A reader let me know that I was mentioned on the March for Science Seattle page.
An excellent example of the perils of ideology trumping science…. from the left. Yes, we love talking about how the Right is so anti-science and ideologically based and praise the Left for being so much better. But they aren’t. They just have different ideologies and therefore reject different science. We laugh at those dumb Republicans for denying climate science while our own “tribe” screams about the (false) perils of nuclear power, the (false) dangers of GMOs, and now, with the Regressive Left (of which PZ Myers is as deeply dogmatic as the worst Evangelical) the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis – false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.
Men and women ARE different. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be different. Yes there is a lot of variation and there is more in group heterogeneity than between group heterogeneity (meaning that there will be a lot of overlap where on just about any characteristic there will be men that are less “manly” than some women and so on), but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate differences based purely in our biology and contingent evolutionary history.
But as Steven Pinker points out, it is ALWAYS a mistake to tie your *ethics* to your *science*. Different =/= better or worse. It CAN be, but usually isn’t. Acknowledging that men and women are biologically different is not the same as as saying one is “better” than the other. But in a bizarre and ironic twist the Left (particularly the regressives) have fetishized science to the point where they can’t make an argument that they see as valid without referencing science, and so they twist and deny scientific facts to fit into their ideology, bastardizing it just as much as their counterparts on the right.
Wow. Let me repeat that amazing accusation.
…the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis – false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.
I am a fairly conventional cis-het man, steeped in Western culture, married to a conventional cis-het woman. I have seen porn. I have had heterosexual intercourse. I’m entirely conscious of the biological differences between men and women.
I’m also a biologist. I know the difference between a testis and an ovary, between a Mullerian duct and a Wolffian duct, between testosterone and estrogen (which, in the latter case, isn’t much). I’m also fairly well acquainted with the literature in evolutionary biology, and even know a bit about neuroscience.
To say that I claim there are no biological differences between men and women is so patently absurd and totally divorced from reality that Mr Pavlov ought to be embarrassed about saying something so stupid while accusing me of saying something so stupid. He won’t be.
What he’s doing is a common rhetorical trick. It’s obvious that most men have a penis and most women have a vagina, therefore, with a bit of clumsy sleight of hand, he wants to claim that every bit of cultural bias about the relative abilities of men and women is equally valid. He wants to pretend that because ovaries exist, all his notions about femininity must be equally rooted in biological reality.
Similarly, he reveals his hand with that odious Pinkerism about blank slates — that’s exactly the same game! Argue that some element of human psychology is not fixed by genetics and that it arises in a social context, and you are castigated by Pinker fans who like to bring the discourse to a dead stop with the ludicrous accusation that you must believe everything is 100% socially determined without biological basis.
It’s idiotic and dishonest, but right now it’s Pinker’s main claim to fame.
Some things are complex and culturally determined. Biological sex is strongly canalized to produce a bimodal distribution of physical properties, but intersexes do exist. The brain is a plastic organ that responds to its environment in sophisticated ways, and carries both predispositions and the potential to develop in new ways, and gender is less strongly specified by genes than is the reproductive tract. If anyone is anti-science, it’s these people who want to argue for a less responsive, less adaptive, less diverse pattern of possible behaviors from the human brain.
You don’t get to claim that you have a solid biological footing in arguing that women are more nurturing, are less capable of doing math, and prefer the color pink because estrogen unless you’ve done actual work to demonstrate that those differences are real. Breasts aren’t your shortcut for imposing a mass of narrow Victorian cultural prejudices on how people should be, and you don’t get to hide behind science on this one.
Also…hiding behind trivially exposed lies isn’t science, even if some of your scientific heroes who try to defend a regressive conventionality think so.
Thought you’d be sleeping off a birthday cake hangover.
Proves good work can be done on sugar overload.
In this thread, I have made a set of 100 identical comments.
You disagree? Well, you’re reading this comment now, aren’t you? And you acknowledge that this comment has a comment number at the top left? Well, then as you have plainly observed, this comment is one of a set of 100 identical comments in this thread, and so if you, like any rational person, accept the existence of the comment you are currently reading, then you must necessarily accept the existence of the 99 identical copies of it in the exact same thread.
I am not even home yet. My plane last night was 4 hours late, I’m still in Minneapolis, and have a 3 hour drive ahead of me, with a snow storm on the way.
And there’s that stupid “regressive left” bullshit again. It’s pure projection on part of the Dawkinsian segment of atheism. Rape apologism, gender essentialism, and pretty much everything else they chide us for not believing in are regressive, conservative ideas.
For as much as atheists like this guy talk about how horrible radical Islam is, they don’t seem to realize that their values align with radical Islam far more than ours do. All of the sexism that these people insist is rational and scientific is just a holdover from conservative religious ideology that they haven’t shaken off. If anyone deserves to be called the regressive left, it’s them.
I was going to ask what’s up with this “regressive left” crap? What, exactly, makes these people “regressive?” As emergence notes @4, it does indeed read a lot like projection. It also seems a lot like well poisoning. Regressive = bad. So just assert that your opponent is regressive without evidence to paint them as bad without saying it quite that explicitly. Sad.
Whenever I see someone to use the term “regressive left”, I know that a parade of strawmen is going to follow. And I am never disappointed.
Leo Buzalsky: The accusation is that the SJW Feminazis are oppressing and censoring people, ignoring science in favour of their nasty social studies pseudoscience ideology, and establishing a Politically Correct Orthodoxy. And that they’re therefore just as bad and irrational as right-wing Christians. “Regressive Left” is basically the “Cultural Marxism” of people who aren’t far enough down the antifeminist rabbit hole to find the latter term palatable.
For those who have the time and patience, I highly recommend this read from the Journal of Neuroscience Research. I think these folks are doing honest work on this matter:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jnr.v95.1-2/issuetoc
Yay, you posted it. :) I reported the post to the group administration after sending it your way and it’s gone now. I doubt this guy would have deleted it himself, so I’m guessing the organizer agreed that this post is anything but pro-science.
What an astonishingly poorly written piece of writing. His editor must have been conditioned to feel tired when looking at words. It is, indeed, an excellent example of the perils of ideology trumping science, though. Sometimes scientists and the results of their studies actually do support ideas that you don’t like, and no amount of hooting, “the regressive left! The regressive left!” will change that, nor will refusing to understand the positions you argue against.
Actually… I’m a fan of nuclear power, and I get irritated by supposedly environmentalist people who would have us stuck with fossil fuel power plants and the like for the forseeable future, but there actually are perils related to nuclear power. It is fair and good to recognise that modern nuclear power generators are far safer than Chernobyl, but it is utterly irrational to simply deny that nuclear power is dangerous at all.
Actually… I’m a fan of GMOs too, and I get irritated by supposedly environmentalist people who would have us spraying more pesticides and using more fertiliser than necessary, but there actually are causes for concern with GMOs. It is reasonable to point out that the use of genetic modification is not likely to result in ravenous, man-eating vegetablemen roaming the countryside and laying waste to towns and villages in their path*, but it’s utterly irrational to simply deny that there are any issues with GM crops.
Actually… I’m non binary, and not even I believe that. It’s pretty clear that there’s some biological basis for gender, but it’s also pretty clear that there’s some social basis for gender. It doesn’t actually have to be one extreme or the other. It can be a little more complicated than that. We are not isolated islands of meat and hormones, going through our lives without interacting with each other. Society is not dark matter. It influences us, we influence it.
It is actually a complex question, and it does not have a simple yes/no answer, and I don’t understand why so many people insist that it must have one, then call us ideologues for, in their mind, adhering to the binary choice they reject.
These people claim to be intellectuals and skeptics. Many of them are scientists and philosophers. They have no excuse for failing to comprehend the concepts of complexity and nuance. Are they being deliberately dishonest, or are they simply falling prey to the perils of ideology trumping intellect?
*Yes, I do know this is a blatant strawman. I just couldn’t help but reference a cheesy short story that was on Escape Pod a month or two back.
@Leo Buzalsky #5 – I think it’s because liberals also call themselves “progressives.” Progress is generally perceived as good, so if you want to promote the idea that liberalism bad, you need to dissociate it from the concept of “progress.” For someone who is by nature reactionary rather than given to original thought (i.e., conservative), the obvious course is to simply call progressives the opposite of what they call themselves: regressives. QED
I’ve often thought that, if gender essentialism was a legitimate hypothesis and not just a post hoc justification for patriarchy, gender essentialists would be more anxious to eliminate gender discrimination than anyone, since it’s existence as a confounding factor prevents them from ever being able to truly test their hypothesis. I realize that their entire raison d’etre is to argue that what appears to be discrimination is actually just the inevitable result of women’s natural inferiority, but studies showing that girls get higher math scores when their tests are graded by teachers who don’t know their gender, for example, seem pretty cut-and-dried to me.
The thing I find interesting about these (as opposed to the content) is when people use we and they. This person doesn’t identify with the “Left” or the “Right”, but talks about them both being as bad. That seems to be a really common and annoying dogma, to insist on exact equality between the two. I guess it lets you feel superior to both, but balancing them like that only makes you more and more right-wing as the Overton window shifts.
Well, I think there are people with nutty ideas on the “left”, but right now these people have no discernible power. The nutbars on the right, on the other hand, have power and a lot of it. This being so the nutty people on the “right” are far more dangerous than the nutty people on the “left” and they are therefore the ones we have to resist.
When the nuts on the left attain power (not likely in the near future) I will begin to worry about them and advocate resistance. Until then, nah. And I’m really tired beyond belief of these “moral equivalence” arguments.
Given what I’ve seen of March For Science Facebook, this person got shredded to bits in the comments?
I remember the nature-versus-nurture wars of the early 90s (or was it late 80s). I was in middle school, maybe early high school, when that hit mainstream pop science.
My instinct then: why the fuck would you believe in this dichotomy?
Was the war being waged in popular science outlets ever reflective of an actual debate in the scientific community? I mean, sure, Pinker continues to wage it as he did then, but I mean actual scientists who do real work.
