Guest: Hanania’s “Tears”

My friend Casey Jordan would like to get feedback on this summary of an Internet pundit’s recent essay. (Here’s that essay.) If you’re familiar with the essay, how good do you think the summary is? If you’re not familiar with the essay, Casey hopes that reading this summary is better than reading the original. In either case, what do you think? I’ll pass comments on to Casey.

Richard Hanania’s essay, distilled

Casey Jordan

Way way back in February of 2022, Richard Hanania (political ponderer? podcast provocateur?) wrote an essay that got some traction around the web. It explored some surprising ways gender functions in this, an era that claims to be gender-blind.

I find some of his observations fascinating, and wish they could be considered, discussed, and held up to the light by more folk - especially by people who’d be skeptical of the conclusions he draws, so they can give reasoned pushback. 

Alas! Hanania’s prose style is, let’s say, a bit much. He’s needlessly acerbic; he picks fights even when it limits his reach. His essay is, for many people, almost literally unreadable.

Which is a shame: interesting ideas should be engaged (Hanania would probably say “attacked”) by all sides.

So, in the interest of getting more people to explore his ideas, I summarize them below, minus the punch. His original essay, I think, argues five big ideas. The fifth idea is mostly aimed at his in-group (conservatives), so I’ll leave it out of this. 

My apologies for anything/everything this summary gets wrong.

1: We have a double standard

On the surface, our society claims to treat men and women equally. But in at least one important way, this is a facade: for very (very) good reasons, we treat aggression toward women as a much worse thing than aggression toward men.

Probably this is something we can all get behind. Probably this is something we all should get behind. But in the fast-and-furious world of political debate and social policy, this leads to an unexpected wrinkle:

When a man and a woman disagree in public, the man has to tread exceedingly carefully - or the audience will view him as the aggressor, and disregard his ideas.

Hanania cites a bunch of examples of this, but here, let’s consider just two situations:

Situation 1

You’re a man. You find yourself confronted, publicly, by another man. He’s screaming at you, cursing, and crying. What can you do?

If you escalate, you risk the situation spiraling out of control. You may come to blows. Others may intervene. If you de-escalate - say, by walking away - you risk losing face.

Both of these are bad, but, well, dem’s the breaks. At least they’re better than the other situation.

Situation 2

You’re a man. You find yourself confronted publicly by a woman, acting in a similar way. What can you do?

You certainly can’t escalate: even raising your voice is likely to be seen as an implicit threat of violence. You’ll turn onlookers against you. You can’t de-escalate, either - if you walk away, you’ll appear heartless, and turn onlookers against you. You lose the argument, regardless of how you react. 

In sum

Just to repeat the obvious: it is for excellent reasons that our society treats aggression against women as much worse than aggression against men. However, this creates a no-win situation for any man who finds himself arguing against a woman who’s willing to employ a full suite of emotions.

Is Hanania saying that men and women can’t argue publicly? Not at all! He points out that people of any gender can debate with cool-headed logic and reason, and that the majority do. But, predictably, the outliers can have an outsized effect.

Is Hanania saying, as one person put it, that “it’s unfair women can scream, if men can’t slap”? Not at all!

Men who are outliers tend to express their full suite of emotions through physical violence. Our society has developed ways of dealing with this - for example, jails! Women who are outliers tend to express their full suite of emotions through screaming and crying. We haven’t yet developed a way of dealing with this.

(Keep reading for more on this.)

2: We’re in the darkest timeline

Given that women have been freed of the shackles that kept them out of the public sphere, there are two ways that the norms of public debate could work.

Norm A 

We decide the goal of dialogue is to find what’s true and what works, even though it means that feelings will be hurt. Thus, we urge people to keep their emotions in check when debating the issues of the day.

Historically, this has been seen as a norm of men’s discourse.

Norm B

We decide the goal of dialogue is emotional and mental well-being, even though that means it’s harder to find out what’s true and what works. Thus, we support people when they let their feelings loose in debate.

