Science Denialism in "Scientific American"
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From Scientific American:
Darwin Was Sexist, and So Are Many Modern Scientists
For far too long, Darwinian theory has justified sexist attitudes and behavior
By John Horgan on December 18, 2017
… Actually, Saini points out, anthropological research has revealed that hunter-gatherer societies were remarkably egalitarian. Hence modern gender differences are more likely to stem from discrimination and other cultural factors than from females’ alleged biological inferiority.
“… hunter-gatherer societies were remarkably egalitarian …” Except for that whole hunter-gatherer part of the hunter-gatherer societies, but otherwise …
Ha! Not when you can score points and push your idiotic agenda, right Horgan? What sphincter relaxation produced this raft? Anyone want to take bets on when John Horgan gets Me Tooed?
Science has morphed from an intellectual pursuit with strict standards into just another social-political cudgel by which we may harass and oppress white males. Any science not appropriate for this purpose is ipso facto not science. Hope this clarifies things for you all.
That Horgan guy has no training in any STEM subject, just journalism.
I recently browsed through a copy of Scientific American at a doctor's office. I was shocked at the obvious political correctness, bias, and low-brow content for a magazine that used to summarize the bleeding-edge of science for math-disabled people like me.
There was the politically correct racial and the gender-based mix of authors that ensured that Whites, Blacks, Asians, and women all had balanced representation. There were a surprising number of "soft" articles from female authors on touchy-feely subjects that had little to do with "science".
The long march of Cultural Marxism through our institutions continues ...
I mostly remembered it from the ’90s when it was a reasonably respectable general interest mag that avoided Popular Mechanics style buffoonery (flying cars! Next year! We swear this time!). However I also remember running across some Scientific American issues from back in the early 70s (I believe) and being shocked at how highbrow it had been. It was just slightly below the level of a real peer reviewed journal. So the descent has been stretched over a good 40 years and now it seems it has landed just slightly above the level of People magazine. Actually at this point I much prefer PopMech since they seem to embrace their own campiness.
Neither the term “Scientific”, nor the term “American”, have any real meaning in our modern society so I’m not surprised this has happened.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/03/16/finally-a-flying-car-could-go-on-sale-as-soon-as-2017/#29df77881255
It rotted from the head down.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/google-engineer-fired-for-sexist-memo-isnt-a-hero/
Certainly a sexual division of labor is a feature of all hunter/gatherer societies, if that is what you mean. There is also sexual dimorphism (in strength and size) among humans and lots of other differences. Sexism is nature’s way and not just among people.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/943712191320117248
So Horgan is probably right that hunter gatherer societies were more egalitarian. But he is ignoring the fact that most of us are descended from settled agrarian people, not hunter gatherers, and 5000 years has been enough time to accentuate the biological differences between men and women. Particularly in European and Middle Eastern societies, maybe somewhat less in Asia and Africa.
"I'm afraid science doesn't show that at all. Humans aren't sexually dimporphic, and sexologists, biologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and geneticists have recognised a diversity of gender and sex categories for decades. Binary sex/gender is a recent Western invention."
Are you crying or laughing?
https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-sexism-rampant-in-nature-1819566369
Man, that's funny.
In other news, homeless encampments don’t support much in the way of vertical social structures.
Nature’s very egalitarian. One day you’re eating the bear, and the next, the bear is eating you.
Like the Holy Roman Empire which was not holy, nor Roman and not an empire, Scientific American is neither scientific nor American. It’s published by some outfit based out of Germany. They may be connected to Rammstein or Kraftwerk, the Green Party, Volkswagen emissions labs, Liederhosen, beer gardens and Merkel’s boner but that magazine is not scientific and it sure ain’t American.
But...uh oh...Guess what else is true: It seems that the founder George von Holtzbrinck (1909-1983) was a member of the NS German Students League at age 22 in 1931. :(
One of the suggested stories at the bottom of the link:
“Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned?” (2013)
More penetrating analysis from the Author:
John Horgan (@Horganism) Tweeted:
Edit:
I see this “depedestaling science racists” issue has been commented upon here at Isteve.
Right. It was egalitarian in the sense that there were no classes, inequality, etc. That came with agriculture, surplus of food, civilization.
You are implying that hunter-gatherer society was monogamous. Was that indeed the case?
You might like The Adam and Eve Story in its Mesopotamian Context: https://goo.gl/uikvFb
That is the start of hierachary and the looting class. Hunter-gathers might attack another tribe to protect (or take) hunting/gathering territory and might well steal their women and annihilate them. In fact, that happened a lot. But there generally wasn't that much beyond women that could be stolen. Certainly nothing that could be *repeatedly* stolen to live off of.
The looting and parasite classes start with the neolithic.
Steve,
This article is just another manifestation of Scientific American’s unhinged PC agenda. Probably the prime example of SA’s over-the-top political agenda is its drumbeating support for purported global climate change (rechristened from global warming).
One day a woman will begin to “deconstruct” the “alleged” female physical inferiority and she’ll stop because her conversation partner just reached across the table and slapped her like a de Gaulle era Frenchman.
A detailed and well documented challenge to romanticizing the “egalitarianism” of hunter-gatherer societies appears in the December 2017 Quillette article:
http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/
The article’s right. Patriarchy is a cornerstone of civilization. A lack of it is a mark of uncivilization.
Horgan is useless. I read his book The End of Science when it first came out, not knowing anything about the man. The only thing he proved to me was that if scientific advances had to rely on men like Horgan, it would be the end of science.
And – after all – who are you going to believe in matters of science? Charles Darwin (whoever that is!) and a bunch of scientists, or J-school grad John Horgan?
Remember, John Horgan is smarter than you.
He has a masters degree…………innnnnnn Journalism!
This article is just another manifestation of Scientific American's unhinged PC agenda. Probably the prime example of SA's over-the-top political agenda is its drumbeating support for purported global climate change (rechristened from global warming).
Pretty much all magazines are like this now. Scientific American, Natl Geographic, my friggin car magazines even. (Automobile just ran a two-issue, 27-page extended essay on the Mexican border and why borders are wrong.) The mags won’t be missed, though once they were wonderful.
http://www.automobilemag.com/news/2017-ram-power-wagon-southern-border-part-2-nogales-gulf-of-mexico/
The author runs into a Genuine White Person too:
“It would be tempting to write him off entirely, but he thoroughly believes the things he’s afraid of. He believes them even if there’s nothing there, and he’s not some insane panhandler. He’s a land owner. A voter.”
Wiki sez:
But then:
So Scientific American was saved by Germans. Finally, for once, they get to be the Good Guys.
But…uh oh…Guess what else is true: It seems that the founder George von Holtzbrinck (1909-1983) was a member of the NS German Students League at age 22 in 1931. 🙁
Sure but as Steve has been pointing out, in sub-Saharan Africa the problem historically has been how to get the men to do more of the work.
That white person had the temerity to imply that his country is being overrun. And there’s much more, but I won’t bore you except to remind you that this is supposed to be a car magazine, and BTW: “We’ve Temporarily Removed Comments“
But...uh oh...Guess what else is true: It seems that the founder George von Holtzbrinck (1909-1983) was a member of the NS German Students League at age 22 in 1931. :(
Hail:
The Holtzbrinck Group continues their mission of spreading (ie, propagandizing) their biased version of the truth.
https://www.thewrap.com/fcc-sinclair-broadcasting-fine/
"Sinclair Broadcast Group is an American telecommunications company that is owned by the family of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in Hunt Valley, Maryland, the company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage; owning and/or operating a total of 193 stations across the country (233 after all currently proposed sales are approved) in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households), many of which are located in the South and Midwest. Sinclair also owns four digital multicast networks (Comet, Charge!, Stadium, and TBD) and one cable network (Tennis Channel), and owns or operates four radio stations (all based in the Pacific Northwest region)."
He was at Columbia with Barack Obama.
Not sure what the total enrollment was in 1982. As we speak, I think it's over 30,000. BO would have been enrolled in the undergraduate division of the arts and science faculty, which is a small fraction of the whole. The J-School degree is a one-year program, if I'm not mistaken.
hunter-gatherer societies were remarkably egalitarian …” Except for that whole hunter-gatherer part of the hunter-gatherer societies, but otherwise …
Even if true, it’s because when people got little or nothing, they are equal in savagery.
A guy with loincloth, woman with loincloth, living in a hut, with food on their minds.
Yep, that’s equal alright.
Who is lying here, Horgan or Saini? Naturally, this isn’t a review at all. It’s a single study, from 2000, with a mere N~6,000, subject to all kind of caveats. As opposed to the SAT/ACT scores that are counted in millions and are available for decades.
Incidentally, for the LMAO factor, that Indian striver’s (Saini) previous book was “Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World” (https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Nation-Indian-Science-Taking/dp/1444710168), with its cover featuring phoropter, a device invented in New York by a white guy called Henry De Zeng.
In primitive societies, problems of sexual harassment are dealt in two ways.
If a guy grabs another guy’s woman, the woman’s guy takes a club and knocks him over the head. Lesson learned.
Or the guy grabs another guy’s woman, the woman’s guy protests, and the grabber takes the club and knocks the woman’s guy over the head. The woman now belongs to him, and that’s that.
