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Unfortunately, your explanation does not go the whole way. Consider the evolution of biological genes: a) Men and women share mostly the same genes (the y chr

Unfortunately, your explanation does not go the whole way. Consider the evolution of biological genes: a) Men and women share mostly the same genes (the y chromosome is a desolate wasteland), and there are few (if any) known mechanisms by which gene merging is different for male and female humans. b) Dominant, decisive, intelligent, women are likely to share similar evolutionary advantages to men. Note that I leave high status out of this equation. Compare the mathematics to the evolution of culture: a) There are numerous known cultural differences between what men and women grow up with. There are also many known mechanisms for which cultural meme merging is different for men and for women. Our culture directs different memes towards men and women, to a far greater extent than gene selection does (if it does at all). b) High status women are in fact less likely to have many kids, as is shown by an abundance of demographic data. Therefore, the mechanism by which they can spread what's responsible for 'high-statusness' is limited mostly to memes. But culture strongly moderates this influence of dominant, high status, intelligent women. Consider the treatment Hilary Clinton is getting now. Even in a more ordinary circumstance, male bosses can wield power in a way that would label their female cohorts 'ice queens'. So the influence of powerful women is labeled a bad thing, and the adoption of those values by other women is severely inhibited. --- So, for this case, at first glance, it seems like the evolution of cultural memes completely dominates the influence of the evolution of biological genes. Does anyone see a hole in this argument?

