Saturday, December 30, 2017

Evan Marc Katz Dating Coach pushing pseudo-science again

There's nothing "dating coach" Evan Marc Katz loves so much as to tell women they are different from men,  which inevitably means, in the usual custom of patriarchy, that they should have lower expectations than men in life because that's the way we've all evolved.

As is always the case with extreme pop evo-psychos, nurture - meaning not just socialization but the history and economics that shapes our current world -  is completely left out of the equation. The evolutionary psychologists who dabble in racism have the same approach: African Americans get lower SAT scores, therefore African Americans are intellectually inferior because evolution. That is the basis for all evolutionary psychology/socio-biology thought from Charles Murray's The Bell Curve to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate - all differences are automatically assumed to be the result of "nature."

The worst of these is David Buss, with whom Katz's latest evo-psycho hero David P. Schmitt works

David Buss represents the ultimate in the knee-jerk response of evo-psychos to any cultural phenomenon and he was rightly exposed by David Buller (I'm sure evo psychos could come up with an evolutionary explanation for why there are so many Davids involved in evo psycho discussions, they are just that ridiculous.)

I posted Buller's evisceration of Buss on this blog before but it is worth repeating. In his Adapting Minds - Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature Buller writes:
...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").
But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).
The desire to attribute ALL human phenomenon to nature is so reflexive for evo psychos that even virtual slavery is ignored in order to claim women's sexual choices align with evo psycho theories. 

But of course that's an old sociobiology strategy. American slaves were declared to be naturally suited to slavery. How convenient. And how convenient for patriarchy enthusiasts like David Buss, David Schmitt and Evan Marc Katz that untestable just-so eve psycho theories "prove" that women are "naturally" more agreeable, more complaint, more social and domestic, as shown in the idiotic chart Katz posted on his blog.

Although Evan Marc Katz claims to be working for women, you can see who really loves him in the responses to his latest "women are inferior" post - men who support traditional gender roles.




Well I'm done writing about Evan Marc Katz. Like followers of Donald Trump, Katz's followers are idiots working against their own fundamental interests and there's no reasoning with them. If it wasn't Katz there would be some other asshole telling women to stop trying to do "men's" things like choosing mates on the basis of youth and beauty and competing for good jobs and being non-compliant. 

Evan Marc Katz is just another clown cashing in on the waning days of extreme patriarchy.