First, let me just say this paragraph alone made the article worth the read...
Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.
The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.
With that said I don’t agree with the premise of this article.
The problem I have with classic feminism AND the people making counter arguments (like this article) is it’s all inherently irrational. In the end the rational thing to do in society is to match each job with the person who has the most compatible skill set. Whether that person is man, woman, monkey, or whatever doesn’t really matter.
Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts.
In the end the most disturbing thing about this article, imho, is the fact that someone felt the need to right it in the first place. I mean, if there really is someone out there who thinks either sex is expendable is there really any point in trying to convince them otherwise?
1. You believe that jobs should go to the best-qualified candidates.
2. You believe that irrational beliefs about gender differences prevent this from happening.
3. The article claims that gender differences are real.
4. Therefore, you call the article disturbing and suggest that the author is irrational (last paragraph).
This is a poor line of reasoning. You and the author have different explanations, but instead of challenging the author's reasoning or providing evidence for your own, you seem to dismiss the entire article out of hand. If you really believe that an irrational hiring bias is at work here, I would like to see some arguments.
Small biases certainly exist, but I doubt that they explain the dramatic gender gap. There is a reason no woman has been president of the United States, and I don't think that biases are a sufficient explanation. This problem is as old as civilization itself, and that suggests that something deeper is at work.
In the end the rational thing to do in society is to match each job with the person who has the most compatible skill set.
This point is far from obvious. What if I don't like the job that your rational algorithm assigns to me?
Whenever people say something is "rational for society", they make two leaps of reason: 1) That individual people act as to maximize the value of some function. This is a factual statement, but utterly unfounded (Allais paradox, preference reversals etc.) and IMO incorrect. 2) That it's okay to aggregate the utility functions of many different people into a "common rational direction" for society, to be enforced by the state or other powerful agents. This is a moral statement that has been convincingly demonstrated to be repugnant by any number of 20th century socialist regimes.
Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts.
This makes no sense. Obviously when you say group X is better than group Y, you don't mean that the worst member of X is better than the best member of Y. You might mean that average ability in X is better than average ability in Y, or perhaps, that the best people in some domain tend to come from X.
Not really. You're taking things out of context by putting things in the macro instead of the micro. I have no problem with someone saying "men are usually stronger than women." That's statistics.
But Anti-discrimination laws are designed to keep someone who is offering a job from picking a less qualified man over a more qualified woman. So if someone had a job that required strength and hired the man even though the woman was stronger that would be irrational.
So you see, one's a macro discussion and the other's a micro one. In the macro using statistics is rational in the micro it's not.
I mean almost anyone would agree that you should pick the better candidate for a job. That point is obvious.
Some may argue that it should be ok to discriminate in the presence of insufficient information. While that may be rational in a probabilistic sense if you are lazy, it should be and is illegal.
Anti-discrimination laws force you to evaluate the candidates more carefully, and ultimately, to pick better candidates for the job.
But why are the anti-discrimination laws necessary?
You really have to try to step out of your own perspective for a second and realize that maybe not everyone is enlightened as you. That the whole purpose of feminism is to fight against those who are not as enlightened as y ou.
You saying "almost anyone would agree you should pick the better candidate" tells me that you can't see out of your own perspective long enough to realize there is discrimination out there.
Which is why you can't see my point. My whole point was that these people are out there and that reasoning with them is pointless BECAUSE they aren't making a rational decision in the first place. So the feminist who try to fight against them with rational arguments are wasting their time BECAUSE those people have choosen to disregard all rational evidence.
This is one of those articles that could be labelled "worldview changing." I mean this in the sense that to gain knowledge of certain facts and arguments has immense corollaries for how one understands and interprets the world. Here are two other recent examples I can think of:
- Moore's Law and the resulting implications regarding the "singularity"
- "Happiness" turns out to not be a Platonic ideal or otherwise specially-valued conception, but simply an ever-present state with slight fluctuations (and then perhaps "getting" happiness refers to obtaining the highest positive fluctuation--which will however stabilize over some time). See the recent TED talk on synthesizing happiness.