whacked_new 18y ago
Yes. The reference to cultural memes is a chicken an egg argument; by claiming "complete domination" you essentially overlook the origin of said memes. I'm not armed with sources, but I daresay that nature has given everything specialization, so much so that applying the same ideas to the sexes is not the slightest bit strange. More strongly said, there is nothing surprising when one sex exhibits traits much more ostensibly than another. While I am not referring to the superiority of a specific sex, specie, or trait, it actually seems more unnatural to claim equality on things like attitudes towards risk and attribute difference to culture. Back to your arguments specifically. These come from a fuzzy memory, but they provide a complementary view. a. Even a single genetic difference can lead to drastically different results. We are close enough to chimps. Men and women have different brains; different areas activate up when shown the same picture. It's not a stretch to say that risk evaluation is done differently as well. b. I recall at least two matriarchial societies in which women called the shots. Nevertheless, the men were still the fighters, which is perhaps the most competitive, aggressive, and risky behavior possible. Women can be dominant, intelligent, and decisive, and still partake in less adrenaline-laden activities. There may be something else in the motivation. a. I think this is a good and important point, and am not trying to underplay it, but this argument is usually the convenient one, and the hardest to make any systematic observation. Thought experiment: try comparing startup founder numbers of Japanese men to those of American women. b. Again, true enough, but also: the sperm of a high-status males, whom are shown to produce more offspring, still hold good chance to yield daughters. Does this poke a hole in your argument?
- DaniFong 18y ago
  you essentially overlook the origin of said memes. I don't overlook the origin. Your thrust seems to be that culture only magnifies innate difference. Perhaps this is true in simple cases, but I think that there are particular examples where culture takes on a mind of its own. I point out that existing cultural bias might be due to biological bias interacting with environmental factors long extinct. This bias is encoded and preserved, unlike almost everything else in the animal kingdom, in human culture, which can be perpetuated and passed on. Existing cultural bias might just be a carry over from prehistoric times, entirely irrelevant to whether or not there are now meaningful differences in aptitude, in this, the present. it actually seems more unnatural to claim equality on things like attitudes towards risk and attribute difference to culture. I never claimed equality, I simply pointed out that the differences you'd expect due to biological selection are smaller in magnitude than those due to cultural selection, and so therefore born-attitudes towards things like risk should be largely outweighed by cultural ones. My mind wouldn't scream inconsistency if I heard that women, on average, were intrinsically, say, 30% less likely to take big risks. That kind of difference seems reasonable. But the data on entrepreneurship implies a difference many dozens of times that. I don't think this magnitude is consistent with other risky behaviors -- many women do risky things as well, like dating strange men in remote places, running away from home, abusing hard drugs, or keeping a pregnancy in ill-health. This difference in magnitude may be explained by cultural factors, because men have greater cultural support when projecting high-status creating cultural memes (especially those encouraging risky behavior). this argument is usually the convenient one Perhaps I was unclear. This is a very different argument than the one typically given, because it uses the very same mathematics that the evolutionary biologists use, only applied to culture. And what you find is that the factors in culture -- the influence of the same kind of mathematics, is much stronger. the sperm of a high-status males, whom are shown to produce more offspring, still hold good chance to yield daughters. Can you explain the relevance of this?
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    The easiest way to prove something is genetic rather than cultural is to examine different cultures throughout the world, especially isolated ones like pygmies or aborigines. The paradigm of man as provider and woman as nurturer, and the mating ramifications of that (i.e. women preferring men who are able to provide, which most closely translates in our society to wealth, and men preferring women more fit to raise children, which in our society most closely translates to healthy appearance) are virtually universal. That would strongly suggest that it is genetic rather than cultural.
mattmaroon 18y ago
a) irrelevant b) I don't think anyone suggested that "dominant, decisive, intelligent, women" are any less likely to start startups than "dominant, decisive, intelligent" men. (I'd define the characteristics that drive one to start up differently, but you get the picture. However you define it, it may be that fewer women have those characteristics). a) ok. undoubtedly a part. b) Perhaps you have cause and effect bakcwards. Perhaps women with fewer kids are more likely to become high status. Perhaps both are just correlated and caused by some other factor. And Hillary Clinton is getting a lot of the treatment she is now because her refusal to concede for a long time when it was clear that Obama would be the nominee has been potentially very destructive to her party. I'm not so sure a male candidate who did the same thing would be thought of any better, or at least not much.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  a) irrelevant with respect to what? The point of this is that it contrasts with the case for memes. Memes are directed towards the different groups much more strongly, and so by that force you'd assume that they're more likely divergent. I don't think anyone suggested that "dominant, decisive, intelligent, women" are any less likely to start startups than "dominant, decisive, intelligent" men. That is in fact more along the lines of what i'm suggesting. I think that conditioned on the same startup traits, women are actually less likely to start startups due to cultural factors, of which one of the strongest is the cultural disincentive to risk. My specific claim is that the cultural disincentive strongly outweighs the innate tendency. I'd define the characteristics that drive one to start up differently I too, but these were the traits on topic. b) Perhaps you have cause and effect backwards. My central hypothesis was that women, currently, face more resistance than men in spreading any memes that create high 'provider status'. And that under the model postulated, you'd expect the evolution of memes to dominate genes. And Hillary Clinton is getting a lot of the treatment she is now because her refusal to concede for a long time when it was clear that Obama would be the nominee has been potentially very destructive to her party. Her maltreatment long preceded that moment -- the media has consistently typecast her as 'icequeen' or 'man', and I have heard that sentiment abundantly reflected.
  - 18y ago
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
rsheridan6 18y ago
a) Genes are not expressed the same way in men and women. To oversimplify a little, if a gene is only activated in the presence of male levels of testosterone, it will not be expressed in women. In the long run, natural selection hooks up genes that are beneficial in men and harmful in women to testosterone-sensitive gene promoters, though this may take a long time, and in the meantime you may end up with women with deleterious traits that were beneficial for their fathers. While we're at it, similar mechanisms account for the difference between a neuron and a muscle fiber, which share identical genomes. b) A very successful man can end up with hundreds of concubines and children. A significant percentage of Asians are direct descendents of Genghis Khan, and there was a King Niall in Ulster who is said to be an ancestor of 25% of the men in Northwest Ireland. Monogamy somewhat limits this in our culture, but most people for most of the time humans have existed have been polygynous. For a woman, this is impossible - she can have a dozen or so babies at best.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  Gene expression is a good point. It was in the back of my mind (and I glossed over it completely), but you've succinctly explained why it's actually an important issue. Do you have a notion as to the relative time for gene promoters to hook to a gene with sex dependent fitness? I imagine that the mathematics of evolution would depend to a large degree on gene <-> selector or gene <-> meme coupling.
mcescher 18y ago
> b) Dominant, decisive, intelligent, women are likely to share similar evolutionary advantages to men. Unfortunately women like that are incompatible with many human cultures. E.g. try being a dominant, assertive woman someplace with Sharia law. Historically, those traits were bad for survival in many parts of the world. Or women were treated like chattel and were property of men, and they didn't get a say in who they mated with. So their intelligent genes would be diluted. Or look at Darfur -- it's rape rape rape all the time. Being good at Sudoku requires a certain level of societal stability before it's really that handy.
jimbokun 18y ago
"Even in a more ordinary circumstance, male bosses can wield power in a way that would label their female cohorts 'ice queens'." I suspect that those male bosses are equally called names and disliked. They just don't give a damn. I wonder if women bosses just have a bigger aversion to being strongly disliked? (Rhetorical question here. I really don't know. I've had several different male and female bosses at this point, but haven't really experienced behavior from either that would make me want to call them bad names.)

