Cultural Materialism

Evolutionary Psychology takes another hit - why are the facts so PC?

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:13:00 +0000

Back a few years ago, Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard and was in the news for saying that females had lesser math & science abilities than men did for reasons of biology. Steven Pinker was also at Harvard and was best known for his evolutionary psychology manifesto "The Blank Slate." It immediately occurred to me that Summers got everything he knew about female genetic inferiority from Pinker. And as I expected, Pinker was one of Summers's biggest champions.

I got into an email exchange with Pinker about it at the time. Evolutionary psychologists are big on citing male-female test scores in math/science as proof that females are innately inferior in those areas. (Although most of them refuse to do the same to explain white vs non-white differences, to the frustration of Steven Sailer and American Renaissance.)

I asked Pinker what would happen if the gap started to close in less than an evolutionary time-frame. Would he claim that culture was helping females to triumph over their innate inferiority? It would be odd if he did, because if the power of culture was strong enough to perform such a miracle, why couldn't culture also have prevented females from achieving their full potential? Even evolutionary psychologists do not completely discount the power of sexism.

Pinker never answered my question. But now it's more than academic. According to the NYTimes:

The Wisconsin researchers, Janet S. Hyde and Janet E. Mertz, studied data from 10 states collected in tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind legislation as well as data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal testing program. Differences between girls’ and boys’ performance in the 10 states were “close to zero in all grades,” they said, even in high schools were gaps existed earlier. In the national assessment, they said, differences between girls’ and boys’ performance were “trivial.”

more here

I expected this - but I didn't expect it so soon. I thought we had at least another five years to go.

But I expect it will be much longer than that before Pinker admits that he is wrong.

For an excellent review of The Blank Slate, see Louis Menand's "What Comes Naturally" in the New Yorker.

Spelke in the New Yorker

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 03:35:00 +0000

There's a great article about Elizabeth Spelke and her work ("The Baby Lab") in this week's New Yorker. Unfortunately it isn't available at the online New Yorker site, so go buy a copy of the September 4 2006 Education Issue.

I first heard of Spelke through her debate with Steven Pinker. I had no idea she was such a big deal in the world of psychology and even Pinker knows it - at least he did five years ago:

Spelke's ideas have been enormously influential among academics. "Nowadays every psychology student is taught that James and Piaget were wrong, "the cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in Time five years ago. "From their earliest months, in fact, children interpret the world as a real and predictable place... This new understanding is largely the legacy of Harvard psychologist Elixabeth Spelk." Karen Wynn, an infant-cognition researcher at Yale, told me, "Spelke has done more to shape our understanding of how the human mind initially grasps the world than anyone else." In 2000, when the Association for Psychological Science gave her its William James Fellow Award, the citation noted that Spelke had "developed techniques of studying infants' beliefs that are far more probative than might have been imagined only a short time ago," and that her work had begun "to answer the perennial philosophical questions about the origins of human knowledge about space, objects, motion, unity, persistence, identity, and number."

Although I knew about Spelke-Pinker debate I didn't know this:

Spelke had been one of Summers's fiercest critics, calling his remarks "wrong, point for point." And she lambasted him for ignoring a more obvious explanation for the disparity of achievement: "the impediments to women's progress posed by long-standing patters of prejudice, unwelcoming environments, and unequal resources."

This observation, by the article's author Margaret Talbot, is certainly accurate, but I'd say an understatement:

The field of evolutionary psychology is prone to a cheerful - sometimes gleeful - fatalism about sex differences. (Older men ditching their aging wives for nubile misstresses? Men are genetically programmed to spread their DNA! Women more inclined toward gardening than particle physics? Blame it on our hunter-gatherer ancestors!)

Later in the article, the author gets in this excellent gibe at Pinker:

Men across cultures (Pinker) noted, constituted the more risk-taking and competitive sex - though why risk-taking and competitiveness were more adaptive attributes for, say, aspiring mathemeticians than for aspiring sociologists wasn't exactly clear.

