But there is an interesting twist this year. According to a piece in the New York Times, women are being affected more than men:

…most of the injuries have been sustained by women.

Through Monday night, a review of the events at the Extreme Park counted at least 22 accidents that forced athletes out of the competition or, if on their final run, required medical attention. Of those, 16 involved women. The proportion of injuries to women is greater than it appears given that the men’s fields are generally larger.

Twenty-two falls, with 16 as women, is statistically significant (Chi squared = 4.545 with 1 degrees of freedom, two-tailed P=0.0330)

Why?

Generally, but not always, women and men have different rules or equipment when they play similar sports. In basketball, the rules seem about the same, and the court and the nets are the same, but for women’s basketball the ball is slightly smaller, I’m told. For hockey, as far as I know, the equipment is the same, but women are not allowed to body slam each other. But for many other sports, including a lot of summer and winter Olympic sports, there isn’t any difference as far as I know. Obviously, when there is no need for a different set of rules or alternate gear, there shouldn’t be any difference.

Women use a different downhill course than men, shorter and with, it appears, fewer jumps. That is a little hard to understand since there is no clear difference between what the two sexes are expected to do. On the other hand, I’m not a skier. Perhaps the body strength required to not buckle under the g-forces for so long is sufficiently different for men and women. On the other hand, isn’t this mostly lower body strength, and wouldn’t women have an offsetting advantage having less bulky upper body mass to work against? Any skiers out there want to comment on this?

It is interesting to watch the half pipe. The men and women have the same pipe, the same rules, the same judging, and in the end, produce the same array of spectacular gravity defying moves. In fact, given the standard half-pipe mode of attire, it is not easy to tell which gender is doing the deed. (That could just be me … maybe I need a bigger TV.) This applies to varying degrees across most of the fancy skiing events. But the suggestion has been made that this could be changed. From the same NYT piece:

“Most of the courses are built for the big show, for the men,” said Kim Lamarre of Canada, the bronze medalist in slopestyle skiing, where the competition was delayed a few times by spectacular falls. “I think they could do more to make it safer for women.”

Think back to the afore mentioned Fall Olympics in Vancouver. As I recall, a very large proportion of the ice-dancy people fell during their performances. But in previous Olympics, and during the current Olympics, this has not been the case. Aside from some physical explanation, i.e., that Canadian Ice is extra slippery (unlikely!), I would attribute this to a behavioral syndrome. Some sort of demand for a certain kind of extra jumpy move that would lead to more slippage may have emerged in the sport, peaking at the time of the Vancouver games, and since then either all the skaters learned how to handle this with additional training and experience, or as a group, they’ve shifted their expectations.

Something similar may be happening with the Sochi snow sports. One of the downhill women’s races had several bad runs in a row, and the coaches were able to pass information on to the skiers so they could avoid one particularly bad spot on the run, a jump that was often followed by an out of control spinning off the mountain effect, so the latter half, roughly, of the runs did not abort. A similar cultural, or training related, effect may be at work at Sochi’s slopestyle event for women. Check this out:

J. F. Cusson, ski slopestyle coach for Canada and a former X Games gold medalist, said that his women’s team usually did not practice on jumps as large as the ones the men use, for fear of injury.

“But when they compete, they have to jump on the same jumps, so they get hurt,” he said. “It’s a big concern of mine.”

It seems reasonable to assume that if the women trained for the setting they would be competing in, they would not have as much trouble. This vaguely reminds me of the early days of the Olympics (early 20th century, not Ancient Greek) when women were for the first time allowed to engage in a foot race, a 100 meter dash or something along those lines. It was hot, they were untrained, they wore petticoats. They all fainted. That was not because they were women unable to run. It was because they were women set up for failure, and expected to faint. I’m sure a lot of guys found that to be as hot as the weather was that day.

In a way, the Olympics are a slow and ponderous thing, since they happen only every four years. I suspect that the sex difference in wipe-out and injury rates we saw today will be attenuated in future games due not to adjustments in context or gear but rather to changes in training and preparation.

Photo Credit: jsmezak via Compfight cc

Earlier that day, The Explorer, whom I had commissioned to be my field logistics manager, drove me out to a possible research site — an island centered in one of Southern Africa’s more significant rivers. The island had once been part of a farming project, now defunct, and at some point a levy was built there to divert water into an irrigation system. The now defunct and overgrown levy was about four kilometers long, flat topped, and exactly the width of a vehicle’s wheel-base plus 30 centimeters. There were numerous erosional cuts on both sides of it, so as The Explorer drove our truck along the top of the vegetation-covered berm, the wheels would take turns dropping into these open-ended Potholes-Of-Death. I wondered what would happen if we hit an erosional gully that was a bit bigger than the others, or two at once, and just as I was wondering about that, The Explorer uttered some words that made all that seem less important.

“Oh shit … I was expecting a ramp at this end of the levy so we could drive straight off. Gonna have to back up to the beginning!”

And with that our Toyota Prado reversed direction and we started to back up the four kilometers we had driven, moments earlier, in the other direction.

“Shouldn’t I get out and help you back up?”

“Why? Backing up is the same as going forward, Greg. It’s just in the other way ’round.”

And so we backed up, lurching in and out of the erosional holes, just a little slower than we had driven in, without incident. That was some bad-ass impressive driving.

A half hour later we were off the levy, off the island, out of the river valley and heading for the restaurant where we would meet our Heavily Armed Farmer. But we needed fuel for the truck, so we pulled into a station. As we got out of the truck to visit the shop while it was being fueled up, I noticed two men standing nearby looking at us, and our truck, their eyes scanning back and forth between The Explorer and the side of our vehicle. I quickly realized what they were looking at: The very new Toyota Prado (“4Runner” to you Americans) had a huge, deep and wide scrape running from the front left fender, across both doors, and reaching the back left fender. In other words, repair of this scrape would require replacement of four different panels. In the US this would be at least a $3,000 repair job.

The scrape had been put here by the owner of the truck, from whom we had rented it, just two days before. He was a former Special Forces Commando who had spent several years with the South African Military in Namibia and Angola, then retired to go run an equipment repair business. He was, in fact, the first White South African I was to observe pulling this “Oh, look, I happen to be carrying a gun” trick like The Farmer was to do that evening at dinner. In his case, it was in the parking lot of a busy strip mall where we were loading up on groceries. He had taken up the South African Man Stance, which is where you keep one foot on the ground and put the other foot up on something high so that your knee is rather bent and all the muscles in both legs (you are wearing very short South African Man Shorts) can be seen bulging and rippling and being all hairy and stuff. Or at least that is what I think the purpose of the South African Man Stance is. Anyway, on that occasion, our Special Forces Commando and Toyota Truck Owner had his Very Large Piece (a .357 magnum revolver) in a rather skimpy looking holster strapped to his leather belt, so when he took The Stance it shined and shimmered in the afternoon Sun, the glints and flashes attracting the gaze of everyone hanging around or passing through. Big White Man With Gun. Check.

