Sex at Dawn (Ryan and Jetha)
Jan. 8th, 2012 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn3-/5. If grad school did nothing else for me, it showed me that just because someone shows a lot of evidence for his side doesn't actually mean that he's right. Even within my fairly small field of the hardest of hard sciences, there were controversies between different professors that it was impossible to know how to resolve unless you had carefully followed all the papers. The rest of us had to rely on knowing the general work of the characters in question; if L., for example, was involved, you could be sure he would be on the correct side because he was always scrupulous and rigorous with his physics, and if both G. and L. said something was so, while Y. said the opposite, you were pretty sure where you stood on the matter even if you had no idea what they were actually talking about.
And if you didn't know enough about the field to know that G. was always right, and that Y. was a bit of a crank? You might have taken Y.'s side, because he was awfully persuasive, and because he had done a lot of math to support his opinion, and the part where he made a poor assumption when he did the math was buried pretty deeply in there and fairly hard to tease out for someone with less than a graduate-school-level understanding. And, why, yes, after having followed the papers closely, and knowing exactly where the (multiple!) errors in Y's logic came in, I might still be just a touch bitter that an outside funding agency decided Y. was right and L. was wrong. Though I would like to stress that they did this not through stupidity or incompetence, but simply by not having a way to properly judge.
All this is to say that I don't generally trust science books. You read your string theory book, and then you go read Peter Woit's blog and he points out that the string theorist in question is engaging in a lot of wishful thinking...
But anyway. So, this book. I so wanted to like this book. I love science/social-science that takes on an established paradigm and breaks it down. Awesome stuff, right? And I was totally intrigued by its claim to take down traditional monogamy paradigms. (Full disclosure: there is no one who has been as thoroughly socialized into monogamy as I have! But I can see that it's not necessarily for everyone, either, and in addition, I can, actually, fairly easily imagine a world in which I'd been sexually-socialized differently, thus making me receptive to the book's message.)
The book purports to take down the "standard narrative" of monogamy, which is to explain monogamy as an uneasy compromise between female maximization of having a guy around to take care of kids, and male maximization of spreading his sperm around. Ryan and Jetha (henceforth RJ) say that this is totally bogus, that monogamy is not the human condition; that investigation of related species (bonobos), primitive foraging societies, and various physical considerations make it clear that humans were prehistorically, and are still wired to be, "fiercely egalitarian" and small-group-sharing both sexually and otherwise; and that it was the relatively recent rise of agriculture that brought monogamy with it. And this is why people have affairs so often.
So. This is a highly readable, interesting, and entertaining book. It also gave me a complete headache every time I picked it up, mostly from banging my head against the wall because the authors are needlessly inflammatory, sometimes they don't make sense, and worst of all, they have in general extremely poor logical thinking skills, to the extent that a great many of their arguments are seen to be completely stupid if you just think about it for a little bit. I am not exaggerating, every two-three pages or so I would howl in frustration because they would say something illogical or inconsistent, it was that bad.
And I still came away from it saying, "Well. Three quarters of what they said I can demolish as a logical argument. And yet they've found so much evidence that even a quarter of what they think they have seems pretty convincing." In particular, I thought that there was enough bonobo and foraging-society evidence that they were onto something.
So, of course, the next step (and I highly recommend this whenever one reads a pop science-ish book, really) was to search for critical reviews. Poking around through the interwebs, I came across this academic review (pdf) by Ryan Ellsworth, which, I think, is a good counterpoint to the book.
The article points out a number of flaws in RJ's reasoning, overstating of results, study cherry-picking, and so on. I am now extremely suspicious of RJ's conclusions; data cherry-picking is something that makes me very, very unhappy, as you can prove basically anything if you cherry-pick your data enough. (I'd be happy to prove to you that vaccines cause autism! Using actual peer-reviewed studies! (And including some immunological mouse studies that are actually kind of fascinating... but I digress.) ...But ignoring a lot more other studies, and doing a lot of overstating of my case.)
Now, the review had its own logical issues, including its own overstating of results. The most annoying one was one that RJ actually does point out repeatedly, which is this problem where Ellsworth made a huge jump at the end of the review from "hey, this is all very complicated, much more complicated than RJ admits," which I can totally get behind, to "look, the standard narrative is clearly correct!!" which I... don't really see how he made that jump.
