Mothers’ Helper

Zoom’s whiteboard = playtime

Over the last several years, I set up weekly meetups with little kids as a way to give hard-working moms a break. Mostly they’ve been in person, and for the last couple years they’ve been online. My own kid is grown, and hanging out with kids has been a rewarding way to stay in touch with the next generation. If you’re not currently managing kids, maybe you have some spare time to hang out with a kid or two. Modern parenting puts a heavy burden on moms and dads—especially moms. For what it’s worth, here’s my experience hanging out with kids.

A younger friend of mine has two daughters, and I would truck over to their place once a week to distract and occupy the older one. The stay-at-home mom appreciated having one fewer kid to worry about, and a couple hours a week doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice on my part. The daughter is shy, but she warmed up to me, and the mom appreciated it. The real payoff was seeing the two girls have fun when they showed up at parties at my place. Since they were both used to me, they felt secure around a bunch of people they didn’t know. 

Before the pandemic, once a week I would pick up a grade-school kid from school. Mostly I hung out at the school’s playground while he played with his peers, and eventually we’d go back to his place. My big contribution was to give him some unsupervised play time with his peers, something that kids don’t get enough of these days. When school was out, we switched to me taking him to the grocery store once a week. We would walk together from his place to the store, do some shopping, and walk back. He had money to spend at his discretion, and we talked a lot about how to make good money decisions. He also got to see me struggle in the sun carrying too many groceries up the hill, an object lesson in reaping and sowing. 

During the pandemic, I met weekly with a kid in another time zone. We used Zoom’s collaborative whiteboard to draw zany adventures. The features seem designed for business, but the whiteboard works as an impromptu play space. The graphic tools let me draw myself and then pick up that drawing and move it around the whiteboard. That way, the kid could see me climb the stairs into the attic, or whatever the adventure was that day. Our adventures were mostly about me getting hurt when my parents are away and I break every safety rule. The graphic tool let me distort my image, so I could turn left and right , and when I fell down the stairs I flipped the image upside down. I could also get squished flat, which happened. We also talked about stuff, but mostly it was play. 

Some of my attempts to set up online hangouts failed to take hold. That was no fun, but it was all right. It can be hard to keep a kid’s attention in a Zoom room, so now I know to lead with a whiteboard or some other way for the kid to meaningfully collaborate with me.

Now I’m married to a mom with a kid, and I get all the reward I need helping her out. Maybe when my wife and I are empty-nesters, I’ll find some other kid to hang out with. 

Comment on Twitter

The Liberal Victory of Same-Sex Marriage

Good times, 2015

When same-sex marriage swept the United States, it was a stunning liberal victory. In 1999, no state in the union even had civil unions for same-sex couples. By 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land. Hats off to Vermont for igniting the movement. I fondly remember in 1999 when Vermont’s supreme court called bullshit on limiting the benefits of marriage to cross-sex couples. Then in 2000, Vermont became the first state in the US to allow civil unions between same-sex couples. Other states followed Vermont’s lead, establishing either civil unions or marriage for same-sex couples until, in 2015. the US Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all fifty states. 

The implicit message of the gay-marriage campaign was that our institutions are good, and that everyone should have the right to be part of them. Marriage is a good thing, they said. Most voters are married, and the gay-marriage campaign validated married life. It was a positive message about love and commitment. Who doesn’t like a rainbow? 

If your political opponents are associated with happy things like rainbows and parades, you’ve lost. Opponents of gay marriage came across like haters, which is not only accurate but also politically convenient for liberals like me. I’m hoping that legalizing weed can be another feel-good campaign for liberals, and I think it’s about time, but that’s another story. 

Meanwhile, the proponents of marriage equality did not ask heteroes to confess their hetero privilege. The leaders did not have their eyes on dismantling western civilization. Smashing hetero supremacy was not on the agenda.

In terms of human history, gay-marriage advocates accomplished something remarkable. In societies all across the globe, strict gender roles have been the norm. Gender-nonconforming people were generally expected to take on a different gender role rather than transgress the boundaries of the gender role that they were born into. Modern liberal society, in the other hand, is remarkable for how loose gender roles are, relative to the rest of history. Same-sex marriage seems fine to kids born into our society, but it was unthinkable for our ancestors except perhaps the last few. In terms of being something new under the sun, same-sex marriage really is.

Sixteen years is a short amount of time for such a momentous change. The gay-marriage campaign was a big success, and it was part of a successful movement across the globe. When it comes to social justice, I like approaches that work, and that’s why I’m a liberal. Maybe we can learn from what’s worked and do more of it. 

Group Instincts and Modern Politics

Identity without biology

tl:dr Some aspects of our identities activate in-group social instincts, and it’s easy for people to organize politically along those lines. Other aspects of our identities relate more to distinctions within the in-group or within a family structure, and it’s difficult to organize politically along such lines. 

