One of the central claims of evolutionary psychology is that virtually all human behavior was hard-wired into the brain during the “Era of Evolutionary Adaptation,” a mythical time deep in the Stone Age that bore an uncanny resemblance to The Flintstones. According to ev psychos this golden age ended 10,000 years ago, and the human brain hasn’t evolved since, leading to a cottage industry in self-help books and speaking engagements by would-be brain gurus endlessly repeating that “our modern skulls house stone age minds.” It’s a ridiculous concept that has never made a lick of sense, because it was invented by psychologists who know even less about evolution (biological or cultural) than they do about psychology.

I could go into a lengthy discussion here of why it makes no sense, but instead I’ll just point you to this lovely new genetic study (New York Times, Science Daily) showing that human evolution has in fact sped up — enormously so — in the past 40,000 years, and especially in the past 10,000. Those dates line up nicely with two key transitions in our species’ history. The Upper Paleolithic explosion 40,000 years ago marks the point when modern humans started spreading over the planet and creating complex culture: art, jewelry, burial rituals, vastly more complex tools and technology, everything. And 10,000 years ago we had the Neolithic revolution, with the invention of agriculture and all that brought. If this new study is accurate, the rate of genetic change in humans during the past 5,000 years alone has been 100 times higher than in any other period of our evolution.

A caution: some people are already misunderstanding the import of this, thinking it means that biology rules and cultural evolution is unimportant. That couldn’t be more wrong. As powerful as genetic evolution is, it’s still grindingly slow and small compared to the speed and breadth of human cultural change. Culture is what made our genetic evolution speed up and is what’s keeping it on the boil. Our physical evolution for the past 40,000 years has been an interlocking, spiraling dance of cultural change and biological adaptation. And “human nature” — which the ev psychos are so fond of imagining was carved in stone hundreds of thousands of years ago — is a moving target. You cannot talk about the “nature” of women or the “nature” of men or anything else. The human species is in a slipstream of constant flux as our culture and our genes ceaselessly interact.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Ev-Psych Bullshit on December 11, 2007, 6:35 am EST

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I’m gearing up to post the continuation of the Grandmother Hypothesis, which I’ve been too busy to do proper justice to this week, but in the meantime here’s a news item that will set the stage.

First, a quiz.

1. What allows ev-psychos to get away with their cartoonish, Flintstones view of life in the Pleistocene, in which men controlled the resources and women were passive lumps trading sex for food?
2. What allows morons like Roy F. Baumeister to deliver a lecture on the topic “Women Have Never Contributed Jack-Shit to the Human Species Except By Giving Birth And Even That They Couldn’t Manage Very Well” without being shouted off the stage by an irate audience, disgusted by his ignorance?
3. What allows old-fashioned (read: sexist) archaeologists and museums to still get away with their obsolete “Man the Hunter” depictions of Paleolithic life?

The answer to all three questions is the same: the overwhelming cultural silence about the real role of women in our evolution and history.

Do you think articles like the following help?

Seafood led Early Man to come out of his shell

Ancient shells left in a cave 164,000 years ago suggest that a love of seafood and daytrips to the beach date back to the earliest days of mankind.

The discovery is so early in the history of Modern Man that the shellfish may mark the time when Homo sapiens first developed distinctive human behaviour.

~

The discovery of several species of shellfish in the cave puts back the date where mankind first treated the oceans as a larder by 40,000 years from 125,000 years ago.

Coastlines are recognised by scientists as likely migration routes and the discovery of how to exploit the shore for food would have been a factor in Man’s ability to colonise the rest of the world.

Researchers identified 15 types of marine creatures in the cave, which would have been about three miles from the coast when it was occupied. The remains of ancient fires indicate that the molluscs would have been cooked in their shells. The international team of researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Nature, said that it was likely that the transition to using beaches as a source of food was crucial to Man’s survival.

When our very language erases the existence of women, is it any wonder that our mental landscape is equally bereft?

It’s always offensive when ancient women are “disappeared” in this manner, but it is especially galling in this case since the behavior under discussion is shellfishing. Shellfishing, for chrissake, which is almost as strongly correlated with women as plant gathering — just as big-game hunting is correlated with men.

Look: everybody needs to be very careful about reading a gendered division of labor into the ancient past. But if ethnography is any guide at all to our Paleolithic ancestors, then gathering plants and shellfish has long been the kind of thing women typically do, just as big-game hunting is the kind of thing men typically do. (Let me note parenthetically here that net hunting, on the other hand, is a group-wide activity — men, women, young, old, everybody. And it’s a hell of a lot more productive than big-game hunting.) There are exceptions to these patterns, yes. Absolutely. But the patterns are still there.

