You may recall that sad comment by Scott Aaronson on his blog, Shtetl-Optimized, in which he deplored the way no respect is given to men’s biological imperative to have sex with all the women. Or more recently, Paul Elam’s bizarre appeal to badly interpreted biology and duck rape to justify MRA entitlement. It’s all of a piece, and it’s annoying: it’s reductive nonsense, in which people see a well-established set of scientific principles, and see their own complex situation, and imagine out of whole cloth a clear, simple path from one to the other. And suddenly, they’ve portrayed their messy life as the outcome of a purely determined, clockwork series of inevitable interactions, and they find refuge in the lowest common denominator of possible explanations. “It’s not my fault,” they can say, because of the way electrons interact, because biochemistry and thermodynamics, because genes, because everything follows from astronomical impacts and geology and Chicxlub at the end of the Cretaceous.
As it turns out, that’s what Scott Aaronson (with seemingly little comprehension on his part) was discussing in that notoroious comment section, in part, with someone named Amy. What started as a discussion about a grab-ass professor losing his job evolved into a lot of denial and defensiveness, and of course whenever a lot of nerds try to defend the status quo, they ultimately try to bring up Human Nature and Behavioral Science and This Is How We Evolved. I struggle myself to avoid falling into that trap, and sometimes I do anyway, but a whole gang of male nerds tends to inevitably drift into gross reductionism. Because of thermodynamics, I think, or maybe van der Waals forces.
Anyway, the provocateur behind all that argument, Amy, has now beautiful essay on all the phenomena in the middle that get ignored.
But as a primary explanation for who takes whom to bed, and when, and why, which is how these biological-imperative guys use it… I wonder why these guys don’t see that it’s dumb, what they missed along the way. It’s dumb for lots of reasons, not least of which is that even if you know what you’re talking about (and you won’t), it’s on the wrong level: it’s as dumb as trying to explain your divorce in terms of your husband’s biochemistry (which even Dawkins would say is stupidly reductive), only you’ve flipped the dumbth from the very tiny to the very big side of biology, population-scale biology. Both ignore the scale that involves lying naked next to your husband and listening to him say appalling things about his last-boss-but-one, again, and then watching him pick his nose like an eight-year-old, and realizing you’re going to divorce him, even though at that very moment you have no idea how, and life after marriage is a blank, in your imagination, nothing there at all.
It’s freedoms on that level, not the inhumanly tiny or the inhumanly large, which keep lawyers in business. That you’re lying down, that you’re naked with a man you recently had sex with, that he has a nose to pick and wants to pick it, that the room is heated to 69 degrees Fahrenheit and has a window facing west, all of this finds reason in the way that humans are made. That you married, that you’re married to this man, that you know this is temporary, that there is or is not a child to fight over, that you will simply move into a comfortable if anonymous rented condo that suits your salary, that you’ll work as an accountant for a military contractor involved in the development of a new generation of nuclear weaponry, all of this belongs to decisions taken by you and millions of others, living and dead, within the wide, wide field granted by the human genome, as far as anybody knows.
It’s like seeing the conclusion of a billiards game, and not knowing anything about the rules, but having an elementary grasp of physics. You see the last ball go in the pocket, and you imagine that you can explain everything in terms of angles and velocities and inevitabilities, because after all, eventually the balls end up in pockets. But you completely miss the contribution of the beer that was drunk and that stupid dare to make a ridiculously difficult shot and that it was all in fun as a social event so they tried it, or that one of the players is having trouble keeping his mind on the game because of anxieties about work, while the other hasn’t played in years and is rusty on the details.
Similarly, when someone tries to explain why Modern Men Do X by rolling the scenario all the way back to the Paleolithic and imagining a set of conditions and imagining a series of purely adaptive events that occurred between that fantasy starting point and today, I just want to say…you can’t do that. That’s all wrong. None of that is justifiable. You’re abusing science to justify doing what you want to do.
…but of course you’re only saying that because the Higgs boson has a mass of around 126 GeV :-p
Beautifully put, Amy. It’s almost as if complexity were complex or something.
Wow, existentialism is alive and well. Amy has read Sartre’s La Nausee I reckon. She makes good points too.
Heck, even in physics the good scientist knows that the model is not the reality, it describes a situation of limited scope. Once you get outside that scope things get more complex. Add quantum and statistical models and well…
If you alter your premises and logic to get the answer you want, then you’re doing it wrong.
This is absolutely correct, (and something PZ knows far better than me, anyway) but there’s point I’d like to make that I feel is really important. Sorry if I’m missing something.
If a person commits a crime, and when asked why they did it, replies ‘physics,’ well, they aren’t wrong. The thing actually did happen, and everything that happens is physics. But this absolutely does not justify anything.
