Why Statistics Is Sexy. Or The Need to Distinguish Between Large and Small Numbers.

I've always liked statistics as a science  but never thought it hawt and sexy.  Now I wish we could make statistics more sexy (bare more skin?) in order to save more of us from falling into those hidden wolf traps of the net.  They don't have sharpened sticks, those traps (holes in the ground, covered by branches), but they do hurt our understanding in somewhat similar ways.

An example of the wolf trap:  Someone writes on, say, racism or sexism in recent events and then gets attacked by trolls.  Suppose that in one scenario there are five very active trolls hammering at the poor writer, in an alternative scenario there are five thousand such trolls. 

The two scenarios are not the same, they don't tell us the same story about the likely number of people "out there" believing whatever those trolls believe.  That's why it's very wrong to argue that the presence of five Twitter trolls in one's mentions means that the troll-opinion is extremely common in the real world.  Yet in the last week I've seen several people take that view of events:  The mere existence of any nasty trolls (and nasty they are) means that those trolls have sizable backing in the world of opinions, ideas and values.

So that is about proportions or percentages.  There will always be people with extreme nasty values, there will always be some who troll.  To unearth a troll comment and then to write about it as if it represents a sizable number of people in the real world is lazy and just wrong.  Even utopia would have a few trolls, hankering for life in hell.

It matters whether 0.1 percent or 60% of Americans believe that broccoli should be banned.  Those who don't get that difference are going to create "the-sky-is-falling" stories, and they are not ultimately helpful.

Add to all that the problem of self-selection, which means that those who comment on any particular incendiary topic are much more likely to be the ones who hold the extreme opposite view of the one any particular writer has used in a piece (broccoli haters, whether 0.1% or 60%, will be much more likely to be in the comments section of your Broccoli Is King article than anyone else). 

That's why the comments sections, especially if not moderated, are dominated by angry voices and often opinions better suited to critters who just crawled out of the primeval slime*.  You know, the way any article about gender inequality that focuses on women gets comments from angry meninists.

People who agree with the writer tend not to waste time scribbling that down under the article, and people who aren't that bothered either way tend not to spend time in the comments, either.  The Twitter discussions work on somewhat similar principles, though the fact that people have followers makes them less hostile to the imagined writer here.  But those who hated what you wrote are the ones with real energy to look up your handle and then enter the "discussion."

These two problems I've described above are a) ignoring the actual prevalence of various beliefs  and b) ignoring self-selection on the net.  That double-ignorance can have bad consequences:  We may be misled into believing that a molehill is a mountain, we may initiate much larger angry fights with an imaginary enemy (windmills?) and we may misunderstand the scope of the problem altogether.

A similar problem is born when someone writes an article starting with the planned plot.  Suppose that the plot is how much people hate broccoli.  The intrepid journalist will then go out and interview people.  What if the vast majority of those interviewed aren't bothered about broccoli at all?  That statement will not have a prominent place in the planned story.  Instead, even if it takes a very long time, the journalist will find a few people who reallyreally hate that green tree-pretender among the vegetables, and it is the opinions of those few people that we all will then read.

The next stage (and believe me I've seen this stage recently, though not about broccoli hating) is for people to talk about the vast camp of broccoli haters and mention the opinions of the interviewed few as representative of what that vast camp thinks.

This doesn't mean that anecdotes cannot reflect majority views or the views of an important numerical minority.  But strictly speaking an anecdote, if true, tells us only that one particular person held a particular opinion.  It doesn't tell us how common that opinion is.  For that we need the collection and analysis of statistical data about the whole relevant population (all vegetable eaters in the case of broccoli).

So all this was what has stopped me from writing on various interesting topics yesterday.  Aren't you glad I shared?
-----
*With all due apologies to critters from the primeval slime who are probably charming and empathic ones.

The Cruelest Month Of All. On Recent News.

The foreign and domestic news I came back to (from my selfish post-vacation angle) are so horrible that my customary post-travel migraine hurts less, even before drugs, than the thought of tackling them, assuming that I somehow should have wise words on anything.

