Why Are Evolutionary Psychologists Less Intelligent than Other Mammals?

Santoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist who blogs for Psychology Today. If I were as stupid as he is I’d probably shoot myself, but that didn’t stop someone at the magazine from letting him post the nonsense of Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women? (The same people who don’t know how to use capitalization in titles, maybe…)

The article disappeared pretty quick (the link above is to the Google cache), so either someone at the magazine had a lucid moment or they don’t know how to work their Internet thingies, but either way, it’s out there and it bears the imprimateur of a pretty mainstream magazine.

Here’s the gist: During interviews for a longitudinal study of American adolescent health called Add Health, researchers assign a score for how attractive their subjects are, using a scale of 1-5. Kanazawa takes those objective-because-it’s-a-number-yo! figures and averages them by race, does a little factor analysis, and concludes that black women are objectively less attractive than all other women.  And after discarding a few factors like the “fact” that black women are fat and stupid (which, he points out, doesn’t seem to hurt black men much, who are seen as the most attractive of men), Kanazawa concludes it must be because black women are so testosteroney.

We will NOT be seeing Mr. Kanazawa on Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader

Missing in Kanazawa’s analysis is any consideration of cultural conditioning both his researchers and his subjects have received in a society where for four centuries black women have been consistently branded as chattel and animals and where the peril of sexual relations with them has been a constant drumbeat. For 200 of those years, the offspring of black women were legally slaves. Black men have also been denigrated, of course, but in a society that highlights power, strength, and the capacity for violence as key elements of masculinity, the same racist tendencies that reduce black men to their physical presence works in their favor where raw attractiveness is concerned.

This is easy stuff. Even if there is a biological component, you can’t derive it from Kanazawa’s write-up because he hasn’t done the science – he has selected a hypothesis that fits what he wants to say and put it forth as fact. In the absence of the consideration of alternative hypotheses, there’s no there there.

But you don’t expect to see science from someone who claims to be an evolutionary psychologist and unwittingly undermines a central premise of his own discipline! Oh, right – he accidentally throws a key theory, that the absence of genetic mutations is a factor in attractiveness, under the bus in his rush to be all racist and stuff.

…Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races.  And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health).  But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

This is a big deal in evolutionary psychology, that genetic health = attractiveness. Never mind that nearly everyone procreates except the most egregious outliers, which kind of undermines the selective pressure that attractiveness is supposed to provide (if ugly people procreate, then their ostensibly unhealthy genes stay in the gene pool). But even leaving that aside, there’s the problem of, if high levels of genetic mutations are so unattractive, why are black men rates so attractive?

I’ve already given one explanation: on a purely physical basis, the raw sexuality we’ve saddled cultural understandings of black maleness with is fairly compelling. But in the absence of a cultural explanation – which is to say, in Kanazawa’s worldview – the only explanation must be that the accumulation of mutations has nothing to do with attractiveness, and that therefore genetic health has nothing to do with attractiveness, and that therefore the factors that influence mate choice are not related to genetic health, and that therefore they must be non-biological factors – which is to say, cultural standards! (Man, Kanazawa, you got yourself coming and going with this one!)

PZ Meyers has more on this piece at Pharyngula, digging further into the basic problems inherent in research based on researchers ogling teenagers and assigning them attractiveness scores, but Meyers sticks largely to the biology. Kanazawa’s problem isn’t (just) that he’s a poor biologist, but that he’s a racist who has applied his meager intellect uncritically to a pile of suspect data in order to support his own prejudices. I’ve yet to come across an evolutionary psychological explanation that doesn’t have a corresponding – and often more plausible – cultural explanation; while the cultural explanation might not ultimately be right, if you’re going to build a science on the primacy of the biological over the cultural, you’re going to have to at least consider the cultural as an alternative hypothesis!

 

43 thoughts on “Why Are Evolutionary Psychologists Less Intelligent than Other Mammals?

  1. I wonder why it’s the psychologists (evolutionary or otherwise) who seem to be the biggest proponents of racism in the academy. I am not saying that all psychologists are racist but that there appears to be a prominent vocal minority of racist psychologists who come out of the woodwork every few years. In the 90’s you had the Richard J. Herrnstein half of the bell curve and J. Philippe Rushton measuring skulls (I believe he is still engaged in this 19th century form of research). More recently stuff like Kanazawa’s theories seem par for the course in evolutionary psychology. Is there something about psychology that makes it more likely that these types of theories make sense to their proponents (or rather that allows people such as this to get academic positions and hide their poorly framed arguments)?