Also, women’s problems are minimal cuz a woman is expected to be mate-mother pretty early. Women don’t have career choices and put off wife-mothering for ‘power’. She just fits into social norm.
So, I say let’s bring back hunter-gatherism. Women should just find some guy, marry, have kids, and gather food, aka go shopping.
PS. I’m the only true sex-ist. Ism means belief, and sex + ism = belief in the reality of sexes and sexual differences.
I saw Robert Wright debating Horgan on bloggingheads.tv.
Until I saw him in action there, I didn’t fully realize what a lightweight Horgan was. He genuinely doesn’t seem to understand anything. This poses no impediment to his pontificating.
But...uh oh...Guess what else is true: It seems that the founder George von Holtzbrinck (1909-1983) was a member of the NS German Students League at age 22 in 1931. :(
I know, that’s what I’m talking about. Even when a German does the right thing it always turns out he was a member of the Bund or relocated to Brazil to work in a Volkswagen plant. What’s wrong with these Germanic types anyway? They certainly ruined Scientific American. Do you remember what that magazine did to Bjorn Lomborg in the late 1990s? It was like Ron Unz’s American Pravda, something between a dystopian nightmare and a Bolshevik rewrite of rationality. It was sick. I’ve never bought a copy of Sciam since.
But who would want to live their lives as hunter-gatherers? Obviously early humans did not. And the assumption that people haven’t evolved even in the 15,000 years since agriculture seems unlikely.
In any case, anyone who would think that the hunter-gatherer life for women would have been an egalitarian idyll should either have a child or live with a woman having a child, through the two- or three-year cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing without the benefit of infant formula or modern medicine, and see if that alters their perspective. The idea that prehistory must have been a breeze for women is an idea that could only arise in a culture in which the basic mechanisms and vagaries of human reproduction have become highly medicalized and, to an increasing number of people, largely obscure.
Perhaps this has always been the case, but there's an awful lot of retconning of history going on lately, ISTM. People that appear to have never studied history/anthropology declaiming on how terrible social conditions are now, and how wonderful they once were before the current age.
As if equally savage and impoverished is the model of an egalitarian world one should aspire to...
If there were any hunter-gatherer tribes where the moms and dads took turns deciding who would go hunt that day, and who would stay home and care for the infant, I’m pretty sure no one today is walking around with their genes.
Yeah, weren’t the Yanomami, studied by Napoleon Chagnon, perfect examples of egalitarian hunter gatherers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami
Yeah, ok, there was all this homicide, and the men did all that. And, yeah, the women loved to marry the men with the most killings.
But otherwise, egalitarian. You could hardly tell the sexes apart.
Regarding differences between the sexes, of course there are no gender-equality utopias anywhere.
From the article you link to, some examples of paradisiac egalitarianism:
"Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned?" (2013)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/scientific-american-ban-race-and-iq/
What has he been doing? He was only 31 upon his purge.
Shortly after the revised edition of Stephen J. Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” came out, a journal published a peer-reviewed meta review of the book that consisted of excerpts and commentary of every review in a science journal as well as selected reviews in mainstream publications, with the author’s commentary. Every scientific review but one was negative; every mainstream reveiw positive. The negative scientific review? Scientific American. Today Scientific American would automatically be considered a mainstream consumer publication, but this shows that at the time it was considered to be at least a borderline science journal of sorts. I remember it being really geeky and impenetrable when I was a kid (other than Martin Gardner).
I think that the explanation of what’s happening in publishing is that most of these publications are based in New York, and they have to get their staff from somewhere. When you hire new writers you’re talking people who have graduated from college within the last ten or twenty years. These people majored in some sort of “studies.” They fall into the low-pay-per-year-of-education (or per-I.Q.-point) category of worker. All this adds up to their being radicalized and bitter. When you have a staff of these people, there’s not a lot a publisher or editorial director can do to hold them back. They want to apply critical theory to whatever they write about, no matter how irrelevant it may be in the eyes of normal people, and they don’t want any get-off-my-lawners telling them otherwise.
You know this is pretty much the ideal c.v. for a professional journalist…
Except for that whole hunter-gatherer part of the hunter-gatherer societies, but otherwise …
See, this is a perfect joke. It’s great. But the I F*cking Love Science types won’t even get that it’s supposed to be a joke.
What are people like us supposed to do?
It’s maddening.
How the Hell do these self proclaimed ‘experts’ *know* what were the ‘societal attitudes’ of people who died tens of thousands of years ago, who left behind absolutely zero in the way of written records?
All I can say – based on ‘mere common sense’, that it seems to me ‘exceedingly unlikely’ in the least that *any* society of men in *any* historic time period – except the deranged and pussified present – would allow themselves to be so degraded as to allow women to boss them about.
You seem to imply that all the other magazines not bought by Germans (i.e. the vast majority of magazines) are alright.
It is clear that Scientific American is neither scientific or even very American. Here are some other names that need to be changed to reflect what they really are.
– “National Review” to “Internationalist Review”
– “The Guardian” to “The Attacker” (as in attacking all those that stand in the way of the deep state narratives).
– “The Economist” to “The Globalist”
– “Vox” (which is Latin for “voice”) to the more precise “The Establishment Voice”
– “BBC” to “GBC” (G standing for global as there is nothing British about the BBC)
– “Washington Post” to “The CIA Post” (ok this one is not needed that much because most know what Washington implies)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami
Yeah, ok, there was all this homicide, and the men did all that. And, yeah, the women loved to marry the men with the most killings.
But otherwise, egalitarian. You could hardly tell the sexes apart.
The Yanomami are not a hunting-gathering but a gardening society. There are very few genuine hunter-gatherers left, and I think they are somewhat more egalitarian than the Yanomami. They are also not very representative, because only the poorest, least inhabitable parts of the planet are left for them, and so they tend to be so extremely poor that they simply cannot afford to have large differences in wealth.
Regarding differences between the sexes, of course there are no gender-equality utopias anywhere.
What has been the prevalence of matriarchy?
Is it really 4.5 years since Jason Richwine was purged? (May 2013).
What has he been doing? He was only 31 upon his purge.
https://cis.org/Richwine
http://www.jasonrichwine.com/
What has he been doing? He was only 31 upon his purge.
Richwine’s CV indicates that he is a freelance analyst: http://www.jasonrichwine.com
What has he been doing? He was only 31 upon his purge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Richwine
http://www.nationalreview.com/author/jason-richwine
https://cis.org/Richwine
http://www.jasonrichwine.com/
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/943712191320117248
Right. It was egalitarian in the sense that there were no classes, inequality, etc. That came with agriculture, surplus of food, civilization.
You are implying that hunter-gatherer society was monogamous. Was that indeed the case?
In the case of humans, no matter how tough a man, he can be pierced with a spear, clocked with a club, or shot with an arrow. So big guys that try to hoard women too often get killed by littler guys, maybe first thing in the morning while the big guy is taking a leak.
The thing about hunter gatherers is that they are expert trackers, making their communities a difficult environment for clandestine sexual affairs.
Regarding differences between the sexes, of course there are no gender-equality utopias anywhere.
Regarding differences between the sexes, of course there are no gender-equality utopias anywhere.
What has been the prevalence of matriarchy?
According to my Sociology 201 textbook, nonexistent.
According to movies (AKA documentaries), most civilizations are matriarchies.
All movies are documentaries because the viewer's enjoyment relies on convincing himself that the characters and events are real or at least plausible; otherwise, it becomes merely an exercise in critique: how good are the writing and acting, how convincing are the sets, how good are the special FX?
Fiction is dangerous because there is no such thing as fiction.
Why hasn’t Trump given this man a job?
All I can say - based on 'mere common sense', that it seems to me 'exceedingly unlikely' in the least that *any* society of men in *any* historic time period - except the deranged and pussified present - would allow themselves to be so degraded as to allow women to boss them about.
It it has happened in the present, why would you think it unlikely that it happened in the past?
The present pussification of western men can only only be an aberration. For whatever reason, western society has reached a level of dysfunction and degeneration in which the most brazen obvious falsehood is accepted not only as a 'self-evident truth' but as the 'highest moral precept'!
Put it this way, if historically, and people, ethny, nation, tribe etc worthy of the name 'society' somehow allowed itself to have the most egregious falsehood possible to be its 'guiding principle' then that society, inevitably, could not have lasted for any appreciable length of time.
Either more intelligent rivals would have destroyed it, or it would have fallen from within.
- And my suspicion is that this principle still holds true.
Neither the term "Scientific", nor the term "American", have any real meaning in our modern society so I'm not surprised this has happened.
But didn’t you hear? We really are getting cars this year!! (or maybe next…)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/03/16/finally-a-flying-car-could-go-on-sale-as-soon-as-2017/#29df77881255
My impression is that sexual dimorphism is much more noticeable in settled agricultural societies than in hunter gatherer societies. Which makes sense if you think about it, the division of labor in most agricultural societies requires men to be very strong – moving rocks, clearing fields, controlling livestock, even dragging plows; while women were often taking care of children, mending, etc. The hunting bit in most hunter – gatherer societies is more about fishing, killing small animals and trapping, none of which require men to be significantly stronger or faster than women.
