The XX Factor: What women really think.

Evolutionary Psychology: Bad Science, Bad Journalism, or Both?

Our evolutionary psychology discussion has had me on the lookout for stories that seem particularly ridiculous. And on Fox News today, the morning hosts mentioned a study that purports to show that gentlemen preferred blondes as far back as the Ice Age. I started Googling, and the stories I found demonstrate a huge problem for this particular field of research: The media does a poor job reporting on the science.

For example, the Times of London writes that "north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males." One thing I've learned from my casual reading on evolution is that adaptation doesn't work this way. Yes, if a trait is evolutionarily beneficial, it will get passed on and become more prevalent, while traits that are harmful or undesirable will be lost because the people who carry them don't breed successfully. But a brunette woman is not going to give birth to flaxen-haired tots just because her genes looked around, noticed how all the men were going for the blond hotties, and decided to mutate. (This piece from the Toronto Star explains it better.) Yet so many of the stories I see use this cause-and-effect structure to explain findings on evolution, and the ignorance is incredibly frustrating.  

Some of the claims of evolutionary psychologists are shaky enough without such bad reporting, which leaves me with a lot of questions. Do evolutionary psychologists even care that the reporting is bad, or do they enjoy the attention that misleading stories bring to them? And is too much to expect journalists to have a little bit of knowledge about the subjects they cover?

To Quote Margaret Spellings ...

The good news in the study Meghan writes about is that both men and women reported feeling more comfortable in professional groups that included more women. Does this mean that men, too, find predominantly male groups more intimidating? Or less interesting? I was in one of the first co-ed classes at the University of Notre Dame and the reaction we got all the time was, “Five guys for every girl; that must be great!” I knew no one who looked at it that way, but it was not all that harrowing, either. We were feminists who wore knee socks and loved the Virgin Mary, and about the craziest it ever got was at football games, some people would sing, “as our loyal sons and daughters march on to victory.’’ And some not.  

 When Domers of more recent vintage ask what it was like being a pioneer, I know they want horror stories and maybe the recipe for hoecakes, but all I’ve got for them is that on rare occasions, some stressed-out defender of the old order would lash out—most memorably when one of the few men in my Women in the Bible class stormed out shouting, “Mary Magdalene was a whore, and that’s all there is to it!” A far bigger issue for me was that only a handful of our tenured professors were female. But that, too, has long since changed, and nearly half of all undergraduates are women these days. So what would I tell those aspiring young scientists who see no one like themselves at the conference? In the immortal words of Margaret Spellings, put on your big-girl panties. And go anyway.