If you could link the original paper, that would be fantastic; if it was linked earlier, I missed it. All I’ve seen so far is descriptions of the paper from its supporters and its enemies which feels a little like the blind men describing an elephant.
The rate for modern males in America is 60% and the genetic evidence I linked above suggested that the rate has always been much higher for female than male humans.
That said, this study showed that around 45% of the male chimps in a group never sired young while 65% did, which is higher than I would have guessed given the way dominant chimps monopolize mating. In fact, that was higher than the study’s model predicted, too; they explain this through some strategies sub dominant males use to mate: sneaking copulations at leas desirable times, mating with females who are related to the dominant males; and younger males winning what the authors call “sperm competition” over older and more physically powerful males.
On the OTHER hand, the majority of the sub dominant chimps had only one offspring, while the dominant ones had a bunch. That could explain the gap between the genetic number for early humans and the observed numbers in these chimp groups - if half the males don’t have offspring, and many of the males who do have offspring only have a single one, there’s a decent chance that even if you reproduce once you don’t truly enter the gene pool.
Both. Read what @Spice_Weasel posted.
Im pretty sure it was directly linked above. And a few of the criticisms of it link it. If i have time later today I’ll see if i can find one of those and link it directly. But it’s not too hard to find.
For anyone else trying to find the link to the original paper, I don’t think it was ever specifically linked, but the above quote from an article criticizing the paper contains a hyperlink to an archived version of the paper.
Nature is a poor planner, in so very many ways.
The important figure is not the fraction of men who reproduced, but the fraction of offspring each fathered in the next generation, and whether the traits that led to higher or lower reproductive success are heritable. See 8% of men in the former Mongol Empire sharing Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome.
Obviously it’s not going to be a single gene, but I don’t see why you find this idea unreasonable. Organisms have to follow a developmental plan in a variety of subtly (or greatly) different environments, and hopefully arrive at the same end result. Rather than a ‘variability’ gene, there are more likely genes to compensate for environmental variations and reduce their effect on development, which could be turned up or down in response to sex-specific signals.
That’s higher than I would have guessed, too. Interesting.
Yes.
I gather that it was revised many times in response to all the suggestions/criticism, and for the changes in journal, so whatever is linked may not be the same as the version(s) the various criticisms were based on.
Glurge and mathy details aside, the core idea is:
Suppose there are two sexes, and one is less likely to reproduce than the other. And suppose likeliness to have offspring is a heritable trait that can be quantified as 1, 2, 3, or 4, with 4 bring the most likely to have offering.
If the less likely sex (let’s call them males) has two sub populations A and B, where the distribution of the trait in A is
50% 2, 50% 3
And the distribution in B is
25% 1, 25% 2, 25% 3, 25% 4
Then subpopulation B will outcompete subpopulation A.
I don’t believe it explicitly states (i did not read the whole paper carefully) but it assumes that the next generation of B will have that same even split.
Without ever explaining why the next generation of B is going to have the same distribution, rather than being heavily weighted towards 3 and 4.
This is, to say the least, biologically implausible. GIGO, who cares what this mathematical model predicts? And honestly, the math part is something a decent high school student who has studied precalculus could do.
Ok, I read through the paper. I didn’t go through it in super deep detail or check the math myself or anything like that, I just read through it to see what claims were actually being made.
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where did you think the paper claims that there is a gene responsible for variability? I didn’t see that at all. What I did see is the claim that variability is a trait that can be selected for. This can be true whether there is a single gene driving variability or a whole complex of genes.
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I wanted to see whether the paper makes any claims or prescriptive proposals for how we should act. As I said above, if the paper said something like, “Because men and women evolved this way, we should change society in X, Y, or Z ways” I would very likely agree with your criticism of such prescriptions. But I didn’t see any of that in the linked version of the paper; the closest was this, where they’re raising factors that the study doesn’t consider that might be relevant:
Cultural factors. There are also many cultural aspects of research on the variability hypothesis suggested by empirical evidence of greater male variability in humans and by the selectivity-variability theory above. These include the effects of monogamy, education, religion, social status, etc. on differences in selectivity and variability between the sexes, and the rate at which the disparity in variability between the sexes is disappearing, as predicted by this theory and observed in empirical studies.
