It must be “Let’s all beat up Evo Psych” Day!

Earlier, when I was writing up that criticism of Rybicki and Stangroom, I read through that article on shopping and foraging and evolution that he had cited in defense of his views. There was something in it that drove me to distraction and made me want to find a match and light the whole paper on fire (a bit of indulgent exorcism of annoying work that is getting increasingly difficult to do; I was reading it on my iPad). It’s something that afflicts almost all of the evo-psych work on the evolution of sex differences, and it rankles. So let me try to purge my irritation in a way other than incinerating an expensive bit of electronics. Let me instead pretend to be an evolutionary psychologist.

First, let me stipulate that everything is a product of selection; that the only interesting features in human evolution are adaptive ones. This one really, really hurts, because I’m by no means a panadaptationist, and think a lot of features are far easier to explain as a product of pure chance rather than having to come up with an elaborate just-so story to rationalize them. But have no fear, I’ll return to a pluralist view at the end.

Second, the paper included this nice chart on the differences in roles in hunter-gatherer societies (it’s relevance to a paper on shopping preferences in 19 year old American college students is still in question).

I will stipulate that every single cell in that table is true. I’ll go further and stipulate that the correlation with the sexes is absolute and perfect: in all hunter-gatherer societies, women never hunt and use those hunting skills, and men never gather and use those gathering skills. I’m not an anthropologist, so that table could be totally crackers and there could be a thousand exceptions, but I’m not going to worry about it; we’re stacking the odds to favor the evo-psych hypotheses as much as possible right now.

Further, I will stipulate that many of those skills are biologically based and founded on genetically determined cognitive abilities, and that they have no overlap. That is, for instance, hunters need a theory of mind that is built on an elaborate cortical substrate in order to more efficiently predict the behavior of prey; this ability is not used by gatherers when they’re searching for tubers. Gatherers, on the other hand, need very precise sensitivities to color and nuances of shape to assist in pattern-matching while searching, abilities that hunters do not use.

I will also stipulate that these specific cognitive and perceptual abilities have no utility outside hunting or gathering. There are no social circumstances, for instance, in which these abilities might be an exaptation.

Finally, I stipulate that the circumstances that produce these adaptations are still relevant today, and that 95,000 years of human evolution in hunter-gatherer societies completely dominates and makes irrelevant the last 5,000 years of evolution in agricultural and urban societies; we can ignore any processes that might have undone prior adaptations.

Is that enough yet? Have I given enough of the store away? ‘Cause I’m really feeling a little psychic stress here, since giving up some of those premises makes me want to claw them back and stab them a few times, until they’re bleeding and dead. But I’m playing the game, let’s give evo-psych every possible advantage, and grant them every assumption they make as a default.

Now here’s the part that infuriates me when reading these sex difference papers. They almost always act as if they’re discussing two independent breeding populations facing different selection pressures.

But…

Every hunting man had a gatherer mother; every gathering woman had a hunting father.

Seriously, it’s this feeling that I have to remind them that they’re not dealing with two species, Man and Woman, or even two populations, the man-tribe and the woman-tribe, but one goddamned species, obligately breeding within themselves. If there is a ‘spatial navigating gene’, both men and women have it. If there is a gene that grants us the color sensitivity to distinguish puce from plum, we all carry it. With the exception of a minuscule number of genes involved in sex-specific trait determination on the Y chromosome, we’re sharing everything.

Wait, the naive among you are wondering, does that mean men are carrying genes for large breasts, wide hips, and ovaries, while women are carrying genes for baldness, baggy scrotums, and testicles? Yes, we are. All shared. But these genes are also regulated so that they are expressed or repressed differently in the different sexes. You have to think of each one as a Gene Plus: a gene plus an added switch to turn it on or off differently in different sexes (commonly, they’re regulated differently by the presence or absence of testosterone.)

