Letters to the Editor
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asage
"I also hate it when people choose a particular endpoint, and then try to fit the interpretation around it."
I agree. Like, to pick a random example, when someone chooses the endpoint that any differences in outcomes between the sexes is solely due to male perfidy, and then fits their interpretation of all events around that conclusion?
Yeah, I hate it when people backwards-reason like that.
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I will now explain the situation of human gender roles vs. biology:
There are indeed innate gender differences between men and women which come out the most strongly the further we get back to a 'state of nature.' That is, if men and women are living in the wild as hunters and gatherers, the men are probably going to be the hunters and women caregivers and gatherers.
However, once we get out of such an environment, culture begins to takes over and is going to predominate. And in human society, culture takes over with a vengeance, because there are literally thousands and thousands of cultures out there, with a vast variety of roles for men and women, while there is only one human biology. This means that with humans, culture is far stronger than biology, as long as nature is put under some kind of control.
Hence the idea that men in this society are somehow biologically forced to lust for blondes with big breasts over other types (brands?) of women is just pure idiocy; blondes with big breasts don't exist in the 'wild,' because in a state of nature, hair gets dirty and usually stays dirty, and big breasts such as Pamela Anderson's are probably a positive hinderance in such a state. Blondes with big breasts is a pure social construct and men who prefer them have no doubt been taught to do so.
Thank you and pls send the Nobel Prize money to Salon where I'm sure they will make sure it gets to me.
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Linney Uston
I'm so glad we agree. I should preface my next statement before I get a lot of people jumping down my throat: I'm a feminist in the real sense. I extremely dislike femininism (my own word) which is often mistaken for feminism. Femininism, as I define it, is a worship of the victim (ie the feminine) because she has been a victim. So, there are a lot of people who seem to have a problem with women and men being different in any way. There are a lot of people who seem to think that the "feminine way" of doing things is somehow better just because it's been denigrated. Sometimes, paradoxically, these are the same people. I originally came from an ultra-religious background; the women policed themselves in submission more thoroughly than any man. I later developed a science background. I (maybe unfortunately?) see us as a species. In every species I've ever studied, there's been some conflict between the sexes. There is no such thing as better. There is more fit, but not a moral "better."
I've also been fascinated by how the proverbial patriarchy has affected men. I don't mean "Men," who do all the horrible things. I mean the fathers, brothers, single-men-with-no-close-relations individuals. Have you ever read Robert Bly's Iron John? His prose gets a little tiring (as all gender-related books seem to do unless they talk about hard science). It's about what masculinity lost during the Industrial Revolution. In fact, I also learned about this in various history classes during my schooling. It's pretty clear that before the IR, the work might have been different, but - at least among the poor - men and women were both so vital to survival that sexism (either male-against-female or female-against-male) had no place.
So, yeah, totally glad we're in agreement there. I DO wonder, however, what you think about the issue at hand: namely, why do men like big breasts, and does this article have it right?
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maybe boobs just feel good?
The issue I have with evolutionary psychology is that it's all ad hoc and it's all unfalsifiable. No matter what pattern you observe, you can come up with a logical evolutionary explanation. If women had been the taller, larger sex, they would all be saying that this of course must be so woman can better care for the children.
Further, I see a very definite distinction between self report and actual behavior. Ev psych may show that men prefer blonde woman with large breasts and women like rich men, but doesn't account for the fact that actual mating patterns don't reflect this self-reported data. Do attractive people have more sex than unattractive people? Do rich people have more kids? Are Caucasians really hotter than everyone else? These statements are ridiculous.
We are humans. We have nice big frontal lobes and we use them! We're no longer just animals wandering around with the instinct to reproduce. In us, a hormonal change doesn't necessary bring about a behavioral change. We've evolved these nifty decision making abilities, inhibitory processes and well, consciousness. We have language and we have intricate societies and we are incredibly influenced by culture and socialization. Reducing human behavior to evolution is demeaning to your frontal lobe.
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yeah, kinda like ...
"I also hate it when people choose a particular endpoint, and then try to fit the interpretation around it."