Historically, this has been seen as a norm of women’s discourse. 

(And historically, many people thought this was because men’s and women’s “natures” were different, through blood or genes or whatever. But we don’t need to accept any of that to understand that, culturally, these two norms were seen as gendered - and to remember that our society has held onto many old ideas.)

You might be imagining here that Hanania is one of those complaining that our society has shifted from Norm A to Norm B. You’d be wrong! Hanania thinks either of those situations would be better than the two-faced reality we actually live in: Norm C.

Norm C

We decide that men and women play by different rules. Men need to stick to Norm A: if a man expresses his feelings in a debate, he loses credibility. (This is actually true whether he expresses them in a stereotypically male way - by throwing a punch - or a stereotypically female way - by crying.) Women can, if they choose, take Norm B. And when arguing against a man, Norm B leads to victory.

3: We’re all hypocrites

Hanania argues that this makes hypocrites of the Left, Right, and Center. How?

The Left

People on the Left lean toward believing that gender differences stem from culture, not biology - and we should therefore deconstruct and dismantle them. (The gender differences - not people on the Left!)

However, they don’t treat men’s tears the same way as women’s tears. (Men’s tears are laughable, while women’s tears are allowable.) Hypocrites!

The Right

People on the Right lean towards believing that gender differences stem from biology, not culture - and we should respect and affirm them. (The gender differences - not people on the Right!) 

However, they don’t actually believe that men and women should play by different sets of rules. Hypocrites!

The Center

Hanania saves his greatest vitriol for people in the Center, who cheer on studies that argue that gender differences are, in fact, biological, at least in a statistical way - and then ignore that, and commit to treating everyone as an individual. Hypocrites!

[Summarizer’s note: I’m not confident I’m putting it properly here.]

4: We need to choose, and (A) works better

Norm C is terrible - it systematically works against the participation of men in public discourse. Assuming one finds that unacceptable (!), we need to choose between Norm A and Norm B, and Hanania challenges anyone to argue against the fact that Norm A works better in public discourse.

Again, this doesn’t mean that stereotypically male norms are better. In fact, the excesses of these norms are obviously worse - when left unchecked, they lead to robbery, murder, and war! But the fact that these excesses are so obviously bad means that societies have spent millennia evolving ways to check them (think prisons, anti-bullying campaigns, international war crimes, and the general social stigmatization of violence).

During that time, women have been confined to the home, kept out of the public space. Female norms have only recently entered the public sphere - societies haven’t yet evolved ways to check these kinds of excesses.

Also, this doesn’t mean that male norms are better in all (or even most) contexts. Much of the time, we should adopt female norms, privileging mental well-being over the search for truth. (“Don’t be a jerk” is important life advice.)

To put it all together

Folk on the far Left, Hanania consoles, have long argued that Western institutions are sexist to the core - we all need to accept that they’re right. Public debate was built on stereotypically male norms, and it works better this way. 

Folk in the Center, Hanania argues, have tried to hide this fact. We should drop the facade. We should be honest about how our society works, so we can make it work better.

In a public debate, it’s not okay to throw a punch to get one’s way. We should acknowledge that it’s just as unacceptable to cry.

Please comment on Twitter.

Honest Dialogs Outperform Debates

Dialog is hard but doable.

tl:dr Better dialogs are possible and in fact have been occasionally taking place, especially when participants try to paraphrase each others’ views. 

The traditional debate format is counterproductive. Luckily, we have some new and better ways to approach disagreements. Daniel Dennett recommends four rules in particular, and the most powerful of them is generously paraphrasing the other participant’s position. In Scout Mindset, Julia Galef refers to this tactic as the “epistemological Turing test”—can you state an opposing position so accurately that you could be mistaken for a proponent of that position? It’s also basically steel-manning, the opposite of straw-manning. See Agreeing How to Disagree.

