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Gender divide with religious beliefs
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While I wouldn't consider evolutionary theory to be science at all...
Well you'd be coming into conflict with the greater majority of the practicing scientific community on that one
That's fine, it's your opinion & is incorrect as it may be, with respect to reality, I can't allow you to use elitist straw-man arguments about Bill Maher
& Christopher Hitchens in order to claim there is some atheistic movement & that this supposed movement has womens interests denigrated in some manner.
People admitting they are atheists does not enter them into some club, first off.
The idea that we all join together & invent some club rules is ignorant at best.
If you actually believe that then you haven't thought about this concept deeply enough.
The only tie linking atheists together is
that they do not believe there is a woman/man in the sky.
Now, as it happens more scientifically literate people tend to call themselves atheists. That, however, does not include everyone.
Still, those that do believe science is correct in it's fundamental premise,
i.e. that we are ignorant about how the world works but we have a
self-correcting method that has inbuilt humility, creativity & ignorance as it's guiding forces to understanding it,
do not make absolute statements as ultimate truth because science never claims itself to be so audacious.
Basically if you do find people claiming as such they are inventing their own fantasy construct in the name of science, & history has plenty of
examples of people being shown wrong for doing this.
If you knew more about the basic premise of science you'd be able to see that without ignorantly bandying about sweeping labels...
Why am I so angry? Because you're claiming science is being used to
propagate misogynistic beliefs. This is false.
It's ignorant people who use pseudoscience to pass off their lies.
If you knew anything about real science you would never have said what you said.
So, basically you have fallen into a far deeper trap created by ignorant men who have falsely used science to put women down.
Condemn science and atheists because a few people have spouted nonsense, smart move...
I really would need to see your sources for these pop-science books spouting off material worse than the bible...
In fact, if you would show us detailed passages that condemn women in the name of science I'm pretty confident
I'll find more credible information contradicting what you've said.
If not, I'd appreciate you showing me this material even more
because there may or may not be some truth to it.
Probably not, still though I'd love to actually read it.
If you knew anything about anthropological work you'd know that women gathering seeds etc... provided most of the nourishment for ancestral diets.
Hunting was not the main source of food in their diets so if we're to believe
that it was women who gathered the seeds as men hunted that still does not give men some special place.
These antiquaited ideas are fresh only in the minds of ultra left-wing feminists and in men trying to use some ignorance to their advantage.
Oddly enough this ignorant idea is used to condemn vegetarians too
and it's also science that has shown we can live on vetarian diets.
Anthropological work has also discovered matriarchical vegetarian cultures
(Iroquoi Indians of North America for example)
that kind of put down two false assumptions in one
You have to remember that it is science that discovered we all ultimately
depend on women through the passage of maternal mitochondria and it's
the science of evolution that explains how we can trace this back.
Hardly some idea propagated by mysoginistic atheists...
Science says very little about how women ought to be.
Basically psychology is the area that tends to make sweeping statements
but these are often proven false or as culturally created constructs.
My favourite example is the current arguments about women in science.
If you look at my last post about STEM test scores being the same it's
cultural biases that tend to cause less women to be confident in entering engineering & physics etc...
Science has something to say about this, namely the very enterprise of
showing that men and women's test scores are about the same is science
& flies in the face of culturally created ideas about women being destined
to somehow fail in the hard sciences...
So, basically science has very little to say on how women ought to be.
Now, if atheists are trying to use some arguments to denigrate women
they need to be questioned.
Also, Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher do not speak for anyone but themselves, if feminist blogs are going to try to
a) use this fantasy of an atheist movement
b) say these are the movements spokespeople
c) tell us there is an anti-women bias in science and these movements
then I think we can call feminism dead.
No, wait...
...I think we should call the foolish authors of these articles for what they are, fools...
and not go off bandying about labels about the whole feminist movement, see what I mean...;)0 -
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Evolutionary psychology is currently the best model we have for understanding human behaviour, but you are free to propose an alternative, or falsify EP if you're so inclined.
Evolutionary psychology is not the best method we have for understanding human behaviour,
it can only tell us so much before it turns into a "just-so" story.
I think you must have meant sociobiology, but even then you can't get too far due to lack of proof.
It becomes internal logic & can be used to facilitate contradicting explanations as well.
Basically it can be used to explain nearly everything &, therefore, explains nearly nothing.
