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 have read the OP and only skimmed the thread, but this reminded me of something I listened to ages ago. An I Our Time conversation between Germaine Greer and Helena Cronin (Darwinian philosopher) from 1999.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545b0
I looked up Helena Cronin and there is a recent talk too, rather annoyingly called on youtube 'Feminism is ignorant about modern science':

She talks about sex differences in behaviour and choices being (partly) the result of evolution and the roles of male and female mammals in reproduction. I have read similar evidence in work by Steven Pinker. I think that although (as HB-E said from the OP) there was good reason for feminists to be v cautious about claims for biological/evolutionary sex differences, it has left a gap which is easy to step into for people with an anti-feminist agenda. Cronin's Youtube talk then recommends lots of talks by Jordan Peterson, and on to 'red pill' type stuff. But as women are human, and humans are mammals, and mammals are evolved animals, there has to be some accounting for evolution in discussions of gender and sex.

At a conference recently ish (in the humanities) an audience member said she thought young children (not making a gender point as it happens) have an innate desire to care for other things which is played out through toys/pets etc. That sounds likely to me. But it went down like a lead balloon with the speakers. A long time ago I saw the same in reference to psychological studies which show that the ability to override impulse may be heritable - also went down badly in a room full of academics in the humanities. The humanities and social sciences have abandoned the idea that we are animals. It is much easier to view power relations as purely a result of culture and language if you forget they we are animals.

Just a thought. We are evolutionarily adapted to an earlier environment, not to the present. We are stil primed to panic at the rustling of the grass. We haven’t stopped evolving but our bodies are logging begins. That’s why we are stressed out most of the time (or maybe that’s just me!)

ManderleyAgain

The humanities and social sciences have abandoned the idea that we are animals.

Humanities definitely have, and I'm not at all surprised at your examples of lead balloons. Social sciences vary, however - cultural anthropologists tend to be very anti-innateness. Psychology, on the other hand, has begun adjusting to the evidence regarding heritability, which of course implies some things are partially innate. There are still some hold-outs, particularly among therapists who are invested in the theory that psychological problems are all Mum's/Dad's fault, but things have been moving in the right direction for a while.

AspieandProud

Yes, thinking about our unadaptedness to modern society is fascinating! It makes a lot of sense. The current maladaptiveness of our craving for sugar is a striking and example, IMO.

ElonMusk

Now thats all out the window but our psychology still has maybe hang ups about sex that don't apply ?

Yes, that too makes a lot of sense to me. And I think younger people try to overcome those hang ups by sheer force of will, only to find very often that you just can't, because they're so deep-rooted. And I agree with you about the root of men's sexual jealousy, because how else to explain how often it is so utterly intense and irrational?

But as you point out, we also have evolved very sophisticated brains that can to some extent over-ride these psychological feelings, or at least prevent us from acting on them in a way that damages others or ourselves.

"I think a lot of sexual jealousy for example is a manifestation of mate guarding instinct."

Sure, and the fact that sexual jealousy is common in both males and females indicates something interesting - that both sexes are sexually competitive and choosy (aka they are driven to find a great mate and to keep them focused on the family as it were).

This is in stark contrast to many mammals where only the males are competitive and the females are choosy. That is, where male and female interests are more opposed.

The pattern seen in humans is also seen in other primarily monogamous species (with occasional extrapair matings) such as many aquatic birds.

The first episode of Dynasties is about the struggle for primacy among chimps.

What surprised me is that it’s not just about naked aggression even among male chimps, it’s about 🍋making alliances.

Strength and intimidation will only get you so far. Sometimes you have to be prepared to pick fleas off your colleagues.

I was also impressed at how the male chimps banded together in order to defend an elderly female chimp on whom a younger male chimp was taking out his aggression.

Social behaviour among chimps is amazingly sophisticated. I read jane Goodall's two books about observing a troupe of chimps in the wild, and honestly it's like reading a soap opera. She had names for all of them, and described their behaviour, relationships and personalities so well. She was criticised for this 'unscientific' behaviour, but it certainly made her books extremely readable!

There are a lot of parallels with human behaviour, but of course chimps are our distant cousins, not ancestors. It's easy to think: 'oh, they're so much like us in some ways' - but I'm not sure what conclusions can really be drawn from that.

