
Is There Anything Good About Men? - simonsarris
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm?
======
credo
Previous submissions and interesting discussions at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346> and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634955>

The first submission points to <http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm> (which
has the same post with better formatting than this submission)

~~~
Aloisius
_Much_ better formatting on that one. Thanks!

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The link to this post is a word document exported to html.

<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document> <meta name=Generator
content="Microsoft Word 12"> <meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word
12">

------
JonnieCache
The problem with this essay is that is paints us as slaves to our genes. Since
Dawkins became fashionable, it is now normal to portray human beings as
nothing more than meat-based mechanisms for storing and transporting DNA.

This idea is dangerously embedded in society now, and it risks creating a
self-fulfilling prophecy of barbarism. What possible motivation does one have
for behaving in a manner other than that of an animal, if society is telling
me that I cannot do so, and that any internal experience I might have of doing
so is an illusion? How is it even _possible_ to behave in a non-animalistic
manner once you have internalised these ideas?

Look into the history of George Price, one of the key figures in actually
developing a lot of the stuff that Dawkins popularised:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/George_R._Pri...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/George_R._Price)

The interesting part is how he spent the latter part of his life
systematically giving away all his possessions to the poor in a guilt-ridden
attempt to deny his own theories and to act against the interests of his
genes. He eventually killed himself. The graphic method he chose to do so also
comes across as an attempt to visibly deny his own ideas.

On an entirely separate note, all this talk of inter-gender differences is
useless without some consideration of their scale relative to intra-gender
differences.

Once you realise that the range in behaviour between members of the same
gender is bigger than the difference in behaviour between members of different
genders, by quite some way, this whole argument becomes a lot less compelling.

~~~
lkrubner
>Since Dawkins became fashionable

I am curious why people keep taking this attitude to Dawkins. And Dawkins
himself was also curious why people had this reaction to his books. In his
1976 book The Selfish Gene, he says:

"We can rise above our genes, indeed, we do every time we use contraceptives."

As he makes clear, several times, in the book, our evolution allows a range of
behavior that allows for more than simplistic game-theory calculations.

Personally, there were 2 main things that I got from The Selfish Gene:

1.) sometimes simple experiments, with simple motivations, lead to surprising
results (or sometimes game theory models have surprising conclusions). For
instance, the story of the 2 pigs was surprising -- they had to push a lever
on one end of the pen to get a reward at the other end of the pen, and it
turned out that it was the dominant pig who had to do all the work whereas the
submissive pig got to eat most of the food.

2.) evolution is too slow to react to fast changing circumstances, so behavior
was "invented" to allow creatures to quickly adapt to circumstances. The word
"behavior" in this sense, is meant to suggest a range of possible actions that
a creature can change without having to change its genes. Dawkins devotes a
lot of time to this idea, and it seems to me this idea goes directly against
the interpretation that so many people want to ascribe to Dawkins: "it risks
creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of barbarism".

I suspect that a lot of people who criticize Dawkins have never actually read
Dawkins.

This sentence deserves special criticism:

"How is it even possible to behave in a non-animalistic manner once you have
internalised these ideas?"

Here the word "animalistic" is being used to suggest a failure of morality.
There is history behind this usage, which I don't have time to get into. For
now, I'll simply point out that humans are part of the animal branch of life,
and therefore all human behavior is animalistic by definition.

The above sentence suggests that being an animal leads to immoral behavior.
Frans B. M. de Waal has been especially good about undermining this idea:

[http://www.amazon.com/Good-Natured-Origins-Humans-
Animals/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Good-Natured-Origins-Humans-
Animals/dp/0674356616/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1310761399&sr=8-10)

Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals

Kindness is also a product of evolution. Our sense of decency is also a
product of evolution. To be clear about this, all human behavior has been
facilitated by evolution. Our genes do not control us in a rigid and
deterministic way, but our genes do establish perhaps the outer limits of the
possible for us. It might be best to use the word "facilitate" when describing
the effect of evolution on our behavior.

When Saint Francis of Assisi gave all of his possessions to the poor, his
actions were facilitated by evolution.

When Hitler ordered 6 million Jews killed, his actions were facilitated by
evolution.

When marine Jason Dunham decided to sacrifice his life to save his fellow
soldiers, by diving on top of a hand grenade, his actions were facilitated by
evolution.

When Susan Leigh Vaughan Smith killed her 2 children, her actions were
facilitated by evolution.

