Man the male as "noble hunter" gets a good further kicking

Evolutionary psychology, or its parent/uncle, sociobiology, among its more sexist tropes, latched on to the idea first seriously propounded 60 years or so ago that males evolved to hunt, women to gather (and breed babies, of course).

Well, we know that's not so much the case with Neanderthal women.

And now? The men evolved to hunt, women to gather, sexist Ev Psych theory about Homo sapiens males and females gets further refutation. Early human hunting, we know, relied in large part on humans' ability to outrun other mammals, not on speed, but on endurance running. And, women are better than men at that. And, ancient fossils, as well as modern cultures such as the Ainu of Japan, show women hunting.

The story gets an extra kudo for this:

Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. “Sex” typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms “female” and “male” are often used in relation to biological sex. “Gender” refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen.

And, I'll break that out into separate blogging.

Per the graphic pictured at left, much of the article addresses the detailed benefits of estrogen for endurance activities in general, including endurance based hunting.

Earlier parts look in more detail at the sexist mindset beyond many claims about man the noble hunter and their times, including ignoring disconfirming studies.

As for today's endurance sport world? "But marathons" is nothing. In ultra-length endurance running, women crush men. Ditto in long-distance swimming.

And, re Neanderthals, per the first link, the evidence shows equality of hunting among them, too. Presumably including cave lions.

Andrew Sullivan hits new pseudointellectual low

In what I see as possibly his greatest feat of anti-intellectualism since denoting an entire issue of The New Republic to touting the pseudoscientific insights of The Bell Curve, Sully is now hoisting high the old canard that atheists are really religious, too.

I have myself said that Gnu Atheists, in some sociology-type ways, show a mindset similar to fundamentalist-type Christians, and have thus called them atheist fundamentalists. But, I've never claimed that they, let alone non-Gnus, are religious.

He then followed with teh stupidz of claiming religion is in our genes.

Neither one is close to true, in reality. The fact that Sully is arguably a very good representative of the Peter Principle in mainstream media, especially thought and opinion media, on the other hand, is almost ironclad as an argument now.

But, I couldn't let such arrogant, arrant nonsense go unchecked.

Here's a few thoughts I posted on Twitter, with interspersed comment:

Nope on both points
On A., Gnu Atheists are quasi-religious, sociologically, but not metaphysically religious
On B., no, certain genetic-driven tendencies toward imputing agency, or over-imputing agency, is FAR from being in our genes.

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

In short, per his Bell Curve love, on B, Sully seems to be doubling down on the pseudoscience of Ev Psych. A Scott Atran or Pascal Boyer will easily steer clear of this while offering much more plausible theories about the origins of what eventually became religious belief mindsets.

Of course, the second point, that religion is in our genes, is not far different from the "intelligence is in our racial heredity" that .@SullyDish claimed as part of fellating The Bell Curve.

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

From there, it's off to the land of false analogies, refuted by this:

But Andrew Sullivan, .@sullydish, has yet more teh stupidz.
Claiming that a denial of god is the same as belief in god? That's like claiming that evolutionary biologists who deny creationism are the same as creationists.

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

The real problem is Sully's willful ignorance on a fair amount of philosophy. I note that here

And, MORE Andrew Sullivan stupidity. .@SullyDish practices #scientism when he claims science can't replace religion because it's not abt "meaning." Hey, Sully? Way to prove you're willfully ignorant of #philosophy. It can indeed discuss meaning where science doesn't .@mpigliucci

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

and here:

Sullivan gets even worse, himself using the word "scientism" later on after having strawmanned science for not being scientism. And, on issues of "meaning" and philosophy, he misappropriates John Gray while ignoring likes of Hume and Camus from philosophical greats

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

Finally, Sullivan shows his misunderstanding of the political movement he claims to represent.

.@mpigliucci Sullivan gets worse from there. (And, you need to pass this part on to Dan Kaufman.) He goes into "classical liberal" mode and claims that politics without religion is illiberal. https://t.co/vcclblD88m

— @realDonaldTrump 🌻🚩 (@SocraticGadfly) December 7, 2018

Tosh. Both here and in Europe (and the Anglosphere across the world), many politicians and political thinkers are both classical liberals and irreligious.

#PopEvPsych, more legit version, gets some definite refudiation

I differentiate what seems to be more legitimate work in evolutionary psychology (without in any way turning off my skepticism) and the "pop" version, which is what's given over to the more outrageous pronouncements, like rape being evolutionarily adaptive, and about anything else that makes claims for a set of extreme gene-driven male-female sexual differences.

