Rock on!  Can you define a couple terms for our listeners:
   * proximate mechanisms
   * inclusive fitness
   * cultural group selection (references welcome, but I'll go on record as
     suspecting this concept to be bogus -- fortunately I don't think your
     argument relies on it)

I don't have time to say more about this now other than that I'm with 
Erica 100% on this.  Here's something I thought I forwarded some time ago 
but it's not in the improvetheworld archives so here it is:
  (I'm skimming through this again and it's pretty fascinating.  This was 
written 20 years ago and there are a few areas where we have made more 
progress.  Can anyone spot them?)

FEMINIST UTOPIA

> Synopsis: the battle is over; feminists still retain the
> old world view; why?
>
> My friend and I are reasonably intelligent and observant
> individuals... we simply do not see the injustices claimed
> by modern-day "feminists". What we have seen and experienced
> is probably the "utopia" dreamed of by the feminists who
> fought so long and hard and claim that the battle still
> continues... where? In undergrad and grad school (EE and OR)
> I saw no discrimination . . .
> My friend (a woman) . . .
> who works in Marketing for medical products has seen no
> discrimination. . . .
> Since I've been working here I've seen no evidence
> of discrimination. When we hear feminists make claims as to the
> horrible world we live in and the tremendous injustices
> done to women in it, we look around and wonder what planet
> they are speaking of... it certainly does not resemble
> how we perceive the USA in the year 1986... it does resemble
> the USA in the past, but that is history.

We won!  We won!  The polls are in, the facts have been assessed, and we 
won!  Relax sisters and brothers in the battle for equality; the war is 
over and we can enjoy the well earned fruits of victory.

The ERA has passed and "Equality of rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged on account of sex" is the law of the land.

There is a female president in the White House, and the recently reached 
parity in the number of men and women in both houses of Congress (and in 
government at the state and local levels) ensures that Lincoln's rhetoric 
is finally true.  We have "government of the people, by the people, and 
for the people", rather than government of, by, and for men.

Women have been fully integrated into American business.  Half of the CEOs 
and management of American companies are now women.  American labor unions 
have at last realized the dignity and importance of the female worker; 
half of the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. you encounter will be 
women.

Men have been fully integrated into the American family.  The realization 
has finally arrived that a couple's children are truely the equal 
responsibility and right of both parents.  Men in great numbers have taken 
up the call for decent and afordable day care because the need for it 
impacts THEIR careers.	He, as often as she, leaves work when the kids are 
sick.  Joint custody has become the rule in divorce cases, and where 
custody is given to one parent it is as likely to be the father as the 
mother.  Where couples can afford it and desire a one wage earner family, 
househusbands are seen as often as housewives.	Where both work, housework 
and childcare are shared on a friendly and equal basis.

The military establishment has ceased to coerce young people on the basis 
of sex.  Young women who want to serve their country for a time or make a 
career of the military are no longer shunted into auxilliary support 
groups that have little to do with the real business of the military. 
Young men who do not want to go into the military are not in danger of 
being forced.

The fundamentalist religious right has reverted to being a religious 
revival, and is no longer an anti-feminist political force.  They are 
saving souls instead of bombing abortion clinics, lobbying against day 
care legislation, and preventing birth control from being included in aid 
packages to starving third world countries.  The Roman Catholic church has 
relented on the issue of a male only celebate clergy. Since their 
heirarchy is no longer forced to regard women primarily as temptation, 
they can see them as fellow human beings.  Consequently the church no 
longer takes political stands on issues like divorce, abortion, and birth 
control.

American schools have ceased to be institutions that rudely push or subtly 
cajole our children into old fashioned sex roles.  That article I saw in 
this week's TIME, the one that quoted the superintendent of schools in 
Massachusetts as saying "We discourage the girls from using scarce 
computer resources because our boys are going to need that knowledge in 
their engineering careers."  -- that article was a mistake.  The 
retraction is even now being typeset.  The newspaper interview I saw last 
month with some Minnesota teacher who was up for a major teaching award -- 
he didn't really say that boys were easier to teach because girls were 
flighty and cared mostly about dates and clothes.  It was all a mistake. 
And no one wrote to the newspaper to call him on it and demand he be 
denied his award (as they would surely have done had he made some similar 
remark about blacks) because they knew it was a mistake.  We're all 
waiting confidantly for the correction to be published.