So Horgan is probably right that hunter gatherer societies were more egalitarian. But he is ignoring the fact that most of us are descended from settled agrarian people, not hunter gatherers, and 5000 years has been enough time to accentuate the biological differences between men and women. Particularly in European and Middle Eastern societies, maybe somewhat less in Asia and Africa.
Hunting mammoths was just sooo safe and easy.
Look at the Lascaux daubings to see exactly what sort of game ancient Europeans went after.
In hunter-gather societies the women gather and have babies. The men hunt and *fight* with other tribes (and sometimes among themselves over leadership and the women). There is a high level of violence. Savoir those words--"hunt", "fight", "violence". These aren't soy boys. (I'm perplexed where people get these weird ideas about hunter-gatherers. Do they think it's like a camping trip?--And even camping trips quickly reveal sexual-dimorphism.)
In contrast, in settled agricultural societies the dimorphism in personality tends to recede. Men handle the heavy work with the draft animals, while women do child care, housework and gardening. But the couple--and all their kids--are part of this joint family project "the farm".
My grandparents--while sterotypically male and female--were quite a bit a like in many ways, edges ground and smoothed a bit to fit their roles in farm labor.
As Steve's pointed out, the modern liberation of women (and men) from all this farm and household labor and general high prosperity and career choice isn't creating androgyny, rather guys are off being "guys" and the gals are becoming every more girly-girls.
- "National Review" to "Internationalist Review"
- "The Guardian" to "The Attacker" (as in attacking all those that stand in the way of the deep state narratives).
- "The Economist" to "The Globalist"
- "Vox" (which is Latin for "voice") to the more precise "The Establishment Voice"
- "BBC" to "GBC" (G standing for global as there is nothing British about the BBC)
- "Washington Post" to "The CIA Post" (ok this one is not needed that much because most know what Washington implies)
Why? What’s the difference?
You are implying that hunter-gatherer society was monogamous. Was that indeed the case?
I don’t know if it was monogamous, but it seems like it would have been hard for one man to monopolize multiple women without having a surplus of food.
Do you really think that there was any higher authority than the toughest fist?
And northern Native Americans, who were hunter-gatherers bands for all practical purposes, often had a system of hierarchy with chieftans having more women than others - still a genetic advantage.
Societies where making a living takes more effort typically have more monogamous and nuclear family arrangements.
Hunter-gatherer societies often have ritualistic mechanisms for collectively conspiring and murdering "bullies", including the sort of men who would bogart all the women. This helps preserve the egalitarianism of their societies.
A strong and “persuasive” man could have his women gathering food overtime for him, particularly if he was good at hunting.
All of which points to why SciAm is now best called PoliSciAm.
Good question. Very good question.
The present pussification of western men can only only be an aberration. For whatever reason, western society has reached a level of dysfunction and degeneration in which the most brazen obvious falsehood is accepted not only as a ‘self-evident truth’ but as the ‘highest moral precept’!
Put it this way, if historically, and people, ethny, nation, tribe etc worthy of the name ‘society’ somehow allowed itself to have the most egregious falsehood possible to be its ‘guiding principle’ then that society, inevitably, could not have lasted for any appreciable length of time.
Either more intelligent rivals would have destroyed it, or it would have fallen from within.
– And my suspicion is that this principle still holds true.
Needless to say, Sweden is 'proud' of fact that it is the most pussified and leading pussifying nation on earth. Sweden is or was proud of its living standards and society. Now one effect of its pussification was uncontrolled unlimited immigration of black and brown.
One now wonders for how long will Sweden maintain high living standards?
One watches with interest the rise of a black/brown majority Sweden. One also notes 'razzias' being carried out by virile black/brown youthful men against native Swedish nubile women.
Such an outcome would be rational in terms of game theory.
So Horgan is probably right that hunter gatherer societies were more egalitarian. But he is ignoring the fact that most of us are descended from settled agrarian people, not hunter gatherers, and 5000 years has been enough time to accentuate the biological differences between men and women. Particularly in European and Middle Eastern societies, maybe somewhat less in Asia and Africa.
Yeah right.
Hunting mammoths was just sooo safe and easy.
Look at the Lascaux daubings to see exactly what sort of game ancient Europeans went after.
Not meaning to be nasty; but the paintings at Lascaux are masterpieces, not daubings. I've always wondered where the practice pieces are, there should be many more of them.
Do you really think in those far off days that anyone gave a damn about ‘human rights’?
Do you really think that there was any higher authority than the toughest fist?
In Europe the women had to be fed by their men, because in winter there are no edible plants available, it’s mostly just big game hunting.
- "National Review" to "Internationalist Review"
- "The Guardian" to "The Attacker" (as in attacking all those that stand in the way of the deep state narratives).
- "The Economist" to "The Globalist"
- "Vox" (which is Latin for "voice") to the more precise "The Establishment Voice"
- "BBC" to "GBC" (G standing for global as there is nothing British about the BBC)
- "Washington Post" to "The CIA Post" (ok this one is not needed that much because most know what Washington implies)
“The Dismal Globalist”.
The present pussification of western men can only only be an aberration. For whatever reason, western society has reached a level of dysfunction and degeneration in which the most brazen obvious falsehood is accepted not only as a 'self-evident truth' but as the 'highest moral precept'!
Put it this way, if historically, and people, ethny, nation, tribe etc worthy of the name 'society' somehow allowed itself to have the most egregious falsehood possible to be its 'guiding principle' then that society, inevitably, could not have lasted for any appreciable length of time.
Either more intelligent rivals would have destroyed it, or it would have fallen from within.
- And my suspicion is that this principle still holds true.
In fact, the nation of Sweden provides a real-time, in our lifetimes, spectator example of this.
Needless to say, Sweden is ‘proud’ of fact that it is the most pussified and leading pussifying nation on earth. Sweden is or was proud of its living standards and society. Now one effect of its pussification was uncontrolled unlimited immigration of black and brown.
One now wonders for how long will Sweden maintain high living standards?
One watches with interest the rise of a black/brown majority Sweden. One also notes ‘razzias’ being carried out by virile black/brown youthful men against native Swedish nubile women.
Have you seen hbd chick’s twitter? There’s a tweet quoted from someone replying to someone making that very same claim. It goes like this~:
“I’m afraid science doesn’t show that at all. Humans aren’t sexually dimporphic, and sexologists, biologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and geneticists have recognised a diversity of gender and sex categories for decades. Binary sex/gender is a recent Western invention.”
Are you crying or laughing?
Scientific America has been leftist for some time.
That Horgan guy has no training in any STEM subject, just journalism.
They F*cking Love Science. They don’t F*cking Understand Science.
I don’t know what was worse in that link: the turgid prose, or the sappy sentimentality.
I was waiting for some discussion of the vehicle they were driving. I guess they didn’t want to distract from the politicizing. They did mention that it had leather seats.
They wax on about the scenic beauty, not considering that the policies they implicitly endorse will soon have those places covered with trash, houses, and strip malls.
Invade the world; invite the world; invest in the world (i.e. give them money for nothing.)
Oh, oh, see what I did, I used the words "journalist" and "unaware" in the same sentence. I made a funny.
Or do I mean 'redundancy'..
Scientific American use to be a decent journal for the, science interested, masses, but has transformed into a propaganda rag. This happened many years back.
Do you really think that there was any higher authority than the toughest fist?
If you cannot feed your women, you cannot have them. If there’s no surplus food, you won’t have soldiers, so how can you monopolize all those women, when there will be many men with no women at all? Sure those would get the idea to team up on the strong guy and kill him and get his many women. He sure cannot be stronger than three weaker guys together.
In Europe the women had to be fed by their men, because in winter there are no edible plants available, it’s mostly just big game hunting.
Not to mention him siring hordes of children which he is able to 'feed' adequately.
Because societies were smaller and didn’t accumulate so much technological advantage over others, so they would’ve fallen much quicker. A hunting-gathering tribe wouldn’t have lasted for a year with feminism.
What has been the prevalence of matriarchy?
Basically nonexistent.
I lost my faith in Scientific American when the magazine assigned Leon Kamin, a known enemy of Richard Herrnstein, to review “The Bell Curve.” Clearly the magazine wanted to make sure the book received a hostile review — and that’s exactly what it got.
From Wiki: “Kamin has long opposed the idea that significant personal traits are largely heritable…. Kamin is known in some circles for his speculation that the heritability of IQ could be ‘zero.’”
Horgan has one point, and one only – hunter-gatherers were much more economically and politically equal – when you have to carry all your possessions you can’t take 3,000 acres of land, a castle and a Maserati round with you. Farming was the breakthrough that also enabled kings, noblemen and pharoahs. You can’t have professional soldiers, jewellers, scribes – eveyone has to hunt or gather.
But I’m sure sex roles were highly differentiated among hunter gatherers, and violence didn’t hurt a man’s mating prospects, just as in such societies today.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
(The rot is also in New Scientist, Lancet, BMJ etc. National Geographic under SJW editor Susan Goldberg features “Putin’s Russia” and “Why We Lie” as cover stories, neither anything to do with geography)
Sorry Steve, the revealed truth of the Bible is that God created humans as blank slates, and that all categories of difference between people are socially constructed.