Starting 2014, Brandon Hendrickson and I developed a number of dialogs as we experimented with how to put these principles into practice. Our best result was a dialog about the value of religion. See Honest Debate: Religion, Good and Bad.

Brandon and I also arranged a dialog on Christianity, which went better than your average debate. Both these debates are by and for atheists, but the format of the dialogs is generally applicable. See Honest Debate: Christianity Good and Bad.

Brandon is a innovative educator, and he boiled down the process to a series of structured exchanges. It really works. Here’s a dialog about white privilege, at the end of which both participants feel as though they have been heard. It starts with a lot of glad-handing in order to establish mutual trust between two strangers. You can fast forward through that part, but if you run a dialog, give this step the time and energy it deserves. See White Privilege Dialog.

Resources

Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is amazing. I’ve run two book discussions on it at my Unitarian Universalist Church, and Haidt’s a fan of Grandmother Fish. His book helps explain why people are so polarized over symbols. See Resources for Studying The Righteous Mind.

Human Swarm by Mark Moffett grounds Haidt’s theories in anthropology and zoology. Roughly, he explains what a “nation” is, for humans, pinion jays, Argentine ants, and a few other species. Can a student of E O Wilson’s do wrong? See my review of Human Swarm.

High Conflict by Amanda Ripley is like the practical take on Haidt’s theory. At the end of the book discussions on Righteous Mind, people would say, “OK, but what do we do?” Ripley has some ideas in that direction, including an account of a liberal religious congregation managing unexpected conflicts among members. 

Scout Mindset by Julia Galef zeroes in on the experience of the individual, especially the attitude one needs to cultivate in order to be right more often. If you want to be right, you must be willing to learn that you’re wrong. 

The organization Braver Angels organizes structured dialogs across lines of polarization, and they’re worth a look. 

The Open Mind platform takes Haidt’s theories and puts them into practice, not as a book but as a program. The introductory module is done individually, and it’s worth undertaking. I’d love to get some experience with this system. 

Chickens Are Dumb

the chicken chicken

When I open the cage to let the chickens out, one particular chicken is always afraid of me. She is the last of four chickens out of the cage. She hesitates and backtracks before finally hopping past me through the open door. Every time. Why hasn’t this stupid chicken learned to trust me? Chickens are so stupid.

That’s what I told myself. Then pretty soon I caught myself ginning up needless worries in my head on one topic or another. Have I ginned cup needless worries lots of times in the past? Yes. Has it ever paid off? No. Am I learning faster than a chicken? Dear lord, I’m trying. 

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

Review of The Human Swarm by Mark W Moffett

The book I didn’t know I needed.

The Human Swarm by Mark W Moffett is the book I didn’t know I needed. It covers a topic that’s been missing from the discussion of human society, and the perspective it offers fills gaps in what I’ve learned from other books. Moffett covers the topic of anonymous societies—animal groups in which other animals are identified as “members” even by individuals that don’t know them personally. An Argentine ant, for example, can be accepted by other Argentine ants of its super-colony even hundreds of miles away from its origin, using scent as a marker of belonging. Likewise, Mohawk Indians were able to identify and welcome each other even when they didn’t know each other, thanks to their distinctive hairstyles. Moffett identifies a sort of social organization that is highly unusual in the animal kingdom. A more common arrangement is a flock, herd, or nesting colony, where individuals that don’t know each other get along, and that’s because no individuals are excluded. In intimate bands or families, by contrast, only individuals who know each other are welcome. For a small number of animal species, however, a society consists of individuals that can identify each other as “compatriots” without knowing each other personally. This social organization is found among Argentine ants, scrub jays, and humans.