And it's so wonderful to know that in my own life I can relax and enjoy 
the feminist Utopia.  Tomorrow when I arrive at work, I will no longer 
find an engineering company that employes hundreds of engineers -- and has 
a growing staff of female engineers who can all go out to lunch together 
and sit at the same table in a local restaurant.  I will no longer work 
for a male department head who feels free to stand around the halls and 
make remarks about how women are a pain to have in the work force because 
they have no sense of teamwork -- probably, he says, because they never 
played team sports in school.  I'll never again go into a meeting of other 
staff people at my level and be suddenly afraid that I've blundered into 
the men's room.  When I go to my local medical clinic the next time I know 
I'll see an equal number of female and male doctors, not the one in twenty 
ratio I've been used to -- and, of course, the support staff of nurses, 
clerks, and technicians will be half men.  How wonderful it will be not to 
have to worry any more about the cub scouts turning my boy into an 
unthinking male chauvinist piglet by using 'girl' as a constant insult -- 
"Come on there, what are you, a bunch of GIRLS, get out there and WIN." 
How wonderful never again to explain to some male co-worker that I feel 
about the word 'broad' the same way I feel about the word 'nigger' and 
have him say "But I wasn't talking about YOU, Carole." as if that made 
everything all right.

God, the more I think about it, the more wonderful it seems to be able to 
live my life in the feminist Utopia.  Free at last, free at last . . . 
Huh?  What?  Wait a minute, you mean it's not all true? But he SAID we 
were living in the feminist utopia.  He said it right here on the net. 
And his female friend agreed.  They MUST have meant that all these things 
I've been talking about were true.  I mean, really, there couldn't 
possibly be anybody so (?)impossibly naive(?), as to think that the 
revolution was over and the utopia arrived if these things weren't true. 
Could there?


