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 “primitive” (scarequotes used because of the social baggage around the word “primitive”, which is both judgmental and inaccurate) cultures.
Historically, the sort of people who use arguments based in biological determinism are creating arguments for the status quo. You see this in the history of the relationship between race, biology and evolution and in the history of how women have been perceived by “science” (scarequotes used both in self-awareness that science is hardly a monolithic entity and because a lot of this was bullshit spouted by people in labcoats more than actual science). As this stuff is proven to not only be wrong, but to be extremely harmful, I’ve looked at the arc of history and decided that when an argument is made for something that reinforces the current social order (particularly patriarchy, but other social structures too) and it uses biological determinism as it’s basis, I usually take it with a grain of salt the size of a glacier, because historically those arguments have tended to be wrong, and the context in which I’ve seen them used is almost always one in which people with privilege are circling the wagons in an attempt to defend their privilege as biologically just. It’s also something I see used by people who are determined that their relationship with the opposite gender is because of some biological reason and that default to biology as the reason for that when it’s really easy to find extremely blatant examples of how social conditioning controls how people think and behave and/or their issues come from treating any group of people as a monolithic entity.
Also, I’ve seen a lot more sociological studies and research from that perspective than most people doing the evopsych side of the argument, and when given the science behind evopsych as I’ve seen it and weighing it against the sociological stuff that I know fairly well, the sociological evidence tends to be more compelling and obvious. Sociologists, of course, are likely to have the same issues as scientists do with their biases influencing their data, but because it’s the sociologist’s main job to understand culture, I give them more of the benefit of the doubt than most “hard” scientists for the same reason I would give a linguist more credit in understanding, say, connotation and denotation—it’s easier to break out of society’s box, even when you were raised in said box, if you have more knowledge of what the box is and where it’s edges are.
TL;DR: Evolutionary psychology tends to lead to biologically deterministic arguments and biological determinism has historically not only been wrong but has been actively harmful to marginalized groups. I generally choose to take any argument involving evolutionary psychology or biological determinism with a grain of salt, particularly when that argument supports the social status quo, because historically biologically deterministic arguments about marginalized groups (the big ones being women, racial minorities and sexual minorities) have turned out to be wrong. Because it’s impossible to separate scientists from the society that they work within, I assume that biases are reflected in data, and I also know that the way that evolutionary psychology studies are reported in the media tends to exaggerate findings, so I particularly have to take reports of evopsych findings with a grain of salt unless I or someone I trust has run the data. Even if I can trust the data; I can’t always trust the interpretation of the data because the person doing the interpretation is from a culture with a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
I hope that gives you guys some insight on the whole thing. The other thing you might want to know is that the majority of people on the internet arguing for evolutionary psychology are gigantic assholes, so you have to get over the initial bias against you that’s brought on by, you know, reddit comment threads you can play evolutionary psychology bingo in. In the same way that “state’s rights” can be a codeword for racism, “evopsych” can be a codeword for “I am a misogynist douchebag, and also probably a pick-up-artist, who is into harassing feminists on the internet as, you know, a hobby”.
I wonder if “evopsych” and “the patriarchy” are some sort of mirror image words that make people from the other side stop listening whenever they get brought into the argument.
If humans having any behavior differences by gender that are not culturally constructed is a suspect viewpoint, what do you make of humans having evolved from animals that don’t have culture to construct things but do have behavior differences by gender?
I assume that those differences are slighter than one would assume, that society may necessarily point us in directions in which the evolutionary “purpose” of our traits are harmful (and so we should not privilege those evolutionary traits as inherently good or excuses for behavior which is societally harmful). I know that working from the viewpoint in which all of gendered behavior is culturally constructed will have me wrong sometimes, but the trend of history makes me think I’ll be less wrong by keeping that viewpoint as opposed to the contrary one.
Also, you probably mean sex, not gender—gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs. (It’s more complicated than that, obviously, but that’s the pneumonic that’s been useful for me.)
I know that working from the viewpoint in which all of gendered behavior is culturally constructed will have me wrong sometimes, but the trend of history makes me think I’ll be less wrong by keeping that viewpoint as opposed to the contrary one.
