"Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened, and the fossil record and the molecular biology all confirm it. And yet, in this country, the United States, which is the leading scientific country in the world, we have people who are not only ignorant of science, but who are actively hostile to it and to the scientific method. And that is a serious problem, because science is not just a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility."
-- Carl Sagan
People who think evolution isn’t really are almost always just not understanding evolution, and the ones who do understand it and still think it isn’t real are willfully ignorant and stupid.
Evolution is not a god, it’s not a conscious act, it’s not a thing that does something. It’s just the byproduct of reproduction. All reproduction has the potential for mutations, and all sexual reproduction necessarily combines different traits and aspects of things to create something new. The mutations that are more beneficial, and the combinations of traits that are more beneficial, will allow a creature to survive longer. A creature that survives longer will naturally reproduce more than other creatures, and so their traits will be more likely to get passed on to new generations. Eventually, when enough of these new and more useful traits stack up, a species will be necessarily different from others that didn’t have those changes.
If a population of cats get separated, one living in an extremely cold climate and one living in an extremely warm climate, those cats will necessarily diverge and become two different species of cats. And you will understand that to be true if you just think about it. Let’s say that how they got separated a group of the cats in the colder climate split off and moved down to the warmer one. The fluffiest cats in that group will naturally start to die off, and the ones with less fur will survive longer and reproduce more. More fur means more retained heat, which is not good in hot climates. Eventually, the cats in the warmer climate will have little to no fur, and will be noticeably different from the cats in the colder climate. They will be a new species.
That’s literally the whole idea behind evolution! It’s not a contradiction of god, unless you’re stupid! We can literally see it happening, there have been studies. One such study looked at mice. They had mice in the desert and mice in a darker area. The mice in the desert were tan, and when they moved to the darker area, they got eaten by birds more often because they stood out. This created environmental pressure for darker fur, and so mice with darker fur survived longer and reproduced more, and eventually they were the most common mouse in that area. It’s literally just cause and effect.
If you still think evolution isn’t real, you’re just stupid and willfully ignorant.
Jon Haidt: As I said, if you sacralize your political ideology's heroes, you cannot think straight, and this is where we are in the sciences.
It's obvious that if you're a social conservative, Evangelical, young Earther creationist, you probably shouldn't be going into a PhD program in biology or geology, okay. It's just going to be really hard for you to deal with reality if you deny evolution and the age of the Earth, okay. You shouldn't go into American history if you say America is the greatest country on Earth and it simply cannot have committed war crimes. We just don't do that. I mean that's-- that should be a disqualification.
But what about on the left? Suppose you had students coming in who deny that IQ matters. Not anymore, but for decades it's just very uncomfortable, because there are race differences in IQ, the general view is IQ is a bad test, it doesn't measure, it doesn't matter, we can't allow that IQ matters. Because IQ is heritable, we can't allow that heritability matters. Environment has to be everything. The left has always believed that environment can overcome everything else so, can you do social science if you deny heritability, you think everything is environment when it isn't?
The left is full of sex difference deniers. Hormones are fine for other animals, hormones affect behavior in other animals, but how sexist of you to suggest that male and female differences could in any way be due to the fact that they exposed to different hormones prenatally? That just is ruled out of bounds. Now it's not that the left denies evolution. That's fine for other animals. But evolutionary psychology? Well, that's almost sexist and racist. No, evolution didn't shape human beings.
And last, the biggest area in my field is the study of stereotypes and prejudice. And we're trying-- it's an important social problem but we try to solve it while not allowing anybody to even mention the largest cause of stereotypes and prejudice. There is a small research literature showing that the reason why people hold stereotypes is because they're accurate. Most stereotypes do correspond to some measurable, observable fact about the environment. Now, there are often misinterpretations, the stereotype often lingers long after the reality changes, so I'm not saying the stereotypes are perfectly accurate. But I'm saying a big part of the story is that people are really good at detecting differences between groups. We're intuitive Baysians. We pick up frequencies. You can't stop the brain from doing this. So, suppose you had a whole group of people coming into social psychology who were the equivalent of young Earth creationists, who say, "I'm going to study stereotyping and prejudice, but I'm going to just rule in advance that there are no differences between groups. And now I'm going to study what's left." That's where we are.
So, my point is that all groups value the truth, okay. Every ideological group believes it values the truth. All groups hold something sacred. And if you hold something sacred then, as I've said, no trade-offs, no nuance. That means that your sacred values are going to conflict with the truth. And when that happens, all groups are the same. They throw truth under the bus and they go with their sacred values. And that's where we are.
So, I hope I've shown you that political homogeneity, now that we no longer have conservatives in some academic Fields, it's a problem. It's bad for our science, we need to clean up our act. We talk a lot about the value of diversity; intellectual diversity is the most important kind of diversity there could be.
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Full lecture: 2013 Boyarsky Lecture by Jonathan Haidt, PhD
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What he's describing is faith. Beliefs based on faith. If you think everything is "a social construct" - such as that it's fine for monkeys to choose sex-typical toys and engage in sex-typical activities, but "I aIn'T nO mOnKeY!!1!" - even if you're an atheist, you're dealing in faith.