These patterns are what enabled an earlier generation of blinkered archaeologists to create the myth of “Man the Hunter,” wherein everything really important in human evolution happened because men were getting together to hunt. Those old archaeologist dudes may have been right about men doing most of the big-game hunting, but they were wrong about said hunting being some all-powerful engine of change. After all, chimps hunt too. And real big-game hunting, with spear-wielding humans going after big animals, probably didn’t happen until long after our ancestors had become very, very smart.

The great reassessment happening in anthropology is the realization that the complex of behaviors that seem to mark the emergence of highly intelligent Homo are those activities that have always been associated with women: plant gathering and processing, communal resource acquisition and provisioning — including shellfishing.

More and more, when anthropologists think about intelligent hominids making the transition to modern humans, they’re thinking about women — women figuring out how to dig up tubers and prepare them so they’re edible, how to smash hard seeds and grind them into a mush the baby can eat, how to roast shellfish and turtles so the meat is easy to get to. How to get along with each other, talking things over, sharing tasks. How to work out the provisioning so new Mom can nurse the baby while Grandmother and Aunts pitch in with the tuber-digging and babysitting. How to exploit the environment and harness the power of group effort in a way our simian cousins never do.

Women’s work, people. Women’s work.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry, Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 19, 2007, 12:43 am EST

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From the Creek Running North news desk: Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says.

Further study by Mann-Esser’s team found a surprising commonality among the five percent of subjects showing clinical signs of susceptibility to evolutionary psychology, which the team refers to as “Desmond Morris Syndrome,” or DMS. Ninety percent of the DMS-positive subjects shared a single allele, first isolated by researchers at the University of Lucerne. The recessive allele, named luz-R, was absent from the remaining 95 percent of test subjects. (The corresponding dominant allele, luc-ID, has been tentatively linked to critical thought faculties and penis size.)

Evidence also suggests that Nice Guy® Syndrome, a condition thought to be strongly correlated with the luz-R allele, may have been present in human populations as long ago as the Upper Paleolithic:

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 18, 2007, 8:51 am EST

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It started with a blurb I saw in the New York Times for October 5:

“Evolution’s Secret Weapon: Grandma. Far from burdening society, aging women may have ensured our survival.”

“Grandmother hypothesis,” I said to myself. “But why is it in the paper now?”

I clicked on the link and was surprised to see that the article was in the Health section. Not Science? Then I read on and realized that the slant was about menopause, with the hook being the recent talk given by Kristen Hawkes at a meeting of the North American Menopause Society (who knew there was such a thing?). Hawkes is the anthropologist behind the grandmother hypothesis, and the article helpfully included a link to an older piece in the Times that reported on the theory in more detail.

A much older piece, in fact; ten years old. The linked piece is from 1997, when the grandmother hypothesis (or rather the current Hawkesian version of it) was brand-new. And that piece was also in the Health section — actually the Women’s Health section. Not Science.

Maybe I need to stop for a moment here and explain just what the grandmother hypothesis is and why it’s important.

In a nutshell, the hypothesis is that grandmotherhood is a crucial development of our species. By remaining active for decades after menopause, our ancestral grandmothers were able to channel their energy into helping to provision their daughters’ children. From the standpoint of making sure their genes continued to propagate, this was an extremely effective adaptation. It also made it possible for women to have helpless infants (think big-brained human babies) and to have them fairly close together, since the young mothers could rely on their own mothers to help out with provisioning and childcare. Hawkes and her colleagues believe that this change in life pattern may have been the key adaptation that allowed Homo to flourish.

The grandmother hypothesis has been one of the most productive and influential theories in anthropology in the past 10 years. Hence my surprise at seeing it covered in the Health section of the Times, rather than Science. I mean, sure, menopause is part of women’s health and all that, but it’s a little like putting a geology piece on the Weather page.

Curious, I decided to search the Times archive to see if any of their other articles on the grandmother hypothesis had been run on the Health page instead of Science.

Guess what?

There haven’t been any other articles on the grandmother hypothesis. Not a single one. There’s just the one piece from 1997 in the Women’s Health section, and now this piece from last week, also in the Health section. One of the most exciting current theories in anthropology and human evolution, and the Times isn’t interested.

What the Times is interested in, apparently, is ev-psych pseudo-science about how women evolved to like men with flashy sports cars because life in the Pleistocene was exactly like The Flintstones. They’ve got lots of stories like that. Real anthropology? Actual science that offers groundbreaking new views of human evolution? Not so much.

Okay, screw the Times!

In Part 2 I’ll talk more about the grandmother hypothesis, what it is, and the impact it’s had on studies of human evolution.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry, Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 14, 2007, 8:29 pm EST

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And he’s packin’ Powerpoint:

We first met Crockus man a couple of weeks ago, and now he’s back with even more craptastic pop neuroscience (and spelling errors).