When the claims of science contradict the revealed truth of religion, science must be rejected in favor of the Word according to Saul Alinsky. Doing anything else means you are ignorant fundamentalist, and a deplorable reactionary misogynist.
Just a coincidence.
The journalist appears to be unaware that we have indeed sent a fair number of American jobs to Mexico over the past few decades.
Oh, oh, see what I did, I used the words “journalist” and “unaware” in the same sentence. I made a funny.
Or do I mean ‘redundancy’..
I agree …
I recently browsed through a copy of Scientific American at a doctor’s office. I was shocked at the obvious political correctness, bias, and low-brow content for a magazine that used to summarize the bleeding-edge of science for math-disabled people like me.
There was the politically correct racial and the gender-based mix of authors that ensured that Whites, Blacks, Asians, and women all had balanced representation. There were a surprising number of “soft” articles from female authors on touchy-feely subjects that had little to do with “science”.
The long march of Cultural Marxism through our institutions continues …
(The rot is also in New Scientist, Lancet, BMJ etc. National Geographic under SJW editor Susan Goldberg features "Putin's Russia" and "Why We Lie" as cover stories, neither anything to do with geography)
Yes, the ‘Marsch durch die Institutionen’ most definitely includes the media, all of it, involving also my favorite hobbyist websites where self-appointed busybodies are policing every thread making sure no one mentions Christmas, or anything positive about American or European history, not to mention light-complected people.
Sorry to be negative, but anyone who is hopeful about our plight (or the future of Western Civilization) is, in my opinion, delusional.
In Europe the women had to be fed by their men, because in winter there are no edible plants available, it’s mostly just big game hunting.
To this day, in modern India, many a half-starved Dalit has no trouble in finding, keeping and dominating a wife,in the ‘old fashioned way’.
Not to mention him siring hordes of children which he is able to ‘feed’ adequately.
The present pussification of western men can only only be an aberration. For whatever reason, western society has reached a level of dysfunction and degeneration in which the most brazen obvious falsehood is accepted not only as a 'self-evident truth' but as the 'highest moral precept'!
Put it this way, if historically, and people, ethny, nation, tribe etc worthy of the name 'society' somehow allowed itself to have the most egregious falsehood possible to be its 'guiding principle' then that society, inevitably, could not have lasted for any appreciable length of time.
Either more intelligent rivals would have destroyed it, or it would have fallen from within.
- And my suspicion is that this principle still holds true.
I’ve got a feeling that if a ‘sexual egalitarian’ prehistoric society ever did exist – even for a fleeting historic moment – it would have failed due to the (non modern PC brainwashed) men of that society making common cause and siding with an invading conquering group – which did not practice ‘sex equality’ -against the reputed female ‘equals’ or ‘overladies’ of their own kin group.
Such an outcome would be rational in terms of game theory.
Bret Weinstein (whining): “Okay please can I get laid now? Please? Okay will you at least let me j/o in front of you? Just a little?”
But...uh oh...Guess what else is true: It seems that the founder George von Holtzbrinck (1909-1983) was a member of the NS German Students League at age 22 in 1931. :(
Hate to belabor it but ScAm was only acquired by the Nazi company after the latter merged with Springer (not Jerry), best known for its overpriced textbook supplementals and phony pharmaceutical research peer review.
The third oldest profession: pimp!
Indeed. This kind of PC trash is why I canceled my subscription to SA ten years ago…
Journalists are scum.
Everything else would work out just fine.
If you look at journalism or "creative writing" or academic publications and events concerned with writing, you're looking more often than not at dutiful tuition-payers who "workshop" and "self-examine" when they should've been skinning their knees.
There is a Native American myth that as you arrive in the afterlife you are greeted by a wrinkled norn who will eat your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyes. I would feel better about j-schools if they couldn't go past the master's level and had that myth inscribed over their doors.
There were men with PhDs in biology back in the Third Reich publishing footnoted white-papers comparing Jewish and Aryan crania. And meanwhile, in the early Soviet Union you had Lysenkoism. Whenever they want to establish a totalitarian society, science is the first institution they must colonize precisely because for modern man, science is regarded as the font of all truth. It serves much the same role for modern man that religion served for ancient and medieval man.
I can already see the outlines of where we’re headed, and it’s scary, folks.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/943712191320117248
“One more thing: KSR on the beginning of economic inequality. pic.twitter.com/9JOjDdGEHg”
You might like The Adam and Eve Story in its Mesopotamian Context: https://goo.gl/uikvFb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami
Yeah, ok, there was all this homicide, and the men did all that. And, yeah, the women loved to marry the men with the most killings.
But otherwise, egalitarian. You could hardly tell the sexes apart.
Thanks.
From the article you link to, some examples of paradisiac egalitarianism:
That Horgan guy has no training in any STEM subject, just journalism.
Oxymoron
On the relative egalitarianism of hunter/gatherer societies compared to baboon and gorilla groups and civilized agricultural state societies see Hierarchy in the Forest: https://goo.gl/jgAoY1
The basic argument is that hominids have evolved to love dominating and to hate being dominated. This led to “reverse dominance hierarchies” in hunter/gatherer societies in which would-be “big men” who went too far in lording it over the other members of the band would be ganged-up on by all the other males and taken down a notch or two (beaten up or driven out). Thus we are talking about male/male relationships not male/female, though even the latter were more equal than in patriarchal agricultural states, where class and sexual domination went hand in hand; it was the strong over the weak without apology.
Neither the term "Scientific", nor the term "American", have any real meaning in our modern society so I'm not surprised this has happened.
Scientific American was still a pretty serious magazine even in late 80’s-early 90’s, but within a couple of years IIRC it had gone over to the pop-science format with journalists writing everything. Prior to that it had real top scientists publish articles about their actual research in it’s pages, that would be inconceivable today.
Got old. We had to downsize from single home to apartment.
I wanted to donate the collection. Neither the library nor the local college wanted it. The local collage had some 4 issues, from way back, missing.
I provided them. All the rest to recycling.
I can confirm your observation. The scientific tenor and the rigor went down.
In the last few years I continued alternatively with electronic subscriptions or paper ones. But do not save them. There were a few articles written by actual scientists. most are by "science journalists". And the scientists are not of the hard sciences, and not stars of magnitude 1. (They may still become famous)
The Onion reports “Study Finds Sexism Rampant in Nature.” An oldie but a goodie. Brilliant satire.
https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-sexism-rampant-in-nature-1819566369
Thanks–that was good fun. I especially enjoyed the profiles of the great British broadsheets. Though I noticed my old favorite from my more liberal days, the Independent, was missing.
Meanwhile, it’s always gratifying to encounter anyone who believes–as I do–that many journalists simply make their stories up from whole cloth, even when they can be verified.
Asked why he copied other artists’ work (meaning commercial artists) Andy Warhol replied “it’s easier that way.”
You are implying that hunter-gatherer society was monogamous. Was that indeed the case?
Homo sapiens are primarily a pair bonding species with a little bit of tournament species mixed in. In tournament species, the top males father the overwhelming portion of offspring. In pair bonding ones, almost every male gets a chance. The relative body size of the human sexes verses baboons for example is much more equal, though not equal. In more complete pair bonding species, like gibbons, the sexes are almost the same size.
In the case of humans, no matter how tough a man, he can be pierced with a spear, clocked with a club, or shot with an arrow. So big guys that try to hoard women too often get killed by littler guys, maybe first thing in the morning while the big guy is taking a leak.
The thing about hunter gatherers is that they are expert trackers, making their communities a difficult environment for clandestine sexual affairs.
They had an editor take over early 90s who decided that he had to fight people in Kansas who didn’t accept evolution. He turned it from a magazine of science into a political journal. I stopped subscribing then.
This is still the canonical satire on feminism applied in biology:
https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-sexism-rampant-in-nature-1819566369
Man, that’s funny.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/943712191320117248
How did the farmers go for months without others overrunning their fields? The soldiers MUST have preceded the farmers. See Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities, where she explains (confirmed by recent archeological evidence) that agriculture MUST have developed in cities.
Slash and burn horticulture is an example of simple agriculture practiced by tribes, who had advanced beyond simply hunting and gathering, but still are largely nomadic.
Before there was agriculture and a surplus of food, being a full time anything other than hunter or gather was pretty rare. Maybe there were a handful of master axe makers or something like that.
Cities and plow agriculture developed contemporaneously, as you say, neither being viable without the other.
I find IEEE spectrum gives me some of the broader scientific view withou the PC that SciAm used to.
Not by division of labor. Not even chimpanzee females participate in hunting(with a few exceptions), which highly suggests its a biologically influenced role.
Neither the term "Scientific", nor the term "American", have any real meaning in our modern society so I'm not surprised this has happened.
Why the shade thrown on Popular Mechanics? Flying cars — are you thinking about Popular Science?
Since we are talking about sexual dimorphism, what counts for “women’s magazines” are those featured at the supermarket checkout counter for impulse purchase. Besides the “tabloids” lead by National Enquirer, what do you see there? Cosmopolitan, no? With its cover showing a half-naked female model each issue? And its completely sex-obsessed article headlines?
