Comments on: Why Are Evolutionary Psychologists Less Intelligent than Other Mammals?

By: Antonio

Antonio — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:50:55 +0000

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.

By: Dustin (Oneman)

Dustin (Oneman) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:44:57 +0000

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.

By: Antonio

Antonio — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:24:35 +0000

the data, have a look to self report (not biased !)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/why-black-women-are-less-physically-attractive-tha

the data from OKC , which show that BOTH black men and black women are not seen as attractive:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_gravity/blog/satoshi_kanazawa_racist_or_reporter_actual_human_behavior_quick_look_ok_cupids_data-79034

Conclusion: Black PEOPLE think they are very hot, the rest doesn t….

By: Kate Gillogly

Kate Gillogly — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:57:30 +0000

He’s at it again today – Why Liberals are More Intelligent than Humans. My head is exploding. Anthropology has shown, he says, that people in foraging tribes never share or exchange with other tribes. Which makes them conservatives, and evolutionarily not as advanced as us, I guess. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201003/why-liberals-are-more-intelligent-conservatives

By: Jim King

Jim King — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 03:00:13 +0000

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.

By: johng

johng — Sun, 29 May 2011 15:44:11 +0000

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

By: Darwinian Literary Criticism | Savage Minds

Darwinian Literary Criticism | Savage Minds — Wed, 25 May 2011 04:02:41 +0000

[…] (Vol.332, p.654). Ordinarily this is something I’d be skeptical about. After all I jumped on the bandwagon bashing evo-psyche in the comments of Dustin’s recent post and I’ve blogged about the […]

By: Jason Antrosio

Jason Antrosio — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:14:35 +0000

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/

By: Jasmine

Jasmine — Sat, 21 May 2011 07:58:42 +0000

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.

By: Nica Davidov

Nica Davidov — Thu, 19 May 2011 14:45:39 +0000

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.

By: modestgrrl

modestgrrl — Thu, 19 May 2011 02:52:24 +0000

Please, this article is NOTHING compared to his article that advocated bombing the entire Middle East in response to 9/11: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200803/why-we-are-losing-war

Or his more recent article about “What’s Wrong With Muslims”: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201001/what-s-wrong-muslims

By: Dustin (Oneman)

Dustin (Oneman) — Wed, 18 May 2011 09:06:32 +0000

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?!

By: Jill

Jill — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:04:26 +0000

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.

By: David

David — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:28:15 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:02:45 +0000

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.