whacked_new 18y ago

Yes. The reference to cultural memes is a chicken an egg argument; by claiming "complete domination" you essentially overlook the origin of said memes. I'm not armed with sources, but I daresay that nature has given everything specialization, so much so that applying the same ideas to the sexes is not the slightest bit strange. More strongly said, there is nothing surprising when one sex exhibits traits much more ostensibly than another. While I am not referring to the superiority of a specific sex, specie, or trait, it actually seems more unnatural to claim equality on things like attitudes towards risk and attribute difference to culture. Back to your arguments specifically. These come from a fuzzy memory, but they provide a complementary view. a. Even a single genetic difference can lead to drastically different results. We are close enough to chimps. Men and women have different brains; different areas activate up when shown the same picture. It's not a stretch to say that risk evaluation is done differently as well. b. I recall at least two matriarchial societies in which women called the shots. Nevertheless, the men were still the fighters, which is perhaps the most competitive, aggressive, and risky behavior possible. Women can be dominant, intelligent, and decisive, and still partake in less adrenaline-laden activities. There may be something else in the motivation. a. I think this is a good and important point, and am not trying to underplay it, but this argument is usually the convenient one, and the hardest to make any systematic observation. Thought experiment: try comparing startup founder numbers of Japanese men to those of American women. b. Again, true enough, but also: the sperm of a high-status males, whom are shown to produce more offspring, still hold good chance to yield daughters. Does this poke a hole in your argument?

DaniFong 18y ago
you essentially overlook the origin of said memes. I don't overlook the origin. Your thrust seems to be that culture only magnifies innate difference. Perhaps this is true in simple cases, but I think that there are particular examples where culture takes on a mind of its own. I point out that existing cultural bias might be due to biological bias interacting with environmental factors long extinct. This bias is encoded and preserved, unlike almost everything else in the animal kingdom, in human culture, which can be perpetuated and passed on. Existing cultural bias might just be a carry over from prehistoric times, entirely irrelevant to whether or not there are now meaningful differences in aptitude, in this, the present. it actually seems more unnatural to claim equality on things like attitudes towards risk and attribute difference to culture. I never claimed equality, I simply pointed out that the differences you'd expect due to biological selection are smaller in magnitude than those due to cultural selection, and so therefore born-attitudes towards things like risk should be largely outweighed by cultural ones. My mind wouldn't scream inconsistency if I heard that women, on average, were intrinsically, say, 30% less likely to take big risks. That kind of difference seems reasonable. But the data on entrepreneurship implies a difference many dozens of times that. I don't think this magnitude is consistent with other risky behaviors -- many women do risky things as well, like dating strange men in remote places, running away from home, abusing hard drugs, or keeping a pregnancy in ill-health. This difference in magnitude may be explained by cultural factors, because men have greater cultural support when projecting high-status creating cultural memes (especially those encouraging risky behavior). this argument is usually the convenient one Perhaps I was unclear. This is a very different argument than the one typically given, because it uses the very same mathematics that the evolutionary biologists use, only applied to culture. And what you find is that the factors in culture -- the influence of the same kind of mathematics, is much stronger. the sperm of a high-status males, whom are shown to produce more offspring, still hold good chance to yield daughters. Can you explain the relevance of this?
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  The easiest way to prove something is genetic rather than cultural is to examine different cultures throughout the world, especially isolated ones like pygmies or aborigines. The paradigm of man as provider and woman as nurturer, and the mating ramifications of that (i.e. women preferring men who are able to provide, which most closely translates in our society to wealth, and men preferring women more fit to raise children, which in our society most closely translates to healthy appearance) are virtually universal. That would strongly suggest that it is genetic rather than cultural.