Why is it so much easier to organize African Americans around fighting racism than it is to organize poor people around fighting poverty? Why is it easier to convince poor, white Americans that Muslims are a threat than to convince them that the rich are taking more than their share? Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King tried to unite poor whites and Blacks, but that dream died with him. Why the big difference? Maybe the difference derives from humans’ in-group and out-group instincts.  

Our tribal instincts organize our brains to respond to tribe-versus-tribe conflicts with much stronger emotions than when they respond to conflicts within the tribe. As a result, Christians and Muslims are primed for conflict, while poor people don’t find it natural to organize as a class or group. Below I’ll offer a basic take on nine aspects of identity, pointing out how some of them activate the brain’s tribal programming pretty well while others fail to do so. 

Nine Aspects of Identity

This list comes from the “ADRESSING” model of identity and oppression (see end of post).

Age

All human societies recognize age categories within the group, and these are grounded in biology. Nobody identifies as, say, a “teenager” the way people identify as “Germans” or “Catholics”. 

Tribal Politics: It’s an in-group distinction, and it has low political salience. 

Disability

Disability is a biological reality with broad social implications. Disabled people organize politically, but disability is not a source of identity the way language or religion can be. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

Religion

Religion uses symbolism and ritual to unite people, and before modern times it was the only way to unite different tribes or nations. It’s a breeze to re-orient religious enthusiasm and convert it into hostility toward outsiders. Today, we see hostility across religions lines all over the globe. 

Tribal Politics: Religion distinguishes between “us” and “them”, and it has high political salience.

Ethnicity

Ethnic identity traditionally determined one’s nation, language, religion, and homeland. Armenians, for example, belonged to Armenian culture, and a Navajos belonged to Navajo culture. Today, of course, everything is more complicated, as it was, for instance, in the Roman Empire. Still, even today it’s easy to get most people to identify emotionally with their ethnic groups, especially when there are conflicts with other groups. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics.

Social Class/Culture

People commonly admire the successful people in their own “tribes.” My daughter loves Beyoncé because Beyoncé is a boss. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, humans defer to high-status individuals within the group. How easy is it for the rich to keep the poor divided by race and nationality? Way too easy. In some societies, class and ethnicity align more or less well, especially when class definitions are explicit and legally enforced. When not linked to ethnicity, class still comes with some of ethnicity’s trappings, such as distinctive dress or accents. 

Tribal Politics: In-group or between-group, middling political salience.

Sexual Orientation

Sexual desire operates on its own agenda, cutting across lines of social identity, and often at odds with a conservative religious identity. Oppression and hostility give the LGBTQ+ crowd good reason to organize politically, but “tribe-style” identities seem powerful compared to sexual orientation. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, middling politics.

Indigenous Background

This category is a special case of the more general tendency to form exclusive groups based on ethnicity and nationality (especially in the broad sense). 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

National Origin

Humans are unusual among social animals in that we can tell which strangers are in our society and which are not. A nation is a level of social organization above the tribe, historically allowing tribes to work together and allowing strangers to trust each other. Traditionally, nations have been defined by shared language, religion, lifestyle, and ethnicity. Consider Armenians, Navajos, Danes, etc. Largely, the point of a nation is to get people within it to treat each other better than they treat outsiders. Nearly all Americans, for example, would say that our federal government should concern itself more with our well-being than with the well-being of Argentinians. Politically, it’s easy to get people riled up about their nation, and something like a massive terrorist attack can get even liberal intellectuals to put flag stickers in their car windows. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

Gender

Traditionally, men and woman have often had single-sex social groups, but our tribal instincts are organized to unite men and women in the tribe with each other and against the enemy rather than to unite women against men or vice versa. Gender may be an important part of one’s personal identity, but it’s not typically a political identity. In fact, filling a man’s role often means competing with other men for status, and the same goes for women.  

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

The Nonbiological ADRESSING Model

Leticia Nieto’s model of identity and oppression treats these nine aspects of identity as if they are all analogous to each other, with no real sense that humans are flesh-and-blood animals. Being Black, in this model, is essentially like being disabled. My late wife was both Black and disabled, and I can tell you that these two aspects of one’s identity are not essentially the same. In college I studied 20th century social sciences, and half of what I learned was well-meaning bogus stuff that I later had to unlearn. Nieto’s ADRESSING model fits the pattern of 20th century social science because it’s formulaic and nonbiological.

Missing Aspects of Identity

Three biologically potent aspects of identity are missing from the ADRESSING model. 

Language is a primal indicator of who is “us” and who is “them”, as people with thick accents can tell you. Little children seem to intuit identities based on language at an earlier age than identities based on race. The high political salience of language aligns with that of ethnicity, nation, and religion. Say yes to the Oxford comma, or else let’s fight!

