Why is it that so many modern women have become attention junkies?

Because they can - is the short answer.


That modern Western women are often attention junkies seems clear by their chosen behaviour - their clothes, hair, self-mutilations - the whole way they 'present themselves'... which shows that they strive to get attention; especially from men.

And this attention is sexual.


The 'attention' sought is mostly short-term, causal, superficial... the admiring glance, the second glance, the mild flirtation. Harmless, just fun, one might suppose? This is the affirmation of individuality in the mass context of the anonymous city. Attention is tangible evidence that you 'stand out' from the crowd, are an individual, are desirable to 'men'.

And when women seek more attention, they usually succeed - which is why the process is addictive.


Modern Western women mostly succeed in getting sexual attention because - so long as they are healthy - it is easy when they are young. This for straightforward biological and reproductive reasons: young and healthy-looking women are all desirable, all attention-grabbing. Some more than others, of course - but all young healthy women will attract attention.

So most women start with a baseline of un-earned attention simply by virtue of what they are when young: to men they are potential mates to be evaluated, to other women they are potential rivals. Thus the appraising glance, the second look, the atmosphere of flirtation.

And if young women want it they can get more, simply by sending out cues of 'sexual availability' which men are hard-wired to respond to - hence the use of revealing clothing, or signals such as tattoos and piercings, and the bold glance and confident self-presentation -  which are interpreted by men as signals indicating a higher probability of low cost, no strings sex.

(Sluts always get attention; and a lot of modern women have noticed and taken this lesson to heart; and apply it to varying degrees.)


Of course, women may not be doing this consciously, they may deny that this is their intention, and they may be honest in this denial; but this is the reason for the extra attention.

And when more and more women are doing this, it creates an escalation of signalling, an 'arms race' among young women - to be 'the one' who grabs and holds most attention in a crowd. Anyone who opts out of the arms race becomes almost invisible in the crowds of modern life.

(In early human life, in small groups, every young healthy women was like a goddess due to sheer rarity value - she did not need to do anything at all: but simply be. Indeed it was her transcendent role to 'be'. As the poet Robert Graves put it: Man does, Woman is.)


So even young and beautiful women compete for attention nowadays, and because sexual advertisment is very effective at getting attention (attention from men, and also from other women who intuitively perceive a rival) then unless it is prevented by some internal restraint or external prohibition there is an innate tendency for women increasingly to sexualize their self-presentation - because if attention is the goal, then more sexualization works.


As women age into middle age - through their thirties - they progressively lose this unearned attention which is bestowed by evolution, and such women may start to complain they are 'being ignored'.

In reality, this 'being ignored' is merely a loss of biological privilege. (Welcome to the real world!) But in a secular and nihilistic world where community is broken down, and stable familes are increasingly rare; the loss of the daily thousand self-affirmations of casual attention is experienced as an existential crisis.

So middle aged women dye their hair to make it look younger - or maybe 'go blond', escalate the use of makeup, and start to dress more carefully to maximize their sexual assets.


And it works! They do indeed get more attention.

Perhaps for a while they get more attention because they accurately simulate the appearance of a younger women; but after a while they get more attention because they are giving-off signals of sexual availability - because the way men are 'wired' by evolution is that a middle aged (or elderly) women who is presented herself to enhance or simulate her sexuality, may be offering the chance of low cost, no strings sex.

Such signals are hard, perhaps impossible, to ignore - even when they are ignored or deplored. Hence the extra attention. For women; if you don't want to be ignored - and if that is your main objective, then the easiest and most effective actions is to make yourself look (more or less) like a slut - a woman of 'easy virtue' as they used to say.

(The woman need not deliver on what her appearance seems to promise - the advertisement of sexual availability may not be honest - but meanwhile she will get the attention she craves.)


In the end, women find themselves in an addictive cycle. In order to retain the unearned attention of their youth - or, as they may put it to themselves, in order not to 'be ignored'; from their thirties and continuing for longer and longer into the fifties, sixties, maybe even beyond - many modern women engage in escalating and un-discriminating levels of sexual signalling.


This is most obvious among single women and the divorced and those married women looking for affairs or new husband - but the addiction has infected even happily married women; who hate to 'be ignored' (as they perceive it) in the prevailing highly-sexualized social environment - and feel compelled to present themselves in a sexualized way.

This is experienced as 'empowering', revitalizing. It is socially admired. Instead of accepting their mature role as a 'mousy', ignored, middle aged housewife - faithfully devoted to family and community; middle aged women may suddenly dye their hair, or 'get a tattoo' - and experience a sudden increase in attention - especially from men - and all too often they misinterpret the real, underlying nature of and motivation for this attention. And other women will praise them (at least to their faces).


In the past, this arm race of sexual signalling was prevented by strong social norms - mostly enforced by the peer group of women - against even young women's behaviour. But especially middle aged women were sanctioned for presenting themselves in a sexualized way, or trying to simulate youth (the English expression for such behaviour was 'mutton dressed as lamb).

But typical modern women, and the mass media culture, do not enforce modesty and restraint. Instead our corrupt and morally-inverted society celebrates showing-off, attention-seeking: mere celebrity is celebrated.

To be unnoticed is to be despicable and despised

(I have heard middle aged women express real anger and resentment against those who do not join-in the attention arms race - who 'let themselves go' and accept the withdrawal of unearned privilege.)


This attention addiction is, I believe, the main basis of the ever-increasing sexualization of Western society over the past 50 years; and it was a natural and inevitable consequence of secularization and the removal of social norms that limited public sexual displays among women.

The process of societal sexualization has little or nothing to do with actual sex - the environment is highly sexualized, women are displaying, men are responding to these displays; marriages are delayed and broken, families are not had or abandoned under the pervasive pressure of 24/7 bombardment with sexual signals, of social life experienced as swimming through a sea of sexualization...

Meanwhile there is not much actual sex for most people most of the time - and never enough of it to build a life around (that being intrinsically impossible, a chimera) - and fewer and fewer children are born.

Western society spirals towards self-chosen extinction.


The sexuality of women is indeed a powerful social force - and any society which does not recognize that as a fact, and control this force, is doomed; as we are doomed.

At present each women is 'liberated' - i.e. allowed, encouraged, to manage this nuclear force of female sexuality entirely for herself. It is like giving a machine gun to a kid!

The problem is that the weapon of female sexuality will be used if it can be used without cost. Even with majority restraint, a minority can cause immense problems, and set-off an arms race.

Liberation is socially toxic: obviously so.

Female modesty just is a matter of general societal concern - and must in some way be externally regulated for the good of everyone.

There is no arguing with 'must' - but there are a wide range of possible means, some far preferable to others (some ways of controlling female sexuality are relatively benign, others are loathsome - the current Western secular attempts are both loathsome and ineffectual); and how best to regulate female sexuality is the proper topic.    


Note added: It is my conviction, presented many times elsewhere on this blog; that problems such as the one described above can only constructively be solved on the other side of a mass Christian revival. Any attempt to solve such problems in a secular context, starting from where we are now, will almost certainly do more harm than good overall - because (here, now) our motivations are corrupted, and this corruption will out in attempts to address structural social problems. 

The thing to bear in mind is that when there is a problem (such as modern sexuality in general) which is obvious, and which contravenes basic common sense and traditional wisdom - there must be very powerful forces maintaining that problem. 

This means that attempts at reform must overcome strong resistance, which means that reform must be powerfully motivated - ie. reform must tap-into strong, widespread and fundamental human emotions.

In the modern and secular context, such strong, widespread and powerful emotions are almost entirely negative and selfish - for example: pride, envy, resentment, hatred, Schadenfreude. This seems obvious among the secular right wingers who advocate 'reform' in the sexual arena - either their motivations are too weak for them to succeed, or else their motivations are bad. 

