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Steve Stewart-Williams
149 quotes
“The evolutionary explanation for the peacock’s tail has an interesting implication, namely that the mind of one sex can help shape the body of the other.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does female orgasm have an evolutionary function? Ironically, scientists have yet to come to a satisfying conclusion about this matter.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People who object to the by-product hypothesis [for female orgasm] are doing something strange: They're saying that it's hugely important to them that female orgasm turns out to be an adaptation, like vomiting, cobra venom, and the scorpion's stinger, rather than a "mere" cultural invention, like science, medicine, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus, a curious fact about natural selection is that, even though it’s a completely mindless process – a process without foresight or understanding – it has given rise to creatures that have minds, that have foresight, and that even have some basic understanding of the universe of which they’re a part.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Psychology has made a lot less progress than it could have because too many psychologists know too little about other animals.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Nurture Only theory asks us to believe not only that selection eliminated the [sex] differences for reasons unknown, but that learning and culture then coincidentally reproduced exactly the same differences in every culture on record. This is not a compelling thesis.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why would natural selection give men the physical equipment needed for violence but not the psychological machinery to operate it? This would make about as much sense as giving us teeth and a digestive system, but not a desire to eat.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By clamping down on male aggression, culture may make the sex difference in aggression smaller than it would otherwise have been.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As far as we know, no woman in the history of the species has ever given birth and thought: “Wait a minute! How do I know that this baby is mine and not some other woman’s?” In contrast, if a baby comes out of the body of a woman you slept with nine months ago, that’s not nearly as reliable a clue. As an old saying has it, maternity is a matter of fact, paternity a matter of opinion.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Contrary to stubborn anthropological myth, people everywhere fall in love... the idea that romantic love is an invention of Western culture is itself an invention of Western culture.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A well-designed parental male will tend to end up investing in his own offspring, rather than the offspring of his good-looking next- door neighbor. And one way to help ensure that this happens is to be easily moved to jealousy.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jane Goodall once wrote about a female chimpanzee who mated with more than fifty males in a single day. This is uncommon among human beings, even in LA.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the irritating reality of the human condition: Whatever we do, we’re left with unfulfilled desires. Human beings are chronically conflicted animals. And that’s because that’s what selection made us.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What accounts for psychologists’ kin-blindness – a blindness so profound it would lead to the vaporization of lazy aliens? Part of the answer is that many psychologists, as I’ve already mentioned, have an empty space in their brains where their knowledge of evolution should be. They know little about other animals and little about the nature of the evolutionary process. This impairs their understanding of their own species.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a result of cumulative culture, we have ideas in our heads that are orders of magnitude smarter than we are.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humans are chimpanzees reciting Shakespeare – dunces with the technology of geniuses.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Albert Schweitzer once observed that “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” This was clearly not meant as a compliment. People quote Schweitzer’s statement to thumb their noses at the way we copy each other – which, when you think about it, is rather ironic.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s often a good idea to adopt the practices and beliefs of the people around you. For one thing, the people around you aren’t dead. If you do what they do – eat what they eat; avoid the dark alleys they avoid – you might continue not being dead as well.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“During the heyday of European colonialism, a number of indigenous groups came to the view that, if they had faith, the Europeans’ bullets couldn’t harm them. Needless to say, this meme had disastrous consequences. One group infected with the meme – the Mahdists of Sudan – lost 11,000 men in a single battle to the bullets of Kitchener’s army. This was bad for them obviously, but it was also bad for the meme. In effect, the meme removed itself from the meme pool through its effects on its hosts’ behavior.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rather than the human brain evolving for God, God evolved for the human brain.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As memetic evolution picked up steam, humans were transformed. No longer were we devices designed solely to pass on our genes. Suddenly, we became hybrid creatures, torn between passing on our genes and passing on our memes. This vision of our species helps to explain much of what most puzzled the alien scientist: our moral systems, our religions, our art and music and science. Cultural evolution is the key to unravelling the deepest mysteries of the human animal.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether a trait is natural or unnatural is irrelevant to the question of whether it’s good. Moral worth should be judged not in terms of the naturalness of a trait, but rather in terms of how that trait impacts the wellbeing of everyone affected by it. Thus, violence is natural but bad, medicine unnatural but good.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Members of both sexes can be found at every point on the things vs. people continuum; however, more men than women exhibit a stronger interest in things, whereas more women than men exhibit a stronger interest in people... To get an intuitive sense of the magnitude of the difference, if one were to pick pairs of people at random, one man and one woman, the man would be more things-oriented than the woman around 75% of the time.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f we make the reasonable ballpark assumption that people working in a given field tend to come from the 25% of people most interested in that field, sex differences in occupational interests would account for the entirety of the engineering gender gap and much of the gap in science and mathematics.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sex differences in occupational preferences and priorities suggest one possible reason that more men than women go into maths-intensive STEM fields. The reason, put simply, is that more men than women want to go into these fields.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he same sex differences in occupational preferences have been found in every society where psychologists have looked for them. In one large study (N ≈ 200,000), Lippa found the differences in 53 out of 53 nations: a level of cross-cultural unanimity almost unheard of within psychology.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]mong the minority of people who possess exceptional mathematical abilities, the women are more likely to possess exceptional language abilities as well. This means that mathematically gifted women have more vocational options than their male counterparts, and consequently that fewer mathematically gifted women end up pursuing a STEM career. To the extent that this explains the gender gap in maths-intensive fields, the gap results not from mathematically gifted women having fewer options, but rather from them having more.