10 ms·

Is There Anything Good About Men?

232 points by Zarathu 17y ago

SapphireSun 17y ago
I think this is especially interesting in light of the fact that I and most people frequenting this website are interested in startups. This seems to be the essential male proclivity for seeking greatness at work. I wonder if that is why there seem to be fewer female founders (AFAIK). However, the worst thing to take away from this article would be that you can predict how an individual will react given their gender. That is definitely not true. Although, if you look at a group of people, you can probably predict some of the distribution.
chaosmachine 17y ago
Despite the linkbait-ish title, this is actually a very thorough and well written article.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  So it is, but isn't it a little more MetaFilter than HackerNews? At the same time I can't help a mild feeling of 'Say it ain't so, captain Obvious!' You only have to sit down with a good nature or anthropology documentary to see our social structures aren't all that complex or different from 'primitive' ones.
  - Retric 17y ago
    He actually talks about starting new company's so the link to HackerNews is not that hard to see. But a more interesting link why men become obsessed with specific specializations. For a well understood example consider how many partners a highly talented and successful musician might have over 30 years. The long term impact of effective birth control will probably have long term impact on the most successful approaches.
  - skorgu 17y ago
    Already posted to Metafilter two years ago (along with, frankly, an extremely unproductive debate in the comments): http://www.metafilter.com/64034/The-Waw-effect http://www.metafilter.com/64034/The-Waw-effect
- Retric 17y ago
  There was a lot of interesting ideas. On the Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) Somehow, I don't expect a lot of poor men to have survived.
  - aci 17y ago
    Titanic casualty figures: http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm
- robertk 17y ago
  This is one of those articles that could be labelled "worldview changing." I mean this in the sense that to gain knowledge of certain facts and arguments has immense corollaries for how one understands and interprets the world. Here are two other recent examples I can think of: - Moore's Law and the resulting implications regarding the "singularity" - "Happiness" turns out to not be a Platonic ideal or otherwise specially-valued conception, but simply an ever-present state with slight fluctuations (and then perhaps "getting" happiness refers to obtaining the highest positive fluctuation--which will however stabilize over some time). See the recent TED talk on synthesizing happiness. The key fact in this article, from which all other conclusions naturally seem to follow, is that males as a statistic exhibit much higher traits of extremity (in all aspects) due to the historically much higher probability of a woman being able to obtain a partner and reproduce.
  - iamelgringo 17y ago
    I think the author did have some interesting things to say. His idea of men going to extremes on either end of the productivity scale was interesting. His points that men occupy the top rungs of society as well as are considered expendable are interesting as well. Completely disregarding centuries/millena worth of cultural, historical and legal issues seems a little intellectually dishonest, however. Women have had difficulty for centuries across many cultures in obtaining property rights: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/property_rights.htm http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/pr... Women have had to fight to obtain the basic right to vote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage Women have also had to fight to obtain the right to higher education, work in certain categories of jobs, etc... Dismissing all the cultural, historical and legal evidence to the contrary, and chalking it all up to evolutionary pressures seems a little dishonest. It's hard to evolve aggressive women, when aggressive women are imprisoned or killed. You still the effects of that in some very conservative muslim countries. I imagine that would have some evolutionary pressure on culling certain aggressive genes in women. In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', 'construction workers', 'etc...'].
- vaksel 17y ago
  Thats the reality of the blogosphere, everyone uses linkbait titles now
- ezy 17y ago
  I disagree, I found it cliche'. It's a good blog-post, but not really world changing. Not to put you down -- I get caught up in these kinds of things too -- but what real evidence does he actually have to support his hypothesis? Sure, I could say that it isn't true because of this and that, but how valid would my argument be? ANgels on the head of a pin, and all that... What he does is list a couple surprising facts, then invent scenarios to fit the evidence. It's one of the most common rhetorical techniques on blogs and in pop-science speculative books, and whether the author means it or not -- it can turn intellectually dishonest very quickly without adding clear qualification in the text. I don't find this sort of stuff convincing or useful anymore. It's the same reason I have a natural distaste for Gladwell and his book-selling ilk -- this type of conjecture seems enlightening, and maybe you could get a few interesting ideas out of it.. but it's not supported. And in the end, you end up with stuff that's an interesting thought-experiment, but leaves you none the wiser.
jmtame 17y ago
"For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."
- amichail 17y ago
  In recent times, if you want to maximize your chances of finding a wife, it's better to have a safe career as an employee with a stable income. The only risk involved is in aiming for a career for which you have insufficient ability. Maybe it wasn't like that a long time ago. Maybe having an average job then did not generate enough wealth for the survival of a family.
  - Retric 17y ago
    Having one wife a 2-3 kids is still not the "best" genetic outcome. Many men have 10+ children from several women over there lives. I suspect that on average men who have one wife and no outside children average less than 2 children and because those children only get 1/2 their DNA it's not really success.
  - webwright 17y ago
