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.

Slow - can you design a non-kooky evo psych study?

• can you even find a non-kooky evo psych study?

Itallbefine
Actually I think that's where the conversation shifted - when AskBasil categorised the entire realm of the evolution of psychology (as in psychological processes of the mind) as "Evo-bollocks". I think it was Whatdolget earlier who said she didn't believe that her psychology had evolved but that it was highly adaptive. I believe this point of view is classed as "blank slate theory".

I think others who initially said "It's all bollocks" have been more specific that some studies in Evolutionary Psychology have been bollocks but they accept that way our brains have indeed been subject to the same evolutionary pressures for selection as any other part of our body.

I believe some are probably in the camp of an ideological political opposition to the idea that male and female brains might have evolved differently ... cos patriarchy.

I agree some of those studies are spurious. I think (as with most things in life) how we behave is likely to be a nuanced and complicated interaction between environmental factors, upbringing, reward, pain, personal choice, societal pressures, expectations etc as well as those aspects of our being that we might have less conscious control over e.g. our endocrinology, our physiology, the physical structure of the brain, the complex interplay of hormones in the early stages of foetal development, nutrition in early life, neurology, our genetics and a whole bunch of other stuff we don't yet understand. This is why I am against writing off an entire branch of study as "bollocks".

Found this great article written by a who used to be in the "It's all bollocks" camp.

whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/is-evolutionary-psychology-worthless/

In answer to your question would a girl inherit musical ability from her father in the same way as a boy... I don't know if musical ability is inherited. I am guessing that "nurture" would play by far the biggest factor in whether or not someone was good at music. I can't see any reason why being good at music might confer an advantage (in evolutionary terms)...There might be but I can't see it. Also I can't see why you could predict any differences between the son and daughter in terms of musical ability. In any case, trying to conclude anything from just three individuals would be anecdotal.

Muttaburrasaurus
Can you design a non-kooky evo psych study

I'll give it a go. We know lots about what makes the image of a face (human, animal or made-up) appear appealingly "cute" - a combination of large eyes, larger forhead and smaller jaw, smaller ears (like most mammalian new borns). Cartoonists at Disney have known this for a while. An evolutionary biologist might postulate that it makes sense for us to find such an image appealing (rather than repulsive) -because it elicits nurturing emotions and behaviour (beneficial to the survival of offspring).

You could test this with monkeys if you wanted to see if traditionally "cute" images of faces had the same appeal to them as they do for humans. If you had a big enough sample you could observe for any sex differences.

That's just off the top of my head.

Why the hell would there be a good reason to study something like that? You can look at things like fear and reward through brain imaging techniques and observe some behaviours, but how would you test whether a picture appealed to a monkey, let alone why?

One of the reasons why so much evolutionary psychology is dismissed as bollocks is because such stupid things are picked for studies and such enormous leaps of judgement made on very very slim findings. As in the very first study cited on this thread that let's remember you picked out OP.

Testing something in a modern monkey tells you nothing about how a feeling or thought might have evolved in people. Monkeys aren't unevolved humans.

If we happened to want to see if there was a difference between sexes in humans in relation to infantile face shapes, we'd have to test in humans, certainly.
If there was, we could ask ourselves if it was innate or environment. We could start by testing in babies. But what if it was a difference that developed only in puberty? It might require a series of complex and we'll designed studies to separate the biological from the environmental.

We could test in MANY monkey and ape species. But we would still have the same problem of adults vs young.

What might be interesting would be to see if different mating systems and care for the young in related species correlated with differences or not in perception of young faces between sexes. But we still wouldn't know if that was cause or effect.

Nooka
Why the hell would there be a good reason to study someting like that?
To gather data, build knowledge and increase our understanding.

How would you test whether a picture appealed to a monkey, let alone why?
By observing a sizeable of group and making "cute" and "non-cute" images available to them. Then you would video record which types of images they spend longer looking at. We know from studying the eye movements of babies that they tend to spend longer looking at a simple line drawing of a face than they would say a line drawing of say a crib.

Let alone why?
To learn if the almost universal appeal in humans (of images that remind us of mammalian offspring) is also shared by our evolutionary cousins. Without speculating as to the results, this could provide data to either support or challenge a hyothesis that the appeal of nurturing / caring for offspring is hardwired into our psyche.