That said, as I've also noted before, even the "legit" version of ev psych founders on its presuppositions in this area, namely that one point in human evolution was critical for human psychological evolution, and it just happened to be when man the male was a noble hunter-gatherer.

First, there's absolutely no way, at this time, based on current human DNA or analyzable scraps from long-ago ancestors, that we can get a firm handle on rate of genetic change in general, let alone on specific genes for psychological development.

Second, even legit ev psych still often seems to be in the one gene, one result school of genetics.

Third, as we learn more and more about epigenetics, and learn more and more about what we have yet to figure out, it's also clear that all versions of ev psych have little room for it, and no room for testing for long-ago epigenetic effects.

Fourth, back to all versions' of ev psych's "keystone" from the EEA, man the male as a noble hunter-gatherer? Man the male was a grubby scavenger-gatherer long before that and for much longer, as far as we know.

All of this is why I take great pleasure in reading that increased "feminization" was a key point in leading to the development of behaviorally modern humans.

Game. Set. Match. Not just versus Pop Ev Psych, but at least game and set vs. more "legit" ev psych, overall, and also against its defenders in the so-called "scientific skepticism" movement like Rebecca Watson.

Hey, Ed? Watson's understanding of the issue may be muddled, and she may also have an Atheism Plus or SJW ax to grind. None of that is true for me.

On the "scientific skepticism" issue, also, with at least one offender who has 15 months of free time to rethink such things, this is also connected to the issue of conflating libertarianism and skepticism.

If you really believe faces evolved to absorb punches

I'm sure a number of my science minded friends saw the story last week about two University of Utah professors who claim, in the worst Pop Ev Psych idea since Randy Thornill claimed that rape was evolutionarily adaptive, that australopithecine faces evolved their heavy brow ridges to better absorb punches. (Here's a good, straight-up takedown by  Brian Switek.)

First, given the last prior stupidity to come out of the University of Utah, my first counterargument is that, in that case, our eyes evolved to see the certainty of room-temperature cold fusion.

Second, instead of pressures for intelligence, did Australopithecine brains start getting bigger to act as shock absorbers for their faces that allegedly evolved to absorb punches better?  Ergo, our neocortex is then that word that Pop Ev Psychers hate ... a SPANDREL!

So, I should thank my Australopithecine ancestry and lucky stars that a crude version of self-protection made me brilliant!

Third, does this explain the stereotypical beetle-browed look of modern violent criminals? Does it especially explain modern black criminality? Yes, I went there. Obviously, they kept the brow ridges that enlightened Caucasians lost when they moved out of Africa. And, of course, racialists like to take Pop Ev Psych just one step further.

Fourth, per a Tweet from Massimo Pigliucci, if you believe this trait extended unto modern homo sapiens, have you done rigorous testing on modern homo sapiens? Like, er, yourselves? No fair volunteering your fists for an old claim that the human hand evolved to punch. We're just talking about faces, so your volunteerism in the name of scientific research will be limited to that. I can work on finding volunteer fists for the other end  of the test myself. Maybe I'll start with some of those stereotypical beetle-browed African types, you know?

And, per my "second," above, the smarter you are on a good old IQ test, that means the better your brain is as a shock absorber, theoretically. In turn, that means your face must be punched harder and more often to test this extension of your theory.

We do know, or "know," per Steve Pinker, that we were Hobbesian brutes until recently, after all. So, surely, this arms race increased until some benighted, presumably Caucasian turning point.

One of the more laughable defenses of the pair I found was from someone on Facebook who claimed this didn't involved psychology. Really? Alleged increases in violence don't involve psychology? And, they don't involve evolutionary psychology when tied to claims about evolutionary biology? And, they don't involve Pop Ev Psych when stupidly tied together?

Alex, I'll take "Totally wrong British Facebook commenters" for $1,000, please!

Evolutionary psych finds Texas tiny-penis syndrome

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm not too much of a fan of evolutionary psychology. Many of its claims, even in its more staid versions, sound like "just-so" stories, and the baggage of its even more wild-eyed sibling, Pop Evolutionary Psychology, adds to the problems of even more legitimate evolutionary psychology.

However, at times, something that sounds like a just-so story may not be.

And, one of the most exciting pronouncements is that evolutionary psychology seems to have documented shortened penises in many Texas males, and to have shown how specific types of Texas boastfulness are related to this, in what may be the most significant finding of sexual selection and evolutionary psychology since Charles Darwin himself postulated that peacock tail feathers were a sexual selection device to attract females. (NOT!)

(And, no this is no joke. Condom company research shows that one male thing is smaller indeed in the Lone Star State.)