When Adrienne Rich decided to write a book denouncing male-dominated family
life, and when she came out as a lesbian, her actions were facilitated by
evolution.

When George F. Gilder wrote a book denouncing feminism, his actions were
facilitated by evolution.

What we are capable of has been facilitated by our history so far, all 4
billion years of it. This includes all behavior, including what some might
regard as "good" and some might regard as "bad". But, while keeping all this
in mind, it is also important to realize that we are still evolving today,
still inventing the new, day by day. Possibly the pace is so slow that it is
hard to see, but still, evolution is still happening, for every species on the
planet, including humans. If we could get in a time machine and skip 100,000
years in the future, we would probably note the emergence of many new
behaviors in the human line.

~~~
yters
If evolution explains everything, it explains nothing.

~~~
saturn
A meaningless platitude.

~~~
Natsu
Actually, it's a perfectly reasonable statement. That which truly proves
anything would be able to prove a statement and its own converse, creating a
contradiction.

Evolution, of course, is true, but that doesn't mean that everyone who tries
to claim that X is an effect of evolution is correct. There are other causes
for things, after all and people are right to be wary of easy explanations
trotted out without any discussion of the basis for them.

~~~
wvoq

      converse
    

Negation. There are plenty of true conditional statements whose converses are
also true.

~~~
Natsu
Oops. You are correct.

------
scythe
Obvious problem: Genghis Khan is dead. The fact that a full third of Asia and
consequently a sixth of the whole world has some genetic similarity to Genghis
Khan does not make him any less dead. Evolution is not teleological and genes
do not "want". Genes just happen; they're chemicals. Working to ensure the
continuation of your genes is not mandated or valuable -- it is _likely_. Your
parents probably did, because you exist, and most people are like their
parents; modus ponens you probably will. It's not a command or an idea or a
system of value, it's a description.

The other obvious problem is that societies which played into the competitive
heirarchy were only successful for some weird definitions of successful. If
the Mongol empire is your idea of success, you have some crazy ideas about
success, because the empire flared up and disappeared within 100 years,
leaving Asia in ruins. On the other hand, the British and their methodical
boringness not only conquered the world but lived to tell of it, and they did
so largely by exploiting the willingness of less organized and "fair"
societies to turn on each other -- how, precisely, did the tiny island of
Britain conquer all of India (which had 20 times as many people)? Mostly
because the Indians of the 19th century were backstabbing assholes:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_Rule>

And how were the British kicked out of India? Well, by none other than some
pacifist self-sacrificing guy named Mohandas Gandhi.

~~~
lionhearted
Some good points, but the parts about the British Empire are off. I'd strongly
recommend "Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress" by Jan Morris for a piece
that looks at all the good _and_ bad that the British Empire did under
Victoria.

To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good
in their colonies.

For instance, eliminating the Thugee strangling cult:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee#The_practice>

They also ended a lot of cannibalism, human sacrifices, completely ended the
worldwide slave trade, eliminated piracy, brought rule of law, built
infrastructure, brought science and the scientific method, eliminated cults,
ended rituals of widows burning themselves on their husband's funeral pyre,
eliminated kidnap/rape/murder cycles in many of their possessions, brought
sanitation and education, and... just tons of good. Overwhelming amounts of
good.

The Empire was lost largely out of a sense of guilt and an unwillingness to
take the actions that would have preserved it - pretty much any individual
uprising could have been crushed if they'd decided to (including the American
Revolution - see Ron Chernow's "Washington - A Life" for just how easy it
would been for the British to end the whole thing at Boston, New York, or
Valley Forge at various times).

~~~
wooolf
The British are given too much credit for things they never did. As for doing
good in India, even under the Mughal empire, India is estimated to have a
share of 30% of world GDP until the 18th century. When the British left in
1947, that share was less than 1%. The Brits de-industrialized India, used
Indian raw materials and taxes to fuel their own industrial revolution and
used India as a captive market to hawk their finished goods under an absolute
monopoly. I know, I know. You might point to the railways, English education,
civil service etc. as the 'good ' they did. The railways were first added in
the mid 19th century, and the Brits expanded them only when rail saved their
arses in the first war of independence of 1857. The Education they imparted
was a colonial project to wipe out and subjugate the local natives, and give
them enough English to serve as clerks in running the Empire. Educational
institutes of any lasting value were started by local Hindu & Muslim reformers
and intellectuals. So please save this orientalist reading of history for
yourself. We Indians don't have anything to be thankful to the British. Good
riddance to them. Hope we never see their sorry faces again.

