How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?

The "It must be “Let’s all beat up Evo Psych” Day!" article seemed very convincing when I read it, but now that I had some time to think about it, it seems much less convincing. Please tell me whether I am wrong...

The article essentially says that there are no "male genes" and "female genes", because everyone in every generation gets their genes from their father and their mother. So even when there is an evolutionary pressure only on one sex to evolve some skill, the other sex gets the skill automatically. When we find an evolutionary explanation why men have genes for some skill or trait, at the same time we found an explanation why their daughters have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too. And vice versa, when we find an explanation why women have genes for some skill or trait, we also have an explanation why their sons have the same genes and the same skill or trait, too.

A trait which would be different between sexes, would not only need genes benefiting one sex, but also some special genes to actively turn it off for the other sex. Otherwise, both sexes would have it. Even under assumption that a trait is helpful for one sex and irrelevant for the other sex, our default expectation should be to find the same genes and the same trait in both sexes. To develop otherwise, the trait would have to be actively harmful to the other sex.

For example it is useful for a man to have a penis, and it would be harmful for a woman; this is why both sexes remain different in this aspect. But we cannot use the same logic for things like color perception. Even under unrealistically generous assumptions that historically women always gathered plants, and men never did, and the color perception is useful for discerning plants, and completely useless for anything else... still, we should expect the color perception to be the same for both men and women. To expect a different result we would have to claim that color perception is actively harmful for men, which obviously is not the case.

Did I understand it correctly?

If yes, then...

Reality check: According to Wikipedia, 5-10% of men, but less than 1% of women have some form of color blindness. What?! We have just proved that this should not happen, unless men get some huge evolutionary penalty for not being colorblind, which is obviously not the case. But this information about color blindness is not some evo-psych story; it is measured data. So how is that possible?

Oh yes, there is this pesky little detail that men and women have the same chromosomes, except for the sex chromosome. Women have XX, men have XY. And the X chromosome happens to contain some data not directly related to reproduction, for example the genes for the color perception. Women get two version, men get one. It means that when something goes wrong with the color-perception genes, women have a backup copy, and men don't. Therefore the difference.

As far as I know (but I don't really know much about this), the Y chromosome does not contain much useful information besides specifying the male sex. So this mechanism alone could explain why men can be on average worse than women in some tasks (if the genes necessary for successfully doing the task happen to be located on the chromosome X), but not the other way around! -- By the way, which specific gene happens to be on which chromosome, that is partially a historical coincidence. There is no logical reason why the color-perception genes must be on the chromosome X. It just happened. It could have been on some other chromosome; and perhaps in some other species, it is.

But there is a more general problem with our assumption that men and women, as members of the same species sharing the same genes, must be the same in everything except reproduction (with some disadvantage for men if the genes are on the sex chromosome) -- the genes do not operate independently on each other. The results of a gene can be influenced by the internal environment, which in turn can be influenced by other genes. Different level of sexual hormones can make the same genes produce somewhat different results. Men and women do have different levels of sexual hormones, even during prenatal development. So even the same genes can work a bit differently for men and for women.

Please note that even a small difference can be noticed by people, because we observe each other a lot, for various reasons; we are a social species. You don't need to have all men go completely blind, just to notice that there is perhaps some difference between visions of men and women. A few more percent of partially color-blind men is enough for people to eventually notice. (A possible alternative explanation, that Patriarchy spread the myth of inferior male color perception for its evil purposes, and it just randomly happened to be true, does not make a lot of sense to me.) Also, we compare humans with humans, not with other species. Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other species, people still notice that women have these skills somewhat better than men.

So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones. So if there is a greater evolutionary pressure on one sex to develop some trait, as a result the whole humanity may get a gene for this trait optimized for the given sex. Both men and women will have it, and it will do the same thing; it will just do the thing a little bit better in presence of hormones of one sex than of the other sex. It could be a difference between 100% and 99% efficiency. Just a tiny difference in verbal skills, or math skills, or navigation skills, or whatever. But in the context where these skills are critical, people will notice.