In most of these reproductively relevant sex differences, it’s easy to understand what maintains the Plus; a man whose testes did not see the signal to make male-specific gonads and instead produced some very confused ovaries would be a reproductive failure. Some of the secondary characteristics are only weakly maintained — breast size, for instance, doesn’t seem to be a major factor in reproductive success, and we see a large variation in that parameter…but there are stronger pressures that have maintained lactation, and so that function is more reliable (but not invariant!)

This is the problem for the evolutionary psychology of sex differences: for each trait that you want to claim is a product of selection for a behavior that is different between sexes, you have to postulate a Plus that restricts its expression to a single sex.

You can’t simply have a just-so story that Woman evolved ability X to cope with gathering berries; you have to also have a just-so story that explains why Man evolved a repressor to shut off X for better hunting. And vice-versa for ability Y that aids in hunting.

So, sure, tell me that humans evolved cognitive mechanisms to aid in navigating by landmarks for better fruit and tuber searching, and I might well believe it to be reasonable; now tell me why you think it would only operate in women, and how it would be actively suppressed by genetic mechanisms in men. Then you can tell me why navigating by distance and direction is actively shut off in women. You’re the ones who like purely adaptive explanations: why would there be an advantage to individuals having each only half the suite of potential genetic navigation tools switched on?

And then you can go through each line in the table up above and explain how confining each of those abilities to only one sex or another led to more babies being made than if both had it, and how having that trait in an ‘inappropriate’ sex would be culled by death or reduced fertility…because you know that’s how evolution works, right?

Right about then, my inner pluralist will come roaring back to life, and I’ll have to point out that your feeble rationalizations, even if I were to accept them, can only represent tiny fitness effects, and that in small populations of humans drift is going to dominate over small fitness coefficients, and selection won’t even see your hypothetical advantages. And maybe you don’t understand how evolution works, after all.

I think a better answer is that there are evolved human traits that are shared among every individual in the population without regard to sex, and that culture acts as the repressor/enabler of particular attributes in particular individuals. That ought to be the default assumption, with exceptions requiring exceptional evidence beyond just reading the cultural codes. Change the culture, and all those fully human abilities can be expressed in everyone, not just the ones permitted by convention.

Anything else is a betrayal of our potential.

The Stangroom Experience

So this odd tweet flies by me:

Jeremy Stangroom
Ed Rybicki speaks out about the consequences of the vile bullying he received at FtB: http://bit.ly/TT9CWz #FTBullies

8:52 AM – 23 Nov 12

“Vile bullying” here at FtB? “Consequences”? Really? And who the heck is Ed Rybicki? I don’t remember him. So I did a little digging.

Oh, yeah. Ed Rybicki — he’s the guy that wrote that “Womanspace” short story that parroted goofy evopsych myths.

At this point I must digress, and mention, for those who are not aware, the profound differences in strategy between Men Going Shopping and Women Going Shopping. In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.

It was a not-very-good piece that relied on sexist stereotypes for a crutch. It gets a very thorough going over in the comments section there — a great many people were appalled that such a “tongue-in-cheek” exercise in perpetuating falsehoods about women could get published, even as fiction, in a science journal. It also got slapped down by Jacquelyn Gill, who compiled a huge list of negative responses, such as this one by Anne Jefferson. This wasn’t an FtB-led rejection — it was a massive, science-internet-wide gag reflex that puked all over poor Ed Rybicki’s story. Dana Hunter was our local huntress spearing the wild Rybicki, with follow-ups that included Ophelia Benson.

But to claim it was “bullying” or that FtB was responsible…well, that’s typical Jeremy Stangroom, not letting the evidence cloud his hatred of everything on this network.

But I’m happy to join in now, because I read Rybicki’s awful whine. He doubled down on some truly egregiously bad research in an attempt to salvage his story and credibility.

Oh, by the way, nowhere in his excuse-making does Rybicki mention anything about consequences to himself or his career. That’s another Stangroomism, I’m afraid, and should be completely discounted. Along with everything else he claims. It’s also a year old; I guess Stangroom just wanted to revive an old argument that he saw as damaging to FtB (alas, he’s wrong on all counts.)