    I think what you're saying is that ambition is not rewarded in the dating/mating game, which is decidedly not the case (today or a long time ago). If you took birth control out of the equation, which men do you think would father the most babies today in the US, men with high ambition or men who chose a "safe career" and "stable income"?
    - amichail 17y ago
      Nowadays, many couples don't want any children and this trend will just increase over time. As for long ago, it may be true that richer men had fathered more children. But you must also take into count the number of children fathered by the much larger number of men with average salaries.
TomOfTTB 17y ago
First, let me just say this paragraph alone made the article worth the read... Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man. The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women. With that said I don’t agree with the premise of this article. The problem I have with classic feminism AND the people making counter arguments (like this article) is it’s all inherently irrational. In the end the rational thing to do in society is to match each job with the person who has the most compatible skill set. Whether that person is man, woman, monkey, or whatever doesn’t really matter. Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts. In the end the most disturbing thing about this article, imho, is the fact that someone felt the need to right it in the first place. I mean, if there really is someone out there who thinks either sex is expendable is there really any point in trying to convince them otherwise?
- amichail 17y ago
  Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts. This makes no sense. Obviously when you say group X is better than group Y, you don't mean that the worst member of X is better than the best member of Y. You might mean that average ability in X is better than average ability in Y, or perhaps, that the best people in some domain tend to come from X.
jlees 17y ago
No. Next article!
Allocator2008 17y ago
Interesting stuff. However it would be better if he had not talked about groups or cultures competing, which is ultimately incidental, and talked instead of genes and memes competing. Evolution could give a damn about the group. It cares only about genes. Similarly, cultural (memetic) evolution could give a damn about the culture (or society or whatever). It only is concerned with the meme. Basically his thesis is that women are good at close-knit relationships, and me are good at broader networked relationships. So roughly, though women are protected and valued in society because of reproduction, men are valued in society for the culture they create with their penchant for wide social networking. Fair enough perhaps but this misses the point. I think rather than say woman have a usefulness to the group for the creation of offspring, both in terms of having in offspring and having a higher chance of reproducing, and men have a usefulness to the group because of their cultural contributions, I think we need to look at usefulness with respect to what. The "what" is the gene and the meme. Woman are good for the gene. If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article). So if I want to become part of evolution's junk DNA (and 95% of our DNA is junk, true "selfish genes"), then I have a better chance hanging out in the junk DNA of a female than a male. Women are good for me as a selfish gene. Women are useful to the selfish gene. Men? Well, hell, we can always invent pathogenesis in a pinch as a certain kind of shark in a zoo has done. Men are a nice to have to broaden the genome which enhances fitness, but we can ultimately do without them if we need to ("we" referring to the genes). On the other hand, if I am a selfish meme, if the author is right about men preferring wider social networks (like politics or religion) than I have a better shot infecting the brain of a man than a woman. Why? Because the dude I infect will know more dudes, and can pass me along to them before he gets eaten by a saber tooth cat. So do the author's conclusions make sense? I think so. But he needs to understand what "usefulness" means. Usefulness with respect to WHOM. If I am a selfish gene, women are more useful to me. If I am a selfish meme, men are more useful to me. However I would say though it is hard to put numbers on this, that the higher advantage chicks give the selfish gene versus dudes is greater than the higher advantage endowed by dudes to the memes versus the chicks. This is a guess, but it is my gut feeling. I think that tho genes find chicks more important and memes find dudes more important, a gene can live without the dudes more facily than a meme can live without the chicks. Since whereas women might not network quite with the same alacrity as men, still they network. Anyway. So I like this article. But better clarity could be had in my opinion by looking at the men vs. women thing from the perspective of genes and memes, which again, is all biological and cultural evolution respectively care about. So yes, if you are a meme, you like men. But you kind of can go both ways. If you are a gene, you really prefer women, and are less inclined to go both ways. :-)
alphazero 17y ago
"If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners?" A somewhat disturbing equation. A political prisoner is precisely the (potentially extra-) societal actor that is relegated to the "bottom" by the state through punitive measures. In any event, what's good about men is that we cut code; no 'Y', no 'hacker' ...
earl 17y ago
This also was utterly fascinating: "The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women? It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children. Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men." I had no idea... they must have tested mitochondrial dna or something?
- russell 17y ago
  Mitochondrial DNA would give you female diversity and the Y chromosome would give you male diversity. As to why the discrepancy? Male babies have a lower survival rate. Among the Amazonian Yanomami 40% of the men are murdered or killed in combat. That would lower your odds of being an ancestor.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    No: there are less total fathers than mothers, because more people have the same father than the same mother. People who haven't lived long enough to reproduce have no impact on that figure. There are extreme cases for both genders. While my paternal grandmother had seventeen kids, the comparatively extreme male case probably had well over a hundred. You can only give birth so many times, so the upper bound for women is lower.