Family is a primal source of personal identity, especially perhaps the mother-child connection. It has low political salience in general. The conflict of “young versus old” gets some traction, but that isn’t exactly a conflict between offspring and parents. 

Individual flesh-and-blood reality—the “crazy diamond” of one’s own unique phenotype—can be a major aspect of one’s personal identity, especially for those of us who diverge from the average in mental or physical terms. Political salience is low.

See Also

My review of The Human Swarm by Mark Moffett, which explains the unusual human penchant for identifying not just with clans of people we know but also with larger societies of people who are “us” even though they’re strangers.

What Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind means to me and resources for learning about it. 

2020

We wrote these rules in 2nd person
to avoid sexist pronouns (1987)

RPGs and Gender Differences 

A friend asked me to comment on a screen cap that’s going around Twitter, so here’s the comment. The screen cap is an insensitive post I made in 2008 about women and roleplaying tropes. It appears side by side with a quote by Gary Gygax in 2002 saying that there’s no sense trying to make a game that “will attract females”. The implication seems to be that I think the same way Gygax did, but in fact his quote serves as a useful counterpoint to my own views. He thought that men and women are naturally different and didn’t want RPGs to change. I think that in order to change RPGs to make them more appealing to women we need to understand both how men and women are the same and how we’re different. RPG designers have made real progress, and happily today’s RPGs are more inviting to women and less male-oriented than they were when I joined the hobby. This social-media incident also serves as an opportunity for me to make a number of related points.

A disturbing feature of controversies like this is that they hurt the very women that the accusers are trying to help. In 2014, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt made a bad joke about women in the lab. He used an ironic voice to let his audience know that he was joking, but his words were written down and shared across the internet without tone of voice. People thought he was serious and spread the quotes to shame him. A friend of mine said that Hunt’s words had a chilling effect on women considering whether to enter STEM. OK, but the only way those words had a chilling effect was by their being spread as misinformation. In 2018, University of Washington computer-science lecturer Stuart Reges suggested a way to get more women into computer science and referenced studies showing that girls tend to do better at verbal skills than math. The opposite is true for boys. A reporter from the Seattle Times garbled this reference and accused Reges of making a false claim: that boys are better at math than girls. The reporter ignored Reges’s proposal to expose more women to computing by making a computing class mandatory, and again women got misinformation about a prominent man in STEM looking down on them. Did the reporter help more women feel good about possible careers computing? No. In the current case with me, someone is implying that I have the same disdainful attitude toward women in gaming as Gary Gygax did. The people spreading the post feel like they’re helping women, but surely it doesn’t help to make the field seem more sexist than it is. Personally, it hurts to have people talking about me, but the real damage is to the many gamers who don’t know my true history and who are tricked into thinking that the lead designer on D&D 3E was a hostile to women in gaming. 

Another disturbing thing about this post is the implication that it’s sexist to take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls. Common sense tells us that the differences we see result from a combination of inborn differences and social learning, and the science bears this out. In my career, I’ve worked repeatedly to raise the profile of women in characters, art, pronouns, and the workplace. Do I get disqualified from being a feminist because I take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems to me that we can do a better job of advancing women’s interests if we understand how women and men are different as well as how we’re the same. If you want to hear about inborn differences, listen to parents. And if you disagree with me, does that disagreement mean that we can’t work together to make a better tomorrow? Enough with the left’s circular firing squad already. My focus is on a Blue November, and I hope you’ll join me.

The original post from 2008 was a conversation starter, and it’s being shared as if it were a conclusion. The wording was needlessly provocative, and I’m sorry to everyone I hurt with it. That was the year my wife died, and I wasn’t at my best. The post was provocative, and what it provoked was a bunch of stories from women about how they’d been excluded from roleplaying games by all-boy groups. I learned that my post had been ill-informed. Sometimes I say things that are wrong, and then I get better information that I didn’t even know I needed. It’s all part of the process. 

The other thing I’ve learned since 2008 is that I’m on the autism spectrum. That explains why people sometimes react to what I say in ways that I hadn’t predicted—because they’re neurotypical. Looking back, it was pretty ignorant for me to talk about the gender skew in gaming without referencing autistic traits (“engineer brain”) and their role in games and game styles. Over the decades, roleplaying games have become less “engineer-oriented” and more story oriented, and that’s great. 

For me the big issue is the prevalence of misinformation on social media. I’ve been taken in repeatedly by misinformation myself, I’ve heard misinformation from my friends, and well-meaning people have spread misinformation about me. It’s a mess, and I don’t know what to do about it. 