The key fact in this article, from which all other conclusions naturally seem to follow, is that males as a statistic exhibit much higher traits of extremity (in all aspects) due to the historically much higher probability of a woman being able to obtain a partner and reproduce.
I think the author did have some interesting things to say. His idea of men going to extremes on either end of the productivity scale was interesting. His points that men occupy the top rungs of society as well as are considered expendable are interesting as well.
Completely disregarding centuries/millena worth of cultural, historical and legal issues seems a little intellectually dishonest, however.
Women have also had to fight to obtain the right to higher education, work in certain categories of jobs, etc...
Dismissing all the cultural, historical and legal evidence to the contrary, and chalking it all up to evolutionary pressures seems a little dishonest. It's hard to evolve aggressive women, when aggressive women are imprisoned or killed. You still the effects of that in some very conservative muslim countries. I imagine that would have some evolutionary pressure on culling certain aggressive genes in women.
In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', 'construction workers', 'etc...'].
It sounds to me like he's trying to discount the perspective that "men have kept women down" by suggesting an alternative explanation, "It's just genetic selection. i.e. men are more aggressive and care about dominination, women are more likeable and care about having families".
I think he is ignoring the fact that men have throughout centuries passed laws that did not allow women to own property, get an education, vote, walk outside their house unveiled etc...
Maybe part of the reason that women didn't build boats and sail around the world was because women weren't allowed to own property in many areas of the world, or because women were prohibited from obtaining an education and learning astronomy.
If you can't study astronomy, it's hard to sail around the world. If you can't study medicine, it's impossible to be a doctor or improve Obstetrical care. If you can't own property by yourself, it's hard to build a business. It's hard to be a political leader if you can't vote.
Isn't your response just whataboutery? I think part of the author's thesis is that misogyny is handled in numerous other analyses. However, even in situations where allegations of patriarchy are ludicrous, certain trends are still present. It is not necessary to catalog every true example of misogyny in order to argue against some allegations of oppression.
Maybe part of the reason that women didn't build boats and sail around the world was because women weren't allowed to own property in many areas of the world, or because women were prohibited from obtaining an education and learning astronomy.
Certainly, in some cases. But even in cultures where women are granted the same rights as men, certain lifestyles seem to be much more popular with men than with women; hence far more men among soldiers, death row inmates, and Fortune 500 CEOs. In cases where we notice more men than women reaping a specific reward, we ought to at least consider different preferences owing to biological/evolutionary origins.
But I see what you're saying. I would have liked to hear some discussion of the blatant and real misogyny that exists in the world. In fact, I would be fascinated to see an analysis of the situations you bring up, in light of the observed differences in gender attitude and aptitude.
You've hit on the logical fallacy that everyone seems to gloss over, namely, Men and Women are not different species. Any trait selected for would manifest in both genders.
What this would lend credence to, is the cultural meme concept.
> In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', 'construction workers', 'etc...'].
Funnily enough, everytime someone tries to say that male ascendancy in society isn't a conspiracy by evil men to put down women, there is always someone who construes this as a moral validation of male dominance, or even as an imperative for it.
That cultural, historical and legal issues might have been side-products of gender differences rather than their cause seems to be unthinkable for the typical feminist kool-aid drinker.
The feminist ideology requires us males to be villains, because otherwise there is no war (because males aren't fighting it, and probably never have), and they become obsolete. Which is of course exactly what they are. Gender-gap in pay, academic and economic achievements, or even domestic violence have little or no cultural basis nowadays, so feminists are about as useful as slavery abolitionists would be today in western societies.
The article is very good. Incomplete, but very good. Your response is disappointing because it dismisses the suffering of many people: women and slaves. Just because some university professor came up with a good explanation for the origin of suffering, it does not mean that the suffering is good, or that we should tolerate it.
