Rage less, julian.

Like owning more than a winter/summer pair of outdoor shoes – like having multiple pairs for each day of the week and each social situation.

Sexist social memes introduced by Marketing were encoded in our Genes by Evolution. (Which half of the preceding sentence is wrong?)

oh wait there IS this one guy I know who’s always posting pictures of converse on facebook

And I know of one guy, a professor of biology, who often posts pictures of his cowboy boots on his blog web site.

Thanks for asking, I’ve often wondered the same thing myself.

Memes run directly counter to evolutionary psychology. Evo psych posits that the roots of our behavior are in our genes. Memes are posited to spread culturally. Memes are also incredibly difficult to operationalize for study, making the concept not particularly scientific in its various forms. Nearly all enthusiastic proponents of memes are not experimentalists for this reason.

There are a few good evo psych researchers–a good researcher in this field being one that studies topics cross-culturally including across time, includes biological measures when appropriate, and doesn’t make broad claims based on very narrow findings. They don’t tend to make the news, which was the starting point for Rebecca’s criticism.

Aren’t men and women the same durned species?

If a few thousand years ago “Ugh Caveman of Clan of the Rabbit Hunters” is born and is taller and can run a little faster and it helps hunting, wouldn’t his daughters also be capable of inheriting these traits? If Momma Ugh stays at home and does some stereotypical Momma thing like bake Rabbit Pie and she’s got a bigger Pie Gland or something and it helps to make healthy pie, wouldn’t the sons be just as likely to inherit that trait?

Obviously there are differences between genders (boobs, height, genital configuration, etc.) but my completely uneducated brain makes me think these differences are probably slower to evolve/harder to cause with environmental stress as it’d have to be both beneficial to one and a disadvantage to the other (or a variation in something that was already gender specific)…

I haven’t heard that argument yet though, and I’m not exactly evolutionarily educated beyond an “origin of the species” bathroom read – is it wrong? Or just another disproof of something that’s been pretty beaten to death already?

i’m sure some julian somewhere cares to hear what you have to say

She could have turned this into a wonderful talk on scientific literacy and being able to determine science from pseudoscience. She could have used this a chance to talk about how we should be very critical of who funds certain studies as that may affect results. She could have made an excellent point on skepticism.

@julian — it’s not ‘raging’ to make valid criticism about the talk, how people respond to questioning skeptics and suggest improvements. I want to read an more detailed analysis to see if there’s more than entertainment value.

Q&A asked if there were any ‘good’ scientists in the field and she didn’t have an answer, what about Dawkins’ contributions to Evo Psych (memes)?