Related Posts

Testosterone for Amateurs

Mother Love and Human Nature

Evolution Unites Us All

Testosterone for Amateurs

Testosterone drives male
robins to compete

Testosterone is in the news these days. It’s an interesting hormone that gets talked about a lot, especially in terms of human differences. Speaking personally, I value testosterone as one of the things that connects our little human family to the wider family of animals. Here’s what I’ve learned about testosterone over the last 10 to 20 years.

Testosterone (T) is a steroid. It occurs in both men and women, but most men with “low testosterone” have levels that would be off the charts for women. In addition to levels being higher in adult males, they are higher in male fetuses, infants, and adolescents. 

In vertebrates at least, testosterone mediates the development of a masculine phenotype, with “masculinity” meaning different things for different species. The hormone that drives a male robin to face off with other males is testosterone. In the winter, when T levels are low, male robins tolerate each others’ presence rather than fighting. For most mammals, T spurs growth and thus males are larger. For species of lizards in which males are smaller than females, T inhibits growth instead.

The default body plan for mammals is female, with male hormones diverting the embryo toward the male phenotype. An XY mammal that is insensitive to T develops as an infertile female.

In almost all mammal species, testosterone makes males bigger and stronger, on average, than females. That’s true for humans, and men’s upper body strength points to an evolutionary history of physical struggle. The dimorphism in our species, however, is small relative to other apes and nothing compared to gorillas or sea lions. Men don’t have antlers or peacock tails or other outlandish adaptations for out-competing the other males. Our species’ modest level of dimorphism suggests that male-to-male competition over mates has been low, lower than among chimpanzees or orangutans.

Testosterone levels have a large effect on human development and a smaller effect on current behavior. Exposure to T in the womb organizes the brain along male lines, especially with connections that become active when exposed to T at adolescence. In mammals, brains are wired for both male and female behaviors, with males predisposed toward but not limited to male-typical behaviors, and the same with females and female-typical behavior. 

Prenatal exposure to T predisposes a child to rough-and-tumble play and probably to being sexually attracted to women. 

Boys tend to be born larger than girls, especially a woman’s first son. Hormones at puberty increase the dimorphism between the typical males and females.

T promotes the sex drive in men and women. 

Trans men who take testosterone often report changes to mood. 

Each human is individually more or less sensitive to testosterone depending on the length of the “CAG repeats” associated with their androgen receptor genes. The gene is on the X chromosome, so women have two copies and are thus more likely to be in the “average” range of sensitivity. 

Further Reading

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley. If you want to learn about how sex functions and evolves not just for humans but across the family of living things: bacteria, parasites, millipedes, etc. 

The Female Brain and The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine. If you want to learn how hormones affect individual development and the human experience from embryogenesis to senescence. 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

2019

Untrue and Female Sex Instincts

An anthropologist suggested that I read the book Untrue by Wednesday Martin for an example of a good treatment of modern thinking on evolved behavior, and I’m glad she did. The book has some great takes on sex instincts, particularly those involved in female “extra-pair coupling”, as the biologists call it. It’s not the first book I would recommend on evolution and sexuality, but I got a lot out of it.

Men of faith and men of science have long described women’s sexuality in limited terms, and Martin shows how wrong these simplistic views are. In civilizations east and west, men have defined a wife’s infidelity as a sin or a biological aberration. Martin demonstrates that extra-pair coupling is indeed part of the human female’s sexual repertoire. While women have been relentlessly programmed to be submissive and faithful wives, Martin shows that women have sex drives that send many wives seeking partners other than their husbands. The brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, and human behavior is facultative. That is, we have more behavioral routines that we ever use, and we use the ones that fit any given situation. Studying psychology in the 1980s, I was taught that society conditioned people so that socially constructed behavior patterns, such as gender roles, seemed natural. Untrue shows just how limited any such conditioning is, as women’s instinctive drives lead many of them to break the rules they were supposedly conditioned to internalize.

Western civilization, notes Martin, has tried to define women’s sexuality as passive, the supposed counterpart to the active male. But this passive role doesn’t stick, and in real life women are not passive but responsive. That’s a great clarification. Speaking personally, I prefer “responsive” to “passive”. 

Biologists talk about “female choice”. Among mammals in particular, females invest so much of their own lives and energy in their young that they can be choosy about which males impregnate them and thereby get a “free ride” on all their blood, sweat, and milk. In historical civilizations, however, families have exercised oppressive control over their daughters’ choices. Female choice is on full display when Martin discusses Ashley Madison, the web site for wives who wanted to cheat. The women on that site were able to specify, sometimes down to penis size, the sorts of lovers they would consider taking.

