Pursuing the Truth

Speaking of empirical practice, did you bother to email Bernstein and ask him whether he’s done any reading on the issue beyond the “alumni magazine?”

He doesn’t say he hasn’t, just that he hasn’t read this particular book, or all the studies it cites. It may be unfair to criticize a particular book before reading it, but it’s not exactly news that certain feminist scholars (in this case, a journalist and a clinical psychologist) are claiming that innate sex differences differences don’t exist. Bernstein does mention that there are stats on the well-known phenomenon that much older men are much more likely to marry younger women than older women are to marry younger men. And anyone who is intellectually sentinent and hasn’t been completely isolated from the emerging scientific consensus of the last several decades knows that the research on sex differences is confirming what everyone thought to be common sense–that men and women are, taken as groups, different in the way they approach mating (among other things), just as every other mammal has sex differences.

johnqp, you forget that when it comes to sociobiology and/or evolutionary psychology, the bloggers at Crooked Timber are as one with Phillip Johnson: they don’t believe in this kind of evolutionary theory. So citing to a literature that they read not to learn but only to refute will do you no good.

I know that proponents of ev psych are always eager to inform the rest of us on the unchangeable facts of human nature that they have deduced from e.g. reading the newspaper singles ads or getting rejected in singles bars. But do johnqp and others really want us to believe that gender roles are not highly malleable across cultures?

Note that highly malleable does not mean that gender is completely socially determined, that biology plays no role — that’s a straw man. Just that gender is a complex mix of biological predisposition and cultural indoctrination. You know, just like language, family structure, the organization of aggression, and just about every other important component of human nature.

Bernstein is a big part of the reason why I don’t read VC anymore. His posts are Axe Grinding, All the Time.

Brian, you’re wrong. What I’ve observed from CT is that the default point of view on EP here is as knee-jerk and two-dimensional as Bernstein is on, say, women’s studies. Those of you that are vocal on this subject implicitly pick the most extreme EP proponents and their most risible assertions and use them as representative. Any mention of EP, anything that smacks of sociobiology, is assumed to be such a strawman unless demonstrated otherwise. This is exactly how people like Bernstein are heavily biased against feminist scholarship and women’s studies departments. In both cases—CT’s (and fellow-travelers) views on EP and Bernstein’s (and fellow-travelers) views on feminist scholarship—are heavily influenced by a sociopolitical bias that has identified an entire field of study and its practitioners as being fundamentally politically motivated and, essentially, an aspect of the enemy political viewpoint. Among other things, these cliched jeremiads are tedious. That’s why Bernstein and non-Volokh and other axe-grinders have completely ruined VC for me—the only right-of-center blog I could previously stomach. Crooked Timber is not completely innocent of this.

Oh, also, you have probably a majority non-academic readership. I suspect that most CT readers don’t have the knowledge or experience to take a look at the CT CVs and evaluate what they read here in the context of academic politics and related biases. CT’s contibuters strongly represent the fields that believe EP to be trespassing on their turf.

Not being an academic myself, I have absolutely no vested interest in any of these competing ideas. That’s not the case for many of CT’s contributers. I apologize for being so irritable, but I am so tired of so many people’s views on so many things being so predictable. There is the pretense of truth-seeking, but so many views conform to a very simplistic political sorting principle that it’s hard to believe that there’s as much truth-seeking going on as is usually claimed. It’s not clear at all to me that a naturist viewpoint must be inherently conservative while a nurturist viewpoint must be inherently progressive; in contrast, it is clear to me the historical context that has created these associations. It could be otherwise.

Keith, you are completely wrong to think that all CT contributors are hostile to EP/sociobiology/etc in the way you suggest. I’m not, for one. BUT, I do think that the leading EP theorists systematically underplay the importance of culture. I’m currently reading (with some other people) an advance copy of Richerson and Boyd’s “Not by Genes Alone”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/16460.ctl , I’ll probably post on it when the book actually appears.

