Religion is a Mental Illness

Why Do We Find Modern Life So Hard?

Navigating the paradox of progress and well-being

news.fairforall.org

Something is wrong in modern life. We're experiencing levels of safety and security that our ancestors would have found unfathomable. According to Statista, the rate of violent crime in the United States fell by almost half from 1990 to 2022. That's not an anomaly; as Harvard University professor of psychology Steven Pinker notes in Better Angels of Our Nature, crime of all kinds has been falling for centuries. We experience far less rape, murder, and robbery than did our ancestors. We're also much less likely to die in war. While the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tragic, it's also a far cry from the continent-spanning conflicts of centuries past, like the Thirty Years War or the Napoleonic Wars.

Similarly, we're experiencing a level of material prosperity that our ancestors could only dream of. According to economic historians at the Maddison Project Database, from around 1 CE to 1800 CE, the annual real (or inflation-adjusted) income per person was under $2,000. By 2016, that number in the United States was a comparatively staggering $53,015. Life expectancy for most of human history was around 30 years; in the United States, life expectancy in 2022 was 76.1 years. We even work fewer hours than people even a century ago. 

And yet, in spite of our historical levels of privilege, many of us are miserable. Over 40 million people in the United States suffer from an anxiety disorder. 47 million Americans suffer from depression. As Dr. Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist at Harvard University, puts it when describing modern life, "Life just seems to be squeezing everyone dry."

What's going on? Why are we struggling so much to cope with the demands of modern life, even though those demands are lighter than anything our ancestors had to contend with? Our ancestors slew dragons on a daily basis; why are we struggling to beat back chihuahuas?

The truth is that humans evolved specific powerful ways to cope with the world. Our ancestors used these to great effect to thrive in conditions of intense danger and poverty. Over the past several decades, most of our society has accidentally turned away from these ways.

In order to cope with negative experiences, we need two things: time and mental space. We need idle time, in which our hands might be occupied but our minds are not, in order to let our minds simply process whatever has happened to us. Here's how Dr. Kanojia describes it: "[emotional] processing is actually…a subconscious or relatively automatic activity that…happens over long periods of time." This is a very powerful process and can help folks to work through brutal experiences. 

In ages past, humans had lots of idle time. We fished, sharpened spears, tended fires, repaired nets, and performed other physical activities that kept our hands busy while leaving our minds free to process the events of the day. By contrast, in the modern world, we have little to no idle time. Every spare minute is filled with distractions: we listen to podcasts, read books, text friends, and check social media ten thousand times per day. As a result, we never actually process our emotions and work through them. Dr. Kanojia describes this phenomenon using an example of a bad date:

"Let's say I have a bad date. What I end up doing immediately after the bad date…is distract myself and then what happens is—as I distract myself—I don't process any of those emotions. They kind of just go dormant…as this goes on again and again and again what we tend to see is that our life is filled with negative impacts that we don't allow ourselves time to actually process."

As humans, we're designed to be very resilient; but a primary mechanism of that resilience is giving ourselves idle time in which to process our emotions. In the absence of that idle time, we start to feel very fragile. As Dr. Kanojia puts it, we experience "death by a thousand cuts." He says he works with a lot of people who "as they try to move through life, they're just getting more and more shriveled and kind of patched up and defunct." Or, as he sums it up, "We're not able to recover from things the way that we used to."

It's not just lack of idle time that's handicapping our ability to cope with life's challenges. Sebastian Junger is a war correspondent who spent time on the front lines of the Afghanistan conflict. In a piece for Vanity Fair titled "How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield," he points out that chronic PTSD was rare in pre-modern societies. "Ethnographic studies on hunter-gatherer societies rarely turn up evidence of chronic PTSD among their warriors," he writes, "and oral histories of Native American warfare consistently fail to mention psychological trauma." Even fifty years ago, reports of PTSD were relatively low among soldiers. But modern soldiers experience high rates of PTSD; as of 2015, he notes, fully half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans applied for disability. As Junger puts it: "They return from wars that are safer than those their fathers and grandfathers fought, and yet far greater numbers of them wind up alienated and depressed."

What's driving this increase in PTSD among modern soldiers? Junger chalks it up to changes in modern society. We evolved as hunter-gatherers; we lived in small communal tribes where we worked, hunted, and slept surrounded by our fellows. That communal experience is common for soldiers, who live in tight-knit platoons and have to rely on their brothers for their daily survival. By contrast, modern civilian society in the United States is isolationist and atomistic. Most of us are lonely; according to an Advisory by the Surgeon General, "In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness." Even those of us with spouses and close friend networks don't experience the deep web of social connection that hunter-gatherers—or many soldiers on active duty—experience.

Leaving a close-knit platoon to return to a society where a "strong support network" might mean a few friends that you see once per week can be jarring. According to anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz, "Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that." 

The alienating effects of modern society can even prevent recovery after a traumatic event. Junger describes an experiment with lab rats in which a rat is traumatized by an attack by a larger rat. The smaller rat, who was frightened but not injured, generally recovered within 48 hours—unless it was kept in isolation. As Junger puts it, "The ones that are kept apart from other rats are the only ones that develop long-term traumatic symptoms." Our veterans spend years overseas in the kind of dense social web that we evolved to thrive in, and then return to a society that feels utterly isolating by contrast. No wonder so many of them experience long-term PTSD.

It's not just veterans who suffer from this alienation, of course. Many Americans experience trauma of some kind. We evolved to heal from that trauma; but when our mechanism for healing (social connection) is hijacked, we shouldn't be surprised when people start to seem more fragile. 

We see the same story in conflict resolution. We have a lot of conflict in our society. According to a 2021 study by the American Enterprise Institute,15 percent of American adults have ended a relationship over politics. 40-50 percent of first marriages end in divorce (and the numbers are even higher for second marriages). And a quick glance at Twitter will reveal that, when it comes to conflict, we're bursting at the seams.

Partly, this is because we don't process our emotions, so they keep bubbling out of us in unpleasant ways. But part of it is that we rarely take advantage of how our bodies were designed to work through conflict.

In his book The Way Out, Columbia University professor of psychology Peter T. Coleman notes that when we have conflict with someone, we normally sit down to hash it out. But this is suboptimal; in fact, it's much more productive to physically move with the person. As Coleman reports, "physically moving in sync with others has been shown to enhance cooperation, prosocial behavior, and the ability to achieve joint goals, and it also increases our compassion and helping behavior." "One study," he said, even "showed that walking in sync with a group of people made them more willing to make personal sacrifices that benefited the group."

When you have conflict with someone, taking a walk or even going for a run with them can be a much more powerful way to get back to peace than simply sitting down with them. Our bodies evolved to move. When we ignore this and assume that our thoughts and our words are the only things that matter, we shouldn't be surprised when conflict starts to feel endemic and unfixable.

Another way to reduce conflict is to take some time away from the conflict to breathe. As psychologist Chris Ferguson explained to us in an interview, doing this can help us to calm down and not fly off the handle at small conflicts. Ferguson explains that "there are two related issues here…emotional responses usually peak immediately after a stressor, then lessen with time, and, second, emotional responses tend to impair problem-solving." "Thus," he argues, "you see people have a bad emotional response, impulsively do something stupid, only to later acknowledge how stupid it was." When we pause and take time to process, we can "evaluate if the situation is really as bad as we initially thought it was" and calibrate our response from there. Again, this is something that most of our ancestors did very easily; in a relatively slow-paced society, you have a lot of time to breathe when it comes to addressing (non-violent) conflict. But in our hyper-online age, we're far more used to experiencing a stimulus (for example, a tweet we don't like) and immediately reacting. That's a formula for conflict escalation that our ancestors rarely had to deal with.

This rejection of our biology and the rhythms for which we evolved is having damaging effects on our psyches. But even more concerning is its erosion of our civic society.

For most of American history, the United States has been characterized by the strong bonds of civic association. In his book Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the United States was unique in terms of our willingness to band together to form private organizations in order to address problems. In the 20th century, these organizations included religious groups, bowling leagues, charitable organizations, interest groups, trade unions, and more. They bound us together in a tight web of interpersonal associations that helped us feel connected to the world and to our neighbors.

The problem with human connection, though, is that it's inherently risky. If you go on a date, you might find true love…or you might get rejected. If you join a bowling league with your neighbors, you might find a much-needed sense of community…or you might feel humiliated by your low score or hurt by something that another league member said (whether or not their statement was intended to be hurtful). Our ancestors were able to shrug off this risk and deal with the rough-and-tumble of human interaction because they used the powerful strategies that our biology and evolution gave us. But because we've turned away from these strategies, human interaction has started to feel substantially more dangerous. When we stop processing our emotions, we stop recovering from interactions that might rub us the wrong way. We move away from seeing these annoyances as a minor irritant and the small price of human connection and start to experience death by a thousand cuts.