    - jibiki 17y ago
      > People who haven't lived long enough to reproduce have no impact on that figure. They impact it indirectly. Say you have a tribe with 12 men and 12 women. 11 men die (before they can reproduce.) Then the next generation has 1 father and 12 mothers. One could say that the men's deaths caused more people to have the same father. So having a lot of men die before reproducing increases the strength of the effect, under the assumption that women will usually reproduce regardless. Obviously the root cause is that men can bear more offspring, that much is obvious.
dmix 17y ago
>"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it’s a hard sell." This is a great article but the premise of that argument doesn't make sense to me - even if he admits its a hard sell. I'm all for equality but paying someone more for doing less work to bring fairness seems illogical. If someone is genetically less motivated to be a workaholic then how does taking money from the person who does work an extra 10hrs a week, so the the other person can be paid more, make the world a fairer place? When I was 15 I accepted the fact that I'm wasn't born tall enough to play basketball professionally so I focused my efforts on something that I was capable of being great at.
- Retric 17y ago
  It was a joke. Men work longer hours, so if men work at the same rate then you pay them more. Saying there is a problem with people getting paid more for working more seems silly thus the joke.
  - lanaer 17y ago
    I guess the joke is that the author would like to work less?
    - dmix 17y ago
      Ha I completely missed that if that's true. Makes sense.
      - lanaer 17y ago
        No worries. I completely missed the joke, too, until Retric said it was there.
visitor4rmindia 17y ago
This is a very well written article. However, I must admit I don't really understand the wide interest the (western) world seems to have in the men vs women viewpoints. Perhaps (and I'm just guessing here), it is because the culture in the west has changed so fast that men and women are struggling to find new "places" in society. I don't know - it's just a guess. I'm going to pick on one point to discuss - the WAW effect (Women are Wonderful). >Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men. leading to: >perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness. Sounds reasonable until you see he has skipped over the middle: >It was not always thus. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version. It seems strange to draw such broad conclusions that completely ignore the past in favour of present circumstance. Plus I can tell you, in India the bias is more towards liking men than women. In any case, I wish I understood the fascination the west has with men vs women debates. The fact that men and women are different is obvious as is the fact that they tend to complement each other. The fact that men and women are similar is also obvious as is the fact that they tend to compete with each other. So what??!
- skinnymuch 17y ago
  India is pretty young. I remember your movies being incredibly prude in the mid 90s. I just watched a recent clip of a top boxoffice film in '08 and let's just say it was insanely racy compared to just ten years ago. I bet India will be having the same insane feminist driven society in 50 years.
  - visitor4rmindia 17y ago
    That's an excellent point! I really hope it doesn't work out that way but let's just wait and see.
alexkearns 17y ago
Brilliant!
radu_floricica 17y ago
Great stuff. I found a bit disconcerting the constant use of words like "fairness" and "morality". I tend to see them as "quick and dirty" models useful for everyday behavior. But in a scientific work, which is supposed to study the real thing, I find them not so fitting.
stcredzero 17y ago
Bjork went through this stage where she used to say, "Boys are only good for sex and beats."
sunjain 17y ago
This is a very interesting and well thought essay. Especially the stats and facts behind some of the positions he is taking are very interesting. With regards to creativity, I would tend to think that: if we look at nature, there seem to be two inherent trends emerge from time immemorial: 1) nature is interested mainly in prorogation of species(thru reproduction) and 2) at the subject level creativity seems to be one of the big driving factors. Meaning, if we look at every species, it is hardwired to reproduce, and lot of physical and non-physical characteristics/actions are specifically put in place by nature, so that species propagates(including humans). Second, behind lot of our endeavors, creativity is the underlying force. And so, for example art, music, scientific discovery (and even sports or programming), the underlying desire is to create(something). I tend to think, even behind the desire to be powerful (for example CEOs/other powerful positions etc, in present times is nothing but desire to create(or failure there of fulfilling this desire and thus reflecting in powergrab). And so in case of women, this particular desire(to create something) is inherently fulfilled(or fulfillable) by giving birth and creating a human being. And of lot their energies over centuries has gone towards this (and then tending and caring for their created product). Whereas men has no such outlet, so they need to express it somehow - hence this is also one reason why see men all over the place at top in lot of fields.
tc 17y ago
This paragraph struck me: "That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it's a hard sell." (emphasis mine) It takes a special kind of commitment to the truth to write an extended, compelling piece that ruthlessly undermines any rational basis for a position you support.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  I personally support extravagant pay for no work at all, however I don't think many people will give me a $5 mil salary for sitting at home all day. There's always the slim chance interest rates will hit %10,000 and I'll be able to cache an unemployment check for $5 mil, but that kind of defeats the prospect of being a millionaire by not working. It's quite easy to back a policy that rationally doesn't make sense. I agree with him, I support the principle of equal pay for both men and women, however equal pay is complete BS. There shouldn't even be equal pay between solely male or female workers, because quite simply no one does the exact same amount of work. Even if you're tasked with making 50 microchips a day and two people produce 50 microchips a day, there's still lots of other factors involved. What if one person's trained in first aid? What if one's a real douchbag and pisses everyone off, shouldn't they be punished because they aren't conducive to a company environment? The variables are huge, and unless two people are identical duplicates beamed down from space, then I don't believe they should be paid the same just because it's nice.
