If there was a scientific field (Evolutionary Sociology) that declared rationalism is harmful for humanity and the pursuit of rationality should be shunned or persecuted, I suspect that the vast majority of us would not accept these claims at face value and would look to see if their research was flawed, or their conclusions didn't follow. And if we found such evidence, we'd probably shout it from the rooftops.
(PZ links below, as I read him daily)
Evo-Psych is, not infrequently, used as a weapon against women.
The case made for these claims is often very bad.
...Every hunting man had a gatherer mother; every gathering woman had a hunting father.
This is the problem for the evolutionary psychology of sex differences: for each trait that you want to claim is a product of selection for a behavior that is different between sexes, you have to postulate a Plus that restricts its expression to a single sex.
So, sure, tell me that humans evolved cognitive mechanisms to aid in navigating by landmarks for better fruit and tuber searching, and I might well believe it to be reasonable; now tell me why you think it would only operate in women, and how it would be actively suppressed by genetic mecha
The "It must be “Let’s all beat up Evo Psych” Day!" article seemed very convincing when I read it, but now that I had some time to think about it, it seems much less convincing. Please tell me whether I am wrong...
The article essentially says that there are no "male genes" and "female genes", because everyone in every generation gets their genes from their father and their mother. So even when there is an evolutionary pressure only on one sex to evolve some skill, the other sex gets the skill automatically. When we find an evolutionary explanation why men have genes for some skill or trait, at the same time we found an explanation why their daughters have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too. And vice versa, when we find an explanation why women have genes for some skill or trait, we also have an explanation why their sons have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too.
A trait which would be different between sexes, would not only need genes benefiting one sex, but also some special genes to actively turn it off for the other sex. Otherwise, both sexes would have it. Even under assumption that a trait is helpful for one sex and irrelev...
So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones.
Sex hormones are actually a huge factor in human developmental biology and the interaction with genes is interesting; the overall contribution of chromosomal differentiation to sex differentiation is pretty minor in humans (note that this is not a generalizable statement about other living things; birds might be considered to have rather more definitively-linked chromosomal sex traits, and some species don't depend on chromosome structure directly, often using outside factors like temperature during development to influence this). Trivial example: this is why when a person assigned male at birth doses with exogenous estrogen during puberty, their breast development will tend to resemble that female-assigned relatives -- testosterone vs oestrogen during the pubescent phase is the big regulator of mammary tissue growth and clustering sites for subcutaneous fat; genetics influences the potential range of that growth.
...Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other sp
I clicked on this title with hackles slightly raised, prepared to point out that feminism is a normative set of beliefs, evolutionary psychology is a descriptive set of theories, and therefore there is no such conflict. Fortunately the content of your actual post makes it clear that it's unnecessary to point this out, but you might like to know that your title may come across as inflammatory!
I think the problem you describe, to the extent that it does exist, is part of a more general problem in (some communities in) feminism that has to do with a vague general suspicion of "the establishment", including science. Some of it's there for good reason, e.g. the history of medicine contains some pretty bad atrocities against women, but it's definitely taken too far in some circles.
My opinion is that there's no quick fix for this. Getting more women into science is the long-term fix. Scientifically-inclined online communities incorporating friendly behaviour towards women and embracing feminism is a small step that can help!
Some of it's there for good reason, e.g. the history of medicine contains some pretty bad atrocities against women, but it's definitely taken too far in some circles.
The history of medicine contains some pretty bad atrocities full stop.
The preferred interpretation is that focus on women is misplaced if women are not being particularly targeted by atrocities
"Ones particularly targeting women" is not an empty set, so that takes care of that, surely?
instead, the whole atrocities (preferably their source) should be tackled on directly in most cases.
Except in the real world, existing groups and their situations are exploited to get those atrocities a pass; most of these incidents (I'm tabooing "atrocities" here as the effect of repeated reference seems to be to make my words sound more emotionally-laden than is the case) happen in the first place because ofexisting attitudes on the part of the perpetrators, and majority/marginalized power imbalances etween them and the target population.
When a senior surgeon at their own clinic a wealthy area with a mostly-majority, mostly-wealthy clientele starts sterilizing people who come in for other procedures, it's a bunch of lawsuits and a media frenzy just waiting to explode -- malpractice charges are the best-case scenario. When it's a bunch of doctors in Indian Health Service hospitals on reservations all over the country doing it to Native American women, basically nobody outside those women and their families ever hears about it or takes it seriously. It may take decades to get a public acknowledgement from any of the relevant parties that it happened at all.
Wouldn't that just be the non-overlapping magasteria argument, though?
No. The problem with NOMA type arguments isn't because of an attempt to separate normative and descriptive statements about reality. The problem with NOMA is that it is a pathological system deliberately constructed to avoid paying rent while still claiming that ontological entities exist which in their usual constructions have their rent checks bounce.
The problem is that feminists generally don't restrict themselves to making normative claims. Furthermore, many of the arguments for their normative claims rely on descriptive claims.
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism.
Feminism as an ideology that makes both factual and moral claims, with the moral claims being the primary motivation, and the factual claims serving as rationalizations for the moral claims. It's a matter of indifference whether the factual claims are true - they're just tools in the service of furthering the moral claims. Opening the factual claims to alternative explanations that don't support the moral claims undermines the power of the ideology, and so is resisted.
I'm a feminist. I started reading this blog because I like Methods of Rationality and the overlap between rationalists and nootropics nerds intrigued me. I studied sociology, gender studies and cultural studies in college, so that's where my background is.
In discussions I've been a part of, evolutionary psychology ends up being sort of a pariah viewpoint because it's constantly used to reinforce social norms that are tied up in patriarchy. We also tend to, for various reasons, believe more in nurture over nature. Here's my reasons why I do that, and why I am dismissive of evolutionary psychology by default.