So then what is a men’s magazine? Playbox? Esquire? A true men’s magazine is Popular Mechanics, which I had seen once at the supermarket checkout when its cover was “We fly the B-2 Stealth Bomber.” This is something men want to know, especially since so few of them were ever made and only a figurative handful of men, yes men, have ever taken the controls. And if you are wondering as most men do, the B-2 is “fly-by-wire”, piloted through a “joy stick”, and its aerodynamic handling is heavily mediated by a computer algorithm, so it flies much like the Anglo-French Airbus family of passenger jets, which pretty much settles the question.
Now at the risk of offending earnest 9-11 Truthers among iSteve’s loyal readers, Popular Mechanics has been a serious publication in addressing the claim “But steel doesn’t burn” that had been a talking point on, you guessed it, The View, although I don’t recall whether it was Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg offering that bit of material science and metallurgical insight.
Popular Mechanics devoted page space to explaining that if steel doesn’t catch fire, it could certainly soften and hence weaken if exposed to a raging jet-fuel-fed fire. There was a major public university with a male, Mechanical Engineering professor as its Provost (whose engineering specialization, by the way, was in combustion), who was in the eye-of-the-storm and offering a lame defense regarding some non-tenured instructor who was teaching Trutherism in the classroom. There was a suggestion of buying the Provost a subscription.
There is a lot of truth in that, the lack of the ability to accumulate wealth certainly created a form of equality. Still, even at its “best”, hunter-gatherers practiced things that basically no society could imagine in order to even survive: infanticide, abandonment of the elderly, and there’s even evidence of cannibalism.
And northern Native Americans, who were hunter-gatherers bands for all practical purposes, often had a system of hierarchy with chieftans having more women than others – still a genetic advantage.
Can’t wait for Brave New World. Electrical stimulation of the remains of the prostate shall be the only form of physical pleasure, subject #8559241!
He was at Columbia with Barack Obama.
Not sure what the total enrollment was in 1982. As we speak, I think it’s over 30,000. BO would have been enrolled in the undergraduate division of the arts and science faculty, which is a small fraction of the whole. The J-School degree is a one-year program, if I’m not mistaken.
That Horgan guy has no training in any STEM subject, just journalism.
My parents read it in the 70’s and called it Unscientific UnAmerican. They cancelled the subscription sometime around 1980.
Horgan’s M.O. for writing a book is to line up 10-12 experts, then go interview each one. Each interview becomes a chapter in the book. Tack on an intro and a summing-it-up concluding chapter, and you’ve got a book! At no point does Horgan himself do any heavy lifting intellectually. (Actually this “collection of interviews” approach to book writing is pretty common among journalists these days–not unique to Horgan.)
They are preceded by a BBC documentary video format in which The Experts are presented one at a time, answering unaired questions, to create the impression of choral harmony and Settled Science.
The worst example of this was a program in which they presented Lying Jack Kerkove, who thinks the Constitution was written in the Carter administration by lobbyists in order to sell more Rugers, without explaining to Britons that in this country we do not consider him to be an expert on anything.
To their credit they are one of the few establishmentarian mouthpieces who have acknowledged the existence of the reproduction and replication crisis. That episode was as good as it could have been. It would have been too much for them to make the connection between the current crisis of official authority and "science" consisting of big pharma ads and thinking real deep about what it means to be black.
Yep, I’m old enough to remember when Scientific American was a very stark, imposing magazine with long articles. The cover design alone gave off an air of seriousness, and you had to put on your thinking cap to make it through the feature articles. Somewhere along the way it rebranded itself as a glossy, casual magazine with garish, color-rich cover art and short, breezy articles.
Zing!
If I had one wish God would fulfill, it would be that command of the English language would correlate precisely with genuine knowledge of the world.
Everything else would work out just fine.
https://cis.org/Richwine
http://www.jasonrichwine.com/
NR is bizarre. Derbyshire is ungood, but Richwine is good.
So Horgan is probably right that hunter gatherer societies were more egalitarian. But he is ignoring the fact that most of us are descended from settled agrarian people, not hunter gatherers, and 5000 years has been enough time to accentuate the biological differences between men and women. Particularly in European and Middle Eastern societies, maybe somewhat less in Asia and Africa.
This is pretty much completely backwards.
In hunter-gather societies the women gather and have babies. The men hunt and *fight* with other tribes (and sometimes among themselves over leadership and the women). There is a high level of violence. Savoir those words–“hunt”, “fight”, “violence”. These aren’t soy boys. (I’m perplexed where people get these weird ideas about hunter-gatherers. Do they think it’s like a camping trip?–And even camping trips quickly reveal sexual-dimorphism.)
In contrast, in settled agricultural societies the dimorphism in personality tends to recede. Men handle the heavy work with the draft animals, while women do child care, housework and gardening. But the couple–and all their kids–are part of this joint family project “the farm”.
My grandparents–while sterotypically male and female–were quite a bit a like in many ways, edges ground and smoothed a bit to fit their roles in farm labor.
As Steve’s pointed out, the modern liberation of women (and men) from all this farm and household labor and general high prosperity and career choice isn’t creating androgyny, rather guys are off being “guys” and the gals are becoming every more girly-girls.
Masculine men are still pretty macho (and more masculine looking than ever) relatively feminine men are acting more feminine. Feminine women are still pretty feminine (and spend more money looking pretty than ever) while relatively masculine women are acting more masculine. If it was simply a case of both sexes becoming more feminine, personal choices would shift in the direction of female-dominated activities. However, there is no general decline in interest in male-dominated activities, and some male-dominated activities (such as body-building and extreme sports) are now more popular than they were in the past.
Here downunder where we don't have Mexicans, it is indeed apparent (as you suggest) that men are reverting into a hunter lifestyle as roaming 'tradies', servicing women nested in welfare enclaves with their babies. Gorillas in the mist. Bring it on.
Polygamy doesn’t seem to be much of a feature among hunter-gatherers. Instead of “owning” multiple wives, hunter-gatherers living in abundance typically “rent” their women, living in “frat house” type arrangements among other men while the women raise a family of children sired by multiple fathers.
Societies where making a living takes more effort typically have more monogamous and nuclear family arrangements.
Hunter-gatherer societies often have ritualistic mechanisms for collectively conspiring and murdering “bullies”, including the sort of men who would bogart all the women. This helps preserve the egalitarianism of their societies.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/943712191320117248
Thanks Dave. Yeah i’m continually surprised that there are apparently a bunch of even pretty smart people–commenters here even–who just don’t seem to have any understanding of this complete phase change of human history with the neolithic.
That is the start of hierachary and the looting class. Hunter-gathers might attack another tribe to protect (or take) hunting/gathering territory and might well steal their women and annihilate them. In fact, that happened a lot. But there generally wasn’t that much beyond women that could be stolen. Certainly nothing that could be *repeatedly* stolen to live off of.
The looting and parasite classes start with the neolithic.
The best “comment” that readers could, and perhaps should, make is to cancel their subscriptions, and to let them know exactly why they refuse to spend money on this magazine any longer. Doubt it would work to change their minds; the arc of leftist history demands that they double down despite evidence that those with sense are not buying it.
hunter-gatherer societies were remarkably egalitarian …” Except for that whole hunter-gatherer part of the hunter-gatherer societies, but otherwise …
Science itself is evil because it leads to great inequalities. Before rise of modern science, all peoples were more or less equal in power. The West didn’t great ships and guns. Damn that science and technology. Why can’t we all go back to sticks and stones? More equal that way.
In an illiterate primitive society, the most that someone like Einstein, Edison, and Gates could do is make a better bow or spear. They would be like other savages. But due to damn science and technology, they made themselves so much more honored or richer than others.
Invention of money was a great evil. When people bartered or traded with clams, wealth was a lot more equal.
Even slavery was ok in savagery cuz master and slave were more equal. Slave slept in a small mudhut and master had a bigger mudhut. The richest guy in the tribe had 5 spears than one, what the poorest guy had.
We need to return to hunter-gathering days. We need savage justice.
You are a kindred spirit. I owned an almost full collection of SciAm since 1973 (when I got into the USA).
Got old. We had to downsize from single home to apartment.
I wanted to donate the collection. Neither the library nor the local college wanted it. The local collage had some 4 issues, from way back, missing.
I provided them. All the rest to recycling.
I can confirm your observation. The scientific tenor and the rigor went down.
In the last few years I continued alternatively with electronic subscriptions or paper ones. But do not save them. There were a few articles written by actual scientists. most are by “science journalists”. And the scientists are not of the hard sciences, and not stars of magnitude 1. (They may still become famous)
Neither the term "Scientific", nor the term "American", have any real meaning in our modern society so I'm not surprised this has happened.
The big sellout was right around the turn of the century.
It rotted from the head down.
I thought the Big Thing for hunter-gatherer societies was the Dawn Raid or the Massacre. Kill all the men and do the Rape of the Sabine Women on the women.
But I must have missed something.
Also, in War Before Civilization, if the number of men in a tribe got too low the tribe would dissolve and the women would be distributed into the neighboring tribes who would take over the old tribe’s territory. I wonder what the social status of these distributed women would be.
But don’t mind me, I’m a racist, sexist, homophobe.
Probably depended on how interested the Alpha was in them.
Maybe NR were taken over by an anti-British cabal around the time as Derbyshire’s “Beware of Blacks” essay.
