Dakota Beacon

A Book Review by Lynn Bergman

Nature vs Nurture (Heredity vs Environment)

The author’s goal in writing this book was not to argue that “genes (heredity) are everything and culture (environment) is nothing” (no one believes that), but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything and genes are nothing) is so often seen as “moderate” and the moderate position (that genes are everything and culture is nothing) is seen as extreme.

Why is it important to sort this all out? Because acknowledging human nature does not have the political implications so many fear. The author does not try to advocate policies or to advance the agenda of the political left or right.

Capitalism

I choose to focus, in this book review, on Chapter 18, “Gender” because I referenced it in a previous article titled “Support for Capitalism in the US, Canada, Australia, and UK” toward explaining why about 3 of 5 men (about 60%) but only about 2 of 5 women (about 40%) favor capitalism. But first, let us define capitalism:

Capitalism is an economic system where private individuals and corporations own and control the means of production, such as property, businesses, and industries. Capitalism’s core principles are:

1)      Profit Motive

2)      Private Property

3)      Market Competition – No Central Planning by Government

Competition breeds new businesses that multiply economic growth. Corporations and individuals are given the freedom to operate their businesses and manage their income as they choose.

Government’s role, as a punisher, is limited to taxation, regulation, and the nation’s defense.

Society’s role, as a benefactor, is to help those who cannot support themselves.

Research on the biological basis of sex differences has been led by women

Because it is so often said that this research is a plot to keep women down, I will first share the number of women listed by name by the author for each research discipline:

Neuroscientists – seven

Psychologists – five

Sociobiologists and Evolutionary Psychologists – twenty-one

Note that the last area of research is sometimes stereotyped as a “sexist discipline” yet is perhaps the most bi-gendered academic field the author is familiar with.

Types of feminism -Equity Feminism, Gender Feminism (and its offshoot, Difference Feminism)

Equity Feminism:

Opposes sex discrimination and other forms of unfairness to women. It is part of the classical liberal and humanistic tradition that grew out of the Enlightenment, guiding the first wave of feminism and launching the second wave.

The first wave of feminism, bookended in the United States by the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, gave women the right to vote, to serve as jurors, to hold property in marriage, to divorce, and to receive an education.

The second wave of feminism, flowering in the 1970s, brought women into the professions, changed the division of labor in the home, exposed sexual biases in business, government, and other institutions, and threw a spotlight on women’s interests in all walks of life. The theories that are the friendliest to women are the “Blank Slate” (if nothing is innate, difference between the sexes cannot be innate) and the “Noble Savage” (if we harbor no ignoble urges, sexual exploitation can be eliminated by changing our institutions.”

Equity Feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Equity Feminists include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Wendy Kaminer, Noretta Koertge, Donna Laframboise, Mary Lefkowitz, Wendy McElroy, Camile Paglia, Daphne Patai, Virginian Postrel, Alice Rossi, Sally Satel, Christina Hoff Sommers, Nadine Strossen, Joan Kennedy Taylor, and Cathy Young. These equity feminists have excoriated gender feminism’s disdain for analytical rigor and classical liberal principles.  

Gender Feminism:

Holds that women continue to be enslaved by a pervasive system of male dominance, the gender system, in which “bi-sexual infants are transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey.”

Gender Feminism is opposed to the classical liberal tradition and allied instead with Marxism. Postmodernism, social constructionism, and radical science.

Gender Feminism is an empirical (verifiable by observation or experience) doctrine committed to three claims about human nature:

1)      The differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety.

2)      Humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it (power) is exercised.

3)      Human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.

In embracing these doctrines, genderists doom feminism. Neuroscience, genetics, psychology, and ethnography are documenting sex differences that almost certainly originate in human biology. Evolutionary psychology is documenting a web of motives (such as love, sex, family, and beauty) other than group-against-group dominance than entangle us in many conflicts and confluences of (common) interest with members of the same sex and the opposite sex.

Difference Feminism:

It is not just gender feminism’s collision with science that repels many feminists. Like other inbred ideologies, it has produced strange excrescences (abnormal outgrowths), like the offshoot known as “Difference Feminism.” Difference Feminism offers women the worst of both worlds: invidious (unfair) claims without scientific support.

How many women consider themselves “feminists?

About 30% of women considered themselves “feminists” in 1997, down from 40% a decade earlier, yet they agree with every major feminist position. This was most recently confirmed in a National Geographic/Ipsos poll in late 2019. The poll positions all women agree with are equity feminism positions while the word “feminist” is mostly associated with gender feminists.

How are men and women alike?

Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women, and virtually all psychological traits may be found in varying degrees among the members of each sex. No sex difference yet discovered applies to every last man compared with every last woman, so generalizations will always be untrue of many individuals. Notions like “proper role” and “natural place” are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.

Men and women are not from Mars and Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our civilization. Men and women all have the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to determine small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same. They use language and think about the physical and living word in the same general way. They feel the same basic emotions, and both enjoy sex, seek intelligent and kind marriage partners, get jealous, make sacrifices for their children, compete for status and mates, and sometimes commit aggression in pursuit of their interests.

Contrary to popular belief, parents in contemporary America do not treat their sons and daughters very differently. A recent assessment of 172 studies involving 28,000 children found that boys and girls are given similar amounts of encouragement, warmth, nurturance, restrictiveness, discipline, and clarity of communication. Differences between boys and girls do not depend on their observing the behavior of their parents.

