Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Vive what difference?












Are there evolutionary differences between the sexes that mitigate against gender equality? This is the vexing new field of scientific research called evolutionary psychology ("evo-psych"), highly controversial and politically incorrect, but one that can't be ignored-- as shown in this report by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal.
Begley is right that pop evolutionary psychology often bears about the same relation to science as an episode of The Flintstones does to the Pleistocene era. But she’s wrong about the field’s being on its way out. If anything, recent findings in primatology, neuroscience, and genetics have given evo-psych new life. Scientists in these fields, many of them women, have lent support to some deeply controversial ideas about differences between the sexes. Among the most troubling for women like Rosin is that their inner conflict between child rearing and independence may be a battle between two powerful evolutionary forces.
If there’s one part of evolutionary thinking that spells bad news for the feminist worldview, it is parental-investment theory, an idea originally proposed by Harvard professor Robert Trivers. Trivers was attempting to clarify Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which went something like this: females of most species are more particular about their mates than males are. That means males must compete for female attention; hence the colorful tails of peacocks and the lovely songs of many male birds.
But why should females be pickier than males? In 1972, Trivers offered an answer. He observed that in just about every species, it’s the females that gestate the young. When an animal nurses its offspring, as is the case with mammals, that’s part of the female job description, too. It is also mostly females who feed and guard the kids. In fact, females do nearly everything that increases the survival, and eventual reproductive success, of their offspring. Trivers concluded, logically enough, that as the sex with so much more at stake in gestating and feeding, females would take a stronger interest in their young. Females, as he put it, “invest” more than males—and that includes being cautious about their sexual partners, the fathers of their offspring.

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