I’m not sure how stable this strategy is. Right now, personal genomics and big data informatics might be making biology smarter at a surprising rate, while sociology has no similar tool ratchet to boost it up. I mean, you’re not up against some caricature from the 19th century spouting about God-ordained moral order, but people who are intent on actually looking into the one billion moving parts that make a human come together and make sense of them.
Also, you probably mean sex, not gender—gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs. (It’s more complicated than that, obviously, but that’s the pneumonic that’s been useful for me.)
Well, you do decide how to behave with what’s between your ears, not what’s between your legs.
Hmm. I’m getting a bit of what you’re getting at with biology, and you might be right. But sociology doesn’t become less true when it’s harder to study it, and I’m throwing in my chips with the side that is guessing that most of the time genetics matter less than most people think on issues that can also be effected by societal conditioning.
The sex/gender thing was a correction, you were talking about gendered animals, and animals don’t have genders, they just have sexes. Gender is the societal construction, sex is biological. It’s just a definition/clarity issue—sorry to sidetrack with it!
I’d like to point out the falsity that animals do not have gender. Perhaps crickets and pigeons do not have enough complexity within their psychology to either ‘feel like a male’ being a female or ‘behave in stereotipically male ways’ being a female (which I understand as two ways of being cross-gendered. I’m not sure this is how the term “cross-gendered” is used, but it is what I’m meaning here, having sex A and gender B)
But I’ll bet all my money in that a lot of more complex animals (I”ll go with Lions, Bonobos, Dolphins and maybe Baboons) are obviously possibly cross-gendered as a personality trait. That would mean that behaviors usually pertaining to males activate in females (especially triggered ones) with strong stimuli for instance. And some specific animals (say Joe and Mimi) might be so prone to that that actually they behave more like the opposite sex than their own.
Other than that I’m happy with the above clarifying discussion.
I had a bit about how it was possible that some animals had gender but decided that was probably nitpicky detail that overcomplicated the issue, which was that the original response to me was confusing sex and gender. Though it’s also possible that some of the animals that you’re discussing actually are just intersex, or that the entire issue is just us anthromorphizing animals, attributing personality traits to be gendered at all because we’re so entrenched in biological determinism that we’re willing to spew that social baggage on everything we touch.
For me, the strongest argument in favor of evolutionary psychology is how well it works for explaining social behaviours of non-human animals. I think this is important background material to understand where evolutionary psychologists come from. I recommend parsing through the following textbooks:
(Disclaimer: I have only read Alcock, but Krebs and Davies is supposed to be stronger and better organized from a theoretical point of view—Alcock has wonderful examples.)
Of course, human social behaviour is orders of magnitude more diverse and complicated than in any other species—and even for other primates, one already needs to adopt the point of view of sociology and social psychology to get a good picture. But the premise that culture somehow freed us from all this background of behavioural adaptations is very strange, especially given the tendancy of the evolutionary process to recycle everything in sight into new shapes and patterns.
Thank you for explaining your point of view. I agree that if you don’t know anything about a person other than that they are talking about evolutionary psychology, that is good evidence that they are a misogynist douchebag who is using it as an excuse to be a misogynist douchebag.
However, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that there are despicable people using a particular branch of science to justify their behavior is not strong evidence for or against the truth of the results in that branch of science. Lots of people have very silly ideas about quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t mean that quantum mechanics is broken.
I think I am not too far off the mark when I say that generally speaking, on LessWrong we aspire to judge ideas based on how right they are and not based on how much we dislike the people who have historically held ideas superficially similar to those ideas.
I wasn’t saying I was basing my opinions based on that, but that the context that people are coming from—being treated like shit by people on the internet who profess to be using evolutionary psychology but are really using pseudoscientific bullshit to defend the fact that they are misogynist and/or racist asswagons—often is why people have such an emotional reaction to evolutionary psychology when brought up, particularly when it’s brought up in discussions of sex, gender, race, and sexuality. It’s not something against evolutionary psychology as a whole—these people aren’t really even using good science of any kind—but a warning that using the term evolutionary psychology tends to get hackles up. I meant it as a sideline so people getting into discussions of evopsych with feminists know the connotations that evopsych and biological determinism have with a lot of people.