Anyway, Special Forces had purchased the truck as an investment. He owned several vehicles and rented them out to various people for specialized uses, and The Explorer, an old friend of his, was able to get a nice deal on a truck that was virtually off the lot. It had fewer than 200 klicks on it when we picked it up. Not even 200 kilometers on the odometer and this huge crease shamefully scratched into the side. Special Forces Guy had picked up the truck at the sales lot, drove it home, and proceeded to get it stuck between a rock and a hard place, where the hard place was an iron post in his yard. He couldn’t figure out how to turn the truck without scraping it to get it out of this jam, so he just drove it against the post and let the chips fall where they may. Rather embarrassing for a man of his experience and with his manly legs and giant piece and everything.

So the two men standing by their truck looked at the scrape, looked at The Explorer getting out of he driver’s seat, looked at me, and one of them said to me, “That’s what happens when you let a woman drive your nice new truck, eh?”

So we bought the dried antelope flesh, paid for the gas, tipped the service station attendee and headed off to meet our Heavily Armed Farmer. “We’d better get going, dinner is at 7:00” I said to Lynne as she pulled the truck out onto the road.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “If we’re late, it won’t matter. She’s always a half hour behind,” Lynne said of her old friend, the Heavily Armed Farmer named Mary.

I list this argument among the falsehoods that I write about, but really, this is a category of argument with numerous little sub-arguments, and one about which I could write as many blog posts as I have fingers and toes, which means, at least twenty. (Apparently there was some pentaldactylsim in my ancestry, and I must admit that I’ll never really know what they cut off when I was born, if anything.)

Before going into this discussion I think it is wise, if against my nature, to tell you what the outcome will be: There is not a good argument to be found in the realm of behavioral biology for why American Women shop while their husbands sit on the bench in the mall outside the women’s fashion store fantasizing about a larger TV on which to watch the game. At the same time, there is a good argument to be made that men and women should have different hard wired behavioral proclivities, if there are any hard wired behavioral proclivities in our species. And, I’m afraid, the validity from an individual’s perspective of the various arguments that men and women are genetically programmed to be different (in ways that make biological sense) is normally determined by the background and politics of the observer and not the science. I am trained in behavioral biology, I was taught by the leading sociobiologists, I’ve carried out research in this area, and I was even present, somewhat admiringly, at the very birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in Room 14A in the Peabody Museum at Harvard, in the 1980s. So, if anyone is going to be a supporter of evolutionary psychology, it’s me.

But I’m not. Let me ‘splain….

[This is an updated repost of an item originally posted here where you will find many interesting comments.]

I want to first provide the argument from bottom up. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll outline why evolving during the Pleistocene made us what we are today, and what some evolved features of our species may be. Later, I’ll deconstruct the argument.

Organisms have genes that vary (the variants are called alleles). Sometimes a variant arises that, when interacting with the environment, confers a negative or positive effect. Those that confer a positive effect with respect to the process of passing on genes to future generations are over-represented (on average) in the next generation while those that confer a negative effect are under-represented. If the strength of this selection is sufficient and random effects do not overpower it, there may be a shift in allele frequencies over time.

That’s evolution.

Some behaviors vary because of underlying genes. The pattern of foraging by fruit fly larva, for example, varies in a way that has been mapped directly to specific base pair differences between alleles for a gene. There are a handful of other gene-behavior links (a handful relative to the total amount of behavior out there to study) but in most cases, the link between the underlying genetics and the resulting behavior is not directly documented, but assumed. This is reasonable. The link between phenotypic variation and the underlying genetic variation is almost always assumed and hardly ever documented directly.

Humans are mammals and thus have internal fertilization, internal gestation, and lactation. Each of these three important features of mammalian reproduction means a striking difference between males and females in the risks and benefits of behavioral practices, and in the very nature of reproductive strategies. Consider the very act of mating. A single copulation may have consequences that are extraordinarily different between a female and a male. A pregnancy followed by nursing and so on is a huge investment for a female, but virtually zero investment for a male. Copulating with the “wrong” mate (i.e., one that is somehow genetically not the best choice) has almost zero consequences for a male, who can simply copulate with some other female. A bad choice in mate for a female, however, may blow a huge percentage of her total reproductive career.

(Pause: In the above paragraph, I was writing about mammals. Voles, for instance. Or aardvarks. You may have been putting humans in there as your mammal of choice, but since the vast majority of mammals are rodents or bats, that may have been a bad idea. Please consider re-reading the paragraph and placing a wild, non-domestic ‘typical’ mammal in there as the fill-in organism, just in case your assumption that I was talking specifically about you was influencing your thinking on this.)

It is not at all unreasonable to expect that any mammal, including humans, would evolve such that there are male-female differences in things like risk-taking behavior, mate-preference, offspring-care proclivities, etc.

In particular, and this is very important, humans are the result of evolution over two million years or so of the Pleistocene, during which time our ancestors lived in a social setting that is represented today by the likes of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of southern Africa, who were intensively studied during the 1960s in part to learn about what the lifeways of our ancestors may have been like.

Furthermore, it has been proposed that the behavioral tendencies of humans are often fairly specifically hard wired protocols. We have the ability to do certain things because our brains are really a set of many different organs, including a set of cognitive structures called “modules” which were shaped by natural selection over these millions of Pleistocene years, a time that was pretty much similar from generation to generation, among people living in Ju/’hoansi Bushman like groups in the tropics and subtropics of Africa.

These modules provide the ability to be very good at certain things. When these modules are tested or challenged in modern-day humans living in the West, we see that we are still good at doing some of the things that we did back in the Pleistocene but no longer need to do today, and we often show poor performance when it comes to modern, western, industrialized, non hunter-gatherer or non-Pleistocene problems or contexts. Just as our hand eye coordination evolved to facilitate the use of tools, our brainy bits evolved to detect certain kinds of cheaters but not others, have a taste for important but rare nutrients, and so on. Most importantly relative to the current discussion, males have a module that facilitates promiscuous sexual behavior and females have a module (probably the female version of the same module, according to the theory) that makes them relatively prudish and careful about sexual relationships. Males have abilities to orient things in time and space in order to better shoot the antelope with the spear, while women have the ability to remember details of things in space in order to better find and select the proper plant foods. And so on. Thus, males show off, fight other males, and practice hunting by playing hockey, baseball, and football, or at least, watching the games and knowing every detail of the statistics, while females … shop and stuff.