For example, suppose a person commits a rape, in part because they carry a gene that predisposes them to committing rape. Now, for that gene to exist in the population, it has to be that natural selection supports that presence. We could say that our evolution has selected for x% of the human population to carry that gene, and if we choose to model natural selection as some kind of decision-making intelligence (I’ve no fundamental problem with that model) then according to natural selection’s decision criteria, the existence of that gene is ‘good’.
But we are not natural selection. We are humans. We do not have the same definition of ‘good.’ Even if some behaviour maximizes some metric of evolutionary fitness, this is not identical with what is morally optimal. ‘Survival of the fittest’ may prefer X, but we are not ‘survival of the fittest’. There is nothing to support the hypothesis that the maximal propagation of my genes must be my ultimate source of value. Even if the fairy tales about the Paleolithic are true, it says nothing about what is acceptable behaviour today.
We derive value from our decision criteria, just like ‘natural selection’ does. In part, these criteria are derived from our genetic history, but culture is also hugely important, and many of the more important aspects of that culture are not arbitrarty, either. In particular, being a species that gains extraordinary advantages from highly cultivated technology, we derive massive value from our capacity to cooperate. Our ability to do this is described as ‘the social contract.’ It is a contract that requires trust, and is strengthed hugely when those involved are allowed to feel secure.
When a person commits a crime, it makes no sense to ask whether or not they are really to blame, or whether, instead, physics made their act inevitable. It only makes sense to ask, ‘how do we want the future world to look?’ When we ask this question, when faced with a person whose actions undermine the social contract, we see that we have the legitimate capacity to take measures (sometimes drastic) to lower the incidence of such crimes in the future. The fundamental physical explanation for the crime is not our direct concern (though it may influence the optimality of our curative measures).
I don’t remember Aaronson writing about any sort of biological imperative. Scott Alexander did, writing about how men have more testosterone and therefore lack of sex is just the worst.
Consider a spherical cow …
There’s a term for attempting to explain a phenomenon by going too small: ‘greedy reductionism. A greedy reductionist might, say, deny that thoughts exist because there are no electrons made out of Thought. But I’m not sure what word describes the opposite process, where you go too large and explain a person’s choice in terms of the entire cosmos and its history. ‘Greedy extensionism?’ ‘Greedy enlargement?’ I don’t know.
Well, no, only that it doesn’t actively remove it. Such a gene could still be selectively neutral or even very slightly disadvantageous.
Read PZ’s post on the nearly neutral theory of evolution and the 111 comments to it.
Greedy holism?
The World Is Not Enough?
David Marjanović
‘Not actively remove,’ is identically what I mean by ‘supports.’
Good. That was ambiguous.
Yep. Human interaction is messy. I’m sorry if you don’t like that, but no amount of whining is going to change it. Yes, societal expectations, values and norms hugely shape those interactions and yes, more freedom has made things more messy.
Jacob Schmidt @6 is correct. Aaronson did not play the bio-troof card, Alexander did, in his defense of Aaronson. Aaronson himself, instead, simply committed an epic-level tone-troll, claiming that mean feminists made him suffer from crippling social anxiety and a phobia of expressing his sexual interest in others.
As a nerd who lived through the 80s, I have seen this sort of thing before–namely, the Satanic Scare against Dungeons & Dragons. The problem wasn’t that D&D caused schizophrenia; the problem was that a single schizophrenic teenager pathology happened to latch onto D&D. Similarly, Aaronson still fails to realize that the issue is that his social anxiety latched onto feminism and anti-rape teachings as the ‘reason’ for him to avoid human contact. I can pity him, even as I denounce the stuff her wrote.
Alexander, OTOH, is just an opportunistic asshat. Fuck that shit.
If the MRAs want so badly to base their excuses on biology, can’t we use praying mantises as our example? >:-)
The following is probably a little muddled but I thought I would put it down on paper anyway. I think there is even more problems with this argument than a non-linear relationship behind purpose and motives.
I find this sort of logic a little teleological. ‘The purpose of atom A colliding with atom B is so I have desire to screw person C’. No no no. Atom A collides with atom B because they happen to be on a path towards each other. There is no pre-deterministic ‘purpose’ for this. If they bounce off each other it’s not because they are ‘meant to’. If they covalent bond to each other its not because they are ‘meant to’. If they fuse its not because they are ‘meant to’. They just do what they do as governed by physical law. Any persons notion of purpose (the idea that something is meant to happen) can’t be simply derived from events that don’t have that purpose. The driving force behind a personal notion ‘purpose’ has to be complex. It has to be non-linear. It’s teleological to think otherwise. Just as thermodynamics is not the reason your bedroom is messy, thermodynamics is not the reason you think its ok to hurt other people. It’s because you have the decision making power to decide it’s ok (the atoms do not), therefore, it’s because you’re an arsehole.