Mark Liberman has the corpus callosum issue under control, so I want to use my time at the mike to talk about a slightly different aspect of the brain-sex thing Mr. Crockus-Dude is peddling here. The ultimate fount of this nonsense is Simon Baron-Cohen,* who argues that there is something called a “male brain” (systematizing) and a “female brain” (empathizing), and that these are innate predispositions, not culturally influenced behaviors. He specifically argues that males are predisposed from birth to learn about objects and their mechanical relationships, whereas female infants are predisposed to learn about people, emotions, and personal relationships. The problem is, that’s not what the evidence shows.

Elizabeth Spelke (who is a very big wheel in infant cognition research) dealt with the issue in the first part of this paper. She noted that Baron-Cohen’s claim that male infants are more object-oriented than female infants is based on a single study which has not been replicated – an important point, since that one study contradicts several decades of research showing no such effect. That singular study also suffered from methodological flaws, which suggests that it should be taken with a grain of salt until or unless it can be replicated with better controls.

In contrast,

Over the past three decades, many experiments have investigated infants’ perception of and learning about objects. This literature has received wide attention by experimental psychologists, popular science writers, and televised science programs, but it has not figured in recent discussions of the origins of cognitive sex differences. Let us consider its findings.

Object perception begins at birth. Newborn human infants show clear, though limited, abilities to perceive the colors, shapes, sizes, and orientations of objects (e.g., Slater, Mattock, & Brown, 1990) and to perceive and extrapolate object motions (e.g., von Hofsten, 1982). Over the first six months, abilities to perceive and reach for objects develop rapidly (see Spelke, Vishton, & von Hofsten, 1995, and Johnson, 2004, for reviews). Infants also begin to represent objects that move fully out of view, to make inferences about mechanical interactions between objects, and to group objects into categories (e.g., Baillargeon, 2004; Hespos & Spelke, 2004; Quinn & Eimas, 1996). These findings are supported by multiple, converging experiments that test systematically both the existence and limits of infants’ abilities, with displays that are systematically varied to pinpoint the basis of infants’ responses and with methods that guard against potential sources of bias.

In most of these studies, the performance of male and female infants is compared systematically. Most studies find no sex differences. Some studies find an advantage for female infants, particularly in the domains of mechanical reasoning and the ages at which new abilities emerge (e.g., Baillargeon, Kotovsky, & Needham, 1995). For example, experiments have assessed infants’ understanding that an object travels farther when hit by a heavier object; female infants achieve this understanding at 5.5 months, and male infants achieve it at 6.5 months (Kotovsky & Baillargeon, 1998). Such findings do not imply that female infants are superior to male infants at mechanical reasoning, because female infants develop somewhat more rapidly across the board, and so their superior performance is not likely to be specific to objects. Moreover, research on infancy has not been subjected to the powerful techniques of meta-analysis that are needed to evaluate positive findings of sex differences. Meta-analyses of cognitive sex differences are rare in infant research because they depend on significant effects, whereas the vast majority of studies of cognitive development in infancy report no significant sex differences.

If positive conclusions concerning sex differences are not warranted by this literature, however, negative conclusions can be offered with more confidence. Thousands of studies of human infants, conducted over three decades, provide no evidence for a male advantage in perceiving, learning, or reasoning about objects, their motions, and their mechanical interactions. Instead, male and female infants perceive and learn about objects in highly convergent ways. This conclusion accords well with that of Maccoby and Jacklin (1974), whose review of an older literature led them to characterize the notion that girls are more socially oriented and boys are more object oriented as the first of many “unfounded beliefs about sex differences” (p. 349).

And yet I guarantee you somebody will read this post and still accuse me of being afraid to face “the facts.”

*I realized in the comment thread that readers may infer that Simon Baron-Cohen is the inventor of the crockus, etc. I didn’t mean to give that impression at all. The person I’m referring to as “crockus man,” the inventor of the crockus and the creator of these Powerpoint slides, is Dan Hodgins. Simon Baron-Cohen is a psychologist and researcher whose theory of the brain apparently underlies some of this brain-sex stuff (see his book The Essential Difference), though Hodgins is bowdlerizing to a level of craptastic fantasy that boggles the mind. I don’t doubt that Baron-Cohen is a sexist asshat, and his theories are controversial, but he is a scientist in good standing and not a crackpot who would invent an entire region of the brain, as Dan Hodgins did.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 5, 2007, 4:50 pm EST

69 Comments »

In the stock photo catalog this pic is labeled “sexy man.” But according to ev-psychos, if you’re a woman you’re not turned on by this. So stop looking at it. Stop! Here, this is what you want:


Bill Gates, Sex God.