mattmaroon 18y ago

a) irrelevant b) I don't think anyone suggested that "dominant, decisive, intelligent, women" are any less likely to start startups than "dominant, decisive, intelligent" men. (I'd define the characteristics that drive one to start up differently, but you get the picture. However you define it, it may be that fewer women have those characteristics). a) ok. undoubtedly a part. b) Perhaps you have cause and effect bakcwards. Perhaps women with fewer kids are more likely to become high status. Perhaps both are just correlated and caused by some other factor. And Hillary Clinton is getting a lot of the treatment she is now because her refusal to concede for a long time when it was clear that Obama would be the nominee has been potentially very destructive to her party. I'm not so sure a male candidate who did the same thing would be thought of any better, or at least not much.

DaniFong 18y ago
a) irrelevant with respect to what? The point of this is that it contrasts with the case for memes. Memes are directed towards the different groups much more strongly, and so by that force you'd assume that they're more likely divergent. I don't think anyone suggested that "dominant, decisive, intelligent, women" are any less likely to start startups than "dominant, decisive, intelligent" men. That is in fact more along the lines of what i'm suggesting. I think that conditioned on the same startup traits, women are actually less likely to start startups due to cultural factors, of which one of the strongest is the cultural disincentive to risk. My specific claim is that the cultural disincentive strongly outweighs the innate tendency. I'd define the characteristics that drive one to start up differently I too, but these were the traits on topic. b) Perhaps you have cause and effect backwards. My central hypothesis was that women, currently, face more resistance than men in spreading any memes that create high 'provider status'. And that under the model postulated, you'd expect the evolution of memes to dominate genes. And Hillary Clinton is getting a lot of the treatment she is now because her refusal to concede for a long time when it was clear that Obama would be the nominee has been potentially very destructive to her party. Her maltreatment long preceded that moment -- the media has consistently typecast her as 'icequeen' or 'man', and I have heard that sentiment abundantly reflected.
- 18y ago

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

rsheridan6 18y ago

a) Genes are not expressed the same way in men and women. To oversimplify a little, if a gene is only activated in the presence of male levels of testosterone, it will not be expressed in women. In the long run, natural selection hooks up genes that are beneficial in men and harmful in women to testosterone-sensitive gene promoters, though this may take a long time, and in the meantime you may end up with women with deleterious traits that were beneficial for their fathers. While we're at it, similar mechanisms account for the difference between a neuron and a muscle fiber, which share identical genomes. b) A very successful man can end up with hundreds of concubines and children. A significant percentage of Asians are direct descendents of Genghis Khan, and there was a King Niall in Ulster who is said to be an ancestor of 25% of the men in Northwest Ireland. Monogamy somewhat limits this in our culture, but most people for most of the time humans have existed have been polygynous. For a woman, this is impossible - she can have a dozen or so babies at best.

DaniFong 18y ago
Gene expression is a good point. It was in the back of my mind (and I glossed over it completely), but you've succinctly explained why it's actually an important issue. Do you have a notion as to the relative time for gene promoters to hook to a gene with sex dependent fitness? I imagine that the mathematics of evolution would depend to a large degree on gene <-> selector or gene <-> meme coupling.

mcescher 18y ago

> b) Dominant, decisive, intelligent, women are likely to share similar evolutionary advantages to men. Unfortunately women like that are incompatible with many human cultures. E.g. try being a dominant, assertive woman someplace with Sharia law. Historically, those traits were bad for survival in many parts of the world. Or women were treated like chattel and were property of men, and they didn't get a say in who they mated with. So their intelligent genes would be diluted. Or look at Darfur -- it's rape rape rape all the time. Being good at Sudoku requires a certain level of societal stability before it's really that handy.

jimbokun 18y ago

"Even in a more ordinary circumstance, male bosses can wield power in a way that would label their female cohorts 'ice queens'." I suspect that those male bosses are equally called names and disliked. They just don't give a damn. I wonder if women bosses just have a bigger aversion to being strongly disliked? (Rhetorical question here. I really don't know. I've had several different male and female bosses at this point, but haven't really experienced behavior from either that would make me want to call them bad names.)