[SCENE: Small, suburban house on the Pleistocene savannah, maybe a million years ago. Looks suspiciously like somewhere in mid-twentieth-century America. There may be white picket fences. ANCESTRAL WOMAN, dressed in a fetching floral summer dress, is doing some ironing. The playful voices of ANCESTRAL BOY and ANCESTRAL GIRL drift through from outside. Enter ANCESTRAL MAN, stage left.]
ANCESTRAL MAN: Hi, honey, I'm home.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: And about time! These kids are driving me up the wall. I'd have kicked them out to play earlier, but, well, you know what the lions are like at this time of year. And that two-faced bitch from the watering hole was gossiping about my new flint hair curlers again, and -
ANCESTRAL MAN: Okay! Enough! I get it! [He takes off his jacket and loosens his tie.] I've had a hard day too, you know. At least you're lucky enough to live in a society where men do all the providing and women raise the kids. Just don't ask me about mammoth, okay?
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: ...the hell were you hunting mammoth?
ANCESTRAL MAN: Because I Am A Mighty Hunter, and it sounds so much cooler than hunting voles.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Well, there's that. [She takes the proffered bag, looks inside, sighs. Turns to yell out of the window] Kids! Dinner's in half an hour!
ANCESTRAL MAN: And I'm starving. [He sits down and begins to read a newspaper.]
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: You could always, you know. Help.
ANCESTRAL MAN: Hey, now. I do the providing, you do the nurturing. That's how our entire society works. Why, just think - a million years from now, human nature will have been permanently shaped by the way we live today!
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: [Fetching a blender from a cupboard, not really listening] Hm, yeah... I think the children need more fruit and vegetables in their diet.
ANCESTRAL MAN: Obviously their societies will be very different, but their brains won't have had chance to change. And since our behaviour is entirely governed by specific programs hardwired into those brains, they'll have to work with the same programs we've got!
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Mammoth seven days a week can't be good for them -
TOGETHER: You're not listening.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: [sighs] I'm sorry, honey. Carry on. Programs hardwired into our brains?
ANCESTRAL MAN: And there's one of them! You see how you were more concerned with nurturing, while I was more interested in abstract speculation, scientific endeavour and logical thought processes? That's because I do all the cool, interesting and competitive stuff that requires real thought, while you raise babies.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: And here's me thinking that's some kind of pseudo-Victorian 'men have access to higher thought process while women are all sweet and cuddly' argument.
ANCESTRAL MAN: Nah. Program, hardwired. It's the same with all other aspects of our behaviour. See, in our society, men are pretty much the sole providers while women just bring home a few mushrooms occasionally.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Yes. Can we talk about vegetables? Just for a second?
ANCESTRAL MAN: I'd rather we didn't. The best card I've got there is the generalisation about men hunting while women gather, and that would make you responsible for bringing home most of the food, which sort of screws up the point I'm trying to make.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Ah, right. So, providers?
ANCESTRAL MAN: Yes. You see, the reason men are inherently more competitive, courageous and rational -
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Wait, now. They're what?
ANCESTRAL MAN: - is because these are traits we're born with, designed specifically for the people who do all the providing and therefore need to think! See?
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Uh, well...
ANCESTRAL MAN: It's okay. People in a million years won't have figured it out either - they'll be asking questions like 'Why the hell are men getting paid more?' and trying to put the blame on their own societies, rather than looking at ours!
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: And our society is, after all, the default setting for humanity.
ANCESTRAL MAN: Precisely. And this doesn't just explain why I'll get promoted over you in a million years, either. It's the basis of all interaction between the sexes.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Go on...
ANCESTRAL MAN: See, you need a man to provide for you and our children, and to protect you against marauding sabretooth cats and so on. I need a woman to bear my children and nurture them. So, while you're looking for a man who's a good hunter -
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: - you're looking for a woman who's a good gatherer?