I disagree, I found it cliche'. It's a good blog-post, but not really world changing. Not to put you down -- I get caught up in these kinds of things too -- but what real evidence does he actually have to support his hypothesis? Sure, I could say that it isn't true because of this and that, but how valid would my argument be? ANgels on the head of a pin, and all that...
What he does is list a couple surprising facts, then invent scenarios to fit the evidence. It's one of the most common rhetorical techniques on blogs and in pop-science speculative books, and whether the author means it or not -- it can turn intellectually dishonest very quickly without adding clear qualification in the text.
I don't find this sort of stuff convincing or useful anymore. It's the same reason I have a natural distaste for Gladwell and his book-selling ilk -- this type of conjecture seems enlightening, and maybe you could get a few interesting ideas out of it.. but it's not supported. And in the end, you end up with stuff that's an interesting thought-experiment, but leaves you none the wiser.
So it is, but isn't it a little more MetaFilter than HackerNews? At the same time I can't help a mild feeling of 'Say it ain't so, captain Obvious!' You only have to sit down with a good nature or anthropology documentary to see our social structures aren't all that complex or different from 'primitive' ones.
He actually talks about starting new company's so the link to HackerNews is not that hard to see.
But a more interesting link why men become obsessed with specific specializations. For a well understood example consider how many partners a highly talented and successful musician might have over 30 years. The long term impact of effective birth control will probably have long term impact on the most successful approaches.
"For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."
In recent times, if you want to maximize your chances of finding a wife, it's better to have a safe career as an employee with a stable income. The only risk involved is in aiming for a career for which you have insufficient ability.
Maybe it wasn't like that a long time ago. Maybe having an average job then did not generate enough wealth for the survival of a family.
"If you want to maximize your chances of finding a wife, it's better to have a safe career as an employee with a stable income."
Even if that's true today, the argument that it wasn't true in the environment in which we evolved. We're adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/adaptation-exec.html. Our genes "tell" us to take risks because that's how they evolved, regardless of whether it's the best strategy today.
And (from purely anecdotal experience) it isn't true today either. I did not have a safe career with a stable income when I met and married my wife. One of my best friends dropped out of college and married his sweetheart (they started off living in a single room). Recently, another friend of mine was laid off. He's just got engaged.
IMHO The safe, stable, incomes make it easier to get married only if it is an "arranged" marriage where you are scrutinized by the parent and relatives of your wife-to-be. Otherwise it really doesn't matter.
Did any of them have children? Getting married is one thing, but most people, at least the responsible ones, who don't have a stable income will tend to use birth control.
I'm not sure if culture has anything to do with it. But there is something seriously wrong when well educated people go about reproducing without even thinking about it.
No wonder India is bursting at the seams with all the population overload that it can't really support.
Are you from India? I am not and I don't know it, but I can only imagine that cultural differences make people not worry about child support. Perhaps it is a given that the extended family will take care of children, or people don't mind much if children starve in the street if things don't work out (I don't think so, just saying - things might be very different). In any case I am pretty sure people only have children if it makes sense for them to do so, even in India.
Coming to your question about whether I'm from India, I don't think it really matters; I never claimed that I know India. No matter where it happens, having children without proper planning and letting them starve is not acceptable. May be it's socially acceptable in certain societies to do so, but it's still outright stupid and cruel to children.
If you would stop posting personal anecdotes, and focus on objective arguments, you wouldn't find yourself in a position of taking the conversation personally!
xenophanes's reply to you is exactly what I was thinking. I'm not sure why I was downvoted. Having a good looking SO is important to most people when considering the prestige of the SO. So from your comment, I'm assuming she isn't very good looking. At least she is smart.
I think what you're saying is that ambition is not rewarded in the dating/mating game, which is decidedly not the case (today or a long time ago). If you took birth control out of the equation, which men do you think would father the most babies today in the US, men with high ambition or men who chose a "safe career" and "stable income"?
Birth control changes everything. The number of children a man has is inversely (and counterintuitively) related to the number of sexual partners he's had.