Herr Dr. Paul von Schlippenschtupper, professor of evolutionary psychology at Lower East Texas State University in Vidor, explained how this fit in with psychological theories of compensation.

"First, we had to postulate what some common compensatory mechanisms might be," von Schlippenschtupper said. "Then we had to show a correlation between penis length, or lack thereof, and these compensatory mechanisms. Third, we had to in some way show that this correlation is causal and not just statistical."

Von Schlippenschtupper said that for the first item, Texas males were compared with non-Texas males to determine some common sociological and psychological differences.

A few immediately stood out. They included:
1. The phrase "everything's bigger in Texas."
2. The phrase "Don't mess with Texas."
3. Large belt buckles
4. Fake bull testicles on pickup back bumpers.

Von Schlippenschtupper said the first item seemed clear.

"Only someone who did not believe everything in his life was bigger would loudly shout that everything is bigger," he said.

The second item, he said, might also have a second component.

"If this were correlated with penis size, it might also have other sexual issues," he said. "This would include an element of overt homophobia, with the verb 'mess' often being used in the sense of 'touch' or 'fondle.' Then, this overt homophobia might reflect a repression of one's own homosexuality, and combined with penis shortening, actually have two compensatory issues fused together."

The third and fourth were obvious, he said.

"The belt buckle is a visual version of George Lakoff's 'framing,' von Schlippenschtupper said. "It attempts to frame a smaller penis in a way to make it look larger than it actually is. It also attempts to substitute a second sexual symbol for the first one, with the size of the belt buckle, and its theoretical skill in reframing a short penis, actually making the false claim that the wearer of a large buckle has a long penis."

"The fake bull testicles are more unconscious. And,  of course, they're technically not compensation for a shorter human penis, but smaller human testicles," von Schlippenschtupper said. "However, it's a similar type of compensation for perceived sexual inadequacy, so we included it."

Von Schlippenschtupper said that he and his postgraduate research assistants would continue to research the issue. Other possible indicators of tiny-penis syndrome could include ornate, overwrought iron gates for fake ranches, double-cab pickup ownership by people who don't even need single-cab pickups and more.

As for the degree of correlation? Von Schlippenschtupper and his staff did the appropriate measurements. With a p-value not just of 0.05, but 0.001, they found a 98 percent correlation with average penis length of 0.91 inches shorter than that of the average American male in general.

Von Schlippenschtupper said proving there's a direct causal element will be more difficult. He noted that the typical tiny-penis Texan refused to admit he suffered from this, let alone saying when he first noticed he suffered from this. Therefore, it's impossible to tell if a sufferer went out and bought fake bull testicles as a direct result of knowing he had a tiny penis.

However, von Schlippenschtupper said he and his staff are looking for various ways to prove the causal angle.

Von Schlippenschtupper also said that tiny-penis syndrome appeared much more likely to be found in those of conservative political beliefs. He said that 42 percent of sufferers identified as being very conservative and 36 percent identified as being conservative. Again, he said he and his postdocs were working to nail down issues of causation.

Paleo diets - yet another #PopEvPsych failure

Hey, third time is the charm today on Scientific American stories and blogs. I found one that's actually scientific.

The writer notes several things wrong with paleo diets, such as incorrect assumptions about evolution and how it works, and, even more, the assumption that there's "one" Paleolithic diet and only one.

Man the noble hunter-gatherer, for example, informs wrong ideas in PopEvPsych and in the idea of "one," meat-heavy, Paleolithic diet. Indeed, per the chart, the Kung of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" fame only get 10 percent of their food intake from meat.

Meanwhile, both Pop Ev Psych with its noble meat-killing hunter-gatherer (already shown to be incorrect, above) and the paleo diet craze, gets a more direct smackdown. Our ancestors started eating more grasses 3.5 million years ago. The Science Daily story notes that we don't know for sure what part of those grasses were being eaten, but part that was surely seed heads, i.e. ...

GRAINS! The grains decried as unhealthy by the paleo dieters and rejected as being beyond the noble pale by Pop Ev Psychers.

Oh, and per claims (not necessarily wrong) that meat cooked on fires fueled our brain expansion, this does matter for reasons beyond what I just listed.

Per Science Daily:

"If diet has anything to do with the evolution of larger brain size and intelligence, then we are considering a diet that is very different than we were thinking about 15 years ago," when it was believed human ancestors ate mostly leaves and fruits, Cerling says.

Now, the biggest brain explosion happened later. But, it may not been quite so much due to cooked meat, as to expansion of proteins in general, and perhaps certain fats and fatty acids, too.

That said, the Scientific American author, on the first link, could have gone much further.