Read all the popular literature on evolution and you'll see it's the same thing. Just like Rudyard Kipling's "Just-So" stories (How the Leopard Got His Spots, How the Elephant Got His Trunk), they take what is and try to explain it through a fantastical set of circumstances that make sense only if you buy the opening premise, a premise which is, of course, complete nonsense.
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Melthough, psychologist guy, and that one Anonymous who mercifully refuses to be an asshat...
They pretty much hit on the problem with Evolutionary Psychology.
It's not that it's a cultish pseudoscience. It is based on a synthesis of sociological methods, psychological perspective, and evolutionary structure. It is primarily a hypothesis-generating engine, a framework in which to interpret behavior.
It does get a little cultish (to the guy who provided the interminable list of academics involved with ev psych--I could give you an equally long list of prominent individuals involved in Scientology, or the Roman Catholic church. This doesn't provide unequivocable proof that Jesus exists or that depression is caused by malevolent immaterial ghost aliens), but if actually used as an interpretive framework, it hardly qualifies as pseudoscience any more than the works of Skinner or James.
The problem comes in articles like this, where it is blatantly misused. I have taken courses from Drs. Cosmides (who self-identifies as a feminist) and Tooby, and they are extremely careful to specify at the outset that ev psych is in no way a prescriptive discipline. It does not deal with how things SHOULD BE, it does not seek to conflate RESULT OF NATURAL PROCESSES with GOOD, and it does not dismiss the powerful effect of learning on human behavior. It simply seeks to provide an explanation for how things are as they could potentially have arisen by natural selection, and use those explanations to make predictions of tendencies which are usually then tested via social psych-style experiments. The fact that it DOES accurately predict some counterintuitive results (the idea that mate selection can often bias towards moderately attractive people over extremely attractive people, as supported by silhouette and facial composite experiments... see last week's excuse for the misogynist trolls to both whine about and exult in their inability to relate to women... would be an example) lends at least a little credence to the methodology.
But it's so easy to explain every single aspect about how things are in terms of natural selection that reactionary and simple-minded people use it to indicate that the way things are is the way they should be. This is a fundamentally false and destructive premise, for several reasons.
1) The environment we live in, with the exception maybe of small and isolated tribes which constitute a miniscule portion of the world population, is different in almost every important way from the one in which we evolved. We do not live in tribal groups. We are dependent on farming, not hunting, for sustenance (to the guy who wanted an indication that there are any gender roles that aren't completely inherent--there is NO selection pressure for men to want to be farmers, yet the proverbial Farmer is almost always perceived as male). Almost every single individual we will meet under the age of 40 is reproductively viable. The gene pool is enormously mixed. So many ev psych structures are useless in understanding our everyday society.
2) Learning is a fundamentally powerful process. Again, Tooby and Cosmides put it at least on equal footing with evolutionary effects as far as determination of psychology is concerned. Evolutionary psychology is next to useless to describe a single individual. It's effects only show up at a statistical level. Furthermore, our ability to behave in ways that were NOT evolutionarily proscribed is exactly why the human race is so damn predominant. Control over instinct is fundamental to human success as a species. So some things that are "natural," can and should be resisted, and some things that we accept as natural could easily be the results of learning.
3) Right and wrong do not comes from evolutionary forces. Genocide is a perfectly legitimate stratagem in terms of guaranteeing the spread of certain genes. Rape is a perfectly legitimate stratagem in terms of guaranteeing the spread of certain genes. Fratricide is a perfectly legitimate stratagem in terms of guaranteeing the spread of certain genes. Sex with young teenagers is a perfectly legitimate stratagem in terms of guaranteeing the spread of certain genes. However, consciousness and conscience come with different demands. The fact that these things are regarded as wrong is an unnatural but very, very, very good-for-everyone-at-large development.
We're already seeing ev psych creep into policy, with wonks like David Brooks using it as a grounds to proscribe sex-segregated education. And honestly, I think intellectuals such as the Broadsheet crew are better off pushing people to understand ev psych and use it correctly rather than just dismissing the whole field. After all, if the trolls teach us anything, it's that people with chips on their shoulder make for some of the most categorically hateful and angry people; god forbid they ever get a position of power and a half-assed understanding of ev psych to motivate them!