Series from Denmark
Moderators: kiore, Blip, The_Metatron
Each side makes really good points, I sometimes feel the nurture side brushes off any suggestion that nature plays some role, but they seem to do it in a way that says until you bring "acceptable" evidence we really don't have much to say. Which is fair, but you would think the newborn study by Baron-Cohen would be somewhat acceptable?
"I thought if society was equal, then they would get the same jobs".
It's a moderate proposal to say it's a mixture of biology and culture.
Mr.Samsa wrote:
Some of the people on the "nurture" side of the video had obviously been picked because they were a bit more extreme than the average researcher, and/or their comments were selectively edited to make it seem like there was a stronger position being advocated. It's important to remember that there has never been a field or approach to science which has been blank slatist, so the idea that major fields like sociology or areas within psychology believe or promote a blank slate approach is absurd. The general position is that nature obviously plays some role but we have to be careful about speaking beyond our data - not only for important scientific reasons (as speculation can dilute the validity of your results and lead you on wild goose chases), but also because the research in areas like these obviously have a real social impact. This obviously doesn't mean we should ignore any results or not report them, but it does mean that if our data or methodology is flimsy, we should be careful to present our results as tentative, or gather more data to support our conclusions.
Mr.Samsa wrote:I've only had time to watch the first episode, but I made some notes as I went through so here are my thoughts (any quotes I make are approximate):
The whole section at the beginning about Norway leading the world in gender equality was so irrelevant to the whole episode, I don't understand why the host spent so much time discussing it. Leading the world in terms of fairness in employment, and pay, and law, etc, does not equate to equality in terms of how the genders are treated on a social level. Just look at all the people on the street that he interviewed, promoting the same ideas of girls liking to talk and play with dolls, boys liking trucks and playing rough, etc. Even if there were absolutely no biological basis, this kind of thinking would necessarily generate some difference.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Another point I found interesting was that none of the Norwegian scientists interviewed promoted a blank slate ideology. It was hard to tell with the editing and the sound bites we got, but the woman was mostly basing her position on the fact that gender differences were largely explained by environmental studies and that there was no need for a biological explanation. This is importantly different from a blank slate view. The host shows a clip of her saying that she's not interested in brain differences because she doesn't think they're relevant, as if that suggests she's holding a sort of blank slate view, but obviously it doesn't. No matter what side of the fence you sit on in this debate, brain differences are of course irrelevant. If we know that men and women behave differently, then there must necessarily be brain differences unless you believe that behaviors come from somewhere other than the brain. Similarly, we can show that liberals and conservatives have different brains, atheists and theists, rock fans and emos, etc. Showing a neurological difference tells us absolutely nothing.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Lorentzen also doesn't claim that there are no differences, but simply suggests that there are "basically" no differences. The qualifier is important because it means he accepts there is some variation, but he doesn't believe that the biological and innate component is significant enough to warrant the claims made by some people. He also claims that the American studies are speculative, most likely talking about the evolutionary psychologists from the Santa Barbara church of psychology, like Pinker, Buss, Cosmides etc, and he's certainly right - they are speculative, and that's why their work is not overly influential in science, even in evolutionary psychology.
Mr.Samsa wrote:The first study presented is the survey of over 200,000 people which demonstrated that there are differences in preferences of jobs in men and women. Well, we already knew this. That's the gender difference we're trying to explain. It doesn't tell us whether it's innate or learnt (or a mixture of both).