Nowadays, many couples don't want any children and this trend will just increase over time.
As for long ago, it may be true that richer men had fathered more children. But you must also take into count the number of children fathered by the much larger number of men with average salaries.
Having one wife a 2-3 kids is still not the "best" genetic outcome. Many men have 10+ children from several women over there lives.
I suspect that on average men who have one wife and no outside children average less than 2 children and because those children only get 1/2 their DNA it's not really success.
Safe career is better? Not really. Given that a male is reasonably unlikely to be killed, most men will have wives, but the more competitive, higher paid ones, will get the more desirable women. Remember the company Christmas party? The executives didn't have dogs.
The men who dont get wives are those at the bottom of the heap: in jail, on drugs, homeless.
>"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it’s a hard sell."
This is a great article but the premise of that argument doesn't make sense to me - even if he admits its a hard sell.
I'm all for equality but paying someone more for doing less work to bring fairness seems illogical. If someone is genetically less motivated to be a workaholic then how does taking money from the person who does work an extra 10hrs a week, so the the other person can be paid more, make the world a fairer place?
When I was 15 I accepted the fact that I'm wasn't born tall enough to play basketball professionally so I focused my efforts on something that I was capable of being great at.
Men work longer hours, so if men work at the same rate then you pay them more. Saying there is a problem with people getting paid more for working more seems silly thus the joke.
This is a very well written article. However, I must admit I don't really understand the wide interest the (western) world seems to have in the men vs women viewpoints.
Perhaps (and I'm just guessing here), it is because the culture in the west has changed so fast that men and women are struggling to find new "places" in society. I don't know - it's just a guess.
I'm going to pick on one point to discuss - the WAW effect (Women are Wonderful).
>Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men.
leading to:
>perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.
Sounds reasonable until you see he has skipped over the middle:
>It was not always thus. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version.
It seems strange to draw such broad conclusions that completely ignore the past in favour of present circumstance. Plus I can tell you, in India the bias is more towards liking men than women.
In any case, I wish I understood the fascination the west has with men vs women debates. The fact that men and women are different is obvious as is the fact that they tend to complement each other. The fact that men and women are similar is also obvious as is the fact that they tend to compete with each other.
India is pretty young. I remember your movies being incredibly prude in the mid 90s. I just watched a recent clip of a top boxoffice film in '08 and let's just say it was insanely racy compared to just ten years ago. I bet India will be having the same insane feminist driven society in 50 years.
When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted facts about gender equality in the interest of the truth, rather than what might be the socially acceptable answer. I was glad to find an article that posits some alternative hypotheses and simply acknowledges that the answers are not so simple as they might seem, and that discusses the issue from a neutral, non-activist viewpoint. I read Pinker's article in The New Republic, but this one talks about the issue more than about the discussion itself.
One thing I kept expecting the talk to mention as I was reading was the importance of outliers. While I agree that comparisons of fundamental ability between the sexes, as opposed to factors such as motivation, is probably flawed, I think it might make the argument more immune to activist criticism to point out that there are always outliers in either group. Just because men may be, on average, more inclined to build large businesses, for example, does not mean that each man is more inclined to build large businesses than every woman — the curves overlap. Of course, the different shape of the distributions are important, as Baumeister pointed out (the male curves tend to be bimodal in certain cases whereas the female ones might be more normal). But there are always outliers, and so there will probably always be certain woman who are better at any given thing than most men; even though there may be more men than woman who are 'really good'. The entire talk discusses generalities and statistical tendencies, I know, but might easily be confused by less sophisticated readers as talking about individuals, which seems to be the common criticism of such talk.
"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it's a hard sell." (emphasis mine)
It takes a special kind of commitment to the truth to write an extended, compelling piece that ruthlessly undermines any rational basis for a position you support.
I personally support extravagant pay for no work at all, however I don't think many people will give me a $5 mil salary for sitting at home all day.