Which isn't the case.  But neither is this August the cruelest month of all.  It just seems so, because of the access to global news which have not been good.  That access gives bystanders the feeling of participating, the diffuse feeling of needing to do something, yet knowing that there isn't much one can do.

Against that background the events in Ferguson, Missouri are not as horrible as the events in Iraq /Syria or Israel /Palestine or Ukraine or the Ebola epidemic in Africa.  Ferguson offers hope, of people responding to the police ineptness and brutality with protests, of black people responding to a poorly representative local government in terms of race by setting up voter registration tables, of all people waking up to the needs for racial justice in policing. Whatever the horrors of Ferguson, there are also these spots of light.

It's harder to see a lot of immediate hope in how the Ebola epidemic is developing.  Jina Moore writes touchingly of the special dangers women in Liberia face, because they are the majority of the caretakers of patients.  There is no known effective treatment for Ebola, with a current death rate of 54%, and that makes quarantine imperative, despite its cruelty.

Then there is the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, with its extreme radical ideology, its desire for genocides of those whose religious beliefs differ from the radical doctrine by even one iota, its brutality and inflexibility.  The most recent news about the beheading of one US journalist and the threat to behead another journalist are disgusting. 

They might also be intended to elicit a certain response from the US, because recruiting new soldiers is easier if the enemy can be seen as the great white Satan raining drones on innocents in Iraq and Syria rather than local almost-coreligionists.  And the news about the slaughter of journalists are intended to terrorize the rest of us.

Right now the Islamic State is slaughtering to glorify the god they imagine to exist, and that slaughtering applies to anyone who opposes them but especially to adult men.  Women and children are usually not killed because they are seen as resources, not as equal opponents.  Young boys can be brought up to be soldiers, young girls can be married off soonish, and young adult women (and teenage boys) can provide immediate sexual services which do not seem to differ from the idea of rape or sexual slavery for the non-Muslim women and youth in the area.   But the longer-term goals of this particular regime are surely going to be terrible for the Muslim women.

Assuming there is a longer term for the regime.  My impression is that the fighters have a sizable contingency of outside fanatics:  men, who have gathered there to turn their dream of a medieval caliphate into reality.  I doubt that those dreams can be turned into anything but a nightmare, even for them.  Still, any possible response to the current nightmare will not be without further violence or cruelty, because that is what wars mean.

How does one end a post like this on a positive note?  By remembering that most people on this planet are not suffering the types of cruelty I describe above, and by believing that education, a just distribution of resources and the belief in the humanity of all members of homo sapiens can make some difference.  We are never going to have utopia, but we could have a  milder type of dystopian future where people complain about taxes and what their neighbors do to their yards and the way the youth behaves.

Letters from Vacation 3: The Male Nannies of Scandinavia

That title is a joke, reflecting the surprise of some outside observer a while ago  about the much greater participation of Nordic fathers on hands-on care of their children than is common in the Anglo-Saxon world, say, and probably in most other places.

I observed that participation in Finland.  Now, July is the vacation month there, so it could be that all those young dads were out alone with their children because they were doing vacation parenting only. 

But I seriously doubt that, given the great competency of so many young men loading (and unloading) two or three toddlers into and out of the family car while expertly assembling (and disassembling) the stroller and also negotiating with a crying child, all simultaneously.  Indeed, the parental skills most demonstrated were first class and clearly reflected long practice.

It's not that dads in the US aren't competent carers; it's that seeing them out alone with the children is much less common than what I recently observed, and that difference is probably a cultural one.  What drives it is unclear, but one guess is the generally greater gender equality in the Nordic cultures and another is the effect of the parental leave policies which make it desirable for the dads to take some part of the total parental leave, because that gives the fathers both time for bonding and time for learning how to care for the child, on their own.

I've written about this difference after my past travels to Finland, too, but as far as I can tell the trend is getting stronger over time, and the few dads I spoke with both love it and are surprised that the same wouldn't be true elsewhere.