The idea that evolution has driven men to be a certain way and women to be otherwise is generally really hard to prove because it's pretty much impossible to find people who are outside of the social structures that exist. However, historically ideas of how men and women evolve are tied up in ideas of hunter-gatherer cultures, many of which are being regularly proven wrong (the recent evidence found on the proportion of gathered food vs. hunted food eaten by hunter-gatherer societies, for example). These assumptions are based on how we view gender as a society and how we perceive...
I believe that a large portion of people who think feminism and ev-psych conflict are making some form of the mistake Eliezer describes in The Evolutionary Cognitive Boundary.
When someone says, "People do X to signal Y", I tend to hear, "People do X when they consciously or subconsciously expect it to signal Y", not, "Evolution built people to do X as an adaptation that executes given such-and-such circumstances, because in the ancestral environment, X signaled Y."....
....All that should matter for saying "The parent truly cares about the child" is that the grief in the parent's mind is cognitively real and unconditional and not even subconsciously for the sake of any ulterior motive....
.....Of course the emotional circuitry is ultimately there for evolutionary-historical reasons. But only conscious or subconscious computations can gloom up my day; natural selection is an alien thing whose 'decisions' can't be the target of my cynicism or admiration.
To be more explicit, many feminists probably get upset at many of the ideas that ev-psych proposes because, if one does not keep the evolutionary-cognitive boundary in mind, those theories ma...
Being cuckolded (in this context) means unknowingly raising not-your-genetic-offspring while believing it is your own. A male partner's infidelity can't cuckold a woman.
But I imagine most mothers would be horrified to discover, ten years after the fact, that their newborn was stolen and replaced with someone else's, and the child they've devoted so much to is not actually their genetic offspring. A brief bout of Google indicates that hospital baby swaps can spark multimillion dollar lawsuits, sometimes successful...
All the possible reasons for the conflict you listed suggest that the solution is to help feminists understand evolutionary psychology better, so they won't have a knee-jerk defensive reaction against it. This could come off as a little condescending, but more importantly, it misses the other side of the issue. In order to leave itself less open to criticism, evolutionary psychology could be more rigorous, just as other "soft" sciences like medicine and nutrition could be more rigorous. This would make it harder for critics to find things to o...
Is the standard for writing '[Link]' on a topic applicable here? The links are only recommended, not the bulk of the post. Thanks
Feminism is epistemically irrational but potential instrumentally rational for both women (obviously) and men.
Consider factual claims about domestic violence. Domestic violence costs around 50,000 dollars per person AUD according to this paper.
The foremost authoritive Australian source summarises the matter as such:
...eminist researchers have long identified ‘gender asymmetry’ in domestic violence, arguing that women are the primary targets of abuse and that men comprise the large majority of perpetrators. On the other hand, family conflict researchers typi
Just to update this thread with recent discussions on EP: the list of all commentaries and responses to SWT's 'The Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences?' is here and most of the papers are available online freely by googling them. Very easy:
The problem with these kinds of debates is that human have political type thinking, even when we are trying not to. So we tend to interpreted things through the lens of our politics.
This debate is one example alone others. Like have inter-sex people are considered to be something to fix, rather than just sexual features not being set in stone.
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism.
That's false. The moral claim of feminism is that man and woman should be treated equally. Reality is that they aren't treated equally. The goal of feminism is to change reality.
In the last decades feminist were quite successful in doing so. Given the success of the feminist movement they don't have a real incentive to chance the way they try to create social change.
Most humans have biases on a subconscious level. Scientists are humans. A person that's well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.
A person that's well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.
Maybe that's because a person well trained in deconstructivism can find anything in anything. :D
More seriously, maybe a person can more easily find the biases they don't share then the biases they share. And maybe being interested in feminism and being interested in deconstructivism correlates positively.
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism.
That's false. The moral claim of feminism is that man and woman should be treated equally. Reality is that they aren't treated equally.
I think you are misinterpreting what was meant here. What seems to have been meant is that there's no conflict between what normatively feminism claims and the description of how reality actually behaves, not whether the feminist ideals have been accomplished. This is in contrast with for example how classical marxism makes claims about the nature of reality that are just demonstrably false about the nature of economics, and that's independent from any descriptive claim about how economies currently work.
No, I do understand well what diegocaleiro intended to communicate. It's just that what he intended to communicate isn't the only thing that he communicates.
Are you saying that you are deliberately interpreting his statement in a way that you know wasn't intended?
It feels only sporting to tell you that a lot of people on this site have been trained to have alarm bells go off when reading this sentence.
That doesn't change the fact that this is the reality. This is why it's hard to have no conflict between evolutionary psychology folks and academic feminists.
I describe reality and because of their training for alarm bells LessWrong folk doesn't like my post. Evolutionary psychologists describe reality and because of their training for alarm bells feminists don't like it.
There no substantial difference. Few people care about understanding reality for it's own sake. I don't see LessWrong as a sport that's about maximizing karma.
That's not what I mean. I am talking specifically about the statement:
A person that's well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.
If I were feeling less sporting, I would make a jibe about how well-trained in deconstructivism (deconstructionism?) a person would have to be to find gender bias in the list of ingredients on a box of cereal. Literary textual analysis is not seen as a particularly credible method for deducing facts around here.
The wording of the statement is also worrying, in that it's reminiscent of confirmation bias and Type I errors.
I am not making any kind of comment on any gender-politics issue in my response to you. I am simply informing you that the argument you have chosen to use in this case is an extremely poor match for the audience.
I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.
Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed. and others...
But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.
How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.
But will the scientific community pull it off?
Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8