Reclaiming (evolutionary) biology! (thinking about what Heather Brunskell Evans said)

[Feministme]

Lots of food for thought from LAWS last night, but one thing that really struck me was Heather B-E's plea to "reclaim biology".

Evolutionary biology and 'biological essentialism' often seem like dirty words in feminism because they are used as lazy justification for inequality and oppression: "men rape because of a natural urge", "there are more men in positions of power because they are natural leaders", "women are natural homemakers" etc...

So feminism has tended to shy away from seeking biological explanations (eg for male violence) and to say its all about conditioning/social constructions of gender.

But we shouldn't mistake "natural" for "good". Cancer is natural. Dementia is natural. Children dying of measles is natural. Everything about the world of biological beings must be explainable by evolution through natural selection (unless we invoke "souls" etc...). The evolutionary pressures on males (capable of fathering many offspring, but never certain which ones are theirs) and females (capable of mothering a limited number of offspring, with certainty but at great personal cost) are quite different. So we would expect males and females to be different (on average) in behavioral traits.

This whole fight against transgenderism has been about protecting the definition of women as a biological reality.... it's brought us back to thinking about biology in relation to feminism.....

Just wondered what others think?

I've always understood feminism as being about acknowledging that men and women are different but equal, and acting to maintain or achieve that equality - so positive discrimination to protect against discrimination that may arise as a result of our differences and biological functioning (maternity, childcare, breastfeeding, smaller stature, weaker strength etc)
I'm a bit too sleep deprived for my brain to work properly today (up all night with croupy child who just wanted mum and breastfeeding - biological function) but yes, how can you protect women as different but equal if you can't acknowledge the biological differences! The special protections and rights make no sense if there is no biological difference

The belief that men cant help acting on their 'natural' urges to harm their companions and children lowers them to the status of animals.
Its a denial of civilisation.

It also holds them to a lower standard of behaviour than women, who are vilified for harming their children when in the grip of post puerperal psychosis.

Acknowledging that men have a higher propensity for violence surely just means that they need to take special effort NOT to be knowing that they can inflict more damage. And that we as mothers and society need to take special care against giving permission for that violence. Be MORE nurturing and empathetic to male babies and children. Make doubly sure that male adolescents understand enthusiastic consent etc.
Well that's been my take on that anyway.

upstart crow *a bit crapper" yes! I don't mean to argue that men cant help acting on their 'natural' urges.... But that we tend to deny a biological basis in propensity for violence etc... because we think it must be a justification (... If you see what I mean?)

Like many of us have a natural urge to eat far too much high calorie food, because our bodies evolved in an environment where these were scarce....we can learn to control that if we think about our longer term health.

It is an interesting one, since humans are such an amazingly adaptable species it is hard to even see what our actual 'nature' is through all the socialiation.

If you look to the animal world, closely related species can have very different ways of dealing with sex, parenthood and social order. One type of seal has enormous males fighting over sexual control of a harem, another type has more equally sized sexes and the mother raises the pup as a single mum. In birds you have the albatross sharing equal parenting but male capercaillies and peacocks strut their stuff and fight to win breeding rights with all the females.

In chimps there is a lot of cruelty and violence in their male-dominated groups, especially around females coming into oestrus where the dominant male tries to ensure they are the only one who mates with them, but in bonobos matriarchs rule, females permanently have the appearance of oestrus and have sex with all the males (apart from their own sons) whether they are fertile or not and they have a pretty tolerant, peaceful society. Males still can get a bit attention-seeking - showing off though.

My own opinion on nature/nurture in humans is that male humans do need specific socialisation to prepare them to be decent towards people who are smaller than them and they can easily overpower, to listen to people who have a higher, less powerful voice than them even though it is easy for a broken male voice to cut straight across. Also males need to be taught good impulse control and management and positive, creative ways to channel their sexual urges when it is all to easy to become a creepy perv (voyeur, pornsick, exhibitionist, sadist, etc).

I think boys need to be taught these things before becoming taller, stronger, louder and more sex obsessed than girls.

Biology hasn’t gone anywhere it is just that the people who study it aren’t as noisey as in some other disciplines.

I do genuinely think the truth will out.

In my hungover, exhausted, post-LAWS stupor, my immediate reaction to this is: Cordelia Fine.

Your brain seems to be working just fine, ABitCrapper !