 

Speed-Blogging, 8/15/14: On Ferguson, the Benefits of PMS and the First Woman to Win the Field Medal in Mathematics

This will be a hodgepodge of issues, as usual, but more than usual, because I intentionally avoided all news while recharging my batteries.  That made me blissfully and innocently uninformed, even happy, the way people living sane lives look to me.

Here it goes:

First, on Ferguson, wiser people have written about the horrors of racism, the militarized police shooting an unarmed young teenager and then using tear gas on mostly peaceful protesters, the arrest of journalists and so on, as well as the tone-deafness of the local police forces until last night.

But it's still worth pointing out that if Ferguson's 21,000 inhabitants are two-thirds black, to get a police force of 53 officers with just three black officers suggests that the selection process is not a random one in the sense of the applicant pool consisting of a fair sample from the community.  It takes more information than I have to analyze the reasons for that racial imbalance (is it straight racism, indirect racism, the reluctance of people of color to side with the "enemy" or what?), but surely the community efforts should be aimed at getting a more representative police force.  A more representative city council is also necessary.

Second, a "brave scientist" (to quote the popularization I read) has figured out the evolutionary edge PMS (premenstrual syndrome) gives to some women!  I bet you want to know what that might be:

Professor of Molecular Evolution, Michael Gillings, believes that in our evolutionary past there was a hidden selective advantage to PMS, because it increased the chance that infertile pair bonds would dissolve, thus improving the reproductive outcomes of women in such partnerships.
“In the past, women had many fewer menstrual cycles than women in modern societies, because they did not have control over reproduction and were either pregnant or breastfeeding most of the time,” said Gillings.
“Imagine that a woman was pair bonded with a sterile or infertile male. Then, even in the past, they would have had regular cycles. If women in these relationships exhibited PMS and this increased the likelihood of the pair bond dissolving, this would be a huge reproductive advantage.

Damn.  There goes my evolutionary edge, because PMS is not something I've ever experienced.

More seriously, perhaps professor Gillings is correct.  But perhaps he isn't.  Not everything that exists does so because it was advantageous for evolutionary reasons, though I have read serious ruminations (in evolutionary psychology literature, natch) on the idea that suicide conveys evolutionary benefits! It only remains to prove those benefits.

It's pretty hard to find out if prehistoric women were continually pregnant or breastfeeding, by the way.  Perhaps they were.  But pregnancy can be a pretty hormonal experience for some women, right?  According to Gillings, pregnancies might then have caused similar reasons to dissolve the pair bond.  And then there's the possibility that menstruation might have been infrequent not only because of pregnancies and breastfeeding, but because women cease to menstruate below a certain body weight.  If food was hard to get in those distant times, it could be the case that many women weren't menstruating that frequently.

And were people of the distant past pair-bonded in the first place?  If so, were the women free to walk out of that bond or not?

We cannot answer those types of questions without a time machine.  But what we can do, is to point out that the writer of this popularization began the piece with an extraordinary sentence:

A brave scientist has sought to answer a question that has baffled for centuries: why do women get premenstrual syndrome (PMS)?

When you combine that with the attached picture you get something very different from a neutral discussion of an article.

Finally, Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics:

Maryam Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal for her sophisticated and highly original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems.
"This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians," Mirzakhani said. "I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years."

Mirzakhani is Iranian by birth.  Iran's president supposedly tweeted congratulations to Mirzakhani.  The tweet shows her picture both with and without a head scarf.  More on that dilemma for Iranian newspapers here.  

Letters From Vacation 2: Interesting Differences in Public Toilets

The vacation is over (sniff), but the letters I planned to write will be written now, and this one is all about the differences I spotted, in the order they happened.

Public toilets.  The flushing mechanism can vary widely, and then you feel like a three-year-old figuring out that potty business:  Proud when you get it right.  And what's very nice are places which have the sinks for washing hands inside the cubicles, too.  But mostly I was impressed by the hooks.  When you travel you need strong hooks for the backpack and whatever else you have in the cabin of the plane, and the tiny, flimsy door hooks of the usual cubicles are worth zit in that context.