Actual quote from actual book¹ (emphasis mine):

A simple example of how evolutionary psychology operates is how it looks at the evolution of behavioural differences between males and females. Fertile men can potentially have many offspring right through their adult lifespan, whereas women are much more restricted by birth intervals, their shorter reproductive life (given menopause), and the need to nurture their offspring. Thus it is argued that past evolution has operated such that men are attracted by potential fertility in a prospective partner, while women are attracted by men who are likely to provide stability and resources after reproduction. There is certainly good evidence to back up such theoretical expectations from a range of human societies, yet it is clear that such imperatives are not the whole story, given variations such as partnerships that continue in the face of reproductive cessation or failure, and homosexual relationships.

No, there isn’t “good evidence,” you fucking moron. Why is it so hard for these stupid old men to realize that the TV shows they watched in the 1950s weren’t a reliable guide to female nature?

What the evidence actually shows is that in societies where women can only gain access to certain resources through marriage, they (quite sensibly) are more likely to choose mates with those resources. This is an economic decision, not a matter of sexual attraction. (Though note that even in such societies, many women follow their hearts anyway and marry the good-looking ne’er-do-well.) In societies where women’s mate choices are not economically constrained, they go for the hotties. They go for good-looking, personable men, because they can. The Mosu, the Wodaabe — the women in those societies always follow their hearts, and their hearts lead them to sweet, sexy men with big brown eyes and handsome faces. And nice muscle tone. And broad shoulders. And delicious furry treasure trails that go all the way down….sigh.

Buy a clue, ev-psychos: teenage girls the world over don’t have posters of Bill Gates up on their bedroom walls, okay? They’re not drooling over Donald Fucking Trump. Ever notice that?

No, of course they’ve never noticed that. They’re too busy saying things like “it would make no sense for a woman to be easily aroused by the sight of a naked man.”² Call me cruel, but I hear in that the plaintive plea of a man who has never met a woman who was aroused by the sight of his naked body. Perhaps it’s a form of desperate denial to imagine that the teenage girls who buy cheesecake posters of Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp are just trying to figure out where 18th century pirates kept their wallets. You know, so they can choose a high-status mate on their next time-travel trip.

Shit, even the half-assed experiments the ev-psychos themselves have done show that women are sexually attracted to sexy men, though god knows the ev-psychos seem utterly incapable of reading their own data. In one experiment a group of women at a private college were shown two different male models in various outfits — a homely guy in a Burger King uniform and then in business attire, and a handsome guy in a Burger King uniform and then in business attire. The women strongly preferred the handsome guy to the homely guy, and preferred each man when he was in business attire to when he was in the Burger King outfit. A normal person would interpret that to mean that the women in the study preferred good-looking guys, and also preferred a person of their own social class to a person of somewhat lower socioeconomic status. (And also, possibly, that the BK uniform isn’t doing anybody any favors in the fashion department.)

But the ev-psychos interpreted the study to “prove” that women choose mates based on status, and that this is an innate and universal female behavior. They ignored the part about all the women preferring the good-looking guy. They also ignored a bunch of other stuff, like the fact that numerous studies have demonstrated that all humans show a robust preference for mating with people of their own social class, which is why college women (at a private, largely upper-class school, at that) were pretty much guaranteed to choose the business guy over Burger King Boy. They ignored the fact that in American society, as in most Eurasian societies for the past several thousand years, women’s marriage choices have been economically constrained, so that women are strongly conditioned to look for a “provider” mate. They ignored the fact that the preferences of American college women tell us nothing about female humans in other societies, especially societies that are very differently structured. They ignored the fact that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the behavior of American college students in the late 20th century is a suitable proxy for human behavior in the Pleistocene. And speaking of the Pleistocene, they ignored the fact that the anthropological evidence suggests that women in those early societies, as in modern foraging groups, provided the bulk of the sustenance and weren’t even reliant on male provisioning.

Instead, they just proclaimed that their half-assed study “proved” that women are attracted to high status, and that this is an innate, universal female behavior caused by some fucking brain module that evolved in the Pleistocene.

This is why people consider ev-psych junk science. For chrissake, this shit makes the blood type diet look like particle physics.

¹The Complete World of Human Evolution, Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews, 2005.
Note that I do not actually think Chris Stringer is a moron; he’s excellent in his field and I’ll take him in a match with Milford Wolpoff any day. But ev-psych is bullshit and he’s being entirely too kind to it.
²Steven Pinker, Professional Twit Extraordinaire.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Recommended, Ev-Psych Bullshit on October 1, 2007, 12:59 am EST

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Ann Bartow David S. Cohen has been having a lot more fun this week than I have. She’s He’s been following the Quest for the Crockus over at Language Log, but I’m just now getting caught up.

Here are the week’s posts from Language Log, in order:

September 17: How big is your crockus? — The first appearance of the “crockus”! Mysterious brain-sex educator roams the country, distributing hand-outs!

