Saffron wrote:

Interbane wrote:The misogyny of religion has lead to patriarchy in recent millennia. I would guess that before that, muscular strength of men was one more factor to weigh in on the prowess of an individual, combined with wisdom which in all fairness we can say is split evenly.l

Patriarchy seems to have come from bands of herding people in the middle east area of the world. Muscular strength doesn't really explain much about why patriarchy; more about the how. Human culture existed for tens of thousands of years in some other form than patriarchy, so it must be something other than the physical ability to dominate that caused patriarchy to develop.

Commandment Ten from Moses the Patriarch stated that women are the property of men. This teaching is at the centre of the three Abrahamic faiths. Dawkins provides great tools to analyse the adaptivity of such cultural norms. He observes it is not about any objective morality, but just whichever strategy is most fecund and long-lasting and accurate in copying. This remorseless logic from biological evolution shows that if such a misogynist strategy can produce an expansionary society then it will overwhelm other approaches which are based only on abstract values such as love and justice. Yet, in the long term, as in Dawkins' great example of hawks and doves, if the dove strategy has an underlying adaptivity then the hawk will not be evolutionarily stable on its own. We are seeing this imbalance now with patriarchal values. The Mosaic Judeo-Christian ideology is like a pure hawk, producing all sorts of unanticipated harmful consequences. As a result, we now see that equality between the sexes is correlated with societies of high wealth and development, while inequality is correlated with poverty and ignorance. On the larger scale, equality seems to be more adaptive in terms of producing a more highly evolved culture. However, the birth rate is lower in more equal societies, so the fundamentalists can outbreed the enlightened.

Oh, I'm going to kick myself for saying this, seespotrun may kick me too.

I would never kick you, Suzanne.

Beauty holds power in our society. A beautiful woman has the capability to manipulate men, and any man who says otherwise, is kidding themselves. Yes, women do doll themselves up to attract men, and the richer, the better.

I wonder about this, though. Beauty is really subjective. And I wonder if the tables were turned and it was the women with the money and the power if men would not behave in the same way. In many cultures, women have been required to be economically dependent on men. It is still that way to some extent. Women do not get paid as much as men and oftentimes do not get equal pay for equal work. But women are required to be beautiful. And in our culture it is not just any beauty. It is an impossible beauty that advertising companies create for us.

However, once the peacock has been captured, the drab hen needs to keep her appearance up to keep him. This is what I have a problem with. See, seespotrun, maybe I've redeemed myself a little. There are two many divorces because the "rich" man no longer finds his wife disireable, and he knows, there are those dolled up women waiting to fight for his attention.

I think that there are some really great guys out there who do not expect their partner to be any less human than they are. And not every man is rich.

The misogyny of religion has lead to patriarchy in recent millennia.

I disagree, Interbane. I think that religion has been used to maintain power structures. And religion reflects cultural values as well.

Patriarchy seems to have come from bands of herding people in the middle east area of the world. Muscular strength doesn't really explain much about why patriarchy; more about the how. Human culture existed for tens of thousands of years in some other form than patriarchy, so it must be something other than the physical ability to dominate that caused patriarchy to develop.

I agree. And it is more than just physical strength that maintains patriarchy. Although Gloria Steinem did say that the heart of patriarchy is violence. Economics, religion, philosophy, science, entertainment have all been used to maintain the power structure of patriarchy.

Robert Tulip wrote:. He observes it is not about any objective morality, but just whichever strategy is most fecund and long-lasting and accurate in copying. This remorseless logic from biological evolution shows that if such a misogynist strategy can produce an expansionary society then it will overwhelm other approaches which are based only on abstract values such as love and justice.

I think one problem with this reasoning, Robert, is that we can't determine that misogyny accounted for 'expansionary' success. It could be one of many factors in that success, or--who knows--a factor irrelevant to it. I also can't possibly see that accuracy and fecundity in copying is a good way to account for the history of patriarchy. Since much of the world has headed away from such domination, would you now say the reason is a drop in the fecundity and accuracy of the 'memes' that compose the strategy of patriarchy? Would you be better off here, perhaps, with Hegel's idea of the world-spirit evolving, in this case evolving to eclipse the belief that women should be subjugated to men? That would allow values and human reason to enter the equation, which seems proper.

I'm sorry if I keep throwing a wet blanket on your idea to apply biological determinism to human society, because of course you could be right. I simply feel a need to express my strong certainty that changes in human society cannot be explained by natural laws that we know of. I don't expect my certainty to have any weight in itself, though (looking back to Robert Burton).

Suzanne wrote:Oh, I'm going to kick myself for saying this, seespotrun may kick me too, but I have to agree. Beauty holds power in our society. A beautiful woman has the capability to manipulate men, and any man who says otherwise, is kidding themselves. Yes, women do doll themselves up to attract men, and the richer, the better.