A few years ago, a bit before the trans agenda became apparent, and when I'd not long been thinking and reading about feminism myself, I went along with DH to a 'philosophy in pubs' meeting which was broadly discussing women's rights, equality.... lead by a nice bloke who'd fairly obviously not really thought much about the issues at all, and as far as I could tell neither had anyone else. Which was a bit odd, but it meant no-one was spouting Pomo gender theory. I cant remember the details of the discussion but roughly we ended up at, no, women don't yet have equality and that the reason underlying this was biology. I don't think anyone in that mixed group of adults who liked discussing ideas disagreed with that.

Everything about the world of biological beings must be explainable by evolution through natural selection (unless we invoke "souls" etc...).
Yes biology is a limitation but humans have evolved to be adaptable. Our children are the product of culture just as much as biology. As a species we have invoked God's and souls or spirits almost universally. We are not just an animal but a tool making animal from spears or cooking pots to works of art - jewellery etc. We've developed laws and made treaties.
How we raise our children is the most important way to shape society. If boys can be taught to control their tears they can be taught to control their fists.

What writers said!

Evolutionary biology and 'biological essentialism' often seem like dirty words in feminism because they are used as lazy justification for inequality and oppression I think that is usually evolutionary psychology not evolutionary biology. What bothers me about it is thesloppy, unscientific thinking these "just so" stories. Usually the archaeological or historical evidence doesn't support these theories but the men making the theory don't care because their assertion women are naturally inferior is so core to their belief system, they are suffering a huge confirmation bias and not actually testing their theory properly.

Also, properly getting ones head around evolution is really hard (I am aware I sound very pompous here.....). So.lots of people don't understand it.

Biology hasn’t gone anywhere it is just that the people who study it aren’t as noisey as in some other disciplines.

I think there's a general problem in our 'two cultures' society that STEM types tend to be busy doing science, creating technology etc. And at university level they have a heavy learning workload. Facts, reality matter. Whereas in quite a lot of other fields, essentially all there is is words, and opinions matter.

If boys can be taught to control their tears they can be taught to control their fists.

That needs to be made into a poster!

In my hungover, exhausted, post-LAWS stupor, my immediate reaction to this is: Cordelia Fine.
Yes! I recently read her ‘Testosterone Rex’, which thoroughly debunks the whole idea of men being naturally inclined to be competitive, unfaithful in relationships, violent, etc. A really good read.

I suspect that's it's ultimately impossible to unravel the nature/nurture discussion. As a bit crapper says, the physiological differences between men and women are clearly an element in our behaviour - but they are certainly not completely defining - for example, some women are bigger and stronger than some men while some men (and not necessarily the smaller weaker ones!) are gentler and less aggressive than some women. But I do think it's foolish to dismiss the idea that our biology has a part to play in shaping behaviour - and that boys and girls alike need to learn how to treat others with respect and as equals.

Also, there’s a big difference between evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. The latter, as Fine says, involving a lot of guesswork and prejudice.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

I am not saying that boys cant be taught to control their fists.....or that we are not adaptable

I am saying ....when we try to understand and explain a situation:

There are more males in prison for sexual assault than women
There are more male grand masters in chess than women
There are more male CEOs than females
or whatever...

We tend to talk about culture and socialisation, and structures in society, and try not to talk about biology (because we think talking about biology excuses inequality and is bad for women...) ...... but in practice the explanation are likely to be a combination of tendencies that are genetically coded and which served as survival/reproduction adaptations for our ancestors, and stuff that is passed on as culture (which is also a product of evolution for survival and reproduction......)

Thoughts not well formed (also a LAWS hangover...) .... but it seems like there is a gap in feminist thought in being able to hold the space to talk about how biological sex differences in behaviour and how this plays out in social structures, without people jumping straight to the argument that "inequality is not a problem, because its a product of biology", "men can't help it" etc........ and it is this gap that transgenderism has driven a coach and horses through.

I dunno about the chess or CEOs when you have systemic cultural barriers for women which explain the gap.

However physical differences do have a big impact, for example, I notice that Germane Greer, as a tall woman, seems incapable of understanding certain physical vulnerabilities other women feel. She doesn't realise that her height means she is treated slightly differently by everyone. Its like a close male friend is absolutely enormous, yet has no awareness about how this is read by others and they modify their behaviour. No one 'starts on him'. I see it. I notice that a lot of men walk about subconsciously sizing themselves up against other men, then slightly 'give way' to someone bigger and my friend is totally oblivious. He even has a slight delusion of vulnerability because of his abusive father when he was a kid.