Lippa then suggests that if these differences were learnt, then we'd expect them to change across cultures, and he points to a graph with two constant, unchanging lines, and says that this is evidence that something biological is going on. Obviously it isn't. It's evidence that there is a common underlying variable controlling both, which can be biological or learnt. This is the problem with most people's interpretation of cross-cultural studies, they ignore the fact that cross-cultural behaviors can also be explained by species-specific environmental constraints which produce universal learning. As an example, look at the fact that all individuals, across all cultures and generations, eat hot soup from a bowl. Amazing, must be innate, right? Clearly not, there is no "eating-soup-from-a-bowl gene", and instead the common behavior is there because the guy who tried to eat it off a plate or flat leaf or whatever burnt his nutsack. The common factor of gravity produces this learnt effect. This isn't to say that the behavior is learnt, but that it's something that needs to be ruled out, not just shrugged off.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Campbell, the evolutionary psychologist, suggests that it would be surprising if evolution hadn't equipped women (who give birth and generally look after children) with some kind of innate mechanism that made such actions pleasurable. Of course it's not surprising. We build bonds with people we spend time with, and we build a sunk-cost fallacy into the way we behave as a result of our learning, and so carrying something around for 9 months generally results in us being pretty protective of it, and rationalising to ourselves that it's a good thing. It would be surprising if we needed extra innate mechanisms on top of this.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Lippa, who told us that cross-cultural studies and unchanging opinions demonstrate that there is a biological cause, then explains why some cultures (the non-egalitarian ones) differ from others. In other words, cross-cultural studies always support the biological cause, whether they show consistent results, or divergent ones..
Mr.Samsa wrote:Campbell makes the standard evo psych fallacy, of pointing out that our brains are evolved organs and then trying to conclude that our behaviors (specifically whatever behaviors are currently being discussed) must have evolved as well. This obviously isn't true. It's probably true for at least some behaviors, but it's also possible that the evolution of the brain was to push it entirely into a domain-general processor, meaning that we can accept the evolution of the brain and conclusively reject the claim that evolutionary theories must have a role to play in sex differences.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Lorentzen makes the good argument that he's not a blank slatist, he just accepts that there is currently no good evidence of a biological link - and he's entirely correct here. There are some studies suggesting it, and the studies are getting better and more interesting, but it's still a leap to accept that position from what we currently know.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Baron-Cohen concludes with:It's a moderate proposal to say it's a mixture of biology and culture.
This is the golden mean fallacy; the idea that it's reasonable to presume that the two extremes of a position are wrong, and that the middle ground is likely to be correct. Of course, since the evidence is largely in favour of a cultural explanation of gender differences (mostly due to the longer history, and the ability to perform more rigorous experiments), it is an extreme position to suggest that gender differences are equally influenced by biology and culture.
Mayak wrote:Yeah, after re-watching it again I see what you mean. I don't know if they were picked on purpose. It is interesting that the nurture researchers come from his country and none of them have any international recognition outside of their field of study but on the nature side they all seem to be very well known, and great at popularizing their works. It's funny that the nurture people seem content with their position while the nature people want to popularize their position as much as possible. You're right though, that shouldn't change the facts.
Mayak wrote:Yeah, I guess making laws is not the same thing as changing people's minds. I'm thinking of myself when they asked the question of whether or not you would like someone else in the room before your shock treatment, and I instantly told myself no. I wonder why, maybe something with boys are supposed to tough it out while girls should always ask for help. But for me it had more to do with how awkward that would be.
Mayak wrote:That makes sense, where else would all of our differences in thinking be if not the brain. But by differences they seemed to imply that our brains could be structured differently or wired differently, like in the example they said where testosterone production had a lot to do with how female and male brains develop during child birth.
Mayak wrote:I mean what really shapes our brains? Are genes just the blueprint and the environment fills in the remaining area? Kind of like when you get a computer, there's the hardware and then you, as the environment, choose what software you want to install. But, way back before computers when we threw rocks at each other and our culture consisted of running around naked to the full moon, wouldn't it help to have some "pre-programming" from our genes? Something that guides men to be big, strong hunters and women to be social, friendly child bearers...
Mayak wrote:Pinker, speculative??? But he's a professor at Harvard! I kid
Mayak wrote:Well, what to your knowledge is species-specific environmental constraint that we all share that makes men go to certain jobs and women go to others?
Mayak wrote:Why do we build bonds with people we spend time with? How did we learn to associate people with the sunk-cost fallacy?