I believe that these, and other incorrect ideas and assumptions, are partially connected, or more than partially, to Pop Evolutionary Psychology, even though its starting point is further back in hominid history.

Because of this and other incorrectnessess, paleo diets are stupid because like anything connected in any way to Pop Ev Psych (and this halfway goes for "normal" ev psych) it's based on half-baked, largely untested, probably largely untestable ideas, and ideas that often have a good "leaven" of sexism behind them.

And, note that I applied this critique as halfway falling on "normal" evolutionary psychology, too. Because it's true. Some of its assumptions about human evolution and its pace are just ill-thought. The EEA is largely untestable. And probably will always be so. To the degree it is testable, it's at least partially refutable.

And, the sexism is heavy in the idea of man the "noble hunter-gatherer." Mankind first increased the amount of meat the species was eating by being a scavenger-gatherer, not a hunter-gatherer. That's less noble. It's also less individualistic.

And, as I recently blogged about how there's no basic difference between men and women on level of sexual drive, or on level of sexual roaming eyes outside of strict monogamy, one key tenet of such sexism has not just been refuted but crushed.

And, I'm more and more willing to say that about "legit" ev psych. Other than the idea that mind = brain, and brain evolved, therefore human psychology evolved, I think a legitimate field of evolutionary psychology needs to start from ground zero.

Update: I think paleo dieters ought to combine with breatharians, once they figure out the exact composition, by ratios of elements and CO2, of the atmosphere of the PopEvPsych EEA, and therefore, lose weight, trump conventional science, and become Social Darwinist sexists all at once!

#PopEvPsych has another fail - sex and sexuality differences

It's one of the biggest "commonplaces" of Pop Evolutionary Psychology, and somewhat of more restrained "legitimate" (I reserve the right for the scare quotes) evolutionary psychology that men are from Mars and women are from Venus in terms of sexual desire, sexual drive levels, and, above all, sexual roving eyes and interest in not being fully monogamous.

Taint quite so, says research around new studies trying to finally find a "female Viagra" or equavalent. Most of the women in most of the studies, it seems, haven't lost their Jones because of kids at home, housework, or whatever. Rather, familiarity has bred, if not contempt, ennui.

And, indeed, if I were into the "just so stories" of Pop Ev Psych, I could easily make up one to explain this, that has at least as much actual scientific grounding as do most those of Pop Ev Psychers.

First, we know that, in some mammalian species, the female of the species can do more than prevent immediate womb implantation of a fertilized embryo. She can delay immediate fertilization of an egg cell by sperm inside her uterus.

Why? Why do this?

Because a better male, evolutionarily speaking, may come along.

Well, there's no proof that human females do that. But, given that in the hunter-gatherer times of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness so beloved by "legit" ev psychers and Pop Ev Psych types alike (despite somewhat shaky scientific grounding), a child would be nursed until age 3, in part as a contraceptive, but that, in part because of that and in part because of the simplicity of life there, said child was ready to do a certain amount of work by age 5, why WOULDN'T women have the seven-year-itch after four years?

Further confirmation of how Pop Ev Psych is wrong?  Women lie as much as men about how much sex they have. They just underreport, rather than overreport.

Move over, Pop Ev Psych, you may have a new bedfellow

The "replication" phenomena in social psychology, and first cousin behavioral psychology, depending on your phrase of choice, is getting to be bigger and bigger. The latest problem, or casualty? Research claiming to have demonstrated the priming effect.

Nearly as big a problem? The way supporters claim there's no problem. Or maybe a bigger one?

Bargh, Dijksterhuis and their supporters argue that social-priming results are hard to replicate because the slightest change in conditions can affect the outcome. “There are moderators that we are unaware of,” says Dijksterhuis.

Geez, this sounds just like psi phenomena researchers!

More evidence that's bollocks?

Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego — a long-time critic of social priming — notes that the effects reported in the original papers were huge. “If effects were that strong, it is unlikely they would abruptly disappear with subtle changes in procedure,” he says.

Bingo.

Then, there's more special pleading:

Dijksterhuis says that “focusing on a single phenomenon is not that helpful and won’t solve the problem”. He adds that social psychology needs to get more rigorous, but that the rigour should be applied to future, not historical, experiments. The social-priming debate will rumble on, he says, because “there is an ideology out there that doesn’t want to believe that our behaviour can be cued by the environment”.

You don't venture much closer to at least junk science, if not pseudoscience, with a Red Queen comment like that.

Now, the Nature story says there's no suspicion of fraud at this time. But, this did come from the Netherlands, and Nature mentions the name of known Dutch research fraudster Diederik Stapel.