Only religion is capable of being both a sufficiently powerful and also good motivation as the basis for the tough work of reform. And of religions, only some few. 

So, as in most things here and now, the first choice is to choose your religion. (And the choice of adequate religions, known to be sufficiently powerful, is in fact very limited indeed - indeed for the West the choice is practically limited to two broad and obvious categories.)

And if you cannot choose a religion, then (no matter how severe the problem - and indeed the more severe, obvious and simple-to-solve is the problem) it is probably best to do nothing: because no matter how bad things are - they can always get worse. 

Two kinds of human anti-evolutionism: macro and micro, religious and Leftist

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There are two prominent kinds of anti-evolutionist in public life - and by which I mean people who deny the applicability of evolution by natural selection to some aspect of humans.

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Macro anti-evolutionists deny the reality of 'macro' evolution - by which is meant the 'origin of species' - and therefore the use of natural selection to explain the distinctive essence of what it is to be human.

This is related to the idea that the basic forms of living things are 'given', and that natural selection may modify these basic forms - but cannot create a new form nor change one form into another.

This macro anti-evolutionist may be religious - believing that the forms are created by God or gods; or may be one of a non-religious school of biologists who regard form as just a part of the way things are, primary reality, without speculating on how these forms arise or where they come from. For instance suggesting that the forms happen to be mathematically-stable attractors.

This latter group includes many eminent biologists such as Goethe, D'Arcy Thomson, the earliest geneticists, Conrad Waddington, and some of the recent chaos/ complexity theorists.

It should be noted that the only substantive difference between the religious and non-religious 'formalists' is that the religious give a general account of the origin of the forms - and how it is that human may have knowledge of them; while the non-religious say nothing about these matters, accepting the reality of their assertions and avoiding the subject of why their assertions (e.g. their ability to identify forms) should be regarded as valid.

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I am, nowadays, sympathetic to this idealist or 'formalist' group since on the one hand they have a strong empirical basis for denying that natural selection can lead to genuine novelty at a formal level - because there just aren't any strong and solid examples of this happening; and more fundamentally because natural selection formally depends upon the prior assumption of forms, and the process of NS operates within already existing concepts of form.

In other words, we may observe or impute a selection process when seeing differential reproductive success leading to a stepwise modification of a form, and a change of function leading to enhanced reproductive success.

But such observations always begin with a definition of form, with identification of a form - changes of which are tracked.

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The big question, therefore, is whether natural selection is an open-ended process, unconstrained by form, which can lead to stepwise change to the point of creating novel forms; or whether natural selection is constrained by forms - that it can lead to stepwise changes only within the boundaries of forms.

Micro-evolution is about natural selection producing change within the bounds of form; macro-evolution is about natural selection producing change of form.

Or, natural selection within the bounds of form is adaptation; while natural selection yielding diversity of form is )in a general sense) speciation.

Darwin's assertion was that adaptation may, indeed does, progress to speciation; that a form may undergo adaptation to the point that it changes form. This is used a metaphysical assumption, outside of science and framing science - but it is not a discovery made by science.

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Micro-evolution or adaptation within forms seems certainly to be happen - since there are innumerable examples of human selection of animals and plants (especially in agriculture) leading to heritable modifications of function; and if human selection can purposefully change functionality over the space of a human lifespan, then presumably analogous change could result from nature doing the selection over a longer span of generations.

So, there are many religious people, and a minority of biologists - some of whom are highly prestigious, who believe in the reality of micro-evolution or adaptation; but who are skeptical about macro-evolution of new forms (such as a new genus, order, family or some similar large scale and fundamental modification of form).

They do not accept the assumption that adaptation leads to speciation.

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But another group of evolution sceptics actually deny the reality of adaptation or micro-evolution in humans, they deny that human functions, especially psychological functions, can incrementally be modified by natural selection - and these are mostly secular Left wing political adherents who must (for ideological reasons) deny the reality of sexual and racial differences.

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Or rather, secular Leftists do not straightforwardly and honestly deny that adaptation can occur in humans - rather, they make an assumption that all humans are essentially the same everywhere and throughout historical time - and any differences are superficial and non-heritable ('environmental'); and then demand a literally-impossible standard of evidential certainty before they will overturn this assumption of universal sameness.

This is presented as if it were a higher form of scientific integrity - a purist stance that requires a higher standard of evidence... Nonsense! It is merely rigging the evaluation method to generate the results you want.

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The assumption that all humans are essentially the same everywhere is therefore a metaphysical - not scientific - assumption: an assumption standing outside science and framing science.

Certainly it refutes spontaneous beliefs, common sense and the historical wisdom of mankind.

Denial of micro-evolution has reached almost psychotic extremes in relation to men and women, where there are many Leftist social science academics, journalists, politicians etc who refuse to acknowledge even quantitative differences in functionality between men and women.

For such people, to assert the reality of qualitative differences (e.g. between men and women) is regarded as simply abhorrent - malicious, vile, hurtful, aggressive, stupid, dangerous to the Leftist project and 'therefore' (according to such people) necessarily untrue.

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Secular Leftist anti-evolutionists will deny even universal human experience, obvious knowledge and common sense; for instance that offspring (strongly) tend to resemble their parents and such resemblances are heritable, that some of these heritable differences have functional consequences, and these functional consequences may lead to robust average differences in the numbers of surviving and reproducing offspring.

The fact that humans who have spent multiple generations in different environments (which include men and women in any society where the experiences of the sexes are stably non-identical) are (at the group level of averages) superficially, internally, psychologically, biochemically and genetically different is taken to be wholly accidental and irrelevant - contingent.

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So it turns out that the much demonised and despised religious anti-evolutionists who are skeptical about macro-evolution of humans are in plain fact much more scientific and empirical than are those numerous and influential secular Leftists who challenge the solid, and indeed observable, reality of human adaptation or micro-evolution.

The religious anti-macro-evolutionists who acknowledge within-form adaption are indeed within the historical mainstream of biology in their focus upon form as primary; the secular Leftist anti-adaptationists are chucking-out biology altogether in favour of a political ideology which ignores the most basic level of reality-testing.

And yet, these same secular Leftist anti-adaptationists whose denial of the obvious is delusional by a strict definition, regard the religious anti-macro-evolutionists as knuckle-dragging, ideologically-blinded anti-scientific fools, beneath contempt...

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(The scientific 'crime' - or solecism - of creationists is that they introduce divine explanations into science and this is an error, because science properly operates within a framework of religious explanations, but does not include religious explanations. Science just is that type of explanation which does not use religious explanation. By contrast, secular Leftists stick to the rule of keeping their ideology outside of science, structuring the interpretation and application of science yet unmentioned within the science. Because they usually stick by this simple but counter-intuitive rule, anti-micro-evolution secular Leftists are often able to get-away-with outrageous dishonesty and distortion of science, whereas religious anti-macro-evolutionary more often blunder by trying to slip divine explanataions inside the science.)

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Since it is secular Leftists who control public discourse we find public discourse in the extraordinary, and scientifically indefensible, position of asserting that on the one hand macro-evolution is necessarily real and the essential form of the human species certainly arose by natural selection - which is an incremental accumulation of adaptive changes; yet on the other hand denying that micro-evolution, adaptation, has occurred within the human species.

In other words, the speculative and uncertain aspect of Darwinian natural selection is accepted as necessary, as dogma (to reject which is to move outwith the bounds of legitimate public discourse); while the empirically and experientially verifiable aspect of Darwinism is at the same time rejected.

(This is the way that Leftism works: skepticism or outright denial of the obvious and primary, dogmatic belief in the interpretative and secondary.)

Secular Leftists thus believe in speciation but not adaptation; they believe that humans arose by natural selection, but also that - once humans had arisen - natural selection does not apply to humans!