ANCESTRAL MAN: [Pointing at himself] Provider, see? You just do the nurturing. So I'm looking for a woman who's young, attractive, healthy and capable of bearing and raising children.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: That's it?
ANCESTRAL MAN: Sure. Why else would the standards of female beauty be exactly the same now as they will be in a million years? Program! Hardwired?
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Right, right. So, you were saying?
ANCESTRAL MAN: So, since our society is based around a nuclear family structure, you'll be looking for a man who can protect and provide for your every need on a long-term basis. That's why women in a million years' time will all want rich men.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: They will?
ANCESTRAL MAN: Program. Hardwired. It's a legacy from our society now, where the women always go for the richer men that are higher up in the hierarchy.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: ...right.
ANCESTRAL MAN: But you're probably cheating on me.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: I am not! Who told - I mean, how dare you?
ANCESTRAL MAN: Logic told me! Ah, you women and your intuitive, irrational thought processes. See, you're programmed to look for the best genes to combine with your own, so your optimum strategy is to sleep around and pass off the resulting kids as mine.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: And you're cheating on me?
ANCESTRAL MAN: Of course. The best strategy for me is to spread my genes as far and wide as possible, and just cross my fingers about how many of them end up in babies that grow to adulthood.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Well. Nice to know.
ANCESTRAL MAN: It's the way of the world. Just like in other primate societies, women always go for the more powerful higher-status males and the strongest, richest men always get the girls. Really! Our society seems so civilised on the outside, but deep down, it's just a seething mass of sex and violence.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Y'know, I don't think primatology a million years from now is really going to support that simplistic a conclusion about relationships between the sexes. Chimp societies definitely don't work that way, and as for the bonobos -
ANCESTRAL MAN: Again, you're not exactly being constructive.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: I'm fed up with getting all the shortest lines.
ANCESTRAL MAN: But you can't argue with my conclusions. Human behaviour is governed by programs created for the society we live in now: nuclear families, strongly-marked hierarchies, rich and poor individuals, men who provide and women who nurture. And this explains why, in a million years, men will get paid more and women will be gold-digging whores. It's genetic. And anyone who thinks that people's lives and expectations might be significantly shaped by their societies in the future is just kidding themselves. We should run our societies based on the way they already are, since that's obviously basic human nature, and entirely unchangeable.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Is that, um, perhaps getting a bit too close to the is/ought fallacy?
ANCESTRAL MAN: [Sighs] More like taking the is/ought fallacy home and introducing it to your parents.
[Long silence. They stare at the mammoth slowly cooking on the fire in front of them.]
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: You know, I'd like to live in one of those real hunter-gatherer societies. The ones where people live in small communities rather than nuclear families, so nobody has to worry about getting a specific partner to provide them with specific things. The ones where labour's divided up between the sexes, and there's no real hierarchy or concepts of wealth. I don't know why, I just...
ANCESTRAL MAN: Get the impression that they'd cope far better in the Pleistocene savannah than we do?
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Yes.
[Another long silence.]
ANCESTRAL MAN: It wouldn't work, you know.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Because the conclusions drawn by large portions of evolutionary psychology tend to be based on naive, poorly-researched ideas of prehistoric society that rarely specify anything more than 'during evolution', entirely ignore the role played by nurture, pay little attention to the idea of adaptability being one thing that's always going to be useful for human brains, reduce all human behaviour to the level of genetic reproduction even when the connection's clearly tenuous, and come up with some pretty iffy and often misogynistic conclusions that seem to be based far more in justifying contemporary society and the speaker's own place within it than explaining the limitations and capabilities of human behaviour?
ANCESTRAL MAN: Well... you could say that. But, see, you're a woman. You're more emotional. That's why you're letting your idealistic, head-in-the-clouds nonsense about hunter-gatherer societies cloud your perception of the Harsh Truth.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: Which is?
ANCESTRAL MAN: That that the default setting for humanity is the gender roles and domestic arrangements of the worst stereotypes of 1950s suburbia.
