Nandini's Niche

Story so far: Amit Varma took a look at the lives of Indian women, examined the additional hurdles to independent identity/actions placed in their paths every step of the way, and declared that this played little role compared to women’s innate genetic politics-hating-ness in why so few women “naturally” make it in Indian politics without reservation. I outlined a few over those overwhelming hurdles in an effort to suggest they cannot be brushed aside so lightly.

In this second part, I’m going to show you that the OMG BIOLOGY hypothesis is truly and completely bullshit. This is because evolutionary psychology (EP) is a bullshit field in general, one that is very prone to endorsing sexism, racism and other Very Bad And Harmful Social Attitudes.

See, the biggest problem with EP is that nobody’s ever found a “dependent/clingy/emotional/anti-math/anti-screwdriver/I-hate-sex/pink-loving” gene in women. There isn’t any sign of a “beer-loving/fat-women-hating/unable-to-see-dirt/umemotional/rape-loving” gene that is exclusive to men either. Hard evidence is really, really important, because that’s what gives weight to explanations of social observations.

For example, you can’t just prove that men outperform women at math and deduce from it that men have better math genes. Claude Steele is a researcher whose work on gender differences in learning gives solid grounding to the concern that simply saying that women are genetically inferior at math is exactly what makes women bad at math. Steele studies the way stereotypes affect people’s performance. And he has found that when women are told that a test is going to measure cognitive differences between genders they tend to do much worse than men. But when they’re told a test is gender-blind, they tend to perform as well. The pressure of the “stereotype threat,” as Steel terms it, actually leads women to do worse.

Consider the case of classical musicians: until blind auditions were held for national orchestras, women were radically underrepresented in field of classical music. Many had argued that women have less wind power and were biologically incapable of performance at highest levels on many instruments. Since blind auditions have been held, though, the participation of women has risen precipitously—evidence that it was almost entirely discrimination that was keeping women out.

Hard evidence in support of EP is completely absent. In my opinion this makes evolutionary psychology only the most recent in a long string of ideologies that keep cropping up in our world to justify the supremacy of the fair-skinned often-western male. Natalie Angier, author of Women: An Intimate Geography and a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer is puts it scathingly:

In the Darwin-o-gram reckoning of human nature, a stereotype is not an intellectual pitfall to guard against; it’s an opportunity! What is a stereotype if not an expression of a potentially universal truth, which means it could be the signpost of an adaptation, a trait that might have conferred selective advantage on those who bore it? All of which merits further exploration by the distribution of a questionnaire to a couple of hundred willing college students to see whether or not they believe the stereotype to be true.

EP works so well for men. Religion proclaimed him owner of the earth and everything in it. The concept of the white man’s burden proclaimed him king of the world’s people. The Hindu caste system proclaimed him leader of the dark-skinned untouchables. White supremacy proclaimed him master of the coloured folks. How convenient for the modern “progressive” internet-class males that “SCIENCE” confirms their exclusive right to all the power, wealth and women in the world.

That’s what Amit claims: that men are naturally power-seeking, women naturally shun power, so it’s only fair that men are the only ones that have any political power. Note that nowhere did he provide any scientific evidence for this. He invokes the sacred name of science while steadfastly refusing to be at all scientific. But if you dispute his claims he turns around and accuses you of not believing in science and trying to censor science.

Oh, the irony.

All Amit and his ilk have is “logic”. But what if I turned this logic on its head? It’s easy: politics is a fundamentally people-oriented business. And hey, guess which “science” tells us that women are biologically people-oriented and men are biologically machine-oriented! Let’s try another tack: politics is about building better communities by taking care of the people’s needs. The ideal politician is one who sacrifices self in the cause of helping others. Hmm. I wonder which gender according to evolutionary psychologists is intrinsically more in tune with communities at large, more nurturing, empathetic, and interested in helping others?

Since I as your newly minted evo psych expert have now proved that evolutionarily speaking, women are biologically fine-tuned for the task of being politicians, haven’t I thus also proved that it is UNFAIR that politics is male-dominated? Obviously the men are stopping the biologically good politicians from doing what they should because they are power-hungry, oppressive boors.

This is the second reason why evo psych is bullshit. You can draw any conclusion you like from it. You can justify contradictory points of view with it. You can make it tell you what you want to hear every single time. If a theory does not make actual predictions, it is not science. Because where’s the test for it anymore? Falsifiability is a non-negotiable requirement of any scientific hypothesis. Science rejects most God hypotheses for precisely this reason: postulating God is not useful, and since it predicts nothing there’s nothing can happen in the universe that will prove the non-existence of God. This is the basis for Russel’s Teapot and parody religions like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Falsifiability is an alien notion to evolutionary psychology. It makes no predictions, only offers just-so stories to explain observed behaviour. Take the claim that women prefer redder hues because as stone age gatherers women had to look out for red berries to pick. Couldn’t we just as easily reason that women like red because red is the colour of blood which leaks out of them every month showing that they are still fertile YAY? Or maybe women have always been nuts about flowers, and their favourite flowers have always been red roses…? Or maybe red is a colour associated with strong emotions and women are obviously more emotional than men? We could go on all day. None of these explanations is any less logical than the other. None has any more evidence for it than another. But somehow EP picks the berry theory. Most red berries are actually inedible the world over, so if women had any brains they’s consider red a sign of poison or danger. Just goes to show, eh?