This trend is most pronounced among younger generations, who are more prone to living online and more cut off from in-person connection and physical movement. Is it any wonder that 73% of Gen Z’ers (age 18-22) report "sometimes or always feeling alone?" Or that 63% percent of men aged 18 to 29 are single, according to Pew Research? More and more young people are deciding that IRL social relationships are too risky for them because they've never been taught the coping mechanisms that our bodies and evolution gave us.

The rejection of these coping mechanisms also poses dangers for our republic. Our republic requires that people come together to debate and discuss ideas. As governmental systems go, this is pretty rough-and-tumble. It requires that we engage with people in good faith who might disagree with us or even believe that decisions we have made should be illegal. When we take time to process our emotions, this engagement is highly doable. But when we neglect to do so, these conversations start to feel riskier. We have trouble coping with opposing views and are more likely to stew and ruminate on the perceived awfulness of those views to our psychological detriment. This is made worse by the fact that more people are carrying around a lot of bottled-up anger and frustration, looking to vent it on someone else. We're all getting more angry at the same time that we're getting more sensitive, which is not a recipe for productive conversations. In the absence of these productive conversations, we may find that people lose their appetite for democracy.

This isn't hypothetical. Again, the problems that we've identified in this piece are most acute among younger Americans. And young Americans are indeed losing faith in democracy. Only 59 percent of Americans aged 18-25 agree that "Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government" (compared to 74 percent of Americans as a whole). 

So what can we do to ameliorate the malaise of modern society and get back to the emotional peace and well-being that our ancestors experienced? One key is to get back into the rhythms from which we evolved. Cultivate idle time. Develop a closer circle of friends, and spend more time in person with other human beings rather than trying to connect through a keyboard (as far as our evolved brains are concerned, the latter is mostly pseudo-connection anyway). If you're in conflict with someone else, get together in person and physically move through it. Once we start working with our biology instead of against it, we might be surprised at how much better we, and our society as a whole, start to feel.

Another key is to stop letting ourselves be artificially divided into in-groups and out-groups. Illiberal attitudes towards race and gender can certainly contribute to us not interacting as often or as deeply with people who have superficial differences (for example, college students are warned to avoid an ever-increasing list of microaggressions when interacting with someone of a different race or gender, some of which are just basic get-to-know-you questions). But we can choose to not fall into these divides to instead recognize another core component of our biology, which is that we are all one human species and that our differences are dwarfed by our similarities. If we do that, we might all feel a little bit less lonely.

How Emotions Evolved

Understanding Human Emotions: Notes on Lecture 2

robkhenderson.com

• This lecture focuses on how evolution pertains to human emotions
• Professor Reed opens with a quote from the biologist George C. Williams: “Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed?”
• Evolutionary theory provides a framework for describing the functions—that is, the purposes—of our emotions and the problems they were designed to solve
• This will help us to understand why we feel different emotions in different scenarios
• Evolution operates at the level of the gene, not the individual carrying the gene
• Reed offers a useful thought experiment to help understand this: Imagine you wanted to survive until the year 2400. You want to create a cryogenic capsule to preserve your body for the next few centuries. But in the ensuing decades, your capsule (and your body within it) might be tampered with or destroyed. There are two possible engineering solutions.
• First, you can go off and find a quiet area to place your capsule, and hope that no one will harm it or you after you enter it and go to sleep for a few hundred years. This is analogous to what plant life does.
• The second strategy is more complex and pricier, but you don’t have to worry about your body being tampered with or destroyed. You can create a mobile cryogenic unit. You add sensors and early warning devices. With these additions, you can evade danger and make repairs. This is analogous to what animal life does.
• You build the mobile unit, and you program it not to benefit itself, but rather to benefit you. Any program it executes prioritizes you rather than itself. Any path it takes will, on average, serve your interests in order to ensure your survival. You are the sole purpose of this robot. After all, you’re your interests will usually align, though not always. Generally if the robot survives a perilous skirmish, you would survive too. 
• Reed asks: How would you design this robot? You’d likely want it to have vision, senses, feelings, selfishness, algorithms, heuristics, etc.
• Now imagine others also want to live until the year 2400, and they also build robots equipped with devices and algorithms to benefit their own survival.
• This thought experiment helps us to understand the perspective of the gene. Genes are not conscious entities; they merely replicate themselves. From our point of view as humans—as intentional beings—we use intentional language as a shorthand to comprehend how they operate.
• [It comes naturally for humans to attribute mental states like intentionality to non-conscious entities.]
• [Goals do not need to be consciously understood by an entity to be effective. Goals do not need to be internally represented at all. For instance, single-celled organisms swim toward nutrients without any awareness or understanding of the reason for their behavior. But as humans—as intentional beings who evolved in a highly social environment with other conscious beings—we use language like “It is ‘seeking’ sustenance”
• One of Darwin’s enduring insights is that nature “chooses” which traits survive each generation (again, intentional language is just a shorthand way of communicating the idea of natural selection). Those traits that best aid in survival and reproduction are more likely to be “chosen,” that is, survive and be passed on to offspring.
• Darwin found that organisms that were best adapted to their surroundings were the most likely to leave descendants
• [When evolution has to make tradeoffs between survival and reproduction, reproduction usually wins. Traits that aid reproduction can inflict costs on survival: The ovarian hormones that make women fertile when young increases odds of breast cancer later in life. Testosterone tends to boost men's attractiveness when young but raises odds of prostate cancer later in life.]
• [Imagine an organism highly adapted to its environment that has a long life but never reproduces (perhaps it’s unable to attract a mate or uninterested in doing so). It will not pass on its genes. Now imagine an organism that is moderately adapted to its environment, lives long enough to reproduce, and then dies. This second organism will pass on its genes.]
• [The currency of evolution is reproduction. Every one of your ancestors managed to reproduce. They form an unbroken chain dating back billions of years. The drive to reproduce is fundamental. Evolution doesn’t “care” that much about survival. It “cares” primarily about reproduction. A trait that damages survival can still spread if it aids in reproduction. Risk-taking, for example, might put an animal in increased physical danger and thus greater odds of death. But if risk-taking is also, on average, associated with obtaining access to reproductive partners, or impressing reproductive partners, then this trait can still spread.]
• The reproductive rates of organisms are not “random.” Rather, nature “selects” those best able to cope with the environment. Organisms unable to cope with the environment have few or no offspring.
• [Evolutionarily, one reason human males exist is we have higher reproductive variance—more males than females don’t reproduce and die—the idea is these males carry more mutations, are less adapted to their environment, less likely to be chosen for reproduction by females, and leave no descendants. Males are basically the garbage collectors of negative mutations in the species. Throughout history, far more men died childless compared with women.]
• Due to genetics, parents tend to have offspring similar to themselves. Any advantages that allow an organism to survive and reproduce are frequently passed on to their children. Disadvantages, in contrast, are less likely to be passed on, because organisms that have disadvantageous traits tend to be selected less often for mating and reproduction.
• Over many generations, natural selection shapes organisms to be well-adapted to their environment. Advantages become more common over time; disadvantages become less common over time or disappear entirely.
• [This raises the question: Why has evolution retained a heterogeneity of different traits within the same species? Particularly with regard to humans. In other words, why do we not all have some fixed optimal set of attributes with regard to our personalities, mental and physical abilities, temperament, preferences, and so on? A large body of research in evolutionary biology and psychology suggests that evolution has not selected a singular optimal set of traits because no such set exists across all possible varied environments. For example, Personality A (e.g., proneness to behavioral expressions of rage) might be optimal in environment Y whereas personality B (e.g., strong impulse control) might be best suited for environment X. In evolutionary terms, there are no universal selection pressures to eradicate individual human differences among people across different environments.]
• We have inherited adaptations from our ancestors that they used to solve recurrent problems in their environments.
• [Our evolved traits benefited our ancestors. Our environments have changed much faster than our minds. Our emotional and cognitive architecture was, very roughly speaking, shaped for small-scale nomadic hunter-gatherer societies between 10,000-300,000 years ago. This is why evolutionary scientists focus on how our existing traits benefited our ancestors more so than humans in modern developed countries.]
• These adaptations include foraging, mate choice, face recognition, heart rate regulation, predator vigilance, and so on.
• These adaptations can be thought of as mental micro-programs. They are useful, but can create challenges if activated simultaneously and interfere with or nullify one another.
• For example, sleep and flight from a predator require jointly inconsistent actions, calculations, and physiological conditions. Sleep is hard when your mind and your heart are racing. This is not just by chance. Your mind and heart need to race if you believe it is likely a predator is nearby.
• To resolve these disputes between mental micro-program (in this example, sleeping vs. fleeing from a predator), the mind is equipped with superordinate programs to direct these adaptations. These superordinate programs can inhibit and activate different adaptations depending on the circumstances. This is what emotions are. Emotions are superordinate programs that exert control over our mental and behavioral adaptations.
• An emotion is a superordinate program that controls the minds many micro-programs—attention, memory, learning, goal choice, motivational priorities, categories and conceptual frameworks, and so on.
• For example, if you hear strange voices in your house in the evening, you’ll feel the emotion of fear. Suddenly, your hearing improves. The main priority is safety. Any other goals and the subsystems that serve them are deactivated. You might be hungry. You might be sleepy. You might be lonely or in physical pain. But when you feel fear, all of those things are subdued. You’re no longer worried about what you’re going to have for dinner, or getting ready for bed, or your lower back pain. Your information gathering programs also change. You’ll think about where your loved ones are. You’ll think about how to get help, or how to call the police, or where your nearest neighbors are. In addition to psychological changes, you’ll undergo physiological changes as well. Your blood will leave your digestive tract and enter your legs and muscles to enhance your strength and speed. Adrenaline will spike. Your heart rate will either increase or decrease depending on whether the situation calls for physical confrontation, fleeing, or immobility (sometimes described as fight, flight, or freeze).
• Our various emotions such as anger, sadness, disgust, shame, and so on all activate in response to different situations, and evolved in order to improve our ancestors’ likelihood of surviving and reproducing.
• [Emotions evolved because they generally work to confer evolutionary benefits to organisms, helping us to ultimately increase the likelihood of survival or reproductive capacities. For example, under an evolutionary framework, the emotion of happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end. The things that made us happy in the ancestral environment were typically things that benefited our likelihood of survival and reproduction. A successful hunt, locating a source of honey, eating, obtaining social allies, attracting romantic partners, having sex, having children, bolstering one’s status and respect, etc. Today, actions associated with accruing resources, satisfying fundamental needs like hunger and thirst, bolstering our esteem in the eyes of others, being thought of as attractive and desirable, being valued, etc. continue to make us happy.]
• [Even negative emotions are functional. For example, shame and humiliation are emotions that evolved to track our social reputation. Feeling humiliated is evolutionarily adaptive, because it spurs us to avoid status-harming situations and behaviors in the future.]