Then Talbot gives this amusing description of the Spelke-Pinker debate:

After Pinker and Spelke had given their talks, they sat at a table onstage, and listened to each other with interrupting. But when Pinker spoke, Spelke wore one of those smiles which suggest a certain effort - and when she spoke she used her large hands to make sweeping gestures, as if she were dismissing one silly notion after another. When Pinker started talking about how "the most subjective fields in academia - the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions" had the greatest representation of women because the jibed with "what gave women satisfaction in life," Spelke looked as though she'd had enough. "I think it's a really interesting possibility that the forces that were active in our evolutionary past have led men and women to evolved somewhate differing concerns," she began. "But to jump from that possibility to the present, and draw conclusions about what people's motives will be for pursuing one or another career is way too big a stretch." The career choices people pursue now, she concluded acidly, were "radically different from anything that anybody faced back in the Pleistocene."

Pinker was suggesting that, because of both sexual selection and parental-investment issues, women are selected to be more nurturing and men more competitive. Suppose that this were true, Spelke said, in the final words of the debate. What sort of motivation made a better scientist? Was it "competitive motives like those J. D. Watson described in 'The Double Helix' to get the structure of DNA before Lunus Pauling did?* Or nurturant motives of the kind that Doug Melton" - the Harvard developmental biologist = "described recently to explain why he's going into stem-cell research: to find a cure for juvenile diabetes, which his children suffer from? I think it's anything but clear how motives from our past translate into modern contexts. We would need to do the experiment, getting rid of discrimination and social pressures, in order to find out."

But while Spelke's reputation will hopefully be enhanced by this article, it also gives Steven Pinker a way to dismiss Spelke. For although Pinker will give respectful interviews to the racists and hard-core right-wingers at Gene Expression, he dismissed evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's critiques this way: "The criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould have been extensively addressed in my writings and others, and I believe they stem more from his political ideology than from the empirical literature."

You see, Gould was a leftist. Only right-wingers can hold opinions that don't pollute their empirical arguments, apparently according to Steven Pinker.

And Spelke is also left of the gang at Gene Expression. Spelke is

A committed liberal who talks indignantly about race and gender discrimination

.

Maybe the best part of the article though is this:

It was a civil occasion, certainly, but (the Spelke-Pinker debate) was lively enough that the Harvard Crimson couldn't quite resist calling the exchange a "showdown of the sexes."

I think Steven Pinker does deserve the fate of going down in history as a scientific Bobby Riggs.

* And of course Watson was helped immensely by the work of British researcher Rosalind Franklin who died of cancer at 37 before she could receive a Nobel Prize for her work.)

Steven Pinker at Gene Expression

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 03:05:00 +0000

Normally I think of Evolutionary Psychology as having two main strains. The "liberal" strain that sees only female academic/social underachievement as due primarly to genetic causes, and the "conservative" strain that sees both female AND non-white academic/social underachievement as primarily due to genetics.

I had assumed that Steven Pinker was in the liberal camp, since, as the blatantly racist American Renaissance web site notes in its mostly positive review of Pinker's Blank Slate:

Prof. Pinker is firm and clear about the “inherent” or “innate” characteristics and behavior of human beings—human nature—that exist before anyone has a chance to scribble on the blank slate. Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.

He endorses the environmentalist theories of the origins of civilization of Jared Diamond and Thomas Sowell as opposed to racial ones, and tells us that “My own view … is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference—the black-white IQ gap in the United States—the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.” Yet, six pages later, he tells us that “… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variations in life outcomes such as income and social status.” Combined with the different scores of blacks and whites on IQ tests, of course, this implies that the “most discussed racial difference” has a significantly genetic and not an environmentalist explanation.

Prof. Pinker also tries to evade the implications of racial differences by emphasizing the universal meaning of human nature.

“Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences,” and, further:

“People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.”

So imagine my surprise when Pinker turns up in the less blatant but nevertheless thoroughly racist Gene Expression

The beginning of the interview dwelled on the things that Pinker has in common with the Gene Expression crowd - with Pinker characterizing his political opponents in the standard Evolutionary Psychology way:
"Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities."