Imagine a largish letter U, flatten the base and then attach it to the wall from that flattened base so that the arms of the U flail out into the room, invitingly.  If the flattened base is about three inches long, the hook can either take two bags, one on each flailing arm, or support a heavy backpack over both of them.

Such trivial things make life much easier.  God is in details and Goddesses are in the micro-details.

Other travelers have told me stories about public toilets which are just holes in the floor.  That takes good knees, but I didn't come across any to test mine (which are divinely flexible, naturally).  And naturally I know nothing about the toilets for men (though in some places people used the toilets independently of gender-markings (women's icons have a dress with one leg hanging from the middle of it)) because the toilets were for just one person at a time.

All the toilets I saw were impeccably clean, by the way.

Those words make me sound like someone with a bad vacation diarrhea.  The real reason is that when we fly we see lots of toilets in various countries, right?  Toilets must stand for symbols of countries. 

Incidentally, I hate the euphemism of calling toilets bathrooms, because taking a bath in the toilet bowl would be a disgusting experience and not on anybody's bucket list.

Economics Tuesday 5: On Austerity

Or the idea that austerity is a good economic policy to get us rapidly out of recessions.  Or the idea that austerity policies can be used as a disguise to dismantle the welfare states all over the world.  Or the idea that austerity policies are good for us because we are all sinners and we deserve to be punished for those sins.

This post has links to theories which try to explain how austerity policies would work.  I recommend reading those.  The experience for the reader is of "the-emperor's-new-clothes" type.

Research Monday 5: The Baumeister Chronicles

I wrote about Roy Baumeister in 2012, because of the paper he then published together with Kathleen Vohs.  It's worth coming back to his general work as it is a very important basic pillar of the belief systems among some of the angriest MRAs. 

For example, I've recently read several comments explaining that civilization, roads, bridges, art and science all belong to men and so do corporations:  Men, and men alone created them.  For women to just demand entry into something they never contributed to (honest, that's what those guys believe:  that women never worked, never gave birth or cared for children, never created art etc.) is the greatest unfairness ever. 

All this is based on Baumeister's arguments.  By the way, John Tierney of the New York Times eagerly disseminated them here and here.

For these reasons, it's useful to see what Baumeister's arguments are.  The first post I wrote is here, the second here and the third here.  A very important additional post about the idea that men have evolved more than women (which both Tierney and Baumeister implicitly support) can be found here.

A Few Old Rants, Re-Heated

Because I still think these are good rants.  This one is about the definition of political participation, this one is about my eternal frustration with the research popularizers and this one is about the unattainable perfection which we are, nevertheless, expected to try to attain.

A Most Hilarious Cadillac Ad. And Thoughts on Paid Vacations.

This post talks about the ad.  On the question of guaranteed paid vacation days and vacation time taken the US fares terribly.  Or very well if you view this from the employers' point of view.

And then there's this map about the countries which don't guarantee paid maternity leave (or parental leave!):

Remember that the countries the US competes against are mostly not among the ones who have similar policies?  Just pointing out that the usual competitive argument (we can't afford it because "they" don't do it) fails here.

Women, Get Your Mrs. Degrees Before It Is Too Late! A Re-Post

The post, from last February, is here.  On reading it I'd like to stress one aspect of these eternally-repeating warnings:  They are always aimed at women who are going to college or who want to have a career instead of a job.  That it's those women who are most likely to marry and stay married is immaterial, because the objective of the stories is not to address single-motherhood or childlessness or anything similar but to assert that women must choose between their brains and their uteri.

The way the message is told to women who are not planning to go to college and/or to women who come from lower income classes is slightly different:  There the problem is all those men who have given up and play computer games at home on unemployment benefits.  Those men need good jobs so that they can become worthy of marriage, but the road to the good jobs is blocked by --- guess what? --- the society (coughfeminaziworldfavoringgirlscough) pushing girls to fill up colleges etc.

