[FRIAM] the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology?
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sun Feb 25 13:28:17 EST 2018
I appreciate and second Ed's observaions here. While my own role as an
instructor during this period was very limited. I was first a student
*among* CS majors (I was a Physics/Math major with a CS minor) in the
70's when it was all pretty new by some measure and the participation by
women was higher than in the more physical engineering and science
disciplines (ME/EE and Physics/Chemistry) which I generally attribute to
the socialization of girls against manipulating the natural world as
aggressively as boys (i.e. playing with sticks and stones outside), but
might *also* reflect the possibility that males DO have a *different*
sense of 3D spatial relations and possibly even materials than females.
As for Lena... I think the fact that *she* was selected in the first
place by the male eye, and her recurrence in the "industry" was probably
almost exclusively a male propagation for what I would call "obvious"
reasons (and Glen might argue against that). I think Lena's pervasive
image might have been a symbol of the "maleness" of CS in general and
Image Processing in particular and THAT might have inhibited some women
at a very subtle level, recognizing that the other (male) students might
objectify them a bit. Of course one could make a MUCH stronger argument
in this regard for any of the Sports fields and perhaps some subset of
"Sports Journalism"?
One might want to infer something about the ubiquity of the Teapot in
the field of Computer Graphics... Ed can probably reference how it got
started (who made the first Teapot as a 3D model?) and why it got
re-used so ubiquitously... sort of the "Hello World" of CG. But
probably nothing about culinary arts or kitchens or even the British
love of Tea is likely to be significant.
- Stve
On 2/24/18 6:57 PM, Edward Angel wrote:
> I found the email with David’s question for me re the Lena image.
>
> I don’t think the Lena image had anything significant to do with the
> decline in the percentage of women going into CS. It was a very
> limited group of people that actually dealt with or even saw the
> image. And they were almost all male.
>
> When I was chair of the CS dept at UNM (1985-88) about 40% of the
> majors were women. Two other factors were much more responsible for
> the decline that started around then First, pre the mid 80’s, women
> saw CS as closer to Math but a major that led to jobs. However, they
> found that CS was more like Engineering (or was becoming more like
> Engineering), a field which for various reasons was not appealing to
> women or welcoming of them. Second, more and more students were
> attracted to CS because they they were computer game players. They
> were almost 100% male, aggressive, individualistic and often
> obnoxious, all characteristics that were not those that women students
> possessed (to their credit). Consequently, beginning programming
> classes were terrible experiences for many women students and they
> left the program With the faculty almost all male and comprised of
> people who had been rewarded for precisely these characteristics,
> there wasn’t much effort to change to make the program more attractive
> to women. Eventually CS at UNM changed and now has a healthy
> percentage of women students and faculty.
>
> Ed
> _______________________
>
> Ed Angel
>
> Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory
> (ARTS Lab)
> Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
>
> 1017 Sierra Pinon
> Santa Fe, NM 87501
> 505-984-0136 (home) angel at cs.unm.edu <mailto:angel at cs.unm.edu>
> 505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
> <http://www.cs.unm.edu/%7Eangel>
>
>> On Feb 16, 2018, at 10:41 AM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm
>> <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>> wrote:
>>
>> Some questions for Nick and one for Ed Angel
>>
>> Peterson's "alpha male" silliness seemed to have prompted this thread
>> but I wonder if a different example might advance the discussion more
>> productively, especially since, I suspect, most everyone on the list
>> would dismiss Peterson as inane.
>>
>> The example I have in mind is sexism in computing. Back in the
>> sixties, two psychologists (Cannon and Perry) created a "profile" or
>> aptitude test to determine who would be a good programmer. Their work
>> became the de facto standard used for hiring (and to a lesser extent
>> for admission to grad school in CS) up to and including today.
>>
>> Two psychological / behavioral traits dominate their profile: 1)
>> affinity for and proficiency at 'logical / mathematical puzzle
>> solving';and 2) antipathy towards people. Both of these traits are,
>> supposedly, more prevalent in males than females, especially the
>> second one. This instantly marginalized women as potential
>> programmers. (I would argue that this work also had significant
>> impact, indirectly and via cultural diffusion, on the reduction of
>> women in all of the STEM educational paths and professions.)
>>
>> Within the last year, James Damone, former Google engineer,
>> essentially made the same argument and explicitly stated that the
>> prevalence of the two behavioral traits was "biological" in origin.
