Something that I have been thinking about that actually supports "nurture" as an explanation of a behavior is attitudes towards breaking wind. Although exact reactions vary across circumstance, I think we can all agree that if another human (or animal) breaks wind generally other humans in the area would find the smell unpleasant and react accordingly.

However, you could break the largest fart in the world in a dog or cats face and they would be completely agnostic towards it. And these animals (at least dogs) have far superior olfactory senses than our own. I guess an interesting case study would be to observe Chimpanzee reactions.

The bolded is emphatically false. I have a study to prove it.

Amazing isn't it? What is very ironic is that by being honest on the issue of male violence, by understand the biological/evo mechanisms, we could potentially do better as a society to do something about it. Ignoring reality is not the way to go to better society. Sometimes the truth is harsh, but nature does not care about what's is harsh/moral/immoral, it does not care. If we want to better society socially, we need to be honest about the origins of human behavior.

And for all the people that call me a white supremacist, just understand that you people are the ones that are holding the world back, not me. This is why I refer to you guys as regressive liberals, you guys are not progressives and you slow down progress, you guys are the exact opposite and do not even realize it.

What can you do with an incontinent dog?

One way to test what people mean and how they feel about blank slate theories would be to get a harvard professor of psychology to write a book about the problems with blank slate theories and then title the book "the blank slate". Then maybe if all the lefties come out of the woodwork screeching hilariously feeble nonsense in outrage we could validate the claims they endorse "blank slate" perspectives. One could only dream. Perhaps we could look at the research produced by the actual experts in explaining gender difference in something like engineering at google. We could look at how someone explains those differences with the relevant research and then see the experts in the company DIE (diversity equity inclusion) department and get their reaction? Lets see of that is blank slate explanation. Perhaps we could formulate a scenario where we look at men switching their identity and pronouns and dominating womens sports at a mathematically miraculous rate and get the lefts reactions and explanations?

Maybe we could even take the way back machine and look at well named's posts on gender differences and see if they are "blank slate" leaning and contrary to mainstream science?

Let me use health issues as an analogy. You must understand the mechanism of a disease if you want to treat it properly. Would it be better that we not attempt to understand the mechanisms that contribute to a specific disease occurring? The same is true for negative behaviors human exhibit, we must understand their mechanism if we are going to potentially treat them.

Is it just me or are the male violence/pornography questions in that study written in completely the opposite way to all the others?

Questions 1-5, 7 are all worded to say that there is a significant evolutionary biological component but 6, 8 specifically say that there is no significant evolutionary biology component. If those are genuinely the questions as written on the survey then at a minimum the answers to 6 and 8 are going to be unreliable and such a blatant failure in the methodology would probably cast doubt on the whole paper.

I'm not particularly interested in arguing the findings but this is such a major issue with the methodology that I don't quite understand how a serious study could make this mistake.

I don't think it's unique to sociology or the liberal arts - it's just a lot easier to visualize the insanity because they deal with things that most of us have given a lot of thought to and are relevant to our lives.

The reverence that some people have for stem fields is completely unwarranted imo. Ability to do high level math is a guarantee of very little - I had an upper year calculus prof who wore a q-ray bracelet who justified it in class as "well, maybe it doesn't work, but what if it does!". He's what you'd call a... loud talker.

https://www.qray.com

Not a tenured professor, no, but this was at a pretty reputable school (for it's math program).

I think people in general just tend to put way too much stock in the title of professor and professional titles more generally. You want to avoid the hubris in thinking you know better than 'da experts' but the standards in almost any field is shockingly low, probably because being able to teach the subject matter is a trivially easy task even for people who have very obvious learning disabilities.

I'd speculate that a large proportion of these professors (and professionals more generally) are dim people from "good homes" who were encouraged to be all they can be, whose ambition is fueled by the lack of respect they get in their social life. And this probably contributes to the general trend towards embracing blank slate theory because it caters to their emotional need to believe that everything in life is hard work - because the alternative is that they may be innately deficient (no way!).

In science/biology the term significant just means it has an impact, essentially does it matter or not.

You missed my point. For 6 of the questions a response of "plausible" would imply belief that there is an evolutionary component but for the other 2 "plausible" would imply belief that there is not an evolutionary component.

