Nature vs. Nurture redux: It's the culture, stupid!
Those of you who have been around me more than five minutes in real life know that my number one pet peeve, of all the pet peeves there are in the entire world, is gender stereotypes and all that come from them (sexism, misogyny, etc.). Nothing can make me angrier than this. This is why I hate romantic comedies and ground my teeth through Knocked Up. Just the thought of that awful weddings movie with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson makes me want to flip out and kill people. However, nothing, but NOTHING, makes me more angry than when people start talking about how "nature" somehow made Western, hetero-normative gender stereotypes.
You know what I mean. The classic example is that women should be the ones to do the housework because while the men were out hunting the mammoths, the women stayed at home in the cave and kept it tidy, a brood of babies clutched around her neck. Look at any museum diorama about our predecessors and you will see this classic trope: Man the Hunter, woman the... whatever that boring stuff over there in that cave is, why don't you amuse yourself with your woman-stuff, honey?
Evolutionary biologists have long been running away with this field, trying to tell us that somehow evolution made our Western gender roles the way that they are. Stories about how men prefer women with certain waistlines, how men can't be monogamous because of their desire to impregnate as many women as possible, and, in the case of some evo bio people, how rape is an evolved, evolutionary advantage.
I was therefore really happy to read the following article in Newsweek, that makes the case that different environments lead to different behaviors, evolution happens a bit differently than we suspected, and oh, fyi, rape is actually a terrible idea in a social setting.
The article also raises the central issue with evolutionary biology, which is that it has almost no grounding in the scientific method or fact. Basically it's a bunch of (mostly) dudes sitting around saying things like, "How can I excuse all of the Western, heteronormative male behavior that I've been taught by my culture to like doing? Oh, right, I can say that it wasn't culture! It's NATURE!"
Here's the article, definitely worth reading.
You know what I mean. The classic example is that women should be the ones to do the housework because while the men were out hunting the mammoths, the women stayed at home in the cave and kept it tidy, a brood of babies clutched around her neck. Look at any museum diorama about our predecessors and you will see this classic trope: Man the Hunter, woman the... whatever that boring stuff over there in that cave is, why don't you amuse yourself with your woman-stuff, honey?
Evolutionary biologists have long been running away with this field, trying to tell us that somehow evolution made our Western gender roles the way that they are. Stories about how men prefer women with certain waistlines, how men can't be monogamous because of their desire to impregnate as many women as possible, and, in the case of some evo bio people, how rape is an evolved, evolutionary advantage.
I was therefore really happy to read the following article in Newsweek, that makes the case that different environments lead to different behaviors, evolution happens a bit differently than we suspected, and oh, fyi, rape is actually a terrible idea in a social setting.
The article also raises the central issue with evolutionary biology, which is that it has almost no grounding in the scientific method or fact. Basically it's a bunch of (mostly) dudes sitting around saying things like, "How can I excuse all of the Western, heteronormative male behavior that I've been taught by my culture to like doing? Oh, right, I can say that it wasn't culture! It's NATURE!"
Here's the article, definitely worth reading.