But oh, gob, the excuses. They’re embarrassingly bad. Rybicki has to settle on one strategy, first of all. He tries to claim that it was just a fictional story, a little exercise in what-if, and that no one should be offended. But he also tries to cite a whole bunch of articles to show that his hypothetical sex difference in shopping vs. hunting is actually reasonable and true, and therefore no one should be offended because he’s just using the facts.

Look, guy: you could possibly try to make a case for either of those, but you can’t do both: they’re mutually incompatible arguments. Especially when you announce your intent to pursue the evidence like this:

Being a scientist, however, I have been trained to demand evidence, to either support or disprove a hypothesis.

And then what he proceeds to do is cite a series of papers with complete credulity. About a paper titled “Evolved foraging psychology underlies sex differences in shopping experiences and behaviors” he writes:

So: a reasonably respectable gathering, then, of respected academics, reporting academic work? One has to assume so – and that this paper is in good standing, otherwise it would never have been published? Again, a reasonable assumption – so to quote from said article could possibly come under the heading of scientific reportage, rather than sexist assumptions based only on gender bias? If the chain of logic holds, then what I will write now cannot be held as evidence of my innate gender bias – can it?

Good grief, the man is a trained academic at a university, and he hasn’t yet figured out that a horrific amount of crap gets through peer review and manages to get published? How could he read the 15 pages of bloated speculation in that paper, all built on the results of a survey of the shopping habits of students enrolled in an American college introductory psychology course, and not see the flaws?

No, all that matters is…

Right: so it went through an Ethics Committee, then? Evidently – it being a large, respectable US university, and all.

I don’t know. At this point it’s hard to believe this guy is being serious: none of those are grounds to trust a paper’s results. But then he claims that the study has been confirmed by two other papers!

I give you “‘Men Buy, Women Shop’: The Sexes Have Different Priorities When Walking Down the Aisles” – from “researchers at Wharton’s Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative and the Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm”.

Gosh, when I grow up I want to study evolutionary biology at the Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative. And this is the source for the other confirming study:

The study was commissioned by PayPal, meaning again, big $$$ are involved.

I give up. Really, Stangroom? This is the basis of your accusation that FtB is a place of “vile bullying”? That some of us, at least, are willing to call out bad science?

By the way, I’m sure Ed Rybicki will be grateful to you for resurrecting his shamelessly bad story out of the blue like that. I suspect he’s actually been hoping everyone would just forget it after that net-wide panning it received the first time through.

Oh, wait. In the pile of links I dug up to figure this out, I lost track of the main one Stangroom was pointing out: Ed Rybicki himself has brought it up recently. It’s still true, though, that there were no consequences to Rybicki.

While I received next to no personal communications, other than replies to blog comments, I was vilified at my place of work in what amounted to a systematic campaign – despite never having used a Departmental or institutional affiliation anywhere, and having written and published the thing in my private capacity – to the extent that the principal and a DVC of my university actually asked if we could have a public debate on the issue. I told the DVC he HAD to be joking; getting abused in print was one thing, but public attacks would be another thing entirely. I advised our hierarchy that it would blow over – and you know, it did? Quite quickly, too.

So where am I, now? Well, pretty much in the same place I was in prior to early November, 2011, because I have stopped reading Hatespace: that’s right; I no longer bother to check in on the circle-jerk that FtB had obviously become. I also got good news which completely distracted me from the bullshit: my long-shot effort at getting my 30-year dream project funded struck gold, and yes, the wonderful person who walked into my office and asked “Does anyone here know anything about viruses?” and I will be exploring oceanic viromes (thank you, Maya!).

So – all I can say is that I am wiser (but not sadder); that while as an atheist, humanist and liberal, the FtB blogs would look like they were made for me – they can Fuck. Right. Off.

So he’s had no adverse affects on his career, recently got a grant funded (I presume), and the only effect on his life is that he now blames freethoughtblogs for all the criticisms he received over his petty little story. He hasn’t learned one single damned thing.