ANCESTRAL WOMAN: White picket fences and all.
It's a bright, guilty world
Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward, into the er rode the 600.
- Peyton Place in the Pleistocene
-
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eye_of_a_cat- April 11th, 2006
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Can I cross-post this to metaquotes and the feminist_rage communities? Because WOW. I'll credit.
AAAAGH. I have seen this argued way, way too many times without irony. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Despite the entire subject being disgustingly depressing and enraging.
Despite the entire subject being disgustingly depressing and enraging.
Yeah. I mean, I do know someone who's very emotional, more interested in socialising and gossip than education, more interested in cuddling than discussion, doesn't tend to think in linear, rational patterns, wants to be protected and provided for, and can't read maps - but she's my dog.
You must have a much stranger version of Evolutionary Psychology over there than I was taught, because our definitions run nowhere near each other. Our studies on this mostly looked at why there are certain differences between men and women that seem to non-cultural in nature. Nobody made any mention of nuclear families, or anything besides the anthropologically associated behavior patterns (which may or may not be wrong).
Actually, I liked Evolutionary Psychology, but we spent a minority of time covering sex differences, and most of them on different ways that we perceive motion, ways that our memory works, and our responses to certain social stimuli. None of this had anything to do with gender differences, and I could not see any gaping holes in it at the time. None of their conclusions were set in concrete, and they seemed to know it.
I'm a lukewarm defender of the field at best, since I didn't get much into it, but I will say that you appear to have hit the fringe lunatics. The problem with Evolutionary Psychology is that at low and middle level, their work is so basic that it's quite possible that it has to work. It's at higher levels that you get into trouble, and I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Actually, I liked Evolutionary Psychology, but we spent a minority of time covering sex differences, and most of them on different ways that we perceive motion, ways that our memory works, and our responses to certain social stimuli. None of this had anything to do with gender differences, and I could not see any gaping holes in it at the time. None of their conclusions were set in concrete, and they seemed to know it.
I'm a lukewarm defender of the field at best, since I didn't get much into it, but I will say that you appear to have hit the fringe lunatics. The problem with Evolutionary Psychology is that at low and middle level, their work is so basic that it's quite possible that it has to work. It's at higher levels that you get into trouble, and I don't know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I should add that some of the claims of the higher level EPs are highly dubious on any extent, as EP does have a rather large fringe. I've seen some justification for some of their arguments, and I haven't yet seen anything to disprove the field as a whole, but their model still sucks. You'll get a lot of error entered in tracking one set of adaptive traits backward pretending that it was isolated. I don't pretend to know whether or not that's justified by the evidence.
The respectable part of EP, such as it is, depends on the extent to which the brain developed as a whole problem solver, or as a series of adaptive processes. Since I don't see the light on that front any time soon, I'm not sure what to say...
The respectable part of EP, such as it is, depends on the extent to which the brain developed as a whole problem solver, or as a series of adaptive processes. Since I don't see the light on that front any time soon, I'm not sure what to say...
why there are certain differences between men and women that seem to non-cultural in nature.
I'm curious - like what?
I'm curious - like what?
From a neuro-biological standpoint (which I operate from): 2% difference in circumference, and a lot of density issues in pieces of the hypothalamus. Brain chemisty and connection development in the male brain may be different enough from the female brain (due to how sex-selected developments occur with testosterone triggering) that it would not be unreasonable for there to be drastic psychological consequences. IIRC, someone mentioned that women tend to be more resistant to autism and certain forms of schizophrenia. Increased development of dopamine receptors may trigger Parkinson's more often in males.
Rumor has consistently had it that women learn to speak slightly earlier (although I can't provide citation right now). If this is true it would suggest fundamental differences in how the cortex processes thought. I won't go into the spatial visualization picture, since that is murky at the moment, but the physical differences in the brain do indicate that there should be some separate thought processes above the background noise.