September 18: High Crockalorum — A daring theory. Dr. Alfred Crockus is revealed!

September 19: Dr. Alfred Crockus and Crosley Shelvador, M.D. — A poignant trip down memory lane.

September 20: Crosley Shelvador comes in from the cold — A confession, and the search for Dr. Crockus continues!

September 21: Dr. Crockus in Central New Jersey — A fresh sighting!

September 22: The Crockus and the Bassoon — Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached Shatnervana.

By all means, do read the entire series. It’s delightful.

Of course, if you’re the kind of person who reads things like this, you’re probably not the kind of person who needs to read things like this. You’re probably not the kind of person who buys books on “brain sex” and sends me unintentionally hilarious messages telling me that it’s an “established scientific fact” that men and women’s brains are wired completely differently, and that I just need to get over my hysterical pink self and yield to scientific rigor.

P.S. I need to change the name of this category to make it more inclusive, because this story isn’t about ev-psych, exactly, but rather the closely related fields of “craptastic pop neuroscience” and “cashing in on the brain-sex craze.” Any suggestions?

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 23, 2007, 12:08 am EST

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From the “Birth to 12 months” girls’ section at Toys R Us: The Little Princess Big Favor Pack. Includes pink tiara bag, Little Princess stickers, pink princess pen, glitter nail polish, birthday bubbles, marabou tiara, and daisy swirl lip gloss.

Whenever the conversation turns to ev-psych, some chump or two (or twenty) shows up to insist that any test score differences between male and female teenagers must reflect an underlying innate disparity between the sexes. Apparently it is widely believed by chumps everywhere that there is no such thing as socialization, that boys and girls are all raised in identical featureless plastic bubbles and are treated exactly the same by their caretakers. Maybe it’s like that in your neighborhood, but I’m not seeing it.

Eight years ago, the Renfrew Center found that “90 percent of commercial toys and dolls for girls age 2 to 10 emphasize beauty, shopping and dating.”

What’s changed since then? That would be nothing, Bob.

In 2005 Sudie Hofmann did a study of children’s toys and found the same thing. Girls’ toys: beauty, shopping dating. All pink. Boys’ toys: war, weaponry, and educational toys. That’s right — the challenging word games and chess sets and science kits were all in the boys’ section. Hofmann couldn’t find a single female pictured on a science kit, nor a single science kit in the girls’ aisle. Not even a pink one.

But Hofmann did find one area of girls’ toys that the Renfrew Center didn’t mention: housework! That’s right, pink housework toys. For when the girls grow up.

And for all the Larry Summers types out there who insist that these toys are just mirroring children’s behavior rather than shaping it, let me quote this long section from Hofmann’s excellent article:

The girls’ area, or should we say fantasyland, is well stocked with vanity mirrors, combs, brushes, nail kits, makeup, and polyester hair extensions. The focus is on being popular with boys. The shelves are overflowing with Mattel Barbies and endless paraphernalia, including Barbie’s scale, set at one weight: 110 pounds.

Shopping is a focus of many of the girl toys such as Lil Bratz Fashion Mall, which warns girls, “Don’t forget to stop at the makeup shop.” Packages provide fashion advice and tips about how to be trendy and get noticed. Crowns, pompons, and phones in lavender and pink hang on the separate carousels near the small, upholstered furniture. Jump ropes, umbrellas, tea sets, and sticker books are in abundance. Unlike the colors used on the panels of the boys’ toys, pastels reign here. The edges of the letters are smooth and an i or a t is dotted or crossed with a heart, butterfly, or star. Glitter is on everything — from the packaging to the product itself. The copy usually includes words such as “kitten,” “princess,” “fairy,” “precious,” “wish,” “dream,” and “wonder.”

The girls’ section does not have many board games that stimulate creative thinking or require higher-order reasoning. It has bingo and simple activities such as coloring books and car or travel games. Although the female area appears to be a pink fantasyland, the dream soon ends. After getting the guy, by playing Milton Bradley’s Mystery Date or through sheer vanity and competition, the girls get the brooms, mops, vacuums, diapers, and plastic food. And they are smiling in every packaging photo.

Boys are noticeably absent from any of the advertisements, promotions, store posters, or packaging for toy household cleaning products, kitchen items, or childcare toys such as baby dolls and strollers. The product lines do not model social acceptance for boys to play homemaking or parenting.

When young boys engage in dress up, pile on the necklaces, enjoy painting their nails or select other girl toys, cultural norms or homophobia often correct the behavior immediately. In fact, in Fisher Price Playlab studies where staff members observed children behind one-way glass, they found that boys will play with “girl” toys if they think they are in a safe environment.