I think humans have a very crude thing going on, where they do things simply because they can and no one can stop them. Male violence and domination is I believe rooted in this.

Acknowledging a biological basis for behaviour isn’t the same as excusing it.

I don’t believe for a second that human beings are unique in being born with entirely empty brains because I don’t believe for a second human beings are an exception to nature. The belief that we stand outside nature is a fundamentally religious one.

We each have innate abilities and predispositions that can be shaped by society and othe environmental conditions but it beggars belief that the most complex structure we have - the human brain - is an empty vessel empty at birth.

I know I have innate differences to most people because I am autistic. Those differences began in the womb and were present in me at birth. I have been shaped by society but that shaping acted upon a brain that had a material reality. I am not some floaty presence occupying an organ but independent of it. For all intents and purposes I am that organ and all the electrochemical inputs feeding into it.

Put it this way: if you accept the spectrum model of autism - or any other condition for that matter - you accept that everyone is somewhere on that spectrum - it’s just that most people are clustered towards the ‘neurotypical’ end.

But even at that end there’s a natural variation in autistic traits. Some people are innately better at reading emotions than others. Some people are innately better at processing sensory information than others. Some people have an innate preference for the routine than novelty. It’s simply insulting to insist that they are not trying hard enough or that they weren’t socialised properly.

But if you can accept there are natural variations at birth then you have to accept the blank state model is wrong.

We can debate how these statistical variations map onti sex and how gendered expectations feed into socialisation but I can’t accept that those expectations act upon an empty vessel and I haven’t met anybody else qualified in psychology who does.

I dunno about the chess or CEOs when you have systemic cultural barriers for women which explain the gap.

At the moment, it's impossible to tell how nature/nurture (biology/socialisation + structural sexism) affects those distributions.

From a practical POV, we don't need to unravel that before framing laws etc affecting the rights and responsibilities of individuals.

For instance: there are graphs showing distributions of mathematical ability, with the male one being a bit broader and flatter than the female one. More men at the top and the bottom. We don't know how how much of this is due to education, stereotype threat etc and whether that leaves a genuine biological difference in distribution at the population level. In practice: we should implement education that allows each individual to achieve their full potential. We should have laws which prohibit sex discrimination when hiring someone for their maths ability. We should have a societal rejection of stereotypes which tell girls they may not be good at maths - and conversely, tell boys they should be, that it's a manly attribute. If the final outcome of all that (oh, and leaving aside for a moment the impacts of motherhood on career paths) is that there are more women doing jobs which require mathematical literacy but fewer women than men winning the Fields medal - well, that would be fine.

Dropping in Colin Wright's essay on The New Evolution Deniers that covers evolution and biological essentialism that covers some of the issues raised in Heather Brunskell-Evans talk last night (I can't remember HBE's MN user name):

This stance is maintained by the belief that evolutionary explanations for sex-linked behavioral differences are biologically essentialist, which is the fatalistic notion that biology alone directly determines our behavior. Blank Slate psychology, however, is universally rejected by experts, as the evidence for innate sex-linked personality differences in humans is overwhelmingly strong. But experts also universally reject that this view demands we embrace biological essentialism, because the environment does play a role, and observed sex differences are simply averages and overlap tremendously between the sexes. Sex no more determines one’s personality than it determines one’s height. Sex certainly influences these traits, but it does not determine them. For instance, most of us know females who are taller than most males, and males who are shorter than most females, though we are all aware that males are, on average, taller than females. In humans, the same is true for behavioral traits.
...
Despite there being zero evidence in favor of Blank Slate psychology, and a mountain of evidence to the contrary, this belief has entrenched itself within the walls of many university humanities departments where it is often taught as fact. Now, armed with what they perceive to be an indisputable truth questioned only by sexist bigots, they respond with well-practiced outrage to alternative views. This has resulted in a chilling effect that causes scientists to self-censor, lest these activists accuse them of bigotry and petition their departments for their dismissal. I’ve been privately contacted by close, like-minded colleagues warning me that my public feuds with social justice activists on social media could be occupational suicide, and that I should disengage and delete my comments immediately. My experience is anything but unique, and the problem is intensifying. Having successfully cultivated power over administrations and silenced faculty by inflicting reputational terrorism on their critics and weaponizing their own fragility and outrage, one fears whether there was no belief or claim too dubious that administrations wouldn’t cater to. Recently, this fear has been realized as social justice activists attempt to jump the epistemological shark by claiming that the very notion of biological sex, too, is a social construct.