~~~
forensic
When it comes to world-spanning Empires, the British were one of the more
benevolent -- and this especially applies for India. It's worth noting that
the most powerful British Empire builders like Cecil Rhodes were planning for
Indian swaraj decades before it became a popular idea among Indians.

Hindu culture was not going anywhere, it desperately needed an injection of
rationality and a forced demonstration of good government. India is on a very
good path now and it owes most of that to the British. The British used raw
force to reform Indian culture away from degenerate, irrational religious
fatalism toward a progressive, modern approach to life.

Anyway Indian culture today is unrecognizable compared to pre-British India.
The most important part of culture is the approach to law, property,
government, and individual rights, and these are the fruits of the British
Empire in India. Underestimating these crucial factors is very easy now that
you are reaping their benefits. India today would look like Somalia if it
wasn't for the Empire.

In 19th century India the British really did reform the savages. They ended
wife burning, vigilante decapitations, cannibalism, among other savage but
accepted cultural norms. They significantly curtailed the systematic
corruption, clarified property rights, introduced representative government,
paved the way for social mobility, and are really solely responsible for the
slow turning away from pernicious Hindu mysticism -- which is the bane of
civilization. Hindu mysticism is really the most damaging kind of irrational
religiosity on Earth and causes tremendous suffering and poverty.

The Brits were surprisingly generous given their global hegemony. It is easy
to argue that the American Empire is more exploitative and uncaring with
respect to their colonies: and the American Empire is less powerful today
thanks to the liberalizing influence of the British who themselves foresaw
independence for every colony, often before the colonies did. The positive
effects of Rhodesian foreign policy should not be underestimated.

It's popular to hate Empires but there really is nothing romantic about
cannibalism, institutionalized irrationality, rigid caste systems and all the
other savage cultural features of many parts of the world before the age of
sail. For all the faults of the British, we often forget just how good England
and her colonies had life in comparison to the alternatives.

~~~
chakde
While it is true that India tolerated a variety of cultural norms amongst its
many people before the British, practices like those you mention were fringe
practices and by no means mainstream. It was Indian reformers like Ram Mohan
Roy who asked for British for help in removing them. The British being the
much stronger party do deserve credit for heeding these demands, but in
relation to the widespread damage Indian industry suffered under them, these
were things that made for good press rather than something that bought about a
systematic positive change. It was only after the 1857 war/mutiny fought by
the Indians which ended the 257 year old East India Company that Indians were
given greater share and responsibility in self governance. Not doing that
would have been a fundamentally unstable government system. This very limited
civil governmant participation is what eventually grew to a movement which led
to independance. You only need to read the writings of Lord Curzon to see that
the British never intended to leave India and on the contrary wanted to expand
their control over China and Japan as well.

------
k_kisiel
Hi all, earth rotated, greetings from another side of the globe. There are
many good points in the article, but not this one:

"Communal (including communist) countries remain primitive and poor, whereas
the rich, advanced nations have gotten where they are by means of economic
exchange."

From European (continental) perspective, that statement is false. Rich
countries in Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway etc.) are observably
more communal than poorer countries. Division is not between the former
Communist countries vs. other countries. Among the former the more communal,
bourgeois-oriented Czech Republic has bigger GDP per capita than more
individualistic, nobility-oriented Hungary or Poland. More communal means
richer, how weird! Why is that?

My favorite theory explaining it is based on historical military
considerations - countries in mainland Europe have long land borders other
countries of approximately equal size and development level. In order to
maintain sovereignty a country (or other "culture" as defined in the article,
say independent city) needs as many soldiers as possible. So it pays to offer
free medical care and welfare to the population so that all citizens are stay
in good health and can, if necessary, defend the country and it's culture. So
it was beneficial to the country to divide resources more equally rather than
based on equity. Prime example is Switzerland which was founded in exactly
these circumstances and look where they are:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita).

------
kqr2
The author expanded his original essay into a book:

[http://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-
Men/dp/01953...](http://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-
Men/dp/019537410X/)

------
frankus
The question this article raises for me is whether the strategy of out-
breeding every other culture is going to continue to be a successful one at
cultural level in the near future. The article suggests that it was, at least
in the distant past.

It seems like the most successful cultures today (measured by standard of
living, anyway) are no longer those with the fastest-growing populations.
China (strictly speaking a nation and not a culture) explicitly embraced a
policy of slowing population growth, but I'm not knowledgable enough to have
an opinion on how complete a success it has been.

The interesting thing about culture in the modern age is that it is
increasingly divorced from the genetic makeup of its members. If someone who
is genetically foreign (to the extent that such a thing is possible) moves to
the US and assimilates, their "home culture" has lost a member and "American
culture" has gained one (leaving aside the plausibility of this scenario the
current insanity of the US immigration system). If this "cultural switcher"
phenomenon is large enough to overwhelm birthrate effects we could see culture
shaped by some very different forces than in the past.

------
tariqk
First off, the author misrepresents the idea of patriarchy as a "conspiracy of
men to subjugate women". That's not how I've heard how it's been defined.
Patriarchy/kyriarchy, roughly put, is a series of assumptions and privileges
provided to a segment of the population, often at the expense of everyone
else.

It's not, as far as I can see, a conspiracy -- i.e. a secret plan hatched by a
clandestine group that goes against a larger society's interests. You can have
a pat/kyriarchy where each member acts on their own best interests, and yet
the results of that unfairly disadvantage certain groups.

A good example of the kind of decentralised, mass-action that disenfranchises
a particular social group or class can be found in Michael Young's coining of
the word "meritocracy", and how, through the collective action of a group of
self-interested actors, a particular social group can be disenfranchised or
demoralised. It doesn't require secrets, it doesn't require conspiracies, as a
matter of fact it just requires everyone acting to their own best interests.

Secondly, the author doesn't make a convincing argument that the fact that the
reason why men get all the risk and all the reward is because of something
innate, instead of a self-perpetuating social system that actively encourages
one gender to risk it all and reap the rewards, while holding back the other
gender to mediocrity and risk-free existences. The possibility is raised for a
few sentences, and discarded, as if it's ridiculous, and it's obvious that the
reasons are inherent.

Since the arguments in the rest of the post requires me to buy the above
premise without conclusively eliminating social mores and non-innate
possibilities, I didn't bother reading the rest of the article.

Incidentally, as a member of a nation that was born out of British
Colonialism, the statement "the British Empire did a lot more good than harm"
is a disgusting, privileged statement that really doesn't elicit much more
than pitying contempt from me. Since of course we wouldn't have known what our
lives would have been without John Company coming down to "civilise" our
barbarian asses, obviously the only feelings we should be having is gratitude,
especially since we owe our broken conception of race and ethnicity, our de-
facto one-party rule since we gained independence from our Magnanimous
Masters, our police force, more intent in beating down dissent and enforcing
"public order" that is beneficial to only the ruling class and no one else, to
organisations, concepts and social structures derived from British rule.

That's right; it was this or barbarism. Yeah, I hope it helps you sleep at
night too, jerk.