c00p3r 17y ago
I didn't exactly remember the quote, but there are another 'biological' prove of this concept - in case 'one man, hundred women' there are guaranteed survival for entire specie, while 'hundred men, one woman' is a lose case. In simple words, men are consumables, and this fact is known for ages. Especially in poor countries.
JeffJenkins 17y ago
I had a discussion about this with a friend recently. She linked me to this: http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performance_in_the_us_boy.php http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performanc... Of particular note: "The present study also indicated that the variance ratio for boys and girls is inverted for Asian American students -- the girls have higher variance. Thus, higher variance in boys is not always a robust finding." I can't speak to the significance of this, it being way out of my knowledge, but if true it certainly suggests something strange is going on.
codyrobbins 17y ago
When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted facts about gender equality in the interest of the truth, rather than what might be the socially acceptable answer. I was glad to find an article that posits some alternative hypotheses and simply acknowledges that the answers are not so simple as they might seem, and that discusses the issue from a neutral, non-activist viewpoint. I read Pinker's article in The New Republic, but this one talks about the issue more than about the discussion itself. One thing I kept expecting the talk to mention as I was reading was the importance of outliers. While I agree that comparisons of fundamental ability between the sexes, as opposed to factors such as motivation, is probably flawed, I think it might make the argument more immune to activist criticism to point out that there are always outliers in either group. Just because men may be, on average, more inclined to build large businesses, for example, does not mean that each man is more inclined to build large businesses than every woman — the curves overlap. Of course, the different shape of the distributions are important, as Baumeister pointed out (the male curves tend to be bimodal in certain cases whereas the female ones might be more normal). But there are always outliers, and so there will probably always be certain woman who are better at any given thing than most men; even though there may be more men than woman who are 'really good'. The entire talk discusses generalities and statistical tendencies, I know, but might easily be confused by less sophisticated readers as talking about individuals, which seems to be the common criticism of such talk.
tallpapab 17y ago
As Artie Johnson might have said, verrrry interestink, (long drag on cigarette, turn back to camera) but risky.
geebee 17y ago
This was an interesting article, and a very important counter-point to the notion that any difference between men and women is evidence of discrimination or at least socialization. That said, I think the article is a little extreme. I suspect that the genetic benefits of "playing it safe" for men and "risk taking" for women were greater throughout our evolutionary history than the author suggests. For starters, a brief glance out into the world suggests that women do take risks and seek power - sometimes through a man, but often independently. They may not build boats and sail to far away lands, but they sure will follow the yellow brick road to hollywood on a pipe dream of becoming a high status movie star or singer. The author used the example of Genghis Kahn as an example of why men would benefit from high status in a way women wouldn't - GK fathered hundreds (thousands?) of children, whereas a woman wouldn't be able to exploit this power in the same way. This isn't necessarily the case. Sure, a woman can't have hundreds of thousands of kids, but her sons may be able to. In fact, the biggest fights among Bonobo apes are between Females, usually over their son's status in the mating hierarchy. For men - I've read (and sorry, no cite here) that many hunting gathering societies are quite egalitarian, mainly because the leverage that great wealth and concentration of power aren't present. While good hunters do more mating than poor ones, the opportunity and benefit to shooting the moon with extreme risk taking may not be nearly as prevalent in our evolutionary history as the author suggests. Again, a brief glance out into the world suggests that the norm among males is to exhibit some risk taking and status seeking behavior - and perhaps a bit more so than women - but ultimately, I suggest that for at least some of our evolutionary history, many males had the opportunity of, well, behaving more like females, but acting fairly monogamous and playing it safe. Still a good article, I just think it overstates the case considerably.
kleevr 17y ago
So, I read this article early today. Then later, I was just googling interesting things, and thus surfing ensued... I landed here (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AAyQ7aF http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AA...), and noticing the nature of the comments/avatars. Do you think it would be possible to find "reliable"-confirmation that "even on the internet", 'female personalities', in situations where one would expect 'care ethics' to be emergent on the social graph (perhaps health care industry), could one find numerical-"confirmation" of the one-to-one vs one-to-many interactions hypothesized in the article? ...or is that just a cyclical thought... a bias?
azgolfer 17y ago
One important factor is that naturally a lot of women die in childbirth, So a successful man in the past would often go through multiple wives.