I, like Daniel Kahnemann, would like (in part) to believe that priming is real. It fits with some ideas I have about subconscious or semiconscious subselves. But, my thoughts on subselves aren't dependent on ideas of priming. And, the whole idea of "pliability" behind priming may be more iffy in general than some would wish.

Per Kahneman's phrase, "fast thinking" is possible without any such pliability in general or priming in particular.

And, since both behavioral and social psychology are partial spinoffs and developments from good old fashioned B.F. Skinner behavioralism, there's other reasons to be skeptical, eh?

Even worse, they and ev psych are arguing the same issues from other ends of the stick. And they're both apparently making inflated claims, tho ev psych, especially in its pop version, still appears worse, and has started most of these tempests.

That said -
A: Two wrongs don't make a right;
B: This shows just how little we know, yet, about human mental development.

Pop Ev Psych and sexism

Legitimate evolutionary psychology, as it has developed, has enough problem with scientific rigor, especially on gender issues. That all starts with its idea of an environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, or EEA. (Scratch that; I think ALL ev psych, even with the bathwater thrown out, is borderline pseudoscientific.)

Ev Psych "conveniently" postulates a long history of Homo sapiens as hunter-gatherers, with noble, brawny males battling to hunt down big game while dutiful demure women gathered up tubers, roots and herbs.

However, early in H. sapiens' history, and going back to our Homo erectus predecessors, we were scavenger-gatherers long before, and for many millennia before, become hunter gatherers. Nothing "noble" about it. Nothing particular androcentric about it, either. 

Of course, that's actually three scientific problems, or more.

• Getting human development wrong by ignoring scavenger-gathererers;
• Trying to artificially constrain the "evolutionary" part by limiting it to homo sapiens;
• Either accidentally or willfully putting Nos 1 and 2 in the service of sexist conclusions.  

That said, as someone who accepts the neo-Darwinian findings of evolution by natural selection, I don't argue with the baseline idea, that as hominids, including but not limited to H. sapiens, evolved, so did the minds expressed by their brains in interaction with their external environments.

I do object to the things above.

Beyond that, I object to:

• Making unfalsifiable statements, especially ones we may NEVER be able to falsify. And, given that brains generally don't fossilize, that covers a lot of territory.
• Telling "just-so" stories, for which Steve Gould, especially, criticized evolutionary psychologists. 

Pop Evolutionary Psychology is to legitimate ev psych (to the degree it's becoming more legit) as Dan Dennett's idea of folk psychology is to legitimate psychology (to the degree psychology is becoming more legit scientifically). And, in going beyond the first three issues with much of ev pscyh, Pop Ev Psychers seem determined to be egregious about the second set of bullet points.

(Note: This post was inspired, originally, and developed from, one I did about sexual objectification among Pop Ev Psychers and nth-wave feminists alike. And, yes, feminists can be sexists, just like blacks or other populations can be racists.)

The  EEA, being based on sexist ideas about hunter-gatherer societies’ operation, as well as further sexist ideas that Homo sapiens had a long period as hunter-gatherers when we probably had just as much a period as less sexy scavenger-gatherers, has shown itself to be bathed in about as much an aroma of sexism as a bottle of Old Spice gone past its expiration date. (This long and colorful metaphor assumes Old Spice has an expiration date, of course.) And, Pop Ev Psychers like to treat it like the Nicene Creed

Example No. 1 is like shooting fish in a barrel — Randy Thornhill claiming rape isevolutionarily adaptive. Tosh. Bullshit.

In pre-state tribe/band sized societies, you raped once, inside your clan, you were likely killed. There was little hierarchical structure for a chieftan, jefe or whomever to "pull rank" to rape lower-class women, either.

You raped some woman in another band? You immediately started a small-scale war, most likely satisfied when your clan handed you over ot the other clan to be put to death by them.

So, even if you were 100 percent sure your rape caused a pregnancy, it was only a break-even on "adaptiveness" if you were caught immediately. And, rape appears to be less likely to cause pregnancy than even the hit-and-miss of normal human sexual intercourse.   

Short of rape, though, there's plenty of other "just so" storytelling that's sexist.

Here's another. Theoretically, based on porn or whatever, we men in the modern West like big boobs. But,  Pop Ev Psychers claim that a genetic variation that appears to have given East Asian women, on average, smaller breasts, possibly to adapt to its cold winters (and per Jerry Coyne, even the issue that the genetic change coded for small breasts is debatable) was actually driven by sexual selection.

But Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he thought the more likely cause of the gene’s spread among East Asians was sexual selection. Thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children.

