BoysToys

[SlowFJH]

We have two boys and a girl (all now teenagers). My daughter was never into dolls and never really liked pink. She was into arts and crafts and loves knitting and sowing. The boys were completely stereotypical (plastic and wooden swords, guns, cars, diggers and tractors, soldiers etc).

We have good feminist friends (with three boys) who banned violent toys for boys. They always gave us the cat's bum face when they visited ours because their boys used to absolutely love playing with my sons' swords and shields. When we went out it for a walk, every stick they found was a gun - despite their parents vocal disapproval.

My friend's boys (now all strapping teenage lads) joke about how their parents banned them from having the toys they always wanted.

We definitely saw differences in toy preferences very early on. My daughter had zero interest in wheeled toys (despite my efforts) but both boys were fascinated by them virtually from day one.

I know my experience is not scientific. But there were some studies several years ago using baby apes (who obviously had not been conditioned by human systems or been exposed to advertising etc). Baby male apes showed a clear preference for mechanical toys over plush toys.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/

I'd love to hear others views on this topic... social conditioning versus biological predispositions.

Lets split it down further then.

Evopsych as a concept - fine, could be interesting, really tough to get any valid data, but sure, knock yourself out

Evopsych as in every study I've read or seen widely reported then read - rubbish.

whales have a much larger brain than humans do. Surely there is more to cognitive capacity than brain size?

there are cultures existing today who did not make the tools that the homo ancestors you refer to did. Do they belong to a different species than Europeans?

Again, I don't doubt that cognitive function has changed over millions of years. I do not think that evolutionary psychology is equipped to tell us how that happened, and you saying natural selection over and over isn't telling me how it happened.

We do not know what these ancestors' minds were like. We can find their leavings, (where they exist) and make inferences but there is no way to verify them

Slow - please design an evolutionary psychology experiment.

Psychologists have plenty of problems with evolutionary psychology as a subject too. As we've all pointed out its not about whether we believe in evolution or that psychological processes are subject to it to some degree - its about what questions can be meaningfully asked by the subject evolutionary psychology within the paradigm of scientific method.

Psychology is fundamentally about studying how we think and behave. You can study how that has changed over time, it's very interesting too. But as you need a record of people's thoughts and behaviours it doesn't make much sense to link it to evolution as we don't have records about how people think before people started to leave a record of their thoughts, and that's not a long enough time period to talk about evolution, at least in a biological sense. You can get some glimpses from burial sites etc, but they are really just glimpses and subject to a huge amount of interpretation.

The potential size of an animals brain doesn't tell you very much about the thoughts inside of it. Does a Great Dane have more complex thoughts than a Chiwawa?

Neuroscience is looking at some interesting stuff with regard to the possible functions of different parts of the brain which can tell us something about thought, but only pretty basic thinking really. So they have looked at which parts of the brain light up on MRI when people are encouraged to think about reward or fear, and use rather cruder and intrusive ways to see the same thing in rats and monkeys. Some things seem to use more 'primative' parts of our brain than others.

Oh and all social animals have some degree of socialisation (including interesting things like altruism which have been observed in primates). I'd not assume that baby apes were total blank slates (or if they were from experimental breeding stock and lived in captivity that their reactions would be the same as in the wild).

But as you need a record of people's thoughts and behaviours it doesn't make much sense to link it to evolution as we don't have records about how people think before people started to leave a record of their thought

That's not strictly true about evolutionary studies.
Such studies have been done about language and dna, even without physical records.
But the methodology used is specific for these studies, as I've explained before. And btw, it's a field I work on.

Such evolutionary studies won't (and couldn't) tell anyone specifically why their personality is x or y, but could unravel why humans in general tend to behave in certain ways.

It's certainly not the case of the study debated here, though.

Yes I was thinking of more sophisticated stuff, like belief (and gender preferences/prejudices!). My field is risk management, so why people think the way they do is fascinating to me, and that has certainly changed a lot over time. But I also have a masters in Public Health, so I'm very skeptical of most behavioural type studies as they are so open to interpretation and no one is immune from bias. Almost impossible to do blind or controlled studies really.

Oh and your work sounds fascinating Lewji. I'm totally a dabbler in reading about these things now. Every now and then I think about doing further study, but as my dh has just reminded me, I'm a terrible student! I doubt very much I'd actually be able to finish a PhD which would be the logical next step for me.