“You don’t get to claim that you have a solid biological footing in arguing that women are more nurturing, are less capable of doing math, and prefer the color pink because estrogen unless you’ve done actual work to demonstrate that those differences are real.”
Did Pavlov state this though? I feel as though you are straw manning them as badly as they straw manned you.
When people who disagree with strong social constructionists accuse them of claiming there are “no biological differences between men and women,” etc., they do two things.
One is that they sound like utter idiots as this is a strawman on a scale of “All known racists want every nonwhite person executed.” It’s a complete conversation-stopper, for the most part.
The other, and related to the first, is that they make it hard to take any of the numerous valid and supportable claims about evolutionary psychology seriously. Just as it would be difficult for me to sit though a KKK member’s quoting of selected crime statistics that include racial correlates, I would not be inclined to hear the purportedly scientific views of concerning innate gender differences from anyone blithering about PZ in the above manner. As a consequence, we see this kind of pushback:
“It’s obvious that most men have a penis and most women have a vagina, therefore, with a bit of clumsy sleight of hand, he wants to claim that every bit of cultural bias about the relative abilities of men and women is equally valid.”
I doubt that this actually is the case. PZ may be parodying Pavlov for effect, but whatever that wahoo believes, I don’t know any more serious behavioral scientists who deny the contribution of socially acquired gender differences than I know serious biologists who adopt anything close to the baldly satirical argument Pavlov rails against above (although some of what he says is true, albeit trivially so).
This sort of exaggerated pushback against dumb ideas unfortunately seems almost inevitable. In response to Trump’s determined anti-Muslim-immigration horseshit, I’ve seen people loudly calling for open borders and zero immigration restrictions, which for obvious reasons would be catastrophic in its own right.
Whatever useful data might actually emerge from the nature-vs-nuture gender issue, it’s not going to happen when people no nothing but lampoon each other. When sexism remains a colossal force — both insidiously and overtly — in the supposedly advanced world, it’s hard to even want to entertain studies about biologically determined behavioral differences between men and women without imagining the person presenting it as some smug refugee from GamerGate or 4chan.
what is it with some people it has to always be some kind of either or and nothing else.
I realize that it makes everything seem more understandable but really the cases where it is only one way or another and nothing in between are astonishingly small. coming from so often from people who claim to be educated and rational and sophisticated and all and usually deliberately take the other side in the most simplistic and distorted way it just sounds so condescending and pretentious.
pointless comments that add very little.
uncle frogy
PZ you mentioned Pinker’s strawman of the “blank slate”; which was a very prominent in his book The Blank Slate and of course is indeed a strawman distortion of his “opponents” by Pinker designed to make it easy for him to score points against them. It is also in my opinion a clear sign of a basic lack of intellectual integrity and honesty by Pinker.
However that is not the only strawman that Pinker deploys in his book. Also in the book, The Blank Slate, is the familiar strawman of the “Noble Savage”. Pinker accuses his historical enemies and some present day intellectual opponents of having a starry eyed, bucolic and innocent vision of “primitive” man; wereas “realists” like himself realize that “primatives” were actually quite horrible. Basically that Hobbes was entirely right about what life was like in a “state of nature”. It is like his strawman “blank slate” stuff largely a crock, a familiar academic urban legend that became received wisdom through repeated repetition.
Pinker’s book The Blank Slate is actually a polemic against those who argue against the view that differences between human’s in regards to behaviour etc., are to a very large extent cultural / environmental. Pinker’s purpose is to argue that the differences are largely genetic / biological and one of his tools in this polemical fight is erecting strawmen too tear down. Of course Pinker also uses other polemical techniques. My favorite is his positioning himself has in the moderate middle by means of creating of strawman positions.
Yeah, sure, moderate, Hey? *as the skeptical would say in Dah Yoo Pee* Not a moderate.
@numerobis #14
It’s since been deleted, but every single comment under it talked about how “interesting” the discussion was or took a moderate position while gently disagreeing with the poster. I’m guessing he was deleting the replies he didn’t like, though I’m not sure if FB allows you to do that on group page discussions.
“Regressive left”, eh? I can only think of two instances where this might be an accurate term. (1) People who want to return to Stalinism or Maoism or some other extremist communist system. (2) People who may be on the left in many ways but want to roll back specific groups’ rights (e.g. political leftists who want to revoke gay marriage). Outside of these two groups, the term is a blatant rhetorical lie.
TERFs.
I remember the term “regressive left” coming into common usage to specifically refer to liberals who defended the regressive aspects of conservative Islamic cultures under the banner of cultural sensitivity.
The thing is, the regressive label there doesn’t make any sense. The kind of vapid liberals who believe people of color only deserve what rights the dominant clerics in their communities say they should have are awful, but there’s already a term for those idiots, which is “moral relativist”. “Regressive” implies the antithesis of “progressive”, and Progressivism has been a specific, coherent ideology since the Teddy Roosevelt days. The irony being, who is better described as having a knee-jerk reaction against progressive ideals than the kind of morons who use the term “regressive Left” in total seriousness?
The man’s name is Pavlov. You ring his bell and he spouts nonsense. It’s nature not nature.
Should say nurture. Damned autocorrect.
Sounds to me like someone never made it past Kindy…
https://youtu.be/OPP_In40at4
It’s seems like I’ve seen Pavlov’s argument before. But I can’t quite put my finger on it. Give me a second… I’ve got it. Excuse my facetious tone, I can’t help being playful with this.
We are supposed to accept that the “others” are radicals both left and right, who worship at the alter of a false science. It’s supposed to follow “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If science be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans)
By portraying others arguments as radical, ones own seems legitimate and “normative” by comparison. Therefore the claim that “true” science is on their side is supposed to bolster Pavlov’s argument and bring those radical saints like PZ around. (1) As such “When the saints act out of character, corrections will be employed to bring them back again. And here is the order of the causes of our salvation, a golden chain, one which cannot be broken.” By portraying oneself as the “norm” and others as radicals, such rhetoric is supposed to establish that they are the primary standard which binds members of a group, which is supposed to serve as a guide or control to regulate proper acceptable thoughts and behavior. (However, the blatant misrepresentation of PZ’s views undermines that rhetoric and renders their position as an authoritative norm untenable. Irrational? )
It’s not clever rhetoric, as you see by it’s use in ancient texts it’s just a tad trite. I award D-. Misrepresenting someones views to make an argument should be an automatic failing grade. One grade up for effort because it was, at the least, an attempt at bringing people together in a more cohesive cause, as misled as it was. Which I don’t frown upon.
*(1) Or perhaps just to alienate them. In that case I would award a failing grade.
I just love the chain of logic people used to come up with the “regressive left” nonsense:
Complete and utter nonsense. Every line item is ridiculously oversimplified, which leads to an absurd conclusion.
I mean, he does have a point. I’m constantly hearing the chant “One, two, three, four — there’s no physical difference between a penis and a vagina” at every protest I go to.
As a group, we *really* need to start closely examining our biases.
ck @28
Notice the biases and assumptions that need to be unpacked there;
1. They think that acknowledging Muslims as human beings with rights somehow endorses Islam as a religion. They don’t get that it’s entirely possible to show compassion towards a group of people while simultaneously disliking their religion.
2. They think that all or a majority of the Muslims we think should be treated with basic human decency are fundamentalists who want to mutilate vaginas and behead gay people. They refuse to acknowledge that the majority of Muslims living in the US and other western countries are moderates with no interest in enforcing sharia law.
@28
In addition to the criticism above. I would not that, in the UK at least, the support for murdering LGBT people primarily comes from the conservative side of the aisle. They are allied with Saudi Arabia and approved weapons trading in order to keep the oppressive fundamentalist regime in place.
Emergence, No 30, I completely agree with you that it is possible to dislike a religion while not disliking individual practitioners of it, nor thinking that they should be discriminated against because of their religion. That is my position with respect to both Islam and Christianity. However, it has been my experience that the problem you cite has a second side, and that is some who equate any criticism of Islam with hatred of Muslims. And I think both points need to be made. It’s wrong to hate Muslims, but it’s also wrong to ignore the fact that Islam itself is a religion of misogyny and violence. Just like it’s wrong to hate Christians but it’s also wrong to ignore all that’s wrong with Christianity.
On the broader issue of gender essentialism, why is this an all-or-nothing proposition? Perhaps some differences are cultural and others are biological. Maybe the purists on both sides are being driven by ideology.
Nothing says “I’m a biased shithead” like believing that PZ is some kind of leading figurehead of the gay/trans/feminist/anti racist revolution. Of course that’s got to be a self-acclaimed “conventional cis hetero white guy”.
Somebody light the HJ Hornbeck sign.
I know this is getting boring:
1. Name the specific difference
2. Show the evidence that this is rooted in biology
3. Show the evidence that this difference is due to evolutionary pressure.
No, really, honey, believe me. It’s not that I am in any way better than you. We are just different. You are better at staying at home with the children and doing all that boring housework while I am better at going out, having a career and earning money. It’s just that we are different. Now be a doll and do the laundry.
it is not a question of is there a difference between the sexes it is a question of what they are and how they are derived. How is it that that is not acknowledged.
Its like the critics like the above refuse to actually think about the question at all and instead go off on some random direction instead.
Like they do not really care about the question but just do not want to change any thing about the way things are now because that is they like it
uncle frogy
#33: Heck, I’m not even a leader of the “conventional cis hetero white guy” revolution.
thirdmill @ 32
It’s a shame how assholes have twisted legitimate criticism of Islam into an excuse to dehumanize and demonize Muslims as people. It would be a lot easier to have an intelligent conversation about the negative effects of Islam if people like Trump hadn’t made Muslims into victims of discrimination.