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he evidence for discrimination in STEM is considerably more mixed than is often assumed. Certainly, many studies have found evidence of anti-female discrimination in STEM. At the same time, however, many other studies have failed to find such discrimination, or have found discrimination in favour of women.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Real-world data going back to the 1980s suggest that, although fewer women apply for jobs in fields such as maths, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, those who do apply are no less likely to be interviewed and no less likely to be offered the job. On the contrary, they are generally more likely to be.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the quest to promote women in STEM, academics and activists may sometimes inadvertently overstate the ubiquity of bias and discrimination against women in this sector. An unintended consequence may be to scare away some women who would otherwise be interested in a STEM career... If women are given the impression that the STEM workplace is a hotbed of sexism and an unwelcome place for women, many might quite understandably decide to look for other fields in which to make their mark.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Several studies have concluded that tests of implicit bias (in particular, the Implicit Association Test or IAT) have poor test-retest reliability, and fail to predict discriminatory behaviour. Furthermore, though interventions may change people’s implicit biases to some degree – or do so, at least, in the short-term – the effects of such changes on behaviour are trivially small or non-existent, even in the immediate wake of the intervention.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[O]ne of the main moral foundations of the women’s liberation movement – and indeed of all liberation movements – is the idea that individuals should be treated fairly and equally, and that unjust barriers should be removed. A policy that advantages members of one demographic group over those of another necessarily abandons those principles. In doing so, it risks leaving the women’s movement without one of its main moral foundations.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why should any individual woman today be advantaged over any individual man just because other men were advantaged over other women in the past? Reversing historical injustices does not erase them; it merely adds to the total number of injustices in the world. The question we face today, therefore, is this: Is the appropriate response to injustice to try to eliminate it, or to turn it on its head?”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t is not only men who may be harmed by preferences and quotas. In a number of ways, women could be harmed as well. To begin with, such policies could cast a shadow of doubt over women’s genuine accomplishments.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most women do not want a career in STEM and nor do most men. Why should the small fraction of women who do want such a career be the same size as the small fraction of men? To put it another way, as long as everyone has the opportunity to pursue a STEM career, and as long as the selection process is fair, why would it be important to get as many women as men into jobs that fewer women want?”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[P]olicies that artificially engineer gender parity – financial incentives and quotas, for instance – could potentially lower aggregate happiness. To the extent that these policies work, they necessarily mean that some people will be funnelled into occupations that are less in line with their tastes and talents.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why should we put a statistical, collective goal – i.e., more equal sex ratios in STEM – above the happiness and autonomy of the flesh-and-blood individuals who constitute those collectives? Why should policy makers’ preference for gender parity take precedence over individual men and women’s preferences regarding their own careers and lives?”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he strong emphasis on increasing the numbers of women in male-dominated fields is arguably somewhat sexist. As Susan Pinker argues, it tacitly assumes that women do not know what they want, or that they want the wrong things and thus that wiser third-parties need to “fix” their existing preferences. It also tacitly assumes that the areas where men dominate are superior.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although men and women are roughly equally represented in STEM overall, in certain fields, the sex ratios are somewhat unbalanced. More women than men are found in health-related fields, for instance, whereas more men than women are found in fields such as computer science, engineering, and physics.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t is widely accepted these days that people should be treated fairly and respectfully regardless of whether they buck the trend for their sex, and no ethical theory we’re familiar with implies that this is only the case if the trend in question is 100% environmental in origin.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The evidence for bias in STEM is mixed: Although some studies find bias against women, others find none or bias in women’s favour... The mixed findings suggest that narrow-sense anti-female bias is less ubiquitous than sometimes assumed – or that different people have different biases, and these sometimes favour males but sometimes favour females.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In our species, both sexes are choosy about their long-term mates, and both compete among themselves for the best mates on offer. For that reason, both sexes have their equivalents of the peacock’s tail and the deer’s antlers. Indeed, when it comes to physical attractiveness, females in our species have the larger “peacock’s tail”: a reversal of the usual pattern in nature. It’s all very weird.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In our primary approach to making babies, humans are more like the average bird than the average mammal. Again: all very weird.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If variation and overlap imply that sex differences in brain, mind, and behaviour aren’t really real or important, they equally imply that sex differences in earnings aren’t really real or important – and the same for sex differences in power, privilege, and many other areas central to the activist worldview. The inconsistency in the treatment of the gaps has a political explanation, not a scientific one: The overlap argument is levelled selectively against differences the levellers want to minimize.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our genes push us in certain directions, but our genes aren’t the only things shaping us, and thus we can often push right back.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live in an age where, quite rightly, we encourage people to accept and celebrate differences and diversity, and yet we get outraged whenever anyone points any out. Not exactly tolerance of diversity!”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no average sex differences in IQ, for instance (much to the surprise and disappointment of both sexes).”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even though the risks are real, the sexes do differ on average, and we can’t just lie about that. What we should do instead is tell the truth carefully.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unless sex differences are products of discrimination or cause demonstrable harm, progressives have no more right to eliminate them than traditionalists have to enlarge them.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some differences may never be completely eradicated – not, at any rate, without draconian interventions that limit people’s freedom and potentially make them miserable. Such interventions may be modern-day equivalents of earlier efforts to force gay people to be straight or left-handers to use their right hands: a progressive form of conversion therapy.”
Steve Stewart-Williams (born 1971) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source