It’s a nice theory and there have been a lot of studies supporting the basic idea as well as a number of specifics. However, there are some problems.

Let’s start with the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene is, among recent geological time periods, considered to be the most variable time period that the Earth has ever experienced since the origin of multicellular life in terms of climate change, and thus, overall ecology, habitat distributions, etc. There is no expectation that any given population making up part of a species like humans or their close relatives would have had any long term consistency in natural environment. Indeed, the post-Pleistocene life of the horticulturalist, buffering their food supply by growing crops, is probably more consistent over time than any period in the Pleistocene, with respect to basic ecology. Furthermore, when we look at foragers across Africa today, and at the archaeology which tells us something about their past, we see a huge amount of variation in habitats and adaptations to habitats. Humans have lived in very arid environments and very wet environments, coastal and inland, riverine and woodland, grassland and forest. Post-Pleistocene food producing human groups tended to avoid several of these habitats and have lived in a much narrower range of contexts.

One might argue (and this is the usual argument) that it is really the social setting in which humans lived, not the habitat, that was consistent over two million years, thus the Pleistocene as a variable time period argument goes out the window. But I should point something out about that counterargument: It wasn’t ever made until people like me (mainly me, in fact) started arguing, mainly at conferences, that the Pleistocene varied too much to be thought of as a stable habitat in which certain behaviors would evolve and get “stuck.” You see, part of the Pleistocene argument is that it was a long time compared to the subsequent Holocene (two million vs. 10,000 year) so we are essentially Pleistocene creatures. But when it was pointed out to evolutionary psychologists that the Pleistocene varied tremendously compared to the Holocene, the “oh, it’s the social argument” was raised to salvage the idea.

But that doesn’t work. We know that habitat determines social structure in humans, with technology as a major factor. Foragers vary a tremendous amount in their behaviors, depending in large part on the ecology in which they live. Forager group size, often considered to be an important intermediate variable between ecology and social structure, varies tremendously with habitat. There are even foragers with stratified societies and slavery, and there are foragers who live in such small isolated groups that they need special cultural conventions to get together now and then in order to socialize, find mates, and so on.

There is also variation in important social norms beyond that which can be explained easily by ecology. For instance, it is probably fairly rare for an Efe Pygmy woman’s offspring to have been fathered by anyone other than that woman’s husband at the time of birth (though with serial monogamy a woman may have different children fathered by different men). In contrast, the Ache and other foragers of the Amazon seem to pay little attention to who is the father of whom, and it is common for a woman to have children fathered by several different men other than her long-term husband. These are very, fundamentally, even dramatically different social systems, found in tropical rain forest foragers. Efe Pygmy men compared to Baka Pygmy men spend dramatically different amounts of time caring for their own children. Add to these examples the diversity that must arise in groups living across a range of different habitats, and we pretty much have destroyed the argument of one social environment in which we evolved for two million years. If the basis of the modern evolutionary psychology argument is falsified, the rest of the argument may be … well, weak at best.

When this argument … that the social Pleistocene was a weak idea … was proposed, the counter argument was this: Sure, the social environment changed, but there are still some basic things that are always the same: Predators and the need to mate being key.

Fine. So now, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA), which this thing … this time period … is called is “Predators and mating.” How do we distinguish, then, between evolution in humans vs. evolution in mammals, or even tetrapods, or for that matter, organisms, in general?

We don’t.

Then, consider the foragers used as exemplars in the studies done today in evolutionary psychology. A disturbing trend has emerged over the last five or ten years: The use of groups that are not foragers as though they were foragers. For some reason, it is very common today to see evolutionary psychologists claim that the homicide rate and level of violence among Pleistocene foragers was very high. There is, however no evidence whatsoever to support this. When we look at the evidence that is being adduced, we find that several groups of food growers, horticulturalists such as the Yanomamo of the Amazon, have somehow been included in the sample of “foragers.” I can’t decide if this is ignorance (the researchers have no clue what they are doing), intellectual dishonesty (the researchers need violent ancestors so they cook the data) or merely a tradition of indifference (the researchers use some data they got somewhere that someone else used, so they use it uncritically).

The Yanomamo and other groups like them do indeed have high rates of violence and homicide. It has been effectively argued that this violence arises because thy have horticulture. The thing that makes them different from foragers in terms of habitat and ecology also makes them different from other groups in terms of behavior.

Having said this, there is evidence for plenty of violence in human history. Many of the earliest remains of Homo sapiens (including the “archaic” forms such as Neanderthal) show boney damage that could be interpreted as the result of interpersonal violence (though other explanations have been suggested). Personally, I think that we went through a phase of high levels of frequent interpersonal violence which was mitigated by the invention of effective longer distance projectiles. The bow and arrow democratizes the fight, and makes killing a) easier to do without brute strength and b) less likely to happen because once people can “shoot” each other easily they may be more compelled to negotiate. The evidence that recent foragers were highly violent is not as ubiquitous as that for earlier humans, and tends to be geographically spotty, and can probably be explained by the same hypothesis of the effects of killing technology.

Then there is the argument about the modules. Let’s assume that the research that shows how modules seem to work and what they seem to “look like” functionally is good. The fact that humans are running around with modules today does not mean that these modules are genetically programmed. It is very possible that module-like structures in our neocortex arise during development, de novo, in each of us, and that these modules are similar across groups (but perhaps different sometimes by gender) because of overall similar developmental trajectories. The cases of modules failing, say, to detect cheating if the cheating is modern (non-Pleistocene, if you will) in context is unimpressive. In one famous study, people were shown to be very good at detecting cheaters when the cheater was someone possibly lying about their age to get a drink in a bar, but very poor at detecting cheaters when the cheater was a file folder in an esoteric filing system that may or may not have been filed correctly. In other words, when comparing actual social cheating to a glitch in a filing system, humans were pretty good at the social cheating part but not so good at the arbitrary artificial strange filings system. We are not impressed.

There are dozens of reported gender differences, with piles of research demonstrating them. But when we look more closely, we often see that the either a) the methodology of the research sucks or b) the gender difference, while likely real, changes, goes away, or even reverses as times change, suggesting that the difference is (was) cultural.