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The situation is extraordinary, obviously incoherent, and yet it is the everyday underlying assumption of respectable interaction, and it is a mandatory belief: imposed by harsh sanctions.

The situation with respect to evolution is therefore revealing of the objective nature of our society: that our society in its public discourse just is ideological, totalitarian, anti-religious; and it reveals that ours is a society in which where politics utterly dominates and trumps logic and science.

Ours is a society in which logic and science must work within politics such that logical and scientific contradictions are allowed - are indeed required - but not political contradictions.

And it reveals that ours is a society where the ruling, dominating, structuring political ideology is secular and Leftist.

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The science of sex - the most important recent book? Sexual selection under parental choice, by Menelaos Apostolou

Menelaos Apostolou. Sexual selection under parental choice: the evolution of human mating behaviour. Psychology Press: London, 2014. pp. xi, 175.
See also: http://www.menelaosapostolou.com/
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/parental-choice-determines-mating.html
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The work of Menelaos Apostolou, a young Assistant Professor from Nicosia University in Cyprus - collected and explored in this recent book, turns-out to be the most significant 'paradigm shift' in the evolutionary psychology of sex since the modern field began in 1979 with Don Symons The evolution of human sexuality.

Apostolou's work means that this whole area of work - many thousands of papers and scores of best-selling books (not to mention the theoretical basis of the online Manosphere and PUA movement) - now need to be reframed within a new explanatory context.

In a nutshell, and with exhaustive documentation and rigorous argument, Apostolou establishes that parental choice is primary in human evolutionary history: for many hundreds of generations of our ancestors it was primarily parents who chose and controlled who their children would marry and reproduce-with; and the individual sexual preferences of both men and women were relegated to a secondary role.

This means that it was mainly parent choice that shaped human mating preferences - and personal choice would have been relegated to a subordinate role within and after marriage (e.g. infidelity choices; and the choice to end marriage - e.g. when to divorce).

Most of this book is taken up by the collection and discussion of a mass of empirical data - hundreds of references, and the detailed working-through of the implications; but the take home message is relatively simple and clear.

Apostolou shows that in most societies in human history, and continuing in most modern societies outside of The West, individual men and women had very little choice of their mates - and that this choice was nearly always made by their parents. In other words, marriages were arranged by the parents of the husband and wife - especially the daughter's marriage, and usually by their fathers more than their mothers.

Parents preferences for a marriage partner differ from those of their offspring. In general, parents (relatively to their children, especially daughter) prefer delaying sexual relationships until an early marriage with early onset of child-bearing and little or no extra-marital sex. And parents have been generally hostile to divorce.

The characteristics parents prefer (compared with individual preferences) include good character, ability to provide resources (especially men), coming from a 'good family' - with high status and wealth, and pre-marital chastity (especially in women).

The characteristics individuals prefer (compared with their parents) include beauty and good looks (hair, face, figure etc. in a woman; muscular physique in a man), a charming and entertaining personality, the ability to provide sexual excitement and so on.

The system of parental sexual choice seems to be unique to humans - which makes it a matter of exceptional biological interest: we may be the only species that has not evolved to choose our own mates.

More exactly, the ancestral system was probably (to simplify) that two sets of parents controlled who their children married - the individual preferences of the prospective husband and wife may or may not have been consulted. Individual choice was probably important mostly after marriage - since there was the possibility of extra-marital liaisons (although Apostolou documents that these were extremely risky, and generally very harshly punished, up to and including death - especially for women).

But all the ancestral societies permitted divorce (while strongly discouraging it - since this undermined parental decisions) - although mainly in a context where one of the spouses turned out to be unsatisfactory from the point of view of providing grandchildren (eg. men who did not provide sufficient resources - due to their behaviour or from illness or injury, or women who were barren). Probably since women are more controlled in arranging marriage, it is mainly women who initiate divorces.

Apostolou summarises this as: Parents decide who gets married, children decide whether they stay married.

Another way of describing this is that parents screen or filter prospective spouses - and individual preferences only work within this pre-screened and filtered population. Consequently, modern men and women are not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population - and not equipped with the proper instincts to assist their choice; so they are vulnerable to deception and exploitation.

Therefore human evolutionary history has left modern individuals, in a world where parental choice and control has been all-but eliminated from mainstream life, woefully ill-equipped to manage their sexual lives.

This affects both men and women adversely - but in partly different ways. men and women share a common problem of not being worried-enough about the problem of finding suitable long-term mates, marrying and having children - precisely because this whole business was managed for them by parents through hundreds of preceding human generations.

Women delay and delay marriage and child-bearing, and seem unconcerned about their genetic extinction - because their deep inbuilt expectation is that these matters will be arranged for-them. men worry too much about attaining high status among men, and becoming a good provider - when these were selected for in a world where prospective in-laws wanted these attributes from men; but in the modern world they are an ineffectual strategy for getting a mate.
In sum (and in terms of their biological fitness) modern men are too worried about working hard, and not worried enough about meeting and impressing individual women.

So men and women who are apparently, in biological and historical terms, extremely well-qualified as potential husbands and wives, remain unmarried and childless in large and increasing numbers.

Modern single people therefore are much too happy about their living in a state of unattached childlessness, than is good for their reproductive success. And this (biologically) foolish happiness is at least partly a consequence of evolutionary history: people are behaving as if mating and marriage will be sorted-out by parents - but it isn't.

However, as is usual in works of evolutionary psychology - in a subject where the professionals are almost 100 percent atheists (and militant atheists at that!), in this book there is a too brief and conceptually inadequate consideration of the role of religion.

The subject gets about three pages, and religion is treated as merely a trumped-up rationalisation for enforcing biological imperatives. However, it is not mentioned that in modern societies it is only among the religious that we can find biologically viable patterns of mating, marriage and family - and indeed only among some particular religions that are traditionalist in ethics and patriarchal in structure: which fits exactly with the evolutionary predictions.

My point is that religion needs to be regarded as a cause, not merely a consequence, of sexual behaviour and selection pressure; in sum, religion (more exactly, some specific religions) is the only known antidote to the pattern of maladaptive modern sexuality which is trending towards extinction.

Another omission is the role of intoxication by alcohol and drugs. Much of modern sexual behaviour is initiated in parties, bars and nightclubs; and occurs more-or-less under the influence of intoxicants - and this in itself deranges delicate brain functioning and destroys the benefits of behavioural adaptations that may have taken centuries or millennia to evolve.

An intoxicated person is maladaptive.

So, from a biological perspective, I would contend that there is no reason to suppose we can solve the biological problems of modernity outwith religion (especially since the social system of religion has in practice been replaced by... the mass media - see my book Addicted to Distraction). Biological knowledge can diagnose the problem - but science cannot provide a solution nor the motivation to implement it; since humans are not evolved to structure their sexuality according to biological principles.

We are 'set-up' to seek our own gratification and try to avoid suffering with reproductive success as a by-product - we do not seek directly to achieve optimal personal/ or tribal/ or national/ or species-level reproductive fitness.

Such omissions and other imperfections do not detract from the exceptional originality and importance of this book and the empirical research and theoretical discussion which it summarises.

In a world where actual scientific achievement was the primary determinant of professional success; Menelaos Apostolou would be among the most prestigious, most cited, and most intellectually influential people in evolutionary psychology.

I hope that this deserved outcome will, sooner or later, come to pass.

What work does the concept of natural selection do in public discourse? Atheism and Social Darwinism

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I continue to puzzle over the way that the Left has embraced 'macro'-selection (the origin of species, of form) as a metaphysical dogma applying to humans - while suppressing discussion of micro-selection (adaptation, the shaping of form) as it applies to humans.

Such that to doubt that species evolved - and especially to doubt that humans evolved - is regarded as an extreme form of intellectual stupidity; while to assert the observable fact that humans that have adapted to (been selected by) their conditions over the past dozens of generations, is a discourse policed with extreme strictness among the elites.