I haven't read the paper in detail so it's possible they address this discrepancy but even if it is addressed and was deliberate then it definitely seems like a terrible decision to do it.

I noticed this and thought it was odd, but I was assuming that they just swapped the answers around to normalize table 3, so that if someone said that it was implausible that "there is no significant evolutionary biological component" then they were saying that it is plausible that there is, and if someone said it was plausible that there is no evolutionary component then they are saying it's implausible that there is such a component.

It does seem like an unnecessary complication and I haven't thought through whether or not I think it could impact the results. It seems like the latter responses could be skewed by the inversion. Someone could think that both possibilities are plausible, and this would cause them to overestimate how many disagree with the plausibility of evolutionary theories.

With regard to violence, I also thought that was the most surprising result. I don't know if it's possible that this explains some of that difference or not. Methodologically I think they would have better off keeping the question forms parallel to avoid this.

I'll respond to other posts later on...

I disagree that everyone understands the term this way. The authors of the study I was discussing, for example, do not:

Nor did the sociologists whose quotes I referenced before.

Now, if instead you want to level the charge that sociologists tend to prefer explanations from sociocultural/environmental factors over biological explanations, then I think that's guilty as charged, but it's a different question. I would also view this is mostly a consequence of specialization, which has its benefits and drawbacks. We're discussing some of the drawbacks.

Mostly my view is that we should recognize the limits of any particular theoretical paradigm. I said this before. A good theoretical lens tends to clarify some issues while obscuring others. Sociological approaches both benefit and suffer from this in the same way that biological approaches do. The benefit is that apart from specialization we might be far more likely to ignore social-level factors in our explanations. As far as I can tell that is the norm for people who have little exposure to the field.

You've overestimated the importance of politics and underestimated the importance of intellectual history within the field, and particularly the inertia of theory. That is, if you were more familiar with classical social theory you might easily come to the opposite conclusion. There's a footnote in the article poker phenom cited: "Among sociologists, Emile Durkheim is perhaps most often targeted for holding a blank slate view in his discussion of social facts." This was also the first thought that came to mind for me. It's part of the history of the field -- Durkheim was in part trying to justify the existence of sociology as a specialization separate from other natural sciences, and I think it led him to overstate his thesis about social facts in a way that comes closer to a blank slate view. Sociologists' preferences for social theories are not something new, or something that results primarily from political identity. Political identity is certainly salient, but the causation runs both ways, e.g. sociologists' theoretical views inform their politics as much as their politics inform their theoretical preferences.

The authors of this study also provide some background survey data:

Note of course that not emphasizing "sociobiology" as a primary perspective is also not the same as rejecting that perspective altogether (and see the other data from tables 1 and 2 already mentioned), but the point is that it would appear the trend is opposite of what you predicted. This actually makes sense to me and reflects my experiences. There's going to be more Dalton Conleys in the future (he went back for a genetics PhD after completing a sociology PhD), not fewer of them.

I think if your view of the field was more informed by reading and interacting with mainstream sociologists, and less by reading and listening to political commentary then you'd probably have had different expectations.

Fair enough. I admit I am not representing an informed opinion in this instance.

The complicated truth about testosterone’s effect on athletic performance

What is your claim?

This is my main issue with them, when I said they push the blank slate theory, I said that because I have no idea how a field of science in 2019 can hold some of these views some of the individuals have in this specific field. No biological basis for humans having a fear of spiders and snakes + male violence? In my eyes, people will think that I am exaggerating here, some of the views these sociologist hold are just as anti-evolution as the christian conservatives, except there actual ****ing scientist.

The only problem I have is when you over-generalize or misrepresent your own citation. If the claim is that some largish minority of sociological theorists in the survey have a poor understanding of biology then I think that claim is well supported by the data presented. I'm not even sure this should be that surprising. Sociologists aren't biologists. They contribute useful ideas and research to a holistic understanding of the world but I would never accuse the field of being comprehensive or providing the only answers anyone could ever need.

But the data also illustrate that sociology is not a monolithic field where everyone has the same views, despite all the allegations to the contrary. At best to me it represents a good example for why I value a generalist approach instead of over-specialization.