Unless I’m greatly misreading this, they’re saying that due to societal factors like monogamy that impact how humans select mates, the selective pressure on variability should be decreasing in modern times, and this may impact future evolution. In other words - they’re agreeing with the quote about how it’s ludicrous to think that >50% of men can now easily and reliably find mates, and they agree that this would impact the results of their study of it was looking at how humans continue to evolve in the future.
What do you mean? The entire purpose of models is to say “if things worked this way, we would see X” and then once you measure things and find Y you say “huh, what might be driving these differences?”. For example, in the chimp study linked above, they came up with a model for how dominant males protect mating rights within the group; they ran paternity tests on a bunch of baby chimps and found that dominant males were the fathers less often than expected; so they came up with explanations and refinements of the model (young males who also mate are more likely to successfully impregnate their mate, mating with individuals related to the dominant males, and mating in secret).
Likewise, this model predicts stuff about the distribution of higher variability individuals, and we can study how close or far off those predictions are to reality in order to tweak the model and arrive at a more fitting model for reality.
Again, I’m not saying this model is absolutely correct in every way or anything. But I also don’t see anything about the paper that makes it so terribly wrong or offensive that it should never have been published.
Do you? If so, can you quote that part of the original paper?
Did you read the hypotheses?
There is a known source of male variability, which is that they have two single chromosomes (X and Y) so they are more likely to exhibit recessive traits. And this is known to be a major cause of the higher risk of major birth defects in mammalian males. So, i guess there is a heritable trait associated with variability.
But the hypotheses in the article are, let us say, biologically implausible.
I don’t know anything about math or genetics, but some of the comments to the critique were saying that the ratio of males to females used to be heavily skewed toward females. I had no idea! Is this accounted for in the argument?
The default view of conservatives tends to be that inequality of outcome is natural and desirable. Because people are not born with the same talents and abilities, and because either they simply believe people deserve to keep what they produce, or that rewarding people for working hard, and developing and using their talents, benefits everyone indirectly.
Affirmative action and other efforts to increase diversity have existed for a long time, but the last decade, and especially the last 5 years, has seen a dramatic increase in focus on this area, a major stepping up of such efforts, and a switch from emphasising equality of opportunity - something conservatives are generally on board with - to basing targets on equality of outcome (equity) - something they mostly are not.
The justification for this is that all such disparities must be due to bias of some kind, whether ordinary prejudice, or systemic and baked into society and culture. Yet this is far from being an established fact, and theories like GMV can provide alternative explanations for some of those disparities. Thus the controversy over something that would otherwise be obscure (and largely ignored).
Would you say that this is the hypothesis, or were you thinking of something else?
Ok, but that’s not one gene, is it? There are tons and tons of genes on the X and Y chromosomes.
Unless I’m really misreading the article, it isn’t presenting a hypothesis in the sense of “We think this is how the world works and will now run some tests to prove or disprove it”. The paper is saying, “There’s a bunch of observations out there, and a theory explaining them; we created two mathematical models to see whether populations would evolve along the lines we actually observe based on our assumptions”.
The genetic data doesn’t say that there used to be way more female than male humans at any given time; afaik the ratio was always close to 50/50.
What the genetic data says is that more of the women who were alive successfully passed their genes on to the population that now includes us.
Thanks for clarifying.
I certainly wouldn’t use the findings of this study or ones like it to make the point that we don’t need to fight gender disparities. That seems like a huge leap. It might address the gender ratio in super extreme areas like Nobel prizes, but I frankly doubt that this outweighs systemic and cultural barriers; however, even if it did, it definitely wouldn’t address disparities in other parts of life, like the pay gap or being the head of a company.
Like I said, I’m right there with you in pushing back against unsound interpretations of the data. But if you say “This data could be used by someone to justify an action I disagree with, therefore I will pretend that the data is inherently wrong and flawed” then you’ve lost me.
The next generation would presumably have a higher mean for whatever trait this is, and a lower variance, but it’s still going to have variance around this new mean, and variance is still going to be higher for subpopulation B.
