Letters to the Editor
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J. Goodrich is an economist. Carol Lloyd is a journalist. Neither of you appear to have the chops necessary to call evolutionary psychologists cultists, religionists, and pseudoscience
Carol, I really think it is time Joan Walsh stopped your blog. I think it is completely offensive that in a reality based progressive liberal blog you, with apparently no credentials at all, would slam evolutionary psychology, a field with many many ph.ds as pseudo-science.
That is intellectual crap on your part.
That goes for Echidne too, who claims to be "J. Goodrich is a recovering economist and the sole proprietor of the political blog Echidne of the Snakes. She also blogs for TAPPED."
Why do women insist they are the know it alls even in fields in which it is obviously true they know nothing? Talk about arrogant and patronizing to your readers.
Broadsheet continues to be an embarrassment to Salon.
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You can't think worth a damn
Look, I have better credentials than Carol Lloyd -- I have a bachelor's degree in psychobiology (essentially the same thing as evolutionary psychology, it just wasn't called that then), and nearly got a master's. And this article is crap. Not because it says things that feminists don't like. Personally I very much like the theory that Muslims blow themselves up because they aren't getting laid;
So if you like the theory, then it is more likely to be true???
from a feminist standpoint it says that a society with full or nearly full female equality which allows women sexual agency and which permits them to participate equally in society is a much more peaceful and rational society than one that practices strict sex segregation.
Feminist are of course wrong about this, as you assert in your next sentence. American society is far more violent, less peaceful, and less rational towards the world than any Arab nation currently.
It's a great theory. It's just probably wrong. Why is it probably wrong? Because SOME WOMEN ARE SUICIDE BOMBERS.
Another false conclusion. There can be women suicide bombers for other reasons, and this would still not necessarily invalidate the (agreed upon) wrongness of the prior statement.
If the motivation to be a suicide bomber is precisely *because* there's a sexual element involved, and yet Islam offers no sexual goodies to women who die, then women would never be suicide bombers.
This is ridiculous, ignorant and demonstrably false. There is no sexual element to suicide bombers because the so called 72 virgins thing is an imaginary myth made up by someone in the west. Suicide bombing is the last refuge of a powerless culture being violated from the outside by western money interests, the USA being the handmaiden of those interests.
Why should women never be suicide bombers if there is no sexual interest? It males no sense and trivializes the severity of the whole affair- men and women suicide bombers.
You have a degree in psychology? From where? Hamburger University?
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I read the article at the Psychology Today site.
I did not read the blog that refutes it. I didn't feel I needed to because the article seemed rather facile. I assume the authors offer support for their generalizations somewhere. I have read astrology articles that seemed aimed at a more intelligent audience.
I am not a scientist of any kind. What baffled me was the authors' argument that a polygynous culture was more likely to produce suicide bombers -- and then they decided to arbitrarily ignore the fact that there are pockets of polygyny all over Asia and Africa -- even in places where the dominant religion is NOT Islam. Then they offer this 16 virgins argument as a sort of tipping point in Islam that causes men in Islamic cultures to go over the edge. However, wouldn't that 16 virgins thing be Religion or Culture and not science? Aren't they arguing in that instance that culture overpowers their own evolutionary argument? It seems like they are contradicting themselves.
That, and the claim that blonde, blue-eyed, big-breasted women were somehow more attractive to men, made me think that the authors had some sort of agenda. Dare I say a racist agenda?
Am I correct in assuming that the article is strictly a form of popular evolutionary "psychology" and not real science? (Or whatever we mean by the term real science.)
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the reason why SO MANY WOMEN have such an aversion to evo-psych
is because it renders less credible the proposition that the only reason a man could disagree with a woman about anything is because there is something wrong with him, obviously men like it for the same reason.
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@ Anonymous 11:24 pm
Could you explain in scientific detail just how evolutionary psychology does what you claim it does?
Thank you.
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because if males and females have differing presdispositions based on biology
then they can have differing and conflicting emotional reactions in a situation and it cannot be AUTOMATICALLY ASSUMED IN EVERY CASE that the difference is due to socially invented beliefs or behaviors designed to oppress women. It MAY be that this is the case and the men may be "wrong" but because evo-psych allows the possibility that there could be another reason for this disagreement but you have to discuss specifics. If men and women are really the same and the differences are ALL invented as an excuse to keep women down then you can ASSUME in EVERY case of disagreement that that is what is happening without ever having to examine anything. It's much more credible to claim that society is conspiring against women than to claim that nature is, and few people can resist a belief system that tells them they are always right. Of course compromise is a theoretical possibility but that would be capitulation to the patriarchy.
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it's a common misconception that most suicide bombers are moslems and motivated by religion
the Tamil tigers, a non Moslem non religious political movement, has carried out more suicide bombings than any other organization in the world (at least until the last couple of years in Iraq inflated the Moslem count).
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Well, Anonymous 11:24 pm,
I assume that it could be argued that the apparent oppression of women serves a biological function that promotes (or once promoted) the survival of the human species. If you say that what has evolved today is a consequence of our nature and women have been treated as subservient because of that, then you could argue that that is as nature intended, couldn't you?
Sounds rather circular.
Of course words like "oppression" and "intended" have a certain subjective quality, don't they? "Oppression" may be defined differently by a group who benefits from the oppression -- let us call this group oppressors -- than it does for the oppressed. The word "intended" can only have meaning if nature can be said to actually have intentions. In fact, it does not, unless you want to argue that there is/was an intelligent designer with goals. It is human beings who have intentions.
Of course for this to matter in any huge consequential way, one has to assume the survival of the human species is a good thing. It would be hard to argue this. The survival of the human species may be a very bad thing for the survival of the earth itself. It could get along without us. It is ridiculous to argue that the purpose of humans who exist now is the reproduction of humans who will exist later -- maybe even centuries later. Nature has no purpose. The word purpose implies intention. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is humans who have intentions.
So however you look at it, absurd human desires enter into the subject matter of evolutionary psychology. Our desire to survive. Our desire to dominate rather than be dominated. Our desire to interpret the "facts" (chosen by us) in a way that satisfies a our own personal viewpoint.
It seems to me that when you end up talking politics supported by "science" that the science sometimes succumbs to politics.
Tell me; how did this "science" of evolutionary psychology manage to acquire a language that is free of political freight? Maybe it didn't.