Trying to work in a billion years of evolution is just you being silly, though. Why stop there? You might as well go back to the big bang.

Well, the point was that our hierarchies, social organization, and gender roles are a path dependent product of how sexual reproduction evolved (eg. motile sperm competing to reproduce non motile eggs)

I think very generally gender roles and hierarchies, especially insomuch as how narrow human societies have organized successfully given the infinite possibilities, is a byproduct of this path dependence.

For example, I don’t think it is an accident that pretty much the only species that seems able to make communism work (social insects) evolved a completely different form of reproduction.

I mean, If you think discrimination in human patriarchies are bad, you should see what goes on in social insect matriarchies. It is brutal how badly the males are treated, yet it never deters them from coming back for more.

Yeah we treat human women like ****, but have you SEEN the honeybees?!

The leaf cutter ants are the REAL nazis!

This is an enormous claim that you can't support with any real argument that's not hand-waving. That's always been the problem: you just assume your conclusion. Or, it might be more accurate to say that the extreme importance you place on biological evolution is not justified by available data. Some weaker version of your claims would be more or less reasonable, e.g. that it's reasonable to think that at least some aspects of human social organization are conditioned by human sexual characteristics. Some aspects are obviously dependent on sex. Others not at all.

For example, in Becoming Human Tomasello discusses how longer development times in primates (i.e. the length of time in which humans are entirely dependent on care, and the nature of care given by mothers) may have contributed to the development of the "shared attention" processes that then lead to the development of conventional language, concepts of fairness, and so on. Part of that story involves biological development through evolution. The point is that more detailed and specific ideas supported by empirical and experimental evidence are worth thinking about, but "gender roles are a path dependent product of how sexual reproduction evolved" is pretty empty of content.

And, to avoid a common misunderstanding, I say it's empty if you want to draw conclusions more specific than just noticing that some very basic concepts of gender certainly depend on the existence of biological sex. Of course it's true that we generally recognize the existence of two genders because of sexual dimorphism, and that some gendered roles are closely coupled to sex. But "gender roles" encompasses much, much more than that, and the conclusions you want to reach also go much, much further.

Perhaps part of the problem is this: "path dependent" doesn't mean merely that state X followed state Y chronologically. It means something more like that in the absence of specific characteristics of X, Y would necessarily be different. It's not really possible to ascertain that all aspects of human social organization strongly depend on something as remotely connected as sexual reproduction in the broadest sense. The counterfactual is so remote that it's not possible to say anything useful about it. That's why it's silly to try to go back a billion years. There's no explanatory value there. If you stopped at just looking at primate evolution over a couple million years, and if you were more reserved in your conclusions, then it would be a lot more reasonable.

I am on phone so this is more brief than I would ideally like.

But in my defense I presented a counter factual (social insects) and tied their completely different social organization structure and gender roles as a byproduct of their differing form of reproduction. I mean this would be a pretty consmic coincidence that the only species that organizes themselves along true communal lines has a different reproductive strategy.

Generally, I find it so interesting how much our assumptions about humanity rely on a constructed belief that humans are intrinsically different and special (made in Gods image one could say) when I just don’t see it. I just see a bunch of hairless apes following the same natural rules that life has been following for the last 5 billion years or so.

Also, i am perfectly fine if we as a species try to build our Brave New World, but if we are going to make it work I think it is important to understand what is really going on. And I think a lot of the failures in progress are a direct result of us generally not understanding what is really going on.

At this point I think it probably more likely that western civilization ends up more like China or a Muslim theocracy than the other way around. And ill-conceived attempts at “progress” are a big reason why.

I agree that bees and ants evolved differently from humans. So differently, in fact, that it's just absurd to think you can derive a conclusion about human cultural dynamics from the behavior of social insects which lack pretty much all of the characteristics which make humans unique among animals on earth -- symbolic culture and language probably being the most important in this conversation.

I have no idea what "brave new world" you think I'm even trying to construct. You spend so much time railing against this sort of thing but it's like your depiction of it is tremendously vague. There are almost certainly specific bits of activism or specific ideas out there which, if you complained about them, I'd agree that they are problematic. But it's like you've made it your mission to oppose some kind of specter of progressivism and often your complaints about it here seem pretty divorced from anything anyone here says or believes. At the same time, you seem pretty ideologically attached to an extreme preference for "nature" arguments. Is it just some kind of reaction against what you perceive as an overemphasis on "nurture" arguments? From my perspective that's like rejecting one problematic ideological commitment for a worse one.

Again I am on phone so I apologize for my brevity. But I think you are overselling the human uniqueness and specialness part of it and underselling what’s we can learn by studying how reproductive strategies and genetics influences social behavior.

Interestingly, I think a lot of “our” biases that humans are “special or different” are tied into our mythologies, in the western world the Genesis story especially.

I mean, my counter-argument is that the importance of "mythology" (in a broad sense -- mythos, stories) to understanding human culture is precisely an example of why shallow comparisons to bees are pretty useless. Bees do not have cultures, mythologies, symbols, etc.