I’m sure there are gender differences. Part of the reason I think that is an inappropriate argument: I think there are gender differences in behavior because there must be. Such an argument is not evidential and does not lead us to a legitimate conclusion. Rather, it leads us to a set of valid hypotheses, if done right. However, I am utterly unconvinced that most gender differences are hard wired. There are probably some. Testosterone poising of neural tissue (indirectly) during development probably accounts for the fact that there are almost no male simultaneous translators. The neural ability to do this difficult thing is retains in some females but lost in almost all males during puberty. That is not genes coding for neural connections, but it is genes coding for different endocrine systems which then, through a series of negative and positive feedback systems, cause hormonally mediated changes in the body (including the brain).

Perhaps hormones make men like sports and women like shoes. But if so, it is not very consistent. My wife has three pairs of shoes and one purse. I have two pairs of shoes and four laptop bags. My brother-in-law knows more about sports than anyone in my wife’s sports-oriented family. But his new wife knows twice as much as he does, even though no one in Andrew’s family has quite admitted this out loud yet. I can track my own interest in both baseball and football as a function of a female mate or friend who had such an interest, with my involvement being a way to socialize and get along. I find sports interesting enough to pay attention and to enjoy it, but if I want to know what is going on, I have to ask the female I’m watching the sport with (often, but not always, my wife). Yes, I guess I’m following my true genetic nature: I’m somewhat promiscuous as to whom I watch the game with.

Sex differences are probably real and probably important, but they may not be hard wired as often as people think they are, or hard wired in the manner people think. We would expect a species like humans, born with this big blank brain and subjected to many extra years of learning as children, to develop these differences as a function of culture rather than genes. That, to me, is the most likely null model. I’m not sure I would attribute a priori much likelihood to a genes-up model of human behavior. How the heck would that work, anyway?

See also Understanding Sex Differences in Humans: What do we learn from nature?

The question at hand is this: Should men and women be given fundamentally different rights? Would it be OK if men and women had different pay for the same job, or different access to jobs? Would it be OK if men and women were treated differently by the law in a way that accounted for the behavioral differences between them that arise from their biology which, in turn, may be partly a function of their evolutionary history? Should men and women have different status because of their gender? Similar questions can be extended to people that are biologically different in other ways, such as by age, gender orientation, physical handicap or, should it be proven a valid categorization, race. But for now, let’s stick with the basic adult male vs. female difference.

[This is a heavily rewritten post originally published here.]

The idea is very simple: That which we observe in nature is the best guide to how things should be. We see that in mammals mothers nurse their young. Departures from this (bottle feeding, early weening, feeding young something other than mother’s milk, etc.) are risky and often have negative consequences. In the modern, Western, industrialized world, there is a socially constructed balance between natural and non natural choices. A child that is fatally allergic to mother’s milk would be left to die if being raised in a “state of nature.” But in practice, the life of such a child is placed at a higher value than one’s philosophical purity, and non-natural intervention (feeding the child soy milk from a bottle) is chosen as the ‘correct’ decision. In truth, day to day, we may be utterly arbitrary in adherence to or ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the naturalistic premise. We do what is convenient, what feels good, what provides us some good (money, status, etc.). Then later we explain our decision rhetorically as necessary. But that, dear reader, is a whole other post.

Nature, as a guideline, is often invoked when considering political or economic decisions. Free market capitalism is natural. Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, is natural.

Let’s look at the idea that nature argues for differential pay between men and women. The premise is that women get paid less than men. There is plenty of room for clarification here … do women get paid less than men for the same exact job? Do women get paid the same but end up with a lower salary because they take unpaid leave to have babies? Do women get paid the same but end up with lower pay because they take unpaid leave which indirectly contributes to slower (in calendar time) advancement on the pay scale? Are women kept out of jobs, or even entire professions, that tend to be higher paid? Some or all of the above? For the present purposes, none of these questions matter, as you will see.

To orient the argument, let’s consider the following list of hypothetical comments that may be found on the internet.

• Is every way we treat the two genders differently insulting? Why stop at 24% lower salary? How about holding the door for the weaker sex? How about only women getting to improve their daily look with make-up, while men doing it are ridiculed? Why must the stronger sex always carry all the groceries?
• Is paying men and women equally really fair? Women and men are different, have different strengths and advantages, and different limitations. Those are obviously a very large part of the reason why salaries are skewed.
• …it is evolutionarily more important for men to earn money, as money is earned for status, and not for consumption.
• …physically … Men are stronger, taller, and don’t get pregnant.
• Psychologically … Men are more aggressive, more ambitious, more authoritative, more psychopathic, less caring of others …
• …being more aggressive, more ambitious, more authoritative, more psychopathic, less caring of others are “qualities” that are sought in CEOs…
• …hiring a woman in a job involves the risk that she will be unable to work if she gets pregnant. The “worth” of that employee is thus modified as a result.
• …if you hire a person who is likely to die soon the employee is worth less to an employer than someone who is guaranteed to live for a long time and work in that job.
• …in divorces it is usually the wife who gets the children. …. The higher salary of men as compensation for that fact.
• Bottom line is salary difference has a biological basis. Until it is thoroughly understood why there is that difference why come out and say it should be abandoned.
• Women are on average less strong than men. That there is variation doesn’t change that the probability that a random man is stronger than a random woman is above fifty percent.

I would argue that these and similar beliefs are not matters of opinion nor are they matters of political correctness. The discussion at hand has a deep and rich intellectual history, and embracing pure and unadulterated reference to nature in such a male-biased way (or any way for that matter) is no more acceptable than embracing a heliocentric universe as a student of physical sciences. We’ve been there, done that, and we called it the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, lets look at the argument in more detail.

A nature-based justification of human behavior may take into account the fact that we are mammals. Our mammalness encompasses many of the critically important facets of our lives. We have approximately two sexes, a male (producing sperm) and a female (producing ova). Pregnancy lasts a long time relative to the overall life cycle of a given female. The females nurse the young, adding significant time in the form of child care. In mammals, males fight or display for sexual access, and females are either herded or harassed by males or choose males with which to mate, and males provide virtually no offspring care in most species. In some species there is courting and female choice, in others, hormonally mediated sexual arousal and activity, in others, what we might call rape, or to chose a better term, forced copulation, may be routine.

That is a pretty wide range of behaviors, but one must use this wide range to describe ‘typical’ mammals, as they do vary somewhat. There are key characteristics that do pertain to all mammals, however: Pregnancy and nursing being entirely female, longish period of offspring care, and internal fertilization which results in a certain amount of paternal uncertainty (unclear attribution of fatherhood) for all males.