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So, what was natural selection for? What was the point of believing it? In the years after NS was brought into prominence by Darwin, what work did the concept do? 

There was, of course, the anti-Christian aspect. And this was perhaps the main value of macro-evolution in general discourse - to explain the origins of the human species without reference to divine intervention.

Because, let's be quite honest, biological taxonomy, the classification of living things, is a highly technical minority business; and while it is vital to the science is not and seldom has been exactly a hot topic either within biology or in public discourse - except insofar as it applies to humans...

(Indeed, the concept of natural selection didn't actually make all that much difference to the classification of living things, just tinkering at the edges: most of taxonomy had already been done by 1859.)

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So, to simplify, the main function of macro-evolution in general intellectual discourse was to create a metaphysical framework that assumed humans had evolved - the specific details of which were unimportant, since they have been and continue to be constantly changed.

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But what of micro-evolution?

Well, in the 19th century this was mainly applied to human society, in 'Social Darwinism' - that was surely the main positive interest of the theory of natural selection.

The interest was a matter of how natural selection could explain differences between races, between men and women, and human society at different stages of civilization - in sum, how natural selection could explain the specifics of human behavior.

These was among the themes of The Descent of Man - Darwin's follow-up to The Origin of Species. Unsurprisingly, Descent (including its path-breaking descriptions of sexual selection) was pretty much forgotten for many decades and remains one of Darwin's least known writings.

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The Leftist Western intellectual elites were happy with the atheistic metaphysics of natural selection, but very worried by the use of natural selection to explain human behavior in terms of adaptation; and for many decades (since the ascendancy of the Left among elites in the 1960s) this discourse has been policed with extreme strictness.

Indeed, the whole domain of differences between humans became a taboo subject - never to be discussed freely and candidly. 

When sociobiology emerged, it was attacked with extreme aggression: deploying the crudest mob intimidation. Only when 'evolutionary psychology' emerged with a dogma against all significant human evolution since the evolution of 'anatomically modern' Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago was pressure relented somewhat.

This dogma of the essential unity of mankind was, in fact, another re-assertion of macro- over micro-evolution - since it meant that significant adaptation was only of the species, and not within the species - yet even here the discussion of male female differences was fraught with hazard.

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So that is my current answer to the question of what work does natural selection do in public discourse: macro-evolution (speciation) frames the question of human origins and purpose such as to exclude divine causes; micro-evolution (adaptation) provides explanations for observable differences between humans.

Macro-evolution is almost wholly a framing structure for science - and there is no direct human knowledge or experience to support it; while micro-evolution is a matter of direct observation in terms of, for example, the spontaneously obvious workings of heredity among individuals and groups and the perceptible effects of population changes (demographics).

Macro-evolution is therefore essentially metaphysical - and Leftist (since the framework is intrinsically atheist - excludes god/s); while micro-evolution is essentially scientific and threatening to Leftism (since it challenges intrinsic Leftist dogmas about equality and the causes of difference).

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So, back in the nineteenth century macro-evolution was used in public discourse to support atheism, while micro-evolution was used to support Social Darwinism.

Therefore, presumably the reason that (contrary to common sense and experiential support) the first has become a dogma while the second has become a taboo is that twenty-first century politics is pro-atheist but anti-Social Darwinist.

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Note: For previous postings on this subject, search this blog for "selection"

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Analyzing "what women do" is... what *women* do: Hospital Society signs of maladaptive mutation accumulation?

In the weird online world, the masculine reaction against feminism and feminization, has often taken the form of men analyzing what women do (in order, supposedly, for men to be able better to understand and manipulate women). 

So, men who purport to desire to re-establish patriarchy, are expending their time and efforts in discussing the opposite sex.

And yet... this kind of thing is exactly what women do!

Back in the day "when men were men", men would never dream of getting together to analyze women - they were just not interested in such gossip. 

Men, instead, wanted to talk about things that interested them - work, sports, politics, theology... 

That was even the case just 20-plus years ago, when Robin Dunbar was researching his book "Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language". In his studies, eavesdropping on single sex groups chatting; men talked about their interests; while women talked about social stuff: mostly about... men*.

There was, indeed, a whole evolutionary rationale for this difference in subject matter (to which I made a small contribution). 

Indirectly, the biological evidence was that such different interests were broadly adaptive. That is: such differences led to enhanced reproductive success throughout past evolutionary history. 

In traditional societies, it was a better reproductive strategy (overall, on average) for men to focus their social interactions on 'the world', and women to focus on people - especially men. 

Therefore, I would regard men analyzing women as a Hospital Society phenomenon, consistent with de-differentiation (loss of sexual differentiation) and maladaptation (loss of social and sexual adaptations) - which are plausibly caused by mutation accumulation. 

Of course, this does not mean that it is wrong for groups of men to want to analyze women in their online gossip (or IRL), esepcially considering that The West 2023 is not our "environment of evolutionary adaptedness"...

Just that such behaviour is rather... effeminate!

Thus paradoxically; the modern pro-masculine reaction is in this, as in other respects, un-masculine. 

*Briefly to summarize and caricature: men spontaneously talk about men, and so do women.

Evolution of Empathizing and Systemizing personality traits - a draft book chapter, request for comments

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The following is a draft book chapter I co-wrote for a book on Systemizing and Empathizing which was to be edited by the originator of these terms - Simon Baron-Cohen.

 

In the draft, Patrick Rosenkranz and I put forward some new hypotheses for the evolution of these personality traits - and these may be of some general interest.

 

However, the original contract for this book fell-through, and a new publisher is being arranged. This means that there will be time, and need, for the draft chapter to be revised considerably before publication.

 

Therefore, if anyone has suggestions and comments for how this book chapter might be improved these would be gratefully received.

 

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Evolution of Empathizing and Systemizing:  Economic specialization and the sexual division of labour

 

By Patrick Rosenkranz and Bruce G Charlton

 

 

Draft version February 2013: , Psychology

 

Email: brucedotcharltonatncldotacdotuk

 

 

Introduction: What is it that needs to be explained?

 

The first purpose of this chapter is conceptual clarification. In other words, we first aim to clarify what an evolutionary theory of Empathizing and Systemizing needs to explain. In other words, we need to be clear what has evolved, before we can suggest why and how it may have evolved.

 

Therefore we need to define the nature of both Empathizing (E) and Systemizing (S), and to emphasize that they are personality traits rather than abilities. We consider E as the disposition to apply ‘theory of mind’ (or social intelligence) reasoning to experience; while Systemizing is a disposition to apply non-social, abstract and systematic reasoning to experience. Therefore, E and S are distinctive modes of thinking – in an identical situation, an Empathizer would use one mode of thinking, while a Systemizer would use another – even if both had the same underlying cognitive abilities, their preferences or dispositions would be different.

 

To put matters simply, E and S describe a fundamental orientation towards either People or Things. An orientation could be understood in terms of a spontaneous focus, a preference. The reason for an orientation may be sought in terms of motivational systems of gratification and aversion: a concern with either people, or things, will tend to give more pleasure (or less pain) than its opposite.

 

But the situation is not symmetrical for Empathizing and Systemizing, because man is a social animal: thus a focus on people is to be expected, while a focus on things in preference to people is unexpected, and invites specific explanation.

 

In evolutionary terms, we need to explain how it was possible that a preference to deal with things rather than people was able to arise, specifically in men more strongly than in women (Baron-Cohen, 2003)– in face of our presumption that a preference for things over people would be likely to provide a selective disadvantage in terms of social relationships. In particular, this would probably be a disadvantage from the perspective of sexual selection in its major form of female sexual choice.

 

In a nutshell: we need to explain why ancestral women could have ended-up with a mate who was more interested in things than they were interested in other people (such as herself). 