232 points by Zarathu 17y ago

I think this is especially interesting in light of the fact that I and most people frequenting this website are interested in startups. This seems to be the essential male proclivity for seeking greatness at work. I wonder if that is why there seem to be fewer female founders (AFAIK). However, the worst thing to take away from this article would be that you can predict how an individual will react given their gender. That is definitely not true. Although, if you look at a group of people, you can probably predict some of the distribution.

chaosmachine 17y ago

Despite the linkbait-ish title, this is actually a very thorough and well written article.

anigbrowl 17y ago
So it is, but isn't it a little more MetaFilter than HackerNews? At the same time I can't help a mild feeling of 'Say it ain't so, captain Obvious!' You only have to sit down with a good nature or anthropology documentary to see our social structures aren't all that complex or different from 'primitive' ones.
- Retric 17y ago
  He actually talks about starting new company's so the link to HackerNews is not that hard to see. But a more interesting link why men become obsessed with specific specializations. For a well understood example consider how many partners a highly talented and successful musician might have over 30 years. The long term impact of effective birth control will probably have long term impact on the most successful approaches.
- skorgu 17y ago
  Already posted to Metafilter two years ago (along with, frankly, an extremely unproductive debate in the comments): http://www.metafilter.com/64034/The-Waw-effect http://www.metafilter.com/64034/The-Waw-effect
Retric 17y ago
There was a lot of interesting ideas. On the Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) Somehow, I don't expect a lot of poor men to have survived.
- aci 17y ago
  Titanic casualty figures: http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm
robertk 17y ago
This is one of those articles that could be labelled "worldview changing." I mean this in the sense that to gain knowledge of certain facts and arguments has immense corollaries for how one understands and interprets the world. Here are two other recent examples I can think of: - Moore's Law and the resulting implications regarding the "singularity" - "Happiness" turns out to not be a Platonic ideal or otherwise specially-valued conception, but simply an ever-present state with slight fluctuations (and then perhaps "getting" happiness refers to obtaining the highest positive fluctuation--which will however stabilize over some time). See the recent TED talk on synthesizing happiness. The key fact in this article, from which all other conclusions naturally seem to follow, is that males as a statistic exhibit much higher traits of extremity (in all aspects) due to the historically much higher probability of a woman being able to obtain a partner and reproduce.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  I think the author did have some interesting things to say. His idea of men going to extremes on either end of the productivity scale was interesting. His points that men occupy the top rungs of society as well as are considered expendable are interesting as well. Completely disregarding centuries/millena worth of cultural, historical and legal issues seems a little intellectually dishonest, however. Women have had difficulty for centuries across many cultures in obtaining property rights: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/property_rights.htm http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/pr... Women have had to fight to obtain the basic right to vote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage Women have also had to fight to obtain the right to higher education, work in certain categories of jobs, etc... Dismissing all the cultural, historical and legal evidence to the contrary, and chalking it all up to evolutionary pressures seems a little dishonest. It's hard to evolve aggressive women, when aggressive women are imprisoned or killed. You still the effects of that in some very conservative muslim countries. I imagine that would have some evolutionary pressure on culling certain aggressive genes in women. In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', 'construction workers', 'etc...'].
vaksel 17y ago
Thats the reality of the blogosphere, everyone uses linkbait titles now
ezy 17y ago
I disagree, I found it cliche'. It's a good blog-post, but not really world changing. Not to put you down -- I get caught up in these kinds of things too -- but what real evidence does he actually have to support his hypothesis? Sure, I could say that it isn't true because of this and that, but how valid would my argument be? ANgels on the head of a pin, and all that... What he does is list a couple surprising facts, then invent scenarios to fit the evidence. It's one of the most common rhetorical techniques on blogs and in pop-science speculative books, and whether the author means it or not -- it can turn intellectually dishonest very quickly without adding clear qualification in the text. I don't find this sort of stuff convincing or useful anymore. It's the same reason I have a natural distaste for Gladwell and his book-selling ilk -- this type of conjecture seems enlightening, and maybe you could get a few interesting ideas out of it.. but it's not supported. And in the end, you end up with stuff that's an interesting thought-experiment, but leaves you none the wiser.

jmtame 17y ago

"For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."

amichail 17y ago
In recent times, if you want to maximize your chances of finding a wife, it's better to have a safe career as an employee with a stable income. The only risk involved is in aiming for a career for which you have insufficient ability. Maybe it wasn't like that a long time ago. Maybe having an average job then did not generate enough wealth for the survival of a family.
- Retric 17y ago
  Having one wife a 2-3 kids is still not the "best" genetic outcome. Many men have 10+ children from several women over there lives. I suspect that on average men who have one wife and no outside children average less than 2 children and because those children only get 1/2 their DNA it's not really success.
- webwright 17y ago
  I think what you're saying is that ambition is not rewarded in the dating/mating game, which is decidedly not the case (today or a long time ago). If you took birth control out of the equation, which men do you think would father the most babies today in the US, men with high ambition or men who chose a "safe career" and "stable income"?
  - amichail 17y ago
    Nowadays, many couples don't want any children and this trend will just increase over time. As for long ago, it may be true that richer men had fathered more children. But you must also take into count the number of children fathered by the much larger number of men with average salaries.

