Steven Pinker's'The Blank Slate' explains it well. Western culture has a bias toward nurture explanations rather than nature explanations because admitting nature affects people's perceptions of their abilities and our sense of agency as a culture. If all differences are culture we can fix them. That's why it becomes political.
Another reason to favor nurture explanations is that nurture explanations carry less weight in an argument than nature explanations.
There's no arguing with nature, it's the ultimate citation.
But nurture means that you, or somebody involved, had a choice. So the buck stops at, rather than the faceless divinity of nature, a mere human. And those are much easier to dismiss.
So we paint the opposing argument as arising from nurture rather than nature. And those arguments stick around and get cited. And a "it's all nurture" model develops.
I disagree. The opposite is ridiculously pushed from what I can tell of the online-manifestation of western culture. Rather, what I'd argue is the elephant in the room, is that it doesn't matter which of the two is the right answer. We should take responsibility for doing the right thing, regardless if our nature or our surroundings made us a certain way.
Barring certain extreme cases, of course, such as mental illness and such.
I wasn't talking about which one is right. It's just an interesting feature of American culture. The positive side is that people are proud of their successes, they are encouraged, every kid is told they can one day become President etc (obviously exaggerated, but the Tall Poppy Syndrome is not characteristic of the US).
The stereotypical US things, like no universal health care, no tuition-free education, lax gun laws, mass incarceration, death penalty etc. are also a manifestation of this attitude.
You must take care of yourself, you must protect yourself, if you make it then great! If you become a criminal, you become subhuman and can be executed and treated brutally by the police. If you become dirt poor, that's your fault, you can become homeless, there's no welfare.
Now again, I'm exaggerating somewhat to emphasize what I mean. And yes I also know the historical origins of this mentality, and as I said, there are also positive consequences, like most major innovations and scientific discoveries coming from the US, the huge dynamic market where anyone can start a new company with manageable levels of bureaucracy (compared to most European countries) etc.
Pinker is full of shit on this subject. I remember his intro to psych lecture including an example of a how gendered thinking is hard-wired involving small boys playing with guns. Obviously an example of socialization; evolution did not teach anything to anyone about guns. There is a huge amount of sloppy thinking in this subject.
People have been using bows for 500+ generations and ranged weapons for even longer. That's plenty of time for a preference for ranged combat to show up (ed: become frequent).
This is the kind of argument I am criticizing; "its possible based on our vague understanding of the evolutionary background and selection that this behavior is adaptive, therefore my speculation that this behavior is genetic and the product of evolution is correct."
That's not what I said. I said there was enough time, not that anything actually happened. Thus evolution did not teach anything to anyone about guns is not a supported statement.
Also, a preference for guns may or may not be there. But, males having more accurate spatial reasoning due to ranged weapons, or hunting, and or fighting seems likely. The obvious alternatives are men developed better spatial reasoning due to very widespread cultural factors seems suspicious. Or women scarified spacial reasoning for some competing features.
Anyway, the important thing is not to debate this stuff it's to actually test it. Until then it's all just hot air.
Based on my understanding of genetics this reasoning is very unattractive. 500 generations is the blink of an eye in genetic terms, certainly not enough to establish a pervasive biological truth that splits the whole species across gender lines; maybe you could drive a single variant to global fixation in that time, certainly not a whole host of them. We also know nothing about how strong the selection in question might be. We know nothing, in fact, to suggest that evolution is "likely" other than our own gut feeling that it must be.
As for testing, that would be great. But it turns out that proving anything about human evolution is very hard, because most of the evidence is lost.
For clarity, 500 generations is easily enough for some things to shift frequency, but I agree it would be fast for a mutation to go global. However, thrown weapons are on the order of ~20,000+ generations which is plenty of time for mutation and adaptation.
As to testing, I suspect we are going to get good at decoding and editing human DNA fairly soon which is going to have a lot to say about these debates. This stuff is either there or not, when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.
>when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.
I don't think new data will help. We know the changes in the human lineage; even if we knew their functional meaning, we cannot conclude whether they are adaptive or not; fixed alleles reveal little about their fixation time, etc.
They believe the haast eagle evolved from the little eagle diverging just 700 000 years ago. That's going from one of the smallest eagles(0.8kgs) to the largest (11.5-14kgs) in under a million years.
> "You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."
Cordelia Fine also does a great breakdown of all of these "monkey does this, therefore women shopping men guns" arguments.
The nurture side of the debate has its "no nature" clowns, but the caricature by the top-level post is completely uncalled for in this context.
Distaff side here. I loved playing with guns when I was a kid. My parents though thought they weren't suitable for girls, so they were quickly banned. So I made my own bow and arrow set, needless to say, that didn't last long in the suburbs. Then I finally got smart, and they never found about the slingshot.
They could be; its just difficult to conclude that based on observing that they play with weapons, since obviously they must be taught what weapons are, and along with that who (men, women) should use them. Pinker makes little effort to account for such problems and often makes the "widely observed == genetic" fallacy.