Of course this does not make every evo-psych hypothesis automatically true. But neither does it make a hypothesis automatically false just because it explained a difference between sexes by greater evolutionary pressure on one of them with regard to the given trait... as the linked article seems to suggest.

I agree denotationally but object connotationally. So, yes, it's true that people seeking to justify social practices that we-socially-liberal-people strongly disapprove of often make poorly-reasoned appeals to evolutionary psychology, and that this is not only bad because it's bad reasoning, but it also damages the credibility of evopsych as field, but ...

I don't know, correct me if I'm misreading your intent, but to me it seems like your comment is engaged in a mode of reasoning about conflicts between contemporary social groups, rather than reasoning about reality, and that in this venue of all places, we can actually do better. The mindset which dubs an entire area of inquiry "disgraced" because many of the thinkers working in that area are systematically biased in identifiable ways is a common one, but it's a mistake. There's absolutely nothing contradictory about simultaneously believing that many scholars whose work is labeled as "evolutionary psychology" have important insights about human nature, and also that many of their critics also have important insights, for the same reason that very different-looking maps can both usefully model different aspects of the same territory. Of course, this is not to say that "everyone is equally right"; rather, I'm saying we can talk about the actual observations and inferences under dispute, rather than getting distracted with irrelevant side issues like whether Satoshi Kanazawa is a bad person.

I think that there's so little rationality in the world today, that on the current margin it's more important for those of us who know better to explicitly say things like what I'm saying now (Social Reality Is a Strict Subset of Actual Reality; the Facts Really Aren't on Anyone's Side), rather than trying to apply social pressure in favor of our preferred ideology. I say this not because it's wrong to have ideologically-derived values (I don't like gender roles, either), but because lots of other people are already working on politics, and not very many people are working on epistemology, so that almost anyone in a position to notice this choice should take the latter. You write that "[t]he victims are currently only pointing out all the crap[;] [t]he gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job," but without necessarily denying that the victims are in fact victims and that the crap is in fact crap, this really seems like a distraction from the real issues.

You quote P. Z. Myers arguing that in order for a sex difference to be evolutionarily favored, there needs to be some reason why the trait in question would be adaptive in one sex but actually maladaptive in the other. To someone in the mindset of "discrediting evolutionary psychology", this might seem like a crushing objection, but to someone in the mindset of trying to understand human evolution, there's no reason to be thinking of objecting to anything; it's just a good line of reasoning that stands on its own merits. And, in fact, competent evolutionary psychologists already know it; Eliezer makes the same point (which I would imagine is standard and familiar to people who really know the literature) in his post "The Psychological Unity of Humankind":

Note, however, that in the absence of actually opposed selection pressures, the species as a whole will get dragged along even by selection pressure on a single sex. This is why males have nipples; it's not a selective disadvantage.

So I think a lot of the apparent disagreement between Myers et al. and (well-done) evolutionary psychology is illusory, as should not be surprising because Bayesian reasoners cannot agree to disagree; reality just doesn't care about our culture wars.

I read the first of those two articles posted awhile and took issue with it for making statements like this:

Here’s an easy indicator. If it’s a paper that presumes to tell you the evolutionary basis of differences between the sexes or races, it’s bullshit.

But I didn't read any of his other stuff and the second article has good arguments that I had not heard before. And quippy articles are okay, sometimes, if there they are backed up.

Who are the people that are using evolutionary psychology to cast aspersions on women? Heartiste doesn't seem like a representative pick-up artist, he is the most misogynistic and "bad" to my knowledge.

Some of it's there for good reason, e.g. the history of medicine contains some pretty bad atrocities against women, but it's definitely taken too far in some circles.

The history of medicine contains some pretty bad atrocities full stop.

I clicked on this title with hackles slightly raised, prepared to point out that feminism is a normative set of beliefs, evolutionary psychology is a descriptive set of theories, and therefore there is no such conflict.

Wouldn't that just be the non-overlapping magasteria argument, though?