FtB was not made for him. Scientists who can’t recognize pseudo-science and who use it to defend sexism aren’t quite our audience.

Nature’s sexism

The magazine, that is, not the natural world. They’ve published a good editorial today in which they acknowledge inequalities in their editorial staff (14% of their editors are women, 6% of the researcher profiles they did in 2012 were about women).

Unfortunately, they do make a few excuses.

One can speculate that there also may be a tendency for women to be less willing than men to push themselves forward, which may lead to editors being less aware of them. But it is certainly the case that women typically spend more time than men as homemakers and looking after children, further reducing the time available for journal contributions

One could say there is also a tendency for men to shout down women, and to assume that they’ll be the ones taking care of the babies. These are all self-perpetuating stereotypes, you know, and the first step in breaking them involves consciously rejecting them.

But the editorial goes beyond that to recommend steps to break unconscious biases.

However, we do not believe that these considerations can fully account for, or excuse, the imbalance in Nature’s pages. Nor do we believe that our own editors consciously discriminate against women.

That leaves the unconscious factors, and here we believe that there is work to do. We believe that in commissioning articles or in thinking about who is doing interesting or relevant work, for all of the social factors already mentioned, and possibly for psychological reasons too, men most readily come to editorial minds. The September paper speculated about an unconscious assumption that women are less competent than men. A moment’s reflection about past and present female colleagues should lead most researchers to correct any such assumption.

We therefore believe that there is a need for every editor to work through a conscious loop before proceeding with commissioning: to ask themselves, “Who are the five women I could ask?”

Under no circumstances will this ‘gender loop’ involve a requirement to fulfill a quota or to select anyone whom we do not know to be fully appropriate for the job, although we will set ourselves internal targets to help us to focus on the task. It is not yet clear just what difference this workflow loop will make. But it seems to us to be a step towards appropriately reflecting in our pages the contributions of women to science.

This is the same step many of us asked meeting organizers to take in the atheist community, to simply start being aware of the gender balance in their speaker rosters and to think about bringing good and interesting women to the fore…which was no problem for anyone and has resulted in great progress. Honestly, I believe that most people want to be fair and can respect people of all sexes, but it takes work to overcome deeply ingrained cultural assumptions.

My sad and pathetic thanksgiving

I cancelled my Thanksgiving this year — I just have too much work piled up on me right now. So Mary went off to Madison to visit my daughter Skatje today — we had a small bowl of pad thai together for our feast, just before she left — so I’m home alone all weekend. I got all my grading sorted out into six stacks, though, and finished off one of the most difficult ones, so yay.

My dinner tonight was a bowl of rice, and I’m going to celebrate by kicking back with a glass of wine and something on netflix — anyone got any recommendations? It’s my one bit of fun for the weekend, so make it a good one.

Tomorrow: complete two stacks of grading.

In which Americans celebrate their traditional regard for Native culture

Damaged petroglyph

 

Happy Thanksgiving from those of us in the United States! It’s a day in which we Estadounidenses traditionally gather to celebrate the debt of gratitude we owe the original inhabitants of the land for helping the first European colonists survive. The remembrance takes many forms. Most commonly, we commemorate our Native cousins by not paying any attention to them at all, though on occasion we note their contributions by red-baiting their allies. And every once in a while, we celebrate this holiday by destroying irreplaceable Native ceremonial art dating back to a time contemporaneous with the European Bronze Age.

From my KCET story linked above:

The petroglyphs are thought to be as much as 3,500 years old, and still play an important role in the cultural life of the Owens Valley Paiute and Shoshone people. Paiute tribal historic preservation officer Raymond Andrews told Los Angeles Times reporter Louis Sahagun this week that the vandalized petroglyphs are regularly visited by modern-day Native people of the Eastern Sierra. “We still use this sacred place as a kind of church to educate tribal members and children about our historical and spiritual connections. So, our tribal elders are appalled by what happened here.”

