Schadrach said:
NeutralDrow said:
They did do that while measuring financial risk aversion. IIRC, there is a correlation between high testosterone and more willingness to take risks, and vice versa regarding low testosterone, but that the correlation is between those levels alone, with no gender disparity in the actual effects (i.e. at low testosterone, men and women become equally risk averse).
It was mainly the "our ancestors specifically bred for x" argument (which testosterone levels don't answer) that made me raise my eyebrows, rather than the actual conclusion.
Is that absolute testosterone level, or relative to what is typical for their sex? Because if it's absolute, then I feel like it's necessary to point out that typical testosterone levels for healthy men and women are something like an order of magnitude apart.
Absolute levels. The conclusion reached was that it was the testosterone that correlated with the risk aversion, not gender itself. Bear in mind that men have
on average around 8 times the level of testosterone in their bodies at a given time as women, but that testosterone levels are still determined by individual tendencies and circumstances, and fluctuate wildly over time.
Besides, I just brought it up as an example of your literal question. They
did do a study like that, specifically applied to financial risk aversion (specifically, a large mixed-gender group of MBA students), and found that the correlation was to the testosterone specifically,
not the gender.
I'm not sure how it doesn't answer the "ancestors specifically bred for x" argument though, if we're talking about a behavior that is testosterone linked and increases male but not female reproductive success, wouldn't that yield, in the long run, "breeding for" higher-T males and a wider gap between male and female T-levels?
It doesn't answer the question for three reasons off the top of my head. One is that testosterone levels aren't fixed (hence why they were able to find men and women with similar testosterone levels in that study), even within one sex, so if our ancestors bred for it, they did a piss-poor inconsistent job of it. Another is that testosterone is not unique to humans, and while we haven't measured risk aversion in mammals, we have found intra-mammalian comparable effects of the hormone in other areas (aggression and sexual levels). We would have to qualify the original sentiment to mean either "our proto-mammal ancestors" or "our proto-human ancestors bred themselves to express
this exact average ratio of testosterone." And another is the assumption itself of "risk-taking" as measuring reproductive success.
Going by the article you link to, this is defined as "competition for mates" among males (and "competition for resources" among females) but even that doesn't make much logical sense. That's attributing quite a lot to biological selection pressures, and using that to extrapolate for increased risk taking ignores that A) the males who are taking lower risks are still breeding, and there's no way at all to tell what the relative numbers are (after all, high-risk males may be breeding more often, but they're also killing each other more often), B) individual genetics are actually not the be-all-and-end-all of natural selection (this is the concept behind "genetic altruism"). It's also kind of eyebrow-raising as a biological explanation for gender differences in violence (after all, outside the Y chromosome, men and women have the same genes), but if all else was equal, that would be a plausibility.
NeutralDrow said:
What I find amusing is that I actually recognize the particular explanation Eddie mentioned because I was looking into a quote about gender of murderers and it turned out that the work they referenced was about aggression, hierarchy-building, and risk-taking behavior by gender that came to essentially the same conclusion. I found it amusing because it was a feminist article uncritically quoting something from an evo-psych article that they would have been wholly unwilling to accept any other point from.
That's...tremendously ironic, yes.
It was a feminist blog quoting a line from Scientific American that cited Anne Campbell (1999) in the quote itself. Anne Campbell (1999) referring to "Staying alive: Evolution, culture, and women?s intrasexual aggression" ( http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/campbell.pdf ). Having given it a bit more of a read, I can find a few other points they'd probably be willing to quote, but not much. Largely because evo-psych tends to be a thing that disagrees with feminism on an ideological level sufficient to typically be dismissed out of hand, because the idea that there are biological components to any gender differences beyond genital configuration is anathema to the idea that gender is wholly socially constructed.
Given that evopsych frequently conforms to current ideology, tying into the bad habits of starting with conclusions rather than hypotheses, ignoring cultural pressures, and assuming that we know
far more about prehistoric humanity than we actually do, taking along a few grains of salt in a reading shows pattern recognition rather than bias. You don't have to reject biological gender (transgender is a thing) to have that.
Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be what the author you cite is doing. It looks more like she's arguing that cultural pressures grew out of the initial biological pressure. Speaking as an ideological feminist who considers any suggestion that there are biological components to gender differentiation beyond genital configuration to be anathema, I mainly wonder why the initial assumption is that female aversions to violence are considered innate rather than conscious.