~~~
bermanoid
_Secondly, the author doesn't make a convincing argument that the fact that
the reason why men get all the risk and all the reward is because of something
innate, instead of a self-perpetuating social system that actively encourages
one gender to risk it all and reap the rewards, while holding back the other
gender to mediocrity and risk-free existences._

The author may not have gone into it, but the argument exists, based on what
we know about genetics and reproduction.

Female reproduction is inherently limited, first of all by the time it takes
to have a single child, second by the probability of death due to childbirth
(relatively small, but not insignificant for most of human history), and third
by the reduced fertility that comes with age.

Male reproduction is essentially unlimited; the potential maximum "genetic
fitness" (measured by simple count of the branches you spawn on the tree of
life) of becoming a king and impregnating an entire harem of women over your
life is easily 10x the maximum "fitness" for a woman (though the probability
is very low for such extreme situations), so it's to be expected that any
preferentially male-expressed genes that would increase the probability of
ending up in that situation would be more prevalent in the gene pool than the
corresponding traits for women (which would be mostly neutral evolutionarily,
since a woman with a male harem is not going to spread, on average, more
copies of her genes than she would in normal life).

We don't need to assume that the dominant factor is the king + harem
situation, either; it's enough merely that men, on average, see wider
variability in reproduction than women do (cheating, cuckolding, etc. tend to
make that happen).

