Evolution vs. PC Parenting: Guess Which Wins
It's so amazing when people try really, really hard to believe that sex differences are caused by culture.
The way the PC people think, if only you give little girls trucks and refuse to let them wear pink, they'll end up working as garbagepersons -- oops, that is, they'll become corporate presidents and leaders in STEM. (Nobody wants the garbageman job -- so a guy will take it. Male privilege!)
A quote from a man whom evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman met at a party recently:
"We were very careful not to give our children gendered toys. Now my daughter is a lingerie designer & son designs construction equipment"
— Diana S. Fleischman (@sentientist) February 20, 2017
A reply from cognitive neuroscientist Christian Jarrett:
@sentientist Twin 2-yr-olds' bedroom this AM: my son armed w/ his slipper "me fighting man"; my daughter arranging "circle time" w/ teddies
— Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) February 20, 2017
Where do sex differences come from? As I wrote in a column, referencing the work of sex differences researcher Joyce Benenson:
As developmental psychologist Joyce Benenson writes in "Warriors and Worriers," an excellent new book on evolved sex differences, "Throughout most of human history, men and women have specialized in different behaviors necessary to ensure the survival of their children to adulthood."Men evolved to be warriors, physically and psychologically prepared to do battle in a way women are not. Most men have far more muscle mass and physical strength than women and far more of the hormone of aggression, testosterone.
Even very young boys show a love (not shared by girls) of play fighting, of having an "enemy" to battle, and of weaponry -- to the point where Benenson finds it common for boys in preschool who lack toy guns to shoot "bullets" out of a doll's head.
In addition to women being physically weaker, research finds that they are more fearful than men -- from infancy on -- and rarely engage in physical fighting. This makes sense, Benenson points out, as physical injury would jeopardize a woman's ability to have children or to survive to protect the ones she's already had.
So women evolved to prefer men who would protect them and their children -- a preference that is still with us today. (Our genes are clueless about the women's movement and the fact that a woman can defend herself just fine by using a pink Glock with a Hello Kitty slide cover plate.)
P.S. On an unrelated note, Christian Jarrett's book, "Great Myths of the Brain," is just terrific and very readable and engaging for non-academics. I haven't been doing new podcasts lately because I'm in the process of doing corrections on my book, but I'll have him on when I start up again.
It's a religion not a science. They so desperately want to believe everyone is a blank slate. But reality won't bend to their whims.
This is also why psychology is called a soft science. There are far too many who pick data to support their beliefs rather than change their beliefs to match the data.
Ben at February 26, 2017 5:12 AM
Don't kid yourself that the data in medicine are better. An epidemiologist and statistician talks to me about vetting studies and the abuse that goes on (shelving papers when experiments don't have the desired effect, p-hacking, etc.) He pretty frequently sends me stuff that reflects that the medical community is not making evidence-based decisions about your health.
The areas in psychology where some want to see what's there instead of what they'd like to be there are ev psych and anthropology, though anthropology is growing increasingly ideologue-ized. (Just had this conversation yesterday when I sat down in a coffee shop next to a guy who turned out to be one of the rock stars of anthropology. Pays to be a busybody! Also pays to have your boyfriend be fixing your computer on a Saturday -- a day you normally would not want to go out to the crowded hipster paradise that the big street by me has become.
Amy Alkon at February 26, 2017 5:33 AM
Strange (not) that they did not go after Kardashian. Some animals are more equal than others.
http://www.eonline.com/news/644458/kim-kardashian-on-girlie-girl-north-west-s-fashion-sense-shoes-first-then-you-can-change-her-diaper
Bob in Texas at February 26, 2017 5:41 AM
The kids.
Crid at February 26, 2017 5:44 AM
Because of biology, men and women evolved to be different. And we evolved a social structure based on those differences. Feminists want to remake society so those differences are negated, that is so little girls don't grow up thinking they have to have tea parties with their dolls and little boys don't grow up thinking they have to fight monsters.
The drive to not pigeonhole children into a social role is admirable. The way the feminists are trying to do this is beyond ridiculous. They want to deny nature for everyone.
Not every little girl who has a tea party with her dolls is a frustrated math prodigy. And not every little boy playing pirates with his friends is secretly wishing he could be holding a tea party with them instead. However, some are.