So there you have it. Two sets of academics (if RJ really qualifies... it looks like this book was Ryan's Ph.D. thesis, and his advisor has no background in this particular subfield, which also rather disposes me to distrust him), both of whom have what appear to me to be severe logical reasoning issues. Man, I'm glad i'm not an anthropologist. It would drive me crazy.
But this did inspire me to dig at it a little myself, and the more I got into it, the more it appears to me that RJ do overstate their case in every area I looked at. (Disclaimer: I am not an anthropologist nor an evolutionary psychiatrist, nor did I know anything about the field before reading this book, though because of my background I do probably have more training than the average bear in paper-surfing and detecting illogical arguments... so, take that all together and you can figure out for yourself how much my word is worth. In fact, I encourage you to NOT take my word, RJ's word, OR Ellsworth's word at face value, and to investigate the primary sources yourself. )
For example, the claims that bonobos and humans are more similar socially than chimpanzees and humans seem to be much less strong than RJ makes out (1998 cite from Current Anthropology, PDF link. Plus which RJ seem to do a lot of simplification that's rather misleading in their chart showing the various similarities/differences between bonobos/chimps/humans; for example, bonding in female chimpanzees seems to be rather more complicated than their blithe summary of "don't form strong bonds" on p. 66 (PDF 2009 cite from American Journal of Primatology) (this was an key piece of evidence for me that chimps were socially unlike humans, until I found it was incorrect, because I find female bonding a very important human thing).
Another example of their logical inconsistencies and poor argumentation and data cherry-picking: One of their big things is that you shouldn't let your culturally-derived squick against promiscuity keep you from appreciating their arguments, okay? (Which is a good argument, and one I thoroughly support.) Hold that in your head for a minute. Okay... now, one of the big elements of their argument is that the standard evolutionary narrative can't be correct because it assumes conscious paternity knowledge. Leaving aside the biggest problem with this, which is that I do not think Darwinian natural selection means what RJ think it means (evolution-induced behavior would be evolution-induced behavior regardless of whether the subjects are consciously aware of it or not), they then go on to say, if this were true, why then, people would be more eager to share their spouses with siblings than non-siblings, and they clearly aren't: "Ladies, would you prefer your husband have an affair with your sister? Didn't think so" (p. 141). Ummm. Besides the condescending tone, aren't you using culturally-derived squick for your argument, that you told us not to use? (They do this kind of switcheroo all over the place, and it drove me nuts.)
Plus which, in fact, this is simply wrong. Aside from my own response ("Well, sure, I wouldn't want my husband to have an affair with my sister, because that would imply they were lying to me, which would suck, but of course I'd rather be in a polygynous relationship with my sister than some other woman!"), a very little bit of digging shows that polygyny with bio-sisters and polyandry with bio-brothers is sufficiently common that it has a name: sororal polygyny and fraternal polyandry, and it appears to crop up in multiple cultures (e.g., Mardudjara of Australia, Achuar of South America (pdf link), Nyinba culture (note: not peer-reviewed paper)). So actually... the data in this case support the side RJ are trying to argue against.
The one thing where I found that my quick research supported RJ's claims was the physical evidence of testes size, which apparently is widely thought to correlate with the species promiscuity. So, good on them. Unfortunately for them, the human testes size of between gorillas (totally monogamous) and chimpanzees (totally nonmonogamous)... supports both their theory and the standard narrative (both of which postulate non-monogamy in practice), so whatever. I was unable to find much on their claims about human penis size, but this may have been, quite frankly, perhaps because I could not really care less about the evolution of human penis size.
Anyway. In summary: I do not dare recommend this book, because of the possibility that you will read it and think that RJ have a very strong case (I myself certainly thought they had a fairly strong case before reading the rebuttal and doing some research on my own, and I'm more cynical than most), when in my opinion they don't at all. At best I would say that there are some interesting ideas in this book that some extremely limited data suggest could be true. (Again, take my opinion for what it's worth as a layperson in this field, though one who does have a fair amount of scientific experience.) However, it does have interesting ideas, and it got me interested in the whole subject, and it did point out to me the lack of rigor in the field as a whole, so it's getting rounded up to a 3-. And there's a chapter on arousal that is a little random but that seems, almost by accident, to say some things that struck me as accurate. Anyway, if you do read it, at least be sure to check out the rebuttal to see some of the problems with it.
