You may not be Interested in Genes, but Genes are Interested in You.
The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck, about 7,000 years ago, was a huge event in human history:
The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously across Africa, Europe and Asia, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17.
Discovered in 2015, the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck may not be a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success in Neolithic agropastoralist cultures, compared to the previous hunter gatherers.
Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby.:
The development of farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans — which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species — and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils.
Hence, there is a dramatic bottleneck in male lineages but not in female lineages. …
This selection event left men great at forming teams, but women as not-team-players:
This had consequences. A major one is that the male expression of human genes became dramatically better at forming and maintaining teams — as there was drastic selection pressure for that — but the female expression of human genes did not.
This is why young schoolboy sporting teams regularly crush adult women’s national teams in team sports such as soccer. It is not that schoolboys have the strength advantage over women associated with adult men (they are often not particularly advantaged around age 14-15). It’s simply that human males are much more likely to “get” teamwork at a visceral level.
At least some of the differences in the statistical distribution of cognitive traits between men and women comes from this genetic bottleneck’s intense selection pressure differences. This is particularly clear in social patterns. For instance, men readily form hierarchies — often using physical cues such as height to do so.
Men focus on roles, suppressing or otherwise managing their emotions to do so. They regularly test each other — hence ragging each other, making appalling jokes, etc. Such mechanisms generate trust, as they test whether you will fold under pressure, whether one can say outrageous things and still get support. Hence the popular quip:
Men insult each other but they don’t mean it. Women compliment each other but they also don’t mean it.
Men roast each other as tests because so much male interaction is about teamwork, and the roles and reliability that requires, while women typically look to emotional connection. Given that the latter requires a lot of interaction to build up trust, yes, female friendships can be quite intense, but relations between human females can also be viciously unstable and fissile.
Men prefer free speech, women not so much:
These differences have other social consequences. Men are notably more positive about free speech than women, because men often see speech as a test while women are more likely to see it as a threat.
As universities have feminised, the male-female differences on free speech among students have become more pronounced. Men are systematically more tolerant of alternative points of view than are women. Orwell’s famous comment in his novel 1984:
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
Was a great novelist doing what great novelists do: noticing.
Class and status:
As part of the teamwork focus, men tend to be the social solidarity sex while women are not. Women are much less likely to have friends of lower socio-economic status than are men. For women, such friends are much less likely to be worth the emotional investment. For men, they may be useful members of a future team.
Feminized institutions become less competent and more conformist:
As institutions, occupations and public discourse become more feminised, there has been a shift in patterns of language. A massive study of patterns of language use found a dramatic shift since the 1980s, such that:
our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.
All this means that male-dominated institutions and spaces will be generally better, often much better, at generating and managing feedback than female-dominated spaces. When people note that feminising institutions and occupations have a strong tendency to become less functional, it is precisely because they are worse at generating and managing feedback, and at generating and maintaining trust.
Lower trust, and the narrowing of acceptable feedback, encourages safety through conformity. Modern publishing, which is very strongly female-dominated displays such problems. The decline of the global reach of Hollywood has coincided with strong antipathy to employing white males and a rise in moralised conformity in its output.
As universities have become more feminised, they have also become more conformist. …
The conformity departure of the male risk takers has made the newly feminized entertainment industry boring and teachy:
Hollywood’s — and academe’s and publishing’s — antipathy to employing (straight) white males also means systematically excluding the demographic (striving males) most willing to take risks.
Hollywood’s leaching of originality — the endless remakes, sequels, prequels — goes with the conformist preaching that has been driving away viewers and (in the case of comics and fiction) readers.
The surge in manga — and other East Asian entertainment products — is another consequence, as people switch to entertainment that takes story and character seriously, rather than the performative moralising the disfigures so much of the recent cultural output of the US and the rest of the Anglosphere. … ‘
Then there’s rape and immigration:
While the Neolithic Y Chromosome Bottleneck did not notably affect female lineages, this obscures a different horror. Generations of women bred with a rapist who had helped kill all their male relatives. This has continuing consequences. All those romance novels and stories where a male brute is tamed by the love of a good woman hark back to this.
So does the well-known female fascination with “bad boys”. Imprisoned male serial killers generate female “fans”: criminal lawyers refer to it as hybristophilia. In more recent times, it’s become clear that some Western women are fascinated by Hamas and other jihadis, not despite them being ruthless killers, but because they are.
The notion that only men have toxic behavioural patterns is nonsense. …
It only takes a few people:
This genetic shadow thus includes the variation in our responses, and how much how our social patterns are driven by the statistical distribution of traits.
Think, for example, how much violent crime is driven by a small, statistical “tail” of males — a tail whose size varies among human populations. How large that statistical “tail” is, and how well public policy deals with it, is fundamental to violent crime rates.
Islam is driven by the small statistical tail of radical Islamists, but they have conquered 2 billion people so far.
hat-tip Phil C.