How are Men and Women Different?

Now we search the facts to see how men and women differ from one another. As we numerate the ways, we should keep in the back of our mind,” How much does this “difference” explain the ideological divide concerning each gender’s support of Capitalism.”

The minds of men and women are not identical. Sometimes the differences are large. On average, women are more interested in dealing with people and men are more interested in dealing with things.

Boys are far more likely to be dyslectic, learning disabled, attention deficient, emotionally disturbed, and mentally retarded (at least for some types of retardation).

Boys play more at fighting, chasing, and manipulating objects.

Boys spend far more time practicing for violent conflict in the form of “rough-and-tumble play.”

In a sample of talented students who score above 700 (out of 800) on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Assessment Test, boys outnumber girls by thirteen to one, even though the scores of boys and girls are similar within the bulk of the bell curve.

Men have a much stronger taste for no-strings sex with multiple or anonymous partners, as we see in the almost all-male consumer base for prostitution and visual pornography.

Men are far more likely to compete violently, sometimes lethally, with one another over stakes great and small.

Men are more likely to compete with one another for status using violence or occupational achievement.

The ability to manipulate three-dimensional objects and space in the mind shows a large difference in favor of men. Men are better throwers.

Men are better at solving mathematical word problems.

Men have a higher tolerance for pain and a greater willingness to risk life and limb for status, attention, and other dubious rewards.

Men and women differ in their patterns of sexual jealousy, their mate preferences, and their incentives to philander.

In all cultures men are more aggressive, more prone to stealing, more prone to lethal violence (including war), and more likely to woo, seduce, and trade favors for sex. In all cultures one finds rape, as well as proscriptions against rape.

Physical traits of men, such as later puberty, greater adult strength, and shorter lives, also indicate a history of selection for high-stakes competition.

Men often have a greater territorial range.

Men have larger brains with more neurons (even correcting for body size).

Girls play more at parenting and trying on social roles

Women have a greater percentage of gray matter in the brain.

Women are better at mathematical calculation.

Women are better at remembering landmarks and the positions of objects.

Women are more sensitive to sounds and smells, have better depth perception, match shapes faster, and are much better at reading facial expressions and body language.

Women are better spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal material.

Women experience basic emotions more intensely, except perhaps anger.

Women have more intimate social relationships, are more concerned about them, and feel more empathy toward their friends, though not toward strangers.

Women maintain more eye contact and smile and laugh far more often.

Women are more likely to use derogatory remarks and other forms of verbal aggression.

Women are more dexterous.

Women are more attentive to their infants’ everyday cries (though both sexes respond equally to cries of extreme distress) and are more solicitous toward their children in general.

In the Workplace

This is where the answer to our question concerning relative support of men (60%) and women (40%) for capitalism begins to surface.

In most professions, average differences in ability are irrelevant, but average differences in preferences may set the sexes on different paths. The most dramatic example comes from an analysis of a sample of mathematically precocious seventh-graders selected in a nationwide talent search. The teenagers were born during the second wave of feminism, were encouraged by their parents to develop their talents and were fully aware of their ability to achieve.

The gifted girls told the researchers that they were more interested in people, social values, and humanitarian and altruistic goals. The gifted boys said they were more interested in things, theoretical values, and abstract intellectual inquiry.

In college, the women chose a broad range of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences. Fewer than 1% of the young women pursued doctorates in math, physical sciences, or engineering. The women went into medicine, law, the humanities, and biology, instead.

In college, the boys were geeks who stuck to math and science and 8% of the young men pursued doctorates in math, physical sciences, or engineering.

Men are keen to work longer hours and sacrifice other parts of their lives to climb the corporate ladder or achieve notoriety in their fields.

Men, on average, are also more willing to undergo physical discomfort and danger, and thus are more likely to be found in grungy but relatively lucrative jobs.

Women, on average, are more likely to choose administrative support jobs that offer lower pay in air- conditioned offices.

Men prefer to work for corporations, women for government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Male doctors are more likely to specialize and to open private practices. Female doctors are more likely to be general practitioners on salary in hospitals and clinics.

Men are more likely to be managers in factories, women more likely to be managers in human resources or corporate communications.

Key demographic information

The state government workforce of all 50 states are about 58% women and 42% men vs about half the total population of the states.

The healthcare industry is around 80% women.

Summary

It is likely that the health care industry in the United States may be a key demographic contributing to women’s bias against capitalism. This is likely the reason that healthcare was the first industry targeted by Marxists for government takeover. Envy is a powerful human emotion leading to desire for equality of outcomes. This is why our healthcare industry must be reformed and socialists kept out of federal office. Americans do not deserve the socialized medicine of Canada and the UK.

Another key demographic may be state government where 58% are women. Most state employees already are unionized and thus sympathetic to socialism. Many state budgets are bloated with workers. This is not just a drain on state revenues… it is a threat to state economies and invites socialized governance.

This article was a valuable exercise in determining the root causes of Marxist resurgence in the US. While we cannot identify all the causes, this was a start and should make state employees, healthcare workers, and other yet unknown sources of Marxist influence in our society pause before voting for the first Democratic Socialist President. Our economy is at stake no less than that of Argentina and Venezuela. Argentina may have been saved… Venezuela will likely have to fight for her freedom back.

Love = Work + Courage