...I think I might swear off pop-science books totally. They just make me cranky.
And if you didn't know enough about the field to know that G. was always right, and that Y. was a bit of a crank? You might have taken Y.'s side, because he was awfully persuasive, and because he had done a lot of math to support his opinion, and the part where he made a poor assumption when he did the math was buried pretty deeply in there and fairly hard to tease out for someone with less than a graduate-school-level understanding. And, why, yes, after having followed the papers closely, and knowing exactly where the (multiple!) errors in Y's logic came in, I might still be just a touch bitter that an outside funding agency decided Y. was right and L. was wrong. Though I would like to stress that they did this not through stupidity or incompetence, but simply by not having a way to properly judge.
All this is to say that I don't generally trust science books. You read your string theory book, and then you go read Peter Woit's blog and he points out that the string theorist in question is engaging in a lot of wishful thinking...
But anyway. So, this book. I so wanted to like this book. I love science/social-science that takes on an established paradigm and breaks it down. Awesome stuff, right? And I was totally intrigued by its claim to take down traditional monogamy paradigms. (Full disclosure: there is no one who has been as thoroughly socialized into monogamy as I have! But I can see that it's not necessarily for everyone, either, and in addition, I can, actually, fairly easily imagine a world in which I'd been sexually-socialized differently, thus making me receptive to the book's message.)
The book purports to take down the "standard narrative" of monogamy, which is to explain monogamy as an uneasy compromise between female maximization of having a guy around to take care of kids, and male maximization of spreading his sperm around. Ryan and Jetha (henceforth RJ) say that this is totally bogus, that monogamy is not the human condition; that investigation of related species (bonobos), primitive foraging societies, and various physical considerations make it clear that humans were prehistorically, and are still wired to be, "fiercely egalitarian" and small-group-sharing both sexually and otherwise; and that it was the relatively recent rise of agriculture that brought monogamy with it. And this is why people have affairs so often.
So. This is a highly readable, interesting, and entertaining book. It also gave me a complete headache every time I picked it up, mostly from banging my head against the wall because the authors are needlessly inflammatory, sometimes they don't make sense, and worst of all, they have in general extremely poor logical thinking skills, to the extent that a great many of their arguments are seen to be completely stupid if you just think about it for a little bit. I am not exaggerating, every two-three pages or so I would howl in frustration because they would say something illogical or inconsistent, it was that bad.
And I still came away from it saying, "Well. Three quarters of what they said I can demolish as a logical argument. And yet they've found so much evidence that even a quarter of what they think they have seems pretty convincing." In particular, I thought that there was enough bonobo and foraging-society evidence that they were onto something.
So, of course, the next step (and I highly recommend this whenever one reads a pop science-ish book, really) was to search for critical reviews. Poking around through the interwebs, I came across this academic review (pdf) by Ryan Ellsworth, which, I think, is a good counterpoint to the book.
The article points out a number of flaws in RJ's reasoning, overstating of results, study cherry-picking, and so on. I am now extremely suspicious of RJ's conclusions; data cherry-picking is something that makes me very, very unhappy, as you can prove basically anything if you cherry-pick your data enough. (I'd be happy to prove to you that vaccines cause autism! Using actual peer-reviewed studies! (And including some immunological mouse studies that are actually kind of fascinating... but I digress.) ...But ignoring a lot more other studies, and doing a lot of overstating of my case.)
Now, the review had its own logical issues, including its own overstating of results. The most annoying one was one that RJ actually does point out repeatedly, which is this problem where Ellsworth made a huge jump at the end of the review from "hey, this is all very complicated, much more complicated than RJ admits," which I can totally get behind, to "look, the standard narrative is clearly correct!!" which I... don't really see how he made that jump.
So there you have it. Two sets of academics (if RJ really qualifies... it looks like this book was Ryan's Ph.D. thesis, and his advisor has no background in this particular subfield, which also rather disposes me to distrust him), both of whom have what appear to me to be severe logical reasoning issues. Man, I'm glad i'm not an anthropologist. It would drive me crazy.