I think I made a similar comment to you before: you are all-in on ideology, narrative, and the like being a determining factor when it comes to explaining the behavior and beliefs of people you disagree with, so it seems odd you discount all of that in this context. Which isn't to say we can learn nothing from studying other animals, studying genetics, evolution, and so on. I did reference a book on evolutionary developmental biology which spends a lot of time comparing humans to other animals.

I will get back this later when I have the luxury of a computer. But I will say, if nothing else, from my perspective at least these kinds of discussions are infinitesimally more interesting than arguing whether Trump raped his first wife or not.

*Infinitely :P Well, maybe you mean infinitesimally, but I assume not

That is something we generally agree on.

It just generally assorts desirable jobs on the basis of loyalties and relationships.

If a job is so desirable that people would do it for less than the minimum wage (because they expect to learn on the job, because it's convenient, because it's not particularly strenuous) and the company has to pay someone minimum wage to do it, it grants the people who're in a position to hire a nepotistic gift to give to whoever they want without even betraying their fiduciary duty.

It's even worse than that in a lot of scenarios. People pay tens if not hundreds of thousands to get an education in the hopes of getting skills to be able to do something they enjoy. It stands to reason that they would also be willing to pay to learn within an organization to get that experience.


If YOU were hiring for a job that a lot of people want (for any level of competency/qualifications), and you can't lower the wage to reflect peoples willingness to do it... if you had a family member or a friend who was interested, would you not give them preference? Obviously you'd want the most qualified person but in most cases there's an endless number of people who are more or less equivalently qualified. It practically enshrines this kind of corruption into law, because now the guy doing the hiring isn't even violating his/her fiduciary duty.

Western Individualism Arose from Incest Taboo

I haven't had a chance to really read this article closely, or the underlying research, but I've read a bit of prior theorizing about the rise of so-called WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), and I've seen this theory about the role of the church in modifying kinship structures. Interesting stuff.

[s]Sanctimonious asshatery [/s] Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict
Warning: it's a plosone paper that received Koch brothers funding so if you're the type that becomes a sanctimonious asshat over such things then stop reading now, but I thought this paper was interesting as the problem of "moral grandstanding" is one that we've all gotten to witnesses here in the politics subforum of 2p2. Certainly it is a theme that Kelhus has enjoyed in his critique of liberals but I like it too.
The key findings are that:
1. Moral grandstanding does exist
2. It is associated with status-seeking traits.
3. It occurs across the political spectrum and is associated with extremes on both the left and right (although there are issues with the framing there).

I'll have to read it later, but regardless of who sponsored it I don't think anyone could possibly deny that the phenomenon exists.

However, I think people should also be careful about assuming that "virtue signalling" or "moral grandstanding" (or whatever you want to call it) is inherently counterproductive, useless, or so on. I mean it probably can and often is all of those things, but a great deal of communication is about signalling more than "information" (or more than the "text" of the communication, so to speak). I'm pretty sure there are important social functions associated with signalling. That part is interesting to me. See also the work of Erving Goffman on dramaturgy.

[mod note: excised from Academic freedom, tenure, and the First Amendment


Liberals in social sciences do this also.

Scroll down on the link below to see the paper.

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ical_Theorists

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/...tbl1_266914863

Note. Sociologists’ receptiveness to evolutionary explanations declines steeply
with politically sensitive questions that bear on the implications of sex differences.

They want to push the blank slate theory, not all of them of course.

Your citation does not support the claim that theorists in sociology (n.b. this survey is targeted even more specifically then sociologists in general) want to push blank slate theory. In fact, the paper supports the opposite conclusion. See for example tables 1 and 2.

If social theorists endorsed blank slate theories of human nature then they would disagree with any and all evolutionary explanations for human behavior. The data shows that the opposite is true for their survey cohort.

I also think, re: table 3, the survey questions used in this study do not actually support the claim about sociologists' "receptiveness to evolutionary explanations" regarding sex differences. There are two problems with this claim. The first is that less than half of the survey respondents said that evolutionary perspectives were implausible for all of the sex-related questions except one, and a similar number found evolutionary explanations plausible as found them implausible for all but two of the questions. These numbers do not support some strong claim that sociologists are rejecting evolutionary explanations. If anything, they indicate a lack of consensus.

As an aside, it's interesting that they do not present complete data for table 3, though they do for the first two. The percentages don't add up to 100%. Presumably the missing responses were some form of agnosticism, in which case a fairly substantial majority either agreed that evolutionary explanations were either plausible or weren't sure for most of the questions, including those which touch on sex.

The other problem is that the researchers seem to have missed the most obvious explanation for their data, and the most obvious problem with their methodology. The fundamental problem is that it's invalid to draw such a general conclusion from what are actually quite specific questions. If they wanted to know people's attitudes about blank slate theories of human nature then they could have asked directly. The problem with using such specific questions as a proxy is that you can color the results pretty easily. That is, say you ask me whether I think evolutionary explanations are plausible to explain differences in clothing style between men and women. I'm going to say such explanations are not plausible at all, but it does not follow that I would similarly reject evolutionary explanations for beauty as a fitness indicator (a question on which many more of their respondents recognized such a plausible role for evolutionary accounts).