In evolutionary terms, it pays off for a female mammal to mate with a high-status male, since doing so increases the odds that one’s sons will achieve high status. That behavior is called called hypergamy, and in human society it commonly appears as women “marrying up”. In fairy tales, the commoner girl marries the prince. Martin provides us with great example of hyergamy with the housewives of the 50s and 60s who carried on affairs with their husbands’ superiors. Eventually, the women left their lower-status husbands in favor of their new, higher-status mates. So much for being programmed to passivity.

For the readers who might think that gender roles can be constructed any which way without regard to universal human predispositions, Martin cites anthropologist Agustin Fuentes as saying that there are indeed half a dozen instances of gender-role differences that are universal among humans.

Untrue has a lot more details, such as the author’s visit to a “skirt party” for adventurous women, but my take-away is the power of primeval instincts in the face of modern attempts at socialization.

Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá: Untrue shows that sexual instincts make themselves felt in today’s society, and Sex at Dawn covers a more explicitly evolutionary take on the topic. Martin mentions this book, and I’ve recommended it before, but I hear that science people aren’t impressed with it, so haven’t been recommending it lately.

The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley: This book is my top recommendation for the science of sex, including bacteria, millipedes, parasites, and more. I hoped it would be a good overview of humanity’s evolved sexuality, but it is way more than that. More people should read this book. 

Evolution Unites Us All

Protesters in New Mexico

In 2017, New Mexicans crowded into a public hearing to speak up for scientific literacy, and the state Department of Education listened. Citizens criticized the department’s plan to drop climate change, the age of the Earth, and evolution from the science standards. In response to backlash, the DOE dropped its plan to edit the standards. Instead it will follow the Next Generation Science Standards in full, as developed by a consortium of states and organizations, such as the National Science Teachers Association. This news is a welcome change in a world that has increasingly rejected evolution science. Recently, governments from Turkey to Florida have been undermining children’s education in evolution. Our kids deserve a scientific understanding of who we are and where we came from. Evolution is more than just the bedrock of biology. Humans evolved from earlier life forms, and a scientific understanding of that fact promotes self-understanding and justice. From biology, we learn that each of us is born unique, that we are related to all life on Earth, and that we are connected to each other.

The theory of evolution tells us that humans can never fit neatly into categories. Natural selection works because the organisms in a population always vary among themselves. Today we need this lesson especially in the realm of gender diversity. Human brains prefer simple binary thinking, so it’s common for people to consider “male” and “female” to be all there is to say about gender. Obviously, we see more diversity than that, and biology tells us why. Biology is messy. The concepts of “male” and “female” are handy shortcuts, but the messy truth is that all sorts of different developmental processes contribute to that dichotomy, and human populations exhibit variety in all those processes. Generating adult male and female humans requires many steps. The fetuses’ genitals develop, their brains masculinize or feminize, the infants experience life either revved up on testosterone or not, children develop gender identities, and they develop sexual attraction. Finally, puberty hits and hormones activate the hormone-sensitive brain structures that were laid down during fetal development. Humans differ from each other in all those biological processes, most commonly in terms of sexual attraction. If all this built-in gender variety isn’t enough, the brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, so of course humans express more variety than found in our genes and hormones. Opponents of gender diversity treat is as if it were a violation of an ultimate, binary division, but evolution says that variety is our birthright.

Paradoxically, while the theory of evolution affirms that we are each unique, it also tells us how much we have in common with the rest of the living world. Traditionalists say that humans are essentially separate from animals, but evolution says we are in fact animals. When I was working on Grandmother Fish, Eric Meikle of the National Center for Science Education impressed on me that the core message of evolution is, “We are all related.” We need this lesson today because scientists say that we are driving our planet into its sixth global extinction. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid wrecked the planet, but today the villains are climate change and habitat destruction. The theory of evolution tells us that the species we wipe out are our flesh and blood. The polar bears and all other living things are literally our distant cousins. Furthermore, just as all living things are one family, all humanity is one human race, as Darwin himself recognized. In fact, the entire Homo sapiens population today is just one closely related branch of the human race, which until recently included the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and more. Evolution science says that those of us on humanity’s one remaining branch are more alike than different.

Evolution tells us that we are related to all people not only by our shared DNA but also by our shared social instincts. Zoologists call a species like us “obligatorily social.” In everyday terms, we need each other. If you think that hell is other people, anyone in solitary confinement can tell you the opposite. For the human animal, sociality comes built in. Our natural habitat is not the savanna but the tribe. Our smile, for example, is an instinctive sign of happiness, and it functions only in a group. Our eyes also have white scleras so one human can see where the other is looking. Other primates have dark scleras so that competitors can’t track their gazes, but we humans are born to work together. According to social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, caring for others is a moral imperative that our ancestors evolved long ago. Today when politics is so divisive, maybe the theory of evolution can remind us of the value we all place on the primeval drive to care for each other.