I think that the idea that human behavior is a combination of inherited and learned behavior is actually what most people on here think. However, there’s no reason to think that the differences in male and female cognition have to fall in line with traditional gender roles. The dispute isn’t so much about whether differences exist, but rather about what those differences actually are. It’s cringe-worthy when gender essentialists try to come up with genetic explanations for stuff like why long hair and the color pink are considered feminine, even though those gender norms have only existed for a century or less. It’s downright infuriating when ad hoc evo-psych explanations are used to justify inequalities that women face.
thirdmill wrote:
The problem is that critiques of Islam tend to be wielded as weapons by those who hate Muslims. Furthermore, since Muslims carry little to no political power in my country, I see little reason to spend much time critiquing their religion. Christians, on the other hand, have significant political power and are currently leveraging it for misogyny and violence.
So, yes, I censor myself when criticizing Islam. That doesn’t mean I endorse any of it, though. My critiques of Islam won’t stop horrible things from happening in Muslim-majority countries, and will harm the more moderate ones living in my own country, and serves as a deflection away from the horrible things being done in my backyard by the majority religion. It means I refuse to provide aid to those intent on committing harm against my neighbors when my voice is better used to fight those who have the power to harm.
Quite simple really. A single X chromosome makes you want wearing pants, favor sports, beer and pizza, have short hear and possibly a beard, and a crave for having sex with people with two X chromosomes. Two X chromosomes make you want wearing skirts, favor tea and talk, have long hair with thingies in it (preferably pink) and a crave for cuddling and, okay, sometimes sex with a person with one X chromosome.
It’s science, no way to deny it.
So having two X chromosomes and an ambition to become CEO of a large international company is very unscientific.
If gender essentialism means that women prefer pink and men prefer contact sports, then I agree it’s pretty stupid. However, I think men and women do look at the world differently and I doubt very much that that’s all socialization. When polling is done on issues like gun control and single payer health insurance and the death penalty and gay marriage, there is a definite breakdown by sex. Male libertarians outnumber female libertarians by something like six to one. Females are more likely to vote Democrat; males are more likely to vote Republican. I think some of that can be written off to cultural issues and socialization, but that pattern is pervasive enough that I don’t think some degree of gender essentialism can be written off. And that’s not just an American pattern; those data seem to be consistent in other places too.
ck and emergence, no argument out of me about anti-Muslim bigotry being used by despicable demagogues. I absolutely agree with you on that point. Also agreed that in the West, Muslims wield little political power. But who wields political power changes on short notice. Before November 8, I would have said neo-Nazis wielded little political power in the US and we now have one as the defacto president. Bolsheviks had no political power in Russia until they did. Few people saw Hitler coming until it was too late. So just because Muslims have no real political power in the West today does not mean that will remain true indefinitely. In the meantime, as persecuted as its adherents are in parts of the West, it is a deeply misogynistic, anti-enlightenment ideology. No way in hell anyone here would give any other ideology that misogynistic and anti-enlightenment a free pass.
thirdmill
There’s an even bigger breakdown on gun control when polling the UK or Germany vs the USA. Which genes make ‘Muricans blood thirsty assholes?
Seriously, you’re listing things that are very neatly explained by socialisation. People here in Europe cannot even grasp how mindbogingly stupid the USA are when it comes to health care and gun control.
thirdmill
1. Separate some population into two groups by some random trait.
2. Find something else in which they differ statistically significant.
3. Attribute found difference to random trait.
Tadaaaaa, science!
4. Call every deviation ideological, political correct, or something.
Tadaaaaa, bigotry backed up by science!
Seriously, one does not need a training in science or statistics to see how flawed that line of reasoning is. Even if men and women think differently about gun control, so fucking what?
Women tend not to vote for politicians who are opposed to women’s issues, whereas men are less swayed.
IT MUST BE THE GENES.
thirdmill:
So you think gender essentialism means that men and women do look at the world differently, and not entirely because existing in the world is a different experience for each. OK.
You’re interesting; do you not realise that issues like gun control and single payer health insurance and the death penalty and gay marriage and libertarianism and voting Democrat are purely cultural issues?
(No less than are preferring pink or contact sports)
Seriously, you should realise that since you think that whichever way most women’s attitudes go towards those issues is due to their feminine essentialism, it follows that those women who aren’t in said majority must perforce be acting contrary to their essential nature. And the converse for men, obviously.
(What a way to look at the world!)
riepluim, No. 42, it’s hardly a random trait. For large numbers of people, both male and female, it’s one of their defining traits. And your “so fucking what” is the question that’s on the table — do they think differently about gun control because of something related to biology, or is it socialization? That’s the “so fucking what”.
Numerobis, No 44, as I understand feminism, every issue is a women’s issue, but you think men don’t vote on men’s issues too?
John, No. 45, yes, living in the world is a different experience for each, and I can think of several reasons for why it’s a different experience for each that are purely biological. For one thing, men don’t get pregnant, just to name the most obvious. And while I agree that a significant part of the different experience for each has to do with culture and socialization, my argument is that it’s not *all* culture and socialization (or, at least, is is far from being proven that it’s *all* culture and socialization. And your final point about women in the majority are acting contrary to their nature is deliberately being obtuse; we’re talking about averages and not individual cases.
So here’s my question to all of you: Since we seem to agree on the main point that culture and socialization are a significant chunk of gender differences, why are you so threatened at the idea that some part of it might not be? If it turns out to be true that there is a biological component, why would that be such a terrible thing?
thirdmill wrote:
Virtually everything you mentioned is US-specific. The one-in-six libertarian thing should not be a surprise given that women make up less than 1/5 of congress (as an interesting contrast, Rwanda is sitting at 64% women in the lower house of government and 39% in the upper house). Gun control, universal health care, and capital punishment are not nearly as polarized in other countries as they are in the United States. For example, Japan remains heavily patriarchal, but has some of the world’s strongest gun controls. In Canada, 83% of men support universal health care while only 77% of women do. I can’t say there couldn’t be biological factors that make women less or more likely to support or believe something, but it’s almost impossible to untangle the social effects, and plenty of the things you’ve assumed as obviously genetic turn out to be social when looking outside of your local community.
Seriously, the U.S. is not a window into the rest of the world. If anything, it’s the abnormality.
The SPLC was warning quite early during Trump’s campaign that his rhetoric was fueling various kinds of hate crimes. They continued warning about this as he started to dominate the Republican primaries. Even if Trump had ultimately lost the election, those neo-nazis weren’t going to disappear back into the shadows unless Trump lost by a historic landslide (which did not seem likely). The writing was on the wall for anyone who cared to actually look for it.
An argument without third party evidence….So I have trouble with with assertion without evidence. And I won’t be the only one.
I’m not. But the burden of evidence is upon you….And I see not one link….
We’re objecting to gender essentialism because it’s a poorly-justified hypothesis that historically is used to back up and support oppression and see no reason to treat it as anything but a poorly-justified hypothesis that historically is used to back up and support oppression.
thirdmill @46:
But you claimed to be talking about gender essentialism, which you’ve reduced to any observed different overall probability distribution between all men and all women for some behavioural trait.
For example, consider your adduced example of the gender distribution for Democrat voters and widen your scope; is it factual that a large proportion of Democratic politicians are men. Do you draw the conclusion from that latter observation that therefore women are essentially less-suited to being politicians?
But then, Democrats have a much larger proportion of women politicians compared to Republicans.
(Are Democrats then, essentially, more feminine than Republicans? :) )
—
Also, Vivec @49 made that same point, if less elliptically.
I’ll make a comment, despite the fact that it is almost certain to be useless. Well, not so much a comment so much as to point a few things out.
Firstly, PZ does his usual of engaging with a straw man rather than anything of substance. In this case it was not my comment that was particularly relevant, but what PZ decided to not include in his post here. And that lack of inclusion is what puts my words into proper context. Specifically, I had posted a link to a post by Jerry Coyne over at WEIT pointing out how PZ gets the science wrong regarding male and female sexual behaviours. My comments were addressing that, never intended to stand alone (but it is much easier to invent what you wish I had been saying and engage with those strawmen of your choosing, which is the standard modus operandi around these parts). Here is a link to the post, entitled when ideology trumps biology.
Dr. Coyne, himself a rather lauded evolutionary biologist as I am sure y’all know, critiques one of PZ’s recent posts here and starts out by discussing Lysenko… not a good start for PZ. He then goes into a discussion about why Cordelia Fine’s book, the subject of the original post to which Coyne was responding, gets the science wrong. Of course, even Coyne is quite aware that “…Myers has always rejected biology that is ideologically unpalatable to him.” And he even points out that one of the commenters here actually did the math to demonstrate that Fine’s conclusions in at least one specific case were wrong and PZ himself commented stating “your math is fine. It’s your humanity that is broken” leading Dr. Coyne to conclude: “And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: an admission that the biology is right, at least in theory, but the person who did the calculations is immoral. What better example can we find of someone who opposes the truth because it’s ideologically repugnant?”
And so from thence comes my critique of the science denialism found therein and the comments I made in the comment attached to the link. A rather important piece of information, though PZ has long been incapable of honestly looking at everything someone says to actually engage with it, preferring his own narratives and strawmen instead.
So at the end of the day, if y’all wish to claim I am wrong in my assertions here, well… perhaps take it up with Coyne who is vastly more qualified than I am on the topic.
A few other things worth pointing out…
The post here starts with referring to me as a “fairly conventional cis-het man, steeped in Western culture, married to a conventional cis-het woman” and then inferring what my beliefs, motivations, and “real” meaning behind my claims may be. Forgive me, I always tend to blank on words… what is it called when people judge the content of someone’s mind and character by their skin color and sex? Oh, right… racism and sexism.
Nextly, the claim is not that there are no biological differences between men and women, but that these biological differences can and do equate to behavioural differences across the population. Which is exactly the claim addressed by Dr. Coyne’s post in which he points out PZ’s preference of ideology over science.
Next is the flaming straw man – “women are more nurturing, are less capable of doing math, and prefer the color pink because estrogen unless you’ve done actual work to demonstrate that those differences are real.” Yup, absolutely correct. And nowhere – anywhere – was there ever once the mention of being less capable of doing math or color preferences. And the work done to demonstrate differences in sexual behaviour has been done and is robust. Hence why Cordelia Fine is wrong and hence why PZ is as well. But the narrative that Fine promulgates fits PZ’s narrative much better, so of course he prefers that over the science.