There's always the slim chance interest rates will hit %10,000 and I'll be able to cache an unemployment check for $5 mil, but that kind of defeats the prospect of being a millionaire by not working.
It's quite easy to back a policy that rationally doesn't make sense. I agree with him, I support the principle of equal pay for both men and women, however equal pay is complete BS. There shouldn't even be equal pay between solely male or female workers, because quite simply no one does the exact same amount of work.
Even if you're tasked with making 50 microchips a day and two people produce 50 microchips a day, there's still lots of other factors involved. What if one person's trained in first aid? What if one's a real douchbag and pisses everyone off, shouldn't they be punished because they aren't conducive to a company environment?
The variables are huge, and unless two people are identical duplicates beamed down from space, then I don't believe they should be paid the same just because it's nice.
I think this is especially interesting in light of the fact that I and most people frequenting this website are interested in startups. This seems to be the essential male proclivity for seeking greatness at work. I wonder if that is why there seem to be fewer female founders (AFAIK).
However, the worst thing to take away from this article would be that you can predict how an individual will react given their gender. That is definitely not true. Although, if you look at a group of people, you can probably predict some of the distribution.
This was an interesting article, and a very important counter-point to the notion that any difference between men and women is evidence of discrimination or at least socialization.
That said, I think the article is a little extreme. I suspect that the genetic benefits of "playing it safe" for men and "risk taking" for women were greater throughout our evolutionary history than the author suggests.
For starters, a brief glance out into the world suggests that women do take risks and seek power - sometimes through a man, but often independently. They may not build boats and sail to far away lands, but they sure will follow the yellow brick road to hollywood on a pipe dream of becoming a high status movie star or singer.
The author used the example of Genghis Kahn as an example of why men would benefit from high status in a way women wouldn't - GK fathered hundreds (thousands?) of children, whereas a woman wouldn't be able to exploit this power in the same way. This isn't necessarily the case. Sure, a woman can't have hundreds of thousands of kids, but her sons may be able to. In fact, the biggest fights among Bonobo apes are between Females, usually over their son's status in the mating hierarchy.
For men - I've read (and sorry, no cite here) that many hunting gathering societies are quite egalitarian, mainly because the leverage that great wealth and concentration of power aren't present. While good hunters do more mating than poor ones, the opportunity and benefit to shooting the moon with extreme risk taking may not be nearly as prevalent in our evolutionary history as the author suggests. Again, a brief glance out into the world suggests that the norm among males is to exhibit some risk taking and status seeking behavior - and perhaps a bit more so than women - but ultimately, I suggest that for at least some of our evolutionary history, many males had the opportunity of, well, behaving more like females, but acting fairly monogamous and playing it safe.
Still a good article, I just think it overstates the case considerably.
Of particular note: "The present study also indicated that the variance ratio for boys and girls is inverted for Asian American students -- the girls have higher variance. Thus, higher variance in boys is not always a robust finding."
I can't speak to the significance of this, it being way out of my knowledge, but if true it certainly suggests something strange is going on.
This is a very interesting and well thought essay. Especially the stats and facts behind some of the positions he is taking are very interesting. With regards to creativity, I would tend to think that: if we look at nature, there seem to be two inherent trends emerge from time immemorial: 1) nature is interested mainly in prorogation of species(thru reproduction) and 2) at the subject level creativity seems to be one of the big driving factors. Meaning, if we look at every species, it is hardwired to reproduce, and lot of physical and non-physical characteristics/actions are specifically put in place by nature, so that species propagates(including humans). Second, behind lot of our endeavors, creativity is the underlying force. And so, for example art, music, scientific discovery (and even sports or programming), the underlying desire is to create(something). I tend to think, even behind the desire to be powerful (for example CEOs/other powerful positions etc, in present times is nothing but desire to create(or failure there of fulfilling this desire and thus reflecting in powergrab). And so in case of women, this particular desire(to create something) is inherently fulfilled(or fulfillable) by giving birth and creating a human being. And of lot their energies over centuries has gone towards this (and then tending and caring for their created product). Whereas men has no such outlet, so they need to express it somehow - hence this is also one reason why see men all over the place at top in lot of fields.