The other argument comes from historical anthropologists/sociologists (who are all crazy anyway), who wonder why in the majority of cultures that reach a certain point, men and women have fairly similar roles, and why all the major developed cultures of the world were patriarchial at the time they entered modernity. This is a tricky point with EP, by a psychological standpoint, patriarchial societies have gender differences because they are socially conditioned, but from an EP standpoint you can consider a social difference to be an evolutionary difference. After all, our socities have been shaped by adaptations that have spent millenia evolving. This goes around in circles and goes nowhere, but a valid point is raised somewhere in the fog. Is there perhaps a reason why patriarchial societies seemed to take hold in so many places, and over so many time periods, and establish dominance? Perhaps there was a reason for this, a solid behavorial difference? Who knows?
This is the sticking point on which the entire field is currently jammed, it seems. They suspect, and their theory indicates, that there should be some difference in how men and women behave, but it's impossible to test this without cultural differences getting in the way. So they have to sit back and deal with the evolution of various low-level mental health adaptations (that can be statistically measured) and leave the rest up to the whackos.
Rumor has consistently had it that women learn to speak slightly earlier (although I can't provide citation right now). If this is true it would suggest fundamental differences in how the cortex processes thought. I won't go into the spatial visualization picture, since that is murky at the moment, but the physical differences in the brain do indicate that there should be some separate thought processes above the background noise.
The other argument comes from historical anthropologists/sociologists (who are all crazy anyway), who wonder why in the majority of cultures that reach a certain point, men and women have fairly similar roles, and why all the major developed cultures of the world were patriarchial at the time they entered modernity. This is a tricky point with EP, by a psychological standpoint, patriarchial societies have gender differences because they are socially conditioned, but from an EP standpoint you can consider a social difference to be an evolutionary difference. After all, our socities have been shaped by adaptations that have spent millenia evolving. This goes around in circles and goes nowhere, but a valid point is raised somewhere in the fog. Is there perhaps a reason why patriarchial societies seemed to take hold in so many places, and over so many time periods, and establish dominance? Perhaps there was a reason for this, a solid behavorial difference? Who knows?
This is the sticking point on which the entire field is currently jammed, it seems. They suspect, and their theory indicates, that there should be some difference in how men and women behave, but it's impossible to test this without cultural differences getting in the way. So they have to sit back and deal with the evolution of various low-level mental health adaptations (that can be statistically measured) and leave the rest up to the whackos.
My perspective — (Anonymous) (Expand)
It's not that the suggested mechanisms for cognition are wrong, necessarily - they seem a little close to genetic determinism for me, but hey, I'm not a psychologist, and it's entirely possible the model of hundreds upon thousands of modules governing our brain's interaction with the world, each shaped by the environment millions of years in the past, is close enough. The stuff about memory seems to work okay, for one. But its explanations of specific human behaviours today tend to rely on a mish-mash of mistaken assumptions about early human society, vague arm-waving in the direction of primatology, and 'common sense' ideas of gender roles. That's the bit I have problems with.
Our studies on this mostly looked at why there are certain differences between men and women that seem to non-cultural in nature
we spent a minority of time covering sex differences
None of this had anything to do with gender differences
I'm confused... For what it's worth, though, I think the kind of explanations for any contemporary human behaviour suggested by evolutionary psychology - e.g., tendencies towards aggression - hit the same roadblocks as its explanations for contemporary gender roles: they attribute to nature what may well be explained by nurture, and on top of that, they presuppose that our brains developed in the kind of society that likely never existed. While nobody with any sense is going to suggest that our ancestors a million years back lived in nuclear families, the assumptions made about the kind of society they did live in - women search for partners who can provide for them and their children - suggest a family structure and a division of labour that doesn't really work for tribal hunter-gatherer societies.