And to address a couple points in the comments…
Yes, “Left” and “Right” are crude labels and necessarily will never describe the actual complexity of real groups of people. But they are good shorthand to illustrate a point. Their real flaw is when intellectually dishonest folks use them as cudgels to beat their ideological opponents with, as we see here. And the term “regressive Left” is similar not perfectly apt, but certainly accurate enough. I also like the newer term bigoteer as it is more descriptive of the actions of said people.
As for the post itself and comments being deleted… correct, I would never delete a post myself. Wrong or right, if I said it I said it, and I am more than happy to admit my error if demonstrated wrong. Also, I can assure you I deleted no comments that were made on the post (don’t even know if I could). The discussion around it was civil and actually reasonably engaging, unlike what goes on around these parts. So sorry, but no shredding, since it is actually a March for Science page and it seems that more people there actually care about science than ideology than they do here. It also seems that the moderator of the group was aware of the post being reported and decided to leave it up and is unaware of who it was who took it down and is currently investigating.
PZ’s lack of reading comprehension also seems to extend to his commenters here as well. Or at least, the willingness to take a statement and invent your own meaning to it. When I referred to “the (false) perils of nuclear power” that does not mean that there are no perils to nuclear power. It is in reference to the common mythology surrounding the perils of nuclear power which make them out to be vastly more than they are. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of energy generation, including when factoring in events like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. It is common from the political left to pretend that nuclear is vastly more dangerous than it is, hence the false perils of nuclear power. In fact, in the same group the moderator in question put up a similar style post regarding the false perils of nuclear power and it led to much more ideological pushback, despite the clear science on the matter, than my own post did. Same with GMO.
And so to close this out, and let y’all know what “this wahoo” really believes… I believe that men and women are different, that there are biologically and evolutionary rooted differences in behaviour, thinking, and that this translates to actions. That these are heavily modulated by society and culture is without doubt, but that there is science to demonstrate that there are baseline predilections and that these are not entirely erasable by acculturation. And, most importantly, I firmly believe that different does not equal better or worse. I absolutely believe that all people are the moral, political, and social equals of each other regardless of their sex or gender.
Oh, and my honorific is Dr. Pavlov. But feel free to call me Drey.
A friend of mine has pointed out that I misread the opening of the PZ’s post here. I thought he was referring to me as the “cis-het man” but it seems he was referring to himself. My apologies for the misread and the error. That section can be stricken from my comment.
I believe I’ll have another drink.
Imagine having the free time to ramble out these nonsense screeds
I’ve got to catch a bus in 30 minutes, so just a brief thing:
@dpavlov, 51
This is an issue of writing comprehension, not one of reading comprehension. If you wish people to understand that you are saying concerns are overstated, call them overstated. If you do not wish people to understand that you are saying concerns are false, do not call them false.
Although if you need it pointing out that a sentence starting with “I” probably refers to the writer more than to the reader, I suppose I’ll let that pass.
dpavlov:
Thanks for the adumbration.
You only make a vague existence claim, however — can you adduce one specific difference in thinking between men and women?
(PS what’s the relevant distinction between behaviour and actions?)
thirdmill
What exactly is the defining trait? The number of X chromosomes? The shape of their genitals? The length of their hair? The shape of their clothes?
You just demonstrated how easy it is to fall for the flawed line of reasoning we know from sexists (no, I’m not saying you are sexist, but you are following a sexist line of reasoning).
We are talking science here. So you have to be very specific about what it is you are measuring. So suppose you do establish a correlation between have two X chromosomes and voting Democrats. What exactly is it that defines being female, having two X chromosomes or voting Democrats?
It this sounds silly to you, then consider this: there is a strong correlation between chromosomes and the shape of genitals, a very strong one, but still it is not equal to one. Then what is it that defines being female, having two X chromosomes or having a vagina?
This is not just a matter of definition. “Male” and “female” have connotations far beyond the chromosomes and genitals. They are heavily culturally biased with expectations with how to behave, how to dress, who to favor as sex partner etcetera.
Gender is a matter of identity and way too complex to support the idea of gender essentialism.
ck, No. 47, yes, those specific issues are US specific, but is there a reason to think American women are any different than women anywhere else in the world? And as far as predicting the rise of neo-Nazis, hindsight is always 20/20 and in retrospect probably anything that happened could have been predicted, but that doesn’t mean it actually was seen. Don’t forget that most political commentators expected Hillary Clinton to win right up until she didn’t. (And of course she would have won if not for the archaic electoral college), yet more evidence that you don’t need a majority of the people to agree with you to take power.
Nerd, No. 48, actually I don’t have the burden because the title of this piece is “Gender Essentialism is not scientific,” so that’s the question. PZ undertook to prove the negative. And if you read what I said, the furthest I’ve gone is to say that there is some data that indicates it may be, so the negative has not been proven.
Vivec, No. 49, it has historically been used to back oppression, but then Hitler abused science to justify racism. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Whether something is true is a separate question from whether it can be abused.
John, No 50, as I understand gender essentialism, it holds that some traits are related to gender, which is not the same thing as saying that that’s true in every case, or that other factors may not play a role. I think you’re reading way more into it than what’s actually there. Smoking is related to lung cancer but that does not mean that every smoker will get cancer, or that every non-smoker will avoid it, or that other factors don’t also play a role.
Rietpluim, No. 57, if your position is that gender cannot be defined, then this entire conversation, including PZ’s original post, is meaningless. And while there are some people whose anatomy does not match their chromosomes, this is a statistically small (probably small enough to be meaningless) number of people, and as I said to John, we’re talking averages here, not individual cases. And while I agree with you that there are heavy cultural biases as to how the different genders should behave, and that those biases are mostly nothing but biases, that is a separate question from whether gender actually exists. On that point, I think it does and we probably just disagree.
By the way, I just finished reading a fairly exhaustive analysis of Christian theological objections to homosexuality, and I was struck at how deeply misogyny plays a role in homophobia — it’s mostly about gender roles; if you’re a guy, you’re expected to not do certain things because — oooh, ick — that’s what women do, and doing what women do is beneath you. So I do get the extent to which a lot of these discussions are informed by misogyny. I just don’t think that’s dispositive here.
dpavlov
Ok. Show me the science. I am eager to learn about it.
So far everything I have seen in this regard was a case of falsely assuming that correlation = causation and tacking some post-hoc and ad-hoc explanations on observations.
We are primates and primate brains are extremely plastic. Most primates are very social, with an awfull lot of behaviour being learned and not innate. How then do you find out, whether any specific behaviour correlating with any specific gender is innate or learned? Simple correlation and logicall(ish) explanation for why it could be innate does not suffice, because if any given behaviour can be learned without additional costs to the population there would be no selective pressure to make it innate. And if it once were innate but later could be learned with sufficient proficacy, the innate part would become neutral and therefore the responsible genes would degenerate very rapidly.
Take child care for example. The brunt of child care in primates lies on the females. For non-human primates and even human primates in hunter-gatherer societies without acces to the advances of modern society this is logical for many reasons that I will not enumerate.
For some few aspects females are obviously bilogically predisposted (obviously breast-feeding) but for many others there does not seem to be any obvious reason for females to do one specific thing “x”. But when you can find correlations stating that females in fact are better at “x” (of which you can find plenty), you are still not done and you cannot say that “x” is therefore innate. Primates learn by “monkey see-monkey do”, from very early on they imitate and learn and respond to whatever peer pressure presents them with as worth learning and how. This includes societal roles, so of course gender roles too. The more plastic the brain, the more things can be learned – and the brains in our branch of the evolutionary tree of life are very plastic long before there was something you could call “human”.
In order for any gender specific trait to become innate in these conditions it would have to give significant reproductive advantage to the individual that has it innate over one that has “merely” learned it. In primates, where youngs are dependent on their parents for years and have plenty of time to learn a huge plethora of things I find this very unlikely.
So, again, show me the science. Show me examples of specific psychological traits, where not only has correlation been found, but also an evidence that such behaviour is innate, i.e. that it leads to reprodictive advantage over a behaviour learned.
And one last thing please – when you wish to complain ab out being strawmanned, do not start with strawman yourself. I have yet to see anyone on this site to claim “there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate”. The only claim I have ever seen here is that it is extremely difficult to find out what those bilogical differences actually are exactly because “there is a lot of variation and there is more in group heterogeneity than between group heterogeneity” and “these are heavily modulated by society and culture”. If you actually took the care to read what your perceived opponents actually write, you would have found out that the disagreement is not as clear cut as you think it is.
@Charly:
Feel free to read the link I provided that PZ did not include in his original discussion. The one where Jerry Coyne discusses why Cordelia Fine’s conclusions are false. In this case specifically related to sexual behaviours.
Does Coyne actually cite the scientific literature, or just riffs on why he poo-poos Fine’s ideas?
thirdmill
Who said that gender cannot be defined? I said that gender is a matter of identity, not that it cannot be defined. Gender can be easily defined: just ask a person how s/he identifies. Very unsatisfactory to essentialists, but that’s just how the world is.
@dpavlov I read the link a few days ago. The link on WEIT does not contain any specific links to specific studies and I will not go on a search for unicorn. You claim to have seen the evidence, you claim there is plenty of it. So put up. I have to reiterate my question: Show me examples of specific psychological traits, where not only has correlation been found, but also an evidence that such behaviour is innate, i.e. that it leads to reproductive advantage over a behaviour learned.
@58
No shit, did you miss the part where I also said I think it’s a poorly-justified hypothesis?
My point wasn’t just that it is used to justify sexism, its also just a shit hypothesis with little in the way of good supporting evidence.
thirdmill
Ye gods, you sound like religious people.
Let me repeat it once again: You define the trait, show it’s heritable and, if you claim it’s been selected for, show the selective pressure.
I’m simply sick an tired of the “but there could be, why won’t you admit” dance.
Your own examples were quite obviously bullshit to start with and nowhere did you provide any shred of evidence that they were rooted in biology, but then you have the gall to claim we feel threatened.
