How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?

diegocaleiro

I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.

Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed. and others...

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?

There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.

But will the scientific community pull it off?

Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8

I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?

But will the scientific community pull it off?

Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8

If there was a scientific field (Evolutionary Sociology) that declared rationalism is harmful for humanity and the pursuit of rationality should be shunned or persecuted, I suspect that the vast majority of us would not accept these claims at face value and would look to see if their research was flawed, or their conclusions didn't follow. And if we found such evidence, we'd probably shout it from the rooftops.

(PZ links below, as I read him daily)

Evo-Psych is, not infrequently, used as a weapon against women.

The case made for these claims is often very bad.

Every hunting man had a gatherer mother; every gathering woman had a hunting father.

This is the problem for the evolutionary psychology of sex differences: for each trait that you want to claim is a product of selection for a behavior that is different between sexes, you have to postulate a Plus that restricts its expression to a single sex.

So, sure, tell me that humans evolved cognitive mechanisms to aid in navigating by landmarks for better fruit and tuber searching, and I might well believe it to be reasonable; now tell me why you think it would only operate in women, and how it would be actively suppressed by genetic mechanisms in men. Then you can tell me why navigating by distance and direction is actively shut off in women. You’re the ones who like purely adaptive explanations: why would there be an advantage to individuals having each only half the suite of potential genetic navigation tools switched on?

If Evo-Psych is used by sexists the same way that Eugenics was used by totalitarians, it will suffer the same stigma and be abandoned for decades the same way. Seeing as this is a self-defense move by a traditionally oppressed group, I don't blame them. Unless the crap is weeded out quickly the whole field will be disgraced. The victims are currently only pointing out all the crap, they didn't allow it to get in there in the first place. The gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job, rather than trying to defend their prior shoddy performance.

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 ab... (read more)

23Viliam_Bur14y

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 obvio

4Jabberslythe14y

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