GreenTomato
Can you please give an example of why you think it isn't.

Words from someone I respect...
"Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation."

Charles Darwin
from the closing pages of "The Origin of Species"

I'm not sure that one, short quote from The Origin of Species answers the question in any way.

Darwin's view of Psychology from 150 years ago isn't particularly relevant to evo psych as it is practised today.

The patience of the people replying to slow is astounding

GreenTomato
"Darwin's view of psychology from 150 years ago isn't particularly relevant to evo psych as it is practised today"

If you believe the basic tenets of evolution and natural selection, it is a relevant consideration for any study of life on Earth.

So Darwin changed the whole of biological science - for evermore. He himself postulated that as well as the evolution of birds' beaks etc, the theories he proposed can and should be applied to the non-physical aspects of our being (like thought, cognition, emotion etc.)

Yes, yes he did.

Note theory postulate - things that are then supported or not via experimentation.

I contend that Evo Psych as it is practised today has very little to do with Darwin's vision for psychology and evolution.

Give me an example of a good evo psych experiment.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

This is hilarious it really is.

So patriarchy has existed for no more than 10,000 years maximum, probably less (maybe 6,000, maybe slightly less, maybe slightly more)

I remember once reading an April fool's article where papers printed this article saying that human beings' arms were getting longer as a result of evolution. Now that so many of us work in offices, we're having to lean over to get papers etc. and it's making our arms longer. The next generation of human beings will have arms down to their knees, to make it easier to reach for the paper next to the photocopier.

A while back, I read Guy Deutscher Through the Language Mirror. One of the chapters in there looks at colour perception as reflected in the number of words for particular colours in a culture, as reflected in its language. They looked at some remote tribes, as well as our own culture and also Greek and Roman literature. (There's some quote about Homer or someone similar, writing about purple skies.)

Most cultures perceive red easily - it tends to be the first colour that gets recognised. There's much more variation down the other end of the spectrum - the number of words for shades of greens can vary massively, and there was an example of one tribe which was able to distinguish (and name) significantly more shades of green than a European could - partly because they were brought up to it, because when you spend your days hunting in the jungle or across the savannah or whatever their environment was, there is a lot of green, and it's more important to your survival.

Blue is interesting because it just doesn't feature in some languages at all - it's a form of green. It's usually the last colour to be separately defined. Deutscher recounts an anecdote from when his daughter was learning to speak, and he asked her what the colour of the sky was - and she couldn't work it out. I think it was a blue sky day, rather than grey and cloudy- but looking out at today's sky, it's neater white on the horizon in the direction of the sun, it's only a definite blue right overhead.

There was also some discussion of rods and cones and colour blindness and so on, but I don't remember the details.

So while I think blue might be important to some monkeys (and it would be interesting to know about differences in ocular biology and what wave lengths of light can be perceived,) I don't know it is as important a colour to humans (biologically, anyway - culturally, it used to be high status, as it's a comparatively rare pigment, so having a large painting of the Virgin Mary dressed in blue is showing off your wealth, not just your piety.)

Slow, considering psychology's greatest advances have been in the last century, even I wouldn't quote Darwin.

It would be similar to quoting him on how traits are transmitted, as he didn't know about Mendel at the time.

And he was talking about mental capacity and power, which is a bit more quantitative than behaviour.

I don't agree, btw, that evolutionary psychology as an area of study is bollocks, as such. But we should certainly be very cautious about interpreting results and with any studies. And I'd probably agree that many studies done within it are severely faulty in many ways, based on the little I know about it.

I remember once reading an April fool's article (...) saying that human beings' arms were getting longer as a result of evolution. Now that so many of us work in offices, we're having to lean over to get papers etc. and it's making our arms longer. The next generation of human beings will have arms down to their knees, to make it easier to reach for the paper next to the photocopier.

BTW, that would be lamarckian evolution, not darwinian.

I don't see how you can claim that human nature and psychological differences are somehow uniquely immune to evolution and natural selection.

It doesn't seem scientifically sound to say that e.g. the ability to learn language, perform complex mathematics, avoid danger, the motivations for sex/violence/care of offspring, parenting, co-operation etc etc can't possibly have evolved but that these are entirely socially constructed.