I'll concede that it could well be the lunatic fringe shouting the loudest, but the field does seem to have a disproportionately large, loud and well-published fringe: Robert Wright, Howard Bloom, David Geary, Helena Cronin. And with the possible exception of Cronin, these aren't scholars on the outskirts of respectability in their field.
As for inherent and genetically-determined gender difference in the mind, I wouldn't reject the idea out of hand. But I'd be far less sceptical if (a) it had some basis beyond 'it happens everywhere, and everybody knows it's true' for its conclusions (sure, there's a majority of cultures geographically and historically where boys tend to outperform girls academically, but these are also cultures where boys' academic worth is valued more than girls', and the skewed ratio doesn't apply in societies where that's less the case), and (b) if women didn't come out of it quite so badly. I get a bit pissed off with arguments that imply I'm more emotional, less logical, more nurturing and less ambitious than men, or that I'm an exception to my gender if I'm not.
Our studies on this mostly looked at why there are certain differences between men and women that seem to non-cultural in nature
we spent a minority of time covering sex differences
None of this had anything to do with gender differences
I'm confused... For what it's worth, though, I think the kind of explanations for any contemporary human behaviour suggested by evolutionary psychology - e.g., tendencies towards aggression - hit the same roadblocks as its explanations for contemporary gender roles: they attribute to nature what may well be explained by nurture, and on top of that, they presuppose that our brains developed in the kind of society that likely never existed. While nobody with any sense is going to suggest that our ancestors a million years back lived in nuclear families, the assumptions made about the kind of society they did live in - women search for partners who can provide for them and their children - suggest a family structure and a division of labour that doesn't really work for tribal hunter-gatherer societies.
I'll concede that it could well be the lunatic fringe shouting the loudest, but the field does seem to have a disproportionately large, loud and well-published fringe: Robert Wright, Howard Bloom, David Geary, Helena Cronin. And with the possible exception of Cronin, these aren't scholars on the outskirts of respectability in their field.
As for inherent and genetically-determined gender difference in the mind, I wouldn't reject the idea out of hand. But I'd be far less sceptical if (a) it had some basis beyond 'it happens everywhere, and everybody knows it's true' for its conclusions (sure, there's a majority of cultures geographically and historically where boys tend to outperform girls academically, but these are also cultures where boys' academic worth is valued more than girls', and the skewed ratio doesn't apply in societies where that's less the case), and (b) if women didn't come out of it quite so badly. I get a bit pissed off with arguments that imply I'm more emotional, less logical, more nurturing and less ambitious than men, or that I'm an exception to my gender if I'm not.
I read this in feminist_rage and thought it was fabulous - can I link to it on my personal journal?
As an angry psychologist, many thanks!
As an angry psychologist, many thanks!
That looks like it was written by a humanities major who read some screed written by another humanities major who once read an article in Time Magazine about what some fringe sociobiologists thought in the mid 60's.
(no subject) — (Anonymous) (Expand)
Cool! "Is/ought fallacy". I didn't realize there was a handy shorthand term like that for it.
From Mark Foxwell
markhfoxwell@yahoo.com
ratracebypass.blogspot.com
I was referred to your original post from a thread at Pandagon
http://pandagon.net/2006/12/05/this-next-s
You've brilliantly, and wittily, covered one of the 2 things I like to point out in any evo-psych thread--that any valid evo-psych theory has to cover the case of gatherer-hunters as actually known to anthropology, rather than the post-GH agricultural societies the overwhelming majority of popular-press evo-psych tracts seek to justify "from time immemorial."
I also want to point out--
Suppose we establish beyond all resonable doubt that this that or the other typically observed divergence in cognition or behavior does indeed seem to be hard-wired in sex difference.
So what?
Since the human evolutionary trick that matters most of all is our flexible intelligence and our social cooperation to enable same, we don't get any unmixed benefit from rigidly separating roles according to sex. On the contrary, it is much better to get the benefit of divergent reactions and thoughts derived therefrom as this gives us all collectively and individually more options.