  2. My god, you’re right. It is rare to encounter such spectacular stupidity. The scary part is: that article has been read tens of thousands of times.

  3. Two things on evolutionary psychology: one, I think there’s just an historical accident — at some point, this kind of work found a home in psychology and has kept reproducing within that disciplinary framework. It might have developed under the rubric of, say, biology or neurology, it just didn’t happen to. Also, I suspect (though I’m not positive) that psychology is a much larger field than other behavioral sciences, so it could just be a numbers game — maybe it’s the only field where this kind of thinking has the numbers to attain “critical mass” and become noticeable. But I don’t think it’s anything inherent in psychology, or even in evolutionary psychology — there’s no reason why someone couldn’t research, for instance, the rise of cultural malleability as an evolutionary trait even if the guy down the hall believes that black women are objectively uglier than other women…

  4. I appreciate this blog entry, but the way it is written makes you seem spectacularly arrogant. Yes, Kanazawa’s piece is terrible, but is it necessary to resort to personal attacks on his intelligence and character after your exhaustive reading of a 1500 word blog entry? Why not just spend your time analyzing and debunking the relevant issues?

  5. I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, but I’ve had some conversations with some legit evolutionary psychologists about this guy, and I’ve been told over and over again that they recognize he’s a big PR problem for the field — but they don’t know what to do about it. I think the consensus is that he’s a provocateur, more interested in generating clicks than legitimate debate. Still, I’d like to see a concerted public denouncement of this guy from the self-respecting evolutionary psychologists out there.

  6. @ Chris

    Stupidity and poor research more deserves mockery than reasoned critique. Simply putting forth ideas does not require them to be taken seriously.

  7. Chris: He started it.

    kmma: Agreed. The sad part is, thousands of people with less savory intentions than generating click-throughs read this stuff. Psych Today is, after all, a magazine you can buy at the supermarket — it’s got a lot of credibility to people who maybe don’t know much about academic and clinical psychology. Frankly, I’d bet the problem could be pretty easily removed if psychologists (evolutionary and otherwise) refused to write for or be interviewed by writers for a magazine that publishes stuff like this.

  8. Kanazawa’a proven himself to be a clown time and time again. For anyone actually wondering why he doesn’t consider cultural explanations, he actually uses Freeman’s book about Mead to dismiss the entire field of Anthropology in all of one sentence in his book “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters”.

  9. Agreed with Chris. Kanazawa is spectacularly obnoxious, but this blog post is pretty poor, eye-rollingly so. But don’t worry, you’re in good company.

  10. RC: You have a particular complaint? There are three lines, including the title, that mock Kanazawa. Frankly it’s far fewer than he deserves. But aside from the mockery, would you like to take issue with any specific point?

  11. The biggest problem with Kanazawa’s theory, to me, is that it’s post-hoc. That is, it explains the data, but didn’t predict it to begin with. When evolutionary psychology is done badly, it’s usually because it’s post-hoc. We should always be skeptical of post-hoc theories.

    That said, the cultural explanation given in this entry is also entirely post-hoc.

    The author accuses Kanazawa of being racist (without defending this point.)
    Is it racist to look for biological causes for phenomena? I sure hope not. I don’t see why cultural explanations of observed racial differences are any better.

    What’s interesting to me is that both Kanazawa’s biological explanation and Dustin’s cultural one *accept that the phenomena in question as being one that deserves explanation.*

    If one accepts that black women are less attractive than others, does the nature of your explanation for it (biological/cultural) really affect how racist you are?

  12. Jim: That black women are seen as less attractive in US culture has been repeatedly demonstrated. I refer you to… well, pretty much ALL the literature on female physical attractiveness. I’m not the kind of scientist that worries much about post hoc and predictiveness and all that — what concerns me is how notions of attractiveness fit into the overall cultural, social, economic, political, etc. context. But I’ll give you a prediction: if Kanazawa was right about mutations, black men would be considered the UGLIEST of men, not the most attractive. Looking for biological explanations to phenomena isn’t a problem; looking for phenomena that support one’s racist view of the world, then restricting yourself to hypotheses that support that view is. A non-racist STARTS this research with “wait, is it true that black women are actually less attractive”, which is already unsupportable by the data. Pushing on demands a willful desire for that premise to be true.