Predictive implication: antihereditarian beliefs among political egalitarians will cease when eugenics, genetic engineering, or pharmaceutical personality sculpting become technologically (not politically, since we're talking about beliefs in support of already politically implausible interventions) plausible. (You may or may not believe such conditions have already been fulfilled.)

I wonder if "evopsych" and "the patriarchy" are some sort of mirror image words that make people from the other side stop listening whenever they get brought into the argument.

If humans having any behavior differences by gender that are not culturally constructed is a suspect viewpoint, what do you make of humans having evolved from animals that don't have culture to construct things but do have behavior differences by gender?

For me, the strongest argument in favor of evolutionary psychology is how well it works for explaining social behaviours of non-human animals. I think this is important background material to understand where evolutionary psychologists come from. I recommend parsing through the following textbooks:

Animal Behaviour, Alcock

An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology, Krebs and Davies

(Disclaimer: I have only read Alcock, but Krebs and Davies is supposed to be stronger and better organized from a theoretical point of view - Alcock has wonderful examples.)

Of course, human social behaviour is orders of magnitude more diverse and complicated than in any other species - and even for other primates, one already needs to adopt the point of view of sociology and social psychology to get a good picture. But the premise that culture somehow freed us from all this background of behavioural adaptations is very strange, especially given the tendancy of the evolutionary process to recycle everything in sight into new shapes and patterns.

Thank you for explaining your point of view. I agree that if you don't know anything about a person other than that they are talking about evolutionary psychology, that is good evidence that they are a misogynist douchebag who is using it as an excuse to be a misogynist douchebag.

However, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that there are despicable people using a particular branch of science to justify their behavior is not strong evidence for or against the truth of the results in that branch of science. Lots of people have very silly ideas about quantum mechanics, but that doesn't mean that quantum mechanics is broken.

I think I am not too far off the mark when I say that generally speaking, on LessWrong we aspire to judge ideas based on how right they are and not based on how much we dislike the people who have historically held ideas superficially similar to those ideas.

It doesn't help, of course, that there are large groups of men who are dedicated to insulting and condemning women; and that these men have realized that holding women personally responsible for the "motives" that natural selection had when it "designed" them is a great way to give their unpleasantness a scientific veneer. That's basically what Roissy (or Heartiste, as I think he's called now) does. For instance, that whole "cuckolding is the same as rape" nonsense of his is based on the (dead wrong) belief that people consciously desire to spread their genes.

Your comment is mostly correct, except this is a total stawman of Roissy's position.

For instance, if an evolutionary psychologist says "Evolution caused women to be attracted to certain types of men in order to increase the odds of them obtaining good genes and support for their children," someone who isn't keeping the EvCog Boundary in mind will probably hear "Women are cold, calculating, conniving monsters who manipulate men and string them along so they can get good genes for their kids and then trap men into raising them."

Well, more like "women are secretly obsessed with kids", give the stereotypes involved.

Maybe it would also help if the evolutionary psychologists folks would understand feminism better to communicate in a way that reduces conflict.

As we are on LessWrong it would make more sense to focus here on evolutionary psychologists folks understanding feminism than the other way around.

Yes, also disentangling social scientists notion of what used to be called evolutionism in the social sciences, back in the 1920-1940s and what was once sociobiology applied to humans, from the actual evolutionary psychology of our time.

I don't think it's applicable, for the very reason you gave in this comment.

It seems to me that we could get results a bit like that without anyone being grossly dishonest or incompetent, if (1) men and women are violent about equally often but (2) men tend to be substantially more violent than women when they are violent. And #2 seems a plausible-enough just-so story; even if intentions are exactly equal in each case, men tend to be stronger so will do more damage.

(Why would this lead to such results? Well, e.g., officially reported data will tend to focus on violence serious enough for the police or social services to pay attention, whereas if you survey people and ask "have you ever been violent?" or "has your partner ever been violent?" I would expect them to include more-minor violent acts too.)

... OK, I just looked at the paper and behold, that does in fact appear to be the case, and is a large part of why the author says that there is gender asymmetry in domestic violence. (And no, it isn't "somewhat contradictory" to say that one group of researchers finds X, another finds Y, and that on the whole Y is more accurate. The paper goes into quite a lot of detail about the actual evidence each way. The last sentence, aside from acknowledgements and bibliography, is this: "The severity of physical injury and levels of coercion from all forms of violence in relationships appear to be greater for women than for men.")