It’s no coincidence that Moffett’s mentor was E O Wilson, the ant expert who revolutionized our understanding of human nature with his book Sociobiology (1975). It’s humbling and exhilarating how much we can learn about human society by comparing and contrasting ourselves to ants. For my purposes, Moffett’s description of Argentine ants was worth the price of the book. Unlike other ant species, Argentine ants form super-colonies with multiple queens. In Argentina, these super-colonies are kept in check by only one thing: other super-colonies of Argentine ants. In California, where the Argentines are an invasive species, they spread almost without limit. Again, their only limit is another super-colony, which is invasive itself. The comparison to humans is elementary.

E O Wilson hugging Grandmother Fish
h/t Greg Epstein

One of the revolutionary findings of contemporary psychology is that humans are “groupish”, as Jonathan Haidt puts it in his seminal book The Righteous Mind (2012). Freud taught that humans are inherently selfish, but intellectuals of his day had no clear understanding of human evolution or prehistory. Now we understand that humans are innately social, a trait that we can trace back tens of millions of years to our early simian ancestors. Morality, as modern researchers contend, is an adaptation that helps us get along in groups of our peers. Moffett’s insights help us see this “tribalism” on the scale of anonymous societies. Sure, it’s easy to understand why people prefer their friends and kin over strangers, but this book illuminates the human practice of preferring people we don’t know provided they have the right hair styles, modes of dress, manner of speech, or other societal markers. This book unifies Haidt’s modern-day insights, the globe-spanning analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011), and other big-picture books about the nature of human society and the human animal.

The Human Swarm does an admirable job of surveying the topic on all levels: ants that are more or less specialized, spiders that impersonate ants to predate them, chimpanzee bands with their distinctive pant-hoots, bands of humans who know each other as kin, groups of human bands that cooperate across societal boundaries, groups of human bands that split to create new boundaries, and today’s bewildering mix of human populations. This book is worth your time just for the information about whales and scrub jays. Moffett knows that he is filling in the blanks left by previous ethologists and anthropologists, and this book is a treasury of both big ideas and delightful details. Perhaps the most important information for understanding human societies is the material on non-state societies and the bands that compose them. Here we see the many ways that humans have marked membership in their societies and the xenophobia toward outsiders that was the default perspective.

Disclosure: E O Wilson is a fan of my children’s book, Grandmother Fish, so any friend of his is a friend of mine.

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. 

Resources for Studying The Righteous Mind

The book I recommend the most. 

Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind is the book I recommend the most. It has changed the way I understand political conflict. Irrational behavior that used to baffle me, such as denying evolution or thinking Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, now makes perfect sense to me. Haidt shows how political and religious conflicts are grounded in evolved, moral feelings. These feelings provide us with moral judgments, for which we then invent justifications so plausible that we believe them ourselves. This analysis informs the moderated dialogs that a friend and I have been running in Seattle for years. Now at my Unitarian church, I’m running a book discussion group on The Righteous Mind, and I’ve collected links to a few good, online resources for anyone who wants to understand what Haidt is saying here. 

Bill Moyer and Jonathan Haidt

This is reportedly the best video to get an overview of the book and to see what Haidt looks and sounds like. 50 minutes, video. Link. 

Jonathan Haidt and the On Being Project

Good introduction, with extra emphasis on religion and Judaism. 50 minutes, audio. Link.

Figures and images
The figures and images from the book. You can pick up a lot just by reviewing them. Link.

YourMorals.Org research site

Learn about your moral feelings while helping researchers calibrate their tests. This site let me create a group just for people in my church, so we can each see how we compare to others in the church who took the same test. You can spend hours here. Link.

The OpenMind platform

This online program helps you coordinate productive conversations within your organization. The introductory tutorial and interactive quizzes are eye-opening even if you never use this platform with a group. The introductory exercises take less than 90 minutes. Link. 

Fan page

A fellow Unitarian-Universalist wrote up his notes on the book, with a fun chimp-bee graphic. Link.

Link to more resources

A whole page of links to talks or videos that cover the topics in The Righteous Mind. Link. 