My students frequently offer supporting evidence about boys crossing these gender lines, from their part-time jobs at after-school programs. They believe that young boys relish the chance to get their nails painted and have their hair styled when girls are doing it as a special activity. As one student told my class recently, “I think boys just like the closeness of being with a staff member, being touched while we paint their nails, and talking with us.” Perhaps it is the tactile, calming aspect of this activity that draws boys and girls to it. However, sex roles are reinforced very early in boys’ lives, and toys play a part in that socialization.

Jackson Katz in Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, a Media Education Foundation video, explores the ways boys are taught to be tough and how they’re encouraged to define manhood in ways that hurt themselves and others. Katz provides an insightful analysis about how boys are socialized to be solitary, independent, and often violent through toys, video games, and Hollywood movies. According to Katz, the cultural message is that emotional connections are for sissies. Beyond the obvious problems of violence and aggression that many of the toys engender, even the science-based toys are solitary and don’t present opportunities for verbal or social development. Packaging hints at being the best or creating and building superior models or designs. There is little evidence that toys help boys in social and emotional development or in Katz’s words, help boys to be “better men” some day.

Toys for girls implicitly urge them to find husbands in order to get their dream lives. Girls are taught to compete with each other for male validation. One makeup kit states, “Wait ’til they see you.” Female rivalries, jealousies, and other negative behaviors such as bullying and harassment pose a host of problems for girls. Yet girls’ toys promote unattainable physical perfection and materialistic values. Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, a groundbreaking book about the emotional lives of adolescent girls, including depression, eating disorders, and declining self-confidence, refers to contemporary society as a “girl poisoning culture” and offers many empowering approaches for addressing issues of self-esteem. The toys available to girls typically strengthen the cultural messages of inferiority and second-class status that have influenced and continue to affect self-image and academic performance for many girls.

Socialization? What socialization?

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 19, 2007, 2:13 am EST

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This is from an invited address at the APA conference in August, delivered by Roy F. Baumeister, in which he explains that men rule the world because they are naturally more creative, adventurous, and intelligent than women:

Hence religion, literature, art, science, technology, military action, trade and economic marketplaces, political organization, medicine — these all mainly emerged from the men’s sphere. The women’s sphere did not produce such things, though it did other valuable things, like take care of the next generation so the species would continue to exist.

Actually, taking care of the next generation seems to be the only “valuable thing” Baumeister thinks women have done, and they’ve barely managed that:

Giving birth is a revealing example. What could be more feminine than giving birth? Throughout most of history and prehistory, giving birth was at the center of the women’s sphere, and men were totally excluded. Men were rarely or never present at childbirth, nor was the knowledge about birthing even shared with them. But not very long ago, men were finally allowed to get involved, and the men were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby. Think of it: the most quintessentially female activity, and yet the men were able to improve on it in ways the women had not discovered for thousands and thousands of years.

It is astounding that in the year 2007, hate speech like this should be delivered in the context of an invited address at a prestigious medical/scientific conference. I went to the conference page of the APA to see if they’d issued some kind of apology for this thing, but no. They actually refer to it as “a provocative look at the motivational differences between men and women.”

How did this happen? How is it possible?

I’ll tell you how: Ev-psych. Baumeister, whose Ph.D. is in Social Psychology, is allowed to extrude this crud in public because he wraps his misogyny in the pseudo-scientific cloak of EP. His one precious factoid is the same one all the other ev-psych sexists cling to: that some cognitive test results show a wider distribution of scores among men than among women, with males occupying the extremes at both ends. (To an ev-psycho, of course, the statistical distribution of these particular results is a perfect mirror of innate human capacity. There is no possibility of test bias or performance differences based on gendered expectations or socialization or anything else, nor any question about just what external reality the test might be testing. It’s a funny thing, but evolutionary psychologists don’t actually seem to know much about psychology.)

But Baumeister’s statistics will only take him so far, because there’s the pesky fact that overall women’s scores are pretty much the same as men’s. So he adds his own fantastically cockamamie twist: that women are inherently “unmotivated” to use their brains. True, they do have the grey matter, and if someone plops a woman down in an office (invented by a man, of course) she’ll fire up the neurons and eventually figure out what to do, but otherwise females are content to function at about the level of lizards sunning themselves on a rock. Then Baumeister straps on his seven-league boots and leaps over a couple of mountains of logical absurdity to reach his promised land: men naturally rule the world because a) the smartest people in the world are always men, and b) women are lizards. And not only that, but (hang on if you’re an anthropologist because you’re about to vomit) men created all human culture.

Missing from this thesis is any knowledge of history, culture, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, genetics, biology, human origins, or pretty much anything else that you would think might come in handy in terms of understanding the history of our species, much less a social structure like patriarchy.