A person that's well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.

Maybe that's because a person well trained in deconstructivism can find anything in anything. :D

More seriously, maybe a person can more easily find the biases they don't share then the biases they share. And maybe being interested in feminism and being interested in deconstructivism correlates positively.

There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism.

That's false. The moral claim of feminism is that man and woman should be treated equally. Reality is that they aren't treated equally.

I think you are misinterpreting what was meant here. What seems to have been meant is that there's no conflict between what normatively feminism claims and the description of how reality actually behaves, not whether the feminist ideals have been accomplished. This is in contrast with for example how classical marxism makes claims about the nature of reality that are just demonstrably false about the nature of economics, and that's independent from any descriptive claim about how economies currently work.

A person that's well trained in deconstructivsm can find gender bias in a lot of gender related writing by scientists.

It feels only sporting to tell you that a lot of people on this site have been trained to have alarm bells go off when reading this sentence.

If even 95% of males are heterosexual, those who would ban homosexuality as unnatural need to answer this evo psych question: why are 5% of males not heterosexual? Evolution tends towardss great efficiency.

Yeah, you probably need to read more books on evolutionary biology. While technically correct the latter sentence is a misleading generalization when thinking about certain traits. I recommend you start by familiarizing yourself with genetic load to see an example of how evolution can end up relatively inefficient at doing some things. Also note the role of path dependence in the natural world.

We don't have a 5% blindness rate or deafness rate.

A noisy figure, we have estimates going from 1% to about 6% for all non-heterosexual people depending on country and methodology. Statistics vary but about 2% of men are totally infertile. We also have infectious diseases and parasite infection rates for some organisms above 5% in human populations that get in the way of spreading genes as much as homosexuality. This is considered a plausible explanation too:

A related hypothesis is that the proximal cause of homosexuality must be an infection. Cochran does not suggest that an infectious agent that causes homosexuality is spread by homosexuals. The premise is that homosexuality reduces the number of offspring and would lead to the genes carried by a homosexual person to be progressively eliminated over generations. Cochran maintains that the observed level of prevalence of exclusive homosexuality (3 to 4 percent of men and 1 to 2 percent of women in the United States) means genes cannot be the cause of homosexuality. This argument is based on natural selection, the fitness cost of genes 'for' homosexuality being too great for its occurrence at a frequency above that of random mutation (~ 1 in 50,000). The argument assumes that evolution would have largely eliminated homosexuality related to non-infectious environmental causes, except novel ones

evolution does fine by itself, and hardly needs help from law or custom to get its job done.

The problem is that evolution is perfectly capable of evolving things to extinction.

assholes (a technical term describing a male who performs actions that make him less attractive to females)

This would be closer to true if negated.

In any case, the "resolution" between feminist concerns, and evolutionary psychology is to understand that evolution does fine by itself, and hardly needs help from law or custom to get its job done

Evolution doesn't have a job to do. It just is, Moreover, our ancestral environment doesn't look much like modern cultures, but seems at this point pretty clear that culture can influence evolution.

assholes (a technical term describing a male who performs actions that make him less attractive to females)

If you think this definition of asshole captures your intuition about the meaning of that word then something has gone drastically wrong.

f even 95% of males are heterosexual, those who would ban homosexuality as unnatural

They have much more of an is v. ought problem before one gets to whether or not it is unnatural. But it also isn't helpful in this regards in another way: whether something is or is not natural is distinct from whether it is evolutionary advantageous (either now or in our ancestral environment). Note also that there quite a few hypotheses giving potential explanations for why homosexuality would evolve.

one would screw with evo psych's result at one's peril

This is essentially an argument that we should reside in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence agriculture society and also shouldn't try to address cognitive biases and shouldn't do any math that wasn't easy in our ancestral environment, etc. etc. I don't think this argument does what you want it to do.