The first rule of repetition club is you do not talk about repetition club.

The second rule of repetition club is you do NOT TALK ABOUT REPETITION CLUB!

The third of rule of repetition club is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT REPETITION CLUB!

The fourth rule of repetition club is... ok, you get it.

Evolution doesn't justify sexism

Right, I am angry about something and wish to shout at the internet about it. This means of course that it is blogging o'clock.

The thing that has lately attracted my ire is an argument I've heard bandied about a lot lately. It goes something like this;

'Women can only have a limited number of babies in their life, so they only want sex a maximum of once every nine months, and what they've been programmed by evolution to really want is a man long-term to help protect them and their offspring. Men on the other hand can make a baby every time they get laid, and therefore are programmed to want to have sex with everything in sight, all the time.'

Ok, let's examine this. Yes, men and women have different dangly bits. Well done for noticing this. 

Top marks for observation there. 

What doesn't necessarily follow is that we are therefore psychologically hardwired to follow certain behaviour patterns. All that is necessary is to have evolved to be capable of working out what is in our own best interests. That's like saying we've evolved to be afraid of being run over by a lorry. Of course we haven't. We are simply capable of working out that being run over by a lorry is fairly unhealthy as hobbies go, and so avoid it if at all possible, electing to, say, play tennis or eat strawberries instead. In fact, one of the most remarkable features of human thought and behaviour, as compared to that of other animals, is how little of it is 'hardwired'. We  are born knowing very little of how to live. We are not like those gazelles that are up and running away from lions within ten minutes of leaving the womb. We learn how to think and behave in the world. We learn it from our parents, from each other and from our own bitter experience. It is our single biggest advantage and one of the foremost reasons our species has spread across the planet like a bad rash on a man wearing leather trousers on a hot day. 

Evolutionary theorists suggests that the most important thing we will ever do in our lives is have sex and make babies. It seems odd then that they would not consider the possibility that we would apply this ability to learn new behaviours and tactics to the most important thing we will ever do. By this I do not mean that we are capable of overcoming our underlying instincts because we're all civilised and whatnot now. I mean there's good reason to think that our underlying instincts might themselves be flexible and context dependent. We generally think of instincts as being very simple processes, like "AHHH IT'S A FUCKING TIGER RUN AWAY!". This of course makes perfect sense for a simple situation like the aforementioned stripy kitty with the big teeth. The correct response to that situation is fairly reliably going to be: run away very fast.

Mating however, is not quite that simple.

Which brings me to the other BIG and IMPORTANT thing about human behaviour, which is that we are, above all, and to a much greater extent than any other species, social animals. What decides how well a human gets on in the world is not how strong we are or how efficiently we have learned a few key behaviour patterns, but how well we negotiate the fluid, constantly changing world of interactions with other humans. In other words, how good we are at changing our behaviour based on what other people are doing.

Let me put it this way. Societies, even the smallest and most primitive ones, vary hugely in terms of how they interact with one another, share food and resources, rear children, think about relationships, etc, in response to their environment and finding the best way to live in it. Are you (yes you, hypothetical sexist evolutionary theorist by which I may or may not mean Steven Pinker*, sitting there with that hypothetically smug look on your face) really suggesting that people won't vary their mating tactics in response to these different social realities? Think about a small tribal society in which everything is shared pretty equally. Everyone has to co-operate to hunt large animals or travel safely around the forest to forage, and everyone eats their fair share of the catch and helps equally with the child rearing, washing up etc. A woman living there would gain no advantage from having a specific man to look after her and her offspring. In fact, it would be far better to have slept with every guy in the village, so they all think her kids might be theirs and try extra hard to look after them. Also this way she'll make sure she gets the best quality, most fertile baby gravy. It would be in her evolutionary interest to spend her time eyeing up men, having crude conversations with her friends about how best to get guys into bed and take advantage of them when drunk. The men, in response, may well then start being more interested in tying a lady into some sort of monogamous, committed relationship so they can be sure it's their babies she's having. Otherwise the only guy who'll get to have any kids is whichever one of them happens to have the biggest, strongest, steroid-pumped, sports jock style super sperm, the kind who kick over other sperm's sandcastles and then laugh as they walk off with a hot young ovum hanging off each arm.

Not that sperm have arms. Or sandcastles, I suppose. Shut up, it's a metaphor.

Anyway. The reason I chose this type of tribal society as an example is that this is probably our best guess at how things were for most of our evolutionary history. No-one could survive, let alone support a family on their own in a hunter-gatherer world. You depended on the community. If any mating behaviours are in fact hardwired, then 'tying down a husband to extract resources' probably won't be one of them, as this tactic only makes any sense at all after the invention of farming, less than 10'000 years ago.

My point is that our social realities change not just from society to society but from generation to generation and, increasingly, year to year. And those who can't keep up, because, say, they're 'hardwired' to a particular behaviour and can't learn new ways of doing things, are simply going to lose out. They will not be the ones having kids and therefore will not preserve their backward, outdated, rigidly hardwired natures into the next generation.

Of course, where women really do depend on their father or husband for survival then the 'withhold sex until he promises to marry you' tactic suddenly makes quite a lot of sense. Not because women and evolutionarily programmed to like fluffy things, getting married and doing housework, but as a last ditch attempt to secure a stake in society by playing the only card left them; their wombs. Try comparing dating culture in places like Saudi Arabia or rural India where being a single mother is a ticket to poverty, disgrace, social exclusion and in some places even death to places like Berlin and Sweden where there is good quality state sponsored childcare and little if any social stigma. How likely are you to get hit on by a woman in a bar in Saudi Arabia? How many demure German women do you know (as a side note to my female German friends, this should be taken as a compliment)? Whatever you think about the innateness of this or any other behaviour, it is clearly massively socially mediated as well.