Given this, we may expect human males to be less choosy (sexually) than females, we may expect males to be promiscuous, we may expect females to be more cautious, we may expect males to be show-offs and often more violent than females, and we may expect males to be bigger and stronger than females.

But really, we are mammals but we are also primates, which is a subset of mammals. Would it not be more appropriate to look to primates, rather than mammals, to understand our fundamental natures?

Well, most primates are either solitary or monogamous, with males and females not differing very much in size. Mating happens as a matter of female choice more than male fighting in most primate species. In many primate species, especially the polyandrous ones (where a single female has two or more male mates) there is a certain amount of male care of offspring, while in others, not so much. There is not a big difference in the danger level of males vs. females in most primates; predators are not choosy in this regard. So, our evolutionary heritage as primates actually looks quite different than if we look more broadly at mammals. Based on a primate-wide model, we might expect male humans to track females very carefully, be more or less at their service with respect to child care, and there should be very little difference between the sexes in who gets to use force or coercion for personal gain. Males and females would roughly share the job of protecting home and hearth (proverbially or otherwise). Males in many cases would not know if they are the father of a particular female’s offspring, but they would remain devoted to the female and her young because the young are related in some way (the multiple males hooked up to individual females would typically be brothers or half brothers, for instance).

But really, while we are in fact primates, we are actually Old World Primates. If we remove the prosimians and the New World Primates from the mix, we get a different picture.

Looking more narrowly at the Old World Primates, we actually drop all of the polyandry and most of the monogamy. We now get a pretty large difference, on average, in body size of males vs. females, but male coercion is rarely a means of sexual interaction … rather, females and males both engage in quite a bit of politics (these are smart animals) and these political interactions are mediated by quite a bit of biting and poking (within both males and females, but maybe more so in males). The result is often a parallel (male vs. female) set of hierarchies, and position in these hierarchies determines for males who gets to mate and for females who ends up most successfully raising offspring.

From this perhaps we can understand such human behaviors as guys getting together to do sports and gals getting together to shop and compete over makeup and shoes. Gossip, politics, personal status, etc. are all expectable pastimes or passions from such an Old World Primate ancestry.

But wait, the Old World Primates diversified a VERY long time ago. Maybe we should look at the subset of Old World Primates of which we are a part … the apes.

The majority of ape species are monomorphic in body size (the males and females are the same size) and life-long pair bonding. Both males and females are physically equipped (strong bodies, big canines) to defend the territory and the young, and both take similar roles in this regard, though the females nurse the young so there is some difference in male vs. female role in offspring care. A considerable effort is put into care of offspring overall, and with setting them up in new territories, etc., and this sort of care involves the males at least as much as the females.

So we might expect humans, as apes, to be highly monogamous and for both sexes to put huge amounts of efforts into offspring … somewhat different in style but with similar levels of effort for males vs. females.

But hold on a second there… we are apes, yes, and this characterizes the average ape because gibbons and siamangs are all apes. But we are great apes! The great apes constitutes a smaller taxonomic group. Maybe we should look at the great apes only and forget the gibbons and siamangs.

OK, when we do that, we are looking at orangs, gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. Orangs have a very high level of sexual dimorphism, are primarily vegetarian, and the most typical form of sexual interaction is either forced copulation (“rape”) or females swooning over gigantic, and presumably very sexy, but rare, super males. All offspring care is female. In fact, the largest social group among these apes is the mother and offspring with a random male busy raping the female while the offspring hangs out on a nearby branch eating some wild figs. Gorillas also have a high level of dimorphism in body size, but live in large groups with the key group structure consisting of a silver back male and a harem of females who are totally devoted to and sexually monogamous with the male until a lone silver back starts to show up and kill the female’s infant offspring now and then. When that happens, the females join the infanticidal male and abandoned their devoted and gentle silver back.

These two apes provide very different models, but are similar in that females are either raped or have their children killed (and they can stop that by joining the killer) and when push comes to shove, the enormously large males get to do all the pushing. This would suggest that humans get comfortable with a very male dominated society and that the females should just get in line. Fast.

But hold on, we are much much more closely related to the chimpanzees … common chimp and bonobo … than to these other apes. So let’s look at their lifestyles.

Both groups have the unusual and interesting feature of adult and potentially sexually mature males and females living in the same group. When a female is in a state of ovulation, she also enters a state of estrus … the visible display of ovulation. Some of the males may be forced to not mate with this female (forced by dominant males) but for the most part every male mates with such a female. Over time, all of the females go into estrus one or two at a time. So, over the course of a few years, every single male will eventually have potentially baby-making sex with every single female. This is done in the form of giant orgies in which only one female participates.

That is true for common chimps, but it is also true for bonobos, with an added twist. All the chimps have lots of what I will call erotic interaction all the time, including auto erotic. But for bonobos, there is the added feature of almost every possible gender and age combination of erotic interaction, and every combination of body part interaction. So a young female may provide oral sex to an older male. An older male may provide oral sex to a young male. Two adult females may engage in genital-genital rubbing. And so on and so forth. Young male chimps do not seem to have sex with their mothers. Otherwise, pretty much every combination happens.

So, given the chimp model, we should all be bisexual and disregard age of our sexual partners. Almost all baby making sex should involve a gang bang lasting several days. We should have strong male hierarchies and female hierarchies that determine, ultimately, who gets to be the father of each child (more or less) not by who has sex with whom, but by regulating exactly when in the ovulatory cycle intromissive sex with male orgasm happens. If we lean towards the common chimp model, all males should be dominant over all females. If we lean towards the bonobo model, all females should be dominant over all males.

So, that is the sum of our naturalistic models … where they come from and how we might use them … assuming that our evolutionary heritage, our phylogenetic framework, our Darwinian determinism, should provide us with the best naturalistic guidance.

But hold on a second. Humans are ape, yes, but we are also part of a subset of apes that diversified from a chimp-like ancestor millions of years ago. Roughly speaking, these were the “Austrlopiths.” They were chimp like in size, probably dimorphic in body size, with some species being as dimorphic as chimps, others much more dimorphic, in the gorilla and orang range. None of the adults had impressive canines, they walked upright and had hands that were probably better at manipulating tools than are those of chimps. Their upright stance may have made the estrus signal of a sexual swelling impossible. They lived in woodlands and savanna environments, not dense forest. These characteristics suggest that they may have been a lot more like chimps than anything else, but there is an important difference: Some of these species, especially after about 2.5 million years ago, seemed to use stone tools, and they may have had slightly larger brains. Using stone tools, especially chipped stone tools, adds a complication. Stone tools require some degree of investment, to find and shape the raw material. In a purely chimp-like social system, this can not really happen because any investment by the average individual would be wasted when a dominant individual came along and took the stone tool(s) away to use them. If Australopiths of this later period, or their close relatives, used stone tools very often and relied on them, the social system must have involved the ability to “protect” this investment, to make contracts among individuals to not be so chimp-like and grabby all the time. This implies that there could also be social contracts among individuals that may have allowed a different system of mating and child raring, one that might involve more monogamy and more male parental care.