Some aspects will be conditioned by evolution, yes. But not all.

What most people are commenting on is about methodologies of study. And how much it is relevant for people.

An example.

It seems that people tend to choose mates that resemble them somehow, or their relatives. Let's assume it is a theory that hasn't been disproved and there is lots of evidence for it. It may give us some information about population dynamics. But it still won't predict my personal choices.

In a parallel to the study mentioned earlier, a similar study in monkeys would give us very little inkling if that would be true in humans, although it could lead us to make an hypothesis for testing.
But, if there were many studies in related species showing it happened in all of them, it would suggest that at the basis of our reproductive behaviour there would be the same drive.

Another problem is trying to use any of those observations as guidance for our behaviour or our society.

Imagine it had been shown that boys inherently prefer moving toys and girls nurturing toys. That would be on average anyway. Could we conclude that it was ok to restrict wheels to boys and dolls to girls? Or that a girl liking wheels meant she was gender confused? Certainly not.

Completely agree with the above Lweji.
I think some of the more sensationalist "conclusions / application" from these studies are misconstrued by the popular press.

To change tact a little since this conversation appears to be headed nowhere fast....

I think that it is not unreasonable to look at other mammalian species and note the presence of a dominant male. I've probably bored others on here before with such half baked theories, but it seems to me that much of male (and female behaviour) can be explained in such terms. Male aggression is correlated with sexual success, it has been used in the past to coerce unwilling females into unwanted sex, that much is not up for debate. Furthermore females tend to rather like men who are big and "make them feel safe" - is all this just socialised behaviour ? I am not at all sure it is.

Perhaps I am not living up to my user name, but a system whereby men agree to police and arrest/imprison each other for threatening or being violent to women is rather the same as a lower primate killing anyone who threatens to mate with their female.

I don't see what this has to do with a preference for pink however.

There is no inherent preference for pink, afaik, except in modern times and western society.

Not a proper study, but interesting: www.techi.com/2011/03/beyond-pink-and-blue-a-look-at-gender-colors/
It says men and women both prefer... blue!

The purple thing is probably due to culture pressure.

And
www.livescience.com/22037-pink-girls-blue-boys.html
"It wasn't until after the Second World War that the modern convention (pink for girls, blue for boys) started to dominate, and even so, it didn't "gel" until the 1980s, she said."

It's simply a convention.

And while boys and girls start to identify with gender, they follow the conventions around them. Although, still, not all of them.

was also just thinking of the threads you often see on MN e.g. "would you date a man who is shorted than you?" the general consensus is No....so why do females prefer taller men if that is indeed the case, one assumption would be because taller men are more successful - but at what exactly ? physical stuff ?

This is a bad example:
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/

Where they take one observation (in adults), that men and women see colours differently, and propose an evolutionary explanation, that it was selected for by different roles between genders, without taking into account how much it has been shaped by use and disuse when growing up, for example. Or if testosterone level correlated with any differences.

What they proposed should have been controlled for confounding by testing if any differences are inherent to males and females, or if life history made a difference. (I haven't read the actual research paper, though).
Or it could simply be an undesirable byproduct of testosterone, and one that could possibly be at the origin (not consequence) of behaviour such as preferring to hunt than gather.

Can't think of a way to tell the difference.

The focus on the more kooky "studies" (pots and pink etc) seem to me to be more of an ideological and politically motivated wholesale rejection of a potentially legitimate area of scientific exploration.

Human males are (on average) taller, hairier and have more testosterone than human females. Humans of both sexes have a more upright posture and much bigger brains than our ape-like evolutionary ancestors. Aside from Creationists, most people would agree that these differences are as a result of evolution and natural selection.

I haven't heard any scientific reason why our brains, unlike the rest of our bodies, are somehow "exempt" from the processes of natural selection and evolution that have been happening to humans for million of years.

slow - I don't think that anyone is arguing that our brains haven't evolved are they ? What they are saying is that it is silly to claim boys like to play with wheeled toys more than girls because of the way the different sexes brains evolved.

What happens when a man who is an incredible gift for music has a girl, is it not likely that she would inherit whatever it was that her dad had that made his brain understand music in a special way ? Or are you saying that she wouldn't inherit it the same way a boy would ? I'm a bit lost.