What kind of name is Richwine? All wiki picks up is a bass-guitarist and back-up vocalist named Gary Richwine for a 1977 album called Windy City Breakdown. It is not implausible that Gary Richwine is Jason’s father (or uncle), given that Jason was born in 1982. Presumably the 1977 bass guitarist was young, perhaps approaching fatherhood-age at the time of that album (the main singer was b. 1950).
It seems likely that “Richwine” comes “Reichwein,” one bearer of whom was sentenced to death in late 1944 Germany for treason (Adolf Reichwein). So at least Jason can argue that he has family-name anti-Nazi street cred. (There were also some Norwegian Reichweins and everyone likes Norwegians.)
Sorry; you’re actually right, I shouldn’t disrespect PopMech. I actually really enjoy them, and nowadays they’re probably one of the more reputable popular science/engineering magazines. They’ve had a strange trajectory where they went from being founded as a highly practical, down to earth mechanics journal, to some real zaniness and techno-utopianism, and now back to a relatively reputable general interest engineering mag with some how-to thrown in. I think realized where their reputation was going and corrected course around the 1990s. Back then I used to say that Technology Review was a highbrow Popular Mechanics but I actually think that the PMs quality is probably better than Technology Review or Wired at this point. Those guys went down the SJW rabbit hole a few years back.
Not to mention him siring hordes of children which he is able to 'feed' adequately.
In tropical climates it’s different. There’s no winter, when the only available food source is big game hunting for hunters-gatherers. Oh and Dalits are not hunting-gathering, they can have other sources of food. No need for Dalit women to go hunting in winter.
They are the only caste that can empty latrines.
In primitive cultures, the distinction between hunter and fighter are slim to none. The existence of a full-time warrior class did indeed require the accumulation of wealth which was only possible with agriculture.
Slash and burn horticulture is an example of simple agriculture practiced by tribes, who had advanced beyond simply hunting and gathering, but still are largely nomadic.
He makes a point in the book about the difficult task of breeding corn from teosinte, its predecessor, and how that task would challenge modern geneticists. It suggest a complex, knowledge-based society to create the grain. Could the slash and burners do that? Unlikely. So it depends on whether slash and burn people are propagating natural crops, or man-developed ones, else slash and burn is just derivative of agriculture developed elsewhere.
Every man a warrior would remind one of how they could protect fields. In slash and burn, one understanding of protection is being deep in a forest where other humans will not invade. Of course, the men would need to be hunting to get food while the crops grew and matured, while also expending energy to defend the crops.
Neither the term "Scientific", nor the term "American", have any real meaning in our modern society so I'm not surprised this has happened.
I so agree from 1977, when I first took out a subscription to about 2008 when I stopped, Unvalued it so much that I bound the copies annually. It had become The New Scientist. Now …
Not to mention him siring hordes of children which he is able to 'feed' adequately.
They’re still able to feed them. If you look at records of Native Americans, the truly hunting-gathering bands as opposed to ones such as the Iroquois who practiced agriculture, risks of starvation were real and constant. For the most archetypical hunter-gathering band, there’s no concept of wealth – there’s not even a way to keep food from spoiling.
In such societies, polygamy is difficult at best. Infanticide and abandonment is common. The existence of agriculture and the concept of wealth is what promoted chiefdoms, seen as the first evolution from pure tribal societies, where the “big man and his elite bodyguards” would form the beginnings of an elite that could monopolize women. Even the Yanomami produce flour which can be accumulated.
Spectrum regularly wins prizes for science writing despite its closed circulation. I’m semi retired so I am now down to the UK’s IET Engineering & Technology. Not bad but Spectrum was much better
Got old. We had to downsize from single home to apartment.
I wanted to donate the collection. Neither the library nor the local college wanted it. The local collage had some 4 issues, from way back, missing.
I provided them. All the rest to recycling.
I can confirm your observation. The scientific tenor and the rigor went down.
In the last few years I continued alternatively with electronic subscriptions or paper ones. But do not save them. There were a few articles written by actual scientists. most are by "science journalists". And the scientists are not of the hard sciences, and not stars of magnitude 1. (They may still become famous)
SA was good enough to make it into my science class readers in college in the late 80’s. Both my immunology and virology readers had photocopied articles from SA explaining, with excellent graphics, the processes involved with viruses and white or red blood cells. In fact, I enjoyed those articles far above what was in the actual textbooks.
Horgan is sort of right about hunter gatherers like the Bushmen, but black Africans are not hunter gatherers. If Horgan is looking for the origins of patriarchy maybe he should give the Victorians a break and read Gimbutas
. <a title=”"https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-would-a-machine-as-smart-as-god-want/"” href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-would-a-machine-as-smart-as-god-want/" Two in three European men are descended from 3 Bronze age Kurgan men.To paraphrase the title of an Edge event honoring Napoleon Chagnon, Blood Was Their Argument.
Horgan is an Artificial (General) Intelligence denier too. He had a post What Would a Machine as Smart as God Want?. He is quite a few orders of magnitude out about when uber-AGI will be here, and he is missing the point. As Bostrom has noted, any number of possible ultimate goals for a super AGI would converge on the instrumental goal of exterminating the human species.
J-school writers are the clearest answer to the faith that universities can design a course for any occupation. When confronted with a new writer I look into what else he’s done. Heather MacDonald might be the best introductory-conservative writer, she’s a better journalist than a lot of “real” journalists, and she’s a lawyer by training. There used to be a sense (it seems to me) that the training to be a great writer was heavily phronetic, with Hemingway and Cummings driving military ambulances, or Jack London working punishing jobs. Even Lovecraft had a good grasp of hard sciences. So you go out into the world to prove yourself in some other field, and your experiences buy you the right to be a writer, and give you perspectives you will never stumble across in a post-grad library.
If you look at journalism or “creative writing” or academic publications and events concerned with writing, you’re looking more often than not at dutiful tuition-payers who “workshop” and “self-examine” when they should’ve been skinning their knees.
There is a Native American myth that as you arrive in the afterlife you are greeted by a wrinkled norn who will eat your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyes. I would feel better about j-schools if they couldn’t go past the master’s level and had that myth inscribed over their doors.
Far more people want to be writers than actually write. The ones who do want to write are actually writing as we speak rather than pining after it and their primary motivation is something other than the desire to write, writing is just the means to an end.
Steve, was the general desire to be a writer ever a big thing in your development?
[correction]
Two in three European men are descended from 3 Bronze age Kurgan men. To paraphrase the title of an Edge event honoring Napoleon Chagnon, Blood Was Their Argument.
BBC Radio has a program called The Inquiry that uses this format. You’ll never believe this, but by some miracle none of the experts they select ever disagree with each other! What luck!
They are preceded by a BBC documentary video format in which The Experts are presented one at a time, answering unaired questions, to create the impression of choral harmony and Settled Science.
The worst example of this was a program in which they presented Lying Jack Kerkove, who thinks the Constitution was written in the Carter administration by lobbyists in order to sell more Rugers, without explaining to Britons that in this country we do not consider him to be an expert on anything.
To their credit they are one of the few establishmentarian mouthpieces who have acknowledged the existence of the reproduction and replication crisis. That episode was as good as it could have been. It would have been too much for them to make the connection between the current crisis of official authority and “science” consisting of big pharma ads and thinking real deep about what it means to be black.
The reason, I like others here, stopped reading Scientific American is that it ceased being either Scientific or American decades ago. The magazine was bought by a left wing German company and quickly became unrecognizable. In the old days major scientists published largely politics free articles on their research interests. Then it became just another pop science magazine like “Discovery” but with a strong ideological bent.
Wiki: " Few Americans realize that two German Gesellschaften are gaining stranglehold on US books.” Thus, the German media influences Kaplan writes about is also tied up with book publishing as well. Holtzbrinck Publishers and Bertelsmann control most of the big name publishing houses and a sizable market share of all the books produced in the United States. Bertelsmann is a media colossus that has been described as a “state within a state.” Bertelsmann played no small role in the dramatic rise of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama."
Waugh was a prophet or simply wise, since that gag still works–from Kuwait to Syria to Merkel’s Mistake.
In hunter-gather societies the women gather and have babies. The men hunt and *fight* with other tribes (and sometimes among themselves over leadership and the women). There is a high level of violence. Savoir those words--"hunt", "fight", "violence". These aren't soy boys. (I'm perplexed where people get these weird ideas about hunter-gatherers. Do they think it's like a camping trip?--And even camping trips quickly reveal sexual-dimorphism.)
In contrast, in settled agricultural societies the dimorphism in personality tends to recede. Men handle the heavy work with the draft animals, while women do child care, housework and gardening. But the couple--and all their kids--are part of this joint family project "the farm".
My grandparents--while sterotypically male and female--were quite a bit a like in many ways, edges ground and smoothed a bit to fit their roles in farm labor.
As Steve's pointed out, the modern liberation of women (and men) from all this farm and household labor and general high prosperity and career choice isn't creating androgyny, rather guys are off being "guys" and the gals are becoming every more girly-girls.
The reigning ideology of the modern West is personal autonomy. Hence, people just follow their biological instincts under the softening effects of technological comfort and the dictates of PC ideology.