TomOfTTB 17y ago

First, let me just say this paragraph alone made the article worth the read... Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man. The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women. With that said I don’t agree with the premise of this article. The problem I have with classic feminism AND the people making counter arguments (like this article) is it’s all inherently irrational. In the end the rational thing to do in society is to match each job with the person who has the most compatible skill set. Whether that person is man, woman, monkey, or whatever doesn’t really matter. Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts. In the end the most disturbing thing about this article, imho, is the fact that someone felt the need to right it in the first place. I mean, if there really is someone out there who thinks either sex is expendable is there really any point in trying to convince them otherwise?

amichail 17y ago
Now some say these arguments have to be made to stop people who believe women are inherently inferior to men. Well the problem with that is you’re trying to use a rational argument to convince someone who has decided to disregard any rationality. It’s dumb foundingly obvious that some women are better than their male counterparts. This makes no sense. Obviously when you say group X is better than group Y, you don't mean that the worst member of X is better than the best member of Y. You might mean that average ability in X is better than average ability in Y, or perhaps, that the best people in some domain tend to come from X.

jlees 17y ago

No. Next article!

Allocator2008 17y ago

Interesting stuff. However it would be better if he had not talked about groups or cultures competing, which is ultimately incidental, and talked instead of genes and memes competing. Evolution could give a damn about the group. It cares only about genes. Similarly, cultural (memetic) evolution could give a damn about the culture (or society or whatever). It only is concerned with the meme. Basically his thesis is that women are good at close-knit relationships, and me are good at broader networked relationships. So roughly, though women are protected and valued in society because of reproduction, men are valued in society for the culture they create with their penchant for wide social networking. Fair enough perhaps but this misses the point. I think rather than say woman have a usefulness to the group for the creation of offspring, both in terms of having in offspring and having a higher chance of reproducing, and men have a usefulness to the group because of their cultural contributions, I think we need to look at usefulness with respect to what. The "what" is the gene and the meme. Woman are good for the gene. If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article). So if I want to become part of evolution's junk DNA (and 95% of our DNA is junk, true "selfish genes"), then I have a better chance hanging out in the junk DNA of a female than a male. Women are good for me as a selfish gene. Women are useful to the selfish gene. Men? Well, hell, we can always invent pathogenesis in a pinch as a certain kind of shark in a zoo has done. Men are a nice to have to broaden the genome which enhances fitness, but we can ultimately do without them if we need to ("we" referring to the genes). On the other hand, if I am a selfish meme, if the author is right about men preferring wider social networks (like politics or religion) than I have a better shot infecting the brain of a man than a woman. Why? Because the dude I infect will know more dudes, and can pass me along to them before he gets eaten by a saber tooth cat. So do the author's conclusions make sense? I think so. But he needs to understand what "usefulness" means. Usefulness with respect to WHOM. If I am a selfish gene, women are more useful to me. If I am a selfish meme, men are more useful to me. However I would say though it is hard to put numbers on this, that the higher advantage chicks give the selfish gene versus dudes is greater than the higher advantage endowed by dudes to the memes versus the chicks. This is a guess, but it is my gut feeling. I think that tho genes find chicks more important and memes find dudes more important, a gene can live without the dudes more facily than a meme can live without the chicks. Since whereas women might not network quite with the same alacrity as men, still they network. Anyway. So I like this article. But better clarity could be had in my opinion by looking at the men vs. women thing from the perspective of genes and memes, which again, is all biological and cultural evolution respectively care about. So yes, if you are a meme, you like men. But you kind of can go both ways. If you are a gene, you really prefer women, and are less inclined to go both ways. :-)

alphazero 17y ago

"If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners?" A somewhat disturbing equation. A political prisoner is precisely the (potentially extra-) societal actor that is relegated to the "bottom" by the state through punitive measures. In any event, what's good about men is that we cut code; no 'Y', no 'hacker' ...

earl 17y ago

This also was utterly fascinating: "The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women? It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children. Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men." I had no idea... they must have tested mitochondrial dna or something?