As a biologist, it is hard to understand how anyone could believe something so outlandish. It’s a belief on a par with the belief in a flat Earth. I first saw this claim being made this year by anthropology graduate students on Facebook. At first I thought they mistyped and were simply referring to gender. But as I began to pay closer attention, it was clear that they were indeed talking about biological sex. Over the next several months it became apparent that this view was not isolated to this small friend circle, as it began cropping up all over the Internet. In support of this view, recent editorials from Scientific American—an ostensibly trustworthy, scientific, and apolitical online magazine—are often referenced. The titles read, “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic,” and “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum.”

quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/

Does anyone have a rebuttal for the Nordic paradox? Where decades of equality laws and positive discrimination have produced fewer female CEOs for example? I don't have enough time between child wrangling to do detailed reading!

Stereotype threat wouldn’t explain a flatter distribution. A higher or lower mean yes, but for a flat distribution (ie a greater standard deviation) around same mean it would have to impact exactly half the test subjects in one group positively and half negatively.

I should also add that stereotype threat is another of those psychological theories at the centre of the fields ‘replication crisis’. A lot of social psychology - my own field of study when I was a student - is built on very shaky ground.

I think you have to be very careful to articulate what you mean by "determinism".

"Determine" in the sense of "are one of the material causes of, in combination with a lot of other factors, including environment" = durr, well, yes of course.

But that's not what most people mean when they say determinism. It tends to carry quasi religious overtones (predetermination) of one outcome and one outcome only. So "men are predetermined" to become leaders, women are predetermined to be followers/helpmeets.." kind of thing.

The other thing is to allow for variability within populations as well as acknowledging differences between populations at a mean level. The truism that men are on average taller than women, and that this has a biological cause in terms of genes, hormones, pubertal growth spurt, the role of testosterone obviously does not lead to the conclusion that all men are taller than all women, or that it therefore makes sense to talk about a height of, say, 6'2" being a "male height" while a height of 5'2" is a "female height". And yet that sort of spurious reasoning often seems to be applied to cognitive differences (where such sexual dimorphism as our species exhibits is much less pronounced than it is for height).

The other thing is not to throw out sociological critiques of science altogether (and I say that as a working research scientist who is acutely aware that politics, funding, prejudice all play a part in what questions get looked at and what answers people are looking at). Parts of biology are highly politicised, evolutionary biology particularly so (why do pop accounts of evolutionary biology typically reach for the behaviour of male stags rather than emperor penguins when they want to talk about what is "natural" in human men, for instance?) There's some very good writing out there. I tend to the (liberal) position of a writer like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (who argues that the way to correct this is to get a more diverse group of people doing primatology, her field, so that biases cancel each other out) rather than the (postmodern, Foucauldian?) position of Donna Harraway (also a primatologist by training, I think) who argues that the social seal of approval that stamps a certain set of beliefs with the gold standard of counting as "knowledge" rather than "mere belief" is a political phenomenon, and the answer for feminists lies in wresting political power so that we get to define "scientific knowledge" according to our political concerns. (I really don't buy the Harraway version, but I do think that "realists" about scientific knowledge have to come up with a defensible alternative).

Does anyone have a rebuttal for the Nordic paradox? Where decades of equality laws and positive discrimination have produced fewer female CEOs for example? I don't have enough time between child wrangling to do detailed reading!

To be honest, if fields that attracted more women than men were equally rewarded, would it matter?

If more women go into paediatrics and more men go into surgery but both were paid the same would it matter? If more women go into family law and more men go into business law?

We are still talking about statistical differences. We aren’t saying, ‘Right, you are a woman - the children’s ward is that way; you men come this way and scrub up.’

About 1% of the population are psychopaths. Most aren’t serial killers, they are just arseholes. But there is a higher incidence of psychopathy in surgeons, pilots and CEOs of large companies. Being feerless and ruthless are considered assets in those fields. I’m not sure that a paucity of female psychopaths reflects badly on women as a group.