Evolution says we are all unique, all related, and all bound up in each other’s destinies. Let’s take that to heart. Opponents of evolutionary theory are undermining the scientific understanding of human origins, gender diversity, and human nature. In this time of cultural conflict, let’s speak up for science like the people of New Mexico did in 2017. Let’s honor our connections—to our neighbors, to all humanity, and to the entire living world.

2017

Male robins fighting over territory

Robins and Evolution for Kids

[This post was posted in March of 2017, before John & Colleen Marzluff and I created Crow Scientist, the free app that teaches kids how to observe real-life crow behavior.]

Now that spring has come to the northern latitudes, here in Seattle the robins are back in the parks. Robins are easy to observe so they provide a good opportunity to talk to kids about how behavior and natural selection play out. Here are science notes for kids, worded simply and arranged roughly from the most basic for the younger kids to the more advanced for older kids. These notes teach a core evolutionary concept, that individuals within a species compete with each other to have healthier and more numerous offspring.

Brighter Robins Are Male, Plainer Robins Are Female

The robins you see easily are males. They have bright red feathers on their chests, and they spend a lot of time out in the wide open. You can sometimes spot females, too, but they have duller breast feathers, and they don’t put themselves on display the way males do. Males also tend to be somewhat larger than females. Male robins are like roosters, and female robins are like hens. 

Male Robins Fight for Land

Robins need to gather food for their children, so each male fights to have a bigger plot of land. You often see two male robins out on a field or big yard, each keeping his distance from the other. When two robins face off and neither one backs down, they fly at each other and turn around each other in a sort of whirlwind. It’s easy to spot male robins facing off against each other because they stand out in the open. If they notice that you’re watching them, however, they might stop fighting, so be sneaky.  

Female Robins Choose Males with Good Land, Good Feathers, and Good Songs

When a female chooses a male with brighter feathers and a stronger song, that male is probably healthier than average. When she picks a male with a larger area of land, she probably gets more food for her chicks. If her mate is healthier and her chicks have more food, then her chicks are more likely to be strong and to survive. 

Most Chicks Die

A robin mother might hatch a dozen hatchlings in one summer, and most of them die before winter.   

Robins Fight Because They Can’t Cooperate

Robins don’t have language, laws, money, or other tools that humans use to divide up resources. That’s why robins are stuck fighting. Fighting takes lots of time and energy, and it’s dangerous, but it’s the only way a male robin can claim enough land to get a mate. Male robins don’t help each other, work together, or make friends with each other. 

Robins Don’t Know What They’re Doing

Male robins don’t know why they’re fighting. When they see another male’s red chest, they just feel like fighting. Female robins don’t know why they choose males with lots of land, bright feathers, or strong voices. They just feel like making that choice. Humans are driven by feelings, too, but we can reflect on our own behavior and even make explicit agreements with others about what we will do or won’t.  

This lesson is a big one because it’s easy for humans to project human-like thinking onto animals, or even machines.  

Testosterone Drives Male Competition

Hormones are chemicals that animals’ bodies make that affect how they grow, feel, or act. Testosterone is a hormone that affects how robin chicks develop in the egg. One effect of testosterone is to organize the male chick’s brain for fighting. When the chick grows into an adult and the breeding season starts, the male chick’s body creates more testosterone, driving it to fight the other males. Testosterone is a type of hormone called a steroid.

“Testosterone for Amateurs”, the basics about this much-talked-about hormone.

Cock robins at peace, a 10-second video of newly returned male robins hanging out peacefully. 

Bonus Science Humor

Robins are a type of thrush, and the genus name for thrushes is Turdus (Latin for thrush).

Crows in the Park
Once you learn the call of a hungry juvenile crow, it’s easy to spot crows families. With any luck, you'll see the the juvenile beating its wings and the parents feeding it.

Mother Love and Human Nature

The three of us in 2006

In college in the 80s, I studied psychology and sociology, and at that time everyone knew that the biological view of human nature was bunk—racist, sexist, reductionist bunk. Thirty years ago, that outlook seemed reasonable, but now it turns out that the biological view has a lot to tell us about ourselves. It’s embarrassing that I was so wrong about human nature, but I have come to embrace the biological view. The biological view says that each person is unique, that variety is built into the human genome, that the brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, and that we humans are the most behaviorally flexible of all animals. The biggest benefit of biological thinking is that it makes better sense of the human experience than the blank-slate view that I learned in college. As a personal example, I submit the love that my late wife had for our daughter. The biological view affirms that mother love is a core component of human nature, while the blank-slate view portrays it as more like victimhood. 

Nothing that a biologist says about human mothers represents anything essentially true about humans as a group or as individuals. Biology is too messy to be essentialist. Nor can biology tell any individual that they must be a mother or should be a mother. When conservatives say that women should stay home and be mothers because it’s natural, that’s not biology talking. Considering the biology of human motherhood doesn’t oppress anyone. It’s the blank-slate view that minimizes the lived experience of most mothers.    