At some point in time, just under 2.0 million years ago, human ancestors changed dramatically from this forest-ape form. They got big, about doubling in body mass, which meant being able to garner much more food from the environment. Their brains doubled in size, which required not only much more food (the brain is a hungry organ) but also special kinds of food for youngsters with growing brains. Also, the difference in body size between males and females went way down, and the stone tools became much more sophisticated, indicating that they were sometimes made and used for weeks or months, not just expediently. This idea of a social contract involving both possessions and mates probably became very important. Is is possible that for the first time, mates pairs could exist in a social group with a number of sexually mature males and females without too much of that crazy chimpanzee and bonobo behavior. They may have been very human like. But note, they would have been human like in ways that were not Australopith-like, not chimp-like, not great ape-like, not ape-like, not Old World primate-like, not primate-like, and not mammal-like. Some of the most important things about the behavior of those early members of the genus Homo, maybe nearly all of their distinguishing characteristics, were unique in the mammal/primate/monkey/ape world.

To help understand this transition in evolutionary history, we might consider building an alternative model based on nature, by reference to something that is not even a mammal: Birds.

We might be mammals, but we act like birds. Like chimps, we exist in societies with multiple potentially sexually mature males and females. But we tend to pair bond (or nearly so) within this framework. In this sense, we are very different than our closest living mammal relatives (who, by the way, are relatively very distant in relationship compared to many other pairs of species!). We are not that closely related to birds, but if we look at a wide range of human societies who are known to live off the land (‘preagricultural’ groups, either in the present or ethnohistorically known), we see that human societies are often very close to bird societies. We have some kind of monogamy that occasionally develops into a bit of polyandry (like traditional Tibetan highland groups and the phalaropes (birds) of the arctic) or a bit of polygyny (like many cattle keeping groups or the oft-studied oft-cited red winged blackbirds and many other birds). But even in societies that do allow polygyny, most families are based on monogamy, though it is serial monogamy (like the vast majority of bird species including almost all song birds). Yet, when certain economic features … like land (nesting sites) and professional or social milieu (territories) are essential to status and wealth, we have very long term monogamous systems in humans such as the immutable Christian Victorian marriage (or in birds the life long bonding of raptors). In all cases, there is a LOT of care invested in offspring, and males and females deliver similar levels … and in some species very similar kinds … of this care in birds. In humans, there is also considerable care in offspring but … alas … we are mammals so males can’t nurse the young, and this starts a cascade of male-female differences. Perhaps females care for the young directly while the males busy themselves defending the territory.

Why, it is rather remarkable how birds map human variation in society in so many ways. But not all. Birds rarely live in tightly knit, spatially close groups of sexually active pairs. One example of this is nesting sea birds like gulls and terns. And for gulls and terns, the big risk with respect to producing offspring is not so much that your neighbor has slept with your mate. Rather, the risk is that your neighbor eats your babies when you are distracted. Happens all the time with those creatures.

Dear reader, if you are still with me (and I would understand if you’ve gotten bored or frustrated and gone away by now) then you can easily see this point: We have a rich supply of models from which we can draw nature-based conclusions, and these models can be used to ‘justify’ or explain almost anything.

A better question might be: What is the premise we choose, as a society, to be the basis of our ethical and moral codes, our laws, etc.? For many people, this premise is mutualism. We agree to equality of all individuals (with special exceptions). This equality does not mean individuals are identical. Indeed, there may be categorical differences among groups. Females do have babies, males do not. But equal rights are to be preserved.

This does not mean that the consideration of and reference to nature goes away. What it should mean is that nature-based models can not be used to justify systematic social, cultural, legal, economic, philosophical, or political inequalities. But they can be used, if used properly (and that is an academic, not political issue), to explain some things. In my opinion, we are very very far from being able to explain much with what we currently know, and certainly not at the pop psychology level of which so many seem so fond.

But I do want to make an attempt at a nature-based consideration of modern human society with respect to two realities. One, females have the babies and males do not, and two, males tend to be more violent and aggressive than females.

The fundamental reality of these propositions needs to be tested first. Do the females really have the babies, and what does this mean? Well, it is not so simple. For the most part, females do have the babies but with modern approaches it is possible and indeed quite common, and in some cases, necessary, for males to have much more input in offspring care in humans than one might otherwise predict from a purely nature-based model. For example … and very few people know this, and learning this is your reward for sticking with me this far along in this post … I personally fed my daughter for her entire nursing period. I held her, I gave her the milk, we stared into each other’s eyes and bonded, the whole nine yards. Not her mother. Me. So, while the female clearly has a major biological commitment to the process, it is not as absolute as one might assume.

With respect to male violence and aggression: Margaret Mead was wrong but not totally wrong. Males are always, without exception, more violent and aggressive, on average (and bigger and stronger too) than the females when the comparison is made in the same society. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, and males do not have a monopoly on this sort of behavior. The absolute level of aggression and violence among both males and females is highly variable to the extent that there are societies with females who are more violent and aggressive than the males in other societies. Most importantly, the level of difference between males and females in a given society … and especially the level of male control over females … varies greatly. There are societies in which there is very little difference between males and females, and there are societies in which the difference is great. Americans: You live in a society where the difference is considerable, more than the average. That is not how it has to be.

So, with respect to our individual selfish Darwinian reproductive goals, our broader social (territorial, economic, etc.) goals, and our cultural fixations, babies and aggression are both important. Offspring are our Darwinian legacy; sons are guns; little girls grow up and give their parents more Darwins (a unit of fitness). Sexual access must be ensured and paternity managed. Territory must be held, resources protected. And so on.

The problem is that only the ladies can have the babies, and it mainly falls to the gents to be the tough guys. On top of this, when a woman has a child she may fall short in some other responsibilities such as carrying all the firewood and water and other physically demanding tasks (as occur in most societies where women do the vast majority of hard labor). For their part, this aggressiveness of males comes in handy for defending the group territory, but becomes a nuisance when male aggression turns to beating, raping, murdering, and threatening others, mainly women.