  13. Kanazawa rejects the mutations explanation for that very reason, and finishes with the testosterone explanation.

    Why are you beating up on an explanation that he brought up only to reject?

    Do you have a problem with his testosterone explanation? (Other than the fact that he fails to compare it to any cultural explanations?)

  14. RE: evolutionary psychology, it has a more prominent public face than anthropology and I would contend that this is a MAJOR shortcoming in the way our “brand” has been managed.

    As I understand it, evo-psyche contends that contemporary human behavior is influenced by processes ancient in their origins, rooted in our hunter-gatherer and even non-human primate past. They are prone to making overly broad statements like “all humans are afraid of spiders because our ancestors learned they were poisonous and those that avoided them survived” (an actual statement from a evo-psyche on a PBS doc). I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure there’s not a spider-fear gene.

    Behavioral ecology, on the other hand is good stuff. It states that genes which drive behavior that increase fitness are selected for. This goes a long way towards explaining things like the origins of cooperation and non-kin based altruism. It might even prove useful in exploring the origins of language.

    I can’t quite put my finger on why I object to evo-psyche other than to say that the scale of their claims is too great. Of course there’s room for biology and culture together. In fact you’ll find that biologists are much more gracious at accepting cultural explanations than cultural anthropologists are at accepting biological ones.

    But yeah, evolutionary psychology is whack! Even without that dude Kanawaza. And I find its outsized influence very frustrating.

  15. Jim: Because he still subscribes to it, even if he discounts it in this example. He doesn’t even realize he busted it. The testosterone explanation would be fine if his claims weren’t already so far off-base. I don’t know if black women have more testosterone, and that’s not demonstrated. I don’t know if black women are universally regarded as less attractive — which is his claim, despite being based on a sample of US-based teenagers — but I’d assume that the testosterone would be across the whole population of African and African-derived women. So far I’m still playing along with the notion that there *are* “black women” in any biologically real sense, which is a huge concession — there probably aren’t, and in any case he hasn’t defined that category nor how it’s arrived at in his number-crunching.

    What we have is a man who sincerely hopes that black women are actually less attractive and really wishes there was a biological explanation for it. None of this is demonstrated. (And it’s not in the Add Health stuff — this is HIS analysis of data that was, aside from the attractiveness stuff, ostensibly collected in a more or less neutral way.)

  16. Matt:

    There probably is a gene that gives us a *propensity* for being afraid of spiders (and snakes and heights).

    It’s interesting that phobias tend to be about the same things– and often not the things that are most dangerous. Strangely, the most dangerous things in modern life, such as cars and knives, are rarely the object of phobia (Rappoport, 1989).

    Susan Mineka ran an experiment in which she raised, in a lab,
    monkeys that never had exposure to other monkeys. These monkeys were
    not afraid of snakes. They would reach out and try to play with
    them. She found that it was very easy to teach them to be afraid of
    snakes, by, say, showing them a film of another monkey reacting to a
    snake in the wild. Interestingly, she could not teach them to be
    afraid of flowers, even when the flower replaced the snake in the
    same film clip (Mineka & Cook, 1988; Cook & Mineka, 1990). (Note: these experiments were not conducted by evolutionary psychologists.)

    Denis Duton reports that he keeps pigeons off of his windowsill with a rubber snake– in New Zealand, where there are no snakes and have never been. It seems that pigeons cannot have learned to be afraid of snakes.

    All of this evidence from humans and animals alike supports the idea that we have propensities for fearing certain kinds of stimuli. Fascinating!

    References:

    Mineka, S. & Cook, M. (1988). Social Learning and the acquisition of snake fear in monkeys.
    In T. R. Zentall & B. G. Galef (Eds.), Social Learning: Psychological and biological
    perspectives (pp. 51-74). Hilsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    Cook, M. & Mineka, S. (1990). Selective Associations in the Observational Conditioning
    of Fear in Rhesus Monkeys. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,
    16(4), 372-389.

    Rappoport (1989)
    The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing.

  17. “That black women are seen as less attractive in US culture has been repeatedly demonstrated. I refer you to… well, pretty much ALL the literature on female physical attractiveness.”

    Does anyone know if some of these studies were cross-cultural? If the findings are not cross-cultural, then Dustin is right: the testosterone explanation is an attempted universal explanation for a local phenomenon.

    I would think that people who are surrounded by only one race would find that race most attractive– so what I’d be looking for are studies of populations like the US in that people are exposed to many races during their lives, or at least in the media.

