The Savanna Principle
I already talked about this back in my livejournal but I've read further on the topic now, so I'll add some more comments.
From: The Savanna Principle
Satoshi Kanazawa, Managerial and Decision Economics, 2004
Social Capital and the Human Psyche: Why Is Social Life "Capital"?
Joanne Savage, Satoshi Kanazawa, Sociological Theory, 2004
Social Sciences are branches of biology
Satoshi Kanazawa, Socio-Economic Review, 2004
Quoting myself summarising what I say are the key points of Kanazawa:
He describes the approach as avoiding "hydrogenology" - the study of hydrogen separate from the rest of the elements, or considering humans as separate from the animal kingdom. We can note how advanced we are, but we should acknowledge the impact of our animal origins on our current society. The papers seem a little repetitive in that respect to be honest.
In Social Sciences Are Branches Of Biology, the question the question asked is why there is a wage penalty for motherhood, as opposed to a wage reward for fatherhood? What Kanazawa's answer boils down to is that evolutionary pressure compels mothers to want to spend more time looking after children, and fathers to want to spend more time working to provide for them to increase their survival rate. Additionally (and perhaps more persuasively), studies have shown that fathers of male children earn more - this fits in with the theory because historically female children would do as well as they could on their looks regardless, while male children would need status and power to attract the ladies. Apparently couples with sons are less likely to divorce than couples with daughters, also.
I think there's some equally persuasive arguments against this, but the case he has made is still well put. These evolutionary biases of course, are not always appropriate in the modern day and age.
The third paper I read was Social Capital and the Human Psyche: Why Is Social Life "Capital"?. Here's their definition:
When prodded with a stick, the point that falls out of this paper is really just claiming that there are innate differences in what social capital constitutes between genders, based on the idea of what kinds of social structure is likely to have been evolutionary important for men and women. It's really just justifying that women form fewer closer social relationships and more often with kin, while men should be better at cooperating but more competitive with each other. So cooperation happens under a dominance heirarchy for men, by and large. This would also explain the consistently better verbal skills for girls, for instance.
I think there's some more I could talk about here, but it's 6pm on a Friday, so I'll just leave it as a summary so I can remember what they're about at some later point.
From: The Savanna Principle
Satoshi Kanazawa, Managerial and Decision Economics, 2004
Social Capital and the Human Psyche: Why Is Social Life "Capital"?
Joanne Savage, Satoshi Kanazawa, Sociological Theory, 2004
Social Sciences are branches of biology
Satoshi Kanazawa, Socio-Economic Review, 2004
Quoting myself summarising what I say are the key points of Kanazawa:
I've been reading about the Savanna Principle, which is the idea that the human brain is inherently biased towards not comprehending concepts that didn't exist back in the hunter-gatherer days in the African Savanna, known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA).This is the theme that appears to run through all Kanazawa's papers, although he tackles a few different things with this idea.
Fundamentally, the human body hasn't changed in the last 10 000 years, so the idea is that the brain remains in pretty much the same state. This is one explanation for why children take a reasonably long time to learn to distinguish people in real life from people on TV, and indeed, studies have shown that people never really do - those who watch certain types of TV shows (soaps and similar, I expect), rate themselves as having greater satisfaction with their social lives, as if they have those people as actual friends.
He describes the approach as avoiding "hydrogenology" - the study of hydrogen separate from the rest of the elements, or considering humans as separate from the animal kingdom. We can note how advanced we are, but we should acknowledge the impact of our animal origins on our current society. The papers seem a little repetitive in that respect to be honest.
In Social Sciences Are Branches Of Biology, the question the question asked is why there is a wage penalty for motherhood, as opposed to a wage reward for fatherhood? What Kanazawa's answer boils down to is that evolutionary pressure compels mothers to want to spend more time looking after children, and fathers to want to spend more time working to provide for them to increase their survival rate. Additionally (and perhaps more persuasively), studies have shown that fathers of male children earn more - this fits in with the theory because historically female children would do as well as they could on their looks regardless, while male children would need status and power to attract the ladies. Apparently couples with sons are less likely to divorce than couples with daughters, also.
I think there's some equally persuasive arguments against this, but the case he has made is still well put. These evolutionary biases of course, are not always appropriate in the modern day and age.
The third paper I read was Social Capital and the Human Psyche: Why Is Social Life "Capital"?. Here's their definition:
Social Capital from the evolutionary psychological perspective is any feature of a social relationship that, directly or indirectly, confers reproductive benefits to a participant in that relationship.Reproductive success here includes that of close kin (i.e. success of genes).
When prodded with a stick, the point that falls out of this paper is really just claiming that there are innate differences in what social capital constitutes between genders, based on the idea of what kinds of social structure is likely to have been evolutionary important for men and women. It's really just justifying that women form fewer closer social relationships and more often with kin, while men should be better at cooperating but more competitive with each other. So cooperation happens under a dominance heirarchy for men, by and large. This would also explain the consistently better verbal skills for girls, for instance.