The question of whether or not there are innate gender differences (and if there are, how great they are, and what they are like) is irrelevant to the issue of feminism. This is easily proved by observing that there are feminist theorists who argue vociferously on all sides of that debate.

The central tenet of feminism, which I don’t think you can dispute without ceasing to be a feminist, is not a statement of factual truth: instead it is a statement of value. That is, that the suffering and well-being of women is as important a consideration as the suffering or well-being of men when evaluating moral, political, economic etc. etc. questions.

Working out the implications of this commitment does require one to think about the question of gender difference. The core value that underpins feminism requires ruthless pursuit of the truth on that issue. The pursuit is still underway.

My two pence.

The thing is that EP as it is often promoted is merely a small but vocal subset of ‘researchers who are interested in the evolutionary underpinnings of brain and behaviour’, for want of a better phrasing. Cecilia Heyes, and Jan Panksepp, to name but two, are hard nosed scientists (one a comparative and human psychologist, the other an affective neuroscientist) very preoccupied with evolution but who explicitly query the whole ‘Human Nativist Evolutionary Psychologist’ movement (what distinguishes them, specifically, would be their emphasis on domain-specific modularism and disinterest in ontogenetic – ie developmental/learning – methods of cognitive evolution).

I’ll give you a case in point – I went to a postgraduate conference where about 2/3 of the two dozen attending were cognitive neuroscientists (the rest straight experimental or cognitive psych, not a social psychologist amongst us). One of the discussion topics was evolutionary psychology. Unlike other issues (animal testing ethics, obtaining consent), where there was a real to and fro on the issues, this one had to be discontinued because the argument totally bottomed out. Why? No-one had any faith in it as an enterprise. Yet by their own accounts all of these naysayers were
a) straight-up materialists, who believed that the phsycial causes of behaviour were not nebulous but could be pinned down
b) avowedly darwinian, in that they would not accept/put forward an argument that was implausible in an evolutionary sense.

They just thought the EP tendency was a bit crap, often unfalsifiable and overreaching. All arguable, of course, but there was no obvious political component to their complaints – politically, these should be the ground troops of EP!

To back up what I’m saying, I would resort to the recent Heyes paper – (2003, in psychological review, 110(4), 713-727 – I seem to be hawking this around the internet in a campaign of putting EP in its place….)
Abstract and possible full text here (you will need to have a password for full text) http://tinyurl.com/6dl28

Or equally a Panksepp paper, which is a bit older so some of the crit may be obsolete. But its worth checking out.
http://tinyurl.com/382pm

I’ll say, first, that this post takes no position on Evolutionary Psychology. It’s also consistent with the book Bernstein dismisses not being very good.

Lis Riba, you are correct. The link does in fact mention “a commitment to social action.” However, the mission statement itself does NOT.

The four pillars are invoked by President Jehuda Reinharz in his 1995 inaugural address. The actual mission statement, to which Bernstein refers, is presented below the quotation.

For the record, my undergraduate thesis advisor was a big proponent of evolutionary psychology. If I had to pick sides, I’d say that I’m with him.

But I’m not an academic, not current on the state of the debate, and don’t see why my opinion should matter except as a counterexample about what Timberites think.

bq. and feedback effects will lock in the disadvantageous position of women in the labor market.

Is there any evidence for this? It’s a plausible mechanism, but as Kieran “has written of appeals to feedback models more generally”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001259.html this sort of explanation has a bit of a “just so” quality about it that doesn’t necessarily reflect empirical reality very well at all.

bq. What I’ve observed from CT is that the default point of view on EP here is as knee-jerk and two-dimensional as Bernstein is on, say, women’s studies. Those of you that are vocal on this subject implicitly pick the most extreme EP proponents and their most risible assertions and use them as representative. Any mention of EP, anything that smacks of sociobiology, is assumed to be such a strawman unless demonstrated otherwise.