"The church used to say, 'No, God didn't allow evolution. Instead, he hid the bones in the rocks to test our faith.' It didn't work out too well. So now they say, 'Now we know about it, it proves how incredibly clever he was all along.' It's an infinitely elastic airbag, and there's no argument that I can bring or anyone else can bring against it. And that's what should make you suspicious." -- Christopher Hitchens

Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.

Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. [..] So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

Linking gender differences with gender equality: A systematic-narrative literature review of basic skills and personality

There is controversy regarding whether gender differences are smaller or larger in societies that promote gender equality highlighting the n

Frontiers

There is controversy regarding whether gender differences are smaller or larger in societies that promote gender equality highlighting the need for an integrated analysis. This review examines literature correlating, on a national level, gender differences in basic skills—mathematics, science (including attitudes and anxiety), and reading—as well as personality, to gender equality indicators. The aim is to assess the cross-national pattern of these differences when linked to measures of gender equality and explore new explanatory variables that can shed light on this linkage. The review was based on quantitative research relating country-level measures of gender differences to gender equality composite indices and specific indicators. The findings show that the mathematics gender gap from the PISA and TIMMS assessments, is not linked to composite indices and specific indicators, but gender differences are larger in gender-equal countries for reading, mathematics attitudes, and personality (Big Five, HEXACO, Basic Human Values, and Vocational Interests). Research on science and overall scores (mathematics, science, and reading considered together) is inconclusive. It is proposed that the paradox in reading results from the interrelation between basic skills and the attempt to increase girls’ mathematics abilities both acting simultaneously while the paradox in mathematics attitudes might be explained by girls being less exposed to mathematics than boys. On the other hand, a more nuanced understanding of the gender equality paradox in personality is advanced, in which a gene–environment-cultural interplay accounts for the phenomenon. Challenges for future cross-national research are discussed.

Now you see them, and now you don’t: An evolutionarily informed model of environmental influences on human sex differences

The contributions of evolutionary processes to human sex differences are vigorously debated. One counterargument is that the magnitude of ma

sciencedirect.com

The contributions of evolutionary processes to human sex differences are vigorously debated. One counterargument is that the magnitude of many sex differences fluctuates from one context to the next, implying an environment origin. Sexual selection provides a framework for integrating evolutionary processes and environmental influences on the origin and magnitude of sex differences. The dynamics of sexual selection involve competition for mates and discriminative mate choices. The associated traits are typically exaggerated and condition-dependent, that is, their development and expression are very sensitive to social and ecological conditions. The magnitude of sex differences in sexually selected traits should then be largest under optimal social and ecological conditions and shrink as conditions deteriorate. The basics of this framework are described, and its utility is illustrated with discussion of fluctuations in the magnitude of human physical, behavioral, and cognitive sex differences.

"If we are assuming that the choices that men make are the ultimate, absolute best choices, we are making men the default humans. The only reason women aren't doing exactly what men are doing, in exactly the same way is because they're doing something wrong or they're being conditioned into not thinking the right way. Because really, they should be just like men. But, in fact, the areas where women dominate - healthcare, education, psychology, publishing - these are all hugely influential areas on society. They are important."

-- Helen Pluckrose

"If there is no god - and there isn't - then we made up morality. And I'm very impressed."

-- Jennifer Michael Hecht

Why Do Women Online Blow Relationship Issues Out Of Proportion?

why women online constantly encourage one another to escalate small or nonexistent misdeeds into existential relationship threats

piratewires.com

When I was pregnant, I joined a forum for women who were all having babies in the same month. A user, I’ll call her J, complained that while she was feeding her baby breakfast one morning, her husband came up to her and said, “I have the whole day free. What can I do to be most helpful?” Overwhelmed by caring for her baby and sleep deprivation, she snapped: “I’m too burned out to know what needs to be done. You should know what needs to be done!” Her husband walked away dejectedly. J never updated us about whether her husband found a way to make himself useful, or spent the rest of the day eating Doritos and playing video games. 

At the time, I was surprised that no one defended J’s husband. That punishing a man for offering to help around the house is a great way to ensure he never offers to help again didn’t seem to occur to anyone. Instead, everyone maligned the husband for imposing “mental load” or “emotional labor” on J. And a few complained that their husbands asked how they could help in the same way.

In online spaces like pregnancy and childcare forums, women seek advice, ruminate about their anxieties, and commiserate about their relationships with partners and family. The support they get — and give — is usually helpful. But online, women seem to rarely do anything other than unconditionally support each other, regardless of how frivolous a complaint is. So why do women in online spaces give each other unconditionally supportive, sometimes terrible relationship advice? This behavior actually gets at the heart of the complicated ways that women socialize with one another. Let’s take a closer look.

One common theme of advice women receive from each other in majority-woman online spaces is that they should be more demanding and punitive of their male partners. For example, in 2021, on a subreddit for women whose babies were due in February 2022, one stay-at-home mom who had two children with her husband, and a third from a previous relationship, posted about her husband refusing to get the COVID vaccination. The responses were wild. For example, the second most upvoted comment said he didn’t care about the safety of their children and that she should get a divorce. This year, I saw a post from another woman, in a different subreddit, who was concerned that her husband hadn’t initiated sex in the several months since they conceived. “Do you see me as an incubator?” she asked him tearfully. “You kind of are an incubator,” he blurted. His comment was certainly inconsiderate. But only one response suggested he might just be thoughtless — or have insufficient theory of mind — rather than actively malicious. 

In female-dominated online spaces, women often encourage each other to punish their male partners. For example, an argument and several hours of silent treatment will be viewed as a mild punishment for a husband that’s seen to have done something wrong. Is a long conversation or an argument punitive? Women might enjoy long, drawn out discussions about the state of a relationship, but men — usually less reflective and verbally skilled, and wary of upsetting their partners with a wrong word — often find these kinds of conversations stressful and disempowering.  