But this did inspire me to dig at it a little myself, and the more I got into it, the more it appears to me that RJ do overstate their case in every area I looked at. (Disclaimer: I am not an anthropologist nor an evolutionary psychiatrist, nor did I know anything about the field before reading this book, though because of my background I do probably have more training than the average bear in paper-surfing and detecting illogical arguments... so, take that all together and you can figure out for yourself how much my word is worth. In fact, I encourage you to NOT take my word, RJ's word, OR Ellsworth's word at face value, and to investigate the primary sources yourself. )
For example, the claims that bonobos and humans are more similar socially than chimpanzees and humans seem to be much less strong than RJ makes out (1998 cite from Current Anthropology, PDF link. Plus which RJ seem to do a lot of simplification that's rather misleading in their chart showing the various similarities/differences between bonobos/chimps/humans; for example, bonding in female chimpanzees seems to be rather more complicated than their blithe summary of "don't form strong bonds" on p. 66 (PDF 2009 cite from American Journal of Primatology) (this was an key piece of evidence for me that chimps were socially unlike humans, until I found it was incorrect, because I find female bonding a very important human thing).
Another example of their logical inconsistencies and poor argumentation and data cherry-picking: One of their big things is that you shouldn't let your culturally-derived squick against promiscuity keep you from appreciating their arguments, okay? (Which is a good argument, and one I thoroughly support.) Hold that in your head for a minute. Okay... now, one of the big elements of their argument is that the standard evolutionary narrative can't be correct because it assumes conscious paternity knowledge. Leaving aside the biggest problem with this, which is that I do not think Darwinian natural selection means what RJ think it means (evolution-induced behavior would be evolution-induced behavior regardless of whether the subjects are consciously aware of it or not), they then go on to say, if this were true, why then, people would be more eager to share their spouses with siblings than non-siblings, and they clearly aren't: "Ladies, would you prefer your husband have an affair with your sister? Didn't think so" (p. 141). Ummm. Besides the condescending tone, aren't you using culturally-derived squick for your argument, that you told us not to use? (They do this kind of switcheroo all over the place, and it drove me nuts.)
Plus which, in fact, this is simply wrong. Aside from my own response ("Well, sure, I wouldn't want my husband to have an affair with my sister, because that would imply they were lying to me, which would suck, but of course I'd rather be in a polygynous relationship with my sister than some other woman!"), a very little bit of digging shows that polygyny with bio-sisters and polyandry with bio-brothers is sufficiently common that it has a name: sororal polygyny and fraternal polyandry, and it appears to crop up in multiple cultures (e.g., Mardudjara of Australia, Achuar of South America (pdf link), Nyinba culture (note: not peer-reviewed paper)). So actually... the data in this case support the side RJ are trying to argue against.
The one thing where I found that my quick research supported RJ's claims was the physical evidence of testes size, which apparently is widely thought to correlate with the species promiscuity. So, good on them. Unfortunately for them, the human testes size of between gorillas (totally monogamous) and chimpanzees (totally nonmonogamous)... supports both their theory and the standard narrative (both of which postulate non-monogamy in practice), so whatever. I was unable to find much on their claims about human penis size, but this may have been, quite frankly, perhaps because I could not really care less about the evolution of human penis size.
Anyway. In summary: I do not dare recommend this book, because of the possibility that you will read it and think that RJ have a very strong case (I myself certainly thought they had a fairly strong case before reading the rebuttal and doing some research on my own, and I'm more cynical than most), when in my opinion they don't at all. At best I would say that there are some interesting ideas in this book that some extremely limited data suggest could be true. (Again, take my opinion for what it's worth as a layperson in this field, though one who does have a fair amount of scientific experience.) However, it does have interesting ideas, and it got me interested in the whole subject, and it did point out to me the lack of rigor in the field as a whole, so it's getting rounded up to a 3-. And there's a chapter on arousal that is a little random but that seems, almost by accident, to say some things that struck me as accurate. Anyway, if you do read it, at least be sure to check out the rebuttal to see some of the problems with it.
...I think I might swear off pop-science books totally. They just make me cranky.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 02:11 pm (UTC)But that doesn't work for me in anthropology, because it is actually that much wooblier. Go figure.
