Re: When is Hard SF not Hard SF?

In article <qsSdnavvH9Cm3brUnZ2dnUVZ_uGdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Suzanne Blom" <sueblom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"David Friedman" <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ddfr-0979B9.18370420112008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <AsqdnZh4FuE3fbjUnZ2dnUVZ_jKdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Suzanne Blom" <sueblom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"David Friedman" <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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In article <49249422$0$4888$607ed4bc@xxxxxx>,
John W Kennedy <jwkenne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

And can you find any excuse in that talk for the response it evoked?
The
only explanations I can see are either that the people who attacked
him
don't believe in evolution when it suggests politically incorrect
implications or that they do believe it but want to suppress speech
pointing out those implications--want, in fact, to have people
believe
things that aren't true.

Evolution is neither here nor there. On the one hand, plenty of folk
believed that women were intellectually inferior to men for thousands
of
years before Lamarck introduced evolution to the world; on the other
hand, evolution can no more suggest that women have minds inferior to
men's than it can suggest that they have fewer teeth than men have.

I gather you didn't actually read what he said.

Okay, David, I'll bite: What do you think evolution is?

I think the theory of evolution is an explanation of how living things
came to have the characteristics they do--variation plus selection for
characteristics that led to (extended) reproductive success.

Okay, now do you recognize that one of the things organisms can be selected
for is living in groups?

Yes. It's even possible that group selection, which isn't the same
thing, is an influence in evolution, although I gather most people in
the field think it's much less important than individual selection.

Assuming that's the case, and assuming that you recognize that since humans
everywhere.have lived in groups; then it seems to me that it has to be
recognized that humans are influenced by other humans to fit into whatever
group they're in.

I would expect that the human environment is part of what humans are
adapted to, yes. One obvious example is interest in, and ability at,
detecting cheating on norms of reciprocity. Another is the whole
seduction/don't get seduced arms race.

And we find this to be so. In our society, for instance, young women
sometimes starve themselves to death to fit social mores tho this is not
otherwise adaptive.

That's one possible explanation. I would want some evidence before
treating it as a fact rather than a conjecture.

Monastaries and celebate priesthoods last for thousands
of years, tho again, if one simply looked at the individual monk or priest's
reproductive success, one would say this doesn't make sense.

Yes. Are you familiar with Dawkins' "Revolting robots" metaphor? It
helps explain a variety of behaviors which don't serve the objective of
reproductive success.

Therefore, when society says this group does X, and, indeed, that group does
X, one has to assume that there is a large measure of conforming to
society's norms in their behavior. (One can, of course, falsify this
assumption, but it's usually very, very hard.)

And Summers suggested as the most important cause the effects of the (at
least partly culturally determined) division of child rearing
responsibilities between the genders.

I can't see in your comments any evidence that you understand what the
argument was I was suggesting, perhaps because I didn't go into any
detail. Here it is:

1. Humans are "as if" designed by their genes for (extended)
reproductive success. The genes have imperfect control over the
phenotype's behavior, so it doesn't imply that humans act for
reproductive success. So far there doesn't seem to be a phyloprogenitive
gene, or at least one powerful to make individuals use their rationality
to figure out how to maximize their reproductive success and then act
accordingly.

2. Males and females differ in their role in reproduction. Hence the
distribution of heritable characteristics, mental as well as physical,
that maximized reproductive success for males in the environment we
spent most of our species history in (hunter gatherer bands) is quite
unlikely to be the same as the distribution that maximized reproductive
success for females in that environment, just as an automobile designed
for maximum gas economy is likely to differ in many details from one
designed for maximum speed--or, if you prefer, two automobiles designed
for the same objective in quite different environments. Reproductively
speaking, males and females are and always have been in different
environments.

3. One of the differences between the male and female roles in
reproduction is that being a male is a high stakes gamble, since wombs
are a scarce reproductive resource (in the environment we evolved in),
sperm a free good. Hence a very successful male can produce many more
offspring than a very successful female and an unsuccessful male is
likely to produce no offspring. I believe I've seen genetic data
supporting that argument, but I'm afraid I don't have a cite ready to
hand.

4. If you are designing for a high stakes gamble, it is worth taking
chances--creating a phenotype that, if all goes well, will do very well,
even at the risk that if something goes badly it will do very badly--the
standard metaphor is sports car vs sedan. Obviously it would be better
still to produce a phenotype guaranteed to do very well, but presumably
most of those options that are accessible to the genes have already been
exploited. Hence we would expect the distribution of characteristics for
males to have wider tails than the distribution for females.

5. And, in fact, it does, for a variety of characteristics, including IQ.

6. Very successful scientists are people very far out on the upper tail
of the distribution of abilities relevant to their field, so if the
preceding arguments are correct and the average ability of males and
females is similar (for whatever the relevant abilities are) we would
expect to see more males who are successful scientists than females
(also, of course, more males than females at the other end of the
distribution, entirely unable to learn things in the field). Given the
characteristics of the distributions, we would expect the effect to be
large--even a small difference in standard deviation has a big effect
when you are three or four standard deviations out.

Summers didn't give steps 1-4, although I suspect he knows them--he
started with the empirical observation 5. People who are outraged at his
opinion because they are confident that the distribution of heritable
intellectual characteristics must be essentially the same for males and
females are rejecting step 2, which I think requires them to reject step
1, which I think means rejecting the theory of evolution (i.e. Darwin's
theory of evolution by variation and natural selection).

People who accept points 1-5 and merely disagree with Summers about the
importance of that effect relative to others have no business being
outraged. How much business they have disagreeing depends in part on
what evidence they have to support their opinion on the subject. Summers
made it pretty clear that he was offering an opinion that might be
mistaken.

People who have no disagreement with any of the argument but think that
Summers should be punished for saying something true but politically
incorrect have no business playing any important role in the academic
world--deciding, for example, who is president of Harvard--since they
are traitors to its central norm.

I hope that makes my position clearer.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of
_Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_,
Cambridge University Press.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: When is Hard SF not Hard SF?
    ... Evolution is neither here nor there. ... characteristics that led to reproductive success. ... Males and females differ in their role in reproduction. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.misc)
  • Re: Him and Her
    ... apart from the obvious ones of reproductive organs, males are, for example, ... generally taller, heavier, more muscular and hairier than females. ... The obvious explanation would seem to be that male evolution worked towards ... The phenomenon you're talking about is "sexual dimorphism". ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Him and Her
    ... apart from the obvious ones of reproductive organs, males are, for example, ... generally taller, heavier, more muscular and hairier than females. ... The obvious explanation would seem to be that male evolution worked towards ... from what I've read chimps are about as dimorphic as modern humans. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Is sexual selection theory wrong?
    ... Darwin's second monster: sexual selection theory. ... Males want to have sex with several females in order to create ... few, high-quality males, who will give their eggs the best genes. ... University of Chicago professor of ecology and evolution, ...
    (uk.philosophy.humanism)
  • Re: Solid Argument Against Evolution
    ... Reproductive success is the criteria to determine whether or not a trait is beneficial. ... Eugenics is more a direct product of stock breeding, and the theory of evolution did not "empower" Hitler any more than the theory of gravity "empowered" him. ... It was well known at the time that apes and humans were closely related. ...
    (talk.origins)
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