Something something sexists and transphobes something something mostly macho meathead men something something

Illustrative of the point, this article was published in American Sociological Review two days ago: Genes, Gender Inequality, and Educational Attainment (full text here)

ASR is the main journal of the American Sociological Association, and one of the most prestigious journals in American sociology. So first of all I just linked it to illustrate my skepticism about claims that sociologists are generally opposed to this kind of research.

But more importantly it's just an interesting study, and the results seem intuitive to me from previous work that I've read (including that of Dalton Conley). So I might have linked it here anyway. It's also illustrative of why I think "nature vs. nurture" is a false dichotomy. The background discussion on this point is interesting (I've snipped a lot):

The top line result is already articulated in the abstract, but it just further illustrates how genetic and environmental factors interact.

My expectation is that as more and more genetic data because available (more polygenic scores for more phenotypes, larger sample sizes, etc.), we will see more studies of this type in sociology journals, and more emphasis on complex interactions between biology and environment.

I admit I may not be understanding the argument, but the argument seems to be that genetics becomes relatively MORE important as social constraints are lessened?

Grunching bu if you have two influences and one is reduced then the other automatically becomes relatively more significant.

No, you haven't removed the environmental variable (you never can when looking at behavior), you have merely changed it.

A study like this also looks at phenotype, not genotype. Meaning it studies the interaction between genes and environment (in this case gender and education), not the genes specifically.

I would say yes, while perhaps reiterating that relative importance means percentage of variance explained. Chez's note illustrates one way in which that matters; "relatively more important" doesn't necessarily mean that the variation increases, just the percentage of variation explained increases. Those are subtly different, but I infer from kelhus' use of the word "relative" that he understands that. If we reduce (I agree we can never eliminate) environmental contributions to variation, a larger percentage of whatever variation remains will be explained by biology.

The kind of interaction highlighted in the article is pretty straightforward, but applies to a lot of phenomena. Conceptually, we've known that it must exist for a long time. What's new is mostly that we have better tools to measure and quantify it.

One of the main points the authors want to make, in my reading, is that environmental interactions like this mean that we can't interpret snapshot measures of explained variance as fixed and immutable. Historically, there is a tendency to interpret results this way, probably influenced by the intuitive idea that biology is fairly immutable. So if some GWAS study finds that 40% of the variance in phenotype can be explained by genetic differences, we shouldn't expect that to be true across all times and places, because of the importance of environmental interactions.

The second point they emphasize is that early research on relative contributions of genetics and environment tend to use only very local measures of environment, like the effects of immediate family. This is mostly just a methodological limitation with twin studies (though they emphasize that twin studies are really valuable). The interpretation of the data in this study is meant to illustrate that we can see the influence of very macro-level social phenomena as well, once we have the right kinds of data. The effects of feminist movements and women's acceptance into higher education is not going to appear very easily in studies that rely on family-level measures of environment at a single point in time, but becomes apparent using longitudinal data and multiple datasets over a longer time period.

One of the reasons I'm interested in this type of work is because it does seem a like a very fruitful opportunity for interdisciplinary work between the social sciences and biology. What was missing in the past was a useful methodological framework for this. It's become possible mostly because of innovations in biology, and it was biologists who first began to push those methods to ask questions that are of sociological interest. But sociological methods (and experience in dealing with some of the complexities involved) are also useful for these kinds of questions. Particularly with regard to the need for historical/sociological contextualization. And, just as new tools like polygenic scores allow biological researchers to delve into traditionally sociological questions, so you will see sociologists borrow those biological tools and datasets themselves.

I agree that the "nature vs nurture" debate is a false dichotomy. Environmental factors can influence gene expression, phenotypes can be impacted by the environment.

I highly suspect that this is occurring in prisons. Based upon the environment a organism is in, the environment can magnify/lessen certain behaviors we would classify as negative. I also don't think it is also a coincidence that races and ethnic groups stick together in prisons. The harsher/dangerous the environment the males are in, certain genes/behaviors will become magnified. I think essentially what is occurring when males go into prisons is that certain genes are being influenced to essentially give the organism a higher chance of surviving. The organism knows it is now in a harsher environment, and because of this certain extended phenotypes will be influenced to increase the chances of surviving. I would not even be surprised if the endocrine system was influenced, I would not be surprised if a hormone like testosterone was being raised (not claiming that this does occur).