Stupid things are picked for studies and enormous leaps of judgement are made on such slim findings.
Who should be the judge of what is "stupid" or not? Regarding the "enormous leaps of judgement" - that would probably indicate a badly written paper. Very few scientific papers are earth shattering. Most use the language of "this could indicate", "these data support the view that.." and nearly always finish with a statement like "further research is needed to test..." By the time it reaches the popular press, these very measured words are misrepresented as "Girls like pink cos pickin berries"

Monkeys are not unevolved humans
If we find something in the hard wiring of a modern monkey that is very similar to humans we can infer that it has been there for a very long time (at least a 6 million years when it is believed that the evolution if the earliest hominids branched off from our evolutionary ancestors. If you and a distant, distant cousin share a feature, it is reasonable to assume you both inherited it from a common ancestor. In the animal world all mammals (by definition) suckle their young, As this is a feature we share with all of our cousins - you can infer it has been part of our make up ever since the first shrew-like animals walked the Earth 160 million years ago.

If we find something in the hard wiring of a modern monkey that is very similar to humans we can infer that it has been there for a very long time

Actually, no.
Comparison with "a" monkey [species] tells us nothing. Both could have evolved later. And as pointed out each monkey species had evolved exactly as much as we did since separation.

You'd need a large sample of monkey species, preferably apes, and some complex studies.

But I've explained all this earlier.

Lweji
I totally agree we could learn a lot from studying human children at different stages of development. However, this wouldn't eliminate the impact of social conditioning. By the time girls reach puberty are they expected to find babies cute and teenage boys expected not to.

Slow

If females brains have evolved differently to mens, then it follows that men who are good at things because their brains have evolved to be good at it, cannot pass those evolutionary advantages on to their female offspring, because their brains are "wired" differently. Do you think that this does or does not happen, and if you think it does, could you provide an example of a trait that is not inherited by female offspring but is by males ?

Lweji
You'd need a large sample of monkey species and preferably apes

Fully agree. The above was an off the top of my head basic outline of a single study.

"If we find something in the hard wiring of a modern monkey that is very similar to humans we can infer that it has been there for a very long time"

Yes but you can't infer that it's still there can you? Humans have evolved under very different circumstances to monkeys. They're not our ancestors but our "cousins".

Also all this talk of "hard-wiring" is a bit misleading as it isn't as rigid as people tend to think it is. I'm not arguing for the "blank slate" theory, far from it, but people's mating preferences (something that evo psychs tend to think of as fixed) change amongst more "gender-equal" societies.

Sorry, back to the monkeys. It's not so much the "boy monkeys prefer wheely toys" that bothers me but more the "boy monkeys prefer wheely toys so we shouldn't offer them equally to girls" or the "boy monkeys prefer wheely toys which explains why there are so few women in STEM" statements that bother me. They ignore huge social factors and are proscriptive in a regressive reductionist way.

Dawkins himself has always asserted that whilst he believes Darwinism to be a true explanation of how we got here, any society based on Darwinian principles would be a hideous disaster. So you may believe that boys and girls innately gravitate to different toys but that doesn't justify the kind of Mars/Venus indoctrination that we have going on at the moment.

"If females brains have evolved differently to mens, then it follows that men who are good at things because their brains have evolved to be good at it, cannot pass those evolutionary advantages on to their female offspring, because their brains are "wired" differently."

The general rule is that unless a trait is maladaptive it is passed on cross gender. Which is why men have nipples. They're redundant but not harmful.

But then you went straight to the wrong conclusion, Slow. Or at least a big jump that would be totally unsupported by the actual study you proposed.

ItAllBeFine

Not sure I fully understand your question or the premise behind it. Different does not mean better. Both female and male offsping inherit from the father and mother to end up with their XX and XY chromosomes. So in this respect, the daughter also inherits half of her genetic "femaleness" from the father as well as the mother

Could you think of a trait that is not inherited by female offspring but is by males?

If they are both heterosexual, what the male offspring finds sexually attractive could fall into that category. The father would have more in common with his son with regard to what they both found sexually attractive and less in common with his daughter.

That little gene in the Y chromosome can make a big difference on what is expressed or not.

