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?

Maybe it's something like, equality at an individual level, equity at a population level?

What we do, who we are, our talents and almost everything about us are a mix of genes and environment. The way the brain is shaped by experience means (for me) the debate about nature/nurture is no longer very interesting. If men are better at maths (and worse too) then the question if they were born that way or socialised into it is not interesting. What is interesting is to ask the question: if women are given a similar environment to men (support and positive messages etc), where will that lead women?

I've never seen the nature/nurture as a conflict to my feminism. I'm quite happy to accept that women have evolved behaviours that are different to men - for FFS we've got different genes so it would hardly be shocking. But, as Cordelia Fine is fond of repeating, so often these differences are exaggerated for other reasons (political, social or religious agendas), or not there at all.

Outcome of equality should be not the whole point of feminism, but we need to measure these things somehow so it seems legitimate to look at pay gap and so on. However, socially engineering outcomes should still have a role for many good reasons given on this thread: to have managers that reflect their workforce and clients, who have different skills and lived experience to bring to the job.

The upside of the trans movement is the importance of biological differences between men and women and what that means for feminism is finally coming to the fore. Not only do uterus-bearers get raped, they also have very different lives because of their biology. That experience changes behaviour (or maybe the behaviour is innate, I don't care which, see my first point) thus women become primary carers, sacrifice careers and so on. Look at the numbers of men who have nothing to do with their offspring - women are just not the same and even the courts accept this 'unconditionality' of motherly love/bond.

Being a woman starts XX chromosomes but the biological implications goes far beyond.

If innate differences are truly minor then, once we had eliminated gender education, would it Be worth the brain storing sterotypes? Would that mean that we know we have achieved feminsit goals when unconscious bias tests do not detect such bias?

The unconscious bias tests are another one of those dubious social psychology tests, I’m afraid. They are not reliable on individuals as you will score differently each time you take it. They’re different from, say, IQ tests where you will score approximately the same each time you take it, bar hangovers or whatever. They are fine for testing populations but not individuals.

I think the innate differences between men and women are small.

I also think you can’t tease apart nature and nurture any more than you can say what ‘makes’ a cake a cake - the ingredients or the baking process?

You can’t make a cake from a chicken (though I bet Heston Blumenthal has had a crack at it) but you can do a botched job even if you’ve measured the right ingredients exactly.

Similarly crap brain due to my own shit lungs and bf baby all night but there was some research recently on the possibility that males might be more susceptible to negative care than females (something to do with mast cells?) which would mean yes extra care for the male babies.

I do sometimes feel male humans are slightly more genetically fragile than females - more SALT referrals, OT, behavioural referrals etc.

But I often wonder if the extra care for young boys is important to undo/ vaccinate against the extreme masculinity society?

So hard to unpick it.

Somewhere among all this research, there was a study on impact of cosleeping ok girls and boys. It had a positive effect on boys at school age, no difference to girls.

But I wanted to find it again actually as could this be to do with undoing masculine stereotypes rather than dna? (That idea of boys being tough etc).

cosleeping.nd.edu/articles-and-presentations/articles-and-essays/

PerkingFaintly Your post got me pathetically very excited , because this is something I've thought about a lot, and a couple of months I stumbled across a name for the phenomenon you describe. A quote from the article:

The truth conditions of this class of sentences, known as generics, have been the subject of much debate but little successful theorising

The article is called 'Generics: Cognitition and Acquisition' and is written by Sarah Jane Leslie, apparently a specialist in philosophy of language. It's a free pdf - if you're interested!

This "generics" problem constantly comes up in all sorts of debates, though, pushing them into sterile dead-ends, and it's so irritating when people refuse to accept that there is ambiguity to these types of sentences, and insist that the interpretation that gives them the most argumentative leverage must be the 'correct' one.

I think the innate differences between men and women are small.