The "leaps of faith" required to let this explain increased male risk-seeking
are:

a) That the traits we associate with risk seeking correlate well with the
traits that cause men to be highly genetically successful

b) That the way things actually transpired in history, the variance in male
genetic success was, in fact, _significantly_ higher than the variance in
female genetic success. Note that we are _not_ talking about averages (they're
equal, quite trivially), but variances

If you accept a) (which is not much of a stretch - sleeping with other men's
wives is definitely a risk-seeking behavior that increases genetic success for
men), then it's absolutely 100% certain that the amount of genetically linked
risk-seeking will be higher (or equal) in men than in women. It's very easy to
make a similar argument that implies that any genetically linked risk-
avoidance genes that are preferentially expressed in females will be more
common than those that are expressed in males, at least to the extent that
they would reduce male reproductive variance without a corresponding survival
benefit.

Bear in mind that your comment about a "self-perpetuating social system" and
the things that it encourages may not be entirely off-base, but that doesn't
change the genetic imperatives: given what we've seen above, such a social
system would align very well with the genetic best interests of its
constituents, so it's hardly a stretch to imagine that the two factors have
coexisted and reinforced each other quite strongly.

~~~
geebee
Female reproduction isn't as limited as it might seem at first glance, because
you need to consider the reproductive success of her offspring as well. If
we're going to see life as DNAs way of making more DNA, Genghis Khan's mother
did just as much reproducing as his father.

I've read that female bonobos, for instance, take a great interest in the
mating success of their male offspring:

"<http://www.indstate.edu/news/news.php?newsid=1742>

So having a high social status in the pecking order can absolutely translate
in to "unlimited" reproductive potential for a female in this case.

An interesting quote:

"Scientists believe a bonobo mother's rank in the group has an impact on her
son's reproductive rank because if she dies the son falls in rank and becomes
unimportant."

~~~
bermanoid
_If we're going to see life as DNAs way of making more DNA, Genghis Khan's
mother did just as much reproducing as his father._

I absolutely agree with you about that, and in fact, the genes that made
Genghis Khan reproduce so wildly may have even _come_ from his mother. They
may not have been linked to sex _at all_ , and might be expressed equally in
his male and female descendants.

None of which changes the conclusion, though, which is that _if there are_ any
sex-linkages (either by presence on the Y chromosome or by preferential
expression) amongst the genes controlling risk (reproductive risk,
especially), then they will tend to accumulate in such a way that the high
risk male genes are much more strongly selected for than female ones (which
will be mostly neutral if they're not deleterious).

Put another way, the "risk-seeking" phenotype is not the same as the
"encourage male offspring to be risk-seeking" phenotype, and while the former
is only beneficial to male genes, the latter is beneficial to _everyone's_.
And the end result is that male risk seeking is encouraged in the gene pool in
many ways - in fact, what you've suggested is that the social reasons that
male risk-seeking is encouraged are actually quite strongly selected for
individually, which puts the conclusion on even stronger genetic grounds (as
opposed to what comes up often as the more PC theory, that it's just an
accident of history that society decided to bring up males that way, not an
evolutionary imperative).

The stuff about bonobos is quite interesting, I hadn't seen that before. They
have a quite different power structure that makes things very unusual (almost
inverted, in many ways), and it's very interesting to see that increased
reproductive variance there is _not_ linked to dominance, but to keeping a
good position within the female hierarchy. It makes very clear the point that
while a lot of (human) male traits may be evolved in order to increase
reproductive variance, those traits do _not_ necessarily achieve that goal (or
any positive goal) in general, but only within the context of our other
evolutionary peculiarities. As usual, it's difficult to evaluate anything in a
vacuum.

------
Aloisius
I had no idea that the dominant view today was that women are better than men.
It is my view and I haven't dissected all the reasons why I think that, but a
lot of it comes from seeing so many men at the bottom. Biology wasn't kind to
a huge percentage of men.

I do find it true that men seem to try harder to be different, to entertain,
to exceed and to impress. The top is dominated by cocky people and there
aren't a lot of cocky women.

