If you read blog comments or follow discussions on Facebook or Twitter, you probably know by now that a few people are relatively desperate for everyone to know about this interview that Rebecca Watson did with Swedish Skepchick back when she was in Europe for the Berlin World Skeptics Congress. There are various parts of it they would like you to pay attention to, but, well, we’ve already discussed priming once this go ’round.
Still, since this is apparently now an important interview, it will be good if everyone has full access to the whole thing. In order to facilitate that, and to keep the utility of quote mining to a minimum, I’ve produced a transcript.
You will find the occasional [?], which indicates this is my best guess at what was said. You will also find the occasional number in brackets. That refers to text that follows the transcript. However, I still suggest you read the entire thing (or listen to the full interview) before reading any of my take on things. Continue reading “Once You Look Past the Headlines”→
There is an odd line of argument that comes from evolutionary psychologists when people object to poor quality research on rape coming out of their discipline. A form of this argument is in Ed Clint’s post on Rebecca Watson’s Skepticon talk.
Some natural things are quite nice.
The naturalistic fallacy. One can hardly find a more pristine example of this fallacy than in criticism of evolutionary psychology, and Watson’s remarks were no exception. She spelled it out clearly at 38:30 “men evolved to rape… it was used as a well it’s natural for men to rape”. The problem to Watson is that some evolutionary psychologists study the phenomena of rape as a potential adaptation, or a product of adaptations such as the use of violence to obtain what one wants. Watson assumes that if rape is about sex, and sex is good because sex is natural, then rape must be natural and therefore good. This is an absurdity of course; it’s every shade of wrong from the rainbow of ultimate wrongness.
Well, no, but before I get into discussing why this is wrong, here’s another example of the argument in the wild, provided by Clint. Buss & Schmitt argue:
More generally, we believe that proponents of all theoretical perspectives should keep an open mind about the scientific hypothesis (and it is only that, a hypothesis), that men may have evolved adaptations for sexual coercion. It should go without saying that rape is illegal, immoral, and terribly destructive to women, and should in no way be condoned, whatever the ultimate causes turn out to be. Unfortunately, what should go without saying has to be repeated over and over, since those who advance evolutionary psychological hypotheses are unjustly accused of somehow condoning or excusing rape. The naturalistic fallacy, mistakenly inferring an ought from an is, seems to be a particularly stubborn error committed by critics of evolutionary psychology, despite the many published descriptions of this error (e.g., Confer et al. 2010).
As Vandermassen (2010) points out, the two central contenders for explaining sexual coercion are (1) adaptations for rape, (2) byproducts of adaptations that evolved in non-rape contexts (e.g., desire for sexual variety; male use of aggression for other instrumental goals), or some combination of the two. We concur with Symons’s 1979 summary that the then-available evidence was not “even close to sufficient to warrant the conclusion that rape itself is a facultative adaptation in the human male” (Symons 1979, p. 284). We believe that his conclusion is as apt today as it was then. Nonetheless, absence of evidence does not qualify as evidence of absence. Scientists from all theoretical perspectives have a responsibility to uncover the actual underlying causes of rape, even if they turn out to be unpalatable or repugnant. Whatever the flaws inherent in the Thornhill-Palmer book, it is perfectly reasonable for them to advance their two competing scientific hypotheses. It is a gross disservice to current and future victims of rape to prematurely discard either of them.
I’ll mostly be talking about this example, as it indulges less in telling us what someone is thinking and is closer to the primary source. It also contains a glaring error that should tell you what critics are actually objecting to. I’ll save that for a little later though. First, the problem with just saying, “naturalistic fallacy”. Continue reading “Everyone Expects the Naturalistic Fallacy”→
Have you seen Rebecca Watson’s Skepticon talk yet? You should. It’s a brief, entertaining look into some of the ways evolutionary psychologists abuse science when it comes to gender essentialism. Just a word of warning, though, that Rebecca* repeats some ugly arguments about things like rape and sexual harassment. She’s using a good deal of sarcasm, but when you’ve heard enough of them, sometimes you’ve just heard enough.
There are a few people on Twitter asking whether this is something Dawkins actually said. This isn’t anything he hasn’t said before. He made the comparison at length in The God Delusion. Continue reading “Child Sexual Abuse: What “Yucky” Means”→
Last week, Greg Laden and I got together to tape an episode of the Atheists Talk television show to talk about the War on Science in the U.S. It was a combination of background and an update to let people know what’s happening on the legislative front. Enjoy.
The moments of silence at the beginning are a technical issue with our mikes. It doesn’t last long.
If I look a little awkward, this is the first time I’ve hosted the television portion of Minnesota Atheists’ Great Media Empire. I was filling in for our regular host, who had an accident involving stitches to the face. He’s doing okay, but I guess he thought they might be distracting on the show.
Also, it’s very much a pity you can’t see Greg’s tie up close. It’s kind of awesome. Yes, better than crockoducks.
I’ve said before that presenting social science in a way that encourages skepticism and gives a sense of the complexity of the science involved is very difficult. The situations are complex. The number of variables is enormous. The research is of varying quality, not easily spotted from the outside. We all have biases that make it difficult to sort through the mountains of data that have been collected.