2017

Kate Willich’s Dance Church

Dance Church, Seattle

Secular communities are a pet interest of mine, and my latest discovery is Dance Church, which operates here in Seattle and now in Portland, too. In Seattle, the talented Kate Willich leads people of all ability levels through synchronized dance in a large group, as she has been doing for seven years. The group started as a movement class, but her students soon enough told her that the community she was leading is a church, and she embraced that terminology. The way the “church” concept bubbled up from a secular dance class reminds me of the way that a spiritual “Temple” bubbled up out of the profane Burning Man festival. Dancing together makes you feel connected to other people the way that talking just can’t match. If my Unitarian church featured more dancing, that would be fine by me.

Before we humans could talk about world politics over coffee and share gossip over the fence, we danced together. Walking is something that we humans have to learn, but we are programmed to learn it. It’s the same with dancing. Toddlers are desperate to learn to walk, and adults love to dance. To be fair, not every last person on the face of the planet over the last hundred thousand years has loved to dance, and not every toddler has learned to walk. It’s just the norm, the behavior that the human genome is adapted to. Today, not loving to dance seems common. I know people who basically never dance. But I’m not sure we love dancing any less. What’s different is maybe not so much that we love dancing less but that we fear it more. One reason it scares us is that we don’t know how to do it, and that’s generally because we dance like no one else ever has. In primeval terms, dancing is about making music and moving rhythmically together. In most languages, there’s one word for singing and dancing. In many languages, that same word means ceremony or ritual. For our ancestors, being able to sing and dance was assumed, just like being able to walk is assumed. Dancing together is how our ancestors reminded each other that they were all equal and were all one. But today the culture has taught us that we are all individuals and that it’s shameful to do what other people are doing because that’s bowing to peer pressure. “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off?” The obvious answer is that it depends entirely on what happened to your friends. If twelve of them are down there in the water under the bridge yelling up at you that it’s OK, then yes, jump off! Today, people are expected to dance as individuals. But not too much as individuals, because if you dance funny, people will laugh. Singers, even professionals, are not expected to write their own songs, but amateur dancers are expected to invent their own choreography, ad lib. The unmet need for dancing in synch creates dance crazes, such as the Macarena or line dancing. Dancers are so grateful to have the choreography provided for them that they flock to these popular dance styles. Predictably, the elites mock the “simple” people who like dancing and don’t like choreographing their own steps. Meanwhile, the people who dance most frequently are often those who are part of a choreographed program. They do square dancing, contra dancing, exercise dancing, or otherwise follow a caller. You don’t see those dancers at the clubs, but you see them week after week at community centers and ballrooms.

Seattle has a chapter of Jerk Church, for eating and singing together; the Seattle Atheist Church, for intellectual discussion; and Dance Church, for dancing. The big thing that any regular church has that these secular communities lack is a multigenerational community. That’s a big ask.

Find out more about Kate Willich, her Dance Church, and more at her website: http://katewallich.com/#/dance_church

For more about how deep dance and music go in the human psyche, read This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. 

2017

Example of creationist conspiracy theorizing

Creationism is a Conspiracy Theory

You can’t be a young-earth creationist without being a conspiracy theorist. When people like Bill Nye take on creationism, they rely on facts and logic. Maybe we should add a conspiracy-theorist angle when we debate creationists. In the States, there are plenty of people who have heard a lot of disinformation about evolution and who don’t know where to stand, but most of them know that they don’t want to be part of any conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists are nut cases.

VP Mike Pence tries to portray creationism as  just another idea about where humans came from, but in reality it’s much more. Creationism rejects science, and with it the body of scientists across the globe who work to advance human knowledge. They say that scientists are not to be trusted to tell the truth about what is good science and what isn’t. According to a creationist, anybody with a middle school education can look at the evidence and know that the world’s scientists are wrong about the history of life on Earth. How could so many scientists be so wrong for so long all over the world? It has to be a conspiracy.