I started to wonder when/how they would bring up the race issue. I had the answer when I got to question 8:

(8) I want to go back to "empirical hypotheses ... too dangerous to study." This was the topic of the Edge Annual Question. Your own offering was the possibility that the kind of research that we have just discussed may uncover a genetic and evolutionary basis for population differences in mental abilities, personality, and other psychological traits. What are your projections for the trajectory of this idea? Will it be put to the decisive test sooner rather than later? If the hereditarian view is vindicated to any extent, what disruptions and realignments of the intellectual and political landscape do you foresee?

"population differences" is the term of choice at Gene Expression for "the intellectual superiority of whites" and Pinker got that. He answers carefully, while including the obligatory "politically correct" slur:

I suspect that we'll see more studies of this kind, unless they are beaten back by politically correct opposition (as seems to be happening to Bruce Lahn's work on possible recent selection on genes governing brain size). Whether group differences will be found is an empirical question that will differ according to the trait and group comparison. If innate differences are found and acknowledged (two big if's), the effects would include questioning the assumption that all groupwide social differences (e.g., in crime, poverty, and health) are caused by discrimination or a rigged economic system. It would be an enormous challenge to the unspoken consensus of mainstream left-of-center politics during the past fifty years--though also an enormous danger to societal fairness if the claimed difference turns out to be a false alarm. And true or false, a claim of racial differences would also embolden racist kooks and unsavory political movements. (Of course, if the research decisively shows no group differences, that would take the wind out of their sails, a positive development.) Either way, it's dangerous territory, and the moral issues in exploring it are complex.

It's striking how full of conservative jargon and liberal bashing Pinker's comments often are, yet he claimed in an email to me that Stephen Jay Gould's ideas about evolutionary psychology are dismissable due to Gould's politics:

The criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould have been extensively addressed in my writings and others, and I believe they stem more from his political ideology than from the empirical literature.

The implication is that Pinker is above politics and all about pure science. Of course the motley crew at Gene Expression makes the same claim, although "feminist" is a dirty word throughout the site, and they never miss a chance to tout studies that they believe prove that non-whites are genetically less intelligent or more violent than whites.

I think the connection between the far right and the Evolutionary Psychologists needs to be monitored carefully. They have too much too offer each other - "scientific" respectablity for the right and lots of funding for the EvPsych project of, as Marvin Harris called it "biologizing inequality."

UPDATE: It seems that Pinker and blatant racist Steve Sailer are good pals, and even back in 2002 Sailer is pleased that Pinker is making progress on the racism front:

Reading The Blank Slate is particularly enjoyable to me because Pinker and I are so much on the same wavelength. We even have similar expansive concepts of evidence, relying not just on refereed journals but also on Tom Wolfe, Dave Barry, and the great Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Further, Pinker is an enthusiastic subscriber to my iSteve mailing list. And arguments that I've made over the years pop up throughout The Blank Slate.

For example, according to Pinker, his section on IQ on pp. 149-150 embellishes upon various of my articles. My VDARE series on how to help the left half of the bell curve was apparently a particularly fruitful source. Here's an excerpt from The Blank Slate with links to my supporting articles:

“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64, removing lead paint that lowers a child's IQ by five points, or the Presidential qualifications of George W. Bush.”

Several readers have complained that while The Blank Slate is excellent on sex and individual differences, it wimps out on racial differences. My response: "Thank God." Pinker is not only a major scientist, while I'm merely a journalist, but he's also much more articulate. If he had written a book about race, there would be nothing for me to say.

Further, it's important to realize how far Pinker has come over the years. He started out completely under the spell of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the founders of evolutionary psychology, which has succeeded on politically-correct campuses by stripping from Edward O. Wilson's discipline of sociobiology its emphasis on explaining human differences.

Adapting Minds hits a nerve

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:37:00 +0000

A few months ago I blogged about Adapting Minds by David Buller. I see that the book has hit a nerve with the Evolutionary Psychologists.