Another common piece of advice you’ll see in women-dominated forums is that women should make ultimatums for their male partners to go to therapy. Ultimatums like these tend to benefit women because, in therapy, they’re in a privileged position because of their greater emotional and verbal skills. At the same time, men tend to be highly averse to therapy. And at the moment — especially since the pandemic — there’s unreserved, unqualified popular support for therapy. But psychology, generally — and therapy specifically — are hostile to men. Clinical psychologist David Ley told me that the therapy industry “has some negative and ideological ideas about men, that don’t help them to create welcoming environments for men.” It may be controversial, but my cynical interpretation is that women often use couple’s therapy as a form of punishment, a way to have another woman convince their male partners to yield to their demands, or a way of making the man prove his commitment to the relationship with time, energy, money, and pain.

Why are women, in general, unconditionally supportive of each other online? “Women care a lot about whether their same sex friends are loyal to them,” my friend, colleague, and female friendship expert Tania Reynolds told me.  Women are also more likely to signal that they’re kind, agreeable, and concerned about others. When they gossip, or transmit negative information about each other, they often couch it in terms of concern. For instance, instead of calling Veronica a drunk slut, a woman is more likely to say, “I’m worried Veronica’s alcohol consumption is getting out of control. I’m worried about her sexual health.” Or instead of saying that Bridget is a bad friend, you’re more likely to hear a woman complain that “Sara’s dog died and Bridget didn’t text her. Sara is so upset.” Online forums offer a context that is totally unique in evolutionary history — women competing to be seen as the most loyal and supportive. 

This loyalty signaling is also why women online offer especially punitive and severe advice. Let’s say Sara and Joe break up because Joe stops being an attentive boyfriend. They stay friendly because Sara doesn’t think Joe did anything terrible. But Sara’s friend Lisa decides that Joe should be ostracized and gossiped about, so that he loses other sexual and social opportunities. Lisa is signaling that she demands better treatment for Sara than Sara does for herself. Similarly, a woman online who says “divorce him” or “don’t talk to him for three days” is demonstrating that she thinks the OP has high social value. Such high social value that any degree of mistreatment should be considered intolerable, like suggesting a peasant who doesn’t kneel for a queen should be put to death. 

Why do women have these different friendship values? Most of our female ancestors had to live among their male partners’ relatives (aka patrilocal residence), where they were surrounded by near strangers, many of whom (like cowives) would have been actively competitive with them. This competition usually didn’t break out into physical aggression, because kids with injured or dead mothers either fare poorly or don’t survive at all. Thus, women were more likely to be indirectly or relationally aggressive (for example by spreading rumors) rather than physically aggressive to compete with other women for resources, mates, and social influence. 

A history of intergroup conflict, where men banded together to defend or aggress against rival groups, has also left traces on men and women’s friendships. For instance, men are more likely to have groups of friends, rather than “best friends.” According to social psychologist Jaime Krems, men’s friendships are more coalitional and “males typically prefer shoulder-to-shoulder relationships.” Because group cohesion is more important than any particular dyad (one-on-one relationship), men’s friendships are more resilient over time and men are more tolerant of other men. But ancestral women, who had to navigate the social landscape by finding other women to help with childcare, or to care for their kids when they themselves were sick or injured, had to have high standards for loyalty, kindness and commitment. And it’s easier to monitor signs of commitment, loyalty, helpfulness, and mutual benefit in a dyad than in a large group. Combined with their greater sensitivity to breaking friendship “rules,” like “doesn’t disclose my feelings and personal problems to others,” women’s friendships are more fragile, and require continual maintenance and negotiation. These dyads aren’t that stable, which is why women are more likely to express “friend jealousy”. 

Another reason women are so supportive online is related to the importance of social information. In the competition among women for friends, status, and resources, information is ammunition. Even though women online are most often strangers, disclosing social information is rewarding, because it’s how women establish intimacy. The unconditional support women give each other can be seen as a reward for the disclosure of valuable information. We tend to reward behavior that helps us achieve our adaptive goals, like learning sensitive information about others in our group.

Women initiate the majority of divorces and express more dissatisfaction in relationships, and estimates show that  a third or a half of people who get divorced regret it. As Louise Perry says, “there is a lot of space between ‘happy’ and ‘irreparably unhappy’. In the past, those people remained married; now they usually don’t.” Recent research has shown that women are more likely to be given feedback that inflates their performance at work, compared to men. This is one of many findings showing female bias, including those showing that women are more likely to be seen as victims. And when considering other women in relationships, women inflate their estimates of how wronged other women are, and encourage unforgiving and often irrational behavior. How much is advice from other women, online or in person, contributing to the dissolution of relationships with minor or tractable problems? While I hope that women are receiving advice from other women with the requisite skepticism, it’s inevitable that some of this loyalty signaling nudges women toward breakups or divorce that they may ultimately regret. 

-Diana Fleischman

Darwinian Gender Studies: Unpoisoning The Well

One sex cannot be understood except in light of the other. Men and women have co-evolved, each shaping the other both physically and psychol

paulawright.substack.com

If any man could draw up a comprehensive, infallible guide to navigating this treacherous territory, we would certainly erect a statue to his everlasting memory. There is a Twitter account dedicated to exploring and enumerating precisely the distinctions and differences between the acceptably erotic and the intolerably sexist. It’s called @SexyIsntSexist. It is, of course, under the control of a woman.” Neil Lyndon. Do men really understand what sexism is? The Telegraph 20/5/14

I created Darwinian Gender Studies (DGS) in 2008 as a cross-disciplinary area of study and research which utilises insights across the evolutionary behavioural sciences, including but not limited to, evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, ethology, palaeoanthropology and cultural evolution.    It represents the consilience of the natural and social sciences, as envisioned by E. O. Wilson.

Back then, my planned PhD thesis was to be in developing an evolutionary, bio-cultural model of ‘patriarchy’ which challenged the premises of the feminist conception of patriarchy. Even in 2008, the project foresaw that political correctness, social justice and toxic feminism were taking us deep down the postmodern rabbit hole. My goal was to build bridges of understanding between the sexes not walls of fear and mistrust, which is what feminism does today. To learn about humans and humanity; what we are, and what we are not.

Two things we are, which we cannot cease to be and remain human, are a sexually reproducing, moderately sexually dimorphic, pair-bonded species. These are basic facts of our human nature which cannot be erased by social engineering.

Within DGS, I interrogate orthodox feminist concepts, such as patriarchy theory, objectification theory, gender, power, mating strategies, and sex differences and similarities, using humour and evolutionary explanatory models such as natural and sexual selection, parental investment theory, female choice, signalling theory, life history theory, intersexual competition and intrasexual competition.

History has demonstrated many times, that whenever our species attempts to take control of biology and bend it out of shape to ideological goals, human tragedy always follows. It’s a lesson we still don’t seem to have learned, as in spite of overwhelming evidence, many people still hold fast to the idea of an endlessly flexible human nature, and indeed, human nature is flexible, but a blank slate it is not. Neither however is it a crude caricature of immutable deterministic drives and instincts as often painted within the straw man of biological determinism. Human nature is very much mutable, but not infinitely or arbitrarily so, and here lies the nub: Within what may seem like infinite variations of human action and reaction to what life throws at us, our predispositions on an average scale are actually predictable. There are enough constants within this calculus to recognise the existence of an unmistakably human nature. This nature will vary and recalibrate between individuals and ecologies (variation is one of the engines of evolution) but these variations dance around a constant, evolutionary fire.

“Those who journey from political correctness to truth often risk public disapprobation, but it is notable that most never lose their tolerance or humanity. They may question the politics of race, but not that racism is bad; they may question campaigns about women’s pay, but not that women and men deserve equality of treatment.” Browne, A. (2006) The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of political debate in modern Britain. Civitas

I was, and am, standing on the shoulders of many female evolutionary scientists and philosophers who came before me such as Barbara Smuts, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Anne Campbell, Helena Cronin, Griet Vandermassen, Catherine Salmon, Maryanne Fisher, Bobby Low, Helen Fisher, and many more. Over the last 50 years, their scholarship has revealed that, far from feminist fears to the contrary, evolved sex differences do not equate to inferiority.  Via evolution, we in fact see true equality expressed in discrete and fascinating ways.

These women (and many men) have illuminated the role females play as potent agents of evolution via the phenomenon of female choice. This is sadly still an unsung revolution – unsung by feminism, not evolutionists –  as it shattered the male perspective biases that once dominated biology and Darwinism. These women did this, not with rhetorical declarations of war against ‘patriarchy’ but with logic and critical thinking.

When it comes to the principles of natural selection – the struggle to survive – men and women differ very little. Rather, it is in the principles of sexual selection – the struggle not just to survive but thrive enough to have offspring and allow them to thrive also – that the main differences start to become manifest. It is a categorical fact that none of these differences equates to any moral inferiority. No genuine evolutionary scholar would ever make such a claim.