Similarly, when someone tries to explain why Modern Men Do X by rolling the scenario all the way back to the Paleolithic and imagining a set of conditions and imagining a series of purely adaptive events that occurred between that fantasy starting point and today, I just want to say…you can’t do that.
The operative word here is “imagined.” Most of the people who do this shit have no idea how people really behaved back in prehistoric times, so they just make up primitive-animal-behavior scenarios based on nothing but stereotypes and cartoons. That’s probably where we got that old caricature of cave-man bashing cave-woman on the head with his club and dragging her by her long (normally blond) hair back to his cave. IANAE, but most of the intelligent-sounding people I’ve heard from say that even prehistoric people actually had manners and culture and more-or-less consensual courtship rituals — and that all-important male sex drive was no less blunted and refined then than it is in today’s advanced societies.
AP #5 beat me to it
While the biological imperative argument is BS, it wouldn’t matter if it were 100% iron clad. We are more than our instincts. For nerds sitting in front of computers, wearing polyester shirts, eating cheetos and mountain dew to talk about how they need to do things because that is the “natural state” is beyond ridiculous.
Who actually does that? :-)
Grewgills: perhaps it’s because they’re living in such an unnatural state, that makes those nerds aspire all the more to the “natural state” they imagine. I know I’d damn well rather prowl any singles bar than wear polyester, eat Cheetos and drink mountain dew.
It seems these guys are using stuff out of the creationist playbook.
As a feminist friend of mine use to put it when these “Men have always been pigs so I get to do what I want” arguments would come up on an old e-mail list – “There are millions of men who control themselves everyday. Why are you in the minority who can’t?”
Um, these days polyester is actually quite comfortable (especially polyester/cotton blends), and they dry much faster (and with fewer wrinkles) than 100% cotton.
And Mountain Dew is hardly reserved for “basement dwellers”.
Cheetos, on the other hand, are disgusting.
Sastra @ 7:
It certainly does pretend to be an extension/enlargement of the self, but to attribute one’s own current decisions to a deterministic universe as a whole is really to deny the relevance of anything that could be called a “self.” It’s still a kind of extreme reductionism — perhaps an “irresponsible reductionism.” It is very akin to what Daniel Dennett talks about in his book “Freedom Evolves,” and his warning that if you make yourself small enough, you can completely disappear. You can also (try to) expand your own privilege while shrinking your own responsibility down to nothing.
Or, recalling Flip Wilson’s character Geraldine Jones, (who, in the 70’s, used to say “The Devil made me buy this dress”); and splicing in a phrase from the 1980 movie “9 to 5”: “The Cosmos made me a sexist egotistical lying hypocritical bigot”.
the depiction of the “cave man bashing the cave woman over the head” is, was and always will be a joke, it is a cartoon image, a comic characterization of the unthinking human it is the present reality pared down of most of the contemporary realistic imagery. It was never meant to be anything than that.
Anyone who attempts to base any understanding of prehistoric humanity from such a source is a fool and an ignorant one at that. They become the image themselves. they are the subject of the joke.
uncle frogy
I’m pretty sure that Fred never hit Wilma over the head.
chigau@24, I’m not sure I’d trust Bamm-Bamm though, he’s kind of free with that club, just sayin’
@PZ
So, in summary, you’re saying that MRA beak-flappers tend to use science in more or less the same way creationists do: badly, ignorantly, selectively and in a transparently self-serving manner. Gotcha.
QFT.
The idea that anyone would have the gall to complain about mens biological urges not being respected in this Patriarchal rape-tolerant culture is astounding.
We shudder to think what the world would look like if Aaronson’s twisted views were put into practice. We suppose Aaronson would prefer that men just be allowed to rape at will, because we have to respect men’s urges. Porn theaters and strip clubs would be given tax exempt status. Male masturbation in public would become socially acceptable.
Is that what he’s advocating?
Wrong name.
This was already addressed upthread, AND the wrong name we’re using is that of someone who’s already suffering from a basically crippling fear of being wrongly accused of the intention to rape, for crying out loud.
It seems to me that men give women the power to choose who they mate with by being willing to screw anything that will let them.
Ironically, some men try to deal with this by wanting to screw anything that will let them.
Here’s some reductionism: The mere fact of trying to argue that something is a biological imperative – one that should be respected, no less, completely blows the primacy of yer bio-imp out of the water. That you have to explain or attempt to provide proof or a theory of it, that there is at least one form of disagreement with it, that this isn’t just the way things are and rarely is a thought ever given to it; these among other things say that the biological imperative isn’t so damned imperative (or even extant) as you want to claim.
Sastra @ 7:
Religion.
Unless the person thinking that about themselves hasn’t learned to put it a religious framework, in which case, it’s megalomania.