Masculine men are still pretty macho (and more masculine looking than ever) relatively feminine men are acting more feminine. Feminine women are still pretty feminine (and spend more money looking pretty than ever) while relatively masculine women are acting more masculine. If it was simply a case of both sexes becoming more feminine, personal choices would shift in the direction of female-dominated activities. However, there is no general decline in interest in male-dominated activities, and some male-dominated activities (such as body-building and extreme sports) are now more popular than they were in the past.
And northern Native Americans, who were hunter-gatherers bands for all practical purposes, often had a system of hierarchy with chieftans having more women than others - still a genetic advantage.
The FT profiled a group of modern hunter gatherers in Africa last year. They’re pretty egalitarian for just that reason: not much to hoard.
You might like The Adam and Eve Story in its Mesopotamian Context: https://goo.gl/uikvFb
Thanks, will check it out.
This sort of depends on how we’re defining soldiers, I guess, as Daniel Chieh suggests in his reply. If you mean men who occasionally raided other groups and defended against raiders, then sure. But if you mean full time warriors, then no: you need a surplus of food for that, which came with agriculture.
Before there was agriculture and a surplus of food, being a full time anything other than hunter or gather was pretty rare. Maybe there were a handful of master axe makers or something like that.
Since the SJWs are good at only one thing, causing trouble by shrieking, I suspect they won't make it in a world where you need to get along and know and do a lot of things. I think I'd be ok, except for the dentistry part of things.
That is the start of hierachary and the looting class. Hunter-gathers might attack another tribe to protect (or take) hunting/gathering territory and might well steal their women and annihilate them. In fact, that happened a lot. But there generally wasn't that much beyond women that could be stolen. Certainly nothing that could be *repeatedly* stolen to live off of.
The looting and parasite classes start with the neolithic.
Right. Even if you wanted to be a full time raider, without anyone having a surplus of food, that wouldn’t work, because you couldn’t steal enough food to eat.
Your point applies to plow agriculture, particularly of grains, or to wet rice (paddy) agriculture, but not to the simpler swidden agriculture.
Cities and plow agriculture developed contemporaneously, as you say, neither being viable without the other.
It makes for a nice, fanciful counterfactual History. When I first researched it, I contacted archeologists at two major universities. No, they calmly explained, agriculture developed before cities. Jane was wrong.
Recent excavations in Göbekli Tepe showed that Jacobs was right. To quote Wikipedia:
In hunter-gather societies the women gather and have babies. The men hunt and *fight* with other tribes (and sometimes among themselves over leadership and the women). There is a high level of violence. Savoir those words--"hunt", "fight", "violence". These aren't soy boys. (I'm perplexed where people get these weird ideas about hunter-gatherers. Do they think it's like a camping trip?--And even camping trips quickly reveal sexual-dimorphism.)
In contrast, in settled agricultural societies the dimorphism in personality tends to recede. Men handle the heavy work with the draft animals, while women do child care, housework and gardening. But the couple--and all their kids--are part of this joint family project "the farm".
My grandparents--while sterotypically male and female--were quite a bit a like in many ways, edges ground and smoothed a bit to fit their roles in farm labor.
As Steve's pointed out, the modern liberation of women (and men) from all this farm and household labor and general high prosperity and career choice isn't creating androgyny, rather guys are off being "guys" and the gals are becoming every more girly-girls.
It’s amazing isn’t it Dad (and Steve), how people can weave all sorts of verbiage into missing the bloody point.
Here downunder where we don’t have Mexicans, it is indeed apparent (as you suggest) that men are reverting into a hunter lifestyle as roaming ‘tradies’, servicing women nested in welfare enclaves with their babies. Gorillas in the mist. Bring it on.
Discover Magazine is basically a lighterweight version of SciAm; as the greater has gone, so has the lesser went. Exactly the same pattern in miniature.
The real issue here is that there’s no economic demand for good science journalism, and a great deal to be gained by pandering to lower and lower common denominators. Why should they tell people things they don’t want to hear when there’s no reward for doing so? They’d go out of business – or more probably, be replaced by someone who’d then work under the old name.
“Dalits are not hunting-gathering, they can have other sources of food”
They are the only caste that can empty latrines.
Jokes – ahh -Freud said: Jokes are closely related to an open aggression – and what you are talking about is caring – you care about those, who do not laugh – you got that entirely wrong: Because it’s fun, really, if somebody makes you laugh – give it a try.
And afterwards -back – or ahead! – to the arguments against those, who didn’t – or wouldn’t, – laugh!
( But before that: A good laugh – if sardonic, that’d be allright too, mesays).
Neither the term "Scientific", nor the term "American", have any real meaning in our modern society so I'm not surprised this has happened.
This guy really is a piece of work. He race-baits, puts words in others’ mouths and uses boilerplate SJW rhetoric in order to explicitly degrade white males.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/google-engineer-fired-for-sexist-memo-isnt-a-hero/
Sold in 1986 to Holtzbrink Publishing. Soros connections.
Wiki: ” Few Americans realize that two German Gesellschaften are gaining stranglehold on US books.” Thus, the German media influences Kaplan writes about is also tied up with book publishing as well. Holtzbrinck Publishers and Bertelsmann control most of the big name publishing houses and a sizable market share of all the books produced in the United States. Bertelsmann is a media colossus that has been described as a “state within a state.” Bertelsmann played no small role in the dramatic rise of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.”
Bertelsmann also provides Internet censorship and intimidation services for Zuckerberg's Facebook, Twitter, Google and others.
Recently in the news:
https://www.thewrap.com/fcc-sinclair-broadcasting-fine/
“Sinclair Broadcast Group is an American telecommunications company that is owned by the family of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in Hunt Valley, Maryland, the company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage; owning and/or operating a total of 193 stations across the country (233 after all currently proposed sales are approved) in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households), many of which are located in the South and Midwest. Sinclair also owns four digital multicast networks (Comet, Charge!, Stadium, and TBD) and one cable network (Tennis Channel), and owns or operates four radio stations (all based in the Pacific Northwest region).”
Oh, boy.
Hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian in that they don’t have much in the way of men domineering over other men. Most of them, however, have very strong sex roles.
https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-sexism-rampant-in-nature-1819566369
Man, that's funny.
They don’t really live for 200 years, it just feels like it.
Bedbugs mate by what is essentially aggravated rape. Mature females can withstand it. Immature females cannot, not to mention males of any age. Crafty exterminators have learned to mess with their pheromones so the horndogs kill off the rest.
I was going to pitch this script to the Weinsteins, but thought it better not to give them any more ideas.
Yeah, they do. But they all have an asterisk.
Masculine men are still pretty macho (and more masculine looking than ever) relatively feminine men are acting more feminine. Feminine women are still pretty feminine (and spend more money looking pretty than ever) while relatively masculine women are acting more masculine. If it was simply a case of both sexes becoming more feminine, personal choices would shift in the direction of female-dominated activities. However, there is no general decline in interest in male-dominated activities, and some male-dominated activities (such as body-building and extreme sports) are now more popular than they were in the past.
That is nonsensical. The modern world is far more feminine – as Pinker noted, if nothing else, consider the plummeting status of violence.
I remember when Popular Mechanics published a letter from a gun controller asking that they stop publishing articles on firearms. They responded: “No.”
It’s already a famous science fiction story: The Screw-Fly Solution, by Alice Sheldon identifying as James Tiptree.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/google-engineer-fired-for-sexist-memo-isnt-a-hero/
The ones sticking a late token lance into Damore’s career are the scariest because they do not seem to be familiar with that one quote from Man For All Seasons:
I’m going to guess being in a hunter-gatherer tribe might be sorta similar to being in an infantry platoon.
When on mission/in the field, you are all brothers and on point. Back at the ranch and off mission, you are fully willing to vigorously fight each other over women, booze, or nearly anything else out of sheer boredom/aggression or maybe just keeping skills sharp.
Isn’t it amazing how many current trends first began manifesting themselves in the early 90s?
Wiki: " Few Americans realize that two German Gesellschaften are gaining stranglehold on US books.” Thus, the German media influences Kaplan writes about is also tied up with book publishing as well. Holtzbrinck Publishers and Bertelsmann control most of the big name publishing houses and a sizable market share of all the books produced in the United States. Bertelsmann is a media colossus that has been described as a “state within a state.” Bertelsmann played no small role in the dramatic rise of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama."
Bertelsmann is now the de facto Soros/NWO entity in Germany providing policy guidance to Angela Merkel’s administration.
Bertelsmann also provides Internet censorship and intimidation services for Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Twitter, Google and others.
I hope you guys are ready for stuff to get really, really weird. There’s a tangible change to the insanity and there’s no going back.
If you look at journalism or "creative writing" or academic publications and events concerned with writing, you're looking more often than not at dutiful tuition-payers who "workshop" and "self-examine" when they should've been skinning their knees.
There is a Native American myth that as you arrive in the afterlife you are greeted by a wrinkled norn who will eat your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyes. I would feel better about j-schools if they couldn't go past the master's level and had that myth inscribed over their doors.
I run into people all the time saying, “I would love to be a writer”, but then when I ask, “What would you like to write about?”, it is often crickets or hesitant speculation, as if they had never considered than aspect of writing.