In fact there is no human activity aside from reproduction itself that at least some members of the "opposite" sex from the stereotypical one have not proven quite proficient at, more proficient at any rate than large numbers of the stereotypical sex.
Take warfare for instance. We can prove all we like that men are generally hard-wired for more success in fighting, perhaps. (I doubt it, but let's just stipulate it.) What about Jenne D'Arc? What about the numerous female infantrywomen and fighter pilots and so on who helped the Soviet Red Army defeat Hitler? What about the women of the Israeli forces? Quite a few women have proven themselves competent on the battlefield.
Vice versa, quite a few men have successfully raised children.
So even if it were proven that these women and men were overcoming hard-wring to the contrary, it has nevertheless often been done.
And I suspect that in these cases, the women brought unique perspectives leading to unique solutions to the battlefield, and perhaps the men did much the same in their households.
It is quite obvious to me that what is decisive in determining gender roles is social stereotyping more than anything else.
markhfoxwell@yahoo.com
ratracebypass.blogspot.com
I was referred to your original post from a thread at Pandagon
http://pandagon.net/2006/12/05/this-next-s
You've brilliantly, and wittily, covered one of the 2 things I like to point out in any evo-psych thread--that any valid evo-psych theory has to cover the case of gatherer-hunters as actually known to anthropology, rather than the post-GH agricultural societies the overwhelming majority of popular-press evo-psych tracts seek to justify "from time immemorial."
I also want to point out--
Suppose we establish beyond all resonable doubt that this that or the other typically observed divergence in cognition or behavior does indeed seem to be hard-wired in sex difference.
So what?
Since the human evolutionary trick that matters most of all is our flexible intelligence and our social cooperation to enable same, we don't get any unmixed benefit from rigidly separating roles according to sex. On the contrary, it is much better to get the benefit of divergent reactions and thoughts derived therefrom as this gives us all collectively and individually more options.
In fact there is no human activity aside from reproduction itself that at least some members of the "opposite" sex from the stereotypical one have not proven quite proficient at, more proficient at any rate than large numbers of the stereotypical sex.
Take warfare for instance. We can prove all we like that men are generally hard-wired for more success in fighting, perhaps. (I doubt it, but let's just stipulate it.) What about Jenne D'Arc? What about the numerous female infantrywomen and fighter pilots and so on who helped the Soviet Red Army defeat Hitler? What about the women of the Israeli forces? Quite a few women have proven themselves competent on the battlefield.
Vice versa, quite a few men have successfully raised children.
So even if it were proven that these women and men were overcoming hard-wring to the contrary, it has nevertheless often been done.
And I suspect that in these cases, the women brought unique perspectives leading to unique solutions to the battlefield, and perhaps the men did much the same in their households.
It is quite obvious to me that what is decisive in determining gender roles is social stereotyping more than anything else.
By Mark Foxwell the long-winded:
....
This is not to suggest that we don't have any instincts. Rather, I think that human instincts tend to be multiple and contradictory. It would not serve any organism of even moderate intelligence very well to provide one rigidly determined response to most situations. The purpose of a brain is to make decisions in a more sophisticated way, when fixed reactions would not be the best decision in many cases. It is well to give the organism a strong impulse to do _something_ in a dangerous or opportunistic situation, but also well to give many choices of just what to do, and leave the brain the job of evaluating the situation in full context and choose the _best_ reaction, under the circumstances.
Thus, gatherer-hunters as reported by anthropology live in a fundamentally cooperative society, but they are by no means free of selfish, competetive impulses. It is just that these impulses are counter-balanced by a desire to be accepted by their group.