Mayak wrote:Before our learning, when the first cave man had sex with the first cave woman, how did she know that her pregnant belly was not an infection but a baby to protect? I hope that's not an odd question, but I'm trying to think from their perspective before they had tons of cultural knowledge to learn from, her body starts to feel weird, forcing her to throw up, always tired, and then a huge bump on her belly! If I was that first cave woman, I would fucking freak out.
Mayak wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:Lippa, who told us that cross-cultural studies and unchanging opinions demonstrate that there is a biological cause, then explains why some cultures (the non-egalitarian ones) differ from others. In other words, cross-cultural studies always support the biological cause, whether they show consistent results, or divergent ones..
Do you think the reason most cultures show the same pattern is because pretty much every culture has mixed and learned from another? Wasn't there an amazon tribe somewhere that never had contact, ever, with any outside cultures? What did we find out from those guys?
Mayak wrote:I looked up domain-general processor, something about how all brain function is interdependent? I thought this was common knowledge?
Mayak wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:Lorentzen makes the good argument that he's not a blank slatist, he just accepts that there is currently no good evidence of a biological link - and he's entirely correct here. There are some studies suggesting it, and the studies are getting better and more interesting, but it's still a leap to accept that position from what we currently know.
Well, what have we currently found out about gene related behaviors in humans? You would think it would have been big news, the first behavior to be directly connected to a gene.
Mayak wrote:Damn, Pinker is at Harvard, Baron-Cohen is at Cambridge, what gives? I'm even reading Baron-Cohens wikipedia page, and he's on the 'Chair of the NICE Guideline Development Group for adults with autism.' You would think the nurture guys would get all the prestige's positions at the worlds top universities?
Mr.Samsa wrote:Simon Baron-Cohen then presents us with another study where newborn babies look longer at mechanical devices than they do at faces. This is interesting, except that we find that this difference disappears when the person holding the mechanical device (normally a mobile) or showing their face, doesn't know the sex of the baby.
One experiment we conducted here in Cambridge was at the local maternity hospital. Essentially we wanted to find out whether sex differences that you observe later in life could be traced back to birth, to see if such differences are present at birth. In this experiment we looked at just over one hundred newborn babies, 24 hours old, which was the youngest we could see them, and we presented each baby with a human face to look at, and then a mechanical mobile suspended above the crib. Each baby got to see both objects.
Obviously these objects are different in interesting ways, because the human face is alive, and it can express emotion, it's a natural object. The mechanical mobile is man-made, it's not alive, and obviously it doesn't have emotions. We tried to make the two objects equivalent in some important ways. One is that they were both the same size; another was that they were a similar colour, in order to try and control features that might be grabbing the child's attention. But effectively what we did was film how long each baby looked at each of these two objects.
We asked the mothers not to tell us the sex of their babies, so that we could remain blind to whether this was a boy or a girl. And for the most part that was possible. Sometimes it was possible to guess that this was a boy or a girl, because there would be cards around the bed saying, "Congratulations, it's a boy." That potentially could have undermined the experiment, although we then gave the videotapes to a panel of judges to simply measure how long the baby looked at the face or the mobile. By the time the judges were looking at these videotapes they didn't have any of these potential clues to the sex of the baby, because all you could see was the eyes of the baby.
The results of the experiment were that we found more boys than girls looked longer at the mechanical mobile. And more girls than boys looked longer at the human face. Given that it was a sex difference that emerged at birth, it means that you can't attribute the difference to experience or culture. Twenty-four hours old. Now you might say, well, they're not exactly new-born, it would have been better to get them at 24 minutes old — or even younger. But obviously we had to respect the wishes of the parents and the doctors to let the baby relax after the trauma of being born. And let the parents get to know their baby. So strictly speaking, it might have been one day of social experience. But nonetheless, this difference is emerging so early that suggests it's at least partly biological.
Back to hormones. We've been conducting laboratory studies on the amniotic fluid in the womb — the fetus is effectively swimming in this amniotic fluid. We analyze how much testosterone, the so-called male hormone, is in the amniotic fluid. It's not actually a male hormone, because both sexes produce it, it's just that males produce a lot more than females. That's because it comes from the testes. Females also produce it in the adrenal glands. And even within the boys, or within the girls, you see individual differences in how much is produced.