We simply need to learn to accept and encourage the little girl more comfortable with engines and math problems than with dolls a clothes; and the little boy more comfortable with dolls and clothes then with engines and math problems. We don't need to force every little girl to be a mechanic and every little boy to have tea parties.
Feminists are trying to turn society on a dime, rather than letting it evolve. With birth control and statutory rape laws, little girls are not being married off at 14 to endure a lifetime of pregnancy and childbirth. They're exploring math and science, sports, and trades like never before; and not because Gloria Steinem burned her bra.
And men are now free to explore nursing, teaching, fashion, cooking, and other traditionally feminine fields without censure. And some of them have made a pretty good living in those fields.
Society and our social structures are evolving, but it takes time. And time is what the feminists want to deny. These kinds of sea changes need to happen through evolution, not revolution.
Conan the Grammarian at February 26, 2017 6:58 AM
That has to be the most ridiculous thing I see all week. It just has to be, otherwise we're all in trouble.
A daycare center that does not accept immunized kids and sends out an alarmed tweet when an almond is discovered to be in the facility.
What were the parents supposed to do when they saw this tweet? Leave work and rush to the center to save their little darlings? I'm sure their bosses would be okay letting them go in the middle of the workday because there's an errant nut (and not a gun-wielding one) threatening their children.
Conan the Grammarian at February 26, 2017 7:05 AM
Parents and society try hard to acculturate kids with respect to politics and religion. But they fail a good part of the time. Kids of the same parents will split in their politics or change their church. The same person will change their politics and church over time. If gender identity was just like other acculturation, there would be similar massive failures. The claim that gender is just due to culture assumes some sort of massive conspiracy to force kids to behave in certain ways--but how would everyone come to agree on what the indoctrination should be, across cultures, across the centuries? It defies logic and evidence.
cc at February 26, 2017 8:50 AM
It defies logic and evidence.
Logic and evidence are racially insensitive, sexist constructs of patriarchal rapists.
Only a bigot would use logic and acknowledge reality
lujlp at February 26, 2017 10:38 AM
No one wants the garbageman's job, so that's why whoever will take it gets $100K a year in NYC!
Dennis Chapman at February 26, 2017 11:15 AM
Feminists are trying to turn society on a dime, rather than letting it evolve. With birth control and statutory rape laws, little girls are not being married off at 14 to endure a lifetime of pregnancy and childbirth. They're exploring math and science, sports, and trades like never before; and not because Gloria Steinem burned her bra.
And men are now free to explore nursing, teaching, fashion, cooking, and other traditionally feminine fields without censure. And some of them have made a pretty good living in those fields.
Society and our social structures are evolving, but it takes time. And time is what the feminists want to deny. These kinds of sea changes need to happen through evolution, not revolution.
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She didn't burn her bra (very few women did, contrary to popular belief) and all those developments didn't happen without a huge amount of force from women and men who refused to just be patient and "wait." (Taking a page from MLK, no doubt.)
As I've mentioned before, while yes, it's too bad that the role of the housewife got such a bad rap in the 1970s (doing that didn't exactly inspire boys to do/enjoy housework, after all), you'd think everyone would realize by now that SOMETHING had to be done to get girls from conservative families/communities to think twice before throwing away all their options after high school or even college. Even by now, many haven't quite gotten the message that it's not safe for girls to do that.
lenona at February 26, 2017 12:12 PM
Los Feliz Daycare, by the way.
Per Lenona: "... you'd think everyone would realize by now that SOMETHING had to be done to get girls from conservative families/communities to think twice before throwing away all their options after high school or even college."
With you to enlighten the benighted peasant women, no doubt.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at February 26, 2017 12:42 PM
No kidding.
And those developments didn't happen in a vacuum either. Society had already been evolving to the point that it was ready for the changes the latecomers would take an undue amount of credit for implementing.
Women had already shown they could do things they were traditionally not allowed to do. Mary Anne Evans, Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, the codebreakers at Bletchley Park (Mavis Lever Batey et al), and others had already paved the way for society to realize that a woman did not have to be only a housewife and could pursue what had been traditionally male-dominated endeavors.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been campaigning for an expansion of women's role in society decades before Gloria Steinem was alive. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about women's rights in the 1700s and engaged in a famous running debate with Edmund Burke over the French Revolution. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, would write Frankenstein.
If we want to go back even farther to the 1600s, we can examine the career of playwright and novelist, Aphra Behn.