Cultivating a persona of fairness and impartiality, David Buller has written a critique of theory and results from evolutionary psychology. To those unfamiliar with the primary literature, some of his claims may seem plausible. That has not, however, been the reaction of those who know this literature intimately.

Over the next few months, we will be developing on this website a collective response to Buller. It will be collective because we think each scientist should respond to the research that he or she knows best. We will try to provide links to primary sources, so that interested readers can see for themselves what the literature says.

I will be tracking the EvPsych response to Buller's book, which is one of the most damaging to the Evolutionary Psychology cause that I have yet seen. I will also try to find a response from Buller - or contact him myself and get ask him about his reaction.

Mystification

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 23:12:00 +0000

Marvin Harris often pointed out the usefulness of "mystification" for ruling hierarchies in keeping the common people in line. While religion is the most likely candidate for mystification, Harris did not spare Marxism either:

Ruling groups throughout history and prehistory have always promoted the mystification of social life as their first line of defense against actual or potential enemies. In the contemporary political context, idealism and eclecticism serve to obscure the very existence of ruling classes, thus shifting the blame for poverty, exploitation, and environmental degradation from the exploiters to the exploited. Cultural materialism opposes cultural idealism and eclecticism because these strategies, through their distorted and ineffectual analyses, prevent people from understanding the causes of war, poverty and exploitation. Cultural materialism opposes dialectical materialism for the very same reasons. As a political ideology, Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism attempts to advance the struggle against exploitation by promoting a scientifically unjustifiable sense of certainty about the future. But the same sense of certainty gives additional opportunities for the perpetuation of exploitation by the new ruling classes, providing these new classes with an elaborate ideology for justifying the self-serving obfuscation of the exploitative aspects of the state systems they control. Disparagement of positivist epistemologies can lead to the dialectical inevitability of even the most misguided analysis. Cultural materialism holds that the elimination of exploitation will never be achieved in a society which subverts the empirical and operational integrity of social science for reasons of political expediency. Because without the maintenance of an empiricist and operational critique, we shall never know if what some call democracy is a new form of freedom or a new form of slavery.

I added that quote to the entry for cultural materialism at Wikipedia

Remote and Poked, Anthropology's Dream Tribe

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:44:00 +0000

At the NYTimes

Anthropologists and other researchers have long searched the globe for people isolated from the modern world. The Ariaal, a nomadic community of about 10,000 people in northern Kenya, have been seized on by researchers since the 1970's, after one - an anthropologist, Elliot Fratkin - stumbled upon them and began publishing his accounts of their lives in academic journals.

Other researchers have done studies on everything from their cultural practices to their testosterone levels. National Geographic focused on the Ariaal in 1999, in an article on vanishing cultures.

But over the years, more and more Ariaal - like the Masai and the Turkana in Kenya and the Tuaregs and Bedouins elsewhere in Africa - are settling down. Many have migrated closer to Marsabit, the nearest town, which has cellphone reception and even sporadic Internet access.

The scientists continue to arrive in Ariaal country, with their notebooks, tents and bizarre queries, but now they document a semi-isolated people straddling modern life and more traditional ways.

"The era of finding isolated tribal groups is probably over," said Dr. Fratkin, a professor at Smith College who has lived with the Ariaal for long stretches and is regarded by some of them as a member of the tribe.

Gould vs. the evolutionary psychologists

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:56:00 +0000

The late great Stephen Jay Gould opposed socio-biology, now called evolutionary psychology, since E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Sythesis was published in 1975.

Some of the
more fanciful and speculative claims of the sociobiologists are used to justify racial and gender inequality and so many on the Left challenged sociobiology. Ever since, sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists, at least American ones, have routinely claimed that even scientific critiques of sociobiology are merely political and therefore should be completely discounted. Over the years they've consistently tried to stigmatize the work of Gould because of his left-of-center political views.

Steven Pinker carries on this tradition in an email exchange I had with him over the Lawrence Summers brouhaha.