There's a just-so story staring the likes of Ed Clint right in the face. 

Here's Coyne's take, though:

He wonders how the researchers concluded that the variant EDAR gene shrinks breasts at all, given that mice don’t have breasts­—at least, they don’t have pronounced lumps on their chests the way people do.  

Er ... good point.

That said, such nuttery has better-known touters than Joshua Akey.  

Per Massimo Pigliucci, it seems Michael Shermer's also still swimming in the waters of Pop Ev Psych sexism. Gee, what a shock!

Here's Shermer, in an ongoing dialogue about how much science does (Pigliucci) or does not (Shermer) need philosophy to guide discussions of ethics:

Most men, for example, are much more receptive toward unsolicited offers of sex than are women. 

Just wow. And, as Massimo notes, simply not true!  

Shermer then goes on to claim rape is scientifically shows to be immoral, ignoring that Pop Ev Psycher Randy Thornhill claimed it was evolutionarily adaptive! Now, it is not true that everything adaptive should be moral. However, since Shermer himself has previously mangled David Hume's classic is-ought distinction, which in turn led to this dialogue between him and Pigliucci, I think it's legit to hoist him on this petard.

Meanwhile, it's not just differences in sexual desire. Whether it's Pop Ev Psych or John Gray-type pop psychology, the whole "men are from Mars, women from Venus," is getting more and more refutation.

"Sex is not nearly as confining a category as stereotypes and even some academic studies would have us believe," study researcher Bobbi Carothers, a senior data analyst at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement. 

Are there differences? Yes:

Carothers, who completed the research as part of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Rochester, and her colleagues are not denying that men and women often do differ from one another. Women, for example, are known to have higher levels of anxiety than men, on average, and to react to bad news with more stress. Studies also turn up gender differences in aggression, sexuality, frequency of smiling, and body image, Carothers and her colleagues wrote.

But researchers haven't spent much time examining the structure of these differences, Carothers wrote. It's possible, for example, that men and women usually fall into distinct groups. In this categorical world, knowing someone is a man would automatically tell you that he's aggressive, interested in short-term sex over long-term relationships, good at math and bad verbally. Alternatively, gender differences could occur more often on a continuum. You might know someone is a man, but it would tell you little about his skills with math. 

Which possibility is more likely might seem clear to anyone who has ever known a guy who can't figure out a tip to save his life. But humans tend toward categorical thinking, the researchers wrote, and gender is about as basic a category as you can get.

Bingo. And here's some specific issues where gender differences are an overlapping continuum:

Men and women fell along a continuum on such measures as interest in casual sex, frequency of thoughts about sex, and the appeal of certain traits such as virginity, looks and wealth in a mate. The same was true of attitudes toward close relationships, empathy and other interpersonal factors.

In other words, if told that a person is more than 6 feet tall, you would be pretty safe in guessing that they were a guy. If told that a person is very empathic, you'd be much harder-pressed to correctly guess their gender.

So, let's just put this "men are from horndog, women are from demure" idea on ice. It's insulting to both sexes. It perpetuates stereotypes, many of which then translate into our legal system, such as judges still occasionally admonishing rape victims about how they dress. 

Oh, and women don't talk more than men, either. 

Their "gap" on spacial relations skills appears to be at least somewhat culturally driven.

But, a lot of people like to assume they do. And, there have been Pop Ev Psych just-so stories about that, too.
And, on the psychology side of Pop Ev Psych, let's make sure that claims aren't being made on the basis of biased psychological studies, with such bias including gender bias. (Per Robert Sapolsky, in "moving backward" from Pop Ev Psych to some thought within evolutionary biology in general on sexual selection, such sexism isn't confined to thoughts about human evolution.) It also seems that Pop Ev Psychers, like drug companies, don't have any problems with being "selective" on how they frame their research or on what results they report.

Now, I’m not saying there are no sex-based differences in formulation and expression of sexual desire. But, the differences are smaller than either Pop Ev Psychers, nth-wave feminists or male-hierarchy Christians will admit. And, all three are similar in throwing bullshit ideas against the wall, hoping something will socially stick, either due to religious prejudice (the Christians), reverse sex prejudice plus tribalism (the nth-wave feminists) or sex prejudice cloaked in pseudoscience (Pop Ev Psychers).

I'm also not saying every Pop Ev Psycher, let alone every legit evolutionary psychologist, has such sexual issues, but, unless anybody close to a Thornhill is deliberately marginalized, the legit movement risks getting tarred with this big, black brush.

And, speaking of "black," what if such Pop Ev Psych sexist nonsense statements were made about blacks vs. whites?