My wife had a hard life, but being a mother to our child brought her joy and a sense of purpose. Her love for our child came from deep within her being. Our daughter, for her part, was more than a passive subject of conditioning. She responded to her mother’s love with complementary instinctive behaviors, completing a positive feedback loop of mother-child communication and bonding. In the 80s studying sociology and psychology, I learned that a mother’s love for her child was something that had been trained into her by the culture’s gender role system. It didn’t spring from deep within and in fact was a tool that the patriarchy used to keep women down. My wife’s love was a conditioned response, they’d say, like thinking of pink as a “girl” color. Love like my wife’s, I was taught, merely feels as though it springs from deep within. That’s what I learned, but biology knows better. In reality, humans make the best mothers on the planet, bar none. Our mammal lineage has been developing mother-and-child instincts for hundreds of millions of years. As mammals go, we apes are exceptionally good mothers, and as apes go we humans are tops. The love my wife felt for our daughter really did spring from deep within her.

The blank-slate view tells women that their deep maternal feelings are actually shallow. The biological view says that a mother’s love for her children is the real deal, a profound element of the human experience.

2014

More Talk About Talking

Last weeks’ post about men talking over women generated a lot of commentary, so please allow me to clarify and elaborate. The universal relegation of women to second-class status is obviously a huge issue around the world, but here I’m focusing on one particular issue. The phenomenon of men talking over women deserves special attention, I suggest, because it’s ubiquitous and overlooked. That makes it a big opportunity for men to have their consciousnesses raised, and maybe even to make a real difference in how people communicate. What I recommend is that people spend some time observing conversations. There are plenty of gender-related dynamics to look for, but a good place to start is to watch who talks over whom. It can be eye-opening.

As with any social or political movement, feminism includes an us-versus-them element. Our social instincts provide use with adaptations such as pigheadedness and selective hearing so that we can successfully engage in identity-based, us-versus-them struggles. Feminists who try to prove male privilege have limited success because opponents can pigheadedly derail the conversation with straw man arguments, contentious demands for definitions, and other handy devices. If you cite the wage gap, an opponent can question all the details of how you compare one employee’s career to another’s. Any statistic is easy to question and possibly ignore. But what if someone observes a conversation and sees for himself how often men talk over women? Maybe seeing it happen will be like a Zen koan, an experience that circumvents logic to offer enlightenment. It’s hard to argue with something that one has seen oneself.

There are plenty of communication dynamics that one could look for, but the dynamic of men talking over women is easy to see and requires little interpretation. You could look for which participants in a conversation are one-upping each other and which are connecting with each other, but that can be subtle. You could see how much “air time” each participant takes up, but it’s generally OK for some people to talk more and others less. But when you see someone talk over someone else, that’s not a matter degree. No amount of shutting others down is good.

Self-awareness is a hallmark of post-modern society. More than any people before us, post-modern Westerners understand their perspectives as their own personal perspectives. Even so, we’re subject to blind spots and biases. Here’s an opportunity for some men in particular to learn a little more self-awareness. The subtext of this lesson is that the everyday interactions that you take for granted might reveal an underlying bias, if you just know how to look. That’s a big lesson.

Talking Over Women

In 1990, this book got people talking
about male and female conversation styles.

In social gatherings, it’s common to see men talking over women. I don’t think the Y-chromosome has a gene for interrupting women, but there’s no mistaking that males interrupt and talk over females more often than the reverse. In the geek population, it seems to be worse than average, and it’s probably also worse among people don’t know each other well, such as at a convention. The gamer and atheist communities can be uninviting or even hostile to women, and when women get talked over that doesn’t help. Geek conventions have taken to adopting explicit anti-harassment policies to help women be safer, and that’s great. I’d like to go further and implement an anti-interrupting policy. Women commonly have their voices silenced metaphorically, such as when their opinions are dismissed as hysterics. When a man talks over a woman in person, her voice is being silenced literally. How do we get that to stop?

In an open conversation with lots of people and no ground rules, a few people tend to dominate. They’re typically men, and I’ve often been one of them. To make the conversation more even, it helps to have some structure. The Burning Man discussions I lead are “walk and talks,” where everyone in the discussion answers yes/no questions by walking one direction or another. We also discuss the questions, and a few people tend to dominate the verbal discussion, but everyone gets to “speak up” by walking either left or right. When I’m moderating a panel at a game convention, during Q&A I give each member of the audience an opportunity to ask one question. We start at the front of the audience and work our way back one row at a time. Quiet fans get their chances to ask questions before we open the floor. Once the floor is open, a few people dominate the rest of the Q&A. The formats for Burning Man discussions and panel Q&As are gender neutral, but they have the net effect of reducing men’s dominance of the conversations. When I’m out with a group somewhere, I often notice women being talked over. There’s no moderator in these discussions, but sometimes I break in to ask the woman what she was going to say. 