I mean, some might argue that because they're animals, all that intricate social behaviour must be driven by instinct, which shows that, theoretically, instinct could underlie (at least) a lot of our social behaviour. And I think that's true of some things at least, like our need to be part of a group, especially when younger.

But on the other hand, chimpanzees supposedly have the intelligence of a 3 year old human, so there would seem to be a fair amount of thinking involved as well? Although I don't know if that intelligence extends across all domains...

Thank-you for that link Manderleyagain. All feminists should watch it and I agree with the title of the video, 'Feminism is ignorant about modern science'

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7Q9GvR1Mnk

So many on here are desperate to defend the lie that the majority of differences observed between the sexes is down to socialisation. As Kestral pointed out, that lie is often exposed when us women have children.

This thread, and similiar threads, has reminded me why I always had a problem with feminism. So much of it is built on an ideology that has been created by female academics with little real life experience. I never felt they spoke for me and I don't think it's coincidence that so many of the big name feminists have no children.

To be honest I'm cross that a baseless ideology has been allowed to shape social policy for so many decades but I'll be even crosser if the new baseless trans ideology shapes social policy in the future.

A group of predominately childless female academics is slightly preferable to a group of predominately childless male academics.

But in my ideal world I would re educate all those feminists. I wouldn't chose a gulag but I'd send them all to work in a nursery for 6 months. I bet none would come out believing in that socialisation baloney.

The chimps definitely learn from each other. Using grass stalks to tease termites out of the nest, for instance, is almost certainly ‘cultural’.

It’s interesting how so many modern primatologists are women too:

Women receive the majority of Ph.Ds in primatology. Londa Schiebinger, writing in 2001, estimated that women made up 80 percent of graduate students pursuing Ph.Ds in primatology, up from 50 percent in the 1970s. Because of the high number of women, Schiebinger has even asserted that “Primatology is widely celebrated as a feminist science”.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primatology

Socialisation has so much to do with gendering. I say that as a mum.

It is really sad for parents to bring a lovely, sensitive son into the world, then he comes back from nursery as a boorish, confrontational little dickhead. It's the peer group socialisation. Kids pick on each other for liking girls stuff or boys stuff and it's hard for teachers to prevent it. If you have to discipline kids for bullying about gender non-conformity then it is too late. A child is going to have been shamed and it only needs to happen once to scar them for life and have a permanent impact on their behaviour.

Also knowing kids from playgroup, growing through nursery, then school, the gendered behaviour definitely widens. You also notice a difference in girls who have older brothers and boys with older sisters in that they tend to emulate them and defy their own gender stereotypes a bit. You also notice a difference in the kinds of toys parents have in the home depending on whether their eldest child is a boy or a girl.

I feel hugely uncomfortable about reducing the impact of socialisation. For me, I didn't even consider myself a tomboy, I had hobbies and interests but many things I didn't pursue because I was scared to be gender-defying. I still feel bitter about pretending to want a shite Raleigh Sapphire when I actually wanted a BMX. God I fucking hated that thing. I also feel depressed to think of all the shite I did -going through the motions, not being into it, ballet, playing with fucking dolls for God's sake, so depressing.

I just don't see the obvious boy/girl differences at baby/toddler level.

Yes, I agree it's very much peer-group enforced. Children at that age seem to be very much into categorising everything, as a natural psychological process of making sense of the overwhelming amount of information they're receiving about the world around them. So they might not at first distinguish between dogs and cats, for example, but they quickly learn that there are lots of categories of animals, and what distinguishes them.

there's been some fascinating work about how young children seem to have an innate tendency to be "essentialist" in their thinking, which could be part of what causes this heavy insistence on differences between boys and girls - they are perhaps predisposed to look for/believe in deep "essences" for categorisation. So pre-schoolers tend to believe that a Chinese baby raised by English-speaking parents would speak Chinese rather than English, for example. The second paragraph of this article gives some examples of this:

www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/79159

I'm not trying to sound defeatist, though, because children's conceptualisations do change and mature as they get older - well, obviously, in the example of native language! But how to deal with/prevent early bullying around this issue is a difficult one.

I wonder if some gendered behaviour in animals is in some ways socialised too. Many seem to know straight away if a newborn is male or female. Often males born are in danger from older males who sometimes kill the helpless little thing before he becomes a threat. It must make mother hippos, for example, treat their sons differently from their daughters.

I don't think it has to be rational and conscious to be learned rather than innate.