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 “primitive” (scarequotes used because of the social baggage around the word “primitive”, which is both judgmental and inaccurate) cultures.
Historically, the sort of people who use arguments based in biological determinism are creating arguments for the status quo. You see this in the history of the relationship between race, biology and evolution and in the history of how women have been perceived by “science” (scarequotes used both in self-awareness that science is hardly a monolithic entity and because a lot of this was bullshit spouted by people in labcoats more than actual science). As this stuff is proven to not only be wrong, but to be extremely harmful, I’ve looked at the arc of history and decided that when an argument is made for something that reinforces the current social order (particularly patriarchy, but other social structures too) and it uses biological determinism as it’s basis, I usually take it with a grain of salt the size of a glacier, because historically those arguments have tended to be wrong, and the context in which I’ve seen them used is almost always one in which people with privilege are circling the wagons in an attempt to defend their privilege as biologically just. It’s also something I see used by people who are determined that their relationship with the opposite gender is because of some biological reason and that default to biology as the reason for that when it’s really easy to find extremely blatant examples of how social conditioning controls how people think and behave and/or their issues come from treating any group of people as a monolithic entity.
Also, I’ve seen a lot more sociological studies and research from that perspective than most people doing the evopsych side of the argument, and when given the science behind evopsych as I’ve seen it and weighing it against the sociological stuff that I know fairly well, the sociological evidence tends to be more compelling and obvious. Sociologists, of course, are likely to have the same issues as scientists do with their biases influencing their data, but because it’s the sociologist’s main job to understand culture, I give them more of the benefit of the doubt than most “hard” scientists for the same reason I would give a linguist more credit in understanding, say, connotation and denotation—it’s easier to break out of society’s box, even when you were raised in said box, if you have more knowledge of what the box is and where it’s edges are.
TL;DR: Evolutionary psychology tends to lead to biologically deterministic arguments and biological determinism has historically not only been wrong but has been actively harmful to marginalized groups. I generally choose to take any argument involving evolutionary psychology or biological determinism with a grain of salt, particularly when that argument supports the social status quo, because historically biologically deterministic arguments about marginalized groups (the big ones being women, racial minorities and sexual minorities) have turned out to be wrong. Because it’s impossible to separate scientists from the society that they work within, I assume that biases are reflected in data, and I also know that the way that evolutionary psychology studies are reported in the media tends to exaggerate findings, so I particularly have to take reports of evopsych findings with a grain of salt unless I or someone I trust has run the data. Even if I can trust the data; I can’t always trust the interpretation of the data because the person doing the interpretation is from a culture with a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
I hope that gives you guys some insight on the whole thing. The other thing you might want to know is that the majority of people on the internet arguing for evolutionary psychology are gigantic assholes, so you have to get over the initial bias against you that’s brought on by, you know, reddit comment threads you can play evolutionary psychology bingo in. In the same way that “state’s rights” can be a codeword for racism, “evopsych” can be a codeword for “I am a misogynist douchebag, and also probably a pick-up-artist, who is into harassing feminists on the internet as, you know, a hobby”.
I wonder if “evopsych” and “the patriarchy” are some sort of mirror image words that make people from the other side stop listening whenever they get brought into the argument.
If humans having any behavior differences by gender that are not culturally constructed is a suspect viewpoint, what do you make of humans having evolved from animals that don’t have culture to construct things but do have behavior differences by gender?
I could see that being the case, yeah.
I assume that those differences are slighter than one would assume, that society may necessarily point us in directions in which the evolutionary “purpose” of our traits are harmful (and so we should not privilege those evolutionary traits as inherently good or excuses for behavior which is societally harmful). I know that working from the viewpoint in which all of gendered behavior is culturally constructed will have me wrong sometimes, but the trend of history makes me think I’ll be less wrong by keeping that viewpoint as opposed to the contrary one.
Also, you probably mean sex, not gender—gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs. (It’s more complicated than that, obviously, but that’s the pneumonic that’s been useful for me.)