Oh, but wait — “patriarchy,” according to this thesis, doesn’t exist. The very notion that women have ever been systematically oppressed is a feminist conspiracy theory. According to Baumeister, women have never been discriminated against or oppressed or excluded from anything. They’re just naturally at the bottom of the social order because they’re so fucking dumb unmotivated. At one point in the speech he actually wonders aloud why women didn’t become composers in the 19th century, even though they had pianos at home and plenty of time to practice, and argues that the fact that they didn’t is clear evidence of women’s innate lack of creativity. That’s the level we’re dealing with here, folks.

Yet the faddish popularity of ev-psych makes it possible for this ignorant misogynist to expel his toe-curling fumes in public — at the goddamn APA convention! — without being shouted off the stage by an outraged audience.

You know, just the other night I was re-reading the excellent chapter on human origins research in Sarah Milledge Nelson’s Gender in Archaeology. I was chuckling along with Nelson at the ludicrousness of the field in the 60s and early 70s, the era of “Man the Hunter,” when male anthropologists argued that men had driven all of human evolution, that humanity itself was defined by the exclusively (so they thought) male occupations of hunting and flint knapping, and that all women did was sit around in the caves waiting for their pelvises to evolve so they could give birth to big-brained sons who would bring them meat.

Thirty-five years of feminist anthropology has beaten that shit to shreds*, but now ev-psych has come along to replace it. And that’s really all ev-psych is: another patriarchal just-so story explaining why modern male dominance is universal and natural and inevitable. Patriarchy always tells these stories. They’re justification myths — like the Greek legend about how the women of Athens lost power as a sop to Poseidon, or the Bible story that has women eternally paying for the apple thing. The modern version just talks about genes instead of gods and “gender motivational patterns” instead of apples. Same shit, different century.

*From my own comment in the thread below: “And as for the creation of culture, the notion that this was somehow a male-only venture is unsupportable on any grounds. From our primate predecessors to Palelolithic tool makers to the Fiber Revolution to the invention of agriculture, all the evidence is that females have been as much culture-creators as males (if not more, actually, given the way research is going).”

As for the historical restrictions on women (such as, to take the example of “women composers,” the fact that until recently women were actually barred from higher education and musician unions and orchestras, and were ostracized and denied support and publication when they did compose), I feel sure my readers know all about that. Far better than this Baumeister clown.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Recommended, Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 17, 2007, 3:27 pm EST

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“Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?”

This bespeaks a problem with that brand of feminism rather than with anything else. There is something essential biological about the way boys and girls behave. This has been proven over and over and over again in a wide variety of scientific studies. This is not even debatable anymore.

–Some moron

There is nothing quite so dispiriting as the enthusiasm with which the morons of today embrace the myth that feminine and masculine stereotypes are biologically determined. Note the confidence in the statement quoted above. It’s “not even debatable anymore,” says the moron.

It’s a strange situation, because this twerp’s perception (and he’s not alone) of the current state of knowledge about gender is almost the exact opposite of reality. If anthropology has taught us anything, it’s that gender roles are socially constructed. The notion of what is appropriately feminine or masculine varies across cultures and time. Even the notion of how many genders there are varies across cultures. In fact, just about everything that people do, from the language they speak to the way they cook their food to what they think constitutes a “good” woman or man, is culturally mediated. Actual innate differences between male and female behavior are virtually impossible to determine with people over the age of a few months, since gender norms and expectations are imposed from birth. And when psychologists try to get behind that curtain by studying the behavior of infants, they find only slight differences between males and females — differences which pale beside the enormous cultural baggage that accrues around notions of maleness and femaleness. As for the neuroscience angle, there appear to be some average differences between male and female brains in terms of things like cerebral blood flow at rest, but nobody actually knows how or even if those differences map to behavior.

But that’s not what you hear in the media. Instead journalists endlessly report the bullshit cooked up by professional bullshit chefs (otherwise known as “evolutionary psychologists”) as if it’s fact: the differences between men and women in the modern world are biologically based; there’s no culture, no socialization; women evolved to like pink Hello Kitty phones, it was an advantage in the Pleistocene because the pink color helped them find the phone in the bush, and the reason men make more money and get the promotions is not because of discrimination, no, it’s because men evolved to like sailing and and rotating three-dimensional objects in their minds while women evolved to like staying at home and eating oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins.

And the moron public apparently eats it up.

I’m writing about this because the ev-psych bullshit came up on me today like a snake in the grass. The fifth Carnival of Radical Feminists is up, and one of the articles included is this piece by Julie Bindel on trans issues. I went over to read it because I was curious about her perspective on the trans thing, but found myself completely distracted by the ev-pysch bullshit snake slithering around in the comments. EPBS, I think I’ll call it.