I have no idea if similar stories are told to men about their chances of marriage, to ignite that terror of ending up all alone except for several cats.  But I doubt it because the social scripts differ by gender.

Economics Tuesday 4: The Economics of Health Care

Dry horse-food granola posts, these are.  But worth wading through if you have stamina.

This old post talks about some of the basic reasons why market-based solutions do fairly poorly in health care, this post explains why price competition in health care is unlikely to work very well except for a few commodities (preventive care, dental care).  This post turns the idea of death panels in health care (a common conservative imaginary threat) into a boring topic about how all systems, whether government- or market-based, end up having to ration care in some ways.  Finally, this post explains the meaning of the much-hated individual mandate.*

-------
*I just realized that I haven't done a general post on international comparisons of health care costs and health care outcomes!  An odd omission.  The gist of that post would be that the US runs the most expensive health care system in the world, that the US does not do terribly well on crude quantitative measures of health (such as increasing life expectancy or reducing infant mortality) but that it might do somewhat better on qualitative measures of care.  Access to health care remains a problem which ACA might be able to solve.

On the other hand, many of the reasons for, say,  the lower life expectancy figures in the US might not be easily influenced by anything that the formal health care system does.  This is because life expectancy is very much affected by deaths at younger ages (because each such death causes a lot of future years of life to be lost), and the US has high figures of early-age deaths from violence and accidents.  But it would be possible to affect infant mortality rates by providing better access to prenatal care. 

Research Monday 4: The Kanazawa Files

Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist (well, a sociologist, really) whose research can be used as the example for almost everything that makes me grind my teeth about a certain kind of evolutionary psychology (the kind some people denote by capital letters: Evolutionary Psychology).

I've written a lot about his work.  If you need to get irritated for a few hours, the links are in this post from last fall.   You can go backwards to find out why he's a Big Deal.  Or you could begin with this funny-ha-ha and sexist Psychology Today article, or this racist study by him.  Then find out what I say about his work.  To get relief, perhaps.

Have You Seen My Libido? A Re-Post

From here.  Yesterday's re-posting was about Mike Huckabee's opinions so why not do the same today?  This post continues on some of the topics of the previous one.  But I also found it funny.  Mostly I don't find my old posts that funny...

Put Me On A Pedestal. A Re-Post

This post is about how a conservative guy would run a political campaign against a woman.  It's hard to do if she is to stand on a pedestal because then he will have to topple it. 

When I read that post again I started thinking of similar difficulties inside the hierarchy of the Catholic church (they don't affect Islam that much because women are pretty much excluded, and in some other sects or religions women are already in the hierarchy, at least on the lowest rungs of the ladders).  Pope Francis reacted to questions of women's role in his church with a man's-rib joke.

Both responses bring in stuff like chivalry (as do certain sites which hate feminism) or the specific value of the feminine but both are ultimately negative reactions to the idea that we should have a few more women in power.

Needed: A Different Concept of Infrastructure. A Re-Post And More

But a good one, I think.  It uses an expanded concept of the term "infrastructure."  That concept would include the access to potable water.  Given what has been happening in Detroit recently, water is now available for some who have not paid their water bills (golf courses and sports arenas) but not available for others who are late on their water bills (poorer people):

The average monthly water bill in Detroit is $75 for a family of four — nearly twice the United States average — and the department is increasing rates this month by 8.7 percent. Over the past decade, sales have decreased by 20 to 30 percent, while the water department’s fixed costs and debt have remained high. Nonpayment of bills is also common. The increasing strain on the department’s resources is then passed on to customers.
But residents aren’t the only ones with delinquent accounts. Darryl Latimer, the department’s deputy director, told me that the State of Michigan holds its biggest bill: $5 million for water at state fairgrounds. (The state disputes the bill, arguing that it’s not responsible for the costs of infrastructure leaks.)
A local news investigation revealed that Joe Louis Arena, home of the Detroit Red Wings, owed $82,255 as of April. Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions play, owed more than $55,000. City-owned golf courses owed more than $400,000. As of July 2, none had paid. Mr. Latimer said the Department of Water and Sewerage would post notice, giving these commercial customers 10 days to pay before cutting service. But he did not say when.
And in the meantime the city is going after any customers who are more than 60 days late and owe at least $150.