I think there's some more I could talk about here, but it's 6pm on a Friday, so I'll just leave it as a summary so I can remember what they're about at some later point.
posted by Rowan at
2:42 PM
4 Comments:
Why is this beautiful and amazing and clearly worth a re-read item posted twice?
Hmm, what do I have to say? Basically that I'm replying because I have nothing better to do, and this is something like thought, whereas my alternatives are games or something like depression.
I don't know... I feel I should say something about hydrogenology, but I'm not sure enough what the author was trying to get at there. I mean, I understand you shouldn't take things as distinct from other related things, but it's not obvious to me that they're the same case. Humans can be studied in terms of sociology on a much different level to animals - from what I know, in the animal kingdom things are rough and nasty and in the long run the prisoner's dilemma wins out. "I don't kill you if you bring me something better to eat. Every time". Things work. Any natural ecosystem is balanced, any over-population by a species is wiped out in a few cycles time. Things work. People don't always work so well.
But more what I'm trying to say is sure, consider humanity's roots and the social situations in which we evolved. The key point is we have evolved to something that has clearly definable (though dont' make me) "intelligence" - not the ability to learn or repeat tasks or catch things in sneaky ways, but to sit down and devise whole new and unthought of sneaky things to do. If you know what I mean. We are not distinct from the animal kingdom, but nor are we part of it socially.
On the other hand hydrogen is studied separate from all the other elements because with enough approximations to linearity, non-bonding, things like that, we can solve equations for it. We can't solve equations for Helium or Lithium, let alone anything else. So we study hydrogen, and hope that by adding a (Z-1) term we'll catch everything else, near enough. There isn't some super-element with all the properties of the other elements, rather Hydrogen is sort of the lowest common demoninator.
Incidentally, the approximations calculated using the dodgy (Z-1) approximation are reasonable. We gain knowledge of bonding energies etc by calculating them using those formulae, working them out in funky chemistry labs that can do amazing things, and combining the two in molecular modelling packages. It's actually pretty funky, I did a chem honours course on that last year. The predictions of the modelling software combine data with equations and get better results than either, though they still have some error.
But the point is that I don't know what your author was saying, but I don't see how studying sociology in humans as we see them now is in any way the same as studying only particle equations for hydrogen. One is a subset (everything is built from bits of hydrogen, in that it's the simples atom, even though it has component particles), the other is a superset - everything we see in human society we can also see somewhere in the animal kingdom (or at least, we believe we can -dolphins learning/remembering/interpreting, gorillas doing sums etc), though in no other species do various processes, techniques, etc come together as they do in humans.
I'm probably missing the point.
As for the other two I think they're probably fairly arguable points - many women in today's society have been trained to believe (no connotations intended) that it's fine to want money and success, not children, and many men want to raise kids and care for animals and things like that. Now these have always been true - women would marry for power (kings' courts), men would spend their lives in animal husbandry, but it's more clear these days. I think any study proving these things will surely be effected by ethnicity and country of study (some societies will be different to others in terms of status of women, etc), and sometimes these ideas are taken with on emigration. Further, in a typical Western country, you have also to deal with religion - from my observations, fundamentalist Christian's very much conform to those findings, but I would not have said the same of *actual* athiests (as opposed to people who don't go to church). In countries like Australia, the UK, the US, such a study would be hard to gather findings from unless you surveyed basically the whole country to get a large enough sample space. You are dealing constantly with some form of ethnicity and frequently with religion, and both of these are likely to affect the concept of Social Capital, as I see it. Maybe I'm wrong though.
I think the findings of those papers seem quite reasonable and intuitive, even despite the feminist revolution and so on, nevertheless I'm somewhat surprised - particularly seen women's wages are lower REGARDLESS of child-bearing-ness. For instance female scientists are typically paid less than males even though you're less likely to expect them to take maternity leave than an office worker, for example. Similarly women past child-bearing age whose children have grown up have lower wages if they re-enter the workforce, even fully qualified, than their male counterparts. I can't therefore see why the pay discrepency.
It also seems that a lot of men DO earn high wages, but that's not necessarily bread-earning for the family, often that is for selfish status.
Look at the "baby boomer" generation. They've screwed us over royally, by turning their parents morals on their heads, having everything given to htem on a platter, then deciding that platter should be paid for, even though they didn't have to, so they get the advantage of their elders AND their youngers. I understand less and less people are inheriting from their great-aunt's estate anymore, as once you've sold your house to get into a nursing home, and sold everything else to pay your hospital bills, there's nothing left for your family. Where's the justice? I'm not saying Medicare should cover everything, it's just not right that old people suffer because of their selfish next generation, and youth suffer because we pay uni fees through our noses and we can't get work because they obviously should be able to stay in the workforce until they die. But that's okay, we're young, us girls should all quit and have babies (which the world really needs right now) so there'll only be half as many job-seekers.
I hope we learn and improve in the future, give women equal wages and reduce the cost of elderly care and create jobs that are USEFUL. Whoops, I seem to have come over all Green. Hey, and I haven't even started on the raping the planet bit! (let alone the moon, asteroids....)