This is one of the reasons that CSICon made me so happy. They did it right, in two different sessions. The first was on gender differences, and the second was on the interaction of political positions and scientific denialism. Either one of these could have gone badly. Each would have been difficult for a single presenter to remain impartial about over the course of a talk and Q&A.
So the schedule never had just one presenter on this sort of topic. They had multiple presenters with multiple, competing viewpoints whose presentations directly addressed each other’s. I suppose it’s possible that topics like these could be addressed better from a skeptical point of view, but I don’t know how, and I’ve never seen it done this well.
To give you a sense of how this worked, I’ll give you some of the live-tweeting of the session on gender. Ron Lindsay moderated the session. Richard Lippa and Carol Tavris spoke. Lippa, who researches gender differences, spoke first. Continue reading “Doing Social Science Skepticism Right”→
This week is full of commitments and deadlines. Rather than try to meet all my blogging commitments with new work and failing, I’m pulling out some old posts. Given how my audience has grown, most of you won’t have read them at the time. This post was originally published here.
If you read much around FtB, you’ve heard about “The Amazing Atheist”, a ragey vlogger who turned his rage on a rape victim. If you need to catch up and are up for some real ugliness, Kazim brought us the news here, PZ had a few choice words about consent and oppression, Natalie noted some strange places she’s seen this guy cited, and Daniel, Crommunist, Jason, Jen, and Greg have all suggested their readers unsubscribe and shun. So, yes, if you’re subscribed to this guy’s YouTube channel, please fix that now.
I’d like to add a brief note about PTSD and triggers. You see, this whole thing started with TAA declaring on Reddit that he doesn’t believe in triggering. He then went on to attempt to trigger the rape victim in question and claimed it proved his point when no triggering occurred. One little note, then, for TAA: Triggering is part of the definition of PTSD, you self-blindered ass. Continue reading “Rape Traumas and Triggers”→
This week is full of commitments and deadlines. Rather than try to meet all my blogging commitments with new work and failing, I’m pulling out some old posts. Given how my audience has grown, most of you won’t have read them at the time. This post was originally published here.
Last night’s post on the Canadian polygamy ruling included a quote from an “expert” witness in evolutionary psychology, Joseph Heinrich. I didn’t break it down at the time, largely because I was dealing with a migraine and every sound in the room was a major distraction. Let me fix that now. Here is the quote again, now with commentary.
First, like other animals, human males and females have different mating strategies rooted in the nature of primate sexual reproduction.
This is an incredibly ugly sentence. Beyond its infelicities, however, it’s also a muddled mess of an idea.
This week is full of commitments and deadlines. Rather than try to meet all my blogging commitments with new work and failing, I’m pulling out some old posts. Given how my audience has grown, most of you won’t have read them at the time. This post was originally published here.
On the one hand, I’d no doubt be irritated by my very religious wife’s supernatural beliefs. On the other hand, the very fact that she believes strongly in some divinely imposed morality should influence her behavior behind my back. She may well be suffering a very bad case of the dreaded God delusion, but perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing for her atheist husband. After all, my faithful, imaginary wife would then be operating under the assumption that cheating on me would not only hurt her family if the affair ever came to light, but would result in eternal damnation or perhaps an unhappy plague of this-worldly misfortunes even if it didn’t. Never mind if she’s crazy. I’m a pragmatist, so what she believes to be true is all that matters.
[Evo psych argument for why this should be important elided.]
Now, now, Dawkinsian atheists, I know what you’re thinking: You certainly don’t have to believe in God to be faithful to your spouse; marriages are built on mutual trust; religious people cheat, too; and so on. Of course you’re right about these things, but we’re still in the emotionless realm of the hypothetical, remember, and all else being equal, if you’re simply trying to minimize the chances of landing an adulterous partner, you might as well stack the deck in your favor by marrying the woman who “knows” that God would get really mad at her if she misappropriated her genitalia. This isn’t just my being a contrarian, either. There really is evidence from controlled experiments showing that religious thinking and church attendance leads to moral behavior.
For the record, he does recognize this as a bit of cold calculus, done for the purposes of writing the article. That’s not my problem with it. My problem is that the research he cites (the “controlled experiments” link) doesn’t say what he seems to think it says about cheating.
This week is full of commitments and deadlines. Rather than try to meet all my blogging commitments with new work and failing, I’m pulling out some old posts. Given how my audience has grown, most of you won’t have read them at the time. This post was originally published here.
This week, Scicurious and I are tandem blogging her Friday Weird Science paper. This one just had a bit too much weird for one person.
Heh. Heh. Heh.
A summer school theater teacher of mine from way back claimed to long for a unique career. He wanted to be a stand-up comedian for preschoolers. There were just one or two little problems. The kids don’t have a lot of disposable income to spend on entertainment, and the parents weren’t going to pony up for a grown man standing in front of a bunch of kids saying, “Pee-pee. Caca,” no matter how much the kids were, well, peeing themselves with laughter.
My teacher understood humor at its most basic, and he would laugh his ass off if he were to read a recent evolutionary psychology paper on the topic, “Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males.” If he didn’t have one of those common names that makes a person impossible to catch up with, I’d send it to him. It’s the sort of evo psych paper that ignores everything we know about inheritance, almost everything we know about the topic being studied, and much of what we know about sex to say, “Look! Correlation! Thus…selection!”