  18. Not to defend anyone here, but Psychology Today allows bloggers to post their own content directly without any pre-screening (aside, presumably from prescreening who they select to blog in the first place) so that would (hopefully) explain how this one made it up on the website. The question I suppose is, who let him have that blog to begin with? I suspect they may be more interested in clicks than quality.

  19. This article by Oneman doesn’t come anywhere near the level of mockery and attacks that I would consider appropriate, when faced with a such a monumental piece of idiocy and racist bigotry masquerading (poorly) as science. Oneman has been very gentle.

    Satoshi Gobineau-Kanazawa needs not only some lessons in methodology, but also in very basic biology. His crap about africans having “more mutations in their genomes than other races” is pure racist nonsense.
    As made clear by Myers ( http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/i_guess_even_psychology_today.php ), and as anyone pausing for a few seconds to give it a tought could have found out, we all have common ancestors, and the mutation rate is the same for everyone (short of nuclear catastrophe and dioxine contamination). The fact that Gobineau-Kanazawa “rejects” this “explanation” is of no importance. What is important is that he even considered as a possible “explanation” what is in fact unadulterated racist absurdity.

  20. I found the tone of this article to be confusing. Tone is an element of style that facilitates communication with particular audiences. It unclear who Oneman’s intended audience is. If he wants to communicate with anthropologists the analysis is based on stunningly easy anthropology (Oneman’s own assessment) and there is nothing new here. Then the piece reads like self-congratulatory back slapping. Why not focus on saying something novel? If the intention is to open a conversation with readers from other disciplines, Oneman has missed the boat.

  21. Alex: I have always seen Savage Minds as an outreach to general readers, not anthropologists. Anthros already have a wide range of dreadfully boring intra-disciplinary journals, newsletters, and email lists where they can share their thoughts with each other.This is not necessarily a view shared by all the other contributors, but hey, they’re only human. You may feel this piece is not successful in broaching these topics for the mythical “educated layperson” — I disagree, obviously, but you’re entitled to an opinion (only human and all that). Again, I’d ask that you specify your objections. What novel thing would you like to see said? Apparently the whole field of literature dealing with USAnian attractiveness standards and especially the relationship of race to beauty standards is alien to a lot of readers — is it enough that it’s new to them?

  22. I agree that the linked article is severely lacking in science, from numerous angles: biology, anthropology, and statistics prominent among them. Where, though, do you derive that that article shows that Black men are seen as more attractive than men of other races?

    The relevant graph is the second one, where the mean latent physical attractiveness of men of various races are listed as -0.17184 (White), -0.19043 (Asian), -0.22846 (Black), and -0.31106 (Native American). It’s important to recognize that these values are negative. The size of the error bars will make several of those differences statistically insignificant, but the only group Black men are rated as consistently more attractive than is Native American men. While later graphs show a high value in attractiveness of Black men, these are in self-reported attractiveness, not in interviewer-rated. That can lead to interesting questions about self-perception of attractiveness, and whether there are differential cultural pressures at work in different population subgroups, but it’s not the same thing as attractiveness as perceived by others.

  23. The reason these stories are hard to shoot down is that: a) they confirm people’s prejuidices, and b) critiques can be blamed on political correctness. After all, if something is politically incorrect, it must have some truth to it, right? That is how these ‘scholars’ perform their entertainment act, for it is nothing more than that.

    I do think part of the attraction of Black men in the popular imagination is that it is transgressive to have sex with them. Whereas if I would meet a girl with a different skin color it would not raise many eyebrows. What’s behind that?

  24. Mike: He says it. The first time is a bit of a backhanded compliment: “Net of intelligence, black men are significantly more physically attractive than nonblack men.” The second, though, is less so: “But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.” I’m buying into it as regards this article, and certainly there is a hyper-sexualization of black maleness at work in USAnian culture that is seen far afield from this work, but I’m not necessarily endorsing the idea that black men are necessarily seen as more attractive than non-black men.

  25. Marcus: 400 years of racism is behind that. The marginalization of black men (and concomitant elevation of white womanhood) made sex between them profoundly taboo. A black man could be killed simply on the accusation of *looking* at a white woman. Sit on *THAT*, Fonzie! I think this intersects with the post-WWII mainstreaming of radical individualism and the commodification of rebellion as a mainstream identity pose — when you build your identity around breaking of taboos, the hyper-sexuality and dangerousness ascribed to black men becomes attractive.