This book still entertained me thoroughly though.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 04:34 pm (UTC)There is no true on the board. And everyone knows that everyone is reasoning from conclusion backwards anyway. It's just who convinces you best until the next guy comes along, with only a few cardinal true things as guides.
Hm. I'll say that I don't actually think that is the case where science is concerned. I think of science as describing the world in a way that has predictive power. So unless one has a fundamentally flawed, and therefore nonpredictive, model of the world (e.g., epicycles, which didn't work to predict planet motion unless you added... more epicycles), scientific theories are "true" descriptions that may need to be modified (e.g., Newton's theory of motion is a true approximation, at low speeds, of Einstein's theory of relativity, which itself may be a true approximation of some Theory of Everything).
If you mean "there is no true" in the sense of "we don't really understand the underpinnings of anything in a fundamental explanatory sense," then, well, yes, I agree.
(I think it should be, at least theoretically, possible to do predictive power of hypotheses in anthropology as well, but obviously a lot harder... too many woobly variables outside of the experimenters' control.)
Anyway, thanks for reccing it -- it made me angry, but it also made me, at least briefly, interested in anthropology (and the lack of rigor thereof), which was entertaining.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 07:22 am (UTC)I'd be happy to prove to you that vaccines cause autism! Using actual peer-reviewed studies!
The autism-vaccination link hasn't just been questioned, it's been disproven with a bonus side of the UK PI getting nailed for ethics violations and banned from practicing medicine in the UK. Yet the anti-vaccination movement troops on! It's amazing how sturdy peer-reviewed papers look from the outside, and how fragile after other labs and Retraction Watch start poking at the methods section.
...I think I might swear off pop-science books totally. They just make me cranky.
There's evidently a "trained in other disciplines" lay audience. It's a bummer most pop sci reading is such a quality roulette.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-11 03:18 am (UTC)Yes. I am confident in saying that yes, it would. Well, a caveat: the questionable research itself isn't to my eye questionable unless you actually know something about the field (which I didn't, and really still don't), but the illogic jumps are... sort of phenomenal, and you would pick up on that right away. It might be worth just picking up and leafing through, were you in a library/bookstore and wanted to be amused in a horrified sort of way.
The autism-vaccination link hasn't just been questioned, it's been disproven with a bonus side of the UK PI getting nailed for ethics violations and banned from practicing medicine in the UK.
Ahahahaha. Oh yes. You'd think with the complete and total retraction of That Paper that it had been disproven to the masses, wouldn't you? Oh, if only. When E. was a month old (this was not too long after all the news about what's-his-name being busted with the ethics violations, actually) we had an appointment with her pediatrician "to talk about vaccinations." We thought E would, you know, actually get a vaccination, but it turned out that it was the doctor earnestly telling us about how Vaccinations Are Good, You Know! We assured her that yes, we were scientists by training, we did believe this, and we'd been following the news and we knew That Paper had been retracted and there was really no reason to believe Vaccinations Were Bad. The really sad thing was how floored she was by this; she was clearly expecting and armed for a heated argument (she even handed us these Helpful Pamphlets) and... and wait, you AGREE with me?!
But I wouldn't even have to resort to That Paper. For example, there are actually some interesting immunological mouse studies that show that there may be some connection between stimulation of the maternal immune system and autism. (It's a total far cry from there to "vaccination = autism," but it's exactly that kind of poor logic jump that these authors make constantly.)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-19 02:05 am (UTC)Actually, I was thinking of pop science books specifically. They have an agenda by definition, and it's usually an incredibly socially contextual one. Pop science books aren't actually doing science, they're doing narrative.
(Mind you, I am frequently suspicious of the faith some scientists of my acquaintance have that their methods will account for all messy human motivation biases and blindspots. But the good ones know this cannot be true, and know how to live with it and think through it.)
BTW, don't read The Poisoner's Handbook, speaking of pop science (or, well, science history). It's driving me quietly bonkers; you'd have to throw it at things.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-19 04:49 am (UTC)(And a separate rant: for all the ranting I did about Ryan and Jeptha, at least they are in the field. Pop science books written by journalists are a whole different ballgame of hitting my head against the wall.)
Hee. I will take your advice. I think I had seen that book well-reviewed somewhere else by a non-analytical person, so I'm glad you mentioned it.