The invention of The Pill in the '50s freed women from pregnancy, the natural result of having sex and the biology that had spurred the existing social construct. It also initiated a social paradigm in which women were free to have sex without worrying about getting pregnant. Social mores would catch up to that later.
To act like the '60s Women's Lib movement was the beginning of the "liberation" of women is to deliberately ignore all the women who paved the road down which those '60s activists would walk.
But that's what "progressive" movements do, act like progress on the issue dawned with them and all that went on before they came along was oppression and darkness. That way, the "liberated" will owe them.
Conan the Grammarian at February 26, 2017 1:37 PM
Plenty of conservatives are/were rich and educated - and vice versa. Being rich or educated doesn't always mean having common sense.
From Oct. 1987, in Ms. Magazine:
"Six months ago I too was a self-described 'happy homemaker.' I baked bread, grew roses, played with my toddler. Then I woke one morning and found my husband (and our car, our stereo, our checkbook, etc.) gone. I was COMPLETELY surprised; I had assumed he was as happy as I was!
"I had to immediately find a job (which pays a third what his does); arrange for day care: try to scrape together enough money for food, mortgage, and utilities.
"Housewife is NOT a valid career option because you have no control over your own life. If you lose your husband you can’t go down to the employment agency and apply for another one!"
lenona at February 26, 2017 1:48 PM
And those developments didn't happen in a vacuum either.
____________________________________
I never said they did.
Even so, new attitudes didn't mean new, anti-discriminatory laws, because too many people didn't really want the discrimination to stop, whether it was about equal housing for single women, employment, property rights, etc. The 19th Amendment didn't change everything - discriminatory laws persisted into the 1970s, at least. 50-plus years. So clearly, serious action was needed. And young activists will likely always consider themselves to be more important than their predecessors; that doesn't mean they won't change their minds as they get older.
Re a pretty similar subject:
"What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books."
- Gay novelist Christopher Isherwood, probably post-1970 (he died in Jan. 1986).
lenona at February 26, 2017 2:25 PM
I agree Amy that medicine is not a hard science. And economics is more advertising than science. There are large parts of biology that are hard sciences. And physics is largely a hard science. But even in the hard sciences you find fraud and hucksters. People fake their data. Sometimes famously so. The main thing that separates the hard sciences from the soft to non-sciences is replication. The hard sciences have groups who's only job is to repeat others experiments and verify that they get the same results. Sometimes the same experiments get repeated over and over slowly nailing down exactly what were the critical components and correct answers.
In that sense the main difference between the hard and soft sciences is the cost of replication. Measuring the weight of an electron requires some specialized equipment. But that equipment can then be reused for other tests. Human trials, especially dangerous ones, are very difficult to do once much less hundreds of times. As for economics, you can't even run one experiment much less two or three on how a society functions. Instead you have to look for historical trends and hope you got the right answer.
Ben at February 27, 2017 6:44 AM
Yes and no. Sure there are general trends for the sexes. But there are also fashion trends and heavy marketing campaigns.
There is nothing inherently femalr about the color pink.
Nicolek at February 27, 2017 12:22 PM
Adding another "protected class" to our anti-discrimination laws expands society's universe of obligation. It doesn't just give legal protections to a group of people, it obligations society, increasing regulatory burdens and requirements. It's not just that you can't discriminate in hiring or housing, it's that you must prove that you don't. You must count the members of each class in your pool and compare that to the community around you, a community whose boundaries and definitions change at the whim of a government bureaucrat.
The cost to society of expanding its universe of obligation, in terms of economic opportunity, is pretty high.
Conan the Grammarian at March 1, 2017 7:41 AM
Not sure I understand your point. So a woman now has to compete for the goods along with every other individual who might need the goods a lot more than she does. Fine. Doesn't mean that anyone should have the legal right to discriminate against her just because she's female or single or married. Of course, men deserve not to be discriminated against as well. Which is not to say that tax laws are always unfair regarding married people vs. singles - and one day (yes, I know this sounds crazy) it just might happen that parents of minors will find themselves being taxed more than non-parents, in order to put a brake on overpopulation. That would not be discrimination, necessarily. Someone once said that the 15-billionth baby will likely never be born - and not because of birth control, but because of the likelihood of nuclear war and/or global famine.
lenona at March 2, 2017 10:32 AM
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