"Male sex drive the cause of worlds conflict"

.

I'm nearly crying with laughter at this, mate!

It's almost like some succinct 'post-modernist' classic - 'well thought out critique' or 'the ravings of one of the less-evolved amongst men, initiating and displaying aggression'?

Thanks for starting off my Monday morning so well, revol.

Old hat kinda, heard this BS before. Never thought anyone took it that serious though.

"Primitive" societies are like chimpanzees you see, fighting over the most women (but not bonobos for some reason, which enjoy casual sex). But it's not racist old anthropology because every society is the same! Yeah this is possibly the most reductionist evolutionary psychology I've seen, and that's quite an achievement. From the reporting it's not even clear what they've 'discovered', other than in-/out-groups are found across cultures (and a just-so story cooked up to explain it). I'm pretty certain the 'men are always more dominant/aggressive' thing is plain empirically false too, e.g. this was on the BBC recently (though the reporting is a 'mens rights' angle). Fuck I hate evolutionary psychology. And what on earth is 'evolutionary anthropology'? How can you possibly study the genetic basis of culture? Did they find different genes in patriarchies which were shared with chimps but weren't found in matriarchies (clue: of course not or they'd be shouting about 'the male superiority gene')?

I want to think it's a parody/hoax, but then this shit is considered a bona fide academic discipline

jesus h. christ in a chicken basket. incredible that this sort of stuff still gets floated.

yes it was rampant late 80s/early 90s, but not from 'scientists'.

How do they sccount for Thatcher then.

There are probably people who would attempt to argue that she was exposed to abnormally large amounts of testosterone in the womb or something that 'virilised' her brain.

you see this sort of attitude in pro-capitalist pseudo-feminists all the time. remember when star jones amounted the war on terror to a battle between osama bin laden and george bushes male egos? that shit is hilarious.

Aren't scientists and the like suppose to be unbiased when it comes to things like gender? The exact opposite seems true...

Is SCUM a parody of feminist separatism, I can't tell?

Psychologists, and particularly evolutionary psychologists, often try and fit even impeccibly conducted research into their own non-scientific or partially scientific narratives by extrapolating more from the data they produce than is justifiable. In a sense this is how all theory building works, but a lot of stuff, especially stuff that gets reported, in pretty, if you like, biased

Yeah, a lot of otherwise scientific evolutionary psychology conducts fair enough experiments. But if it finds say, a sexually dimorphic behaviour, they then go off on one dreaming up some imaginary evolutionary explanation and present it as fact. It's pretty hard if not impossible to scientifically study the evolution of psychology since there's no fossil record of the mind. You can at best, infer from cross-cultural constants that some kind of evolutionary selection may be operating, and speculate as to the mechanisms.

Although that said a lot of the stuff that gets reported was never even scientific to begin with, it's often marketing stunts for some product or other ('why men evolved to find Jessica Alba's walk sexy. her new album is out next week in all good outlets.')

Nope.
http://libcom.org/library/scum-manifesto-valerie-solanas

Na. She tried to kill Andy Warhol too. She should have said it was art.

On evolutionary psychology. Yeah, really dodgy area. As is socio-biology....

I'd go a step further and say they confuse cause and effect, or rather, can't tell them apart because the whole thing is just a giant blur. They may not even do it consciously, scientific narratives certainly play a part in dealing with underdetermination (which is absolutely a problem with evolutionary psychology IMO).

David Buller
Robert Richardson
Philip Kitcher
Rose,Lewontin, Kamin

Bate those down yis.

Oh and a hoax does exist. VS Ramachandran did one in the journal Medical Hypotheses a few years back.

I share the indignation above with this "scientific analysis" - it's hovering somewhere among the basest levels of bourgeois thought. I think that it's a variation of the more or less permanent perversion of Darwin, the so-called "neo-Darwinism" or "Social Darwinism", which constantly attempts to demonstrate that, like the facets of capitalism, aggression and competition are the natural order of things - "dog eat dog" or the "survival of the fittest" (a phrase that I don't think Darwin ever used).

Along with Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace, I think that we carry important characteristics of our ape-like and more general animal instincts - not least the maternal instinct - and that these in general have stood the development of our ancestors and then our species in good stead in relation to evolution, society and morality. This link with our animal past was also a question taken up Marx, Engels, Pannekoek and others in the workers' movement.

There's no fossil record of the mind, but there is a fossil record of the skull and thus the development of the size of the brain - bearing in mind that a bigger hominin skull doesn't necessarily equate to a more intelligent being. But in general it does. I think that from this there must be a genetic development involved in greater consciousness.