The question is, does this translate into anything psychological if you follow up those children? We measured the amniotic fluid testosterone, then waited until the baby was born, and then looked at the baby's at 12 months old, 18 months old, two years old. It's a longitudinal prospective study.
What we found is that the higher the baby's level of fetal testosterone, the less eye contact the child makes at 12 months old. And also the slower they are to develop language at 18 months old. To me these are really fascinating results, because we're looking at something biological, in this case a hormone which presumably is influencing brain development to produce these quite marked differences in behavior.
Beatsong wrote:I know this is a slightly old thread......
archibald wrote:In other words, my starting position (which I am not wedded to) is (a) that The Gender Equality Paradox is a 'thing', it exists, and (b) that at least part of the explanations for it are innate/biological differences between the sexes.
TopCat wrote:Whether it is a thing or not, and I'm not arguing either way, one thing I'm curious about is why the mean - or its standard deviation, which affects what goes on at the extremes - of any metric would be expected to be identical between men and women.
Having a Y chromosome and consequently bathing the growing foetus and its brain (as steroid hormones can apparently cross the blood brain barrier easily) in a vat of different hormone concentrations makes quite a few differences to the body.
So would it not be unsurprising if men and women were different in a variety of brain/mind respects as well as the more obvious physical ones?
TopCat wrote:So would it not be unsurprising if men and women were different in a variety of brain/mind respects as well as the more obvious physical ones?
Thommo wrote:TopCat wrote:So would it not be unsurprising if men and women were different in a variety of brain/mind respects as well as the more obvious physical ones?
I agree with you, I think it would be surprising. In fact I think people were very surprised at just how equal the sexes turned out to be. It's presumably the fact that a lot of people were so surprised about so many aspects of gender inequality that leads to the belief that there are more surprises in store.
You only need to go back something like 60 or 70 years to find that it was commonly assumed that women could not run long distance races, let alone marathons (as recently as 1967 a woman was banned for trying to run one), due to physical incapability. We now accept that the very pronounced differences in stature, musculature and body fat (men tend to bottom out at about 4%, women at about 10% IIRC) actually only make women about 10% slower than men across most running distances. Given the much, much smaller differences in brain structure (and size, particularly the relevant measure of surface area is also much smaller) it would follow that we probably shouldn't expect too colossal of a difference when it comes to mental activities either.
So, I guess it's reasonable to think the balance point might not be at exact equality, that there might be some small residual differences in preferences and aptitudes in different areas (e.g. the systems vs. social preference discussed elsewhere), but on the other hand you probably can't find that balance point unless you push as far as you can go first.
Thommo wrote:Not exactly no. And you're right, that wouldn't follow.
I'm cautioning against the idea that even a very large observable difference in average features of the brain would necessarily translate into a difference in behaviour (or performance) of equally large degree.
So, for example an average difference in brain sizes might not translate into any meaningful difference (within humans - not cross species) in preferences or abilities. That's not to say it will not, but that it might not.
Thommo wrote:The only way you'll ever find out how equal people can be is if you try and achieve equality and see how far you get.
archibald wrote:
That man, the one voice-acted at the start of the radio discussion I posted above, he was the inventor of sociology or something, did you hear what he said? Here it is again:
https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podca ... 101113.mp3
Evolving wrote:archibald wrote:
That man, the one voice-acted at the start of the radio discussion I posted above, he was the inventor of sociology or something, did you hear what he said? Here it is again:
https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podca ... 101113.mp3
I tried, but it was too hard for me to understand.
archibald wrote:...I am quite happy to give them anything...
archibald wrote:Evolving wrote:archibald wrote:
That man, the one voice-acted at the start of the radio discussion I posted above, he was the inventor of sociology or something, did you hear what he said? Here it is again:
https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podca ... 101113.mp3
I tried, but it was too hard for me to understand.
The accent?
Or that it, the perspective, was so.....alien to you?
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