russell 17y ago
Mitochondrial DNA would give you female diversity and the Y chromosome would give you male diversity. As to why the discrepancy? Male babies have a lower survival rate. Among the Amazonian Yanomami 40% of the men are murdered or killed in combat. That would lower your odds of being an ancestor.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  No: there are less total fathers than mothers, because more people have the same father than the same mother. People who haven't lived long enough to reproduce have no impact on that figure. There are extreme cases for both genders. While my paternal grandmother had seventeen kids, the comparatively extreme male case probably had well over a hundred. You can only give birth so many times, so the upper bound for women is lower.
  - jibiki 17y ago
    > People who haven't lived long enough to reproduce have no impact on that figure. They impact it indirectly. Say you have a tribe with 12 men and 12 women. 11 men die (before they can reproduce.) Then the next generation has 1 father and 12 mothers. One could say that the men's deaths caused more people to have the same father. So having a lot of men die before reproducing increases the strength of the effect, under the assumption that women will usually reproduce regardless. Obviously the root cause is that men can bear more offspring, that much is obvious.

dmix 17y ago

>"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it’s a hard sell." This is a great article but the premise of that argument doesn't make sense to me - even if he admits its a hard sell. I'm all for equality but paying someone more for doing less work to bring fairness seems illogical. If someone is genetically less motivated to be a workaholic then how does taking money from the person who does work an extra 10hrs a week, so the the other person can be paid more, make the world a fairer place? When I was 15 I accepted the fact that I'm wasn't born tall enough to play basketball professionally so I focused my efforts on something that I was capable of being great at.

Retric 17y ago
It was a joke. Men work longer hours, so if men work at the same rate then you pay them more. Saying there is a problem with people getting paid more for working more seems silly thus the joke.
- lanaer 17y ago
  I guess the joke is that the author would like to work less?
  - dmix 17y ago
    Ha I completely missed that if that's true. Makes sense.
    - lanaer 17y ago
      No worries. I completely missed the joke, too, until Retric said it was there.

visitor4rmindia 17y ago

This is a very well written article. However, I must admit I don't really understand the wide interest the (western) world seems to have in the men vs women viewpoints. Perhaps (and I'm just guessing here), it is because the culture in the west has changed so fast that men and women are struggling to find new "places" in society. I don't know - it's just a guess. I'm going to pick on one point to discuss - the WAW effect (Women are Wonderful). >Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men. leading to: >perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness. Sounds reasonable until you see he has skipped over the middle: >It was not always thus. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version. It seems strange to draw such broad conclusions that completely ignore the past in favour of present circumstance. Plus I can tell you, in India the bias is more towards liking men than women. In any case, I wish I understood the fascination the west has with men vs women debates. The fact that men and women are different is obvious as is the fact that they tend to complement each other. The fact that men and women are similar is also obvious as is the fact that they tend to compete with each other. So what??!

skinnymuch 17y ago
India is pretty young. I remember your movies being incredibly prude in the mid 90s. I just watched a recent clip of a top boxoffice film in '08 and let's just say it was insanely racy compared to just ten years ago. I bet India will be having the same insane feminist driven society in 50 years.
- visitor4rmindia 17y ago
  That's an excellent point! I really hope it doesn't work out that way but let's just wait and see.

alexkearns 17y ago

Brilliant!

radu_floricica 17y ago

Great stuff. I found a bit disconcerting the constant use of words like "fairness" and "morality". I tend to see them as "quick and dirty" models useful for everyday behavior. But in a scientific work, which is supposed to study the real thing, I find them not so fitting.

stcredzero 17y ago

Bjork went through this stage where she used to say, "Boys are only good for sex and beats."

sunjain 17y ago

This is a very interesting and well thought essay. Especially the stats and facts behind some of the positions he is taking are very interesting. With regards to creativity, I would tend to think that: if we look at nature, there seem to be two inherent trends emerge from time immemorial: 1) nature is interested mainly in prorogation of species(thru reproduction) and 2) at the subject level creativity seems to be one of the big driving factors. Meaning, if we look at every species, it is hardwired to reproduce, and lot of physical and non-physical characteristics/actions are specifically put in place by nature, so that species propagates(including humans). Second, behind lot of our endeavors, creativity is the underlying force. And so, for example art, music, scientific discovery (and even sports or programming), the underlying desire is to create(something). I tend to think, even behind the desire to be powerful (for example CEOs/other powerful positions etc, in present times is nothing but desire to create(or failure there of fulfilling this desire and thus reflecting in powergrab). And so in case of women, this particular desire(to create something) is inherently fulfilled(or fulfillable) by giving birth and creating a human being. And of lot their energies over centuries has gone towards this (and then tending and caring for their created product). Whereas men has no such outlet, so they need to express it somehow - hence this is also one reason why see men all over the place at top in lot of fields.

tc 17y ago

This paragraph struck me: "That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it's a hard sell." (emphasis mine) It takes a special kind of commitment to the truth to write an extended, compelling piece that ruthlessly undermines any rational basis for a position you support.