Now is that biology or society? I have no idea. Is there a society on the
planet where women have to impress men to get any attention? Do lesbians rise
higher than straight women because they have to impress other women to stand
out?

~~~
Produce
Perhaps it's simple economics at work, with a physical foundation - men make
many low risk investments whereas women make a handful of extremely high risk
ones (bearing a child is physically very costly). Thus, men will be more
inclined to approach and, therefore, lower their market value by increasing
supply, while women will be more inclined to shoot down offers, since they are
in great demand. I think that the society you're talking about would either
have to be one where men have mutated into childbearing creatures or one where
women have mutated to have very short and early pregnancies. An alternative
might be a society where men take the brunt of the work of raising kids,
though this is unlikely because women are more socially inclined due to their
neurochemistry and, therefore, better at providing the emotional support a
child needs, not to mention that they need to breast feed and physically
recover after delivery which makes them less able to actively find food and
shelter.

------
yread
Previous submission with a lot of comments and interesting discussion
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634955>

------
jongraehl
The author, Roy Baumeister, is behind the best-known research in willpower
training/depletion - see <http://jonathan.graehl.org/mitigating-ego-depletion>
and [http://jonathan.graehl.org/evidence-that-self-control-can-
be...](http://jonathan.graehl.org/evidence-that-self-control-can-be-trained-
lik)

------
orofino
Readability link: <http://www.readability.com/articles/cdiekyuv>

The typesetting makes this terrible to read.

------
reasonattlm
Apparently the existence of men, or more accurately some portions of the male
genome coupled with the processes of epigenetic imprinting, is shortening
everyone's lifespan. See:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/07/continued-
investi...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/07/continued-
investigations-of-rasgrf1-and-longevity.php)

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/12/an-update-on-
mice...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/12/an-update-on-mice-from-
two-female-genomes.php)

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/rasgrf1-deficienc...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/rasgrf1-deficiency-
in-mice-causes-a-20-increase-in-maximum-life-span.php)

For what it's worth.

------
maren
"His misdeed was to think thoughts that are not allowed to be thought" <<
could not agree w/ this more, people are WAY too sensitive on both sides &
fail to realize what really matters in life (including freedom of thought).

------
sandstrom
Transcript of Lawrence Summers talk, should anyone be interested to read it:
<http://www.readability.com/articles/yvvvvlgv>
[http://web.archive.org/web/20081212070850/http://www.preside...](http://web.archive.org/web/20081212070850/http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html)

------
nhangen
This is a really, really good piece.

------
munificent
> Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men
> specialize in the larger group. If you make a list of activities that are
> done in large groups, you are likely to have a list of things that men do
> and enjoy more than women: team sports, politics, large corporations,
> economic networks, and so forth.

...open source?

------
reirob
Very nice article. It is centred about observing the past. But as evolution is
going on, things change and I think that we are living in an era where things
are changing and society will less favour the capability to compete but more
to cope together. Think about the globalization, about global political
institutions like UN, IWF, etc. Think about the fact that mankind is reaching
limits of resources - oil, water, soil. I tend to think that these changes
will actually change the roles and favour women, because it will be more
important to share equally - that's just my personal opinion and I am actually
in favour for it. I think we had enough wars and at least on this planet there
is not that much territory to be conquered.

What do you think?

~~~
jkic47
As resources get scarcer, societies that do not share are more likely to
survive. Either it, or the competitor that overcomes it will survive to the
exclusion of others. Either way, the victor will likely not share hard won
spoils.

------
Joeboy
> Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years
> ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

Does anyone know what research he's referring to?

~~~
simonsarris
He is almost certainly referring to research based on Mitochondrial Eve being
far, far older than Mitochondrial Adam

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Not_a_contemp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Not_a_contemporary_of_.22Adam.22)

Initial studies, such as Thomson et al. 2000[7] proposed that Y-chromosome
Adam lived about 59,000 years ago. This date suggested that Y chromosome Adam
lived tens of thousands of years after his female counterpart Mitochondrial
Eve, who lived 150,000-200,000 years ago[8]. This date also meant that
Y-chromosome Adam lived at a time very close to, and possibly after, the out
of Africa migration which is believed to have taken place 50,000-80,000 years
ago.

One explanation given for this discrepancy in the dates of Adam and Eve was
that females have a better chance of reproducing than males due to the
practice of polygyny. When a male individual has several wives, he has
effectively prevented other males in the community from reproducing and
passing on their y-chromosomes to subsequent generations. On the other hand,
polygyny doesn't prevent most females in a community from passing on their
mitochondrial DNA to subsequent generations. This differential reproductive
success of males and females can lead to fewer male lineages relative to
female lineages persisting into the future. These fewer male lineages are more
sensitive to drift and would most likely coalesce on a more recent common
ancestor. This would potentially explain the more recent dates associated with
Y-chromosome Adam.[9][10]

From: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam>

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isomorph
For people interested in this, learn about "stereotype threat"

------
JairusKhan
"In the 19th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far
more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative
output."

Well, I'm convinced!

~~~
btcoal
The sub-point he was making that aptitude or talent does not imply creative
output. So he gave an example of a group that had extremely high ability in an
area but did not produce in that area. With the bigger point being that
differences in achievement in certain areas between women and men may come
down to interest more than ability.

