michael_browne

While it's true that procuring material/financial support from a man isn't the necessity it used to be for women, I would suggest they are still hard-wired, to an extent, as well as socially conditioned to be attracted to men with available resources (also consider the increasingly popular belief that an acceptable lifestyle requires two incomes.) Keep in mind, too, that emotional support is likely considered by women more important than it used to be. They are less likely today to be satisfied with a man who just goes to work everyday and is then distant and uninvolved in domestic life. This is another reason for women to be selective of their mate for what he can provide (rather than just who he is,) despite their opportunity to be financially self-sufficient.

Virtually any woman (regardless of all but the most extreme physical/personality/etc. deficiencies) can find numerous mates at any time, she just has to wander into the nearest nightclub, bar, mall, etc. Of course, most of these men aren't going to meet her standards in one way or another but, the point is, on a biological level reproduction is not a challenge for women...sperm is not a scarce resource. This is true both historically (dating back to caveman days) and in present times.

The difficulty is that women usually aren't just looking to reproduce, they're looking for someone to support them and their potential children, thus the high level of selectivity.

The unstated (but unavoidable) conclusion of the article is that we are all now non-gendered, generic "individuals." Despite his best efforts at suggesting otherwise, what he's describing is not a new definition of masculinity, but the end of it. By definition, if a word or idea can mean anything at all then it really means nothing.

I'm surprised this article is getting as positive feedback as it is. The author is clearly guilty of a pretty significant straw-man argument, presenting evolutionary biology in very simplified, extreme terms, casting it as essentially hardline biological determinism.

The author is clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion that violent and socially unacceptable actions may be very normal parts of human behavior (given the right environmental conditions) and seems very eager to validate any suggestion that we are "blank slates."

The idea that there is no such thing as human nature is patently ridiculous. Is there no such thing as dog, or elephant, or orangutan nature? If we accept that at least one important aspect of what a human being is is an evolutionarily-developed biological organism, than how can this also not apply to us? At the same time, the idea that we are hopelessly determined to express our instincts and innate drives in any one particular way is also surely not valid.

Are evo-psych researchers suggesting that the existence of genetic tendencies makes their (extreme) expression (via rape, murder, infanticide, etc.) acceptable? Clearly not, though that is what the author of the article is unavoidably hinting at with lines like "[l]et's not speculate on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around..."

Her tone throughout the piece communicates the opinion that evol-psych proponents are just looking for excuses for bad behavior, something which I really don’t think is true. Understanding why bad behaviors are so common is not the same things as justifying them and, actually, seems like a more useful step towards making society better than arguing that they’re just the result of "bad" individuals or something.

Evolutionary biology is effective and meaningful when it is used to explain and account for the particular expression of some genetic tendency (in the form of an observed behavior.) It doesn’t make sense to argue that abuse of stepchildren, for instance, is an acceptable or inevitable thing in contemporary society for several reasons, including the fact that this particular expression of instinct is one we have deemed undesirable for moral/ethical reasons. The underlying idea, that we are genetically predisposed to care for our own offspring ahead of the offspring of others, though, seems a useful observation. Overall, theories like evo-psych are ways of understanding why things occur as they do, not a means of prescribing how they should or must be.

That being said, political ideologies like mainstream feminism and much of contemporary liberalism intentionally strive to deny the existence of human nature or instinct because it doesn’t fit into their worldviews, more so than because it really appears not to be present, I suspect. They start with an abstract idea of how things "should" be and work backwards from there, rather than trying to understand why we are the way we are and then working forward from that. There seems to me a significant weakness and danger in drawing a blind spot upon our underlying motivations and darker, biological imperatives.

That's actually a good question. I haven't been on facebook much in a while but last night I decided to go and investigate the situation. I was actually pretty impressed by how things have changed and I think I'll be logging on more often.

As for the recent redesign, they had to do something to get everyone's profile organized, readable, and consistent again (while still giving people the ability to customize things and add apps) and they actually did a really fine job. It may be a little confusing and disorienting at first when you're expecting everything to be on a single page, but once you realize your profile is now made up of several different distinct pages (wall, info, etc.) it makes perfect sense and works smoothly.

Yeah, I still liked using it best pre-apps. It was a fast, legible, efficient, all-around pleasant to use myspace alternative. Between the endless invites, long, messy pages, pointless add-ons, and now the poorly received redesign it does feel like a long time since they've actually made any good changes.

This is so silly, there are A LOT of people with unusual or fake-sounding names. A funny one I remember from personal experience...I used to work in a sporting goods store and one day when I was ringing up customers a man handed me his credit card to pay and the name on the card caught my eye, in raised gold letters: "MR. WANG DONG." ;p

First of all, I think those who brought up the question of why THIS issue when there are other, more life-and-death serious problems in the world (such as AIDS orphans in Africa) are missing the point. Sergey didn’t decide to come out in opposition to prop 8 because he was just looking for some social cause to throw Google behind or because he thought it was necessarily the most pressing or deserving issue, but because it is something that will directly affect the company and the employees he is in charge of and responsible for. As he states, it "is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8." Clearly, this decision was made not because Sergey believes that banning same-sex marriage is wrong in the larger moral sense (though obviously he does) but instead because of the comparatively specific, micro concern of how it well effect the people who work at his company.

While Google surely puts more thought into how its practices affect society than the average giant corporation, it is hardly a charity and I don’t think this statement should be any indication that it plans on becoming one. "Don't be evil" is still a long way on the altruism scale from becoming a humanitarian NGO.

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Is it, though, appropriate for a head of a public company to officially align said company on a piece of controversial (and not strictly relevant to the business) legislation? Well, perhaps not. In this situation however, I think it was an admirable and fitting action. It reinforces Google’s "not business as usual" stance and commitment to social awareness and doing good. Of course, though, there will be many who see this as the opposite of "doing good."

The values of tolerance, diversity, and meritocratic inclusion are, though, so fundamental to the company (and, when at its best, the Valley and the tech industry in general) that this seems like a natural and reasonable move. Though I agree there is certainly room for argument, particularly over specifics, here, many will surely see opposition to Prop. 8 as reflective of the above values. I took Sergey’s blog post as more a statement of "live and let live" and respect for all than as a focused and specific endorsement of gay marriage.

I don't work at Google but I do live in the Bay Area and I'm confident that the employee culture at the company is such that those with strong feelings against gay rights are used to keeping their position largely to themselves. In other words, conservative Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Sikh/etc. individuals who work there have, I’m sure, resigned to keep their religious convictions a personal matter in order to effectively and civilly participate in a diverse environment. Consequently, I would be surprised if this pronouncement causes much of a stir even from pro-Prop. 8 Googlers.