This is a major issue IMO, but I think they also miss a fairly obvious explanation for the different response rates as well. They write:

I think a better explanation, supported by other data in the same survey (including the unreported percentage who apparently weren't sure), is that social theorists are less likely to consider evolutionary explanations for phenomena which are widely studied as social phenomena in sociology. What they are measuring is specialization: where sociologists think they have good theories about social behavior, they tend to prefer them over explanations from other fields. Gender is a major area of study in sociology. Fear of animals is not. Partly I suspect this just reflects a lack of familiarity with alternative perspectives.

I've always thought that a lot of academic disciplines are over-specialized and insulated from perspectives from other fields. So I'd be inclined to agree that the responses represent something of a blind spot, although not one that constitutes an ideological commitment to blank slate theories. That claim is just way too strong. But people who study sociology probably overrate sociological explanations. I'd suggest that this is likely more a consequence of specialization than ideology. It's having a hammer and thinking everything is a nail. I think you can pretty easily observe the opposite biases among specialists in fields outside the social sciences: sociologists probably overrate sociology, but everyone else tends to underrate the field. IMO.

The quotes in the discussion are also illustrative of why it's simply wrong to present this study as evidence of a commitment to blank slate theory:

If you choose to define conservatives as complete imbeciles like the guy being discussed or trollish ann coulter types of course it's going to seem that way, but you're doing the same thing that someone like tucker Carlson does when painting da libs as being some mindless hoard of anti science ******s. What does it even mean to have a conservative position?

Does larry summers count as a conservative for speculating that there may be a biological component to disparities in high end achievement? I'd maybe agree that it's mildly inappropriate for the president of the university to speak publicly about biological sex differences, but the subject itself should be completely fair game in the context of the social sciences (and it definitely is not). You saw how the zealots of this forum reacted to an earnest discussion of the scientific literature. Complete outrage. Shut the thread down. This isn't a fringe position. And the detractors are a strange mix of people who're actually shook by it and, the true scumbags, the ones who agree but have unilaterally decided that talking about it does more harm than good.

You're not being honest with yourself if you think this is limited to people denying evolution, that climate change has been impacted by humans and things that are completely at odds with the evidence.

That's plainly not true.

The reason why profs in the harder sciences aren't as vocal is probably because nobody has an emotional attachment to the nuances of quantum mechanics which means dissenting views aren't shunned. In the social sciences, though, yes - there are many who express these kinds of concerns, and it's not just the ones who're making their rounds in the political blogosphere.

I've had professors who expressed similar concerns in econ seminars. Not always wrt what could loosely be described as leftist attitudes - many were also critical of the cult of neoliberalism which is generally associated with conservatism. Econ is kind of the exception in the social sciences in that it tends to lean much more conservative but there still is a bias, and i don't want to call it a liberal or leftist bias, but rather a bias against any position that arrives at an uncomfortable truth which tends to be associated with left wing politics (but isn't always).

Oh come on. I think everyone understands that when you make a claim that someone ascribes to the blank slate theory it doesn't mean that they reject any biological influence whatsoever. It means that they have the chronic tendency/bias in rejecting biological influences in favor of sociological explanations.

When you set the bar so high for someone to be regarded as a blank slater you reduce the position to a caricature of the position. 40% of sociologists thought that males propensity for violence and watching porn having a biological basis is implausible (when given the choice between plausible and implausible). Indeterminate would be fair. But implausible? What would someone have to believe in order for them to be aptly described as a believer in the blank slate theory? That our sexual preferences have no biological basis? That our appetite for food has no biological basis?

Yes, and I view them very similarly to the macro evolution denying conservative Christians on the right. This is actually my point, earlier I said in this thread that they are not doing good scientific work. There knee-jerk reaction is to deny evolution/biology immediately, instead of actually looking over the data to come to a more accurate conclusion. They are engaging in group think/tribalism. Science has safeguards in place to try to protect itself from these types of scenarios playing out.

Fear of spiders seems an obvious field of study on nature vs nurture. I wonder if any has been done - if not I'll get to it straight after my research into the impact of vessel type on taste and effect of alcoholic drinks

Obviously one explanation is it's down to nature. Another likely possibility is we learn it as very young babies from the reaction of our parents to spiders - this could be examined simply by looking at seasonality as well as other methods.

I have to admit I found that 40% of sociologists stating they found male violent criminality as implausible was a particularly shocking and IMO very worrying result for the field of sociology.

I would actually be curious if someone had done the same survey 50 years ago if the results would be similar. I actually think a higher % of sociologists would have found it much more plausible, because they wouldn't have had the ideological conflicts to deal with.

Given general "criminality" of male behavior throughout pretty much the history of humanity throughout time and space, and the parallels of these behavior patterns in the natural world, I honestly don't know how anyone could honestly come to such a conclusion.