Feminists have long claimed that logic is an exclusively male trait. So much so that to counter the “male” scientific method they felt the need to create “female” method – social constructionism - which ironically invokes every negative female stereotype they claim to want to refute. They did this not because social constructivism was a better tool – it is untested – but because it was the binary opposite of the scientific method.

Women, in fact, have nothing to fear from logic. Yet feminists do fear it, as philosopher Janet Radciffe Richards notes in her book The Sceptical Feminist, 

“…in spite of girls doing better at school than boys, feminists are still woeful at rationality…feminism has some tendency to get stuck in the quagmire of unreason from time to time [but] it cannot be denied that adopting an anti-rational stance has its uses; it can be turned into an all-purpose escape route from tricky corners”  

They also fear it because it falsifies the very premises feminism rests on – especially female inferiority.

This is a description of all feminisms today: radical, intersectional and all other tribes battling for dominance in the victim narrative – including ideological men’s rights, MGTOW and “red pill” groups. All feminisms eschew logic and reason for dogma and ideology and all are in thrall to the flying patriarchal spaghetti monster in the sky. Ask a question about female oppression, you already know the answer: it’s the patriarchy, stupid. And ideological men’s groups have their own version of patriarchy, known as gynocentrism. Both concepts are intellectually myopic.

I created DGS all those years ago because I wanted the opportunity to have a role, however small, in helping us better understand ourselves as a species.

It is true that as a woman I am perhaps more interested in the unique selection pressures women face due directly to their sex. As an evolutionist and a realist, however, this bias does not make me blind to the fact that men face their own unique selection pressures due explicitly to their sex.

The truth is, one sex cannot be understood except in the light of the other. Men and women have co-evolved, each shaping the other both physically and psychologically via sexual selection. Men desire power and resources because women desire men who have power and resources. And female conflict, well that doesn’t look like male conflict, and so often goes unseen, especially by feminists.

From an evolutionary perspective, feminism can be categorised as the study of the conflict between the sexes – intersexual conflict – aka the “battle of the sexes” with a particular interest in proximate, conscious mechanisms of how men can oppress women and how this oppression can be countered. But this is only half the story. Evolutionists posit that to really understand intersexual conflict one must also analyse intrasexual conflict. We do this because we observe across species that competition within a sex is always far more intense than between the sexes. An evolutionary lens also broadens the enquiry to include an analysis of ultimate, unconscious mechanisms of not just how, but why, men pursue the goal of power and resource control. What do men want to do with power? To create strong alliances, subdue rivals, protect against enemies and attract mates.  

Much is known about male intrasexual competition. We have had 2000 years to work it out – its role in shaping cultures and empires – for better or worse. Far less is known about conflict - and conflict resolution - between women; female intrasexual competition (FIC). It is the pink elephant in the feminist room. Do we have the same amount of time to understand female intrasexual competition? For better or worse? I don’t think we do. The epidemic of female-on-female bullying in nursing has long been acknowledged in academia, yet nothing is done about it. In the UK it costs the NHS billions of pounds in workplace attrition, sick leave and low efficiency. It can also cost lives, as a “culture of bullying” was highlighted in the official reports on two scandals in UK maternity wards where both infants and mothers lost their lives.

In another example observe the rise of intragender conflict in the West. Third-gender people exist in many cultures, but only in the West are males who identify with the female gender trying to use it as leverage to get access to sex-based rights and privileges. Then we have feminism itself a battleground fraught with female intrasexual competition, which is often mistakenly called “internalised misogyny”.  Women too, it seems, want to create alliances, subdue rivals and attract the best mates.

Using FIC as a lens to look anew at hot feminist topics such as the beauty industry, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, and the endless wars of attrition between the many tribes of feminisms brings fascinating new insights, as all these phenomena seem to be expressions of female competition not male oppression.

Nonetheless, there is still a comfortable consensus among all feminists that the beauty ‘ideal’ is a tyranny perpetrated upon women by the patriarchy. “Feminists down the ages have argued that the oppression of women is played out on their bodies, their clothes, their style of adornment. To politicise dress has been one of the enduring projects of the women’s movement.” (Walter, N. 1999) Naomi Wolf tackled this concept in her seminal book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. It suggested that this patriarchal strategy is one of ‘divide and rule’ as it “creates a climate of competitiveness among women that divides them from each other.”

Competitiveness is the keyword here. Perhaps the idea of sanctioning the idea, nay the fact, of female intrasexual competition seems frightening for feminists because on the surface of it, it threatens the very notion of a ‘sisterhood’. Yet we know that men are murderously competitive with one another, as homicide rates attest, and this does not seem to threaten their notion of ‘the patriarchy’.

The evidence actually shows that the beauty myth may not be a tyranny perpetuated on women by men, but on one other - if it is a tyranny at all! And it reveals a much more complex and fascinating picture of female agency which goes far to liberate women from the doctrine of passive femininity.

The fact is, women are fiercely competitive with one another, but as the existence of feminism attests, this does not stop women at least trying to cooperate to face challenges, though, as feminism also shows, its own willful ignorance of human nature means feminists cannot agree on anything for long. This explains the many tribes within feminism, and the fiercely defended hierarchies that exist within feminism itself.

I do not deny that these revelations are tricky for feminists to negotiate, but that is no reason for not taking them on. That female intrasexual competition exists is not in doubt. The degree of it however will vary from culture to culture. We know dominance hierarchies exist in many species and all apes. Humans add to the mix competence hierarchies which allow for the utilisation of innate talents and the division of labour which has allowed our species to become far more than the sum of its biologically determined parts.

We also know females have a large role in the construction and maintenance of such hierarchies, for better and worse. Women are individuals and as such are often not united in their interests. An individual’s environment is crucial to how they calibrate their own needs. Yet, ironically, the collective structure of feminism, suppresses the evolutionary mechanism of individual female choice. The epithet “choice feminism” is regarded with contempt by most feminists today.

 “If we do not know what we are capable of…then we do not know what to watch out for, which human propensities to encourage, and which to guard against.” Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

Further reading: Griet Vandermassen Sexual Selection: A Tale of Male Bias and Feminist Denial ; Griet Vandermassen: Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin: Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory; Anne Campbell: A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothernature ; Susan Pinker: The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap ; Christina Hoff Sommers: Who Stole Feminism? ; Cindy Metson & David Buss: Why Women Have Sex; Women reveal the truth about their sex lives, from adventure to revenge (and everything in between) ; E.O. Wilson: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge ; Jerome H.Barklow (ed): Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists

The Nurture of Evolved Sex Differences

Why favorable conditions produce larger sex differences.

www.realityslaststand.com|Geary, David C.

Many human sex differences are now acknowledged, but their origin and practical importance continue to be vigorously debated [1, 2]. The default assumption among many social scientists and much of the lay public seems to be that any differences are largely (or perhaps entirely) the result of social factors, such as stereotypes or gender role expectations for boys and men and girls and women [3]. For some, these beliefs are comforting because they provide a sense of control over matters that are important to them, and an expectation that with appropriate social policies and shifts in social mores, sex differences in culturally important outcomes (e.g., the numbers of women and men in computer science and engineering) will eventually disappear. One implication of this assumption is that sex differences that vary across time and place must per force be driven by social rather than biological factors.

However, the expression of many traits that facilitate reproductive competition for mates and drive mate choices have evolved to signal the underlying genetic and physical health of the individual, and thus their expression can vary across individuals, contexts, and time [4, 5]. For people, social factors, including formal laws (e.g., prohibition of polygynous marriages), informal social mores, and wealth and political developmental (e.g., broad legal rights) are also associated with variation in the magnitude of sex differences for multiple traits [6]. But while these social and contextual factors can both restrict or facilitate the expression of biologically based sex difference, they do not create them.      

Biological Constraints

Darwin’s [7] sexual selection, that is, the social dynamics that emerge with intrasexual competition for mates and intersexual choice of mating partners, is the primary source of sex differences across species [for review see 8]. Sexual selection results in the evolution of traits that support competition and choice, and the evolutionary emergence of sex differences for these traits, as illustrated in Figure 1.

These traits can be physical (e.g., body weight), ornamental (e.g., colorful plumage), behavioral (e.g., mating displays), or supported by brain and cognitive systems (e.g., bird song). The key result is trait exaggeration in one sex or the other. But this exaggeration can also create a vulnerability for the seemingly advantaged sex [4]. Larger, exaggerated traits consume more cellular energy (and result in more oxidative stress and other cell damaging processes) to build, maintain, and express, making them especially vulnerable to energy and nutritional short falls, as well as to other stressors [9]. By analogy, a poorly working furnace will result in a more rapid drop in ambient temperature in a 300-square-meter than a 100-square-meter house. Basically, the ability to fully express these traits depends on the overall condition of the individual, which is why they are called condition-dependent traits, and the condition of the individual will depend in part on social and ecological conditions.