I think that's been pretty well demonstrated when it comes to intellectual abilities. But what do you think about the theory that innate differences are most likely to exist or be greatest around what (for want of a better word) are called 'mating' behaviours and the related emotions and preferences? Because that's where evolutionary pressures are most likely to occur (including 'sexual selection' pressure, e.g. peacock tails)?

That makes sense to me, and also could explain some fairly common observable differences in men's and women's average attitudes to how they conduct their sex lives, for example.

In re: public health epidemic of VAWG: In Russia, Feminist Memes Buy Jail Time, but Domestic Abuse Doesn’t

A year after the country decriminalized domestic violence, women feel the consequences.

The war on women in Russia:
14,000 women murdered every year.
That’s 38 women killed every day.
Almost two women every single hour.
One every 40 minutes.
...
In 2017, according to Human Rights Watch, up to 36,000 Russian women and 26,000 children faced daily violence and abuse. And most of the time—perhaps as much as 91 percent, according to 2013 data from the ANNA Center for the Prevention of Violence—the aggressor is a woman’s husband. Domestic violence is so common, in fact, that it affects one in four Russian families, according to ANNA. Two-thirds of all homicides in Russia are linked to domestic and family issues, and incidents of domestic assault on women and children increased by 20 percent between 2010 and 2015.

foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/15/in-russia-feminist-memes-buy-jail-time-but-domestic-abuse-doesnt/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Yes. Whereas it's possible with a very high accuracy to tell if a pelvis belonged to a man or a woman, you can't do that for a brain (well, other than checking cells for Y chromosomes). And even where there might appear to be some differences at a population level, we don't know if they're 'hardwired' (my recollection is that differences aren't found in prepubertal children) or a result of 'programming' (socialisation, education) or developmental (hormones etc).

Materialist is right, I think. Cognitive within groups is greater than between groups, even at the level of families. There’s a greater cognitive range between two siblings of one family compared with the difference between them and another randomly chosen family. The key is randomly though. Easy to deliberately pick two different families to demonstrate the opposite.

As to kesstrel’s point, that’s probably true. I can’t inagine what adaptive pressures would lead to men being better at maths than women.

But when it comes to attracting a mate - sexual selection rather than natural selection - then size and strength are selected for and so might particular behaviours.

I’ve mentioned before that testosterone increases bevahiiut that is socially valued. In a capitalist society it might lead to competition and aggression - but that sane hormone will increase prosocial behaviour in other circumstances. The hormone which might increase the chances of men to shooting each other also leads them to carry in injured comrade through a minefield. Women have less androgens but they are still involved in behaviour that protects their families.

I can’t imagine what adaptive pressures would lead to men being better at maths than women.

Well, exactly!

kesstrel, thank you! I shall absolutely go and read that!

I've been interested for a while in the way the language that people use allows them to elide ideas which they know aren't equivalent... but which are easily made to sound equivalent.

Tangent to this thread, but reading MN has made me aware of the power of pronoun-slipperiness (nothing to do with trans), to elide individuals and hence responsibility. Eg "We don't need a new car because we have a car": said car is completely controlled by a single member of the household and truthful pronouns would have been: "You don't need a car because I have a car". But that would have revealed the fundamental inequality that the speaker was trying to conceal.

Similarly: "I" have done the washing up for you". Truthful pronouns would have been "I have done the washing up for us," or even "... for me."

Anyway, I don't want to derail this thread. And I'm hopeless at kicking threads off otherwise I'd start one in Relationships on this.

My understanding is, and I’m not a scientist or social scientist, is that when we look at cognitive, behavioural, or neurological (brain stuff) differences between men as a group and women as a group, there are more differences, or a greater range of differences, WITHIN each sex than there is BETWEEN the two sexes.

Good point.

I have no doubt mothers have evolved advanced hearing that can hear a baby crying at 2 a.m. I also have no doubt, fathers have evolved advanced learned helplessness to pretend not to hear a baby crying at 2 a.m. if the mother can get up instead.

