![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'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!