Another example is human propensity to fight vs human propensity to co-operate. Noam Chomsky says:

“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. Just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.”

What’s interesting is how very often the behaviour being explained as genetically ordained corresponds very closely to what was considered normal in USA in the 1950s – an era stunningly similar to the Old Stone Age apparently! So we have EP’s biggest champions saying that women are pogrammed to be dependent on men; that women ought to stay home and make babies and only think about having a career in their 40s when the kids are grown; that women prefer pink (what a 1950s concept that is! Before that pink was considered a very manly colour); that everything related to race and gender are not socially constructed but genetically programmed, e.g. that living in a ghetto is genetically progammed into those tribalistic Africans; women love being raped and men are biologically programmed to rape;

Let’s also try basic common sense. Consider the claims of evolutionary psychologists that men are biologically wired to be more likely to seek power. The question then becomes, how much more likely? And does the real world reflect this probability distribution?

One evo psych claim for which we do have hard data is that men are genetically better at math, and are more likely to be very good at math than women are. This famous Lawrence Summers claim shows a distribution which gives us real numbers: men are about 3-6 times more likely than women to be very good at math.

But the real world does not reflect this distribution. Math faculties at universities around the world are almost guaranteed to be staffed by men only. Harvard just tenured a senior female mathematics professor for the FIRST TIME in its 374 year existence! This overwhelming lack of female math professors is clearly not the result of biology.

To summarise:

• There is no hard evidence for EP; no genes have been found to confirm its theories.
• EP makes no predictions and is not falsifiable; it is thus disqualified from claiming to be science altogether.
• EP, even if assumed correct, does not account for real world gender imbalances – not even close.

Does it make any sense at all for people to cry OMG BIOLOGY at every attempt by oppressed minorities to legislate equal rights into the real world? I hope it’s clear that I am not among those who claim that men and women are biologically identical. I freely grant the existence of biological differences. But this does not justify unequal rights, or unequal opportunity. It does not justify bias against women as a class which always manifests itself as bias against some individual woman at the mercy of a statistical fallacy. And most important, it does not justify doing nothing to rectify real-world systemic oppressions, denials of opportunity and biases against women.

I mean, let’s say EP is simply TRUE, assume we have evidence, assume even that it fully or mostly accounts for why so few women are in politics. EVEN THEN, reservation for women in politics makes a lot of sense – in fact it would be even more necessary than it is now. Because if there is no hope for women in politics even after wiping out discrimination, then what other way than reservation do we have to get women into politics?

A democratic republic MUST HAVE WOMEN IN POLITICS. Amit Varma is fundamentally wrong when he says that politics should be a “merit based” profession, whatever “merit” is in this context (the ability to win elections?). Politics, unlike say engineering, is ideally about representation and not “may the best man win”. Switzerland works by putting every single government decision to vote with the general public – god only knows how they manage to keep that working (I should really read up sometime) – but India works by electing representatives who do the nitty-gritty policy voting for the people. Human beings being who they are, every representative will best represent the segment of population that he identifies with: a Hindu brahmin man from a big city is quite unlikely to fathom the needs of an adivasi woman who lives on a mountain, much less be willing to fight in parliament for them. For representation to work, diversity of representation is an absolute requirement.

So you see, even if women are somehow genetically programmed to not seek power, democratic priciples dictate that we do everything we can to get women into power anyway. Only women can fully represent women’s interests – and I hope I do not need to explain why it is important for the interests of half the population to be adequately represented. (The same principle applies to other marginalised sectors of society: poor people, LGBT people, illiterate people, disabled people, people from SC/STs, etc. Ideally, our house of representatives would be a microcosm of the country itself to the best degree of accuracy possible.) This is why reservations – positive discriminations or quotas or whatever you choose to call it – is such a good idea, such a necessary idea. They can be misused – they are being misused – but that is no reason to disqualify its basic soundness.

Remember the papers I linked to in Part 1? Reservation not only achieves representation for minorities in the short term, it also keeps working even after the policy has ended. It is proven to reduce bias against not just female politicians but females in general.

That sounds like something we should be appluading, doesn’t it?

Related Funnies To Make Up For Lack Of Jokes In My Post:
Tom Tomorrow on EP guru David Brooks
Belief in EP May Be Hardwired, Study Says
Evolutionary Psychology Bingo Card