So how do we deal with this? Start out by admitting that we as a society owe women a great deal for being the baby bearers. It is hard, painful, and you can die doing it. But no. In our society, we take away a woman’s rights because she is the baby bearer. She is paid less, and often her value is diminished.

..hiring a woman in a job involves the risk that she will be unable to work if she gets pregnant. The “worth” of that employee is thus modified as a result….

We also deal with this by admitting that aggressive male approaches are not necessarily a good thing. Yes, it may be true that “… men … earn money … for status, and not for consumption.” But that would be because men are being assholes. If it is true that “…being more aggressive, more ambitious, more authoritative, more psychopathic, less caring of others are ‘qualities’ that are sought in CEOs..” then we have to stop doing that. We have to stop seeking and rewarding those qualities.

Compensation works both ways. We must compensate, as a society, for the burden of our evolutionary past as manifest differentially by gender. Our behavior is flexible, and thus it is incumbent on our society to attenuate violent leanings. Childbearing is fundamental and essential but cannot be totally outsourced by the women who do it. Punishing women for having this responsibility is exactly the opposite of what we should do.

A review of our evolutionary context is interesting to me (it is what my professional research life is entirely about) and this context is causative. But a realistic look at our evolutionary biology does not give any simple answers, and never, ever does it provide justification for unfairness or violence.

There is a reason they call it the Naturalistic Fallacy.

[Repost from Gregladen.com]

You have all seen the sometimes funny, sometimes not cartoon depictions of these differences, for example this one:

Obviously, this is in part a joke: If you looked at someone’s brain, you would not find it to be structured in this way at all. These vastly different “regions” are meant to lampoon culturally widespread perceptions of male-female differences in overall behavior, attitude, etc. by showing huge corresponding brain differences in the cartoon. It is interesting to consider that the differences purported in this sort of cartoon are huge, but the actual neurological differences we see in the real brains are small.

But what about these differences? It is often said that behind every stereotype there is some reality, or that everything no matter how fanciful has a grain of truth, etc. These are utterly idiotic things to say. If you were just now thinking that you kinda agree with these statements, please reconsider. Consider the possibility that people can habitually say or believe something and it is nothing close to, and not remotely based on, any kind of truth. Like that the stars are jewels stuck to the inside of an overturned bowl. That is not even close to the truth.

In almost all cartoon comparative neuroanatomy, males brains have large “sex” regions while female brains have large “don’t want sex” regions (such as a headache generator). This probably means that the person who drew the cartoon is either a teenage male or an older male who is too geeked-out to get dates. That is why he has time to draw these cartoons.

Other differences shown in the cartoons relate to language. These usually denigrate the female half of the equation (the “talk, talk, and more talk” region). It is interesting to note that in real life females have fewer language-related deficits than males, and can often engage in two conversations simultaneously, which most men can not do. It is possible that the language related differences, or some of them, relate to the difference between males and females in the number of connections between the left and right hemispheres (females have way more).

Other differences shown in many cartoons are obviously generation and subculture dependent. For instance, the ability to program a VCR and the fixation on the remote. I live with two females, and one of them is the only person in the house who can program the VCR. I can do it if I need to, but I threw out the directions and it will take me a while to figure out, and blood will be spilled and profanities uttered. Both of my female house mates are about as fixated on the remote as I am. They tend to be able to find it more easily than I can, because their ancestors were gatherers and finding the remote is roughly the same thing as finding nuts, berries, and most importantly, plant underground storage organs. I, on the other hand, descend from a long line of hunters, so I tend to hunt the remote. Hunting, as is well known, tends to yield a more inconsistent return. So most of the time I don’t find any remote at all, and now and then, I find three or four of them in one episode of searching.

In any event, I think the cartoon depictions of male vs. female brains have two functions. One is as a means of examining cultural attitudes towards sex differences. Cultural distinctions, cultural activities, enculturated values, beliefs, and abilities tend to be both much more dramatic and much less controllable or adjustable than so-called “biological” differences. (Which is the opposite of what most people believe.) The cartoons tell us more about the cartoonist than about the object of the cartoon’s message. Also, it is interesting to note that some of the sex differences shown in the cartoons … which are presumably always of heterosexual cartoon brains … are part of the widely enculturated beliefs about homosexuality. A gay man understands, appreciates, and is generally into shoes (men or women’s shoes). Gay men understand the difference between wants and needs. And so on. However, we rarely if ever see the gay vs. straight brain cartoon. Off hand, I can think of no examples.

Which reminds me, if you are interested, please post a comment pointing to any brain difference cartoons you think are interesting or at least (from some perspective or another) funny. If I get enough, and they are sufficiently interesting, I’ll make a post that has them all as a kind of Web Museum of Brain Difference Cartoons. I could use it in class.

The other, closely related, function of these cartoons is as a touchstone to beliefs about how the brain works regardless of sex differences. For instance, the brain seems to function, according to these cartoons, to regulate sexual behavior, linguistic activities, and grooming or household activities. I find it interesting that these cartoons rarely reference thermoregulation, which absolutely counts as a perceived sex differences, and is definitely regulated in the brain.

I think the most commonly held theory is that fur works on quadrupeds, but once you stand upright, it is less effective, and less fur works better. For later time periods, clothing works better than fur because it is more adaptable. Consider that whatever fur-based system human ancestors had was based on needs in the tropics where it does not get that cold, so it is not hard to imagine that clothing is much more effective.

Recent studies of body parasites suggest that body lice unique to humans differentiated genetically only fairly recently, in the range of several tens of thousands of years. This body lice requires clothing … human clothing on human bodies is the habitat for these lice. This suggests there may have been a reduction from a certain level of furriness only with modern humans living in a wide range of environments and using controlled fire, clothing, and some kind of shelter (hut/house) to deal with the elements. So it is possible that the immediate ancestors to modern humans (perhaps Homo erectus?) were actually fairly furry.

As for details of the body hair, this is also interesting. Why do humans have pubic hair but not a lot of other hair? Why to males have more body hair than females in many cases? Why to human males have facial hair? The African Apes have much less facial hair than most modern human males. It has been suggested that this has to do with sexual selection. It is important to distinguish between the idea that the starting condition is a lot of fur and that females may have lost more than males, vs. the starting condition was very little hair and males have added more. The amount of fur, it’s appearance, etc. may be related to testosterone (this is true in males and females but more obvious in males) so facial hair may be a signal of “quality” in males.

The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University.

I would like to weigh in.