Far more people want to be writers than actually write. The ones who do want to write are actually writing as we speak rather than pining after it and their primary motivation is something other than the desire to write, writing is just the means to an end.
Steve, was the general desire to be a writer ever a big thing in your development?
What has been the prevalence of matriarchy?
“What has been the prevalence of matriarchy?”
According to my Sociology 201 textbook, nonexistent.
According to movies (AKA documentaries), most civilizations are matriarchies.
All movies are documentaries because the viewer’s enjoyment relies on convincing himself that the characters and events are real or at least plausible; otherwise, it becomes merely an exercise in critique: how good are the writing and acting, how convincing are the sets, how good are the special FX?
Fiction is dangerous because there is no such thing as fiction.
First Onion piece I ever read, absolutely hilarious. Today a lot of people would assume it was factual.
Amazing.
According to my Sociology 201 textbook, nonexistent.
According to movies (AKA documentaries), most civilizations are matriarchies.
All movies are documentaries because the viewer's enjoyment relies on convincing himself that the characters and events are real or at least plausible; otherwise, it becomes merely an exercise in critique: how good are the writing and acting, how convincing are the sets, how good are the special FX?
Fiction is dangerous because there is no such thing as fiction.
Did your Sociology text or course offer an explanation?
It’s going to be awhile before people recognize this, but 1981 and 1992 were major inflection points. Before the early 1980s we weren’t even in debt, relatively speaking.
Granted, for America, the Great Inflection was Hart-Celler, and most people don’t even know about that.
Slash and burn horticulture is an example of simple agriculture practiced by tribes, who had advanced beyond simply hunting and gathering, but still are largely nomadic.
In the book 1491, Charles Mann talks about the slash-and-burn tribes of the Amazon, which we now see as performing an ancient type of farming. He makes a convincing argument that the original residents of the Amazon were able to build large societies in one location by “farming”the forest, shaping the growth of trees that would supply food for human populations. He cites the work of an anthropologist who shows that, due to the poor soil, no large settlement in the Amazon could have depended on conventional fields, whether slash and burn or otherwise.
He makes a point in the book about the difficult task of breeding corn from teosinte, its predecessor, and how that task would challenge modern geneticists. It suggest a complex, knowledge-based society to create the grain. Could the slash and burners do that? Unlikely. So it depends on whether slash and burn people are propagating natural crops, or man-developed ones, else slash and burn is just derivative of agriculture developed elsewhere.
Every man a warrior would remind one of how they could protect fields. In slash and burn, one understanding of protection is being deep in a forest where other humans will not invade. Of course, the men would need to be hunting to get food while the crops grew and matured, while also expending energy to defend the crops.
Before there was agriculture and a surplus of food, being a full time anything other than hunter or gather was pretty rare. Maybe there were a handful of master axe makers or something like that.
Since the SJW left seems intent on ending civilization entirely, the question becomes: is it more interesting o live in a society where everyone has to do everything, with little specialization, or more interesting to live in a society where one specializes but loses touch with everything the tribe does?
Since the SJWs are good at only one thing, causing trouble by shrieking, I suspect they won’t make it in a world where you need to get along and know and do a lot of things. I think I’d be ok, except for the dentistry part of things.
Cities and plow agriculture developed contemporaneously, as you say, neither being viable without the other.
I would refer you to Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities, as she traces the growth of a place she calls New Obsidian, based on the city of Çatalhöyük In Turkey. First it’s a trading post, defended by men because it is not far from fields of obsidian glass, used to make knives and weapons. Gradually, the wild animals brought to the city for sale have he most violent ones killed first, with the more docile ones eventually bred. Meanwhile, the wild grasses brought from afar are able to cross-breed as the residents of New Obsidian plant small amounts in their sheltered places, protected by the existing social arrangement, o have a supply of grain.
It makes for a nice, fanciful counterfactual History. When I first researched it, I contacted archeologists at two major universities. No, they calmly explained, agriculture developed before cities. Jane was wrong.
Recent excavations in Göbekli Tepe showed that Jacobs was right. To quote Wikipedia:
Excuse me – you would not remember which Journal that was? I’d be interested in the article you mention.
The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that “unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth.”
This view has since achieved substantial popularity in “science studies." But our results falsify Gould's hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views.
The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton's initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.
Hunting mammoths was just sooo safe and easy.
Look at the Lascaux daubings to see exactly what sort of game ancient Europeans went after.
“the Lascaux daubings”
Not meaning to be nasty; but the paintings at Lascaux are masterpieces, not daubings. I’ve always wondered where the practice pieces are, there should be many more of them.
If you look at journalism or "creative writing" or academic publications and events concerned with writing, you're looking more often than not at dutiful tuition-payers who "workshop" and "self-examine" when they should've been skinning their knees.
There is a Native American myth that as you arrive in the afterlife you are greeted by a wrinkled norn who will eat your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyes. I would feel better about j-schools if they couldn't go past the master's level and had that myth inscribed over their doors.
I think H.L. Mencken landed a newspaper job at around age 18 and remained employed in journalism for the next 50 years. James Kilgallen I think was also a newspaperman for nearly his entire worklife. Mencken was a contemporary of Jack London and Kilgallen the next set of cohorts down.
Nobody was at Columbia with Barack Obama.
I don’t think this is the article referred to, but it’s an interesting critique of Gould:
The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias
Samuel George Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct.
The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that “unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth.”
This view has since achieved substantial popularity in “science studies.” But our results falsify Gould’s hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views.
The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton’s initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.
Thank you kindly!
You might like The Adam and Eve Story in its Mesopotamian Context: https://goo.gl/uikvFb
Just read it, Luke. Very interesting. Did you hear back?
Whatever.
In any case, anyone who would think that the hunter-gatherer life for women would have been an egalitarian idyll should either have a child or live with a woman having a child, through the two- or three-year cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing without the benefit of infant formula or modern medicine, and see if that alters their perspective. The idea that prehistory must have been a breeze for women is an idea that could only arise in a culture in which the basic mechanisms and vagaries of human reproduction have become highly medicalized and, to an increasing number of people, largely obscure.
Or prehistory as a breeze for men…
Perhaps this has always been the case, but there’s an awful lot of retconning of history going on lately, ISTM. People that appear to have never studied history/anthropology declaiming on how terrible social conditions are now, and how wonderful they once were before the current age.
As if equally savage and impoverished is the model of an egalitarian world one should aspire to…
It is only just the past few years have I begun to appreciate exactly how much the world changed after the end of the Cold War. Seems obvious now, but I guess it took a while for the pattern recognition to fire or something.
We are now in the first stages of another paradigm breaking epoch enabled largely by social media. It is tearing down barriers between people similar to what done after the end of the Cold War.
So Globalism, Act I was the open borders, free trade and the internet, about 25 years of that. Now, Globalism Act II is via social media everyone on earth is frictionlessly directly connected and can participate in direct democracy via like buttons, forwarding to friends, etc.
This is all a good thing for humanity but not for the residuals of the Dark Age (pre 1989) like nations, borders, exclusive societies, toxic masculinity, Strangelovian nightmares, and a whole host of other things.
I really do believe that human history arcs towards justice and decency. It certainly has in my lifetime and looks to be continuing the trend, if not accelerating it these days.
Let’s hope, and work to make it happen, that this time our new Belle Epoque isn’t interrupted by the guns of August. I’m optimistic about that, FWIW.
We must have read very different history books!
SA began the slide into oblivion during the Reagan admin. They pointed out glaring frauds by his policy wonks and their reward has been destruction by the Rethuglicans. The last attempt by SA was a feeble effort to keep LNG tankers out of Boston harbor. It failed, in spite of mountainous evidence, and reich wing vengance was swift and complete. Now the american science and engineering people are helping the SJW freaks devour what little is left. Most of us red-neck white trash used to admire and respect those in academia, now adays, not-so-much.
What happened in 1981 and 1992?
Horgan has a follow-up column: Do Women Want to Be Oppressed?
HT: Fenster at Uncouth Relections
The decline of Scientific American had nothing to do with Reagan Republicans. It was purely a SJW takeover. SJW’s ruin everything they get their hands on.
Scientific American is a shadow of what it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, preeminent scientists would write intriguing articles about the frontiers of physics and bioscience. The best part of the magazine were the figures and captions, which were so crystal clear that you didn’t need to read the article to learn the essential scientific points. Writing a SciAm piece used to be taken very seriously because of the opportunity to reach an incredibly broad audience of science literate citizens. Now SciAm has fallen below the now defunct Omni Magazine in authority and influence. Mostly, the articles are now written by hack reporters and second rate scientists, and editorial standards have taken a deep dive. It has considerably fewer pages than it used to, probably reflecting the diluted and sensationalized content pitched to an 8th grade reading level.
The market for this increasingly poor content will finally die with the last synapse keeping the last Boomer out of a nursing home.
But I must have missed something.
Also, in War Before Civilization, if the number of men in a tribe got too low the tribe would dissolve and the women would be distributed into the neighboring tribes who would take over the old tribe's territory. I wonder what the social status of these distributed women would be.
But don't mind me, I'm a racist, sexist, homophobe.
“I wonder what the social status of these distributed women would be.”
Probably depended on how interested the Alpha was in them.