Not so – I do plead guilty to once using a fairly ridiculous example of sociobiological explanation in a post – but Dan and others are taking on the big names in the field. Nor do I buy the purported explanation for this bias – that ” CT’s contibuters strongly represent the fields that believe EP to be trespassing on their turf.” I do get annoyed when people take Cosmides and Toobey’s ridiculous portrayal of the “standard social scientific model” seriously. It’s neither standard, social-scientific, nor even a model – instead it’s a set of lazy, tendentious generalizations. That said, the only “turf” that sociobiologists seem to be contending for are the pages of the Sunday colour supplements and the NYRB/LRB – ground that I have no particular problem in ceding.

I don’t think any of us would have any difficulties with the claim that (1) we are the products of evolution, and (2) that this will surely be reflected in important aspects of our social behaviour. But I don’t see why this obliges us to accept silly, and frankly a-scientific arguments with low or no evidentiary standards. So far, the contribution of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology to understanding the kinds of things that I am interested in, is remarkably low – extraordinarily low given the undeniable fact that we are evolved beings. I suspect that this isn’t entirely disconnected to the particular political biases of some of the biggest contributors to this strain of thought. That said, I’m certainly a big believer in the possibilities of an evolutionary approach to human behaviour – and in the kinds of contribution that, say, people like Jared Diamond have to make. He doesn’t get everything right in _Guns, Germs and Steel_ but he shows an interest in empirical testing, and in explaining variation as well as sameness, that seems to avoid most of the evolutionary psychological accounts that I’ve seen. It’s one of the two or three most exciting books in the social sciences (as very broadly defined) that I’ve read in the last decade.

Guns, Germs and Steel… [is] one of the two or three most exciting books in the social sciences (as very broadly defined) that I’ve read in the last decade.

Just curious: what would the others be?

I’ll cop to exactly the same sort of excessive generalization that my two posts last night were complaining about.

I do think that there needs to be some acknowledgement of a sordid history of both sides here. First we have the all the crap from before the turn of the 20th century onward: the modern notion of race, social darwinism, eugenics, etc. Almost all of this was politically and culturally motivated and bigoted. Then we have the social sciences backlash against these horrors and the establishment of the blank slate dogma. When I came of age in the very early eighties, and as a scientifically literate liberal, feminist, anti-racist, and such, the blank slate paradigm was a core idea of my politics and world view. When Wilson advanced his “sociobiology”, there was a tremendous amount of antagonism against it—it was judged prima facie to be deeply politically regressive in intent and effect. Really, though, nothing Wilson wrote was in retrospect that terribly risible. Of course, then we had all the cultural and political reactionaries jumping on the sociobiology bandwagon and, just as in the past, used naturist arguments to justify their worldview.

But, you know, through my adult lifetime I’ve been practically assaulted by tons of science that support a naturist basis for many human behaviors and since I’m emphatically not a dualist, the blank slate paradigm began to look like a convenient fiction to me. Like most reasonable people, it seems to me that either extreme position on the nature/nurture debate is absurd. And, more to the point, I firmly believe that I don’t have to sacrifice my progressive social values to the truth of many naturist positions.

In this context, I’m pretty sympathetic to the EP folks moving to “EP” from “sociobiology” in an attempt to depoliticize this stuff. I don’t doubt that many people have hidden agendas both pro and con, but it seems to me that this is a crucial field of study and it’s to everyone’s benefit to try to emphasize the science and deemphasize the politics. Of course I recognize that essentially it’s a political subject, but still.

and feedback effects will lock in the disadvantageous position of women in the labor market.

Is there any evidence for this?

I didn’t claim that feedback effects explain the whole thing or deny that there were any innate, biological differences at work–I said that you can’t cite differences in male and female choices as revealing different preferences unless you assume that the male-female playing field is level, which manifestly it is not.

The interesting question isn’t whether there are innate psychological male-female differences–their likely are–but whether they are the whole explanation for the difference in the choices men and women make. It seems likely that they don’t since the choices women make change as circumstances change.