Economics Tuesday 3: Free Market Fairy Tales and Food Safety

You need to be careful when using the term "free markets."  For those who would check the box "free-market fundamentalist" in a questionnaire about one's religion, the term means a deus ex machina: markets as an infinitely wise and objective ruler of our lives, a divine power, something which manages things better than anyone else.  This religious view is extended to apply to all those things which non-market institutions usually manage, including the government (except for wars and legal enforcement of property rights).

That concept has nothing to do with economics, by the way.  Markets do some things very well, others so-so and fail dismally in some areas.  But markets are never the arbiters of fairness or justice, and those concepts, too, the market fundamentalists would leave to the marketplace.

The economic meaning of a term like "free markets" would perhaps be closest to an unregulated market.  Whether not to regulate a market is good or bad depends on the characteristics of a market.  Take health care, for an example:  How comfortable would you feel if anyone at all could set up a business as a heart surgeon, without any formal training or qualifications?  The extremists would support that idea, arguing that customers (patients) would do the necessary work to find out if a person is qualified or not.  But most countries do not let an untrained person do heart surgery, and that's because of the high costs of poor care, the difficulty for customers to actually learn about someone's skills (given that one could lie about them in advertising in a completely unregulated market) and the great asymmetry of information in those types of markets.

I used that example because those who believe in market-solutions for health care argue by analogy:  If the farmers' markets work, why not something similar for heart surgery?

A different economic term that some seem to confuse with "free markets" is the concept of perfectly competitive markets.  The two are not the same, and perfectly competitive markets are pretty rare in reality.

Here is a fairy tale about free markets.  It's relevant for understanding why food safety regulations matter.  More on that topic here.

Research Monday 3: Studying Gender in Brains

Now this post (fried girl and boy brains), from last December,  was very hard to write, because it took me ages to research and  because it taught me a lot of unpleasant stuff about science politics in general.  These two posts (the "daring young man on the flying trapeze" and how to popularize gender science) address the popularization problems of studies of this type.

Something Rotten In Denmark, For Pickup Artists. A Re-Post

The post is here.

Horrible events relating to this concept have taken place since I wrote that post, and now I'm much, much more concerned about some of those Manosphere sites which completely objectify women or see them especially feminist women) as Devils Incarnate or as pieces of meat.   Because that's how soldiers have sometimes been trained, to de-sensitize them to the violence that is required from them later.

A Breast-Feeding Joke And Related Comments. A Re-Post.

Here is the joke and the comments.  A recent debate about cases where women outside get masturbated at contained one comment (which I can't find now) arguing that breast-feeding and masturbation in public are no different!  If you disapprove of one type of activity, you should disapprove of the other type of activity.  So.

Letters From Vacation: Evolutionary Psychology As Religion

One university in Finland, the University of Turku, is now offering a minor in evolutionary psychology.  The write-up at the university pages tells us weird stuff.  I translate from the statements of Markus Rantala, the guy who is organizing all this:

Evoluutiopsykologiaa sovelletaan laajasti eri tieteenaloilla yhdysvaltalaisissa huippuyliopistoissa, ja Turun yliopisto on nyt mukana eurooppalaisessa eturintamassa tarjoamalla evoluutiopsykologian sivuaineopintoja kaikille kiinnostuneille opiskelijoille, Rantala sanoo.

My translation:

Evolutionary psychology is widely applied in different disciplines at the top American universities, and Turku University now belongs to the European frontier by offering evolutionary psychology studies as a minor to all interested students, says Rantala.

And:

Itse asiassa evoluutiopsykologiaa pitäisi opettaa jo lukiossa, sillä siitä on hyötyä myös käytännön elämässä. Monia sukupuolten välisiä ristiriitoja muun muassa parisuhteessa vältettäisiin, jos ihmiset ymmärtäisivät, miten seksuaalivalinta on muokannut miesten ja naisten aivoja erilaisiksi ja miten se vaikuttaa eri sukupuolten käyttäytymiseen ja ajattelutapaan.

