Welcome to Darwin's third century
MARGARET WENTE
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
E-mail Margaret Wente | Read Bio | Latest Columns
February 12, 2009 at 12:00 AM EST
Why are recessions harder on men? Helena Cronin knows the answer. Men are far more sensitive to status. When they lose it, the psychological impact can be severe. When a man loses his job, he tends to experience it as a catastrophe. (With women, life goes on.) Low-status men also don't do well. They commit more crimes, get sicker, divorce more, and die earlier than high-status men.
Dr. Cronin is a Darwinian philosopher at the London School of Economics. Today, on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, she maintains he matters more than ever. The way human nature has evolved holds the key to human behaviour today. And human behaviour is the fundamental subject of all the social sciences, from law to politics to psychiatry.
Yet, for a generation the social sciences have more or less ignored, reviled and misunderstood evolution's powerful role in shaping us. The consequence has been a fair amount of dumb, misguided, sometimes harmful social policy.
Take the matter of sex differences. We're beginning to realize some are irreducible. “If you had any evolutionary understanding, you'd understand why there are more men in science,” says Dr. Cronin. It's all about math proficiency. The heavier the math content, the heavier the distribution of males. “There's been all kinds of wriggling and writhing to explain this, and much policy to try to amend it.” But the real explanation lies in the evolved differences between male and female brains – especially the ability to rotate objects in space, which is “fundamental to deep math problem-solving.” The distribution of male and female interests is also markedly different.
But the idea of difference is highly threatening. We conflate difference with inequality, fairness with sameness. We throw millions of dollars at schemes to recruit more women into science or detect deeply hidden biases against them. Instead, Dr. Cronin says, we should be devising teaching methods that take account of brain differences and help girls realize their maximum math potential.
Not surprisingly, feminists tend to loathe Dr. Cronin (who calls herself a feminist Darwinist). But the facts don't care if you don't like them.
Another uncomfortable finding involves stepchildren. It turns out the fairy tales were right – stepchildren are treated worse than biological children. In fact, having a stepparent is one of the major risk factors for child abuse. “We are evolved to lavish special altruism on our own children, as for no other object in the universe,” says Dr. Cronin. This bias in favour of one's own is extraordinarily strong. The Canadian research team of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson laid out the evidence more than a decade ago. But social scientists, including child-care agencies, have mostly ignored it.
One of the most interesting evolutionary studies concerns race. It's long been known that we instinctually categorize people by sex, age and race. It's easy to figure out sex and age – all species use those details for registering potential sex partners. But why race? In small hunter-gatherer societies, race differences would have been unknown.
The (very) short answer seems to be that registering race is not an evolutionary adaptation. It's a byproduct of an adaptation that evolved for other purposes – to forge coalitions with others. To do that, you have to keep close track of ever-shifting alliances and be alert to clues about whether other people share the same values, goals and friends as you do. In our society, skin colour tends to be associated with perceived differences. But experiments have shown that it's quite easy to decouple our coalition-building instincts from our perceptions of race. That's bright news for the future of multicultural societies. It also suggests that class differences matter much more than racial differences.
If these findings are any indication, Darwinism could transform the social sciences.
And Darwin's third century could be as revolutionary as the first two.
MARGARET WENTE
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
E-mail Margaret Wente | Read Bio | Latest Columns
February 12, 2009 at 12:00 AM EST
Why are recessions harder on men? Helena Cronin knows the answer. Men are far more sensitive to status. When they lose it, the psychological impact can be severe. When a man loses his job, he tends to experience it as a catastrophe. (With women, life goes on.) Low-status men also don't do well. They commit more crimes, get sicker, divorce more, and die earlier than high-status men.
Dr. Cronin is a Darwinian philosopher at the London School of Economics. Today, on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, she maintains he matters more than ever. The way human nature has evolved holds the key to human behaviour today. And human behaviour is the fundamental subject of all the social sciences, from law to politics to psychiatry.
Yet, for a generation the social sciences have more or less ignored, reviled and misunderstood evolution's powerful role in shaping us. The consequence has been a fair amount of dumb, misguided, sometimes harmful social policy.
Take the matter of sex differences. We're beginning to realize some are irreducible. “If you had any evolutionary understanding, you'd understand why there are more men in science,” says Dr. Cronin. It's all about math proficiency. The heavier the math content, the heavier the distribution of males. “There's been all kinds of wriggling and writhing to explain this, and much policy to try to amend it.” But the real explanation lies in the evolved differences between male and female brains – especially the ability to rotate objects in space, which is “fundamental to deep math problem-solving.” The distribution of male and female interests is also markedly different.
But the idea of difference is highly threatening. We conflate difference with inequality, fairness with sameness. We throw millions of dollars at schemes to recruit more women into science or detect deeply hidden biases against them. Instead, Dr. Cronin says, we should be devising teaching methods that take account of brain differences and help girls realize their maximum math potential.
Not surprisingly, feminists tend to loathe Dr. Cronin (who calls herself a feminist Darwinist). But the facts don't care if you don't like them.
Another uncomfortable finding involves stepchildren. It turns out the fairy tales were right – stepchildren are treated worse than biological children. In fact, having a stepparent is one of the major risk factors for child abuse. “We are evolved to lavish special altruism on our own children, as for no other object in the universe,” says Dr. Cronin. This bias in favour of one's own is extraordinarily strong. The Canadian research team of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson laid out the evidence more than a decade ago. But social scientists, including child-care agencies, have mostly ignored it.
One of the most interesting evolutionary studies concerns race. It's long been known that we instinctually categorize people by sex, age and race. It's easy to figure out sex and age – all species use those details for registering potential sex partners. But why race? In small hunter-gatherer societies, race differences would have been unknown.
The (very) short answer seems to be that registering race is not an evolutionary adaptation. It's a byproduct of an adaptation that evolved for other purposes – to forge coalitions with others. To do that, you have to keep close track of ever-shifting alliances and be alert to clues about whether other people share the same values, goals and friends as you do. In our society, skin colour tends to be associated with perceived differences. But experiments have shown that it's quite easy to decouple our coalition-building instincts from our perceptions of race. That's bright news for the future of multicultural societies. It also suggests that class differences matter much more than racial differences.
If these findings are any indication, Darwinism could transform the social sciences.
And Darwin's third century could be as revolutionary as the first two.