The factors that sap the development and expression of these traits are well-captured by the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Figure 2), that is, infection, famine, and intense social competition. Exposure to these conditions, as well as some man-made toxins, compromise exaggerated traits more than other traits and therefore reduces the magnitude of any associated sex differences [5, 10, 11]. There are, of course, individual differences within each sex in sensitivity to these stressors, such that some individuals are compromised more strongly than others, but the overall results are smaller sex differences for the population and more variability in the affected trait across individuals.

An example is provided by beak color in the male zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), which influences female mate choices. The color is a good indicator of the male’s current health and his ability to withstand stressors. Poor early nutrition [12] and intense social competition in adulthood [13] can result in larger decrements in males’ than females’ beak coloration that in turn signals poor health and compromised competitive ability. Similarly, exposure to certain toxins can have sex- and trait-specific effects. Bortolotti and colleagues [14] showed that exposure to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) resulted in duller plumage coloration (influences female mate choices) in male but not female kestrels (Falco sparverius), and Jašarević and colleagues [15] showed that prenatal exposure to BPA (bisphenol A) disrupted male but not female spatial abilities (supports males’ searching for mates) in the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus). In all these studies, typical sex differences were reduced or disappeared entirely with exposure to these stressors.

Turning closer to home, we find similar patterns in people, as is nicely illustrated by changes in the sex difference in height with changes in overall health. Among primates, larger males than females indicates an evolutionary history of physical male-male competition. Our male ancestors were larger than our female ancestors going back at least four million years [16], indicating a long history of such competition.

By the logic above, variation in nutrition, disease risk, and social stressors represented by the Horsemen should result in variation in the magnitude of the sex differences in physical size, such as height. More precisely, height differences between the sexes should have increased over time as developed nations kept the Horsemen at bay with improvements in public health (among other factors) and be larger today in developed than in developing nations. Indeed, from 1900 to 1958, the sex difference in height increased 36 percent in Great Britain [17]: In 1900, the average British man was 11 cm taller than the average woman, but this increased to 15 cm by 1958. For young adults in nutritionally stressed regions of Nigeria, men are 7.5 cm shorter than their better-nourished peers, whereas women are 3.2 cm shorter [18]. The result is a sex difference in height that is 38 percent smaller than it would be if these adults had received better nutritional and medical care during childhood and adolescence.

Although much remains to be learned, there is evidence for similar sex-specific vulnerabilities in cognitive and behavioral traits. For instance, male-male competition is associated with more rough-and-tumble play (play fighting) for males than females during development across species [19]. In keeping with a long evolutionary history of male-male competition, boys engage in rough-and-tumble play more frequently, with more vigor, and with greater zest than do girls. The highest rates occur in groups of unsupervised children and in safe contexts, where boys engage in various forms of playful physical assaults and wrestling 3 to 6 times more frequently than do same-age girls [20].

Barrett and colleagues [21, 22] demonstrated that chronic malnourishment through the prenatal and early preschool years undermined the rough-and-tumble and dominance-related play of boys more than girls. Overall, the most active and socially potent children were well-nourished boys and the least potent were malnourished boys, with girls somewhere in between the boys’ groups independent of the girls’ nutritional status.

It’s not just boys and men who are vulnerable to the Horsemen. Girls and women have advantages in folk psychology (sometimes called emotional intelligence), that is, in language, reading facial expressions and body language, and in making inferences about the thoughts and feelings of others (called theory of mind) [23, 24]. I’ve suggested that these advantages have evolved due to female-female competition through relational aggression (i.e., disrupting the reputation and social networks of competitors) and the benefits of forming and maintaining intense friendships that provide critical social and emotional support in adulthood [25].

The nutritional deficits associated with anorexia nervosa severely undermine these social competencies in women and more so than it does for men with similar nutritional deficits [26, 27, 28]. Moreover, these women’s social competencies improve if they recover normal weight. As with men’s height, women’s verbal memory, an aspect of their language and social competencies, improves more rapidity than that of men, resulting in a larger sex difference, as populations become healthier and wealthier [24].  

The punch line is that favorable conditions, those that reduce risk of disease and poor nutrition and that keep social stressors in check, will result in larger sex differences in evolved traits. Ironically, these conditions are most common in wealthy, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations [29]—those that promote gender equality. The irony follows from the belief that the promotion of gender equality and overall favorable conditions will reduce and eventually eliminate sex differences [30], but it does the exact opposite.  

Social Constraints and Opportunities

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are not the only factors that can influence the development and expression of sex differences. In many species, the pattern of sex differences, such as the intensity of male-male competition and the rigor of female choice, can vary with here-and-now social conditions, such as the number of competitors and prospective mates in the local community [31].

Social influences are even more important for people. Formal laws and informal social mores create constraints and opportunities that can substantively influence the expression of evolved biases. The imposition of legally imposed monogamy in WEIRD nations, for instance, reduces the intensity of male-male competition, resulting in less violence and crime, and intensifies female-female competition for high-status mates [25, 32]. These nations also create more social and economic niches and afford greater room for the expression of individual preferences and the expression of many sex differences.

As reviewed by Schmitt and colleagues [33], sex differences in many aspects of personality, self-esteem, and cognitive and psychological functioning are larger in WEIRD, gender equal countries. For instance, women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men and men are more Machiavellian than women, on average. These differences are larger in more egalitarian countries. One potential reason is that religious prohibitions and proscriptions increase social cooperation and decrease self-serving behaviors in men and this in turn reduces the sex differences in these areas. The release of these prohibitions enables fuller expression of underlying differences; in this case, a decrease in men’s agreeableness and an increase in their use of Machiavellian social strategies [34].

Occupational segregation also increases in WEIRD, gender equal countries, presumably due to underlying differences in preferences for working with and helping people as contrasted with working with things [35]. Girls’ and women’s greater interest in other people and relationships follows from their greater investment in children and their need to develop BFF (best friends forever) relationships that serve as a source of social and emotional support. Boys’ and men’s greater interest in things likely follows from an evolutionary history of tool making, most of which is done by men.

Stoet and I found there were proportionally (relative to the number of women and men in college) fewer women than men studying and working in non-organic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, such as computer science, in gender-equal Norway and Finland than in Algeria [36]. In fact, the pattern was found throughout the world, whereby wealth and gender equality were associated with proportionally fewer women entering these fields. Women in less wealthy and less gender equal countries appear to pursue these types of degrees for economic reasons. As economic niches widen and countries become wealthier and more liberal, women (and men) pursue careers that are better aligned with their interests.

In a follow-up study, we examined the occupational aspirations of nearly half a million adolescents across the 80 developing and developed nations that participated in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of academic competencies [37]. In this assessment, students were asked, “What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old?”, which we termed occupational aspirations. As shown in Figure 4, there was not a single country in which girls were as interested in non-organic STEM fields (e.g., engineering) or blue-collar things-oriented occupations (e.g., carpenter) as were boys, and not a single country in which boys were as interested in people-oriented occupations (e.g., teacher) as were girls. There was nonetheless considerable cross-national variation in the magnitude of these differences.

Across countries (median), there were about 4 boys for every girl aspiring to a things-oriented occupation, and about 3 girls for every boy aspiring to a people-oriented occupation. In keeping with our earlier finding for STEM degrees, for every girl who aspired to enter a things-oriented STEM occupation, there were 5 boys. Again, the ratio was larger in gender-equal countries. In Morocco and the United Arabic Emirates, respectively, there were 1.5 and 1.7 boys for every girl aspiring to a things-oriented STEM occupation, as compared to 4.5 and 4.8 boys to every girl in gender-equal Sweden and Norway. These patterns mirror those found one hundred years earlier [38].

These differences were larger in adolescents from blue-collar backgrounds. Many girls from higher-income families aspired to white-collar occupations that were neither clearly things- or people-oriented (e.g., accountant, manager) or were higher-level people-oriented occupations (e.g., physician). The latter findings are consistent with changes in women’s occupational choices from 1972 to 2010 in the U.S., where there was an increase in women working in professional occupations but there was not a shift to more engagement with male-typical blue-collar or white-collar things-oriented occupations [39].