According to creationists, some scientists know that evolution is a lie but spread it anyway, while others are willfully ignorant. It’s not just biology teachers and textbook writers who are in on the conspiracy. It’s anthropologists, archeologists, astronomers, geneticists, geologists, psychologists, and zoologists. The conspiracy includes the whole science community, which should rise up in revolt but instead plays along. It includes everyone with a middle school education or better who looks at the facts and doesn’t see things the way creationists see them. In their book, we’re all dupes or conspirators.

If the science community, as they see it, is a vast conspiracy bent on propagating a devilish lie, what else might scientists be lying about? Climate change? Trump called it a hoax. Vaccines? He said it caused autism. Maybe fluoride in the drinking water? Chemtrails? Morgellon’s? If creationism is true, then the scientific community is a pack of liars, and any of these conspiracy theories could be legitimate. Creationists want to debate by confusing the issue with details, such as the laws of thermodynamics. Let’s look at the big picture: is there a massive, century-old, worldwide conspiracy to lie about science? If that’s the question we’re debating, maybe it will be easier for people to see creationism as the anti-intellectual movement it is.

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.

2015

Chris Stedman advocates working 
with liberal believers. 

Who Cares If You Believe in God?

Atheists should stand up to the religious right to protect equality, liberty, and justice. The religious right is dangerous, the struggle is one that we can win, and opposing the religious right makes us look good. The same cannot be said, for example, for historical Jesus. Promoting the idea that Jesus never existed puts us on the wrong side of scholarship and makes us look biased. I’d like the atheist community to get past its affection for believing that Jesus didn’t found Christianity. I’ll go further. My dream is that atheists will become known as people who don’t care whether you believe in God. Why should we care? Modern culture is about letting people do their thing. But it’s obvious that we do care, and plenty of atheists disparage believers in just the same terms that believers use for atheists. What if atheists stopped caring? If that happened, young people would see that the believers judge people by their beliefs about God, but the atheists don’t. We’d look broad-minded, which is a win in modern culture. If my dream came true, it might also help believers hate us a little tiny bit less. But mainly it’s my dream because we atheists would actually have to become more broad-minded. Specifically, we’d have to tame our tribal instincts and stop gunning for the sacred symbols that the outsiders revere. In other words, we’d have to become more enlightened, and it’s an enlightened community that I want to be part of. 

The conflict is tribal. 

If you listen to atheists and believers describe each other online, you’ll learn that one side is populated by delusional fools who are lying to themselves, a menace to all that is good and true. Luckily for humanity, the other side is populated, with some admitted exceptions, by well-meaning, reasonable people who aren’t blind and can see what’s really going on in this universe. In fact, this second groups has a privileged, enlightened understanding, free of the illusions that most people throughout history have lived their lives under. The only disagreement between the two sides is which side is which. Is is the atheists who are the fools, or the believers? That’s the debate. The first thing to know about the heated conflicts between atheists and believers is that they’re tribal. Humans are naturally tribal, and we instinctively see things “our” way, to the detriment of “them” in the out-group. Believers have dogmatic reasons to believe that their religion-versus-religion conflicts represent cosmic truth, but we atheists can see these conflicts for what they are: political struggles among social apes.  

Humans excel at binary thinking, pattern matching, and taking sides in interpersonal conflicts. These traits lead believers to dislike atheists. Binary thinking says that if “we” believers are good then “they,” the atheists, must be bad. Pattern matching means that if one atheist hates religion then all atheists must hate religion. The human propensity to take sides means that believers intuitively develop negative judgments of us. Of course, the same process works in the other direction, with atheists automatically developing negative judgments of believers. The tribal nature of this conflict explains why it is so resistant to resolution. People get emotional and talk past each other, and debate leads nowhere. Since we atheists don’t have traditions, prophets, or scripture to limit our perspective, we ought to be the first to embrace the modern view of human cognition and to recognize our own tribalism.

Belief in God is the wrong target.