  26. Your analysis, as I read it, goes down the well worn anthropological path of “its not biological, its cultural.” That dichotomy has been addressed pretty widely by anthropologists of science, medicine and the environment. And the reproduction and normalization of racism through science is also nothing new. But there are worthwhile things that could be said about this piece: for example, what is unique to or different about this instance of scientific racism as compared to the numerous other cases that have been written about? Why should we care? How does this piece fit into the larger field of evolutionary psychology? And if the entire field is bogus, as you seem to claim, what is the history of its development, why did it come about and what other kinds of work does it do? Some highly educated people take the field seriously, there are journals, academic programs, etc. So reducing the entire kit and caboodle to the inability of highy educated people to see the logical flaws of their work because they have overlooked culture is not a balanced analysis.

    As to tone: One of the great things about Savage Minds is that it is a public resource. I have sent countless neighbors and acquaintances the Jared Diamond links. I also do a wide range of collaborative work with various kinds of clinicians, including psychologists, and I’ve sent them links on occasion. But sending these links to colleagues or neighbors is a tacit endorsement of anthropological standards of professionalism found on the site. Its also worth bearing in mind that the web is the first place that students turn for resources.

  27. Alex: Clearly this path is not well-worn enough, or mainstream mags wouldn’t be walking it so eagerly. Also: I don’t claim the entire field is bogus — in fact, if you read my comments, you’ll see I’ve been pretty careful to distinguish Dude’s work from the rest of the field. You might be reading too much into the title?

    Savage Minds is a blog. There’s plenty of thought-provoking, academicky stiff here, but ultimately, it is not an academic reference. I find it absolutely hilarious that people are so profoundly worried about the TONE of this piece — seriously, folks? Is this what we get for missing April Fools’ Day? I suppose there’s no law that says you have to like the way I write or the voice I do it in — I mean, there certainly OUGHTTA BE, everyone at least can agree on THAT — but that doesn’t really seem like MY problem. I chose a voice that seemed appropriate to the level of scorn I feel for material that even now is being read by tens of thousands of people. If you’re NOT angry about that, please, visit your mechanic and have your emotion chip recalibrated.

  28. The problem here is not, in fact, Santoshi Kanazawa, or indeed any other Nativist Evolutionary Psychologist. The problem is very much one of a science illiterate media. Ben Goldacre in his Bad Science blog and in his book of the same name make this point. Much of the scandal around vaccination came about in part because the media choses scandalous hypotheses over more mundane science.

    A similar thing is going on here I suspect.

    And unfortunately, nativist evolutionary psychology is perfect media fodder: it appeals to the notion of a underlying human nature and its frequently about sex and can as a consequence have photos of attractive women on the page.

    If we dislike this stuff, we need to start writing letters to editors. The Santoshi Kanazawas of the world will dissappear all the sooner.

  29. Dustin, I’m not sure I’ve followed your point but it seems like you may be getting flustered. It was not my intention to ruffle your feathers.

    Did you mean to say that there is no rule that people adopt your tone although there should be, or that there ought to be norms around this but you personally aren’t interested?

    Savageminds reaches a diverse readership, some who think tone matters. I’m a case in point. Tone and rhetorical style are highly gendered phenomena, and as such they can be modes through which exclusions are reproduced.

    You are free to choose to write in whatever tone you want. But given the audience, and the turn in anthropology to take written form seriously, don’t be surprised if people ask you to account for your choices.

  30. The biology vs culture debate cannot overcome the acceptance of the notion that “culture” is a surface overlay laminated onto “biology.” Unless that hierarchy of causality is overcome, the “I can think of a dozen cultural arguments to explain that” will ALWAYS lose to the idea that a claim to a biological/genetic/body cause has somehow located something more direct, more primal, more real.

  31. I really don’t see any problem with the tone Dustin used in this piece, and find it somewhat surprising and frankly somewhat absurd that this conversation is even happening. I also think it’s kind of laughable to imply that a little bit of snark excludes the delicate female sex, who are presumably the ones alienated by Dustin’s “gendered” rhetorical style. I assure you, I’ve read far harsher condemnations of Kanazawa’s article, many penned by women, than the mild digs Dustin offers here. Personally, I take delight in the style this post is written in.

    If we want to talk about exclusions and rhetorical style, perhaps we might consider how the kind of discursive model you are insisting upon is extremely exclusive itself.

