Discussion Group

"I don't think that word means what you think it means"
In the recent discussion about evolution, creationism, and Marilyn vos Savant, I made the not-original statement that people who are very smart and know a lot about one thing, tend to spout off about any old thing.

A very smart person who does so is Dave Winer. He owns Userland, which created Frontier, over which runs Conversant, over which runs Voices of Unreason. In case you were wondering why Dave matters to me.

Scripting News, his weblog, is also very widely read and widely quoted. And discussed. The latest malestrom is his comments about women, conferences, and evolution. Go read them, but in essence they are "men's evolutionary path drives them to be programmers where women's evolutionary path does not." Meg Hourihan, who co-created the immensely popular Blogger weblogging tool took him to task for overgeneralizing, and Dave continues by accusing Meg (and other female critics) of being typical females and just attacking him because he's a man.

Sigh.

I generally ignore online squabbles, even among important people, because I find them tedious. It's one reason I left nitcentral's Religious Musings--I've got better things to do with my time. But I do have something to say this time, because his comments point to what I consider a common fallacy among both the informed and the uniformed, when it comes to throwing the word "evolution" around. Dave's comments boil down, in my mind, to the argument "since that's what I see men or women doing, that's what they evolved to be like." It's bogus logic, because the single thing that separates humanity from other creatures the most is the shaping role of culture in human development. We're the only species on the planet that has a culture. The role of culture as a determinent of personality is something that makes it difficult, almost impossible, for anyone to say "we evolved to act like X." All we can say is "in almost all cultures, I see men doing X, which I associate with artistry." But evolution applies to our genes and we don't know, and won't know for a very long time, how much of our culture is derived from our genetic coding. We don't know.

And until we do, saying "we evolved to do X", where X is something that is an aspect of our culture, is just blowing air.

Note that there is an exception to this that I am comfortable with: if X is associated with those primates most closely related to us, and also to us, then X is probably a product of evolution. And example would be the human need to be social; it is probably a byproduct of evolution, as it appears in those primates most related to us.

But artistry? Computer programming? Kindness? Plumbing? War? None are present in those primates closest to us. And speculating that we are evolved in some way related to those topics is speculation. Whether you are a very smart owner of a software company, a science fiction writer with his own website, or the head of the social science department of a major university.

You're just blowing air.