The logical counter-response to this would be "well there were so many social
barriers (de-facto and de-jure) preventing women from producing creative
output"

He then gives an example of a similarly or more repressed group with extreme
ability in an area (Black jazz musicians) that managed to be extremely
prolific in that area.

It is actually pretty convincing. Or at least thought-provoking.

That is, if you do in fact think.

------
gte910h
Lots of positions, but very little citations to research, etc that backs it
up.

I'm curious how many of his contentions are borne up by science (other than
the outlier study).

~~~
sandstrom
I think the main reason is that this is a speech (transcribed). Hence the lack
of citation and references, together with rhetorical questions and phrasings
more suitable for verbal performance.

~~~
gte910h
Now that I go back, I see that it's a transcription. I missed the
transcription bit the first time around.

------
mitcheme
What I dislike about these kinds of "evolutionary" arguments is that they tend
to assume that the differences between the genders are genetic, even when
there's no evidence for that. Even as late as the Victorian ages, several of
the traits we now think of as immutable part of being male or female were
swapped around. For the Victorians, blue was for girls and pink was for boys,
and all women had the potential to become insatiable, incurable beasts for
sex, one reason it was so important to keep chaste. This model of sexuality
fit what the people experienced in their daily lives, just as ours does to us,
and they had their studies that revealed women who enjoyed sex far more than
was proper. Compare the here-and-now with every other culture in the history
of the planet, and most of our "innate" traits turn out not to be. It makes it
very difficult to take the "innate" people seriously.

I don't think it's that surprising that so many women are opposed to the idea
that we're essentially designed to live out our whole lives hidden in the
private sphere. Especially when you consider the 1950s, when (white, middle-
to-upper class) women were "free" to do just that. They were miserable. I know
I would have been miserable too. There's a reason the Feminine Mystique
exists, and the 50s housewife who drowns herself in a bottle of booze is a
cliche. For most people, that's just not enough to make a fulfilling life by
itself. Even women today who are SAHMs have other things going on than taking
care of their household, husband, and kids. He implies that it's somehow
detrimental to our survival if women like me are free to create lives that
don't make us deeply unhappy. If this arrangement had been as cooperative and
nice as the author claims, how does feminism fit in? If we were happy inside
the home, why did women look up and think, "I want to be a CEO" in the first
place? Why did they not all look up and say, "I'm glad I don't have to do
that, it looks stressful"? Given that it was their job to take care of the
CEOs and other assorted businessmen after they came home stressed from work,
it's not as though they didn't realize the drawbacks. Vacuuming is just not
meaningful work.

Guys, if you lived in a time where your choices were to latch onto a woman for
financial support or pick a low-paying unskilled job, because everyone
believed you were genetically incapable of doing anything better, would that
be OK with you? Or would you find it personally offensive? What if they said
you were incapable of making art, and labelled any creative work made by men
as not art in order to reinforce that? (In the case of women, that's
tapestries, embroideries, and pottery, for a start.) What if our default model
of "real" sex was stuff women liked more than men (random, probably inaccurate
example: doll up for us, dance for us, an hour of groping, grinding, and oral,
PIV at the end optional), and "all men were frigid" because for some reason
they found it less interesting than women? Come on. Women are people, like
you; empathy applies. The old ways were awful.

~~~
nocipher
You fail to provide a compelling defense of your argument. One of the major
points of the article was in direct opposition to your first sentence. It was
supported by arguing that biology forces women to be more important for
reproduction and then showing how this can lead to the circumstances we have
today.

Your disagreement is predicated on certain traits not being linked to
femininity or masculinity and economic forces. You wave your hand over the
entire article and then rail against women's role in the past. The argument is
a classic strawman. You failed to invalidate any of the article's points and
instead talk about narrow definitions of women's social behaviors as if the
entire article had said women are only good in one-on-one relationships. The
article merely posits that women have more stake in maintaining a few intimate
relationships than a large number of shallow relationships. This point is
arguable but, rather than argue against it, you claim that the article
insinuates women should /only/ focus on intimate relationships for the
survival of our species, and then say this is clearly ridiculous. I agree with
your logic here, but it is rather irrelevant to the topic at hand. The
discourse is about why women are better/worse/different than men, not whether
women should be allowed to live in the "public sphere".

The closing of your argument goes even further afield and tries to elicit
empathy from men by attempting to justify women's historically subservient
economic position and then forming a weak thought experiment based on outdated
female stereotypes. Your penultimate statement is that "women are people"
which is followed by the "The old ways were awful." None of this contributes
to the discussion nor does it it reveal any interesting insight.