BUT... there is nothing that is completely binary between men and women, except production of gametes and for the most part the existence of sexual organs, which are mutually exclusive.
The rest is just a game of averages and distributions.
We can find differences, sometimes, but this will tell us very little about individuals. If anything at all.
For example, even if men are stronger on average and the strongest man is stronger than the strongest woman, it doesn't mean that the strongest woman can't be just as useful as a man in the middle of the strongest men.

TheyDontKnow
I agree the term "hardwired" can be unhelpful. We also have freedom to make choices and we are influenced by our surroundings. As mentioned earlier, there is a lot more than genetics at play.

I have never heard a scientists say "Therefore we shouldn't offer them equally to girls." That sounds like a misrepresentation. The more dogmatic view (about what toys should / should not be offered to children) that I have encountered personally actually came from my dear friend (mentioned in OP) who made dolls available to her sons (they all declined) but adamantly refused to let them have toy guns, soldiers and swords.

The more dogmatic view came from my friend who made dolls available to her sons but adamantly refused to let them have toy guns, soldiers and swords.
But surely that was due to their views on normalisation of guns and violence. And making available is fine. It's not forcing.

I've made available all sorts of toys to ds, as I would to a girl.
Not sure how that falls under the dogmatic scope.
Only the guns, but that is beyond the gender divide. (I used to play cops and robbers as a child anyway)

Slow you don't seem to have much understanding of what can and can't be reasonably suggested by particular bits of data and obviously have a pretty fixed idea that gender stereotypes have a significant innate component regardless of the evidence.
We clearly aren't going to convince you and you clearly aren't going to persude us.

It's not dogmatic to be anti-violence!
It's just being a normal human being.

The more dogmatic view came from my friend who made dolls available to her sons but adamantly refused to let them have toy guns, soldiers and swords.

Sounds like me. One of mine wanted the guns and the dolls. He is completely typical in his interests now.

My oldest loved dolls too but they were called "action figures" therefore didn't count for some reason.

I'm not a feminist but interesting thread! I worked in an after school and holiday club for 3 years (as well as lots of other childcare experiences and 2 children of my own) and ime boys tend to play football, fighting games, Lego, cars and play station games and girls prefer dolls, games involving teachers or princesses, dress up and crafts. Board games were about 50/50.

Girls and boys are fundamentally different so tend to like different things. It's that simple I think. Social conditioning may be a factor but I think child's play is pretty child led mostly. Like the op says, if you don't provide guns boys will pick up sticks and use those! There are some exceptions as with anything.

Muttaburrasaurus
[You] obviously have a pretty fixed idea that gender stereotypes have a significant innate component regardless of the evidence

Not sure I would use the term stereotype. However the fact that violence and violent crime for example is a predominately male problem in every culture and throughout history is pretty compelling evidence. Part of the hypothallamus is twice as large in men than it is in women and it is studded with receptors for testosterone which is 10 times more plentiful in the bloodstream of men than women. While there is a lot nervousness about "blaming" violence on one hormone, there is a lot of evidence to show that testosterone prepares boys and men for challenges of dominance, take more risks and compete more aggressively.

Girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia tend to display preferences for toys which are typically classed as "for boys".

When people suffer particular types of brain injury, it can often have a very dramatic impact on their personality and behaviour e.g. previously placid people become foul mouthed and irritable.

Studies of adoptees suggest a substantial heritability of aggressive tendencies.

Men (having only one X chromosome and therefore no back up), are more at risk if their gene for producing the enzyme Monoamine Oxidase-A is mutated. This enzyme prevents the build up of several neurotransmitters in the brain. Men with a mutation in this particular gene are far more prone to violent outbursts. I think I read once that a substantial proportion of prisoners on death row have this mutation.

To me this is all evidence that at least some (but by no means all) aspects of our psychology are heavily influenced by differences which are innate rather than 100% purely social constructs.

Girls and boys are fundamentally different

In what way?

JW35
THANK YOU for your contribution, Be prepared for a reaction however to your words "I'm not a feminist but..It might not be pleasant

Thank you for stating from the beginning that you're not a feminist. We now know you don't think men and women deserve equal opportunities and rights. :)

And btw: averages and distributions, people. You should look those up.