					Carole Ashmore



--- \/	 FROM Erica O'Connor AT 05.11.02 10:52 (Today)	 \/ ---

>     Thank you to everyone who has responded to my
> comments and participated in this debate thus far.  I
> feel as though it is far from resolved, however.  I've
> taken a bit of time to collect my thoughts (and
> supporting evidence!); so I hope that the topic hasn't
> grown too stale to stand revisiting.
>     Comments such as the following really stuck hard
> in my throat.
> "I agree that there will probably always be more women
> who are better parents than their husbands than vice
> versa."--Dave
>     Dr. Reeves also expressed the belief that more
> stay-at-home mothers than stay-at-home fathers would
> be "in perfect conformity with mammalian instincts,
> social structure, and the interest of the next
> generation."
>     Since when did we decide that men are *inferior*
> at child rearing?  It should be obvious that the
> simple fact that there are currently more stay-at-home
> mothers and mothers as primary child care givers in
> our society does absolutely *nothing* to inform us
> about the superiority or desirability of this
> arrangement in terms of the well-being of children--or
> the well-being of society for that matter.  Female
> mammals nurse their young.  Yeah, so what's the point?
>  Does that mean that it is best for a human female to
> be there to personally wipe her child's nose every
> single time they sniffle?  And that she must choose
> between this and a significant career?  Doubtful.  And
> again, alone, the mere existence of breasts gets us
> nowhere (except maybe backwards) in moral argument.
> Remember that rape can also be considered a "standard
> mammalian instinct".	Please, please don't make me go
> on about the naturalistic fallacy; I will bore
> everyone for sure.
>     My original hypothesis was that individuals may
> be more or less suited for child rearing but this
> quality is not necessarily linked with the sex of the
> parent.  And I stick by it unless I'm proved
> otherwise.  I dug up a relevant family study for
> everyone's enjoyment.  The PDF is attached.  The paper
> compares the well-being of children in single-father
> versus single-mother family structures.  The
> researchers first give an informative overview of some
> of the other work done on this topic.  If nothing else
> this should convince us that the issue is anything but
> settled in favor of female parents' "superiority".
> This particular study does give good support for the
> idea that men and women make equally good parents.
> Interestingly, plenty of gender stereotypes related to
> child-rearing gain no support.  For instance, male
> single-parents aren't better disciplinarians as some
> expected.  Just because some trait is traditionally or
> historically associated with a particular gender
> doesn't mean that it is immutably so.
>     Analogously, I would need to see some empirical
> evidence in support of the claim that women are not as
> "biologically suited" as men to earn a living and
> support a family.  Do note that this assertion is
> simply the logical inverse of "men are better suited
> biologically bring home the bacon"--something stated
> outright or at least tacitly accepted by many thus
> far.	(I wince at that for other reasons as well.  I'd
> much rather bring home the tofu.)  Granted, in this
> country it *is* more difficult for a woman to ascend
> in the workforce than it is for a man.  But the reason
> for this is hardly "biological" in the narrow sense of
> the word.  Glass ceilings still exist.  In Michigan
> women only make 67 cents on the dollar compared to men
> in the same exact positions doing the same amount of
> work.  Women only make up %15 of the US Congress.  I'm
> sorry to pick on you, Dr. Reeves, but Dave is clearly
> not pounding on open doors.  Pointing to a small
> handful of women in prominent, powerful positions
> doesn't mean we should be satisfied with such a
> deficient status quo.  For the same reason it would be
> silly to pronounce that racial discrimination is
> entirely a thing of the past just because Barack Obama
> is who he is.  These two highly relevant programs were
> dropped in my lap recently.  (The NPR genie rarely
> fails me.) They each feature a different study on
> discrimination against women in the workplace and in
> general.  There's plenty of fodder for discussion
> here.
> http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005/Aug/hour2_082605.html
> http://jackshow.blogs.com/jack/recent_shows/index.html
>     Men have always and everywhere held the reins of
> power.  We cannot easily rule out, then, that
> patriarchal societies do a stellar job of "convincing"
> a vast majority of women that they "want" to be
> dependant baby-machines and need not aspire to much
> else.  And possibly this is why we still have an
> innocuous-seeming lopsided distribution of gender
> roles.   This should at least be an open
> question--especially considering all the obstacles
> flung in the path of women trying to gain power.  But
> regardless of the answer we are still free to decide
> objectively what we want society to be like.
>     Now for the perscriptive part of my argument.
> But first I must lay a bit of groundwork.  Human
> beings are indisputably ruled by their biological
> compositions.  In as sense this is practically a
> truism; however, it is also well known that behavioral
> expression is environmentally contextual to a large
> extent.  Lucky for us we are sufficiently self-aware
> to purposefully manipulate our own environment (for
> our purposes I mean primarily our cultural
> environment) to suit our needs.  We are not stuck
> embracing our so-called "biological tendencies" for
> better or worse, nor do we need to think of ourselves
> as shoving them shamefully under the rug.
> Conceptualizing things in this way is not very useful.
> Instead we should think of our natures as more
> pleasingly manifested under certain conditions, some
> of which can be manufactured.  So long as these
> cultural constructions effectively work around,
> manipulate, and cater to humans' proximate mechanisms
> designed to maximize their inclusive fitness we're
> golden!  Human behavioral ecologists have already
> posited that such "work-arounds" must be employed in
> order to allow for the high level of cooperation seen
> in modern societies.	Amazingly, even behaviors very
> costly to one's inclusive fitness are theoretically
> sustainable in a population via cultural group
> selection.  This is extremely encouraging.  It means
> (to me, anyway) that we can imagine even more
> prosocial societies than those that exist today.  And
> we certainly need not resign ourselves to any
> preordained gender roles.
>     My argument does no rely on males and females
> being essentially equal in all ways.	They are not.
> But we have a plausible mechanism which circumvents
> these pesky fears about male vs. female differences
> frustrating social progress.	And by no means am I
> suggesting this is the only mechanism by which we can
> exact world improvement.
>     Back to the original discussion.	It has been
> shown that cross-culturally the more equitably public
> and domestic duties are distributed among males and
> females the less gender stratification exists.  We
> should work towards that ideal.  Women voting, gaining
> more power, and entering the workforce has been
> categorically good, though a struggle all the way.
> Thus, I consider many more permanent stay-at-home
> mothers than permanent stay-at-home fathers as
> distinctly counterproductive and undesirable.  We can
> do a whole lot better.  There, took me a while to get
> to it, but there it is.  I greatly appreciate your
> endurance.  Any replies will be relished.  :-)
>
> -Erica
> P.S.	References on cultural group selection available
> upon request.
>

-- 
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  google://"Daniel Reeves"

Reporter: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization?
Gandhi:   I think it would be a good idea.