~~~
mitcheme
There's very little actual substance there to invalidate, and I did discuss
some of issues. His analysis of women's creativity is wrong, and is his talk
about relative sex drives is spurious. I also think it's a huge mistake to
label cultures who have persisted by making over half their population
miserable (women and low-status men) as "successful". If you wanted me to take
it apart line-by-line you will have to be disappointed.

~~~
cefarix
One of the problems in Western cultures is that being a CEO, a President, a
rockstar, an astronaut, etc is more highly valued than say, being a mother.
This is why many Western women feel that being a mother with young kids and
staying at home is not fulfilling their lives - because the cultural messages
tell them that being a stay-at-home mom is an unglamarous job.

You will find that not all cultures are like this - in many Asian cultures for
example, being a mother is a very honorable and glamorous thing to do.

Women usually make up more than half of a society's population, something you
agree with yourself. In that case, don't think it highly unlikely that
societies in which women are miserable might not survive long? And yet the
cultures in which you assume women are miserable have survived, endured, and
even thrived, for millennia (I'm not talking about the 50s in America here).

Imagine the consequences if women were truly miserable in these societies:
What would happen to the next generation? What would be the consequences of
having a mother, grandmother, and aunts, who are utterly miserable? How would
the next generation be raised in a setting like this? Every society has men
and women, every family has men and women. It would tear families apart,
husbands from wives, brothers from sisters. And it would tear societies apart.
Any society who went down the path of making women miserable, or men
miserable, has not survived because it cannot reproduce and pass on its
culture successfully.

~~~
mitcheme
Why aren't we talking about the 1950's? If you're correct, that the problem is
a lack of glamour, then the 50's should not have been a problem. Motherhood
was the ultimate glamorous profession for a woman in those days. Sure, you can
go to college, but there's no sense doing anything with it when you could get
married. The ideal was a beautiful, spotless house in the suburbs, beautiful
and well-behaved children, a great and successful husband. Dress up every day,
makeup, hair, a pretty dress, pearls even. Fingers in every community
organization: church, PTA, charities. You get to host parties, lots of
parties. The way we talk about 50's homemaking today is a lot different from
the way we talked about it then.

Which cultures in which women are homemakers only, have stayed without change
to gender roles for millenia? When I think of cultures that have stayed mostly
unchanged, I think of the ones where women are contributing significantly to
survival. Hunter-gatherer societies where men hunt and women gather. In most
HG societies plant foods make up a large portion of the food; women's work is
essential. And a step beyond that, societies where men hunt and women tend
gardens or farms. Or where men and women farm and ranch together. Yes, women
_also_ tend to take care of the children in these societies. But modern-day me
still has to do dishes and laundry; that doesn't preclude me from doing other
things.

~~~
cefarix
I was not talking about the 50s in America for two reasons: firstly because I
was talking about cultures in general, and second because I was talking about
long-term multi-generational survival and time periods. The 50s, a decade, is
not long enough for a society to go extinct because its culture subjugated its
women. I don't know everything about the 50s and probably less than you do. I
was born in the late 80s and my family is from Pakistan, although I grew up
mostly in Texas. However, from what I know about the 50s in America and the
decades leading up to today, I can say that women were getting mixed signals.
The culturally right thing to do was to be a stay-at-home mom, have a nice
house in the suburbs, with well-behaved children, to cook and have everything
spotless clean. And yet it was at the same time not a glamorous thing to do.
Let me explain: even when people said it is glamorous to be a mom at home,
people also said, it is really cool to be CEO, president, or an astronaut. And
when they talked about CEOs, presidents, and astronauts, they were much more
excited and much more sincere in their admiration and respect for them than
when they would talk about stay-at-home moms.

------
phektus
Try to name at least two inventions by women in under 5 seconds.

------
madaxe
" we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work.
Personally, I support that principle."

There has never been a more revulsive "principle".

------
Hisoka
Moral of the story: Next time you're in an elevator, don't hold the doors for
the females. get off first... unless you're holding it for a possible mate

------
dreww
citations needed

~~~
roundsquare
To quote from the article: "Media Transcript Full Version"

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olalonde
Anyone else felt a sudden urge to reproduce after reading this?

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maxharris
Is there anything bad? Neither men nor women are born with anything anything
to atone for.