From: Steven Pinker [mailto:pinker@wjh.harvard.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 4:30 PM
To: nancy@mergatroyd.org
Cc: 'Katha Pollitt'; 'Maxine Margolis'; liberties@nytimes.com; 'Lindsay Beyerstein'; bobsomerby@hotmail.com; atrios@comcast.net; nhopkins@mit.edu
Subject: RE: Summers said innate difference was the PRIMARY cause

Dear Ms. McClernan,

[exising non-Gould content]

The criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould have been extensively addressed in my writings and others, and I believe they stem more from his political ideology than from the empirical literature.

Steve Pinker
Johnstone Professor of Psychology

My response, leaving out the non-Gould content:

From: Nancy G. McClernan [mailto:nancy@mergatroyd.org]
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 5:55 PM
To: 'pinker@wjh.harvard.edu'
Cc: 'Katha Pollitt'; 'Maxine Margolis'; 'liberties@nytimes.com'; 'Lindsay Beyerstein'; 'bobsomerby@hotmail.com'; 'atrios@comcast.net'; 'nhopkins@mit.edu'; 'Naomi McClernan'; 'lawrence_summers@harvard.edu'
Subject: RE: Summers said innate difference was the PRIMARY cause

Dear Professor Pinker,

I’ve read criticisms of your work and the work of other evolutionary psychologists by Stephen Jay Gould, and I don’t see how they stem from his political ideology. Would you care to give examples? Or are you claiming that any arguments he made against your work should be discounted because of his political views?

If so, that certainly confirms what I’ve observed – that proponents of evolutionary psychology often dismiss criticism by claiming that the critics are motivated by politics, not science.

Pinker's respone

From: Steven Pinker [mailto:pinker@wjh.harvard.edu]
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 11:10 PM
To: nancy@mergatroyd.org
Cc: 'Katha Pollitt'; 'Maxine Margolis'; liberties@nytimes.com; 'Lindsay Beyerstein'; bobsomerby@hotmail.com; atrios@comcast.net; nhopkins@mit.edu; 'Naomi McClernan'
Subject: psychology of gender differences

Dear Ms. McClernan,

Gould made it clear in his 1975 “Against Sociobiology” manifesto in the New York Review of Books, and in the opening and final chapters of his book The Mismeasure of Man, that he saw his arguments as being in the service of progressive political causes. His coauthor Richard Lewontin was even more explicit, declaring in his 1984 book with Kamin and Rose that he has “a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just—a socialist—society” and that he sees his “critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society” (p. ix).

As you note, this alone is not sufficient to discount their arguments (Nancy's emphasis here). Many responses to the arguments of Gould and Lewontin have been formulated. My own can be found in

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_10_09_nyreviewofbooks.html

and in chapters 6 and 7 of my book The Blank Slate. Others who have dissected Gould’s critique of evolutionary psychology include Dan Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html

Gould’s attack on behavioral genetics in The Mismeasure of Man has been rebutted, in my view, in the following reviews:

Pert, Candace. (1982). Review of S. J. Gould's "The mismeasure of man". Science 82.

Jensen, A. R. (1982). The debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons: Review of The Mismeasure of Man. Contemporary Education Review, 1, 121-135.

Davis, B. D. (1983). Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press. Public Interest, 73, 41-59.

(non-Gould content here)

Sincerely,

Steven Pinker

My response:

From: Nancy G. McClernan [mailto:nancy@mergatroyd.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 6:46 PM
To: 'pinker@wjh.harvard.edu'
Cc: 'Katha Pollitt'; 'Maxine Margolis'; 'liberties@nytimes.com'; 'Lindsay Beyerstein'; 'bobsomerby@hotmail.com'; 'atrios@comcast.net'; 'nhopkins@mit.edu'; 'Naomi McClernan'; 'dick@mcz.harvard.edu'
Subject: RE: psychology of gender differences

Dear Professor Pinker,

I certainly agree with you that Gould’s statement “Against Sociobiology” is not sufficient to discount Gould’s scientific arguments. So I wonder why you quoted it as a response to my questioning your belief that Gould’s criticisms of your work “stem more from his political ideology than from the empirical literature.”