 

The second (and main) purpose of this chapter is to describe specific hypotheses as to how and why E and S traits may have evolved in ancestral humans, what may have been their pay-offs in terms of reproductive success under specific conditions, and to clarify the reason for the reciprocity of these traits and the existence of sex differences(Baron-Cohen, 2003).

In brief we regard Empathizing as the default human personality since, as the application of social intelligence,  it reflects the great importance of social relationships to reproductive success. By contrast, we regard Systemizing as having emerged later in evolutionary history as a result of novel selection pressures due to changed economic conditions - especially the development of more-complex humans societies (such as agriculture and trade) with a variety of socially- essential, specialized jobs for men. 

 

These evolutionary hypotheses are, at this point, necessarily speculative and intended to serve as a guide for future empirical research rather than to provide definitive answers.

 

Empathizing and Systemizing conceptualized as personality traits

 

Empathizing and Systemizing are conceptualized as personality traits, dispositions or preferences to behave in certain ways; therefore not as cognitive abilities. E-S variations are this not-necessarily correlated with cognitive abilities – and indeed in some studies there is no significant measurable correlation with cognitive abilities. For example, there is neither a strong nor consistent association between the ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ test (a test of a cognitive ability), and scores on a self-evaluation Empathizing scale (a measure of disposition or personality): so that an individual may score highly at reading the mind in the eyes but score low on an Empathizing scale, or vice versa (Lawrence, Shaw, Baker, Baron-Cohen, & David, 2004; Voracek & Dressler, 2006).

 

A disposition is a personality trait: understandable as a sustained tendency, an individual’s characteristic of habitually deploying a mode of cognition. A disposition can also be seen as an individual’s preference for using an ability. (In the sense that preferences can only select between a certain set of abilities; one cannot characteristically be disposed to act in any way that one is incapable of acting.).

 

And preference to behave in certain ways is (presumably) based on a motivation, and motivation is associated with a psychological reward (or gratification) from doing something – or else a psychological punishment (or aversive consequence) of not doing something.

 

Ultimately, therefore, a disposition reflects that certain types of behaviour lead to increased gratification (increased pleasure or diminution of suffering). Individuals differ in the types of behaviour which lead to gratification, and in the degree of gratification associated with a specific type of behaviour.

 

In sum, individual and groups variations in Systemizing and Empathizing can be understood as variations in the type of behaviour that (on average) lead to gratification. Put simply, Empathizers gain enhanced gratification from Empathizing behaviour, while Systemizers gain enhanced gratification from Systemizing behaviour. For example, a High-Systemizer may have the ability to understand and empathize with other people, but prefers to spend most of his time doing crosswords; while a High-Empathizer may be able to do crosswords to a high standard, but she would prefer to converse with a group of friends. 

 

Naturally, the disposition to be Empathizing or Systemizing requires that there be the cognitive ability to do these; to empathize requires the ability to empathize and to systemize requires that ability. And at extremes of disposition there may be a deficit in such abilities, so that the extreme Empathizer may be defective in systematizing ability and the extreme Systemizer may be defective in theory of mind ability.

 

However, deficiencies in either E or S ability are not necessary to the finding of variations in E-S, and it seems that there may be a wide range of E-S dispositions even when both abilities are fully intact. Therefore, these abilities must have evolved in order that there be a disposition to use them.

 

Evolution of the Social Brain

 

The social brain hypothesis sees social selection pressures as the driving force behind human brain growth: higher cortical functions have evolved to deal with the adaptive problems of complex group living{Dunbar, 1995 #47} {Dunbar, 1995 #47}{Dunbar, 1995 #47}{Dunbar, 1998 #48}{Adolphs, 1999 #1}{Humphrey, 1976 #74}{Dunbar, 1995 #47}{Dunbar, 1998 #48}(Adolphs, 1999, 2009; Dunbar, 1995, 1998; Humphrey, 1976). The relative neo – cortex growth in humans and other primates is due to the demands on executive brain function required by living in complex social groups. Evidence in favour of this hypothesis shows that as group size increases across primate species, neo-cortex size also grows(Dunbar, 1995, 1998) {Dunbar, 1995 #47}{Dunbar, 1998 #48}. The set of cognitive adaptations that enables successful group living such as the abilities to perceive, recall and process information about others and act according to this information, is often termed social intelligence (Dunbar, 1998), Machiavellian intelligence (Byrne & Whiten, 1988) or social cognition (Brothers, 1990).    

Group living poses a number of adaptive problems for the individual: attracting and maintaining a mate, monitoring and manipulating social interactions, outwitting rivals and forming alliances, inferring dispositions, motivations and intentions of others, etc . Selection favoured those individuals who were the most successful at solving these adaptive problems of group living. In order to successfully survive and reproduce within a social setting, an individual requires the cognitive ability to react adaptively to social challenges and to affect others positively(Byrne & Whiten, 1988){Byrne, 1988 #122} {Byrne, 1988 #122}.

 

Amongst the cognitive abilities enabling complex social interaction are face perception, emotional processing, theory of mind (TOM), self-reference and working memory (Grady & Keightley, 2002). These abilities are mediated by interplay of activity of networks of interdependent brain regions which support the behaviours necessary for social interaction (Grady& Keightley, 2002). Amongst the neural architecture that contributes to social intelligence are the amygdala ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the right somatosensory related cortex (Adolphs, 1999; Grady & Keightley, 2002).

 

An individual clearly benefits in terms of reproductive success by being able to predict the behaviour of others within the group, maintain beneficial social relationships and even manipulating social situations to her own advantage(Byrne& Whiten, 1988; Humphrey, 1976). A lack of the faculties required to function adaptively within the group can have negative reproductive consequences for the individual. The inability to positively affect others, at least to a degree, and to adaptively interact within a group can lead to negative emotional effects for the individual, social ostracism and ultimately, reproductive death .This can most clearly be seen in the devastating effects of lesions and or disorders to the social functioning of the individual(Ylvisaker, Feeney, & Szekeres, 1998). For instance, individuals with the autistic spectrum disorder have abnormal face perception (Klin et al., 1999) as well as strong deficits in the theory of mind mechanism (Grady& Keightley, 2002). Autistic individuals have difficulties in adaptive social behaviour, avoid normal social contact and are generally indifferent to social encounters (Baron-Cohen, 1997).

 

At the core of social intelligence lies the ability to “mind read” or theory of mind: this is the ability to infer  the contents (beliefs, desires, intentions) of the mind of other individuals, predicting behaviour based on these inferences and empathizing with others states of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1999, 2000, 2006b; Baron-Cohen, Leslie,& Frith, 1985; Dennett, 1971; Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Mindreading is often seen as a predominantly cognitive ability, however emotions play a key role in inferring other agent’s content of mind and reactive adaptively.

 

 

Emotions and the somatic marker mechanism

 

Empathizing has evolved to represent the affective states of others and to react with an appropriate emotion. The importance of emotions in adaptive social behaviour is extensive; and they are pivotal in successfully modelling social behaviour. Relevant here is the somatic marker mechanism suggested by Antonio Damasio (Damasio, 1994, 1996, 1999) and further elaborated upon by Charlton (Charlton, 2000, 2003; Charlton & McClelland, 1999).