>>
>> Some questions for Nick:
>>
>> -- is any assertion of a biological origin for a psychological /
>> behavioral trait a naive evolutionary psychology argument? I say
>> naive because I doubt that any of those individuals had any knowledge
>> of the evolutionary psychology discipline or research.
>>
>> -- If the assertion is made that 'anti-social nerdiness' is
>> biological (evolutionary psychological) in origin, what criteria
>> could / would be used to affirm or deny? Must you show that the trait
>> yielded reproductive advantage? Would you need to show the trait was
>> present in antecedent instances of the species — e.g. would you find
>> individuals in hunter-gatherer tribes that exhibited the trait? Could
>> the trait be biological in origin but not 'continuous' in some
>> fashion — e.g. a case of punctuated equilibrium.
>>
>> Nick has accused me of shameless reification when I use the
>> term/concept of "cultural evolution" but ... I was taught that the
>> time frame required for biological evolution is too long to be a
>> reasonable basis for explaining or accounting for observed
>> psychological / behavioral changes in human beings. E.g.
>> psychological behaviors associated with things like social media and
>> cell phones are clearly observable but occur in time frames that are
>> generational at most, and most commonly intra-generational.
>>
>> -- Is it possible to argue for some kind of biological 'precursors'
>> — traits from which the observable changes are derived, and
>> dependent? (Kind of like the evolution of eyes being dependent on
>> precursors like photo-sensitive cells.)
>>
>> -- Is it possible to disprove an evolutionary psychological
>> argument (ala Peterson and Malone) simply by pointing out that it
>> emerged and became prevalent in a time frame inconsistent with
>> biological evolution?
>>
>> The question for Ed Angel (only because he is a graphics maven):
>>
>> -- pure speculation, but what impact did the Lena image (de facto
>> standard for testing image compression algorithms), in 1973, have on
>> the decline of women in the profession? A mere six years
>> earlier, /Cosmopolitan/ magazine was touting programming as a smart
>> career path for women and around the same time a peak of 37% of
>> students in CS were women.
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 16, 2018, at 1:53 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>>> IMO it's going to be difficult to debunk evolutionary psychology.
>>> It is a valid part of the medley of components of psychology and
>>> sociology. But is it the truth the whole truth and nothing but the
>>> truth? No, certainly not. There is much more to human behavior than
>>> evolutionary psychology.
>>> What's coming out from the #MeToo movement is just horrible. Sure,
>>> it may be consistent with evolutionary psychology, but we as humans
>>> should not accept it and root out the abhorrent behavior of some of
>>> the male of the species. And our society has been protecting the
>>> perpetrators and thank god that's changing.
>>> But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Give credit to
>>> evolutionary psychology as part of the effort to understand human
>>> behavior.
>>>
>>> On 15 February 2018 at 22:08, uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com
>>> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> But your point *did* come through. Peterson's (and many
>>> people's) conception of the "alpha male" (or "alpha female" for
>>> Frank), has become second nature. It's everywhere in our
>>> culture. And it is ripe for a debunking that is complete enough
>>> to GRIP the populace. Dave's debunking is right, I think. The
>>> Adam Ruins Everything video is good, but too fluffy.
>>>
>>> Since Peterson depends on (some bastardization of) evol. psych.,
>>> then it would be healthy to have an evol. psych. debunking.
>>> *That's* what I'm actually looking for. Perhaps your "Oh no"
>>> paper contains that debunking. I'll look.
>>>
>>>
>>> On 02/15/2018 11:58 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>>> > I apologize for the length of MY DESCENT and for the poor
>>> quality of the Xerox. It doesn't surprise me that the main
>>> point didn't come through. I think Evolutionary Psychology
>>> does provide testable hypotheses, but I also think testability
>>> is not /sufficient /to make a hypothesis heuristic. The
>>> hypothesis also has to be interesting. To be interesting, a
>>> hypothesis has to challenge some way of thinking that has become
>>> second nature, and good EP thought sometimes produces such
>>> surprising challenges. Such interesting challenges do not arise
>>> from studies designed to bolster social stereotypes with
>>> biological bafflegab. Here is another paper
>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247372033_Oh_no_Not_social_Darwinism_again
>>> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247372033_Oh_no_Not_social_Darwinism_again>>
>>> much shorter (only 600 wds) and better Xeroxed, which
>>> exemplifies my contempt for this latter sort of evolutionary
>>> psychology.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> ☣ uǝlƃ
>>>
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