I have a feeling the differences these people have in mind (that they’re aware of scientific evidence for but are somehow unable to specifically name the differences) are going to be differences that will conveniently justify things like lower pay, lower numbers in STEM, less interest in atheism, less capable of knowing whether to have sex or not, etc.
It really takes some chutzpah for dpavlov@51 to complain about PZ engaging with a straw man when we have dpavlov’s own claim that PZ believes there are “no biological differences between men and women”.
I just want to ad a general info – at least some primates, including humans, are not able to even correctly copulate without learning how (usualy by observation). To me this fact is a strong indicator that no matter how essential behavior is for the survival of the species, if it can be learned, it will not be innate.
Giliell, No. 65, you’ve jumped ahead several steps in the analysis. The question is whether gender essentialism is even a legitimate thing. We’re nowhere near what causes it or which chromosome it’s found on or how it’s passed along. At this point we’re still on whether it exists. I’ve offered some evidence for why I think it might — which is not the same thing as categorically saying it does — which you don’t find persuasive. You’re entitled to your opinion, but I don’t see your case as conclusive enough to close the door on once and for all. Besides which, in science nothing is ever settled anyway.
Saad, if those differences are used as a basis to deny women equal rights, I will be first in line to oppose it, but again, whether something is true is not the same as whether it can be abused.
Rietplum, No. 62, the problem with saying that one’s gender is whatever one identifies it to be is that it assumes that everyone is equally plugged into reality. It also turns gender into a meaningless concept since there can be no objective meaning to the term, since different people may have different standards for why they identify as one gender or another.
thirdmill, #69
And why would that be a problem exactly?
thirdmill, #69
That doesn’t make any sense. There would be no equal rights denial or abuse.
I know the differences you have in mind for women are differences that would allow you to say, “see? science says womenz aren’t good at thinky stuff”. People like you come through here all the damn time. You’re cowards. You want to discuss these differences without naming specifically what you have in mind. Say it already and get it over with.
What kind of differences are you talking about here?
thirdmill
How the fuck am I supposed to declare gender essentialism to be a thing when there’s no evidence offered for its existence?
To the contrary: Gender essentialism as been offered as an explanation many times and so far it has failed every single time. You’Re the one making the claim, you need to support it.
thirdmill @69:
Those purported differences are being used as a basis to deny women equal right. So are you currently first in line to oppose it?
thirdmill, #69
AROOGA! AROOGA! AROOGA!
Oh, sorry, that’s just my bullshit klaxon going off…
Yes, in science, some things actually are settled. The claim to the contrary is ignorant hand-waving sophistry popular amongst creationists and climate change denialists, who tend to haul it out when they’ve been decisively beaten on the facts. You don’t want to be recycling their bad arguments, do you?
There’s no such thing as an objective meaning, words have meaning by virtue of common usage.
Also, by that same standard, literally all terms based off of sense perception are useless.
“We can’t declare that apple over there to be red, because hey that assumes everyone sees colors the same and some people might call it scarlet or orange-ish. “
thirdmill
That’s funny, because I identify as male, and that’s far from meaningless to me. It’s only meaningless from an essentialist point of view. For those more accustomed to the complexities of reality it is still a very useful concept. One has to accept its limitations though.
Which shows you are bullshitting us with prima facie evidence. Gender essentialism is the argument used by bigots to demean the trans (with your sex is your gender) community, and to dehumanize women (see, they aren’t like us, so they must be inferior).
We scientists know gender essentialism doesn’t exist, as both sex and gender (how one looks at oneself) is fluid. From the article:
Gender essentialists are absolutists about once determined, nothing can be changed, and won’t accept almost in “almost universally”.
I am morbidly, apprehensively fascinated to find out what, precisely, Thirdmill and Pavlov think trans people are.
@thirdmill, 46
Bearing in mind that the prevailing attitude around here, and certainly in this thread, seems to be that the claim that we believe that is a pretty obvious strawman, and one that none of us appear to recognise as our own positions… what exactly is it that we’re supposedly threatened by?
I’m not convinced (not threatened by, but find it to be an intellectually vapid argument) that, for example, women are simply less competent, and therefore have less representation in mathematically technical fields, because biology*, but that doesn’t mean I blanket reject the idea that biology plays some role in determining our psychology.
As has previously been mentioned in this thread, nature vs nurture is a false dichotomy. It is not one or the other. We understand this. We don’t need you to hold our hands through discovering this. We simply find that arguments that start with “we hunted the mammoth” and end with “therefore we shouldn’t expect women to be capable scientists”* to be unconvincing.
*Yes, I recognise that this is technically a strawman, and is not representative of the form of most such arguments.
@Charly
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/01/20/are-male-and-female-brains-absolutely-identical/
“Data supporting sexual selection, and a greater promiscuity of males rather than females, include the following:
In human, primate, and many other animal species, males do indeed have a higher variance in reproductive success than do females (it’s been measured). It would be extraordinary if that was just a coincidence based on “social conditioning” in humans but evolution in all the other species that don’t have social conditioning.
The theory of sexual selection is well worked out, and precisely explains this difference in sex-specific behavior.
In species in which males make a greater reproductive investment than females, like seahorses and pipefishes (the males get “pregnant,” holding the eggs and young in pouches), we see the exact opposite of what we normally see. The males are choosy, while females, who produce eggs faster than males can accept them, are promiscuous. In fact, in those groups it is the females who are brightly colored and ornamented while males are drabber: the opposite of the normal situation, but exactly as sexual selection theory predicts.
The difference in body size and strength between human males and females implies an evolutionary basis, almost certainly having something to do with male-male competition, as it does in many mammals, insects, and other groups (see my posts here and here). Holly Dunsworth, whose theories I’ve criticized, has never responded to my comments.
Replicated experiments in both humans and other animals show a strong difference in promiscuity (in humans it’s done using experiments in which attractive strangers proposition people of the opposite sex). Again, it would be extraordinary if the parallel between human and animal behavior were purely coincidental.
There is no convincing way to explain the pervasive existence of bright coloration, elaborate plumage (maladaptive for survival), calling and displays, and other “look-at-me” features of males versus females other than sexual selection. How that selection works may be enigmatic (do the male traits show good genes? good phenotypes? appeal to some innate preferences of females?)—but all of it supports the action of sexual selection.
Bonobos (“pygmy chimps”), which may behaviorally more similar to humans than are “regular chimps”, have a fairly matriarchal society with more promiscuous mating of females than do other chimps, but still show a 25% greater body weight in males than females. Is that a holdover from an ancestor, or a byproduct of males competing for females? (After all, bonobo females are still saddled with pregnancy and child-rearing, and thus have far fewer potential offspring over their lives than do males.)
Finally, insofar as the morphological traits are connected with differences in sexual behavior and proclivities of males versus females, it shows some genetic differences affecting behavior between the sexes—and differences that may rest largely in brain wiring. Now that needn’t reflect a difference in male versus female brain structure, as it could simply represent how brains that are identical produce different responses when affected by different hormones produced outside the brain. (Testosterone, for example, may trigger “promiscuous mating” genes that reside in both male and female brains but are activated only by male hormones.)”
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/the-evolution-of-sexual-dimorphism-in-humans-part-2/
Buss, D. M. 1995. Psychological sex differences. Amer. Psychologist 50:164-168.
Hill, A. K., D. H. Bailey, and D. A. Puts. 2017. Gorillas in our midst? Human sexual dimorphism and contest competition in men. pp. 235-249 in: On Human Nature: Biology, Psychology, Ethics, Politics, and Religion. in M. Tibayrencand F. J. Ayala (eds.) .On Human Nature, M. Tibayrenc and F. J. Ayala, eds. Academic Press.
Puts, D. A. 2010. Beauty and the beast: mechanisms of sexual selection in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior 31:157-175.
Plavcan, J. M. 2012. Sexual size dimorphism, canine dimorphism, and male-male competition in primates. Where do humans fit in? Human Nature 23:45-67.
Gordon, A. D. 2006. Scaling of size and dimorphism in primates II: Macroevolution. Int. J. Primatol. 27:63-105.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6009/1320.full
“Despite the large amount of junk science on the topic that is reported in the popular media and in some academic outlets, there are also consistent findings of sex differences that hold up across studies, across species, and across cultures. Most of these are ignored by Fine. This may, in part, reflect the fact that whereas sex differences are reliably found in several areas of research, none of the differences support essentialist claims that girls and boys need separate educations based on their brain types, that one sex is better suited to become engineers, or that one sex is inherently more intelligent—to name just a few of the ideas being promoted under the guise of “science.””
“Consider the finding that, in more gender-equal societies, females perform as well as males in mathematics (7), much better than males in reading (7), and much worse than males in visuospatial tasks (5). No simple theory, such as the hypothesis that sex differences reflect societal norms or that gender-equal societies will reduce all sex differences, can explain this pattern of results.”
“For some examples: Jay Giedd (National Institute of Mental Health) has found sex differences in normal brains at every stage of development (8). Larry Cahill (University of California, Irvine) has shown that sex and brain lateralization are important influences on emotion and memory (9). Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller University) has spent decades carefully documenting estrogen and other hormonal effects on neural development (10).”
“The books are strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science. They are weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research. “
@abbeycadabra:
Not sure what the question means because to me trans people are not a “what” but a “who.” They are a (very small) group of human beings who have had a disconnect between the phenotypic sex they express and the psychological state of their minds. I do not think we have enough data to know exactly how that happens, but in crude but roughly accurate terms the biological state of their brains leads to a psychology and behaviour that is discordant with the biological state of their bodies. None of that makes them (or women, or men) intrinsically better or worse at most tasks. However there is data to show that certain tasks (visual-spatial, for example as above) are indeed different in men and women. How this would relate to trans people I don’t think anyone knows since their numbers are small and I am unaware of the studies.