 

At the outset, Damasio (Damasio, 1994, 1995, 1999) makes a distinction between emotions and feelings: Emotions are changes in body state (and non-conscious brain state to a secondary extent) primed by either external or internal stimuli. Feelings are the conscious awareness of these changes in body state (Damasio, 1994, 1995). Primary emotions are those that are innate and triggered automatically in certain situations (Charlton, 2000, 2003; Damasio, 1995).  For instance, a “fear” response can be triggered in the presence of a snake. The somatic response in this case would be an increase in heart rate, higher frequency of breathing, dilated pupils etc. This pattern of somatic changes constitutes the emotion of fear which can prime and initiate behaviour, such as a flight or fight response. These changes in body states can be observed in most mammals, however, it’s probably only primates and certainly humans that can be aware of emotions – that is, experience feelings (Charlton, 2000)

Secondary emotions are those emotions triggered by internal events such as remembering an encounter with a snake. Secondary emotions are induced by cognitive representations, i.e. internal events that have previously been associated with a primary emotion. These representations are dispositional in that they include evaluative information about the object/event priming the emotion in the first place. Thus, remembering an encounter with a snake can invoke the same changes in body state as the initial encounter. Secondary emotions can therefore be seen as being acquired through experience and are built upon the foundations of primary emotions (Damasio, 1995). In a nutshell, secondary emotions occur in response to cognitive modelling or cognitive simulations – such as memories or plans (Charlton, 2000).

 

Feeling an emotion is the conscious awareness of this pattern of changes in body state in relation to the representation that primed these changes. Thus, representations are juxtaposed with relevant somatic states, i.e. emotions, to the extent that these representations are associated or marked with a particular emotion. This juxtaposition of representation and emotion is what constitutes the somatic marker mechanism (Charlton, 2000; Damasio, 1994).

According to Damasio (Damasio, 1994, 1996) the somatic marker mechanism is fundamental to human reasoning and decision making especially within the social and personal realm. The neurobiological site which is critical for the somatic marker mechanism to function is the prefrontal cortex, more specifically the ventro-medial sector (Damasio, 1996). Individuals with damage to this section of the cortex have strong difficulties making appropriate social decisions, while still retaining most intellectual capacities (Damasio, 1996).

 

Ultimately, a good decision for any organism is one that is advantageous for the reproductive success and survival of the organism, as well as the quality of survival (Damasio, 1994, p. 169). Somatic markers assist and guide the decision making process by modelling outcomes of decisions through changes in somatic state. A possible bad outcome of a decision can manifest itself as an immediate negative feeling such as fears, misery or disgust. The representation of the negative outcome of a given response option is marked with the unpleasant feeling, allowing the organism to reject a possible decision from the outset. Thus, in Damasio’s words “somatic markers are special instances of feelings, generated from secondary emotions. Those emotions and feelings have been connected, by learning, to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios.” (Damasio, 1994, p. 174). The somatic marker mechanism functions as both a warning and incentive system for possible negative and positive outcomes.

 

When somatic markers operate consciously, they can assist in the modelling and planning of behaviour towards other organisms. By thinking about previous social encounters and being aware of the emotional /somatic responses that are evoked through these deliberations, dispositions and intentions of others can be inferred (Charlton, 2000; Damasio, 1994) .This means that somatic markers are pivotal in internally modelling social behaviour.

Representations of others are linked in working memory with an appropriate feeling, thus associating own emotional reactions with the representation of others. For instance, the perception of a rival male can invoke the emotional reaction of fear.  The perceptual representation of this individual is then marked with the somatic state of fear. At a later point in time, thinking about this individual, i.e. drawing upon the representation from long term memory can similarly produce the same emotional reaction. Inferences about the disposition of the other individual can be modelled upon the own emotional reaction to the encounter (Charlton, 2000).

 

The somatic marker mechanism can be seen as being the underlying neurobiological mechanism of the theory of mind mechanism and the empathizing system .Where Baron-Cohen (2005) describes the development and function of these two systems, Damasio’s somatic marker explain the underlying neurobiological mechanism by which both dispositions and inferences about another organisms’ mental as well as affective  states can be made.

 

Because human intelligence and consciousness have fundamentally evolved to deal with the social world, the spontaneous and immediate experience of the environment is infused by social information. Humans are primed to interpret ambiguous situation (like the fluttering of leaves) as being caused by agency (Barrett, 2000; Guthrie, 1995) and to reading social meaning into natural events  (Bering, 2002). This tendency to anthropomorphise the significant environment and to imbue it with social agency may underlie the evolution of religious beliefs (Charlton, 2002a, 2002b; Guthrie, 1995; Rosenkranz & Charlton, in press).

 

Empathizing evolved to focus on people, Systemizing to focus on things

Evolved function of Empathizing – social focus

 

Empathizing is based upon the ‘theory of mind’ ability. Theory of mind refers to the ability, found in some social animals, to infer metal contents such as dispositions, motivations and intentions in another con-specific.

 

We conceptualize Empathizing as the disposition to apply ‘theory of mind’ cognitive ability – this can be applied to the social situations for which the ability (presumably) evolved, and also to understanding the world in general (and not just the social world). In other words, Empathizing is the spontaneous tendency to focus on people.

 

Since humans are social animals, and in line with evolutionary concepts such as the Social Brain and ‘Machiavellian Intelligence’, we regard social intelligence as probably deriving from primate ancestry, and closer to the spontaneous form of human interest than is an interest in things. We therefore regard the highly Empathizing personality type as underpinned by an evolutionarily more-ancient personality type than is Systemizing.

In other words, Empathizing is more fundamental to humans than Systemizing and intrinsic to the species: Empathizing came before Systemizing. Further, it is possible that a preference for Systemizing did not evolve in all populations, and may be weak or absent in some human groups still extant. But in ancestral hunter gatherer situations – perhaps including pre-modern hominid ancestors – we would assume that all reproductively successful humans were not just able to infer theory of mind, but disposed to focus on other humans and their mental contents: almost everybody in these circumstances was probably a high Empathizer and it is likely that the the Systemizing trait was low, and that there may have been few or zero high Systemizers.

 

Empathizing – in its evolutionary origins - is therefore personal in its application, being specifically directed towards actual human relationships. To have an Empathizing disposition is use this cognitive style (evolved to deal with humans) as a general model of understanding. Therefore be a high Empathizer is to see the world through social spectacles: a tendency to focus attention on social relationships and to understand the world as analogous to social relationships.

 

Empathizing seems to be the natural and spontaneous way for humans to deal-with phenomena they regard as important: this is seen in the tendency to anthropomorphise large and important animals, significant places and landscape features, treasured possessions and so on; and to treat human groups (or modern institutions) as if they were unified, conscious and intentional organisms.

 

Re-defining Systemizing as a preference for focusing on linear sequences of things

 

The usual definition of the trait of Systemizing relates to a preference to analyze the world in terms of the rules which govern systems: such that the Systemizer is a person who sees the world as composed of systems, and is interested in categorization and understanding the rules, patterns or principles that underlie these systems(Baron-Cohen, 2010; Baron-Cohen, Ashwin, Ashwin, Tavassoli,& Chakrabarti, 2009).

 

However, while this is an accurate description of the interests of a high Systemizing personality who also has high general intelligence, it is a potentially misleading description of the Systemizing trait since it refers to the understanding of complex systems, that is systems of processes that are governed by rules.

 

Yet it seems plausible that an interest in the abstract understanding of the processes of complex systems is underpinned (and evolutionarily preceded) by the simpler abstract task of learning linear sequences. So in terms of a personality trait, the interest in complex systems which is measured by Systemizing questionnaires may be considered a more advanced type of an elementary interest in simpler ‘strings’ of facts, names, numbers, tasks or procedures.

 

To create categorizations, to infer a pattern, and to extract the rules from a system are in fact higher-level cognitive abilities; possible only to those of relatively high general intelligence. Abstraction of rules is, indeed, one of the main attributes of ‘g’ which is measured in standard IQ tests: for example in supplying the next member of a number series, or establishing group membership, or performing a task like Raven’s matrices (Deary, 2001; Gottfredson, 2005; Jensen, 1998).Those of low general intelligence are poor at these tasks (which is why they are used to measure IQ), and this implies that a focus on understanding the rules of systems is a high-level definition of Systemizing.