There is a great deal of politics and social value weighting to go through before neurobiologists can determine what is hard wired and what is environmental, and what is hard wired following exposure to environmental factors.

"I am an evolutionary behavioral ecologist, and most of my work is concerned with how individual differences in behavior (i.e. personality) influence individual fitness, and the collective behavior and success of animal societies. Most are probably not aware, but animal personality research is a vibrant field within behavioral ecology due to the ubiquity of personality as a phenomenon in nature, and its ability to explain interactions both within and between species. In nearly every species tested to date for the presence of personality, we’ve found it, and sex-linked personality differences are frequently the most striking. Sex-linked personality differences are very well documented in our closest primate relatives, too, and the presence of sexual dimorphism (i.e. size differences between males and females) in primates, and mammals generally, dramatically intensifies these differences, especially in traits like aggression, female choosiness, territoriality, grooming behavior, and parental care.

Given that humans are sexually dimorphic and exhibit many of the typical sex-linked behavioral traits that any objective observer would predict, based on the mammalian trends, the claim that our behavioral differences have arisen purely via socialization is dubious at best. For that to be true, we would have to posit that the selective forces for these traits inexplicably and uniquely vanished in just our lineage, leading to the elimination of these traits without any vestiges of their past, only to have these traits fully recapitulated in the present due to socialization. Of course, the more evidenced and straightforward explanation is that we exhibit these classic sex-linked behavioral traits because we inherited them from our closest primate ancestors.

Counterintuitively, the social justice stance on human evolution closely resembles that of the Catholic Church."

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

kestrel: innate differences are most likely to exist or be greatest around what (for want of a better word) are called 'mating' behaviours and the related emotions and preferences

Invisible I think those must be pretty crude categories for 'personalities' if they apply to other species.

Much behaviour can be to do with having the ability to beat others up and trying not to be beaten up. Or the ability to harm a mother's offspring or to trying to avoid your babies getting killed. ie- a lot can be to do with physical size and strength and trying to avoid harm. Domineering behaviours and placating behaviours.

But I agree that there is absolutely no evolutionary reason for males to be better at maths.

Thank-you OP for posting this and thank-you HBE for raising this at a feminist meeting, you have won yourself an adoring fan.

I don't consider myself a proper feminist, although I agree with many feminist objectives, as I can't buy into the denial of innate psychological differences between the sexes. If I've raised my concerns previously I get shouted down with waffle about socialisation and patriarchy and told this is a fundamental feminist belief.

From the Colin Wright article;

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.

Isn't this 'sex ideology' exactly the same as trans ideology? And aren't they both counter intuitive and illogical?

I would hazard a guess that if you asked ordinary people (non university, non soc science students) the vast majority would think it's just as ridiculous to deny innate, psychological differences between the sexes as it is to claim that trans women are women.

@KindOfAGeek

according to science there's a significant change in the structure of the female brain during/ after pregnancy that lasts for a few years in order to accommodate said non sleeping small human.

I do think this is a gap in feminist discourse, and one that has been a part of the problem in talking about ideas around gender.

People feel that if they admit that men and women have certain differences in biology, as groups, people will use that to justify problematic behaviour or ideas. Most people admit the basic reproductive differences, but then will not go beyond that, even though it seems pretty arbitrary since sexual roles in humans extend well beyond actual conception and birth. People seem especially stuck on the question of the brain, and in particular brain structures, seems to imply a mind body separation I don't think is very defensible.
It seems kind of ass backwards to me. I don't think equality comes out of being biological identical, so to me whatever happens to be true about this question is the starting point, and doesn't threaten the idea of equality.

Interesting that father's brains did alter a bit too, depending on level of care.

www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2018/07/17/pregnant-women-care-ignores-one-most-profound-changes-new-mom-faces/CF5wyP0b5EGCcZ8fzLUWbP/story.html

Proves how plastic brains are...

Materialist:
They don't decide which are male and female to start. They define the categories, and then see where they fall with regards to sex, or any other group they are interested in.