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Transcript
Cut up the following and get students to arrange them in a logical order. This approach argues that gender differences occur because of selective pressures in the past that shaped different behaviours in men and women. These differences continue to exist in today’s world due to genome lag, although the modern environment is very different from the EEA. Parental investment for males is limited because men produce millions of sperm with little effort and can fertilise many women. A man can father many more children than a woman can mother. Reproductive success for a man means having sex with as many fertile females as possible. The important time period is believed to be the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA), between about 40 thousand and 10 thousand years ago, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Behaviours and traits that lead to reproductive success will be selected. For men these are aggression, dominance and competitiveness as this enables men to fight for a female. Sexual promiscuity will also be advantage for increasing chances of reproduction. Gender differences in behaviour were produced by two complementary processes – natural selection and sexual selection. Natural selection is the selection of behaviours or bodily features that allow an animal to compete successfully for mates and to reproduce. These processes ensured that behaviours that helped survival and reproduction for our ancestors were kept in the gene pool. Women invest far more in parenthood as they only produce one egg a month and each offspring involves nine months of pregnancy, then childbirth and months of nurturing, possibly breast feeding. A woman can only produce a few children in a life time. Reproductive success for the woman is making sure that she ensures the survival of the few precious offspring that are produced. Trivers (1972) suggested that gender differences came from differences in parental investment. This is investment by the parent that increases the offspring’s chance of survival at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring. The qualities and behaviours that led to reproductive success were different for males and females. Behaviours that will be selected for reproductive success for a woman are helpfulness, sensitivity to others’ needs, gentleness, warmth and compassion. Females who are choosy about mate selection and unwilling to engage in casual sex will produce more surviving offspring. Women are therefore programmed to be ‘feminine’. Cut up the following and get students to arrange them in a logical order. On average, human males are about 1.15 times larger than females. This suggests that size and weight were characteristics that enabled men to compete successfully for access to females in the EEA. Size differences between males and females are shown in many other species. Evolutionary accounts cannot be tested using scientific methods as it is not possible to go back to the EEA to see how people behaved. Males show greater amounts of aggressive behaviour across almost all cultures and are more likely than women to be convicted of violent crimes. This suggests that male aggression may have a genetic basis. Aggression has clear links to testosterone, a male hormone. When women undergo sex changes to become male they receive testosterone, a male hormone. Following hormone treatment, they report an increase in aggressive feelings (Van Goozen et al, 1994) Female choosiness can be explained by cultural pressures. In most parts of the world, female chastity is coerced using many different strategies. It may not ba an adaptation at all. Clark and Hatfield’s 1989 study shows how men and women have different attitudes to casual sex. Seventy five per cent of male students agreed to have sex with an attractive female stranger on an American campus. No females agreed to have sex when propositioned by an attractive male. Evolutionary psychology assumes that male/female differences were designed to solve the problem of reproductive success. However, it is not always clear that traits are adaptations that led to success. For example, promiscuity may not lead to increased reproductive success for males, as offspring were less likely to surviving the EEA when males did not stick around (Sternglanz and Nash, 1988) Cut up the following and get students to arrange them in a logical order. The evolutionary account of gender differences explains unacceptable behaviours like rape as ‘natural’. Thornhill and Palmer’s book The Natural History of Rape(2000) claims that rape is an evolved tactic that enables males who cannot reproduce with consent to be successful by resorting to sexual violence. This ignores the fact that many rape victims are of non-reproductive age (e.g. young children or older women), disproving the claim that it aids reproductive success. According to Hagen (2002) evolutionary psychology is becoming out of date and ignoring advancements in archaeology and anthropology. Although there are some indisputable features of the EEA (women got pregnant and men did not), evolutionary psychologists need to update their understanding based on recent discoveries.