 

Therefore, while inferring categories, patterns and rules certainly count as Systemizing, we would favour a more basic and less cognitively-advanced basis for defining systematizing: that the Systemizing trait is seen at its most basic in trying to learn linear sequences of abstract facts or actions.

 

The two main aspects of Systemizing, we suggest, relate to the nature of content which is not-social i.e. abstract; and to the content being understood in terms of linear sequences of facts. Therefore Systemizing relates to:

 

→     Abstract phenomena (things not people)

→     Of a specific identity (these particular things)

→     In a specific order (in this order, or categorized thus)

 

A modern example of the Systemizing preference, would be the kind of crazes and ‘obsessions’ which are characteristic of people on the autism spectrum or with Asperger’s syndrome: learning lists of names and numbers from the telephone directory, or certain types of dates, or pictures make by highly-literal copying, or learning all the facts on a non-social themes such as automobile performance or the performance of a sports team, or literal recollection of sequences from favourite TV shows or passages from books, or hobbies involving collecting and arranging – such as stamps, cards or train-spotting.

 

These and other pastimes such as crossword or other puzzles, or some types of computer games, are often about assembling sequences of correct facts or procedures (united by theme or category) in a correct and specific order or pattern – yet these facts or procedures may not have any rule-based ‘systemic’ structure. Typically, one cannot learn these kinds of activity by learning and applying rules; rather, the activity consists in performing exact sequences of correct responses on specific material.

 

Interestingly, an explanation of Systemizing in terms of the disposition to focus upon ‘close-up’ consideration of abstract linear sequences, bears striking similarities with the concept of left cerebral hemisphere dominance as described in Iain McGilchrist’s The master and his emissary concerning autistic traits and ‘attention to detail’ (Baron-Cohen et al., 2011; McGilchrist, 2009); although at the same time McGilchrist’s evidence and argument renders implausible any direct equation of left hemisphere with male, right with female. The argument is complex and we flag it here as a matter deserving further and detailed consideration.

 

Systemizing and psychological neoteny

 

Indeed, this kind of behaviour focused on linear sequence of abstract knowledge is characteristic of children; for instance when they insist on a fairy story being told with exactly the same words and details. Many pre-adolescent boys, in particular, have periodic ‘crazes’ on various subjects (aircraft, trains, a type of book, a type of construction model, a particular sport) about which theme they voraciously learn everything they can manage.

 

These pre-adolescent boy’s crazes are typically not focused on people nor on social relations, nor are they focused on rule-based understanding; rather they are fact-based, convergent activities involving listing, collecting, categorizing, memorizing – based on learning sequences and patterns but not often complex or dynamic ‘systems’.

 

This similarity between pre-adolescent boys and high Systemizing men does not tell us why high trait Systemizing may have evolved – does not tell us how high Systemizing may have improved differential reproductive success in our ancestors - but it may suggest how high Systemizing evolved: by perpetuation of pre-adult behaviour into sexual maturity. In other words high Systemizing trait in adults may be a neotenous phenomenon.

 

(Neoteny is one type of the more general class of ‘heterochrony’in which evolutionary change is brought about by alterations in the timing of developmental events (Horder, 2001)

 

And this may provide a clue to the proximate mechanism for the evolution of higher levels of trait Systemizing. Natural selection usually works by quantitative modification or amplification of some already-existing trait (as when a hand, or an arm, evolves into a wing in a bat, or a bird; or when a neck, or a nose, become lengthened in a giraffe, or an elephant). In humans, the evolution of the high levels of Systemizing seen in modern people suggests that there was some original trait which underwent evolutionary adaptation.

 

In other words; if neoteny – or something similar – was the proximate mechanism via which natural selection led to Systemizing, then we need to consider the trait which was present in immature humans that may have provided the basis for the evolution of adult Systemizing.  

 

E-S reciprocity and sex differentials generated by selection pressure from economic factors

 

What are the main observations concerning E and S which an evolutionary hypothesis must explain? One is the reciprocity between Empathizing and Systemizing – that when one is high the other is usually low.

 

In a sense, reciprocity is an intrinsic property of some personality traits: one cannot be both highly extravert and highly introverted, cannot be both highly neurotic and very stable. Similarly, one cannot be fascinated by social relationships such as to spend most of one’s time and energy on that matter, and at the same time fascinated by learning about abstract facts and figures and systems so as to spent most of one’s time and energy on that matter as well.

Most strong personality traits can, in principle, alternate in dominance over time and with circumstance – but they cannot dominate simultaneously. So it is an intrinsic property of E-S being descriptive of a personality trait that the predisposition towards one extreme of the trait is itself a predisposition away-from the other extreme.

 

However, the E-S personality traits have been persistently observed as different, on average, between men and women. And most of the most highly empathic people are women, while most high systemisers are men. This observation invites an evolutionary explanation. 

 

We suggest that the ultimate (evolutionary) cause of sex differentials in E-S lies in the ancestral sexual division of labour among humans; men and women having different characteristic roles: women focused child care and food gathering and preparation, men focused on whatever other tasks require doing: e.g. hunting, fighting, crafts(Lee & Daly, 1999; Lee & DeVore, 1968; Ridley, 1997).

 

Specifically, we regard Empathizing as a baseline state common to ancestral men and women, and Systemizing as having been selected-for at a later stage of human evolution, primarily among men due to the ancestral economic division of labour, and the economic benefits of having some men who are high Systemizers. We assume that there were significant material rewards for those men who were both able and willing to perform Systemizing tasks, and that these extra resources would have enhanced the survival of the offspring of successful Systemizers.

Evolution of the Systemizing trait

 

To recapitulate, the Empathizing trait refers to theory of mind abilities, which would be expected to be more evolutionarily ancient than the Systemizing trait, since they are found in non-human primates. Therefore a disposition towards Empathizing (theory of mind) are hypothesized to be a feature of pre-human primate and ancestral hunter-gatherer societies. We believe that Systemizing came later in human evolutionary history, and was an ability and disposition that (in a sense) displaced pre-existing Empathizing in some men.

 

By contrast, it is hard to see any need for, or evidence for, high levels of Systemizing trait in ancestral-type hunter gatherer societies, and it is hard to imagine a plausible benefit for a personality type which is characterized by high Systemizing. Ancestral hunter gatherers were (it is assumed) well-equipped by natural selection to deal with most of the non-personal/ ‘thing’-related problems they would encounter, since they had lived in the same type of environment for up to hundreds of generations. The social brain perspective suggests that the most cognitively-complex tasks our ancestors confronted were related to understanding, predicting and manipulating human social interactions (Byrne & Whiten, 1988). And for these problems, humans were prepared by their theory of mind abilities, and the ‘Empathizing’ personality was motivated to apply theory of mind abilities in relating to the world. 

 

Furthermore, ancestral hunter gatherers were generalists: apart from a sexual division of labour, essentially all women were involved in gathering and child care, all men were warriors and hunters. Any other activities needed to be fitted-around these requirements, but because the usual group size was small (probably around 15-35 including both the young and the old) there was only a little scope for specialization of function except in terms of sex and age (Charlton, 2000; Lee & Daly, 1999)

 

Systemizing abilities and interests seems likely to be most beneficial in post-agricultural, more complex, less ‘natural’ human societies. Indeed, agricultural societies are usually characterized by some degree of economic specialization - especially among men (Woodburn, 1982). This is necessary because of the greater need for learned knowledge and technology – agriculture is itself a specialist expert activity requiring not just invention but significant preservation and inter-generational transmission of knowledge (which is why it was not invented as a stable and continuing social form until the past 10-15,000 years)

 

The evolution of Systemizing can therefore be seen in the context of life history (Rushton, 1985). Woodley (2011) sees ancestral hunter gatherer societies as characterized by a relatively fast life history – with high fertility, rapid maturation of offspring and early maturity – and this leading to an un-specialized type of human – with a narrow range or ‘manifold’ of abilities. This situation may be associated with strong sexual selection – men investing on average little in their offspring but competing for multiple promiscuous matings (with uncertain paternity); presumably men would tend toward early maturity, high vigour and physical prowess, but a short life and a mainly social intelligence (e.g. men being charming rather than Systemizing).