Psychology & sociology would be the areas that would have more concrete to say, I would think.
It's worth researching the counter-arguments to this young science.
Just as evolutionary psychology fails, so do psychology & sociology too when you try to tell somebody what
human nature is, or should be, and arguing that war, rape & tribal warfare are natural is not something I'd accept so easily.
Black people were naturally inferior 200 years ago, women were naturally inferior 60 years ago, and still are according to most atheists apparently :rolleyes::p,
so if you're trying to argue that rape, pillaging & murder are natural you've got to explain why over the last 500 years or so the levels of rape,
murder & pillaging have cut dramatically & continue to drop.
The very fact these things are dropping so dramatically, that people are communicating on a global scale etc...
would tend to indicate that we don't even know what our nature is or what we are capable of & a look at history would certainly confuse you more
if you looked at the root causes for most wars etc...
Unfortunately, in keeping with that trend of evolutionary psychology & sociobiology to make up "just-so" stories we're reading them
in this thread by the people arguing that rape is innate in us.
What is the actual argument?
The argument about rape & evolution being intertwined is that rape confers an evolutionary advantage to those who committed rape
in the past thereby passing their genes into the next generation.
Could someone please tell me how this indicates that it is innate in human nature?
The only way I can see this happening is if we use evolutionary psychology's foolish mode of inquiry in that we'll explain every single
characteristic of human nature with some million year process seeing as we've got so much time in the past & so little evidence.
It sound's plausible... But then we'd all be rapists because of the rape genes our ancestors bestowed onto us... :pac:
Referencing Steven Pinker as challenging the power theory of rape isn't enough because I can reference passages where he argues
from a 1990's modern American person's perspective & not a scientists when he argues in favour of prisons & sexism as necessary.
Even his debate with Elizabeth Spelke on why women are not in the top sciences is totally couched in modern cultural bias &
totally unfair by using male dominated history to advance his arguments.
I've already given studies showing no differences between male & female intellect in tests that matter
so it's most likely cultural bias that leads to the divide. Innate...?
That doesn't mean Steven Pinker is a misogynistic atheist hell bent on ruining women, he isn't.
If you read him you'll see that so I hope nobody comes away from this with that idea.
So, the argument about evolution and rape is really a trivial issue.
Rape does confer an evolutionary advantage if the rapist succeeds in getting his/her genes into the next generation
but that says absolutely nothing about it being innate or desirable.
From an evolutionary standpoint it's getting your genes into the next generation that matters most but
until someone can show me how that means we're all rapists at heart I'm stumped...
The only thing that makes rape natural, as opposed to be inbuilt into human nature, is that a subset of every species does it.
Still, that says zilch about it being inbuilt in human nature.
For all we know it's abnormally high levels of testosterone or something that leads some members of a particular species to actually commit rape.I can honestly say from a females perspective they do not make for pleasant reading.
I can honestly say that from a male's perspective I don't like people telling me that rape is somehow innate in me & is lurking just below the surface.
However, I don't fight the idea just because I don't like it, I think about it & don't let my fear about it get in the way of understanding it.
If it somehow turned out to be unequovically true, there's no point in denying it was a factor in the past but, simply by choice, it doesn't have to be now...
I think the idea of science, i.e. being objective, is scaring you because people may end up creating some ignorant bias against women.
Science is not about that & "taking sex differences seriously" is not something we can avoid doing because we just don't like it.
As far as I can see, it's science that has shown women are not naturally inferoir, black people are not inferior, minority groups etc...
in an intellectually satisfying way even though we have a history of some devious people attempting to castigate all these minority groups.
(Not to say anything about the social movements, I mean from a biological standpoint!).
I wouldn't worry about this because it's scientists honesty that has fleshed out all the BS and continues to do so.
That said, you have to give up this idea of popular discourse being out to get women.
It's science to publish these kinds of books & you've made no point except that you don't like it.
If you don't, this one minute video will tell you what you can do
I haven't seen any substantial malevolence against women or social castigation because of these books & even if it did occur that doesn't
make it right. It's not mine or the authors fault if people misunderstand the ideas/arguments and detrimentally use them.It enrages me when I see it taken as fact in popular discourse
...
...unfortunately these are not the ideas taken up by mainstream discourse.
Popular discourse, where would we be without it
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