You next provide several links, the first of which is your response to Gould’s essays “Darwinian Fundamentalism” and “The Pleasures of Pluralism.” Your response is also available on the NY Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1070 and unlike the link you provided, the NY Review of Books article, “Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange,” includes both Gould’s reply to your response, and a letter in support of Gould’s arguments in “Darwinian Fundamentalism” from Kalow and Kalant of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Toronto.

I’ve read the initial Gould articles and the responses in the NY Review of Books. The main topic of discussion is about approaches to Darwinian theory – strict adaptation vs. pluralism. In Gould’s words:

“…the ultra-Darwinists share a conviction that natural selection regulates everything of any importance in evolution, and that adaptation emerges as a universal result and ultimate test of selection’s ubiquity.”

I haven’t yet found anything that could be called political ideology in either the initial Gould essays, your response, his reply or the Kalow and Kalant response. Would you direct me to what you consider relevant political passages?

One thing that struck me in “Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange” was Gould’s remarks:

--- Gould excerpt --

“Pinker then follows his false opening charge with a three-part argument overturned by its own illogic and verbal inconsistency. The first third denies that evolutionary psychologists rely exclusively on adaptation. The second third (as I shall document below) shows how Pinker's restrictive focus upon adaptationist thinking leads him to misunderstand the concept of spandrels. The closing third then extols the power and range of adaptationist explanation, but gives the game away by equating this limited mode with "evolutionary reasoning" in general.

But the first and third parts contradict each other. Which claim does Pinker want to make: that pluralism reigns in evolutionary psychology (and I characterized the field unfairly), or that adaptationism reigns as a synonym for "evolutionary reasoning" (and my warnings are sterile)? He can't have them both. (My true position, of course, holds that adaptationism rules wrongly and too restrictively.)”

-- end Gould excerpt --

It struck me of course because of our recent exchange on the charge made by (Louis) Menand, and echoed by me, that you want to have things both ways. Your response suggests that you missed my point. You said:

“Your suggestion that I cannot appeal both to innate and environmental factors in discussing the gender gap implies that nature and nurture are mutually exclusive; that if the explanation of a phenomenon invokes nature, it cannot also invoke nurture. I believe that most phenomena require an interaction between the two. If this is “having it both ways,” then yes, I want to have it both ways. “

Does anybody think that nature and nurture are mutually exclusive? As Gould said in his review of Not in Our Genes by Lewontin, Rose and Kamin:

“The straw man set up in response to biological determinism is the caricature of cultural determinism, the tabula rasa in its pure form. Although biological determinists often like to intimate, for rhetorical effect, that their opponents hold such a view, no serious student of human behavior denies the potent influence of evolved biology upon our cultural lives. Our struggle is to figure out how biology affects us, not whether it does.”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5756

The issue I raised isn’t about nature vs. nurture – it’s about how biology affects us, not whether it does. Summers, as we know, didn’t have a problem with identifying which was more important, nature or nurture, in explaining women’s poorer careers in math and science. He said it was innate, biological differences between men and women – and that discrimination and socialization were lesser factors.

I noted that girls have increased their test scores relative to boys, in a time frame that would seem to exclude evolutionary affect. I speculated that you might then try to explain the test score improvements through nurture. I thought it was obvious why this was an example of having things both ways, but maybe not, so I’ll be more explicit – if the test scores changed in a faster-than-evolutionary time frame, why would you assume that it was nurture ameliorating the effects of nature, rather than the other way around – that the errors of nurture were fading away to allow nature to be revealed? Why is it nature when girls are failing, but nurture when they succeed? That’s what I mean by having it both ways.

You never directly claimed in this ongoing correspondence that the answer to the improving test-score question is nurture, although if that isn’t your solution, I’d love to know what it is. But I think that Louis Menand’s review made a convincing case that you do try to have it both ways, based on your statements in The Blank Slate, as in this excerpt:

-- Menand excerpt --

“Pinker doesn't care much for art, though. When he does care for something—cognitive science, for example—he is all in favor of training people to do it, even though, as he admits, many of the methods and assumptions of modern science are counter-intuitive. The fact that innate mathematical ability is still in the Stone Age distresses him; he has fewer problems with Stone Age sex drives. He objects to using education "to instill desirable attitudes toward the environment, gender, sexuality, and ethnic diversity"; but he insists that "the obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education." He thinks that we should be teaching economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics, even if we have to stop teaching literature and the classics. It's O.K. to rewire people's "natural" sense of a just price or the movement of a subatomic particle, in other words, but it's a waste of time to tinker with their untutored notions of gender difference.

Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals."”
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?critics/021125crbo_books
-- end Menand excerpt --

Pinker never responded after that.

I mentioned my interest in Marvin Harris and Pinker had responded:

I look forward to your biography of Marvin Harris, a man whose writings I very much enjoyed.

And I couldn't help responding:

It was through the work of Marvin Harris that I first heard objections to evolutionary psychology. And in his last book, “Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times” he said:

-- Harris excerpt --

The grand achievement of Boas and his followers was their rejection of the Darwinian-Specerian principles as a means of explaining the evolution of sociocultural differences and similarities…. While the Boasians accomplished little by way of their own explanatory theories of culture, they nonetheless made their mark forever in establishing the ontological nature of human cultures as a quantitatively and qualitatively novel emergent feature of human social life. They saw more clearly than any before them that the separation of social learning from close genetic control constituted an event that was as momentous as the appearance of life out of matter. Thenceforth and to this day, every attempt to construe cultural selection as a form of natural selection is a step backwards. All attempts to use differential reproductive success – that is, Darwinian fitness – as the central explanatory feature of cultural anthropology are doomed to failure.”
-- end Harris excerpt --

Poi - Ma Wai E

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 07:48:00 +0000

I became interested in the Maori thanks to reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel - see the PBS GGS website here.

I found this incredible video of a performance of a poi song, Poi - Ma Wai E by Ngati Rangiwewehi at a festival in 1996.

I'm trying to find out who arranged the song, what the lyrics are and what the translation is.

NYTimes - pro-evolutionary psychology?

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 06:28:00 +0000

The NYTimes gave a one-shot column to Simon Baron-Cohen, another evolutionary psychologist.

Says Baron-Cohen:

“In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one's own….”

“…What of Mr. Summers's other claim, that such sex differences are innate? We know that culture plays a role in the divergence of the sexes, but so does biology. For example, on the first day of life, male and female newborns pay attention to different things. On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, whereas more female infants will look at a human face.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08baron-cohen.html?incamp=article_popular_3

But what you'll probably NEVER read in the Times is that these claims were debunked by Elizabeth Spelke in her now-classic debate with Steven Pinker:

Over the last months, we've heard three arguments that men have greater cognitive aptitude for science. The first argument is that from birth, boys are interested in objects and mechanics, and girls are interested in people and emotions. The predisposition to figure out the mechanics of the world sets boys on a path that makes them more likely to become scientists or mathematicians. The second argument assumes, as Galileo told us, that science is conducted in the language of mathematics. On the second claim, males are intrinsically better at mathematical reasoning, including spatial reasoning. The third argument is that men show greater variability than women, and as a result there are more men at the extreme upper end of the ability distribution from which scientists and mathematicians are drawn. Let me take these claims one by one.

The first claim, as Steve said, is gaining new currency from the work of Simon Baron-Cohen. It's an old idea, presented with some new language. Baron-Cohen says that males are innately predisposed to learn about objects and mechanical relationships, and this sets them on a path to becoming what he calls "systematizers." Females, on the other hand, are innately predisposed to learn about people and their emotions, and this puts them on a path to becoming "empathizers." Since systematizing is at the heart of math and science, boys are more apt to develop the knowledge and skills that lead to math and science.

To anyone as old as I am who has been following the literature on sex differences, this may seem like a surprising claim. The classic reference on the nature and development of sex differences is a book by Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin that came out in the 1970s. They reviewed evidence for all sorts of sex differences, across large numbers of studies, but they also concluded that certain ideas about differences between the genders were myths. At the top of their list of myths was the idea that males are primarily interested in objects and females are primarily interested in people. They reviewed an enormous literature, in which babies were presented with objects and people to see if they were more interested in one than the other. They concluded that there were no sex differences in these interests.

