Snoqualmie

Interestingly, there've been some studies that indicate that the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture was a really bad trade-off in the short run. I read the articles several years ago, but I believe the gist was that the cultivators got a less nutritionally diverse diet and were more susceptible to random catastrophes that destroyed their crops. I don't know if the studies in question are accepted at all or are considered outliers, but I'll look around and see if I can find a link, or at least a citation.

Nonetheless, I agree with you about the idealization the past. I think there's a natural human tendency to exaggerate our own problems and ignore our advantages. We look at the past and notice that, hey! They don't suffer from (over-work/breakdown of the family/drug abuse/high crime rates/ennui/insert problem of modernity here). Therefore, they must have lived happy, pleasant lives. Obviously, though, they had problems of their own, quite probably much bigger than ours, but since we don't suffer from those problems anymore we don't think to examine them too closely. This leaves us with a sense that things were just great in the past, when there's a strong chance that things were much, much worse.

Well, as far as your first post is concerned, the Samoa of the 1920s was more agricultural than hunter-gatherer. The villages had communal plantations for yams, taro, and breadfruit, whatever the fuck that is. Granted, though, it's a fair point. When I was studying the archaeology of the American Southwest, I remember hearing that with so much space to move around in relative to population density (which has a pretty big effect on whether people can really do the hunter-gatherer lifestyle), the various tribes developed habits of following foodstuffs -- whatever was in season and not being used by someone else, they'd go and harvest, and then move on to whatever ripened next. Over the course of a couple of years they'd get every native plant and animal in their diet, and you can't get much more variety, or resistance to the possibility of crop failure, than that.

Now I'm trying to imagine a diet that would routinely include every foodstuff that grows in California. It would either make me Superman, or just very rotund.

It's perhaps a bit strange that the field of cultural anthropology established many of the current misconceptions about human nature. For instance, the notion that gender roles are radically relative and are fixed by culture and not basic human nature. In fact, Mead's work has been largely discredited. To quote a brief passage from How the Mind Works:

"Margaret Mead said that nonchalant sex made the Samoans satisfied and free of crime; it turned out that the boys tutored one another in rape techniques. She called the Arapesh 'gentle'; they were headhunters. She said that the Tshambuli reversed our sex roles, the men wearing curls and makeup. In fact the men beat their wives, exterminated neighboring tribes, and treated homicide as a milestone in a young man's life which entitled him to wear the face paint that Mead thought was so effeminate."

It turns out that people from various parts of the world, despite some cultural differences, are pretty much the same. Men the world over are violent and much more so in primitive societies where homicide rates are universally higher. Pinker cites Human Universals by Donald Brown as his major source for anthropology.

Bullet-point time!

1. Studies which set out not to answer a question but to prove what they already assume will most assuredly find the answers for which they are looking. Counting instances of the number 17 will give you thousands of meaningless occurrences. Looking for universal human behaviors will show you plenty whether they actually exist or not. A work like Brown's should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.

2. "Human universals" is a profoundly patronizing and dismissive view, to which (as you may have just gathered) I personally don't subscribe. But then, we've gotten into this before and I'm well aware that you're as stubbornly insistent that structure trumps all as I am that agency trumps all.

3. I do recall (albeit vaguely) hearing about Mead's mistake about the Arapesh. I haven't read Sex and Temperament yet, though -- it's sitting on my shelf -- so I don't have much more to say about it than that. But keep in mind that you can do seminal work in a field, fuck some of it up, and still be respected for what you did get right. That's what I've found to be Berkeley's attitude toward Mead, at least.

4. I was going to say something about how psychology and anthropology may not necessarily have the same aims, but now I just have Doctor Octagon in my head. "Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry." And so on.

In case you can't tell, I'd become considerably less irritated by the time I finished typing that.

Oh shit, there's a horse in the hospital.

A... horse... in the hospital?

I'm assuming this is not a horspital joke?

Cirrhossis of the eye!
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dr.-octagon/43168.html

Cirrhorsis?

There is such a thing as sound science with legitimate empirical evidence. Not every scientific theory is just a personal philosophy with ad hoc evidence invented to support it. Just because Pinker and Brown's work don't fit your personal worldview -- that gender roles, the mind and even reality itself are radically relative and can be whatever we want them to be -- doesn't mean that it isn't absolutely correct. Whether or not you find a theory dismissive and patronizing has nothing to do with its accuracy.

To give an example that I find especially compelling: there are studies of people born with malformed genitals such that their sex is improperly determined by doctors and their parents. These are girls that are thought to be boys, told that they are boys and raised as boys. Indeed, they believe themselves to be male. Eventually the truth is discovered, of course. However, these girls -- despite everything around them guiding them towards a male "gender role" -- still end up with interests and careers typical of females (read: they don't become auto mechanics). It's evidence like this that blows giant holes in popular misconceptions. It's not opinion, it's science.

Regarding the study you describe, that's an example of someone defying their prior gender role to pursue one more in line with their physical sex. For every one of those examples, there must be tens of transvestites (kings *and* queens) who have decided to pursue a gender role opposite their physical sex. To call one right and the other wrong sounds very much like "a personal philosophy with ad hoc evidence invented to support it."

Me, I'm thrilled that we're living in 1900 now. This last century of people consistently showing interest in roles and activities that are outside what's been prescribed for their gender has really been a bummer.

If you were right, Dr V, and gender roles were universal, rigid, and biologically determined, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I would shut my mouth and accept your clearly superior male wisdom, and go back to the kitchen to make pies. It takes one person to make a "human universal" not universal, and if you can't find one person who doesn't fit his or her prescribed gender role, here in San Francisco, it's because you're trying not to look.

