Reddit reviews Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature

> Dawkins did a great interview with Steven Rose where Rose calls him out on this and he really has no coherent answer.

Ha, I was reading your previous post in this chain and thought of that exact debate, and was going to link to it for your enjoyment (figured your knowledge base of evolutionary theory is probably beyond the level of that discussion, but it's a fun way to spend an hour) and that of others reading the thread. I'm pleased to see you thought of it first! It's been a very long time since I watched it, but what I seem to remember most saliently is Dawkins utterly failing to understand the dialectical nature between phenotype and environment and the role of that dialectic in producing evolutionary outcomes. Watching Dawkins compared to Rose in that discussion made me feel like Dawkins had a college freshman's understanding of evolutionary biology and the various mechanisms that make up the process of evolution when compared with Rose's grasp of the subject.

Have you read Lifelines or Not in Our Genes? Again, it's been a while since I've read them but I remember especially enjoying the latter. They were clearly written for the layperson, but I was a poli sci & philosophy student who took a whopping two courses in biology, so they were reasonably interesting for me, and it was nice to get an alternative take on evolutionary biology versus all the gene-centric stuff like that of Dawkins et. al., which so often seems to morph into right-wing evo psych pseudoscientific "just-so" nonsense.

You realize he doesn't need to state something overtly to be saying it, right?

By calling women functionally non-adapted to certain work with rare exceptions there is a clear implication that he thinks they are inferior to men in those roles.

His arguments are:

1. Not in anyway new or insightful
   
   
2. Based on "research" that was originally used to justify discrimination of women due to their "biology"
   
   
3. Based on premises debunked since the 1980s
   
   
4. Advocates for limiting people's consideration for certain work types based on being a woman or minority
   
   These arguments are so commonly found within discriminatory arguments for supporting sexism that avoiding overt claims of inferiority does not separate its from its roots.
   
   I suggest you read Not in our Genes and consider the following:
   
   > The biological determinist argument follows a by now familiar structure: It begins with the citation of “evidence,” the “facts” of differences between men and women … These “facts,” which are taken as unquestioned, are seen as depending on prior psychological tendencies which in turn are accounted for by underlying biological differences between males and females at the level of brain structure or hormones. Biological determinism then shows that male-female differences in behavior among humans are paralleled by those found in nonhuman societies — among primates or rodents or birds . . . giving them an apparent universality that cannot be gainsaid by merely wishing things were different or fairer. . . And finally, the determinist argument endeavors to weld all currently observed differences together on the basis of the now familiar and Panglossian sociobiological arguments: that sexual divisions have emerged adaptively by natural selection, as a result of the different biological roles in reproduction of the two sexes . . . the inequalities are not merely inevitable but functional too.