I’m not sure how stable this strategy is. Right now, personal genomics and big data informatics might be making biology smarter at a surprising rate, while sociology has no similar tool ratchet to boost it up. I mean, you’re not up against some caricature from the 19th century spouting about God-ordained moral order, but people who are intent on actually looking into the one billion moving parts that make a human come together and make sense of them.
Well, you do decide how to behave with what’s between your ears, not what’s between your legs.
Hmm. I’m getting a bit of what you’re getting at with biology, and you might be right. But sociology doesn’t become less true when it’s harder to study it, and I’m throwing in my chips with the side that is guessing that most of the time genetics matter less than most people think on issues that can also be effected by societal conditioning.
The sex/gender thing was a correction, you were talking about gendered animals, and animals don’t have genders, they just have sexes. Gender is the societal construction, sex is biological. It’s just a definition/clarity issue—sorry to sidetrack with it!
I’d like to point out the falsity that animals do not have gender. Perhaps crickets and pigeons do not have enough complexity within their psychology to either ‘feel like a male’ being a female or ‘behave in stereotipically male ways’ being a female (which I understand as two ways of being cross-gendered. I’m not sure this is how the term “cross-gendered” is used, but it is what I’m meaning here, having sex A and gender B)
But I’ll bet all my money in that a lot of more complex animals (I”ll go with Lions, Bonobos, Dolphins and maybe Baboons) are obviously possibly cross-gendered as a personality trait. That would mean that behaviors usually pertaining to males activate in females (especially triggered ones) with strong stimuli for instance. And some specific animals (say Joe and Mimi) might be so prone to that that actually they behave more like the opposite sex than their own.
Other than that I’m happy with the above clarifying discussion.
I had a bit about how it was possible that some animals had gender but decided that was probably nitpicky detail that overcomplicated the issue, which was that the original response to me was confusing sex and gender. Though it’s also possible that some of the animals that you’re discussing actually are just intersex, or that the entire issue is just us anthromorphizing animals, attributing personality traits to be gendered at all because we’re so entrenched in biological determinism that we’re willing to spew that social baggage on everything we touch.
For me, the strongest argument in favor of evolutionary psychology is how well it works for explaining social behaviours of non-human animals. I think this is important background material to understand where evolutionary psychologists come from. I recommend parsing through the following textbooks:
Animal Behaviour, Alcock
An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology, Krebs and Davies
(Disclaimer: I have only read Alcock, but Krebs and Davies is supposed to be stronger and better organized from a theoretical point of view—Alcock has wonderful examples.)
Of course, human social behaviour is orders of magnitude more diverse and complicated than in any other species—and even for other primates, one already needs to adopt the point of view of sociology and social psychology to get a good picture. But the premise that culture somehow freed us from all this background of behavioural adaptations is very strange, especially given the tendancy of the evolutionary process to recycle everything in sight into new shapes and patterns.
Thank you for explaining your point of view. I agree that if you don’t know anything about a person other than that they are talking about evolutionary psychology, that is good evidence that they are a misogynist douchebag who is using it as an excuse to be a misogynist douchebag.
However, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that there are despicable people using a particular branch of science to justify their behavior is not strong evidence for or against the truth of the results in that branch of science. Lots of people have very silly ideas about quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t mean that quantum mechanics is broken.
I think I am not too far off the mark when I say that generally speaking, on LessWrong we aspire to judge ideas based on how right they are and not based on how much we dislike the people who have historically held ideas superficially similar to those ideas.
I wasn’t saying I was basing my opinions based on that, but that the context that people are coming from—being treated like shit by people on the internet who profess to be using evolutionary psychology but are really using pseudoscientific bullshit to defend the fact that they are misogynist and/or racist asswagons—often is why people have such an emotional reaction to evolutionary psychology when brought up, particularly when it’s brought up in discussions of sex, gender, race, and sexuality. It’s not something against evolutionary psychology as a whole—these people aren’t really even using good science of any kind—but a warning that using the term evolutionary psychology tends to get hackles up. I meant it as a sideline so people getting into discussions of evopsych with feminists know the connotations that evopsych and biological determinism have with a lot of people.