  32. Alex: I didn’t say anything like either of those things. What I said was that while there’s no law that says everyone has to agree with whatever I write whichever way I write it, we can all agree that there SHOULD be such a law. That might have been snark.

    Incidentally, I don’t think there’s anything particularly gendered about snark. I can think of a good number of snarkier female feminist bloggers — just look a the way Feministe takes down its trolls. And our boy Kanazawa is certainly a troll!

    But it’s funny you bring it up, because while you may not know it from looking at our current regular lineup, but Savage Minds has had a few really good full members who were female and who left citing not the fact that sometimes I snark but the hostility of commenters who focus not on the substance of what they wrote but on trivial details like the tone of their posts or some minor point of fact readily conceded. I’m not saying YOU’RE doing this — in fact, this comment thread is rather tame in comparison to what I’d face as a woman — but I can certainly see the frustration. What’s a Mind gotta do to get some engagement around heah?!

  33. I agree with the comment above that the fact that this sort of evo-psycho crap is much more widely read and circulated than cultural anthropology is a serious shortcoming in how the cultural anthro “brand” is managed. I also find it disturbing that the subtitle of Kanazawa’s column (“A Look at the Hard Truths About Human Nature”–that is the subtitle, right?) is very much in tune with the disciplinary culture performed by many evolutionary psychologists. As someone who started out in an evolutionary psychology graduate program, and eventually left it for a cultural anthropology program, largely because I found the paradigm cult-ish, and was distressed and alarmed by the racist and sexist culture it seemed to bring out in its acolytes, I believe that while scholars in the field may regard Kanzawa as a PR problem, that does not mean that they fundamentally disagree with his perspectives. The sort of critical perspective that many comments immediately offer up to point out the flaws with the design of his analysis is not built into the way that evolutionary psychologists approach their research–instead, many of the ones that I encountered would adopt the “subtitle” attitude–rational scientists articulating the hard truths wimpy pomo cultural anthropologists are too politically correct to entertain. Ugh.

  34. Interestingly, Psychology Today also reprinted a great article by Jefferson Fish called “Mixed Blood” which shows that the idea of race is tenuous and culture-related.

    So in the US, if a black man and a white woman have five children, where one child looks like the mother, and one looks like the father, and the other 3 range between, all five children will be considered black – because Americans think of race as something that is carried in the blood. However, those same five children would be seen as five different races in Brazil, where race is purely based on the visual.

    I thought the original article by Kanazawa was offensive and deeply, deeply flawed, but I thought it was worse that someone would actually publish it.

  35. As reported in these comments, Kanazawa is seen as an outlier crackpot, an embarrassment to his field. But meanwhile there are others who are getting mainstream representation based on unsupported results, like the recent “Room for Debate” piece in the New York Times titled “Is Anti-White Bias a Problem?”

    For more, please see my blog-post “News? A so-called study on racism”:

    http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2011/05/23/news-a-so-called-study-on-racism/

  36. I am in general not a great fan of Tarantino’s politics. But here I think he provides a very precise set of proceedures for dealing with certain kinds of evolutionary psychologists. In particular there is the openess to general discussion and the ruling out of certain other kinds of discussion. And the method of doing so as well as the consequences. Very useful, scholarly, and interesting.

    https://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=580376035

  37. If I were as stupid as he is I’d probably shoot myself

    If you own a guy already, load it and get on with the thing already. If not, buy one and some ammo immediately.

    The author you’re whining about sounds exceedingly stupid, but then so do you.

  38. Antonio: The issue isn’t whether one group of people is seen as or sees themselves as more attractive than another — this is actually pretty well-established and the primacy of whiteness as part of Western attractiveness standards is a foundational element in much feminist thinking. The point is that the original article disregarded so much data — well-established data, in most cases — in favor of a biological, universalizing explanation that does nothing to actually explain the phenomenon it’s supposedly meant to explain. And it does so because the author really, REALLY wants to believe that there’s something wrong with black folks — so much so that he’s built a career out of making exactly this sort of unfounded and reductive argument.

  39. I do not agree, because on dating site, you overrule most of social rules, people contact each other, anonymously, often for short term relationships,and you then realize that the so called attractiveness from black male toward white woman is very low.I read all the papers of Kanazawa, i agree that he can be very rude on purpose because he always try to higlight the PARADOXES, but i really don t think he is a racist.
    And i have to recognise that i am VERY surprise that no one but me is surprised by the only REAL scoop in the add health, the fact that black people seem way more vain than all the other ethnic groups.

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