So, I read this article early today. Then later, I was just googling interesting things, and thus surfing ensued...
I landed here (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AA...), and noticing the nature of the comments/avatars. Do you think it would be possible to find "reliable"-confirmation that "even on the internet", 'female personalities', in situations where one would expect 'care ethics' to be emergent on the social graph (perhaps health care industry), could one find numerical-"confirmation" of the one-to-one vs one-to-many interactions hypothesized in the article?
I found a bit disconcerting the constant use of words like "fairness" and "morality". I tend to see them as "quick and dirty" models useful for everyday behavior. But in a scientific work, which is supposed to study the real thing, I find them not so fitting.
This also was utterly fascinating:
"The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women?
It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children.
Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men."
I had no idea... they must have tested mitochondrial dna or something?
A good way to visualize this is to imagine a family tree going back for many, many generations. You'd find that certain males were your ancestor "more than once", i.e. you might find the same man was your ancestor on both your mother and father's side.
Of course, females can also be your ancestor "more than once"; it's just that, as a matter of fact, more men have this property. This is due to the fact that some men have dozens of children, by several different women.
Mitochondrial DNA would give you female diversity and the Y chromosome would give you male diversity.
As to why the discrepancy? Male babies have a lower survival rate. Among the Amazonian Yanomami 40% of the men are murdered or killed in combat. That would lower your odds of being an ancestor.
No: there are less total fathers than mothers, because more people have the same father than the same mother. People who haven't lived long enough to reproduce have no impact on that figure.
There are extreme cases for both genders. While my paternal grandmother had seventeen kids, the comparatively extreme male case probably had well over a hundred. You can only give birth so many times, so the upper bound for women is lower.
> People who haven't lived long enough to reproduce have no impact on that figure.
They impact it indirectly. Say you have a tribe with 12 men and 12 women. 11 men die (before they can reproduce.) Then the next generation has 1 father and 12 mothers. One could say that the men's deaths caused more people to have the same father. So having a lot of men die before reproducing increases the strength of the effect, under the assumption that women will usually reproduce regardless.
Obviously the root cause is that men can bear more offspring, that much is obvious.
I didn't exactly remember the quote, but there are another 'biological' prove of this concept - in case 'one man, hundred women' there are guaranteed survival for entire specie, while 'hundred men, one woman' is a lose case.
In simple words, men are consumables, and this fact is known for ages. Especially in poor countries.
Interesting stuff. However it would be better if he had not talked about groups or cultures competing, which is ultimately incidental, and talked instead of genes and memes competing. Evolution could give a damn about the group. It cares only about genes. Similarly, cultural (memetic) evolution could give a damn about the culture (or society or whatever). It only is concerned with the meme.
Basically his thesis is that women are good at close-knit relationships, and me are good at broader networked relationships. So roughly, though women are protected and valued in society because of reproduction, men are valued in society for the culture they create with their penchant for wide social networking. Fair enough perhaps but this misses the point.
I think rather than say woman have a usefulness to the group for the creation of offspring, both in terms of having in offspring and having a higher chance of reproducing, and men have a usefulness to the group because of their cultural contributions, I think we need to look at usefulness with respect to what. The "what" is the gene and the meme.
Woman are good for the gene. If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article). So if I want to become part of evolution's junk DNA (and 95% of our DNA is junk, true "selfish genes"), then I have a better chance hanging out in the junk DNA of a female than a male. Women are good for me as a selfish gene. Women are useful to the selfish gene. Men? Well, hell, we can always invent pathogenesis in a pinch as a certain kind of shark in a zoo has done. Men are a nice to have to broaden the genome which enhances fitness, but we can ultimately do without them if we need to ("we" referring to the genes).