For the record, I don’t share Bindel’s belief that “‘transsexuality’ as a diagnosis…arises from the strong stereotyping of girls and boys into strict gender roles.” That may be part of it in some cases, but trans identity is a complex issue, and I don’t think anybody really knows what causes it — or even what it is exactly. And that includes the transpeople themselves. Bindel’s reading of the issue seems simplistic and off-kilter to me.

But this post isn’t about trans issues; it’s about the Ev-Psych Bullshit Snake. Bindel’s opinion on transpeople may be controversial, but what shouldn’t be controversial is her statement that “feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations.” That’s right, we do. That’s because we recognize that gender is, indeed, a social construct. Biological sex is real, of course; but gender roles, rules about how men and women are supposed to behave, notions about how they’re supposed to be — those are just shibboleths. And for chrissake, this isn’t merely a conceit of feminist theory. It’s a well-demonstrated anthropological finding. It ought to be part of every literate person’s mental furniture.

Yet look at these comments, all singing the same EPBS song:

MsBindel you say “how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?”

Perhaps by accepting that there is something essential and biological about the way most boys and girls behav. It is indisputable that there are significant gender (in the biological sense) differences in behaviour that are obvious at an early age. You cannot ignore facts that don’t fit your ideology. In fact it is dangerous that you would let your “feminist belief that it[behavioural differences] arises from the strong stereotyping of girls and boys into strict gender roles” override reality.

Julie Dear ~ It’s not even a debate anymore. The biological factors, all point to a variable distribution of hormones to the brain, while the fetus is still in utero. Hence, the amount of a Female/Male ratio of the hormonal wash over the brain, in effect, “Hard Wires” the human brain as either “Male,” “Female,” or Gender Variant.

No matter how much you may wish to ignore it there is overwhelming and increasing evidence of the biological differences in brain formation between men and women. Although social experiences will affect the way people behave during their lives we are born with instincts which emanate directly from our individual biological make up. To deny the influence of biology is quite simply ignoring the facts and deluding yourself.

The basic problem is that she sees Gender as purely a social construct, despite insurmountable evidence that it isn’t, evidence she’s aware of but chooses to ignore because she sees it as undermining her whole life’s work. Now that’s a very human thing to do, and perhaps I’d do the same. It’s still wrong.

As for Bindel, I think she should go and do a biology degree. Her idea of gender as an entirely social construct is ludicrous. She really needs to educate herself before her opinions do real harm.

I think re Delphinidae’s point the key thing is that to support the idea that there are biological differences between men and women which can lead to behavioural differences we can point to large amount of research in psychology and neuroscience.

“Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?” I have 3 young children, two boys, the middle one a girl who likes pink, shoes, dresses and prams. Purely her choice! Boys differ from girls in every area of human make up, physicaly, psycologicaly, biologicaly and every other –ology.

I think that last one is from Larry Summers, but I could be wrong.

Why do so many people embrace this stuff so eagerly? What is the appeal?

Of course it’s not surprising that people believe what they’re told; that’s what people do. Huitzilopochtli requires human sacrifice, flies come from rotting meat, women evolved to be bad at math. People will believe anything if it gets hammered home enough.

But it seems to me that the enthusiasm for this current edition of bullshit is alarmingly intense. It’s not enough for people to merely assert their beliefs; instead they feel compelled to argue that the evidence is so insurmountable, the proof so indisputable, that it’s not even worth talking about any more. And I’ve seen that same kind of [spectacularly misplaced]confidence[/] every time the subject comes up. Gender differences are a fact, get used to it, people insist, and you can almost hear the white knuckled scream. The earth revolves around the sun, E=mc², and women evolved to be bad at math. It’s indisputable.

I’ll surprise no one here when I say that from a big-picture sociological perspective, I think this is a reaction to feminism. For men, it’s a reaction to the relative success of feminism, which has succeeded in threatening (though not dislodging) male privilege and in demanding (but not achieving) equal opportunity for women. The EPBS frees men from the guilt induced by feminism; it reassures them that that they’re at the top of the heap because of their innate qualities rather than because of male privilege; it lets them know that they don’t have to make any further concessions to women’s demands.

For women, it’s a reaction to the relative failure of feminism. Feminism teaches us that we have the right to live as full, free human beings, but our still-sexist society makes this impossible. That hurts. It’s painful as hell. And for those women who aren’t fully up on feminist analysis of how patriarchy works, the EPBS sings a soothing song: feminism was wrong, it was a lie, and the reason men won’t do the laundry or take care of the children or listen to you when you talk or give you a job or be faithful to you or treat you like a human being instead of a sex toy is because of evolution. That’s just how things are. You can’t change it, so there’s no point in worrying about it. Just give in. Get a labioplasty, pick up the dirty socks yourself, look on the bright side. And smile more.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Recommended, Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 5, 2007, 9:01 pm EST

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