There is a lot of bullshit “science” out there in this field that is used in the way that everyone here is bristling (and I myself bristle at) but that doesn’t mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Which is what started all of this when PZ agreed with Cordelia Fine’s conclusions, some of which are true but some false, and then doubled down on it with his “your math is fine but your humanity isn’t” comment.
What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?
Have you ever asked a trans person? They could tell you, you know!
@dpavlov, I was not asking you for evidence that there can be found physical and morphological differences between the sexes, nor was I asking for links to blog posts by Jerry Coyne reiterating the same with some examples from non-human animals thrown in for flavour. I was asking specifically for studies about specific psychological traits, where not only has correlation been found, but also an evidence that such behaviour is innate, i.e. that it leads to reproductive advantage over a behaviour learned.
This made me laugh, but if you thought it meets the criteria, it should perhaps made me cry:
Because this is probably (no study linked, cannot check the original source) is experiment performed with fully socialized adults. So it can reliably only ever find a correlation.
The closest to answering you came with this:
However the source ( 5 ) is not a study at all, it is a letter critique of a study that has found the opposite – i.e. that upbringing affects ability to perform visuaspatial tasks. The whole link is not a study, but an article. However I would like to draw your attention to this part of it nonetheless (emphassis mine):
BTW the full article has also a source ( 6 ) I looked it up and it was a study performed with children at the age of 6 years and it found significant difference betwen boys and girls. At 6 years! At this age children are already heavily socialized. And guess what the study also found? With correct educational approach the differences between the sexes were erased. So this one also does not point to any innate behaviour (or predisposition).
BTW, you do not need to repeat that humans are sexually dimorphic. We all know that.
You are circling the real issue being discussed – and that is not whether there are innate differences between the sexes, but how do you distinguish them from learned ones? Especially when they are not directly linked to reproduction?
*reads dpavlov’s posts*
I’m not sure what the hell I just read, but I do know it was a fail of massive proportions.
83. rietpluim
Reckon it means “I am a left-leaning progressive and also a sex essentialist, and I have just found the place where those are not compatible.”
thirdmill wrote:
… What? I’m not arguing that non-American women are genetically different from American women. I’m arguing that everything you presented is highly cultural rather than biological, and presented some evidence that it’s very specific to US culture and that the effects vanish if you widen your net to the entire world. If you want to argue that certain attitudes are innately female, then you have to do a hell of a lot better than that. You don’t have to just explain American attitudes, but also also the entire rest of the world, and all of recorded human history if you want to tag something as innate.
@Charly
If you are looking for a single study to demonstrate causation in such a complex topic then you are asking for the impossible and don’t know how scientific inquiry works. Suffice it to say, I’ve spent enough time rattling around these parts. It’s clear that folks here already have conclusions in mind and that’s that. Such is the problem with being blinded by ideology and hence the critiques by Coyne and Halpern.
@rietpluim
Perhaps one day you will understand what that means, maybe when you wipe the ideology from your eyes to get a clear view. And I have met (and treated) plenty of trans folks. Never seem to have had a problem with them and never seem to have any of them not have any idea what it means when I say something along the lines of my response to you previously. Also falls in line with what the head of endocrinology here sums up and her practice is specifically geared towards trans folks. But hey, what do all those people know anyways?
@abbeycadabra
I am certainly not “progressive” nor am I ideological. I am liberal leaning with a grounding in science and evidence and proactively work to eschew any and all ideology, something I know is completely foreign around these parts. I accept good ideas (and reject bad ones) no matter the source.
In any case, I’ve wasted enough of my time around here and will go back to doing actual work. Or just watching YouTube videos as that is proving (as I suspected) to be a better use of my time. I wish everyone a wonderful evening and remainder of the week (oh, and St. Paddy’s day!).
Tootles.
Dear lord, please let this be the one flounce that sticks.
Bull fucking shit…We have your idiocy and idiotology….
Vivec #89
Amen.
@dpavlov
I am not askig for the magic bullet. I am asking for a study that shows causation for one variable among many.
But I agree that it extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, to perform such a study. Not because it is impossible in principle (there are statistical procedures designed exactly for that), but the numbers of variables are too high and we cannot tweak them at will.
That is the whole effing point of the objection to gender essentialism, a point you seemed to miss. So I guess that your admission of the difficulty in this post of yours is for me mission accomplished – you now understand that the issue is extremely complex and cannot be distilled to simplified statements like “women are bad at reading maps” or “men are innately promiscuous” based only on a few observations and a handfull of studies showing correlations.
You apparently were not very observant when reading Coynes article that you linked here, irony that is undoubtedly not lost on many. It has certainly entertained me.
I always love things that say ‘men are better at’ or ‘women are better at’, because…. I’m excellent at math, have REALLY GOOD spatial skills, and sure I’m great with linguistic stuff but that’s going to just naturally happen when you enjoy reading a lot and therefore had a 4th grade reading level when you were 5. (but reading for fun, is, of course a sissy girly thing to do that no self respecting boy would ever do but clearly something like that couldn’t cause the difference in linguistic tendencies because BIOLOGY! and GENDER ESSENTIALISM!) But I guess if we tally all the stuff up, I technically have a ‘male brain’ residing in my cisgender female body?
And regarding the whole “men are bigger, therefore because competition with other males”…. The size dimorphism between men and women is really very small. It appears to be a steady average of around 5 inches height across the board. There’s far greater proportional size differences in deer, lions, and gorillas than in humans. And being larger doesn’t necessarily mean stronger considering I’m 5’6” tall and stronger than nearly all the men of my acquaintance.
And ohmigods, they brought up the whole ‘attractive strangers propositioning people for sex shows which are promiscuous’ thing of course also completely ignores that I am going to reject ANY man that walks up to me and asks me to have sex because a- I could be murdered, and b- I’d then be posthumously tut-tutted for being incautious enough to accept a random solicitation for sex. That study is so fucking stupid from the get go.
Rowan vet-tech, not as stupid as the vervet vervet toy-preference study.
( http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/laughable-gender-research-vervet-toy.html )
I dunno, man. Kinda sounds like ideology to me. :o)
I’m sorry, you were saying? :o)
I find it really amusing because the most difficult visio-spatial and mental rotation tasks I’ve ever had to tackle were all related to sewing.
@93 Rowen
For you.
http://www.oecd.org/gender/data/education/#d.en.387789
I love the dimorphism argument. It’s always evidence of somebody who has looked at something trivially obvious, made a conclusion that supports their preexisting bias and then decided they don’t need to look at no stinky evidence.
It never ceases to amaze me – or at least piss me off – when people sympathetic to gender essentialism present themselves as mightily impartial and scientific and objective and scientific and very very very scientific – and consistently mix up correlation and causation in what they fondly imagine constitutes scientific evidence.
We are a social species; we are socialised from birth (and even before, to the extent people know or think they know what flavour is being cooked). It is very difficult or impossible to isolate a variable from the almost-infinite confounding factors. And even if we could/where we can, the bell-shaped curves overlap more than they differ. It is both incorrect and useless (except to shore up one’s just-so stories, of course) to generalise “(all) women are more this, and (all) men are more that”.
And even if we could, it would be both wrong and useless to derive prohibitions from this.
… and the self-declaredly very very very impartial objective scientific people are oddly silent on the existence of studies showing stereotype threat and the effects of chilly climate. Funny, that.
@chris61
Looking at those charts a few things are clear:
1) there is a systematic difference between how girls/boys performe that is consistent across many countries
2) these systematic differences seem to be statistically significant even with simple look-and-see test
3) these differences within country are always significantly smaller than differences between countries.
To me from these three follows one conclusion:
Even if there is a statistically significant innate gender difference, it is dwarfed by cultural influence. In technical terms – statistically significant, but practically meaningless.
Charly
It’s also not that we don’t have significant evidence of cultural factors that influence interest/performance.
Seriously, the times I wanted to punch a teacher for declaring that “boys are better at maths, girls at language” about kids age 6…
dpavlov
What ideology?
@101 Charly
If it’s meaningless that boys do quite a bit worse than girls on reading tests, why should anyone care that boys are a little better than girls at certain mathematical skills? Surely either both are meaningful or neither are.
Do not intentionally misinterpret what I wrote. Meaningless is the hypothetical innate minuscule difference in comparison with the evident cultural. We should care about the huge culturally caused differences, and not waste our time with those minute ones. After those hugely influential factors are taken care of, then we can look if there is some innate biological predisposition left. Untill that, everything is just speculation.
@105 Charly
How will we know that those hugely influential cultural factors have been taken care of? What’s the measure of success?
Evidently.
This piece of idiocy, which is impossible anyway…
… directly contradicts this one.
What does Doctor Objective think his algorithm for determining good vs. bad ideas is, if not ‘an ideology’?
Precisely the sort of argument I have learned the hard way to stay the hell out of…BUT…I can’t resist a couple of responses.
Charly @#68:
I must know where you got that idea. It is a very surprising claim. Surprising enough to be difficult to believe.
Morales @#94: Linking to that post uncritically is irresponsible. SC has always been deeply confused about that study (and indeed about the conventions of scientific communication in general).
Gilliel @#98:
That is only true if one is inclined to ignore the entire field of behavioral ecology and all data on species other than modern Homo sapiens (i.e. if one is a sociologist)
From comment 81:
… Because of course no goodlooking man ever harmed a woman he’s never met before when she refuses his oh-so-well-meaning advances. Right.
Also, re: the plumage argument (where females are supposed to be all choosy while the males get out their gaudiest colours and show off with a rockin’ strut of promiscuity) – am I to assume that the (on average relatively) broader shoulders of men (as an example) are the equivalent of antlers, or a peacock’s tail? Bad showing, human men! I was expecting more!
(So if men are more promiscuous and women have the luxury of being choosy, why are men more dissuaded from wearing daring outfits and brighter colours than women in a great number of European-origin cultures? Why is it women are the ones who are sexy when they are revealing their boobs, but it becomes a source of amusement when men wear tight shorts and show off some leg? Isn’t this the opposite of what one should expect, assuming that men are the promiscuous ones and women are being choosy…?)