"We've unearthed millions of fossils around the world, which clearly support the process of evolution.
Denying this fact is a denial of reality itself."
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Whenever they ask for "proof" of evolution, they don't mean actual evolution. They want you to prove their dumbass strawman version, where a dog gives birth to a cat, an ape turns into a man, or a crocodile develops the body of a duck.
We all know what is meant to happen when the genders become more equal. As women smash glass ceilings and open up education, other differenc
By: Tom Whipple
Published: Sept 15, 2018
We all know what is meant to happen when the genders become more equal. As women smash glass ceilings and open up education, other differences should disappear too.
Without the psychological shackles of being the second sex, women are free to think and behave as they want; to become physicists or chief executives, unfettered by outdated stereotypes.
Yet to the confusion of psychologists, we are seeing the reverse. The more gender equality in a country, the greater the difference in the way men and women think. It could be called the patriarchy paradox.
Two new studies have again demonstrated this counterintuitive result, meaning it is now one of the best-established findings in psychology, even if no one can properly explain it.
In a survey of about 130,000 people from a total of 22 countries, scientists from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have shown that countries with more women in the workforce, parliament and education are also those in which men and women diverge more on psychological traits.
Separately, a research paper published by the online journal Plos One found that in countries ranked as less gender equal by the World Economic Forum, women were more likely to choose traditionally male courses such as the sciences or online study.
Erik Mac Giolla, the lead researcher in the first study, said that, if anything, the results found a bigger difference than in previous work. Personality is typically measured using the “big five” traits. These are openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. Women typically score higher on all of them but there is always overlap.
In China, which still scores low on gender parity, the personality overlap between men and women was found to be about 84 per cent. In the Netherlands, which is among the most gender equal societies, it turned out to be just 61 per cent.
“It seems that as gender equality increases, as countries become more progressive, men and women gravitate towards traditional gender norms,” Dr Mac Giolla said. “Why is this happening? I really don’t know.”
Steve Stewart-Williams, from the University of Nottingham, said that there was now too much evidence of this effect to consider it a fluke. “It’s not just personality,” he said. “The same counterintuitive pattern has been found in many other areas, including attachment styles, choice of academic speciality, choice of occupation, crying frequency, depression, happiness and interest in casual sex.
“It’s definitely a challenge to one prominent stream of feminist theory, according to which almost all the differences between the sexes come from cultural training and social roles.”
Dr Stewart-Williams, author of The Ape That Understood the Universe, said an explanation could be that those living in wealthier and more gender-equal societies had greater freedom to pursue their own interests and behave more individually, so magnifying natural differences.
Whatever the reason for the findings, he argued that they meant we should stop thinking of sex differences in society as being automatically a product of oppression. “These differences may be indicators of the opposite: a relatively free and fair society,” he said. If this contradicted some feminist analyses, he said it was also a surprise to pretty much everyone else too. “It seems completely reasonable to think that, in cultures where men and women are treated very differently and have very different opportunities, they’ll end up a lot more different than they would in cultures where they’re treated more similarly and have a similar range of opportunities.
“But it turns out that this has it exactly backwards. Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes then the same. I don’t think anyone predicted that. It’s bizarre.”
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See also:
Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which
Abstract
Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.
Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result p
Abstract
Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self-esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.
Using data from over 200,000 participants from 53 nations, I examined the cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: ext
Abstract
Using data from over 200,000 participants from 53 nations, I examined the cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Across nations, men and women differed significantly on all four traits (mean ds = -.15, -.56, -.41, and 1.40, respectively, with negative values indicating women scoring higher). The strongest evidence for sex differences in SDs was for extraversion (women more variable) and for agreeableness (men more variable). United Nations indices of gender equality and economic development were associated with larger sex differences in agreeableness, but not with sex differences in other traits. Gender equality and economic development were negatively associated with mean national levels of neuroticism, suggesting that economic stress was associated with higher neuroticism. Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.
Preferences concerning time, risk, and social interactions systematically shape human behavior and contribute to differential economic and s
Abstract
Preferences concerning time, risk, and social interactions systematically shape human behavior and contribute to differential economic and social outcomes between women and men. We present a global investigation of gender differences in six fundamental preferences. Our data consist of measures of willingness to take risks, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust for 80,000 individuals in 76 representative country samples. Gender differences in preferences were positively related to economic development and gender equality. This finding suggests that greater availability of and gender-equal access to material and social resources favor the manifestation of gender-differentiated preferences across countries.
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It's almost like men and women have innate evolved sex differences, and treating women like men and/or men like women simply doesn't work.
Social constructivism is so bogus it not only can't be proven to be true, it's actually been proven to be false. If it's not only that your social theory can't account for the observed data, but what your theory predicts is opposite of observed reality, then your theory is garbage.
Social constructivism is garbage. It's false.
So instead of a millennia-long global covert conspiracy without any conspirators, maybe - now hear me out, this might get a little crazy - humans are actually not blank slates imprinted upon by a sinister cabal, and are actually not the only species on the planet whose behaviours, tendencies and preferences are innate, instinctual and fashioned over millions of years of evolution, just like their bodies.
