Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

[AssignedPuuurfectAtBirth]

Just on. He was saying that people are different due to ' agreeableness, women being more likely to be so; men less so, hence the gender gap

It's the first time I have ever seen Cathy Newman angry. And he was spluttering a bit, first time for him too, for me, I think.

Watch it on + 1

I agree with some of Petersen's views but he didn't come off at all well here

Can't believe people are seriously defending the stupid man's smart person!

Haven't RTFT but if I wanted to explore human behaviour, I'd not reach for some lobsters.

Perhaps when lobsters conduct steering committee meetings, organise space travel, make complex medical ethical judgements, then maybe I could be arsed to wonder what lobsters can teach us about our Inner Lives.

Is this male hierarchy seen in the "multi-gendered" clownfish, i wonder?

And why are the animal examples chosen always the ones that behave like Wolf of Wall St? Rather than lovely puffins who mate for life and return to the same nesting site year after year

Anyway, it's an argument worth having as it seems a popular idea these days

I know pasting from google is the HEIGHT of laziness, but this amused me

Clownfish, wrasses, moray eels, gobies and other fish species are known to change sex, including reproductive functions. A school of clownfish is always built into a hierarchy with a female fish at the top. When she dies, the most dominant male changes sex and takes her place

Actually, maybe this isn't that amusing...

AssassinatedB : "So this is innate biology, inescapable. Hence male dominated hierarchies are inevitable and pointless to try and alter."

1. It's not "male dominated hierarchies" it's "male dominance hierarchies" - ie its a way of males sorting themselves out to find out who's No.1 lobster. It's the mechanism for males competing with other males for females. Not a structure designed to oppress females. Females are prizes not players. Depending on the species, females are either willing or unwilling prizes.

1. Female animals do have their own dominance hierarchies but they tend to be weaker and less relevant to mating opportunities. More related to resources. But human female participation in the dominance hierarchies in which males compete is a new thing evolutionarily and we don't know what the effects are going to be. Come back in 20,000 years and see.

1. One reasonably early observable effect of female participation in male dominance hierarchies is the difficulty successful females have in finding a mate. A mate who they are content with I mean. The problem being that females are looking for equal or higher status men, and they seem to measure equal by reference to their own status. Hence the higher up the totem pole a woman gets, the fewer men there are at that altitude. A solution seems to be to go for a guy who's a few years older than you, so that although your potential is as high as his, his current status is above yours because ehe's been scrabbling up for longer. There are studies btw of households with a high status woman and a lower status man, eg where an able ambitious woman falls in love with an agreeable, non ambitious man, and he then becomes the "househusband" (albeit that he may also have a lower track career than his wife.) It turns out that after a while there is less sexual activity in such relationships than in relationships where the man has higher status, and the woman is more likely to have affairs outside the relationship, than similar women with a higher status spouse. The inference is that these women actually begin to find their lower status mates less sexually attractive, because they are low status. ie common sense about how to structure a relationship in the modern word has been defeated by the animal brain. (On average.)

1. When you say "male domin[ance]" hierarchies are inevitable" yes - they are. Or we're going to have to pack in quite a lot of evolution to breed that out. But while a male dominance hierarchy is inevitable the particular form of the male dominance hierarchy is not determined by evolution. That is highly malleable by society. You just need to give the guys a hill to climb, and they'll climb it. And because humans are (mostly) a species in which females have mating choice, females (in aggregate) have the power to determine which areas of male success they're going to pay attention to. If all women ceased to be interested in which males came top of the sporting hierarchy, pretty soon men would stop competing at sports.

That was a typo.

maybe I could be arsed to wonder what lobsters can teach us about our Inner Lives.

Well I have been feeling a little sad about the lobsters, and I've killed a fair few in my time. Didn't know we were related

For a structure not designed to oppress women, the phrase "females are prizes' is pretty oppressive. I know you mean that women get to choose the best man from the top of the hierarchy, but still.

As women completely control who they reproduce with, it's in the power of women to change society. We just need to learn not to prefer men that are currently considered "high status", is that right? What sort of alternate hierarchies ought women to consider?

So does this really boil down to that quote by Margaret Atwood

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Nah. I think men are more worried that other men will kill them. Which they do. In huge numbers.

LeeMoore has finally touched on it, but I do think sexual selection plays a part in this in that the optimal life strategies for men and women differ quite a bit.

Women, on average, across different cultures, tend to choose the men with the highest 'cultural success' available to them (where cultural success is an amalgamation of social status and material resource). We can all scoff and point to exceptions, but this is measurable, observable, and cross-cultural. It's one of the reasons the average age difference between couples is around 4 years.

In biological terms, men don't choose - they compete to get chosen.

The glaringly obvious result of this is that, in evolutionary terms, the reproductive returns to men for achieving 'cultural success' are very much higher than they are for women. Whereas a lack of status does not generally prevent a woman from attracting a partner.

I'm sure CN will be along shortly - "So you're saying evolution means women have no ambition?"

Sorry what? I haven't rtft as it looked a bit turgid but are we genuinely being told that our destinies are determined by the mating behaviour of lobsters?

Evolutionary biology is a just-so story.

It upholds existing power structures by positing immutable biological explanations for 'how things are now'.

It's based on cherry-picking a few concordant examples from a vast and almost infinitely diverse animal kingdom. You could 'prove' absolutely anything about humans by doing that. It only sounds even slightly convincing because it's consistent with our socially constructed beliefs about ourselves (see first point)

Finally, it ignores the adaptability of the human race, which, as I had occasion to remark on another thread earlier, is underpinned by a large neocortex and a 25-year maturation period which we uniquely require because our behaviours are flexibly determined by our environment and not not hardwired like those of most animals including lobsters.

Of course, women must also compete, and high status males are probably top of the overall tree in terms of life options! But most men are not high status.

Intellect and creativity are by-products of our high degree of general intelligence, a highly useful survival trait for both sexes!

Historically, male reproductive variance was much higher than females (you have many more female ancestors than male). Humans are pretty typical of a lot of mammal species in that biologists basically assume that, for each generation, all capable females will reproduce. The same does not hold for males - or at least, it certainly did not in prehistory.

In male life, the rewards accrue disproportionately to the top.

To be clear, I don't in any way think this stuff is deterministic for us. Clearly there's a metric ton of culture and social structure embedded on top of these biological foundations. I simply find it interesting, and think it has some small relevance.

Though to come back on Tallulah, I also think that completely discounting it is wishful thinking.

Yes I'm talking specifically about human social organisation, not evolutionary biology more generally.

Im not rejecting 'any evolutionary influence' on human behaviour.

Our immense capacity for adaptability is evolutionarily determined for heavens sake.

I'm rejecting the explanations provided by an uncritical discipline of evolutionary psychology under patriarchy.

but instead to focus on your own individual determination and the meaning in your life, now?

Yippee I was just about to post something along those lines as I just watched this (yes another JP youtube clip) which says just that. He doesn't say men / women in that clip he's just talking about people.

I would really like to ask him what he thinks about the demographics of people at his talks and online followers (mostly male) and his students (mostly female).

Is there a biological theory that explains that?