So it is that different human societies can mandate radically different behaviors, and all seem equally "natural" and founded in the deepest reaches of "human nature" to each society. It may be that this or that mandate is founded on pure cultural construction, but it may also be that it rests on emphasizing some combination of strong instinctive reactions as "proper" and normal, and deemphasizing some other combination that is equally well rooted in hormones and hard-wired nerve paths. It will not seem to each one that their reactions are anything but natural and instinctive, based on the physiolgical depth of their responses, and yet it might be quite false to claim that they are therefore the only such reactions people in that situation would have. Therefore it is possible to train anyone to have other reactions, in apparent defiance of "human nature" as defined by one society.
Because evolution is not an optimizing processes, it is "satisficing;" when some solution, no matter how Rube Goldberg and haphazard, works well enough to take evolutionary pressure off some problem, then other problems will dominate subsequent natural selection. This is clearly wasteful from the point of view of "intelligent design," but quite fortunate from the point of view of evolving actual intelligence, since intelligence is the business of apprehending many possible solutions to problems and picking the best one _without_ having to sacrifice lives to find out by mere dumb trial and error.
Therefore, a human society that attempts to rigidily separate men and women into reciprocal roles is not playing with a full deck, and human progress is far better furthered by a liberal inclination to let anyone try out anything they have a mind to instead, and by cultivating an open appreciation of diverse methods rather than a bigoted insistance on "one true path," no matter how brilliantly it seems to be reasoned out. The perfect tool for one job is useless for another, and it violates human dignity to regard ourselves as tools at all. We are the tool-makers and users, and all these attempts at defining some eternal human order reek of the attempt to reduce some people to mere machinery-for the benefit of those who are doing the defining.
....
This is not to suggest that we don't have any instincts. Rather, I think that human instincts tend to be multiple and contradictory. It would not serve any organism of even moderate intelligence very well to provide one rigidly determined response to most situations. The purpose of a brain is to make decisions in a more sophisticated way, when fixed reactions would not be the best decision in many cases. It is well to give the organism a strong impulse to do _something_ in a dangerous or opportunistic situation, but also well to give many choices of just what to do, and leave the brain the job of evaluating the situation in full context and choose the _best_ reaction, under the circumstances.
Thus, gatherer-hunters as reported by anthropology live in a fundamentally cooperative society, but they are by no means free of selfish, competetive impulses. It is just that these impulses are counter-balanced by a desire to be accepted by their group.
So it is that different human societies can mandate radically different behaviors, and all seem equally "natural" and founded in the deepest reaches of "human nature" to each society. It may be that this or that mandate is founded on pure cultural construction, but it may also be that it rests on emphasizing some combination of strong instinctive reactions as "proper" and normal, and deemphasizing some other combination that is equally well rooted in hormones and hard-wired nerve paths. It will not seem to each one that their reactions are anything but natural and instinctive, based on the physiolgical depth of their responses, and yet it might be quite false to claim that they are therefore the only such reactions people in that situation would have. Therefore it is possible to train anyone to have other reactions, in apparent defiance of "human nature" as defined by one society.
Because evolution is not an optimizing processes, it is "satisficing;" when some solution, no matter how Rube Goldberg and haphazard, works well enough to take evolutionary pressure off some problem, then other problems will dominate subsequent natural selection. This is clearly wasteful from the point of view of "intelligent design," but quite fortunate from the point of view of evolving actual intelligence, since intelligence is the business of apprehending many possible solutions to problems and picking the best one _without_ having to sacrifice lives to find out by mere dumb trial and error.
Therefore, a human society that attempts to rigidily separate men and women into reciprocal roles is not playing with a full deck, and human progress is far better furthered by a liberal inclination to let anyone try out anything they have a mind to instead, and by cultivating an open appreciation of diverse methods rather than a bigoted insistance on "one true path," no matter how brilliantly it seems to be reasoned out. The perfect tool for one job is useless for another, and it violates human dignity to regard ourselves as tools at all. We are the tool-makers and users, and all these attempts at defining some eternal human order reek of the attempt to reduce some people to mere machinery-for the benefit of those who are doing the defining.
2006-04-11 01:18 am (UTC)