female' way.
So your friend is wrong OP.

Himlaya human beings are not the only animals which eat fruits esp berries. Small animals and especially birds are more important for spreading seeds with many different types of fruit and berry. You seem to have tunnel vision a bit with this - human beings are not the be all and end all of the ecosystem, berries are not the only food.

A lot of berries and fungi use red to signal poisonous which is another point that seems to have been overlooked.

SQ - no indeed human beings are not the only animals. But humans do have colour vision

One of my male friends likes to catch & eat fish. He will sit on a riverbank all day with mates in the freezing cold with their fishing rods & Stella.
They rarely catch anything except a cold.
But i go to Tesco, buy my nice boneless salmon fillets, & then relax in their warm cafe with a hot coffee & magazine.
I think that proves that women are superior!
:-D

SQ - sorry hit sent too early and then lost a message...

Humans and other primates have colour vision - it must have conferred an advantage to them for it to spread and develop, and it is likely that it continued to confer an advantage, as it did not degrade.

If the advantage has nothing to do with finding fruit (I still don't know what is so offensive about this idea) what do you think the advantage was?

Poisonous berries are interesting and a bit of a conundrum if you look at it with a species-centric view - why would a plant bother to create berries no one wants to eat?! But many berries are poisonous or distasteful to mammals but good food for birds. There is a theory that this is an adaptation by the plant to get far-travelling birds to transport seeds, but keep local mammals away from the goodies (thorns on bramble bushes might work similarly).

I'm not sure what your point is about poisonous mushrooms. Yes they can be red.It is not necessary to think that every instance of red/pink = a human specific message of "eat me", or that human beings are unable to learn other associations with colours to think that finding stuff to eat might have been an advantage gained by primates having colour vision.

I'd say "Equal doesn't mean 'same'."

I'd say, first of all, thank god we're wired differently to men.

Some recently released government stats from America (not that we didn't know anyway)

*Across all types of violence, the majority of female victims reported that their perpetrators were male. Male rape victims and male victims of non-contact unwanted sexual experiences reported predominantly male perpetrators. Nearly half of stalking victimizations against males were also perpetrated by males.

• For female rape victims, 98.1% reported only male perpetrators. Additionally, 92.5% of female victims of sexual violence other than rape reported only male perpetrators. For male victims, the sex of the perpetrator varied by the type of sexual violence experienced. The majority of male rape victims (93.3%) reported only male perpetrators.

In 1973, Walter Gove found that ?for women the shift from being single to being married increases the likelihood of being murdered, while for men the shift decreases their chances.? Gove obtained similar findings for single as compared to married women as regards to ?accidental deaths.? It is, of course, likely that many accidental deaths were murders.

It was also found that:

Virtually all mass murderers are men, and most of their victims have been women.

Incest is a form of sexual violence that is primarily directed against female children by adult male perpetrators (Finkelhor (1980; Herman with Herschman, 1977). Herman and Herschman found that 92 % of incest victims are female and 97% of the perpetrators are male.

To say that men are wired differently is a bit of a understatement.

Not sure what this has to do with someone not being a feminist though. Is she saying there's no point becoming a feminist because we're fucked one way or another, being as men hold all the power, and they are so incredibly different to women?

I just saw the word "berries"

Please, for the love of god, tell me that somebody has not brought up that evo psych bullshit berry fantasy about women liking pink.

You could read the thread, sakura. It has some interesting debates and references on it.

LRD, I don't want to be a bore, but I do want to come back on your earlier post. You said " 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?"

It is science in that scientists make speculations and other scientists test them. I agree there is a lot of speculation here, and nothing very conclusive. I guess the question about whether people are better at picking out pink/red things than other colours and whether women are better at it than men could be tested fairly easily with a bowl of coloured beads and a stopwatch - this seems less likely to be culturally influence than preference.

The question of whether human colour vision is an adaptation for finding berries (which is separate from the empirical question of whether men and women show differences in colour related ability) is always going to be speculative, as is any research on origins. Comparison of colour vision between omnivores and carnevores is one bit of evidence though.

More important than the berry thing, you also said, "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 think you (and many others) were misinformed at school about one of the most important theories in science - that description isn't a simplification, it is just not right.

Organisms don't adapt to suit the interests of those that live off them. evolution doesn't operate for the benefit of us (or others at the top of the food chain). Organisms have developed a wide range of defenses to avoid being eaten or infested. Mainly they respond defensively with Poisons, spikes, fast legs, eyes, ears and sense of smell, fight or flight mechanism, camoflage, immune system etc... There are exceptions where organisms gain mutual benefit when one lives off the other - fruit is one, gut bacteria another, but on the whole it is an arms race of attack and defence not a harmonious situation.

evolution acts in 'the genes best interest' not that of the individual, community or species- this is the really surprising thing, and completely changes our understanding.

I think your teachers' (and probably most people's) view of evolution is filtered through the religious/traditional perception that the natural state of the world is harmony -that the world is designed with our welfare in mind and that bad stuff happening is a perversion of the natural order. So what gets explained is a bit of a muddle.

This leaves people thinking they understand evolution but imagining that explanations about origins offer some moral guidance about how we should act.

Or as Bragmatic said much more succinctly than me - "Equal doesn't mean 'same'."

talia - . Btw, my (female) mate is colourblind too (yellow-blue).

himalaya - you're not being a bore, don't worry.

I feel I probably should shut up since I'm not a scientist and this discussion is beyond me. But I was taught at school that science was not about guessing - you don't 'speculate', you hypothesize. This paper sounds like guesswork to me. I think that's a pretty huge difference.

I'm sorry, but my lack of knowledge here is failing me - I just don't understand why your description of evolution is different from mine, but I accept it must be. Can you tell me though why we need to understand genes? I didn't get that - surely Darwin presented his ideas quite a long time before genes were well understood, and he just described the effects he saw?

Himalaya...

'I wonder how you think evolution works at all to be honest.'

The bit I was referring to is known as optimal foraging theory. It is a very basic bit of ecological theory. I didn't just make it up! I think evolution works how evolutionary biologists say it works; I don't believe in evolutionary psychology, as I have said on pretty much every thread you have ever been on.

'If plants create fruit/berries that are too small to be worth eating they won't be eaten.'

Yes they will be eaten, by a smaller animal than us, or an insect. The existence of smaller berries doesn't falsify optimal foraging theory.

'think crab apples, wild plums, wild strawberries, brambles etc.'

Have you any evidence that these existed in the environment of evolutionary adaptation? Or any archaeobotanical evidence that humans consumed them? Or are you speculating?

'We can always say something else would have been a better adaptation. But you have to look at what is actually there and consider how it conferred advantage.'

Or you could accept that a species came into existence that wasn't entirely preprogrammed. You could believe that this species was able to adapt through having different behaviour in different environments. But then you would have to accept that evolutionary psychology is nonsensical and start to look at evolution in terms of behavioural ecology. Because that is the thing with humans - we can go into a situation and say, something else would be a better adaptation. Let's socially construct a better technology, or a better way of interacting, so that we can adapt to this situation in the best possible way. The advantage conferred to humans is that we can adapt through culture.

Sorry wasn't clear. They will be eaten by a smaller animal than us, often one that isn't in direct competition with us, such a small mammal, a bird or an insect.

Didn't want to become long winded though.

MillyR -

Why do you think primates developed colour vision and humans kept it? It can't have been "so they would be adaptable to future environments" it must have confered an advantage in the environment they were living in. Why is it so ridiculous to think that that advantage was related to the colour if fruit and berries?