The clearest and most persuasive evidence for this comes from homicide statistics: In every country, without fail, men commit the vast majority of homicides (and are more likely to be the victims of homicide as well).
Wherever in the world we look, men are more violent and aggressive than women, especially with other men. I’ll summarize them briefly the indented sections are Steve’s writing.ġ.) The behavior is consistent across different cultures, when one would expect different degrees and kinds of socialization.Īn initial line of evidence is that it’s not only in the West that we find sex differences in aggression. The caveats duly presented, Stewart-Williams gives several lines of evidence for an evolutionary origin of this behavioral difference. (They always pretend that their criticism is based on science, but they don’t fool anybody with two neurons to rub together.) That’s why the same people who will admit that men are bigger and stronger than women because of genetics and evolution will also assert that there can be no behavioral or psychological differences due to genetics and evolution. So I deplore those who try to pretend that differences either don’t exist, or can’t have an evolutionary basis, simply because it’s inconvenient for their ideology. (If it did, equality would change as our knowledge of biology changed.) My own view is that any genetic differences we see cannot support any moral or legal inequality between the sexes, which is a philosophical position that shouldn’t depend on biology. And that view comes from the fear that if we do find evolution-based differences, it will lead to discrimination-usually against women.
That is an ideological stand that, in view of the substantial morphological differences between men and women, is pretty insupportable. Nevertheless, the SJW view of differences between men and women’s behavior is that all of those differences are due entirely to socialization, with no moiety due to genetics and evolution. Any geneticist knows that, for nearly all traits, heredity is not destiny, and the environment can make a big difference. I should first emphasize that while Stewart-Williams and I share the view of the evolutionary roots of some male aggression, we both agree that males can also be socialized into being more aggressive by being expected to conform to stereotypes of “masculinity” (remember the car race in Rebel Without a Cause?) and that even if males are more aggressive than females because of natural selection, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make them less aggressive-also by socialization. Click on the screenshot to read it, and you should: It’s a short but good summary of why the greater aggressiveness of men than of women almost certainly reflects, at least in part, natural selection in our ancestors. It’s by Steve Stewart-Williams, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, and appeared online in in Nautilus. I won’t talk about sexual behavior today, as I’ve written about it before, but I do want to highlight an article from last April discussing the evolution of male aggression. I feel that these behavioral differences are likely, at least in part, to be the result of sexual selection in our ancestors. The two sex differences I find most evolutionarily convincing involve human sexual behavior-in particular the observation that males tend to be relatively indiscriminate in choosing someone to mate with, while females are pickier-and the fact that males are more aggressive than females. While it’s hard to test whether some behaviors in our species have evolved by natural selection, there are degrees of confidence we can get, and predictions one can make, to judge the likelihood that these behaviors are indeed “darwinian.” While nobody argues that behaviors like preferring your own children over others aren’t products of natural selection, there are those who claim that behavioral differences between men and women are not-and in fact cannot-be based on genes installed in our species by natural selection. While I’ve long been a critic of evolutionary psychology, I’m not stupid or woke enough-unlike some bloggers I won’t name-to dismiss the entire field as worthless.
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