The real answer, as is so often the case, is “You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!”

But I don’t think they are going to do that.

I find it very interesting that even though the question does not mention IQ across gender, the details of the ‘debate’ (disguised as ‘rules’) actually specify that the commentators will tackle both race and gender links. Kinda proving that Nature is indeed playing the race card.

I like the idea of addressing both the questions of gender and race in relation to any differences (IQ or whatever). The course that I have taught in many forms in the past, and will likely teach again next Spring, does this. I like to do this because of the very important difference of differences. Gender is, biologically, much much more “real” than race. Gender is demonstrably real (in many aspects) and race is demonstrably not real (in almost all aspects). Also, almost all race differences we see bandied about are linked to nefarious racism one way or another. Gender differences, however, run the full spectrum from really destructive to very positive, with a lot of difficult ambiguity in the in between parts. So, looking at the myriad of purported gender differences first, then race second, turns out to be very very interesting. (One could do it the other way round as well, but for various reasons this works better in the context of my class.)

Let me say a few things about each of these papers first (citations below), then I would like to make a few broader remarks about gender, race, and “IQ.”

Steven Rose does a very good job of explaining all the reasons why the answer to this particular question should be “No” … although I hope he would also agree with me that this is not exactly the question that should be asked. He rightly discusses motivation, noting that we are busy comparing certain “races” by IQ while utterly ignoring equally oft constructed multichotomies of difference.

The categories judged relevant to the study of group differences are clearly unstable, dependent on social, cultural and political context. No one, to my knowledge, is arguing for research on group differences in intelligence between north and south Welsh (although there are well-established average genetic differences between people living in the two regions). This calls into question the motivation behind looking for such specific group differences in intelligence, sheds doubt on whether such research is well-founded, and begs whether answers could possibly be put to good use.

He does not spend enough time on, but does address, the fundamental flaw of the question: If race is not a valid categorization of people, then how do we justify funding scientific research of it? He also notes that while people may bellyache about adjusting IQ scores across ‘racial’ groups, no one seems to complain about nor notice the adjustment of IQ scores between gender, whereby boy’s scores are raised to make them seem equal to girls. Who are smarter, obviously.

The other side of the coin argued by Cici and Williams is the usual drek that should not pass for scientific discourse. Race should be studied because … it is truth. Race should be studied because Stalin tried to stop this kind of thing. Race should be studied because … Larry Summers and James Watson and others have been victimized by the Liberal Left.

Whatever whatever.

I would like to note that the “yes” side is being argued by geneticists. That is pretty typical. Geneticists don’t study intelligence, they study genes and they overrate the value of knowledge of genetics and always have. The “no” side is argued by a neurbiologist. Neurobiologists understand things like culling and plasticity. Do you know what culling is? If not you don’t have a valid opinion about race and IQ. That would be like not knowing what an “Internal Combustion Engine” and a “transmission” are and thinking you have a valid idea of how to fix your car’s drive train. You’d be wrong.

About Gender vs. Race and IQ (or any other trait): Gender is both very real and highly constructed. It is probably often more constructed by context and upbringing than ever race is, but there are real aspects of gender. The vast majority of individuals who are constructed as women cannot inseminate a person with viable sperm in the absence of special technology. The vast majority of individuals who are constructed as men cannot carry and birth a baby at this time. Except in that one movie. This is for a number of biological reasons. The evidence suggests that a certain number of measurable gender differences in behavior between various genders are linked to biological differences and probably have something to do with hormonal conditioning which, in turn, may be mediated in some cases by behavior and cultural or social environment (so even hormonal differences are not entirely independent of constructed context). But there is all sorts of biological stuff going on there. And everything in the above paragraph applies to rats as well as humans.

Of course, you don’t inherit your gender, exactly. Well, OK, there is an ongoing argument that gay-osity is heritable. Maybe or maybe not. The argument seems to gain strength then get shot down again and again, like one of those tings many people need to believe is true but isn’t. If it is true, it is pretty wishy washy and depends a lot on stuff that is in turn hard to pin down. But your basic maleness vs. femaleness with respect to reproductive parts and so on is basically not inherited but is provided genetically, as we all know.

“Race” on the other hand is inherited, but in a very complex way. Since race is a social construct, two elements are needed to produce a certain race. First, there must be a construct extant that responds so some signal (like skin color or language dialect), then there must be a signal produced by a particular genetic variant (like skin color) or, in some cases, just a construct (like language dialect).

Imagine a racist act. Many racist acts occur in a broader social context and can be understood by all the people in that cultural milieu as such. Racists acts often have names or commonly understood index terms associated with them. Most people know at least roughly what the racist act is, how it is done, to whom (which race) it is done and by whom (which race) it is done, etc. That is the socially constructed racist act, and linked to it is a socially constructed race.

Then there are the people. Among the people there will be allelic variation … everybody has the same genes, but the genes themselves have variants … alleles … that result in different phenotypes. So among the people there will be individuals of one socially constructed race and individuals of another socially constructed race, and the defined differences and identities will be an interaction between the alleles and the social constructs.

So if you have a handful of alleles that make you seem to be a Native American, for instance, some professor of higher education may look at you and think “Oh, another one of these guys. Last Native American I had to deal with …. well that didn’t go so well. Let’s get rid of this guy.”

That was the expression of a genetic trait possessed by the victim of a racist act. The genotype was the set of alleles that code for Native Americanosity, and the trait, in its fully expressed glory, was a racist act that emerged from the social context.

The same sorts of things happen with respect to both gender and race. In all cases it is hard to draw lines or make clear links between genotype and phenotypes. It is not so hard to understand the power relationships that usually drive the acts themselves. Even if most people engaged in these gendered and race-driven act are not cognizant of the power relationships, they are usually there.

Research in gene-behavior interaction is important. Research in genetic variation is important. Research based on either a race model (of any kind) or a simple two-step gender model is neither important or valid because such research is based on assumptions that not only cart-before-horse but are also sufficiently discredited to be abandoned. And, I suspect that not too much of this research is actually being funded anyway. A fair amount is published, but I’d love to see the actual link between funding source, proposal, research, and publication. I’d wager there is some disconnect there.

Steven Rose (2009). Darwin 200: Should scientists study race and IQ? NO: Science and society do not benefit Nature, 457 (7231), 786-788 DOI: 10.1038/457786a

Stephen Ceci, Wendy M. Williams (2009). Darwin 200: Should scientists study race and IQ? YES: The scientific truth must be pursued Nature, 457 (7231), 788-789 DOI: 10.1038/457788a