Well, maybe we don't totally have to.

I've blogged this before, but I'm going to do so again.

Shermer has had two known racialists, Frank Miele and the recently deceased Vince Sarich, on the masthead of Skeptic magazine.

The two co-wrote "Race," a horrible racialist book which believes the different races are subspecies headed toward speciation, ignores the cultural background of IQ tests and much more, as I note in this review. A sampling:

On page 1, the authors misinterpret a Lincoln quote about the difference between races, and infer that, rather than talking about the sociologocial fallouts from a clearly perceived difference in skin colors, Lincoln was talking about deeper differences in physical attributes. ...

Page 9 - Going with their unproven -- and logically fallacious idea-generating -- 50,000 year date for the evolution of modern Homo sapiens, Miele and Sarich then use this to bootstrap their own arguments about the degree of difference between races, claiming this shows how rapidly human evolution can progress. It's clear circular reasoning based on an already assumed point of view.

Pages 9-10 have a laughably racist "genetic" rather than sociological assumption of evidence for various types of athletic prowess. ...

And, the piece de resistance on page 10 -- the "mean sub-Saharan African IQ of 70." All together, now, can we say Bell Curve?

How bad is it, and are/were they? They're both associates of A-grade racialist Philippe Rushton. With Rushton, at least, I am comfortable with removing the second syllable from the word "racialism."

It's yet more reason not to trust Shermer on any issues like this. Given that racialists like this mentioned above and Arthur Jensen and others, have spouted just-so stories about alleged differences in brain sizes, brain size vs. penis size and more, I have no doubt some racialists have a foot in the currents of Pop Ev Psych.   

I'll also counter Shermer's "scientism" with repeated recent revelations of cheating on grants, Ben Goldacre's whole new book about selective research reporting in the pharmaceutical industry, and more.

Say, Joseph Mengele? Eugenics "research" in the US? Arthur Jensen? Shockley?

Science is, to riff on Euclid, NO royal road to morality. Period. End of story. 

And, as I've said before, science in general is no guarantor of morality. Science badly practiced, or abused and twisted, though, usually is a guarantor of bad ethics, sometimes in narrow ways, sometimes in broad ones.

Besides that, Pop Ev Psych, and to some degree "legit" ev psych, "whiff" on more than sexism. More below the fold.

Men, women, sexual objectification, #GnuAtheism, and Pop #EvPsych

Any woman who's used a dildo more than a couple of times in her life, especially one fully shaped and designed like a penis, not just a cylinder, is in no position to talk about male sexual objectification of women.

Just wondering how many of the nth-wave feminists, especially those that fit into Gnu Atheism, or its kiddie pool of Atheism Plus, this applies to.

Not saying it does, but I'm just thinking of, oh, Stephanie Zvan and Rebecca Watson off the top of my head.

But NOT from the top of my other head. Or the bottom of my heart. Or the bottom of my loins.

Sorry if you didn't want to hear that, but people who read me regularly shouldn't be surprised.

And, if you're lesbian, you can certainly objectify other women, too. So, no get out of jail free card for you, Greta Christina.

Beyond that, there's plenty of women atheist old and gnu alike, non-atheist, professed Christian, feminist or not, etc., who all fit the profile. We've all seen news stories in the past few years, especially in more politically reddish parts of the country, where female small business proprietors have been busted for running afoul of municipal or state laws by selling something much more than Tupperware at house parties. (And, it does much more than "burp"!)

Besides the fact that Pop Ev Psychers have provided plenty of evidence for that case, starting with Randy Thornhill claiming rape is evolutionarily adaptive, the whole framework of Pop Ev Psych, starting with its environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, or EEA, being based on sexist ideas about hunter-gatherer societies’ operation, as well as further sexist ideas that Homo sapiens had a long period as hunter-gatherers when we probably had just as much a period as less sexy scavenger-gatherers, has shown itself to be bathed in about as much an aroma of sexism as a bottle of Old Spice gone past its expiration date. (This long and colorful metaphor assumes Old Spice has an expiration date, of course.)

Besides, it’s fun to consign Rebecca Watson and Edward Clint to the same circle of hell, run over them with the same bus, etc. (Should a B-grade Jean Paul Sartre — who was himself the B-grade Albert Camus at times — come along today, he might remake No Exit with Clint, Watson and Christina together. Or Zvan, Greg Laden and almost anybody. Don’t worry, folks, I’ll stop now, lest I go into material for an entirely separate blog post.)