Sorry, very long reply!
Claire :)
By
Anonymous, at 11:01 AM
Oops, deleted the second post now.
I find that quite amusing, because the point the author was making is that we don't study hydrogen separately from the other elements, despite all its unique properties. Obviously he (as I) hasn't studied chemistry I guess. :)
Anyway, in terms of defending Kanazawa's position rather than necessarily stating my views from here on in:
As far as studying humans in terms of animal behaviour, he wasn't suggesting that humans are part of the animal kingdom, just that a lot of our social norms are inherited from about 10,000 years ago. So his claim is that the reason many men have the "selfish" desire to earn more money is because historically that has made a big difference to the survival of their genes in the next generation. The men can't pin it down to that reason, but it's there.
In terms of what you're saying about male and female scientists, I think there's a semi-reasonable refutaion of that. The wages are the same for the same positions, but on average the female scientists aren't as driven to apply for the "more important" academic positions that have the higher attached wages, while that increase in status is more important to the male scientists.
I'm reasonably confident that there's anti-discrimination laws in place to make sure that there are equal wages for the same positions, so it's just that on average the higher up positions are taken up by men. This either supports the theory, or it just says there's still discrimination in the workplace, I think.
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Rowan, at 11:51 AM
The hydrogen things is more physics than chemistry. When you study Atomic & Nuclear physics you find you spend all semester talking about hydrogen, and then pretending that everything else is just the same but bigger (clearly not true as atomic size shrinks with more nucleons, just for a start). But it works okay.
As for equal pay, in science it IS a bit hard to know. Women study science as much as men, but you also have to consider the type of science they study. It's not surprising that a botanist will earn less than an engineer, and the engi is more likely to be male and the botanist female. So that's a start.
There is the high-power jobs thing too. A lot of that is down to personality. Some women will try to make a name for themselves, others are happy to just do their research. This again will be related to some extent to the field of research.
I think there probably is still a fair bit of discrimination in the work place, even if it's unintentional. Same with disabled people. It's all well and good to not discriminate on grounds of physical ability, but if you have a job that may require some degree of light lifting, for instance, and a really good applicant with cycstic fibrosis, or somesuch, and another applicant almost as good but able, the employer will TEND to employ the able bodied person rather than employ a second person on a part-time basis to take care of the lifting. That said, there are complaints tribunals to avoid this.
It's all a bit weird and often unfair. Glenna's got a temp job a Quarantine which starts as soon as she gets her security clearance back from ASIO. But she applied for a 12 month position a few months ago and was knocked back. She was well qualified and prepared for the interview, so she rang back later and asked what she could improve for next time jobs were available. Their answer was "nothing. There were two jobs and three applicants and you missed out. Apply again and you should get the position next time". It'd be nice if they had some sort of reason as to why the other two were better...
On the subject of equal pay, I dont' really know how it works, obviously I'm paid the same as my colleagues for tutoring, so there's nothing to whinge about there.
Karen claims she's not paid what the male staff in her position are paid. Or more specifically, her rises come around less often, even though if there's any really good secretaries in this uni she's one of them.
That said, it's a bit interesting. I only have a very small sample space, but look at the people I know: I'm studying for a PhD on an APA worth about $19k. You are very gifted (not having a go), and applied to a research school, with extra funding, and got a $7k top up above your APA. Cliff didn't feel he had the marks for an APA and so applied for an industry scholarship as well, and similarly, is on $26k. Aidan studied at CSIRO for his vac scholarship after honours, and it was suggested by his supervisor-to-be that he apply for a scholarship, which he and the other PhD guy he worked with, both got, even though he didn't fulfil the scholarship's requirements to the letter - CSIRO paper reviews before publication submission, duty observing, etc. He had reasons, I'm just saying. Of 4 people I know studying for or with PhDs, the only girl is on the lowest income. In fact, even with all my observing, marking, and tutoring, I still did not pass the taxable threshold last year, meaning despite the extra work I still earned less than you.
Admitedly the other guys studying for PhDs here are mostly on plain APAs, but they also aren't studying in theme areas.
Now the reason I don't have a top up and you guys do is that you have good marks and went out of your way to apply for "rewards", which I dind't do, blissfully believing they'd come to me if I deserved them. My marks aren't special, either.
Still, I imagine that's probably true thoughout science, and possibly throughout work as a whole - often bonuses are available to those with the guts to ask without fear of sacking. Curse the workplace reforms, too, they're going to hurt some people.
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Anonymous, at 12:30 PM
Yeah, I'm quite willing to believe there is some discrimination. But I can't say that rules out other effects from ingrained social norms. In the end one can say that discrimination is the ingrained social norms I suppose. It's the same with the pay rates for different jobs - why are the male dominated fields higher paid in general? Maybe it's because it was more important to them to be paid more and the wage increased because of that.
I'm just making stuff up to defend the point, but it's hard to prove either way. Maybe there's some really in-depth studies of these sorts of things somewhere (there very likely is on some parts, whether I trust their scientific mehtods is another matter).
By
Rowan, at 9:20 PM
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