So, to sum up. Having a vagina does not by itself mean you want a wedding ring on your finger. Having a vagina whilst living in a sexist society however can mean that you need a wedding ring on your finger for your very survival.

* Steven Pinker (2002) 'The Blank Slate', BCA London/NY, page 344, line 18

So I have joined the ranks of digitally opinionated.. First up, the viral phenomenon/tipping point

Ok, so for all these years I have been a non-blogger. One who blogs not. I somehow had myself convinced that I was not sufficiently opinionated that I would ever feel the need to shout those opinions at the internet.

Ha.

Oh well.

Ok, so the first thing I feel the need to shout at the internet about is the concept of 'going viral', and the idea that this is not only a good thing, but is one of the most exciting phenomenons to come out of the internet, expressed beautifully in this talk by Kevin Allocca

The idea is that the media that get spread through social network platforms like Facebook and twitter are those that are recgnised by the viewer as having sufficient value to be worthy of the attention of their friends. The implication is that this represents the future of a more democratic media industry, whereby public opinion serves as a huge, organic filter, selecting that which has value to the people of the internet as a whole and promoting it through a multitude of small actions from individuals, rather than being slave the tastes and agendas of a few individuals in control of large industries.

Except there seems to be something wrong with Kevin's argument. The problem is that the best examples of media from this new dawn of viral, democratic media that he pulls out for us in this talk are a man falling off a bicycle (sorry for spoiling the punchline of that one. No, wait, I'm not sorry), the Nyan cat and Justin Bieber. Justin Bieber? Really Kevin? Aside from the matter of his debatable artistic merit, Justin can hardly be said to a product of a more democratic media industry. Maybe he started as some kid getting a lot of hits on youtube, but that's not what made him commercially successful. What made that happen was the Raymond Braun Media Group deciding they could make money out of this kid. Is Kevin saying that the viral phenomenon is so great because it's made the job of talent spotting by large corporations easier? What about the Nyan cat? Is it really important and/or exciting that it traveled round the world? Or is it just like any other running joke that happens whenever people as shamelessly, wantonly geeky as me and my ilk gather together, except that this one happened in cyberspace rather than a physics department staff room somewhere?

The concept of things going viral is not of course new, nor is it limited to the internet. Aside from the example of actual viruses (the kind that make you ill), there are plenty of to choose from. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell gives the example of Hush Puppies shoes, which were going out of business, but then became cool and trendy with a small group of New York hipsters and suddenly, completely unexpectedly, not least to the Hush Puppies company themselves, they were everywhere. Both Gladwell and Allocca ask why things go viral. How could we predict or control it? Both decide that we cannot predict or control it, that it is an unpredictable, surprising process, whereby a chance act causes unexpected things to rise suddenly to fame after years or days of obscurity.

I have a different answer. My answer is "nobody cares."

I'm not saying that to be offensive. What I'm trying to do is make a point about viral mathematics and how they work.

Let's say you've made a YouTube video of your dog wearing your tortoise as though it were a hat, and you send this to a few friends. Let's say that your video is sufficiently amusing that, on average, each of those friends sends it to one other person. Your video will make its way slowly around the interwebs, but the number of people watching it at any one time will remain constant.
Say however, that your tortoise is not very cute (I know, that's impossible, all tortoises are cute, whatever, just bear with me) and hence the average transmission rate of your video falls from one to only zero point nine. Now the number of people watching will go down, halving every six or seven transmissions, until nobody is watching it any more.
On the other hand though, maybe your tortoise is not only cute, but he is wearing a hat of his own, making for a moment of meta-hatted magnificence in YouTube viewing. The average transmission rate rises from one to one point one. Now, instead of halving, the number of people watching is doubling every six or seven transmissions. Let's say it takes, on average, about ten minutes for someone to watch your clip and send it to a friend (one transmission). If you uploaded and sent it to just one friend at nine o clock at night, by the time you get to work the next day at nine in the morning, just twelve hours later, well over a thousand people will be watching it right at the very moment that you stroll over to your desk and check your YouTube profile to see how your amusing pets are getting on. By the time you go for lunch it will be ten thousand, and by the time you leave the office at six pm, it will be well over five hundred thousand.

My point is, the difference between viral and not viral is small. Sometimes as small as a tortoise's hat. Viral mathematics only come into play when nobody really cares. It doesn't really matter whether you get your daily pet related giggle from a hatted tortoise, or a tortoise 'sans chapeau'. It doesn't really matter whether you wear Hush Puppies or Converse. Honestly, nobody really cares very much. It's just that lots of people care a tiny bit. When the differences are more significant, such as between a hatted tortoise video and a David Attenborough documentary, then the viral mathematics collapse and it becomes a normal, stable, predictable system. Of course everyone watches the tortoise with the hat.
What I mean is that just because anyone's short video clip of their pets can go viral and be seen by millions, doesn't mean that anyone can make a David Attenborough documentary. That takes a lot more than youtube hits.

So, please can we stop being confused about democratic means of consumption and democratic means of production. The fact that it is popular doesn't make it important, exciting or cool. That was true of the kid at your school who hit puberty before anyone else, wore a leather jacket and smoked by the back gate, and it is true of things on the internet.
Yes, the internet is a fantastic tool for independent artists, musicians and the like. It allows media, opinions, culture and even education to reach places they never otherwise would and for the incremental opinions and choices of lots of people to have a large impact. It allows for thousands, millions, perhaps even billions of people across the globe to organise toward a single cause. The use of Twitter in the Arab spring revolutions, the 38 degrees movement to save the NHS, microfinance organisations like Kiva, crowdfunding organisations like Kickstarter, democratic tools like Avaaz. These things are important, exciting and cool.

Nyan cat is not.

Sorry Kevin.