In other words, there are stable sex differences across time and place in many occupational aspirations and choices that likely result from deeper differences in interests in people and relationships as contrasted with an interest in working with things. In WEIRD countries there has also been secular changes that improved women’s educational and occupational opportunities. These improvements, however, are concurrently associated with larger sex differences in aspirations for and segregation into things-oriented and people-oriented occupations. As noted, these amplified sex differences are not restricted to occupations, and emerge in many social, behavioral, and cognitive traits.

Conclusion

The critical point here is that change in the magnitude of sex differences across time and place are part and parcel of the expression of evolved biases, and not necessarily evidence that these traits are largely or solely caused by social and cultural factors. To be sure, social (e.g., prohibition of polygynous marriages) and cultural (e.g., overall wealth, personal liberties) factors can and do have substantive influences on human behavior and well-being. These social and cultural factors can modify the expression of sex differences, but they do not create them de novo.

Science tells Us: Humans created cooking 1 million years ago... Glue 300,000 years ago Clothing 170,000 years ago Jewelry 130,000 years ago Musical instruments 43,000 years ago Sewing needles 30,000 Ceramics 20,000 Booze 10,000

But God created the Universe 6-10,000 years ago...

Tell me again when arithmetic was invented?

Misunderstanding Equality

If confusion between moral and empirical claims persists, we will find ourselves asked to choose between the truth and our ethical preferences.

quillette.com

All men may have been created equal; most certainly they are not all alike. ~Theodosius Dobzhansky

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is perhaps the most venerated sentence in American history. And for good reason. The sentiments it expresses are a triumph of Enlightenment philosophy, and they still resonate hundreds of years later. However, a confusion about their meaning and significance has pervaded popular discourse, muddying moral thinking and leading to extravagant and implausible claims about human sameness. In extreme cases, this muddled thinking has motivated calls to suppress science that supposedly threatens “the dignity and rights of all humans.”

This might seem hyperbolic. It is difficult to believe that a misinterpretation of such a morally uplifting sentence could lead, however circuitously, to the suppression of academic freedom. And certainly, it is true that most people who want to limit academic freedom are not directly motivated by a misreading of the Declaration of Independence. However, they are motivated by a misunderstanding of the fundamental moral value it expresses. They have conflated the laudable ethical claim that all humans deserve dignity, respect, and equal moral consideration with the implausible empirical claim that humans are born with roughly the same characteristics and capabilities. This conflation has led to fear, antipathy, and even censorship of writings that examine human variation on socially valued traits because it has encouraged the erroneous idea that human variation is a threat to moral equality.

The far-Left, of course, has long been attracted to a view of humans as malleable and almost biologically interchangeable. And it has long argued that the contrary view—that humans are biologically limited creatures who vary widely in potential—is primarily an ideological weapon used to defend the status quo by arguing that inequality is natural and inevitable. Therefore, the moral misunderstandings and confusions that arise from the conflation of “created equal” with “created the same” are not new. Indeed, they have a long history and have inspired furious denunciations of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral genetics (as well as thoughtful and ethically insightful responses).

But this denial of biology, and confusion of the moral and the empirical that it requires, has become more ambitious and imperial. It is no longer a fringe ideology, and it is no longer content to attack conservatives or moderates, but also those remaining leftists who believe that we should take genetics seriously. Last year, for example, Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden’s book, The Genetic Lottery, was vehemently denounced by many left-leaning outlets for arguing that genes play a causal role in social inequalities. The New York Review of Books ran an essay which accused Harden of a series of scientific sins, including biological essentialism. Any fair-minded person who has read Harden’s book will struggle to discover the supposed sins the review describes, but the only novelty of such misleading reviews is that they target a left-leaning scholar. Similar reviews were routinely published in prestigious outlets about Charles Murray, Nicholas Wade, and David Geary, among others.

Yet this is not a trivial novelty. It suggests that the ideology of egalitarianism has become more pervasive, powerful, and reluctant to concede or compromise. Harden was so eager to avoid charges of “biological essentialism” that she casually accused right-leaning scholars of advocating white supremacy and eugenics while reassuring readers that she remained committed to progressive notions of social justice. If her book nevertheless provoked denunciations from disconcerted reviewers, one can only imagine the chorus of complaint and condemnation that a similar book written from a different political perspective would produce.

A recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour further illustrates the ascendancy of this misguided strand of egalitarianism. Titled, “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans,” it argues that editors should (and will) be empowered to reject articles that contradict progressive political views about race, sex, and gender identity. Although this constitutes an appalling attack on the dispassionate pursuit of scientific truth, it is merely a public confession of the private practices of many journals. (Many scholars responded with forceful rebuttals, which is heartening.)

For present purposes, the important thing about the editorial is its consistent confusion of empirical and moral claims. This is evident throughout, but is made especially obvious when it contends, “Racism is scientifically unfounded and ethically untenable [italics added].” For this seems to suggest that some set of facts about the world would or could justify racism, which is not only morally abhorrent, but also a category error. It would be like writing, “Claiming that T. S. Eliot is a great poet is scientifically unfounded.” Or “Loving dogs is scientifically unfounded.” Neither moral equality nor racism nor any other value judgement is an empirical claim.

Many scholars—including Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Noah Carl, Steve Pinker, Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, David Reich, and Kathryn Paige Harden—have forwarded some variant of the point that moral commitments are not directly dependent on empirical claims. When I say, “One should not confuse equality with sameness,” my interlocutor frequently responds that such a banal truism is unworthy of articulation. I wish this were true, and that this moral principle were self-evident. But it is not.

Just a few days ago, the Atlantic published an essay skeptical of sex segregation in sports which concluded with the assertion that, “…as long as laws and general practice of youth sports remain rooted in the idea that one sex is inherently inferior, young athletes will continue to learn and internalize that harmful lesson.” The unstated premise of this argument is that empirical claims about differences between men and women are also moral claims about the relative value (inferior vs superior) of men and women. It is therefore worth repeating that created equal does not mean created the same on all socially valued traits. For science will continue to reveal genetically caused differences among individuals, groups, and sexes. And if confusion between the moral and the empirical persists, we will find ourselves asked to choose between the truth and our ethical preferences. The good news in this otherwise gloomy scenario is that no such choice is required. Moral equality is not premised on physical or psychological sameness; it is premised on a commitment to human dignity. And no discovery about humans today, tomorrow, or a hundred years hence will refute Jefferson’s justly celebrated sentence. Scholars should assert and defend the following basic truths and principles and reject the misguided notion of egalitarianism that currently prevails in many mainstream journals and outlets. 1. Humans are not (and will never be) the same on socially valued traits

This might seem painfully obvious. Albert Einstein was never as athletic as Roger Federer, and Federer was never as intellectually gifted as Einstein. Few people, even avowed Marxists, would deny this. Nevertheless, despite the obvious fact of human variation, both the amount and the causes of such variation are fiercely contested. Writers in mainstream outlets still appear to deny obvious biological differences. For example, in the Atlantic piece cited above, the author writes, “And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their full potential.” Most people are willing to grant that humans vary on many traits, from height to body mass to skin color, because of a combination of genes and environment. However, when addressing more socially consequential traits such as intelligence or criminal propensities, they demur. It seems indecent—perhaps even immoral—to suggest that some humans are smarter or more law-abiding than others because of a random shuffle of genes. But the data are overwhelming—almost every human trait of significance is heritable, meaning that variation in each is partially explained by variation in genes. Of course, heritable does not mean intractable or unchangeable. A heritable trait like myopia can be changed (rectified) quite quickly with simple technological interventions.