Easy Peasy. When everybody, male/female/brown/black/LGBT/etc. is treated absolutely the same during in-utero development, early and late education and in cultural socialization and education, Then, and only then, you might see glimmerings of what is underneath the huge plastic human brain, to that which is not plastic.
[In response to OP] I’ve seen the atheist/science blogger drama creeping its way into our local March for Science, too, as well as low-key racist scientists using the March platform to spew their poorly supported bigotry. It’s funny to see folks who are unaware of long-standing drama blink in surprise; harder to convince them that the underlying message is crap and that they’re wasting their time being cordial and trying to challenge assumptions. But with the rise of the alt-right, the newbs seem to be catching on faster.
So on one hand the March is bringing these discussions into the mainstream. OTOH, at a time of greater mistrust for Science, it doesn’t really reflect well on us.
Hahahahahahahahahaha.
Fool.
There is no way to make in utero and ex utero environments the same for any two individuals, let alone for all individuals, so your statement is pretty much like a creationist saying they’ll only believe in evolution when they see a new species form before their very eyes.
@chris61
Except the evolutionary timescale isn’t really a huge confounding factor in our ability to show that evolution happens through means of natural selection.
Nope, it is saying that the experiment to show YOU are right is outside of the parameters considered appropriate for human experimentation.
You are nothing but an idiotlogue. Time to shut the fuck up.
@115 Nerd
So you’re saying that there are huge cultural influences on human behavior (across every culture that we know of) that lead to inequalities in measures like reading scores between males and females but we can never know when they’ve been eliminated? So how do you know that it’s cultural influences that are responsible for these inequalities?
To the extent this isn’t a strawman: parsimony.
ChasCPeterson @108,
Irresponsible, perhaps. But I was not uncritical; I was (contextually) approbative.
FWIW, someone (ahem) was critical about it, in the comments there.
(And SC did cite the study itself)
Thing is, that sort of study is meat and drink to gender essentialists.
@ChasPeterson
With regard to humans I got the idea from this book. Its author Ivo Pondělíček describes how sometimes (not always, but sometimes neverhteless) when people were raised insulated from informations about how sex works and hat dno possibility to observe it animals, they were not able to figure it out later on and ended up in his consultancy. One such pair did not practice intravaginal coitus, only coitus ante portas.
The drive to copulate, and the drive being attracted to opposite sex, are not learned. But the technique of copulation itself is.
As for other primates I skimmed what google.scholar.com showed me, and it showed that there is learned component to this in other primates as well.
For example this one mentions that mounting behaviour is probably learned at least in some primates -click site 145-, unfortunately the preview on google is fractured on all the wrong places but it mentions “Males which do not develop foot clasp mounting as infants or young juveniles, in contrast, fail to copulate in adulthood. Similar findings of deficient adult sexual behavior following early social restriction have been reported in several other laboratories.”
déjà vu
Lots of old ghosts here tonight.
chris61
For me the measure of success would be when the intercultural variation becomes significantly smaller than the inergender one within cultures, without the intergender one rising above its initial levels.
That can be comparatively easy to measure with PISA methology as it is. After that you could say that the cultural factors were mostly taken care off while the innate ones remain. It could still be the case that some underlying cultural bias still survived, however it would be much less likely than now when we know that a lot of underlying cultural biases are still alive and well.
Please note, that for math there are some countries where girls perform as good as boys, even some outliers where they outperform boys. However the diagrams contain only averages, not confidence intervals, so there’s that.
Please also note that it seems from the graphs that the more to the extremes you move (left- poor education, right- good education) the more the gap between the sexes seems to close (especially for reading, where the gap is more profound). It is greatest in the middle, where the learning obviously is not completely crap but has still a lot of room to improve.
Our complicated brains just help us make the same utterly compulsory and utterly compulsive act of sexual reproduction more complicated. We didn’t reinvent meiosis or find a way to circumvent it. Our bodies are going to do what our bodies have been doing since before we were us. Just try and stop yourself mid orgasm, or hold up a mirror and control your face muscles. That shit’s hard wired. My son reaches for a fistful of hair, and nothing but hair, when he’s tired (like me), and my daughter reaches for earlobes and only earlobes (like her aunt used to). No one taught them that. Would you have us believe that all courtship behaviors of all animal species, including invertebrates, are learned from the environment? That’s impossible (not to mention the bizarre lengths that plants will go to get their crossing over freak on). Online dating is nothing more than human lekking, modernized from nightclubs and bars, modernized from whatever came before that. But if instead you think there’s something special about humans because our brains are a little bigger, or even because we know better, then you belong to your own church of arrogant anthropocentrism. If you think that all sexual behavior is learned and subject to environment, then you belong with the conversion therapists. Even a comparison within our tiny ape family (am thinking along the lines of Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee) shows how a set of closely related, large-brained animals can follow contrasting trajectories of coevolution between ecology, social structure, sexual anatomy, and yes, reproductive behavior. Genes do influence behavior, as lancet flukes influence behavior, as a frontal lobotomy does, by changing the way neurons work.
It’s true that loving, dioecious, monogamous human pairs make happy homes for rearing those F1’s, but so do other permutations, which are equally “natural” genetic variants. Yes, it is a part of who we are to imagine a perfectly fair and just and beautiful set of guidelines for symmetrically symbiotic intraspecific sympatry (SSIS, or everyone getting along splendidly if we could all just do what’s right), but Girls Gone Wild and Bill Cosby and Grab the Pussy seem to always tag along too.
@recapitulation
Show me where anybody says this anywhere on this blog.
Now that I reread my #68 I see that I misswrote one word in the last sentence, which should have read “if it can be learned, it need not be innate.” but even with the mistake I made it is nowhere near to the strawman you are making now.
Okay, I’m getting a bit tired of the discussion, and I’m concluding with a question to the dpavlovs among us:
Please name a trait – one is enough – that is exclusive to one gender, other than the trait you use to define that gender. Something like “all people with one X chromosome always also have trait T where people with a different number of X chromosomes do not”. Nature or nurture, I don’t care, any trait will do.
And please don’t give me the “we’re talking averages here, not individual cases” bullshit. I know that, thank you. It is the entire fucking point.
The long socialization of the human child. It’s called parsimony. But then, essentialists can’t get beyond the genes. The genes have some influence, no doubt. The trouble for essentialists is that they can’t show what the genes really say, and what genes are responsible. They have nothing without being able to show links to certain genes.
You claim to be a scientist. You should know that. The burden of evidence is upon the essentialists to demonstrate, not just assert, their claims. And that requires linkages to the genes.
@125 Nerd
Just as I’ve never met anyone who believes that genetics doesn’t play a role, nor have I met any one who believes socialization doesn’t play a role. The human brain is malleable but not infinitely so. You say the trouble for essentialists is that they can’t show what the genes really say; they can’t point to specific links (with rare exceptions). The trouble is the same for the sociologists. They can’t say what role socialization actually plays and with rare exceptions can’t point to specific links either.
@121 Charly
There are some more detailed studies looking at math scores that still show that at the very high end of the scale boys are overrepresented. Also data showing that on SAT-M exams, males still outperform females. There are also data based on SAT scores showing that among those with very high math scores (male or female) those who also have high verbal scores are less likely to go into physical sciences (and more likely to go into health sciences among other fields) than those whose verbal scores are lower. It so happens that women are more likely to fall into the former category. Is that an inequity that requires some kind of correction?
This is of course, complete crap, because anything that changes rapidly over time must have a large socialization component. It’s also pretty difficult to see how inter-societal differences in language, costume, diet, skills normally acquired, etc., could be due to anything other than socialization and specifically, to being taught to children in each society.
@chris61
I do not know. I think there are still underlying societal causes for these for following reasons:
In order to take these data and say with any degree of confidence at all that those remaining differences in the upper range of the spectrum woul would have to be pretty sure that not only the educational system, but also the society as a whole socializes for at least these two tasks (math & reading) identically from early on.
I am not convinced that there is such society on the earth at this moment. Every society around the globe still has to some degree societal construction of gender roles and chlidren are exposed to those from as soon as they can perceive anything at all throughout the life.
Further I would argue that the innate gap between the sexes (if it exists) does not lie anywhere near the average at this time, but is smaller than the smallest measured gap at this moment. Unless it can be demonstrated that the currently still “losing” sex in those countries where the gap is closing or closed get preferential/additional education as well as broader socalisation to take those tasks as part of their gender identity. I specifically say that those both would have to take place together, because remedial education might sometimes be needed to counterbalance the biased socialisation.
Again, I am not convinced that there is such a country where boys would be encouraged to read as a whole, get extra education and still lack behind girls – and the same for girls with math. If there is such a country, please tell me which one.
@Charly (123)
This is the position that totally rejects gender essentialism (e.g., see posts by Giliell). It’s the opposite extreme position that nothing about the way straight or LGBTQ men and women behave has anything to do with genetic differences, or with differences in the way the same genes might function in differently-gendered bodies (adaptive or not). And it’s total bollocks.
@127 KG
You’re right of course. I misspoke. There are many aspects of human behavior that are clearly have a large socialization component. But do you hold the opposite true as well? Anything that doesn’t change rapidly over time must have a genetic component?
@128 Charly
What if the issue isn’t that boys aren’t encouraged to read but that boys, on average, don’t like to read as well as girls do? Do we force boys to read more because that, in effect, would be what remedial education would do? If girls who score very high in mathematical ability still prefer to go into biology or sociology, do we force them to study engineering?
WRONG. Anthropology and Cultural Sociology have a lot to say on the subject, and also science itself. The human brain is malleable, and structures do change during learning/culturalization. Example, musicians brain, link 1, link 2, link 3. A brain scientist looking a cast of Einstein’s brain said immediately he was a musician due to a certain fold in the cortex.
Things like this is why I am certain the cultural/learning influences are usually greater than the underlying basic brain.
Take language. Nobody is born being able to speak a language. But almost everybody learns to speak/sign at least one language. What is genetic is the ability to learn a language, not the language itself.