According to the BLM, the vandals drove ladders, power saws, and portable generators to the site to attempt to remove the petroglyphs. Four were apparently removed successfully. A fifth, shown above, was damaged by saw cuts but left in place: a sixth was broken after removal and left on site. BLM rangers also reported hammer damage to dozens of nearby petroglyphs.

You don’t have to buy into Paiute/Shoshone religious beliefs to find an act like this appalling, just as you wouldn’t need to be a Magdalenian animist to get pissed off if someone took a crowbar to the Megaloceros paintings at Lascaux. A couple years ago a couple of slack-jawed nitwits took their paintball guns into a canyon in southern Nevada that figures prominently in the origin myths of a number of Native people along the lower Colorado River. Said nitwits defaced a number of petroglyph panels there. One doesn’t have to actually believe that Mastamho the creator’s son dug the Colorado out of the desert sands with his walking stick and sent the local tribes off in different directions to feel grief and anger at that damage to culturally significant artwork.

I won’t venture a guess as to the motivation of the thieves, though I suspect — to steal a joke from Professor Bérubé — a primitive form of outrage influenced by what the Greeks called μεθαμφεταμινε. Whatever their motivation, they need to be found and corrected before they do it again. The desert has a deep human history every bit as fascinating and inspiring as its natural history. Damaging it damages our common heritage. On the off chance a reader here has a friend of a friend who knows something, the BLM and the local Tribal government have set up a reward for info.

Are you smarter than a Hovind?

The proof of god is that without god you can’t know anything. You either have to know everything in order to say you know anything, or you have to have somebody who knows everything tell you what’s true. That’s Eric Hovind’s argument, in response to a question from a sixth grader who seems to be about ten times as smart as a Hovind.

It seems to me that if we have any other method than divine authority that allows us to know anything, Hovind’s assertion is proven false and his premise crumbles.

The electrochemical orange

I missed posting the Wednesday Botanical yesterday (this is happening a lot lately — seriously, people, my brain is totally fried by this semester, and it’s getting worse as I limp gasping and moaning into the final weeks), so you’ll have to belatedly make do with this:

That’s an orange lit by the dim glow produced by the electrical interactions between zinc-coated nails and citric acid. It’s really dim: it took a 14 hour exposure to get that image.

Around FtB

It’s Thanksgiving! The Americans around here are going to be slowing down to gorge themselves, and I’m going to be grading! But there’s still lots of stuff to read.

  • Chris Rodda has a horrific story of a Christian poultry processing company’s labor abuses. If I were eating a turkey tonight, I’d be worried that it was the product of a crippled child forced to work by a sneering Christian overlord. But I’m not (vegetarian meal here), so it’s all OK!

  • Digital Cuttlefish has another war on Christmas story for you all. He’s been doing that a lot lately…while also flogging his merch.

  • Steven Andrew features a very confused Pat Robertson, who admits that the words from God he thought he heard predicting the election were wrong. Don’t expect an epiphany in which he realizes maybe he hasn’t been hearing the word of god at all, ever.

  • Alethian Worldview finds Christians wailing over the imminent death of Christianity. It shouldn’t be surprising that an apocalyptic death cult is full of people obsessed with their own demise.

  • Finally! A relevant post! Stephanie Zvan posts a pie crust recipe.

  • Jason Thibeault skeptically shoots down the myth that tryptophan in the thanksgiving turkey makes you sleepy. I’m having pad thai with tofu, so I wasn’t worried about it.

  • Dana Hunter is having a godless thanksgiving…and finds someone other than an invisible sky fairy to thank.

  • Ian Cromwell hates freedom of religion. Not because you shouldn’t be free to practice your religion, but because it’s already covered by freedom of speech. Why does religion get special attention?

  • Kate Donovan seems to have had a good time at Skepticon, and especially enjoyed Rebecca Watson’s talk.

  • Aron Ra is being attacked by a rabid Lutheran. That dog gets put down calmly and with a minimum of fuss.

  • Zinnia Jones is an ABOMINATION!

  • Natalie Reed asks us all to remember the victims of hate driven by race and gender.