Anyway, in a sense, on its overblown, often unverifiable and likely never verifiable gender difference claims, Pop Evolutionary Psychology, as pushed to its envelope-destroying limits recently by Mr. Clint in chastisement of Ms. Watson, is nth-wave feminism’s tar baby. (It’s also a tar baby of traditionalist versions of Christianity in this way.)

All three movements put woman on a pedestal, or similarly, in a gilded cage. They seek to deny that there’s a fair amount of overlap between men and women on sexual fantasizing and related issues. They also, especially Pop Ev Psych but somewhat the other two, seek to deny that a fair amount of how, in what ways, and to what degree both men and women internally formulate and bring to coherence sexual desires, then externally express them, is culturally driven.

Now, I’m not saying there are no sex-based differences in formulation and expression of sexual desire. But, the differences are smaller than either Pop Ev Psychers, nth-wave feminists or male-hierarchy Christians will admit. And, all three are similar in throwing bullshit ideas against the wall, hoping something will socially stick, either due to religious prejudice (the Christians), reverse sex prejudice plus tribalism (the nth-wave feminists) or sex prejudice cloaked in pseudoscience (Pop Ev Psychers).

Update, Feb. 19: Per Massimo Pigliucci, it seems Michael Shermer's also still swimming in the waters of Pop Ev Psych sexism. Gee, what a shock!

Here's Shermer, in an ongoing dialogue about how much science does (Pigliucci) or does not (Shermer) need philosophy to guide discussions of ethics:

Most men, for example, are much more receptive toward unsolicited offers of sex than are women. 

Just wow. And, as Massimo notes, simply not true!  

Shermer then goes on to claim rape is scientifically shows to be immoral, ignoring that Pop Ev Psycher Randy Thornhill claimed it was evolutionarily adaptive! 

Meanwhile, it's not just differences in sexual desire. Whether it's Pop Ev Psych or John Gray-type pop psychology, the whole "men are from Mars, women from Venus," is getting more and more refutation.

"Sex is not nearly as confining a category as stereotypes and even some academic studies would have us believe," study researcher Bobbi Carothers, a senior data analyst at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement. 

Are there differences? Yes:

Carothers, who completed the research as part of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Rochester, and her colleagues are not denying that men and women often do differ from one another. Women, for example, are known to have higher levels of anxiety than men, on average, and to react to bad news with more stress. Studies also turn up gender differences in aggression, sexuality, frequency of smiling, and body image, Carothers and her colleagues wrote.

But researchers haven't spent much time examining the structure of these differences, Carothers wrote. It's possible, for example, that men and women usually fall into distinct groups. In this categorical world, knowing someone is a man would automatically tell you that he's aggressive, interested in short-term sex over long-term relationships, good at math and bad verbally. Alternatively, gender differences could occur more often on a continuum. You might know someone is a man, but it would tell you little about his skills with math. 

Which possibility is more likely might seem clear to anyone who has ever known a guy who can't figure out a tip to save his life. But humans tend toward categorical thinking, the researchers wrote, and gender is about as basic a category as you can get.

Bingo. And here's some specific issues where gender differences are an overlapping continuum:

Men and women fell along a continuum on such measures as interest in casual sex, frequency of thoughts about sex, and the appeal of certain traits such as virginity, looks and wealth in a mate. The same was true of attitudes toward close relationships, empathy and other interpersonal factors.

In other words, if told that a person is more than 6 feet tall, you would be pretty safe in guessing that they were a guy. If told that a person is very empathic, you'd be much harder-pressed to correctly guess their gender.

So, let's just put this "men are from horndog, women are from demure" idea on ice. It's insulting to both sexes. It perpetuates stereotypes, many of which then translate into our legal system, such as judges still occasionally admonishing rape victims about how they dress. 

Oh, and women don't talk more than men, either.

Anyway, expect a separate blog post soon more specific to this issue and more specific to Pop Ev Psych. And that post is here!

That said, nth-wave feminists, to the degree they stereotype men as non-empathetic, etc., don't help on this issue, either.

And, on the psychology side of Pop Ev Psych, let's make sure that claims aren't being made on the basis of biased psychological studies, with such bias including gender bias.

I'll also counter Shermer's "scientism" with repeated recent revelations of cheating on grants, Ben Goldacre's whole new book about selective research reporting in the pharmaceutical industry, and more.

Say, Joseph Mengele? Eugenics "research" in the US? Arthur Jensen? Shockley?

Science is, to riff on Euclid, NO royal road to morality. Period. End of story. 

Note: I apologize to any nth-wave feminist Atheist Plusers I failed to mention here. If you feel you need to be thrown under the bus, too, leave your name in comments. Even better, for people of minds like to mine, who more seriously think I forgot to name anybody, leave a name in comments.