I'm not saying people can't choose alternative lifestyles and of course life is not black and white. I just reject the tenets of cultural relativism that suggest that culture determines human nature and not the other way around. Even thought itself is presumed to be highly relative to some anthropologists. Previously, there were claims that certain cultures did not even have the concept of more than a few colors...this and other claims have since been proven ludicrously false. Yet the basic philosophy of relativism persists in anthropology and in current "common sense" ideas about the way the mind works.

If there are people who want to be transvestites, it's probably because they were born that way and not because of the culture they were surrounded by. Same thing with female auto mechanics. I'll go out on a limb and say that 90% of them are mannish lesbians -- also born that way.

That's not to say that the difference between the sexes is completely rigid. There's plenty of room for women to have high-paying office jobs and for men to raise children, etc. However, if you believe that women will ever compose the majority or even more than a small fraction of the auto mechanic, CEO, stand-up comedian, etc. jobs in the world, it's just wishful thinking. That's not to say they couldn't do those jobs, they'll just never want to in great numbers. And the evidence really does back me up on this whether you want to accept that or not.

I'd have to see the studies, but I'm inclined to believe they aren't as definitive as you claim, Dr. V. Now, my knowledge of cultural anthropology was pretty well exhuasted with my reference to Hunter-Gatherer nutrition above, but I would tend to think that practically any study on gender identity you could concoct would suffer from a poisoned sample population.

That is to say, we live in a culture in which girls are told from birth "Do X, like X, aspire to X," while boys are told from birth "Do Y, like Y, aspire to Y." It's less prevalent now than it was a century ago, but it's pervasive, in advertising, in books, in television. So then when you conduct a study that, at base, asks the subjects "So, what do you do, X or Y? Which do you prefer, X or Y? What do you aspire to, X or Y?" There's a very strong chance that, even were there no innate gender differences, the majority of girls would pick X, the majority of boys would pick Y.

This is all an elaborate way of saying that it's tough to take any scientific study on nature vs. culture seriously as long as it's conducted in the context of a highly gendered society.

I want to make sure everyone caught something here. It's important to take this into consideration when deciding whether to take someone seriously as an authority on human nature and good science.

"Mannish lesbians", folks. Mannish lesbians. Please go back and read that comment carefully.

I was charitably ignoring that, yes. Nonetheless, it's at precisely that point when I stopped taking Dr. V seriously. I just felt that I would be kicking myself if I didn't use my one opportunity to deploy Susan Okun's gender theories. Who knows when I'll get the chance again?

Gender roles used to come up a lot whenever I taught the class on writing humor. The positions were basically: "Girls Aren't Funny"/"Shut Up Jerk". I think the male/female comedy difference only came down to the interest in being *publicly* funny; that is, for whatever reason, 90% of submissions to the humor magazine were from dudes, and open mic particpants were also overwhelmingly male. Submissions from women were generally of a higher quality, but there were a lot less of them. There wasn't nearly the same interest in being published, and the kind of fame you can only get from collegiate humor periodicals.

I think women are far more likely to not be unfunny, if that phrasing isn't too confusing.

Now, I have no idea whether what I've noticed in my informal nature or nurture, and I also never figured out how to talk about it without sounding like a jerk. I wonder if there is an implication for CH blogging, in terms of what audience various people are writing for and how much anyone aims to impress/entertain random strangers.

I used that phrasing because I thought you'd be even more offended if I said "butch". What am I supposed to call them then.

Zack, your reponse is that pretty much any study that's "concocted" is bogus so you might as well just go ahead and believe the relativist stuff that there's no evidence for whatsoever...makes sense to me.

First off, Mr. Details, my name is spelled with an H, not a K. FYI.

Second, I believe that what I said was that I would have to see the studies that you (have thus far failed to) cite before I reached a conclusion. I then voiced a potential objection that might color the studies you could cite. The point of this was not to disprove the concept of science (if anything, science, from my understanding, is welcoming of methodological critiques), but merely to assert that the studies might not be so definitive and flawless as you have maintained. Nonetheless, these objections must remain in the realm of speculation because, again, you havent provided any citations for your point of view.

And that leads me to the main point. Now, I'm not a fancy biologist. I'm not even a scientist. I'm just a law student, and where I come from, telling somebody that "All the sources support my argument" isn't worth a god damn if you don't follow that up with actual, genuine citations to the evidence.

And now to wrap up all my loose ends, I will cite this article on the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies. You will note that it is written by Jared Diamond who, while he has recently gained attention for his studies of history and anthropology, is by training a physiologist at UCLA Med. You will also note that he appears to be of the opinion that sexual inequality has its origins in the transition to agriculture. He further argues that the differentiation in gender roles came about largely because of women being the ones that got pregnant, not due to any massive difference in the female versus male psyche. I am just summarizing; read the article for his full view.

This is not to say Dr. Diamond is right or wrong. It IS, however, to suggest that the hypothesis that gender differences are innate and biological is not, perhaps, as monolithic in the scientific community as you would lead us to believe.

Here's the problem with this argument.

Side A is saying that there are problems with Side B's sources, namely, biases and confounding factors which make them not good science.

Side B responds by saying that Side A is just talking garbage and doesn't understand that science means looking clear-headed at facts gathered in a controlled and reproducible manner.

This is like responding to someone saying the sky is blue by angrily telling them that no, the sky is NOT red, what the hell are they talking about?

Poor Margaret Mead. Lost in the shuffle. In any case, I'll put her on my "to read" list, though when I'll get to her is anyone's guess. It's a very long list.