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anghraineI've been re-reading The Myth of Mars and Venus, which I convinced my mother to give me for Christmas. It's hard not to read straight through; I love the author's style, as well as agreeing completely with her point, and I have to admit I giggle (and cheer) every time she mentions evolutionary psychology:
-- Arguing that some apparently modern phenomenon, like shopping or eating junk food, can best be explained by going back to the Stone Age is the hallmark of a branch of science known as evolutionary psychology.
-- This kind of explanation is unavoidably speculative, because it depends on reconstructing the details of Stone Age life from the very limited evidence that survives.
-- When researchers propose that our approaches to shopping reflect traits inherited from Stone Age hunter-gatherers, it is hard not to be reminded of The Flintstones.
-- This claim underscores a problem with evolutionary psychology which I have already drawn attention to-- the inherently speulative nature of its arguments. These are often ingenious, but in the absence of direct evidence about prehistoric language-use, impossible to verify or falsify. There are too many different and incompatible stories that can be made to fit the supposed facts-- especially if, like many of the writers I have mentioned, you approach the (modern) evidence like a peahen at a lek, fastening enthusiastically on the splashiest generalisations while disregarding the more serviceable but drabber specimens.
and for the win: Evolutionary psychology is open to a similar criticism: that it takes today's social prejudices and projects them back into prehistory, thus elevating them to the status of timeless truths about he human condition.
Anyway, she mentioned a website in passing: the Gender Genie, which uses some algorithm (-->mathly things) to automatically deduce your gender from a sample of your writing (it varies by fiction, nonfiction, and blog post).
Apparently, I'm a man.
In fact I'm decidedly manly as a blogger and a nonfiction writer; slightly, as a ficcer; and androgynous as a writer of (gasp!) original fiction. Yay me!
-- Arguing that some apparently modern phenomenon, like shopping or eating junk food, can best be explained by going back to the Stone Age is the hallmark of a branch of science known as evolutionary psychology.
-- This kind of explanation is unavoidably speculative, because it depends on reconstructing the details of Stone Age life from the very limited evidence that survives.
-- When researchers propose that our approaches to shopping reflect traits inherited from Stone Age hunter-gatherers, it is hard not to be reminded of The Flintstones.
-- This claim underscores a problem with evolutionary psychology which I have already drawn attention to-- the inherently speulative nature of its arguments. These are often ingenious, but in the absence of direct evidence about prehistoric language-use, impossible to verify or falsify. There are too many different and incompatible stories that can be made to fit the supposed facts-- especially if, like many of the writers I have mentioned, you approach the (modern) evidence like a peahen at a lek, fastening enthusiastically on the splashiest generalisations while disregarding the more serviceable but drabber specimens.
and for the win: Evolutionary psychology is open to a similar criticism: that it takes today's social prejudices and projects them back into prehistory, thus elevating them to the status of timeless truths about he human condition.
Anyway, she mentioned a website in passing: the Gender Genie, which uses some algorithm (-->mathly things) to automatically deduce your gender from a sample of your writing (it varies by fiction, nonfiction, and blog post).
Apparently, I'm a man.
In fact I'm decidedly manly as a blogger and a nonfiction writer; slightly, as a ficcer; and androgynous as a writer of (gasp!) original fiction. Yay me!
no subject
on 2010-02-18 06:14 am (UTC)Writing about women already gets you a lot of feminine points, though. The other words seem very random to me. And slightly, uhm. idk. I tend to shift in style, a bit, particularly blog wise, because finding a natural voice in English is difficult for me personally--it always feels like I'm faking it, so I tend to use more certain words, and then shift away from them.
It's interesting, because it must be all statistical (i.e., they use samples of writing from women and men to deduce which use a certain word more)...
So much love for that author, though!