Nevertheless, this conclusion was made in the early 70s. At that time, we didn't know much about babies' understanding of objects and people, or how their understanding grows. Since Baron-Cohen's claims concern differential predispositions to learn about different kinds of things, you could argue that the claims hadn't been tested in Maccoby and Jacklin's time. What does research now show?

Let me take you on a whirlwind tour of 30 years of research in one powerpoint slide. From birth, babies perceive objects. They know where one object ends and the next one begins. They can't see objects as well as we can, but as they grow their object perception becomes richer and more differentiated.

Babies also start with rudimentary abilities to represent that an object continues to exist when it's out of view, and they hold onto those representations longer, and over more complicated kinds of changes, as they grow. Babies make basic inferences about object motion: inferences like, the force with which an object is hit determines the speed with which it moves. These inferences undergo regular developmental changes over the infancy period.

In each of these cases, there is systematic developmental change, and there's variability. Because of this variability, we can compare the abilities of male infants to females. Do we see sex differences? The research gives a clear answer to this question: We don't.

Male and female infants are equally interested in objects. Male and female infants make the same inferences about object motion, at the same time in development. They learn the same things about object mechanics at the same time.

Across large numbers of studies, occasionally a study will favor one sex over the other. For example, girls learn that the force with which something is hit influences the distance it moves a month earlier than boys do. But these differences are small and scattered. For the most part, we see high convergence across the sexes. Common paths of learning continue through the preschool years, as kids start manipulating objects to see if they can get a rectangular block into a circular hole. If you look at the rates at which boys and girls figure these things out, you don't find any differences. We see equal developmental paths.

I think this research supports an important conclusion. In discussions of sex differences, we need to ask what's common across the two sexes. One thing that's common is infants don't divide up the labor of understanding the world, with males focusing on mechanics and females focusing on emotions. Male and female infants are both interested in objects and in people, and they learn about both. The conclusions that Maccoby and Jacklin drew in the early 1970s are well supported by research since that time.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

Guns Germs Steel discussion at Majikthese

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 06:36:00 +0000

Guns Germs Steel and TV

refuting sociobiology part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Sat, 14 May 2005 03:08:00 +0000

The Helena Cronin political agenda: divide men and women into separate spheres.
Phase one: separate work tracks for men and for women:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,239317,00.html

Phase two: separate math tracks for boys and girls:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1436052,00.html

refuting sociobiology - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Sat, 14 May 2005 03:05:00 +0000

Harvard psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke refutes the claims of male math/science superiority with hard data:
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/Spelke_SexSci_2005.pdf

the problem with "Darwinian logic" and evolutionary psychology

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Sat, 14 May 2005 02:24:00 +0000

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

This debate between Elizabeth Spelke and Steven Pinker illustrates the problems with the reliance of evolutionary psychologists on the notion that males and females evolved on separate tracks. Towards the end of the debate, Pinker implies that traditional restrictions on women's opportunities are not the result of bias but rather underlying cognitive differences. To Pinker's way of thinking, there wouldn't be bias against women if there wasn't a good reason for it:

"PINKER: Regarding bias: as I mentioned at the outset, I don't doubt that bias exists. But the idea that the bias started out from some arbitrary coin flip at the dawn of time and that gender differences have been perpetuated ever since by the existence of that bias is extremely unlikely."

Cultural materialists don't claim that bias is the result of an arbitrary coin flip, of course, but rather a series of compelling circumstances that led to patriarchy - which has an in-built bias against female aspirations.

Marvin Harris wiki

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Harris

Harris bio page

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 09:24:00 +0000

Started a biography page for Marvin Harris:
harris.asp

up & running

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:51:00 +0000

cultural-materialism.org is up and running. Check back frequently for improvements and additions to this site.

Some other sites to check out in the meantime:

Cultural materialism overview

A guide for students by Jon Marcoux

James Lett on Cultural Materialism