On the other hand, if I am a selfish meme, if the author is right about men preferring wider social networks (like politics or religion) than I have a better shot infecting the brain of a man than a woman. Why? Because the dude I infect will know more dudes, and can pass me along to them before he gets eaten by a saber tooth cat.
So do the author's conclusions make sense? I think so. But he needs to understand what "usefulness" means. Usefulness with respect to WHOM.
If I am a selfish gene, women are more useful to me.
If I am a selfish meme, men are more useful to me.
However I would say though it is hard to put numbers on this, that the higher advantage chicks give the selfish gene versus dudes is greater than the higher advantage endowed by dudes to the memes versus the chicks. This is a guess, but it is my gut feeling. I think that tho genes find chicks more important and memes find dudes more important, a gene can live without the dudes more facily than a meme can live without the chicks. Since whereas women might not network quite with the same alacrity as men, still they network. Anyway. So I like this article. But better clarity could be had in my opinion by looking at the men vs. women thing from the perspective of genes and memes, which again, is all biological and cultural evolution respectively care about.
So yes, if you are a meme, you like men. But you kind of can go both ways. If you are a gene, you really prefer women, and are less inclined to go both ways. :-)
If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article).
This argument is wrong.
The discrepancy you point out is offset by the fact that the men who did reproduce had more offspring each than the women who did reproduce. On average, males and females produce the exact same expected number of children, because each child has a father and a mother. This explains the near 50/50 ratio of males to females in many species: if females substantially outnumber males, a selfish gene would find it beneficial to twist the mother's physiology to make a male child more probable. So it balances out.
Needless to say, memes have absolutely nothing to do with the whole discussion.
Be wary of reductionism for reductionism's sake, young Padawan. Just because you can frame something in particular terms doesn't necessarily mean you should, especially when context (something all too unappreciated in casual discussion of genetics/memetics) is discarded in the process.
Interesting theory, but wrong. In fact, the right answer is well known, and does not involve memes at all.
The reason why it's equally good for the genes to produce a male or a female, and why there's an equal number of males and females in almost all animal species, is that the expected number of offspring for a male and a female is equal. It has to be that way, because everybody has exactly one father and one mother.
While it might be true that 8/10 of females and 4/10 of males of a given species reproduce, the males reproduce more when they do. A smaller probability of a higher number will give you the same expected value.
I think this argument (among many others) is nicely explained in the Selfish Gene by Dawkins.
When groups fail individuals within that group tend to fail. You might have 20 kids but if they are killed off by the invading army then you fail.
Over the last 100,000+ years I think women tend to maintain genetic information within a group, but it's the highly successful men in highly successful groups tend to spread it.
There's something in your observation that echoes old mythologies and models of the world: men represent Spirit, women represent Matter. I always thought there was some kernel of truth to that metaphor, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. I think you did.
Actually, I think if one looks across most old mythologies and religions, particularly many pre-dating Jeudeo-Christian, one would find quite the opposite.
It's not just the religions of the Book which use that metaphor. The whole Buddhism, the whole Hinduism (to the extent that such a thing does exist) - they all say: man = spirit, woman = matter.
Yeah, well I guess it's a hard thing to really pin down, but I have always interpreted the less male dominated religions as seeing the female as the spiritual or guiding or creative force and the male as being the force which works to bring that creative energy into solid form.
"If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners?"
A somewhat disturbing equation. A political prisoner is precisely the (potentially extra-) societal actor that is relegated to the "bottom" by the state through punitive measures.
In any event, what's good about men is that we cut code; no 'Y', no 'hacker' ...
Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.
The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.
With that said I don’t agree with the premise of this article.
The problem I have with classic feminism AND the people making counter arguments (like this article) is it’s all inherently irrational. In the end the rational thing to do in society is to match each job with the person who has the most compatible skill set. Whether that person is man, woman, monkey, or whatever doesn’t really matter.
Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts.
In the end the most disturbing thing about this article, imho, is the fact that someone felt the need to right it in the first place. I mean, if there really is someone out there who thinks either sex is expendable is there really any point in trying to convince them otherwise?