 

By contrast, as agriculture emerged, and population density increased; it is probable that life history was slowed due to greater competition between humans (Woodley, 2011) In such a situation, men especially would seek a niche in which they could excel, and this would be associated with slower and later maturation – and a wider range (or manifold) of abilities between individuals - which meant that some people were better at one thing while other people were expert at different things. The trend would be towards lower fertility but higher level of parental investment per offspring – and the father contributing economic investment to their offspring (about which they would need have had a high degree of certainty of paternity for this behaviour to be adaptive; Wilson and Daly (1992), Charlton and McClelland (1999).

 

In ancestral ‘simple’ hunter gatherer societies there were probably a few tasks which focused on dealing with ‘things’ and where a personality preference for such tasks might be adaptive: problems such as navigating across a desert,  manufacturing a spear thrower or stone axe, or preparing poison for a bow and arrow. Typically such jobs require (in pre-literate societies) learning and precisely remembering an exact sequence of steps.

 

But such tasks are far more numerous, and more important, in agricultural societies where there is more technology, and where farming and the preparation and storage of food must be learned and repeated exactly year after year(Woodburn, 1982) . Such societies also typically develop specialists in religious ritual (priests) and in various crafts – and craft expertise in particular becomes absolutely essential to the survival of societies(Ingold, 2000; Ridley, 1997) .

Yet such crafts must be devised, remembered, and transmitted between generations. Our assumption is that it was this kind of selection pressure in agricultural societies which led to the evolution of high levels of Systemizing seen in some members of modern populations.

Systemizing was therefore a kind of expert ability and disposition; indeed Systemizing was exactly the trait that would enable expertise to develop; because expertise was (we infer) mostly a matter of learning and memorizing accurately precise sequential facts and procedures.  Thus the development of expertise is only partly about ability to perform a type of task – equally (or more) important is the personality which is motivated to do such tasks.

 

In other words, we suggest that until the development of agriculture, humans were originally towards the Empathizing end of the trait and that sexual differentiation was probably very limited; that the characteristic observed modern pattern of E-S is primarily a product of economic selection pressures following the development of agriculture; and furthermore that the sexual differentials in E-S are a consequence of historical differences in economic selection pressures as they operated on men and women since all ancient human societies display very considerable sexual specialization in terms of economic roles (Indeed, humans are among very few species exhibiting economic sex specialization;(Ridley, 1997).

 

We suggest, therefore, that the primary evolutionary cause of the range and reciprocity of E-S and also the higher average levels of S in men, was the sexual division of labour in a context of post-hunter gather economic systems. One implication is that men and women in hunter gatherer societies were probably more similar in the E-S dimension than are men and women in agricultural and post-agricultural societies (a prediction that may be partially-testable in modern descendants of these populations).

 

Sexual selection

 

Personality clearly affects sexual attractiveness, and may therefore be subject to sexual selection. On the one hand, common sense, personal observation and theoretical considerations suggest that, on average, women do not find the highly Systemizing personality (with its preference for things rather than people) to be (of itself) sexually attractive in men. On the other hand, female sexual preferences are not necessarily an important factor in determining sexual or marriage partners. Many human societies have not allowed much scope for individual female choice of sexual or marriage partners – for instance when young women are allocated to husbands as when marriages are arranged by parents, religious leaders or the wider community (Wilson & Daly, 1992). And in these societies, sexual selection, most often female choice, may be greatly attenuated or insignificant.

 

Individual sexual choice seems, in particular, to be very limited in most stable agricultural societies – and it is our assumption that it was precisely these stable agricultural societies in which the Systemizing trait is likely to have arisen and been amplified in men.

A further factor is that one of the most powerful factors affecting female sexual preference is male status. Insofar as a high Systemizing trait leads to higher status in a man, then it may be indirectly sexually attractive – unattractive in itself, but associated with a higher status that is attractive (Buss, 1995; Symons, 1980).

 

But – at the first level of analysis – we suggest that Systemizing trait may have arisen despite sexual selection, rather than because of it.

 

* 

 

If the Systemizing trait is probably (on average) unattractive to women, this suggests that - when women are allowed to choose freely, sexual selection probably works to reduce or eliminate the Systemizing trait. This would imply that – under modern conditions of independent femal choice of sexual and marriage partners, Systemizing would be under a negative selection pressure; and that this aspect of male personality may well be experiencing a ‘selective sweep’ in which the representation of the trait in the gene pool will be changing from one equilibrium towards another (Miller, 2010).

 

Another aspect is that a highly Systemizing disposition would presumably (like all personality traits) be substantially inherited by female children as well as male children – even when there are sex differentials (Miller, 2000). So that highly Systemizing trait women would become more common, as well as highly Systemizing men – simply as a by-product of the economic selection pressure on men.

 

Then, since Systemizing reflects a person’s interests, and shared interest may be a factor in mate choice; it would be expected that highly Systemizing women would tend to regard highly Systemizing men as relatively more attractive – especially if the woman was expecting to spend a lot of time with her husband. This would be a form of assortative mating, whereby sexual partners are chosen on the basis of similarity (Miller, 2009)  . And assortative mating between high Systemizers could plausibly be a mechanism by which ultra-high Systemizing might become a feature of populations – especially in men (Baron-Cohen, 2006). Therefore this is a plausible mechanism for the emergence of Asperger syndrome at a high frequency and severity – as a by-product of high Systemizing women choosing high systematizing men as partners.

 

Summary

 

Our hypotheses concerning the evolution of Empathizing can briefly be summarized:

1.      The baseline state is that (since humans are social animals) ancestral human hunter gatherers are assumed to be high Empathizers: more interested in people than in things.

2.      Economic changes, especially related to the development of agriculture, and also other technologically dependent societies (requiring complex tools, weapons, equipment, housing etc) mean that it becomes useful for some men to become more interested in things than in people, as a motivation for them to learn and practice socially vital skills.

3.      This selection pressure applies mainly to men since in the sexual division of labour it is typically men’s role to perform such tasks.

4.      The Systemizing trait is amplified by natural selection in men – perhaps by a neotenous mechanism where childhood traits are retained into adulthood. High Systemizers emerge: men who are spontaneously more interested in things than in people. 

5.      High Systemizers are rewarded for their socially vital work by high status (and supported with resources).

6.      Social arrangements develop (or already exist) that allocate women of high reproductive potential (young and healthy) to successful high Systemizers (for example by arranged marriages, dowry payments or bride price settlements) – these mechanism suppress or overcome the sexual selection mechanism by which women choose sexual partners or husbands who are Empathizers. 

7.      The marriages of economically successful high Systemizing men will experience greater-than-average reproductive success (with more surviving and viable offspring due to differentially increased access to economic resources such as food, shelter, technologies etc.) – thus amplifying the representation of genes that cause high systematizing in the population. 

 

Predictions

 

The theory has a number of testable predictions:

 

Systemizing may be undergoing (in developed societies) on the one hand assortative mating which amplifies the number of very high Systemizers (Baron-Cohen, 2006a); and on the other hand a selective sweep that is reducing the average level of S, due to the greater operation of sexual selection in the form of female sexual choice.

 

The male female difference in E- and S may have been less in hunter gather societies  than in agricultural or modern societies – and this may be measurable in the societies which have recently been hunter gatherers and have not yet experienced many generation of the selection effects of complex societies.

 

The theoretical model suggests possible methods of measuring Systemizing and Empathizing by developing instruments that quantify people’s spontaneous preferences as expressed in choices between focusing on either on people or else things.

 

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