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Boys have trouble being ready for kindergarten and having self discipline. But those that do make it, even though they are fewer, tend to do better than their f
by jqm 11y ago
Boys have trouble being ready for kindergarten and having self discipline. But those that do make it, even though they are fewer, tend to do better than their female counterparts in later life.
Kindergarten activities and society's ideas of self discipline aren't really the conditions human life evolved under. Maybe fighting and looking for action/excitement are the same qualities that make boys successful later (if it doesn't kill or otherwise ruin them first).
Here is my theory (after hours of watching the discovery channel). You don't need many males biologically speaking. So for males, it's do or die from day one. Mostly it's die, but there are a few winners that pass their genes on. Women, as long as they are fertile, don't necessarily enter the same competition... they are the prizes.
Of course civilization doesn't work very well with all the males running around trying to kill each other and breed all the women, so we have laws and religions and kindergartens and diversity training classes. Which kind of puts males (and females maybe to an extent) in a biologically uncomfortable position. Those that succeed in this unnatural environment are those that channel their natural impulses into the pathways society has set up. The poor disadvantaged souls that aren't ready for kindergarten and wind up in prison for violent crimes? Well... they might have been leading the pack 20,000 years ago.
- lambdapie 11y agoDo you think this also implies that men have more incentive to become successful in their careers, if they choose the socially acceptable route? And if so, do you think this might partly explain why we see more men in high prestige/pay professions (e.g. tech)?
- tajen 11y agoShould we really keep using the word "incentive"? It keeps presenting any success as something that doesn't belong to them. If they've worked hard for it, it's theirs, whatever the incentives.
- vlehto 11y agoMy native language somewhat lacks this word. The translation exists but is mostly too clumsy for use. Our nation is also infamous for lacking ambition and fostering perverce incentives. I think all of these things are connected. Wittgenstein would probably agree.
- XorNot 11y agoEvopsyche is pseudo-science. EDIT: To expand - it is useless to speculate on psychology in an evolutionary context, because we have precisely 0 observation supported models of what anything was like many thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of evidence that a lot of modern narrative was constructed to suit the current gender roles. For example, "hunter-gatherer" is a complete misnomer. It should "gatherer-hunter". Because evidence shows that 80-90% of early nutrition was likely gathered by the tribe, and that hunting was exceptionally infrequent and probably a huge waste of resources the majority of time it was engaged in.
- paulmd 11y agoIt would certainly help if you would cite a source - I'm only coming up with blogs for the terms "gatherer-hunters". Is there any evidence that this diet is nutritionally optimal? If we don't have any long-term-supported models of what nutrition was like during the bulk of our evolution, then there can be no proof that humans can optimally function on whatever diets historically existed. There's pretty solid evidence that nutritional deprivation stunts both physical and mental development. There's also an overall trend towards higher IQ which has likely coincided with caloric and micronutrient satiation. Don't make the mistake of assuming that "archaic" can be substituted by "better than". in the past, people spent an awful lot of their lives deprived of developmental needs, and humanity is clearly trending upwards as these needs (nutritional and otherwise) are addressed. Other factors include the elimination of contaminants like environmental lead.
- tomp 11y ago> Evopsyche is pseudo-science. All of psychology is pseudo-science. I mean, two sigma. I can't even...
- TeMPOraL 11y agoDon't hyperbolize. It's not all. It's something around 95-99% of "soft science" research done in the last 50 decades. The older research was better, back before we turned the fields into a mix of signalling games and money pumps. But don't worry. In the recent years we've seen that apparently 90% of medical research from last few decades is likely bullshit too.