Start warming up your wrist joints.  You’re going to need them for a facepalm in a short bit.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has offered, over the past few years, several theories often labelled “controversial”.  Here’s an overview, via The Independent:

1. Beautiful people are more likely to have female children than male children
2. Liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives
3. Muslim society has applied evolutionary pressure to make it much more likely for a Muslim to be a suicide bomber than for anyone else to
4. Men are selected to prefer blondes
5. Humans are evolved to be more prone to polygyny than polyandry, because historically a woman would be better off with a fraction of a rich man’s attention than all of a poor man’s, and the reverse was not true
6. Married couples with sons are less likely to divorce than those without
7. Adolescent peaks of criminality and creative endeavors have the same cause: evolved sexual competitiveness at that age
8. It is not that men have evolved a mid-life crisis.  Rather, it is a behavioral response to their wives’ menopause
9. It is to be expected, evolutionarily, that male politicians will risk their careers for an extramarital affair
10. Sexual harassment does not indicate the presence of anti-female sentiment; rather, it indicates that men are indiscriminating, because they abuse, harass, and degrade men as well

Woo-hoo!  Take your pick!  What offends you?  “Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct,” he states.  See that?  Short, inflammatory, and quotable!

OK, tabulation: what offends me?  That this fucker’s logical reasoning is pervasively flawed.  He repeatedly conflates correlation and causation; he relies on debunked, inaccurate, and culturally-dependent measures such as I.Q.; he assumes a person’s religion is the religion of his forebears; he relies on too much armchair reasoning and too little field investigation; he takes as a given that a six-point gap in I.Q. will be evident in first meetings of strangers; and generally he just acts like an imbecile.  If he’s right, he’s right for the wrong reasons.  And that’s worse than being wrong.

Are some of his theories speculations correct?  Maybe.  It is almost certain that some things labelled “political correctness” at some times and in some places are inconsistent with some facts of evolutionary development.  Well, duh.  But it’s not binary, and it’s not monolithic.  Why is he willing to make such a facile statement as “human nature is simply not politically correct”?  Not quite sure — but one can be certain that this willingness to dichotomize and falsely generalize characterizes his entire approach to the subject matter.  I think it worth noting that Steven Pinker, working in a related field but who has different horses in the race, has quote-reasoned-unquote his way to opposite conclusions, such as his claim that the validity of political conservatism over political liberalism is confirmed by the observation that artificial intelligence software with distributed rather than top-down organization functions better (I did not make that up.)

This should be a “move along, folks, nothing to see here” — except that many who deny evolution are likely to be offended by some or all of this (Especially Claim #2.  If you disagree that political conservatism and religiosity have a strong positive correlation with denial of evolution, I would love to know how you get Internet access on whatever planet you’re living on.  [↓Insert obvious comparison to Kanazawa's reasoning here↓])  And if it’s used as reinforcement that evolutionary theory must be nonsense and hateful and eugenic, and resisted at all cost, the … um … someone will have won.  And someone will have lost.  Or something.

Yeah.

Anyway: that is what pisses me off.  Fucker.

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 01:14:16 +0000
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