It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that geeks, gamers, atheists, and similar populations see more talking over than average. First, the populations are skewed in the male direction, so a woman’s odds of getting talked over go up. Second, these populations include a lot of educated, analytical people who don’t always have the best social instincts. In tabletop roleplaying, several people are gathered around the table and only one talks at a time. That setup invites more aggressive talkers to shut out the less aggressive ones.  

An explicit rule against talking over people should be phrased as gender-neutral, the way anti-harassment policies are. Loud people talking over quiet people is bad regardless of the genders involved. But making people aware of previously unconscious conversation habits is a teaching opportunity. The beauty of having a norm about men not talking over women is that anyone who doubts the feminist perspective can simply observe people talking and see for themselves what happens. You don’t have to hate men to say that they interrupt too much. You just have to watch us. And it’s hard to argue with the idea that people should be allowed to participate in a conversation. That’s why I bring up the gender issue, because men are the ones who need the most practice checking their privilege. A rule against talking over people would not only make our conversations more equitable, it would give men a good opportunity to see unthinking sexism in action. Maybe even in their own actions.

Presuming that anyone agrees with me on this point, how do we spread the norm of not talking over people? It’s a tricky question with different answers for different groups. In any event, it probably starts with some discussions on the Internet. Let’s see if that leads anywhere.


Walk-and-Talk Discussions: A post on this structure for “free-range” conversations.

Why Atheists Are Jerks: A closer look at certain interpersonal styles that are common among us atheists.

Save the Waitresses

Bill Picton—pig farmer,
serial killer of sex workers

Imagine if every few years the authorities found the bodies of murdered waitresses in a ditch, along the banks of a river, or on a pig farm. There would be an outcry. Lawmakers would investigate and reform the restaurant industry. We wouldn’t allow psychopaths to prey on our vulnerable women. We would make the world safe for waitresses. But enough imagining. The fact is that the women who wind up in those ditches or ground into pig food are not waitresses but sex workers. There’s no outcry because the people don’t much care what happens to “dirty whores”. Maybe we should cry out.

2011

young woman and powerful man

High Status Sex Scandals

From the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Anthony Weiner sexting incident, high-status men keep getting caught with their pants down. You might wonder why a congressman would send a photo of his crotch to a young woman, or why the leader of the free world would get tangled up with an intern. While evolutionary psychology doesn’t explain why any particular human engages in any particular behavior, it does explain our general tendencies. In this case, the indiscretions of high-status men make more sense when you understand that our ancestors evolved status in order to give stronger males more than their share of access to females. Evolutionarily, high status is largely about having sex with more women.

Millions of years ago, after we chimps* split with the gorillas and before we Hominina split with the other chimps, we evolved a system of male status.** Gibbons, orangutans, and gorillas do not have high- and low-status males living together, but we chimps do. This social system allowed stronger and weaker males to cooperate in a group, something you don’t see among other great apes. High status allowed the stronger males to get more than their share of the resources without having to drive the weaker males away or kill them. The most important scarce resource in the lives of our male chimp ancestors was females. That’s true of mammals in general, and we chimps are no exception.

A drive for status, especially among men, is a human universal, as noted by the world’s first evolutionary psychologist, Charles Darwin. We don’t consciously know that our quest for status is the latest chapter in the mammalian male’s quest for more mates. Once men get power, however, it’s easy to see what comes next.

For their part, women have their own evolutionary baggage. Our female ancestors have long preferred high-status males. The ones who didn’t prefer powerful males wound up bearing sons who were more likely to have low status like their fathers. Since high-status males reproduce at favorable rates, evolution leads females to favor them as mates because that strategy leads to their sons reproducing at favorable rates. If the leader of the free world gets messed up with a flirty aide, it’s partly because there's something about being the leader of the free world that gets a woman’s attention.

None of this is to say that any particular human is hard-wired to have unwise liaisons with any other particular human. Evolutionary psychology is about ultimate causes and population-wide patterns, not individual decisions. The pattern is easy to see, and it’s only a matter of time before another high-status male makes the day’s headlines by acting out yesterday's evolutionary imperative.

* Technically Hominini. (2020)

** Or maybe living in multi-male, multi-female bands goes back tens of millions of years to the early “monkeys” (technically simians). (2020)

PS: It turns out that extroverts in our culture are more promiscuous than average, and lots of powerful men are extroverts. (2019) 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

Related old-website post: Thomas Jefferson the slave-raping hero, 2006