The issue is that during socialization, some boys get the idea you can’t be cool if you read books. It them becomes social pressure within their peer group. They stop each other from reading, making them a cohort with lower reading scores. One cannot reliably dig through the cultural effects to see the genetic effects. You haven’t presented any evidence on how to do that. Your evidence is from people who grew up in cultures, that had effects on their brain and its structures in a feedback loop with their learning and environment. To many variables to detect weak signals.
@Nerd #131
I would ad that there is clearly a developmental window for learning the first language and if that window is missed, later in life no language can be learned. first googled link
So the ability to learn language is innate, the unique window in which language must be learned is also innate, but the language itself or the quality of it etc. are clearly not.
chris61 #130
What if the moon is made of cheese? Would you like a slice?
Sorry, I was answering you honestly and taking you seriously until now, but with these obvious leading questions I have difficulty to continue to do so. Because these questions are completely irrelevant to the issue being discussed. The issue being – are there innate psychological differences between the sexes and how to distinguish them from learned ones.
When we know the answer to that, then we can debate what to do about it. Until then there is an endless row of “what-iffs” one can imagine.
____
Regarding the issue at hand – to me it seems that due to demostrable plasticity of human brain and the failure of feral children to live with humans without socialization in childhood (and the inability of at least some adults to even copulate, a task essential for the survival of the species) the default position, and thus null hypothesis against which alternative hypotheses are to be tested, is that any given behaviour/trait in humans is learned/socialized. Such position should be therefore the preferred explanation unless/until there is strong and conclusive evidence to the contrary. Such position should therefore also be the default position for discussing policies and societal changes etc.
Especially when you’re talking about differential aptitudes for tasks which are themselves clearly the products of culture and learning. I have a hard time believing that there’s a genetically-determined difference in reading ability which correlates with gender, since reading is a recent (in evolutionary terms) cultural invention.
You know who mocked me the most for enjoying reading? Boys. It was a thing to be scorned.
And yet, my dad is the one who instilled my love of reading (particularly sci-fi/fantasy), and my brother loves reading just as much as I do. Because we were brought up in a household that encouraged reading. A household wherein reading was a good and valuable thing.
Also, I’m only 34. I was told by teachers in grade school that girls weren’t good at math (and therefore I, being good at math, was extremely unusual) and that girls aren’t good at science (and therefore I, being good at and liking science, was extremely unusual). That means slightly over two decades ago that sexist shit was being repeated. And it’s still being repeated to this day. So of course there’s going to be differences. Why try hard at something if you’re told you’re just naturally not going to be good at it?
Why is the null hypothesis culture and learning, when they are “a recent (in evolutionary terms) cultural invention”? Before there was culture and learning, there was instinct. As Redhead points out, we didn’t evolve to speak a particular language, but to have the ability to learn a language. Therefore, ability is heritable. So are some pretty complex behaviors.
@135 Rowan
I’m 65 and no one ever told me that girls weren’t good at math or science. So while I don’t doubt your experience it wasn’t every girl’s experience even five decades ago.
I’m not sure if it should count as a proper null hypothesis… depends on where we’re starting, I guess. But you can very easily see it at work and gather all sorts of evidence about it. That is, “culture” (often not the right word to use) has all sorts of effects which are very well documented. We know very well that social differences in how genders/races/etc. are treated, for example, can have very significant effects on people in those groups (and for that matter it affects the dominant groups as well, in different ways). That’s about as fucking obvious and non-controversial as saying that the moon appears in the sky.
So, if you’re going to say “well, gee, maybe genes do it,” you ought to stop speculating and have something that is just as clear, which is just as explanatory, which has just as much of a significant effect, and which has just as much evidence to support it (being a big significant thing tends to go with having evidence for it) — compared to the factors I was just talking about.
Otherwise, your theory is a load of crap, and we can do much much better (scientifically, as well as morally if anybody seriously considers its implications). There’s probably a fancy of way of saying that involving the phrase “null hypothesis,” but anyway that’s the sort of thing you should conclude about your theory: that it’s crap. Maybe it’s not even implausible, but there are bigger things to worry about, which are much more well-established. And those things, “cultural” sorts of things, are to some extent under our control; we can change how fucking racist we are to other people, and which sorts of racist fucking policies and norms we’ll accept in our lives, because we know very well much that shit like that actually matters. So this one actually looks useful: you can apply it to the world to get something done, like you can with engineering or medicine or whatever. What exactly is the other sort of theory doing?
What do you think that means? And what sorts of conclusions should we draw based on the fact that one thing came before another thing?
I’m not sure what you mean by “learning,” but in a broad sense, my impression is that many instincts that developed among humans came around much later than the advent of learning itself. (Not what I learned or what you did, but learning — just as it’s not what my instincts happen to be or what another organism’s instincts are, but the whole category of instinctual behaviors.) There are studies showing even certain kinds of insects can learn, for example. And numerous other species of course, because it appears that all (or nearly all) animals can learn to some extent or another, so the phenomenon of learning in human beings is just a matter of degree. If that has any validity at all, then it looks very likely that the primate/hominid instincts you and I happen to have are an extremely late addition to the game….
… For what that’s worth, which I would say is very little, because the timing of such things in the distant past doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how significant or plausible it is, as an explanation of features/behaviors/etc. which are occurring in a specific person now. If both are operative, if the premise is that both are genuinely parts of the story you need to tell about the real world right now, then why should it make any difference which one started first, on some completely different organism a very long time ago? It seems like you want to say the later one (whichever one that happens to be) isn’t really quite as operative as the earlier one, maybe not as much as it would’ve been if it had come first…. Or I don’t know what the suggestion is supposed to be. When we’re talking about how to understand/explain/predict/affect a specific person’s behaviors now, how are supposed to make sense of anything like that? Does the universe really care when things first appeared in it, or in which order multiple things appeared? Doesn’t appear as if it does.
edit:
@recapitulation
I do not think anybody disputes that. But if there is something heritable that makes boys better at math than girls and girls better at reading than boys, it is not the ability to do math/ability to read. It would have to be some underlying ability that only coincidentally also affects these two recent cultural inventions. If there were such underlying ability under this all, it would in all probability affect more learned behaviors, more uniformly across cultures and it would not be as easily affected by learning.
A crude analogy: the ability to use screw driver is connected to our having hands able to grasp objects firmly and twist. This ability however affects a lot of other behaviours as well. If girls were discouraged from using screw drivers, they would not learn how to do it – but it would be false to imply that their inability to do so is innate unless all other things that are dependent on the ability to grasp objects firmly and twist were – like the ability to wring wet blanket.
So maybe the question you should ask: is there any underlying ability that makes girls better at reading and boys better at math? If yes, what is it?
This is demontrably true in some non-human animals, but also demonstrably unture in humans. Cases of feral children show this very well.
_______________
Chimpanzees have been shown to be able to count. They are our closest relatives. They are unlikely to share any of our cultural biases with regard to math.
When a study is performed that female chimpanzees are worse at learning counting than male chimpanzees, I will reconsider this one issue.
_____________
My sister is 50. Math teacher in ground school has point blank said to her from get go that girls are bad at math and she should not try to pursue any career that requires proficiency in it. He refused to help girls and spent less time with them in class, thus turning his statement into self-fulfilling prophecy.
Some of my woman friends my age shared similar experiences with me. But not all, because not every math teacher was an asshole. But while I know some women who were discouraged from math due to their gender, I do not know a single man with such experience.
Those arguing for gender essentialism should keep in mind the Forest Troop of baboons in Kenya. There, a TB epidemic killed off high status males. Interesting what followed.
Socialization and the need to socialize are strong.
chris61, #137
Decades ago, girls were definitely being told in various ways, implicitly and explicitly, that they’re not supposed to be doing math or science. So while I don’t doubt your experience, it was certainly very commonplace.
Are you a woman? I’m asking because from your posting history, I got the impression you’re a man. Because if you are a man, then your post there sounds absolutely ridiculous.
@142 Saad
Gender stereotyping much?
My mom is 64 and she was told, point blank, that too much education would harm a girl’s/woman’s brain. So your experience is definitely NOT universal.
chris61, #143
So a man then.
@ 144
I didn’t say my experience was universal. I said your’s (and apparently also your mother’s) weren’t.
@145
You’re hilarious!
chris61, apparently you’re not intending it but your words come off as extremely dismissive. Especially on a topic about gender essentialism. It is the experience of MANY women and girls that they are subtly and not so subtly told that they aren’t cut out for science or math. That you did not experience that somehow makes you extremely *lucky*.
It isn’t the job of a theory of natural history to tell us what we can or should do, it’s about the mechanisms that led to the present.
Nothing really, except that we carry our history around with us. This was in response to Dunc., who said that sexes predated reading, to which one could say that sexes also predated humans altogether. For no other species do we separate software, hardware, and ecological context so artificially. I don’t think it’s fair to start with the assumption that everything we do now is de-coupled from the past that got us here. To me, that’s a modern creationism, a “bio-creationism” or something. To me, culture is an emergent property of our brain development. Chemists like to say that biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and physicists try and go a step further and claim to be the only first principle science. All levels are important, and it doesn’t help to draw artificial boundaries.
@ Charly
No, but chimps are one of the most horribly sexist species you’ll find, maybe not surprisingly.
Hopefully, we can fix all of our awful cultural biases.
Re: “Nature vs. Nurture”
It’s both.
We’re all a product of both genetic and environmental influence.
@recapitulation
I do not think you will find anyone here who will disagree with that either. But if you only read blogs who like to bash PZ and his comentators, you find lots of strawmen similar to this one flying around.
I actually have the impression that if for example dpavlov has read carefully what PZ and people here really say (not only what he is told they say) and took the care to think about his position and the arguments presented, they would find out that the positions they argue against nobody here holds and that our positions share more similarities than differences. However they (like many others) entered the debate not to learn and find things out, but to bash, to dominate, to piss on teritory, to win. And when things did not seem work out that well in this regard – whoosh.
That is unfortunately very common attitude in all corners of society.
@Charly
Don’t be silly – trying to understand what you’re arguing against is ideology.