• TRAIT/OUTCOME - HERITABILITY ESTIMATE
• General Intelligence - 50%
• Conscientiousness - 40%
• Self-control - 60%
• School Achievement - 60%
• Aggression/Rule-breaking - 40%

The approximate heritability estimates of some socially consequential traits However, the high heritability of many traits in affluent societies does suggest that human variation will be with us into the foreseeable future. The only way to equalize humans is through intolerably coercive means (or handicaps), such as those humorously depicted in Kurt Vonnegut’s sardonic short story, Harrison Bergeron. The same almost certainly applies to demographic differences. Just as human individuals vary because of environmental and genetic causes, so do demographic groups. About sex, this is uncontroversial in the relevant literature, and David Geary’s erudite and comprehensive Male, Female remains the best overview. About other demographic categories, the literature is more ambiguous and contentious. The point here is not to forward confident opinions about controversial topics. Rather, it is to note that human variation is a basic, irreducible, and permanent fact of social existence. Literal equality is impossible. 2. Differences do not imply inferiority

Despite the claims frequently employed to attack scholars who discuss human differences, those differences do not make one person, sex, or group superior or inferior to another. In the Atlantic article about sex-segregated sports, the author seems to believe that if men and women are different (specifically, if men are on average stronger and faster than women), women are therefore “inherently inferior.” But this is a morally supercharged and unedifying way to frame an already sensitive topic, and only encourages unnecessary confusion between the empirical and the ethical. Strictly speaking, “superior” and “inferior” can be neutral, empirical terms—one might argue that Rafael Nadal is a superior tennis player to Stephen Curry, since if Nadal and Curry were to play 100 matches, Nadal would win them all. This is verifiable, at least in principle. But in normal parlance, “superior” and “inferior” are usually morally or aesthetically valanced terms suffused with ethical significance. For this very reason, they are not appropriate to describe human differences. In general, most people seem to accept this distinction. Few would argue that individuals born with disabilities are “innately inferior” to the able-bodied. The very suggestion is repugnant because physical health is not necessary for full moral respect and dignity. The Paralympics exist so that disabled athletes may compete against each other, but this segregation does not imply innate inferiority and more than segregation of sports by sex. Nor does the fact that most able-bodied humans would be defeated 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 by Rafael Nadal in a tennis match make them his inferior. The same that applies to individuals should also apply to demographic groups. The assertion that men are physically stronger than women is not a moral claim, it is an empirical claim. And just as Noam Chomsky is not inferior to Ronda Rousey because he is physically weaker than she is, so women are not inferior to men because they are physically weaker on average. A person’s moral worth is not measured by his or her strength or intelligence. And nor is that of a demographic group. 3. Reality cannot be racist or sexist

The Nature editorial discussed above claims that, “Racism is scientifically unfounded…” which implies that racism could be (or could have been) scientifically founded, and that reality itself could be racist. This is a perplexing suggestion—“racism” describes an irrational bias against people simply because they are assigned to a racial category by their shared characteristics. It is a value-based orientation to the world; it is not a fact about the world. One could no more discover that racism is true than that “getting rich is the meaning of life” is true. Of course, some people are racist; and some people believe that material wealth is the meaning of life. But these are facts about people’s attitudes, not about the world itself. The same holds for sexism. Men and women are different, but that is not sexist; it is simply a biological truth about a sexually dimorphic species. Relatedly, responsible empirical claims about the world cannot be racist or sexist. Men and women are different for a variety of reasons, some cultural, some genetic. Those differences are not sexist. And neither is studying or discussing them. Or being wrong about them. Humans are incredibly complicated, and the causes of human variation are difficult to disentangle, so the scientists who study such differences must forward plausible and testable hypotheses about the nature and causes of those differences, some of which will be falsified by later discoveries. This inevitably means that scientists who study human variation will make claims about human differences that are either (1) wrong, or (2) plausible but require more research. This is simply how science works. It is an evolutionary process that requires more hypotheses to be produced than will survive. There are no shortcuts. And this inevitably means that some hypotheses about human variation will over-emphasize genetic causes. Eventually, those will be eliminated or adjusted as new evidence is available. Eventually falsified hypotheses, however, are not evidence of underlying malevolence or bigotry. They are an essential and healthy part of science. And the correct way to address suspicious hypotheses is to argue against them, not to denounce the researcher who forwarded them. Of course, this has limits. Human variation is an incendiary topic, and researchers, scholars, and journalists should of course be sensitive to legitimate concerns. The hypothesis that “men are less biased, on average, than women” may or may not be sensible, but it is not sexist. However, if that hypothesis were worded “women are irrational and hysterical,” then it would be reasonable to complain. 4. Moral equality must not be shackled to facts

One of the great dangers of the confusion between moral and empirical claims and associated accusations of bigotry is that they shackle our moral values to scientific facts. This dangerously and needlessly suggests that our growing knowledge of the world could reveal that a commitment to moral equality is empirically wrong. This in turn forces scholars to choose between honest, open inquiry and their moral commitments, lest they discover truths about human biology that undermine the inspiring creed of human equality. Unsurprisingly, many scholars struggle to navigate between this Scylla of rejecting the truth and Charybdis of rejecting inspiring moral principles. The good news is that they can choose a different route altogether. Moral principles are not wholly dependent on facts. They are, one might say, transempirical commitments. Of course, this does not mean that morality is unresponsive to reality. We may believe that human happiness is the ultimate moral good. Thus, our moral commitment to promoting happiness—a transempirical commitment—would impel us to examine the emotional effects of our policies and behaviors and to adjust accordingly. But it does mean that our broad moral commitments are different from traditional empirical assertions. They are something to which we dedicate ourselves; and they do not need to change as our scientific view of the world changes.

At one time, many believed that humans were equal because they were equal “in the eyes of God.” Then Darwin and secularism arrived, and today many people no longer believe in a literal human creator. But that does not vitiate the force of the moral claim that humans are equal. In fact, most of us would be appalled by the assertion that, “Since we know that humans are just evolved creatures, they do not deserve equal moral consideration.” Our endorsement of metaphysical equality is not tethered to belief in a benign creator. This is why we can continue to celebrate the eloquent defense of human equality expressed in the US Declaration of Independence while embracing evolution. The same applies to human variation. We do not yet know what we will discover about the extent and causes of it; but we do know that all humans are different from each other and that genes play a considerable role in many of these differences. Undoubtedly, we will learn much more about the nature of these genetic differences in the next century. But whatever we learn, it will not force us to relinquish a commitment to equality because that commitment is perfectly consistent with individual, sex, and group differences. Indeed, it makes no sense otherwise. For in a world of tedious sameness, the sentence “All [humans] are created equal” would be as insipid and uninspiring as the sentence “All humans are mammals.” Jefferson was writing poetry, not prose.

Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary. - Areo

Long ago, on my father’s farm, we had a particularly bumptious, mischievous, even aggressive cow called Arusha. The herdsman, musing one day on her obstreperous behaviour, remarked, “Seems to me,…View Post

areomagazine.com

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 10, 2021

Ants communicate by slow-diffusing chemicals (pheromones). If their brains had radio-speed links, would “distributed consciousness” emerge at the colony level, while no individual ant had any conscious awareness at all? Discuss, perhaps with reference to the Internet.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 13, 2021

Conjecture: “There must be a moment in history when two siblings born to the same mother were destined, one to become the ancestor of all humans and the other to become the ancestor of all wombats.”

Is the conjecture necessarily true? Discuss.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 14, 2021

Race is very much a spectrum. Most African-Americans are mixed race, so there really is a spectrum. Somebody who looks white may even call themselves black, may have a very slight [African inheritance]. People who have one great-grandparent who is Native American may call themselves Native American. Sex on the other hand is pretty damn binary. So on the face of it, it would seem easier for someone to identify as whatever race they choose. If you have one black parent and one white parent, you might think you could choose what to identify as.

I have lately been inclined to speculate, very crudely and indistinctly, that propagation by true fertilization will turn out to be a sort of mixture, and not true fusion, of two distinct individuals, or rather of innumerable individuals, as each parent has its parents and ancestors. I can understand on no other view the way in which crossed forms go back to so large an extent to ancestral forms. But all this, of course, is infinitely crude.

My dear Wallace …

I do not think you understand what I mean by the non-blending of certain varieties … an instance will explain. I crossed the Painted Lady and Purple sweetpeas, which are very differently coloured varieties, and got, even out of the same pod, both varieties perfect but none intermediate. Something of this kind I should think must occur at least with your butterflies & the three forms of Lythrum; tho’ these cases are in appearance so wonderful, I do not know that they are really more so than every female in the world producing distinct male and female offspring …

Believe me, yours very sincerely

Ch. Darwin

1⇡ I am aware that Rebecca Tuvel was vilified for raising this very discussion topic, doing what academic philosophers are supposed to do, namely think. I am also only too aware of the elaborately planted minefield of constantly evolving neologisms and proliferating pronouns, through and around which academics in some humanities departments are obliged to tiptoe. Never dexterous with my toes, I am content to register awareness while ploughing on flat-footed, as a well-meaning scientist and lover of the English language. A useful map of the mine-strewn obstacle course is provided by the admirable Kathleen Stock in Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

2⇡ Anne Fausto-Sterling’s figure of 1.7 percent intersexes is much repeated. It is inflated from the more realistic 0.018 percent by the dubious inclusion of Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. Whether you take 1.7 or 0.018 percent, the figure is still minuscule when placed in the middle of a frequency distribution, where it is dwarfed by huge peaks on either side. The distribution is overwhelmingly bimodal and sex overwhelmingly binary.

“No zoologists argue that biological sex is a hard-to-define spectrum in tigers.”

-- Wilfred Reilly

"For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs -- as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions."

-- Charles Darwin