why do men dominate in traditionally "female" occupations? (2 Viewers)

[Vinnie]

Bleedin' female Carpenters

 

[nooleen]

And having dared to question the assumptions of both feminists and their opponents, some evolutionary biologists are now hoping to turn conventional wisdom upside down in another area where civil rights meet long-standing prejudice. This is the vexed question of race.....

you would have to be truly mental to even contemplate touching that one with a shitty stick.

 

[Diddles]

That article is suggesting that women are making a choice about their careers as opposed to the choice being made for them, which is the case in most instances.

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

you would have to be truly mental to even contemplate touching that one with a shitty stick.

It's a very interesting article.

 

[nooleen]

That article is suggesting that women are making a choice about their careers as opposed to the choice being made for them, which is the case in most instances.

it's saying darwin is making the choice for them, the beardy sexist

 

[nooleen]

It's a very interesting article.

is there an equivalent article on race?

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

is there an equivalent article on race?

Same article.

Racism/xenophobia are hard-wired but malleable.

Race to the finish

Racial difference is an area where modern Darwinists have feared, until recently, to tread. This is hardly surprising, given the topic’s history. Many early evolutionary biologists (though not Darwin himself) thought that just as man was a risen ape, so white, European man was the zenith of humanity, and that people from other parts of the world were necessarily inferior.
The consequences of that have been terrible. It gave a veneer of intellectual respectability to the eugenic horrors which culminated in the Nazi death camps. Indeed, it is probably one of the roots of the “evolution stops at the neck” point of view. But evolutionary biology is now making amends. By overturning understanding of what race actually is, it may yet provide the tools that allow people of different backgrounds to live in reasonable harmony.
Revenge and punishment lie deep in the human psyche
Its first observation is a bleak one. This is that racism, or at least xenophobia, is a deeply ingrained human characteristic. But its second observation is that, so far as can be determined, the traditional definition of race—the tendency of people living in different parts of the world to have different skin colour, hair colour and physiognomy—has no wider ramifications in areas such as intelligence. Racial prejudice, then, is just that: prejudice.
What is being proposed instead, by another husband and wife team of Darwinists, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby of the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a theory of ethnicity that explains the mishmash of categories anthropologists have tried to shoehorn into the general class of “race”. Are Jews and Sikhs, who are defined by religious exclusivity, races? Are Serbs and Croats, who share their religions with others, but not with each other, and whom no geneticist could tell apart? These examples, and similar ones, argue that race has no biological meaning. But it does. It is just not the traditional meaning.
Social psychologists have long observed that, on first meeting, people automatically classify each other in three ways: by sex, by age and by race. But Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby pointed out that before long-distance transport existed, only two of those would have been relevant. People of different ages and sexes would meet; people of different races would not.
The two researchers argue that modern racial discrimination is an overstimulated response to what might be called an “alliance” detector in the human brain. In a world where the largest social unit is the tribe, clan or what-you-will of a few hundred people, your neighbours and your other allies will normally look a lot like you, and act similarly. However, it is known from the study of modern hunter-gatherers, and inferred from archaeological evidence about ancient ones, that neighbouring tribes are often hostile.
Though an individual might reasonably be expected to know many members of his tribe personally, he would probably not know them all. There would thus be a biological advantage in tribal branding, as it were. Potential allies would quickly identify what marked them out from others, and what marked others out from them—and, because those differences would probably be small, the detector would need to be very sensitive.
In the past, such markers would often have been cultural, since local physical differences would have been minimal. A telling instance is recorded in the Bible:
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him.
The questioners were the Gileadites. The slain, an Ephraimite. But no physical difference could distinguish the tribes, so the Gileadite ethnic-cleansers had to rely on linguistic tics.
In a world where a syllable can get you killed, having differently coloured skin is a pretty strong brand of identity. However, it is not a unique signal. Experiments that Dr Cosmides, Dr Tooby and their students have conducted in both America and Brazil (another racially mixed country) suggest it is surprisingly easy to rebrand even people of different skin colour by making other badges of allegiance more significant—as happens when sportsmen clothe themselves in coloured team shirts. Moreover, Andrew Penner of the University of California, Irvine, and Aliya Saperstein of the University of Oregon have shown that perception of a person’s race can actually change in the real world. Many people shift from being “white” to “black”, in both their own eyes and the eyes of others, in response to unemployment, impoverishment or imprisonment.
That is an uncomfortable reminder of the way group solidarity works in America. The hope this analysis brings, though, is that there is nothing particularly special about biologically based brands such as skin colour. If other brands of group membership can be strengthened, the traditional ones may diminish, even if they do not disappear completely. If this theory of race is correct (and more research is certainly needed), it indicates a strong prescription: policies that encourage groups to retain their identity within a society will cause trouble, but those that encourage cultural integration will smooth things over.
In practice, the history of that most racially mixed country of all, the United States, supports this idea. When integration has been encouraged, as with the descendants of the great flood of European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ethnic distinctions have vanished. When integration has been discouraged, as with the descendants of slaves liberated shortly before those European immigrants arrived, differences have been sharpened. Even in Britain, official policy seems to be shifting from “multiculturalism”, which celebrated diversity and thus encouraged distinction, to a deliberate attempt to forge a cultural consensus.
What the brand theory of ethnicity does not require, however, is that minorities submit to the majority’s definition of what the brands should be. All that is needed is for each generation to be encouraged to form its own identity from the widest range of materials possible.

Illustration by Noma Bar

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

If it's possible to love a graph, I love this one comparing murder rates in the UK and Chicago

Ladies note - *Figures for women are so low as to be invisible at this scale.

Murder
That murderers are usually young men is well known, but Dr Daly and Dr Wilson dug a bit deeper. They discovered that although the murder rate varies from place to place, the pattern does not. Plot the rate against the age of the perpetrator and the peak is the same (see chart). Moreover, the pattern of the victims is similar. They, too, are mostly young men. In the original study, 86% of the victims of male killers aged between 15 and 19 were also male. This is the clue as to what is going on. Most violence (and thus most murder, which is simply violence’s most extreme expression) is a consequence of competition between young, unemployed, unmarried men. In the view of Darwinists, these men are either competing for women directly (“You looking at my girl, Jimmy?”) or competing for status (“You dissing me, man?”).
This is not to deny that crimes of violence are often crimes of poverty (for which read low status). But that is precisely what Darwinism would predict. There is no need to invoke the idea that people are “born criminal”. All that is required is the evolution of enough behavioural flexibility to respond appropriately when violence is (or would have been, in the evolutionary past) an appropriate response.

 

[nooleen]

dunno about the race part of that article, clever ideas but what's the provable basis?

it's not equivalent to the gender part of the argument, either, which is probably for the best.

"blacks tend towards lower-paid employment because they don't care about job success as much as whites, they'd rather be having kids" probably wouldn't go over that well....

 

[D0njo]

I thought they were just all lazy?

 

[flashback]

I thought they were just all lazy?

you're thinking of the Mexicans there.

you can't move for them having naps under trees with their sombreros on round here.

 

[Cormcolash]

it's saying darwin is making the choice for them, the beardy sexist

I heard he rode his cousin too, incestuous misogynist!

 

[Thebeard]

All women have to do to succeed in work is simple:

 

[egg_]

That article is suggesting that women are making a choice about their careers as opposed to the choice being made for them, which is the case in most instances.

I hope you're not trying to imply that anyone has much of a choice, when it comes to work, except for to choose the least unpleasant of a variety of unpleasant options