Because belief in God is a symbol of identity, its importance is exaggerated in the minds of both believers and atheists. In conflicts between groups, tribal symbols loom large: national flags, sacred images, distinctive clothing, holidays, God in various forms, and so on. But it’s costly for atheists to oppose belief in God, and the benefits of doing so are uncertain.  

Costs are high.

Opposing belief in God means we atheists come across as intolerant, as the Christmas billboards from American Atheists do. Even if more people become atheists as a result, the status of atheists goes down in the eyes of observers. Today in the States, there are plenty of people who don’t believe in God but won’t call themselves atheists. Some of that is due to the lies believers tell about us, but I bet our critical habits also contribute to that reluctance. Opposing belief in God also supports the idea that people can be evaluated based on whether they believe in God. The public’s opinion of atheists would get better if people stopped assessing others by their beliefs. Finally, opposing belief means not working with liberal believers who are at work resisting the religious right.

Benefits are iffy.

Anti-theists like to say that religious beliefs lead to bad behaviors, and they’re right. But it’s easy to exaggerate how powerful beliefs are. Christians and atheists go about their lives pretty much the same way, and they even face death with the same feelings of fear and sadness. Why don’t religious beliefs make a bigger practical difference? Because human lives run on feelings more than on ideas. People know they should exercise, but how many do? Of all the people who believe in astrology, few of them head to Las Vegas when the stars say they are lucky with money. If someone believes that President Obama is the Muslim Anti-Christ, they probably go about their lives pretty much like other people. Of all the people who believe that climate change is killing the planet, how many of us are really changing our lifestyles? Beliefs are not good motivators for behavior. A much better motivator is social proof. Seeing other people doing something is a great motivator for doing that behavior yourself. Even if belief in God should in theory lead to all sorts of bad behavior, most people can be counted on to not lead their lives in accord with their own ideals. 

Besides, even when belief does motivate people, is that always bad? Sometimes faith inspires people to do good things, as with Florence Nightingale or Martin Luther King. Belief in God, per se, doesn’t seem to be the problem. Problems are things the religious right wants to do, such as cut evolution from school curricula. Let’s fight those things directly.

Some atheists are likely to say that the world would be a better place if tomorrow everybody stopped believing in God. Suppose that were true. So what? That’s a magical hypothetical. The real question is which would serve humanity better, atheists opposing belief in God or atheists not caring about belief in God?   

Enlightenment is good for us.

The religious right, especially in Christianity and Islam, has created a secular backlash. To most people, secularism looks good compared to the religious right. One part of secularism is an enlightened view of personal liberty, including freedom of belief. Saying that we don’t care whether people believe in God means we are in line with secular ideals, as opposed to the extremists who want to limit what people can believe. 

My fellow atheists should see that it would be good for us if people cared less about belief in God. That idea lets us atheists off the hook. If you want to lay it on thicker, say “I don’t judge people by whether they believe in God.” No one wants to be judgmental. To my compatriots I might go so far as to say it’s un-American to judge people by whether they believe in God. Doing so is also against the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As long as people judge others by their beliefs about God, atheists are going to have a PR problem. So let’s stop. 

The best thing about not caring about theism is that it’s a powerful mental exercise for us. It’s natural for an atheist to oppose theism on some level, but if we can rise above our natural, us-versus-them instincts, then we are better people with a clearer view of the world. Atheists don’t have any supernatural beliefs to limit our view of the world. We know we’re not God’s chosen people, and we know that our truth is not guaranteed by any deity, scripture, or prophet. By rights, we ought to be the first people to embrace the new science of human identity and to check our own biases. Maybe one day believers will say, “Atheists are going to hell for sure, but you gotta admit that they’re broad-minded.” I suppose it’s biased of me to expect that my in-group should be above average in terms of self-awareness and tolerance. I can live with that.

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See also Reading about religion: Books for atheists on the topic of religion, as well as tribalism in general.