Also, you’ve got to remember that males with value 4 in the trait don’t have a ‘4 allele’, they would have a ‘3 allele’ plus the ‘high variance gene’ and have got lucky that it raised the expression of that trait to 4, rather than lowering it to 2.
This is really a bad way to describe how it would work. Did they not use normal distributions for the traits, in the paper?
I don’t think this particular theory is of much significance in explaining disparities, except, as you say, at the extremes of achievement. However, parts of our society have been going full steam ahead demanding changes, setting targets, and increasing existing diversity schemes and creating new ones, without offering any evidence themselves that (for example) men and women would be equally represented at every level of every profession in the absence of discrimination and/or social conditioning. Why is the requirement for proof so one sided?
And worse than that, some of the people pushing for these changes try to shut down discussion of alternative explanations, via cancel culture.
My personal view is that (lack of) interest has more to do with female under-representation in mathematics than ability (you should have seen people’s reaction when I told them I was studying maths and physics as a student!) I don’t think it’s reasonable or desirable to try to make every profession have a 50-50 split, and I think the people who do believe this ought to be expected to provide evidence for their beliefs, not the reverse.
I’ve never heard anyone claim that disparities in outcome are entirely because of prejudice, but certainly gender discrimination exists and is a real problem, which we know because women have been saying that it exists and is a real problem, and we have data supporting this, so we can safely conclude that some non-trivial amount of disparity in outcomes is due to gender bias. Some people want to chalk it all up to genetics, which ignores all the other research and women’s experiences.
Personally I’m interested in good research no matter the implications, but there’s no evidence that would sway me from wanting to remove any and all barriers preventing women from succeeding on their own merits. There’s also no one study that can cover the complexity of our social fabric and how it influences outcomes.
One of my major issues with conservatives is they want everything to adhere to their very simple view of the world. They trust their first instinct about everything. They deny the complexity of reality. I think that’s a dangerous way of approaching anything, and fundamentally unscientific. Some progressives are this way, but scientists, generally not.
Your quotations above make it very clear that the women who objected to the paper objected to it because it would likely be used against women, even though it was a bad paper. Because the average person cannot distinguish between a good paper and a bad paper. For the purposes of my argument, it doesn’t matter whether it was actually a bad paper, only that those women scientists thought so. The fact that they thought it was a bad paper was a fundamental part of their response. We have no idea how they would have responded if they thought the science, logic, mathematics were sound.
Besides the evidence (based on previous discussions) not showing that, the evidence in this case is that even when accepting that the basics were ok, there are still very valid criticisms about the hypothesis and conclusions.
So for Hill’s model to work, it needs a fairly strange and unintuitive combination of hypotheses. Therefore, if he proposes it as a potential explanation for greater variability amongst males, he needs to argue that this combination of hypotheses might actually have occurred for many important features. For example, if it is to explain greater variability for males in mathematics test scores, then he appears to need to argue (i) that there was a gene that made our prehistoric male ancestors more variable with respect to some property that at one end of the scale made them more desirable to females, (ii) that this gene had no effect on average levels of desirability, (iii) that today this curious property has as a side-effect greater variability in mathematics test scores, and (iv) this tendency to increase variability is not outweighed by reduction of variability due to selection of other genes that do affect average levels. (Although he explicitly says that he is not trying to explain any particular instance of greater variability amongst males, most of the references he gives concerning such variability are to do with intellectual ability, and if he can’t give a convincing story about that, then why have all those references?)
Thus, what I object to is not the very idea of a toy model, but more that with this particular toy model I have to make a number of what seem to me to be highly implausible assumptions to get it to work. And I don’t mean the usual kind of entirely legitimate simplifying assumptions. Rather, I’m talking about artificial assumptions that seem to be there only to get the model to do what Hill wants it to do. If some of the hypotheses above that seem implausible to me have in fact been observed by biologists, it seems to me that Hill should have included references to the relevant literature in his copious bibliography.
Meaning that, just like with climate change denial papers and creationism ones, when the right wing tries to apply an iffy conclusion (or a conclusion or spin made that does not really come from what they published) to modern society, it is very irresponsible still.