an offesive, although interesting, read

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This weekend I read Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa’s new book on evolutionary psychology. They make quite a few bold and brazen remarks about human tendencies.

The authors suggest that all human tendencies can be explained by the brain’s Darwinian instincts. And since most social structures have evolved in the past 10,000 years, we’ve changed the world faster than the world could change us. Therefore we act upon ancient impulses to do one thing: reproduce.

They [unapologetically] explain the following questions in terms of evolutionary psychology (i.e. men only want to have sex and women want to have babies):

1. Why do women earn less money than men?
“The sex gap in earnings and so-called glass ceiling are caused not by employer discrimination or any other external factors, but by the sex differences in internal preferences, values, desires, dispositions, and temperaments… Women generally earn less than men do because they tend to make only what they need and usually have better things to do than earn money, whereas men are motivated to earn far more than they need to survive in order to use it to attract women”.
(I find this one quite offensive. I’m a girl who studied finance in a mostly-male program. The workplace and academia have long been tailored to the learning styles and other factors which foster the success of men. Further, typical female jobs (nursing, teaching, etc.) are lower paying jobs not because they are less important, but society has deemed them lower value).

2. Why are people racist?
“Contrary to what social scientists and hippies alike proclaim, we don’t learn to be a racist through parental socialization; we learn not to be one”
(Yuck. This is just depressing).

3. Why do men like big boobs?
“… larger, and hence heaver, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breats. Thus, it is much easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and her reproductive value) by sign if she has larger breasts than if she has smaller breasts, which do not change as much with age… The ancestral men needed to infer a woman’s age and reproductive value from some physical signs, and the state of her breasts provided a pretty good clue, but only if they were large enough to change their shape conspicuously with age”
(Why not because breasts are one of the main differences between males and females, thus larger breasts are more feminine and desirable?)

4. Why are men more violent?
“Crime and violence pay in reproductive terms, by allowing men to eliminate or intimidate their rivals and to accumulate resources to attract mates when they lack legitimate means to acquire such resources.”
(I don’t know about you, but I prefer my men out of jail).

Some other bold claims are that most suicide bombers are Muslim, girls of divorced parents hit puberty earlier, couples who have sons instead of daughters are less likely to get divorced, and as promised by the title- beautiful people have more daughters.

I have a hard time buying into a lot of their outrageous claims and completely ignoring the standard social science model, which credits human behavior to the environment and socialization. I was relieved to find that Statistics Professor Andrew Gelman blogged that “Kanazawa’s conjectures have not been demonstrated statistically” and that there may be some key errors in their conclusions. But I’m still a little disturbed by what I’ve read…

 

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