My translation:

As a matter of fact, evolutionary psychology should be taught already in the upper grades of ordinary schools, because it is also useful in practical life.  Many conflicts between the sexes in mating could be avoided, if people understood how sexual selection has modified the brains of men and women to be different and how it affects the behavior and thinking of both sexes.

Rantala also predicts that in a few decades all university students will study evolutionary psychology! 

This smacks of religion more than science, don't you think?  The conclusions have already been made (for instance, that it's sexual selection alone which affects gender differences and not some combination of societal pressures, cultural evolution, sexual selection and so on), and the time to convert all people to the Right Religion is NOW!

One of the new courses in evolutionary psychology at Turku University is about sexual selection!  Yle, the Finnish public television website, chose to write about that course in this context.  The story begins:

Evoluutiopsykologian sivuainekokonaisuus käynnistyy syksyllä Turun yliopistossa. Opintoja vetävä dosentti Markus J. Rantala uskoo, että oppiaine kiinnostaa etenkin nuoria sinkkumiehiä.

My translation:

A minor in evolutionary psychology begins at Turku University in fall.  Docent Markus J. Rantala who leads the studies believes that the discipline will especially appeal to young single men.

Isn't that fascinating?  The reason why young single men would be particularly interested in evolutionary psychology isn't really addressed in the story, except that Rantala believes that young men have been his most eager students because the courses teach you how to find a sexual partner (hint:  sniff at women to find if they are ovulating, measure their waist and hip ratio, go for the youngest women with the biggest rack).*

But surely it is women who are desperate to find a man who will stick around when the children are born?  I thought men just wanted a lot of quick f**ks in the most rudimentary evolutionary psychology?

Never mind.  The only reason I'm writing about any of this is that it presses one of my buttons which is the treatment of what is supposed to be science as religion or something to market.

For instance,  it's utterly unlikely that all university students of the future would take courses in the kind of evolutionary psychology which exists today**, it's not quite true that evolutionary psychology has become a major force in the American universities, many of the studies on which evolutionary psychology bases its sexual selection arguments are about psychology students looking at pictures, and leaping from those choices to evolutionary adaptations is a very very long leap***.

More precisely, academic researchers don't speak like this, as a rule, but tend not to over-generalize, tend to hedge their bets, tend to include opposing arguments and criticisms in their statements.  I've noticed before that evolutionary psychologists of one particular type tend to differ from that general rule.  They are more likely to preach, to act as missionaries and to hint at a future where all humanities and social sciences have been replaced by evolutionary psychology.

This is partly a response, perhaps understandable but wrong-headed, to outside criticisms.  It's wrong-headed, because it is a religious response, not a scientific response, and the same wrong-headedness can be seen in those evolutionary psychology articles which simply ignore all criticism and contradictory findings in their literature surveys, instead concentrating on only a sub-set of findings:  those which agree with the theory that article will proceed to support.  That's how religious dogma is created, not how science is carried out.

But it does tend to suggest a view of the research field as one uninterrupted march of stronger and stronger evidence supporting one simple model or theory!

After all this ranting, it might come as a surprise for some readers that I'm not at all averse to the idea of an evolutionary psychology minor at Turku University.  It's the lack of a minor in the criticisms of evolutionary psychology that I lament, because a proper scientific approach to the kinds of questions the new minor intends to evaluate depends crucially on the inclusion of contradictory theories and findings.
-------
*Sort of joking there, though all the suggestions are based on some evolutionary psychology argument.
**The kinds which are not based on any actual genetic evidence that something IS an evolutionary adaptation.  I notice that Rantala ties genetics with evolutionary psychology in one statement but the two have practically nothing to do with each other today.  And evolutionary psychology of Rantala's type ignores the plasticity of human behavior.
***Not to mention that there are many studies which don't support the simplest evolutionary psychology (Evolutionary Psychology) explanations.