However, once the peacock has been captured, the drab hen needs to keep her appearance up to keep him. This is what I have a problem with. See, seespotrun, maybe I've redeemed myself a little. There are two many divorces because the "rich" man no longer finds his wife disireable, and he knows, there are those dolled up women waiting to fight for his attention.

True, I think, on both points. It's one of the cruelties of life that women have to face this crisis of losing the attractiveness they had in the eyes of us shallow, visually-dominated men. Men don't have the same pressure brought on by aging; they don't have as much to 'lose.' What is the ratio of women's plastic surgeries to men's? I don't know precisely, but the lopsidedness toward women shows how clearly the message comes across to women that they're no longer 'good' enough.

but just whichever strategy is most fecund and long-lasting and accurate in copying.

I also can't possibly see that accuracy and fecundity in copying is a good way to account for the history of patriarchy. Since much of the world has headed away from such domination, would you now say the reason is a drop in the fecundity and accuracy of the 'memes' that compose the strategy of patriarchy?

I think that Robert's idea of "most fecund and long-lasting" is correct though. It seems like Dawkins is concerned with, not just that culture gets transmitted, but why. He gives the example of Auld Lang Syne. He talks about how people have held on to "for the sake of auld lang syne." This is not how it was written, however. It was written
"for auld lang syne". Dawkins asks what the "survival value" of this mistake was. Ultimately, this leads to asking what is the "survival value" of anything in our culture. Why do we hold on to certain things and not others? Dawkins asks the question about God, but we can also understand all of the ideas and values that make up patriarchy by asking that same question. Why do we hold onto certain values?

It's one of the cruelties of life that women have to face this crisis of losing the attractiveness they had in the eyes of us shallow, visually-dominated men.

Actually, this may not be entirely true. There were some scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine who found that women actually respond very quickly to erotic images. See the article:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/45169.php

seespotrun2008 wrote: I think that Robert's idea of "most fecund and long-lasting" is correct though. It seems like Dawkins is concerned with, not just that culture gets transmitted, but why. He gives the example of Auld Lang Syne. He talks about how people have held on to "for the sake of auld lang syne." This is not how it was written, however. It was written
"for auld lang syne". Dawkins asks what the "survival value" of this mistake was. Ultimately, this leads to asking what is the "survival value" of anything in our culture. Why do we hold on to certain things and not others? Dawkins asks the question about God, but we can also understand all of the ideas and values that make up patriarchy by asking that same question. Why do we hold onto certain values?

The 'why' is just what I find most lacking in this theory of memes. For me, memes beggar the question entirely. If an idea spreads, it must be because it is 'memetically' powerful, it is said. But why people have ended up expressing such ideas in the first place is the interesting and important part, and to explain this by simple 'spread' as with a virus is to me totally inadequate.

By the way, I don't know what to make of Dawkins example of 'Auld Lang Syne'. It must be a British phenomenon to add the words 'for the sake of' to the Robt. Burns song. I don't do this, and the two people I've asked don't either. So the practice spread in Britain but not, I'm guessing, in America. What is the reason? I have no idea, really, but why do regional and national differences of any kind exist? To say that it's because of memes does not, again, seem offer much real information.

DWill wrote: It's one of the cruelties of life that women have to face this crisis of losing the attractiveness they had in the eyes of us shallow, visually-dominated men.

seespotrun wrote:Actually, this may not be entirely true. There were some scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine who found that women actually respond very quickly to erotic images.

Well, thanks for putting in a good word (sort of) for my gender!

The 'why' is just what I find most lacking in this theory of memes. For me, memes beggar the question entirely. If an idea spreads, it must be because it is 'memetically' powerful, it is said. But why people have ended up expressing such ideas in the first place is the interesting and important part, and to explain this by simple 'spread' as with a virus is to me totally inadequate.

I don't think that Dawkins thinks that it is simple either. Ideas, which he thinks of as memes, move from brain to brain but that does not mean everything sticks. I am not really sure where philosophy begins and science ends with memes though. I do not really have a problem with that, though. I think the idea of memes is useful for dissecting different cultural norms and trying to understand where they come from. It may be attractive to me, though, because it seems very feminist so I can relate to it. In the 30th anniversary edition that I have Dawkin’s has a footnote that a fellow scientist was trying to insult his theory by calling it philosophical. I do not totally understand why that is an insult.

Well, thanks for putting in a good word (sort of) for my gender!

Sure. But more than just putting in a good word for men, it calls into question a value we cling to in our society. What would it do to the idea that women have to be beautiful if all human beings were stimulated visually by erotic imagery? Wow, women may be able to focus on something besides being beautiful!