electromagnetic 17y ago
I personally support extravagant pay for no work at all, however I don't think many people will give me a $5 mil salary for sitting at home all day. There's always the slim chance interest rates will hit %10,000 and I'll be able to cache an unemployment check for $5 mil, but that kind of defeats the prospect of being a millionaire by not working. It's quite easy to back a policy that rationally doesn't make sense. I agree with him, I support the principle of equal pay for both men and women, however equal pay is complete BS. There shouldn't even be equal pay between solely male or female workers, because quite simply no one does the exact same amount of work. Even if you're tasked with making 50 microchips a day and two people produce 50 microchips a day, there's still lots of other factors involved. What if one person's trained in first aid? What if one's a real douchbag and pisses everyone off, shouldn't they be punished because they aren't conducive to a company environment? The variables are huge, and unless two people are identical duplicates beamed down from space, then I don't believe they should be paid the same just because it's nice.

c00p3r 17y ago

I didn't exactly remember the quote, but there are another 'biological' prove of this concept - in case 'one man, hundred women' there are guaranteed survival for entire specie, while 'hundred men, one woman' is a lose case. In simple words, men are consumables, and this fact is known for ages. Especially in poor countries.

JeffJenkins 17y ago

I had a discussion about this with a friend recently. She linked me to this: http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performance_in_the_us_boy.php http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performanc... Of particular note: "The present study also indicated that the variance ratio for boys and girls is inverted for Asian American students -- the girls have higher variance. Thus, higher variance in boys is not always a robust finding." I can't speak to the significance of this, it being way out of my knowledge, but if true it certainly suggests something strange is going on.

codyrobbins 17y ago

When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted facts about gender equality in the interest of the truth, rather than what might be the socially acceptable answer. I was glad to find an article that posits some alternative hypotheses and simply acknowledges that the answers are not so simple as they might seem, and that discusses the issue from a neutral, non-activist viewpoint. I read Pinker's article in The New Republic, but this one talks about the issue more than about the discussion itself. One thing I kept expecting the talk to mention as I was reading was the importance of outliers. While I agree that comparisons of fundamental ability between the sexes, as opposed to factors such as motivation, is probably flawed, I think it might make the argument more immune to activist criticism to point out that there are always outliers in either group. Just because men may be, on average, more inclined to build large businesses, for example, does not mean that each man is more inclined to build large businesses than every woman — the curves overlap. Of course, the different shape of the distributions are important, as Baumeister pointed out (the male curves tend to be bimodal in certain cases whereas the female ones might be more normal). But there are always outliers, and so there will probably always be certain woman who are better at any given thing than most men; even though there may be more men than woman who are 'really good'. The entire talk discusses generalities and statistical tendencies, I know, but might easily be confused by less sophisticated readers as talking about individuals, which seems to be the common criticism of such talk.

tallpapab 17y ago

As Artie Johnson might have said, verrrry interestink, (long drag on cigarette, turn back to camera) but risky.

geebee 17y ago

This was an interesting article, and a very important counter-point to the notion that any difference between men and women is evidence of discrimination or at least socialization. That said, I think the article is a little extreme. I suspect that the genetic benefits of "playing it safe" for men and "risk taking" for women were greater throughout our evolutionary history than the author suggests. For starters, a brief glance out into the world suggests that women do take risks and seek power - sometimes through a man, but often independently. They may not build boats and sail to far away lands, but they sure will follow the yellow brick road to hollywood on a pipe dream of becoming a high status movie star or singer. The author used the example of Genghis Kahn as an example of why men would benefit from high status in a way women wouldn't - GK fathered hundreds (thousands?) of children, whereas a woman wouldn't be able to exploit this power in the same way. This isn't necessarily the case. Sure, a woman can't have hundreds of thousands of kids, but her sons may be able to. In fact, the biggest fights among Bonobo apes are between Females, usually over their son's status in the mating hierarchy. For men - I've read (and sorry, no cite here) that many hunting gathering societies are quite egalitarian, mainly because the leverage that great wealth and concentration of power aren't present. While good hunters do more mating than poor ones, the opportunity and benefit to shooting the moon with extreme risk taking may not be nearly as prevalent in our evolutionary history as the author suggests. Again, a brief glance out into the world suggests that the norm among males is to exhibit some risk taking and status seeking behavior - and perhaps a bit more so than women - but ultimately, I suggest that for at least some of our evolutionary history, many males had the opportunity of, well, behaving more like females, but acting fairly monogamous and playing it safe. Still a good article, I just think it overstates the case considerably.

kleevr 17y ago

So, I read this article early today. Then later, I was just googling interesting things, and thus surfing ensued... I landed here (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AAyQ7aF http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090119104804AA...), and noticing the nature of the comments/avatars. Do you think it would be possible to find "reliable"-confirmation that "even on the internet", 'female personalities', in situations where one would expect 'care ethics' to be emergent on the social graph (perhaps health care industry), could one find numerical-"confirmation" of the one-to-one vs one-to-many interactions hypothesized in the article? ...or is that just a cyclical thought... a bias?

azgolfer 17y ago

One important factor is that naturally a lot of women die in childbirth, So a successful man in the past would often go through multiple wives.