A great article about reproductive freedom

A rather practical and historical view of the reasons why denying reproductive choice to women is bad for everyone. link to article at TomPaine.com{Edited title - Took extra "u" out of "reproduuctive". - AM}This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 06-16-2005 12:04 PM

Are you kidding me? I am totally for reproductive rights, but that was one of the most repulsive arguments I have ever seen.Not only is it factually inaccurate... or should I say biased? Its central premise is that reproductive freedom is the only way to adequately indoctrinate first class drones.You honestly agree with the following quotes?: Do you not see that this is pure ethnocentrism to a material/corporate/capitalist cultural view of life? Your kids aren't worth anything if they aren't trying to get ahead and not be slackers? Ye Gods!There is also no support for the idea that it takes more time to machine-press children in to obedience than previous generations. While it may be true that this happened less in other cultures, there is absolutely no logical reason it would take any longer. As it happens past cultures did do this quite well.Indeed until we got laws against kids working as adults, children were machine pressed into corporation cogs even faster than today where kids get luxuries like game boys and MTV. Guess we should just gas all those underprivileged kids... oh yeah this whole piece of shit article is also condescending and errant on who can be a success. Nothing like low expectations. Ever hear of kids rising from poverty to make something of themselves?Some of the hardest workers are poor and didn't necessarily get "produced" by 40 year old women, who only at that age are properly ready to instruct them in delayed gratification. Gag. Yet ironically by saying the debate should be open to the public at all, and with the previous arguments made by the author, what has been opened up is a window for compulsory extermination and repression of women's choices.After all if a woman deferring minimal childbirth to later years is the only reasonable approach to ensuring proper drones, then a young woman having several children is clearly being unreasonable and ensuring poor drone production. The mind boggles at your acceptance of such a red-baiting passage. Can you identify the rather obvious logical fallacy within this paragraph. If it were reworded against Dems and in favor of prolife groups, my guess is you could. Can you spot the inconsistency of this passage with previously noted quotes? Coming from a child-motherhood flag waving feminist, it really shouldn't be that puzzling. But maybe this author can't see her own biases.I really value the cause of reproductive freedom. It is trash like this article which does much more harm than good to that cause, especially as it touches on other social issues which reduce the quality of life for everyone.AbE: This article. if factually accurate, is less an argument for prochoice as it is a call to arms to smash capitalist nations and destroy its purveyors (such as this author) everywhere. Why would anyone want to raise a kid into the orwellian (or huxleyesque) paradise described?This message has been edited by holmes, 06-16-2005 08:12 AM

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

I see two major problems with the article in terms of actual facts: Ireland is proving really rather successful, is it not? And it doesn't allow Abortion, and has a large Catholic population who won't even use contraception. In other words, the tenet on which the article is based is demonstrably false.More critical is that it clings to the modern myth of the importance of parenthood. As the data piles up on the causes behavioural traits in humans, it presents a clear picture: genetics account for about half of the variation in measurable traits; the home environment counts for little or nothing; we don't know what accounts for the rest. In other words, once you get past actual abuse, or inability to provide basic essentials, parents don't actually matter that much.

While I agree that most of that article is troubling, I feel I need to see some support of the following: I personally think this is very innaccurate from my personal experiences. While I do know a number of people who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps so to speak, I know more who are successful and happy who had very involved parents while growing up. Also, almost none are what one could call, "drones" in the sense that holmes mentioned.Maybe you could show us some studies that supports your statement that parents don't matter that much?

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I have to agree that mrJack's statement requires a bit more evidence/explanation. I would agree that parents are not required for a "proper" upbringing, kids can learn from others, but environment is essential and for most people that means family environment. I also knew people that were happy and successful using criteria alien to the article schraf was promoting. I hope most people would be horrified at viewing their children as potential cogs and the highest happiness and goal of childhood is to prepare them to be punctual for work and not slack off while on the clock.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

I get my information from Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate - although I've encountered the same results elsewhere. The fact that behaviour is roughly 50% genetic (technically 50% hereditary, I suppose) is well known, however the assumption that the other 50% is what we'd tradtionally call Nurture is false - adoptive children of the same age and sex raised in the same family so no more correlation than random strangers (there are other ways of testing this, but I can't recall them off the top of my head).This, incidently, meets with evolutionary thinking on the subject. Children should resist indoctrination by their parents since their own interests and their parents interests differ.

I don't think this is true at all (or that it is well known, if true in fact). I have yet to see any material that purports to show scientific evidence for how much of human behavior is genetic.There are certain capabilities which have known physical components and so hereditary effects, but that is different from behavior.The one evo psych guy I started asking direct questions to at EvC has apparently tucked tail and run, which does not help me believe there is much evidence out there at all on the subject of known quantitative analyses of behavior. This is not a scientific way to think about this subject at all. I have yet to find any good defence of evo psych, and most rest upon conjecture like the above.I don't mean to come off being condescending to you, just cautioning you to watch out as it smells like pseudo-science to me.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Having lots of children when you are young and poor is stupid. Not only are you more likely to be unable to provide for them, but it tends to inhibit things like graduate education. On the other hand, waiting until you have a stable income and only having as many children as you know you will be able to feed and provide health insurance for is wise. What this article displays is common sense.Are you saying that because my parents raised me to value education and have a good work ethic it makes me a drone? Just because I am in grad school so that in the future I may have a stable life and contribute my bit to society it makes me a drone? So be it, since I'm happy.

Did you mean to reply to my post instead of schraf's? If so, let me know.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Have you studied any Psychology at all? I ask, because this was first year stuff in the courses I did. Evidence from every line of experimentation (i.e. both kinds of twin studies, adoptive studies, etc.) points in much the same direction, the variation in measurable behavioural traits is between 25% and 75% genetic, depending on trait, the figure converging on around 50% if you take a meta- approach to the body of data. I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, I'm a computer programmer, although I find the arguments for evolutionary psychology compelling on every level. If you haven't done so I suggest you read some of Stephen Pinker's work for a rather good popular science treatment.The example I gave is part of a much more over-reaching theory - that the degree of relatedness between individuals should have a determining effect on the degree of alturism expressed towards them. This I imagine is uncontraversial among animal behaviour? Explaining as it does the prevalance of colonial organisation among certain groups of insects, and the existence and nature of kin bias. The extension to humans explains why humans are biased towards their own family, and more so the more closely related another individual is to themselves, why step parents are more likely to abuse their children than natural parents, and offers a suggestion as to why children would resist parental influence.To me, any psychological approach that does not take into account evolutionary principles is, automatically, flawed. We did evolve and like every single other animal on earth that evolution shaped our behaviour as well as our bodies. To suggest otherwise is nothing more than anthropocentricism.Evolutionary explanations of psychology phenemona are certainly in their infancy and like all psychology the problem is many orders of magnitude too complicated to succumb easily to simple analysis but the fact remains that leaving evolution out of psychology is a fundementally flawed approach to understanding human behaviour.

I would have to take issue with your phraseology here.
The fact is, it is the *potential* for particular behavioral traits that has a large genetic component - not their actual expression. That would be genetic determinism and is not accepted in mainstream thinking on the the heritability of behavior. Not sure what your source is here, but it doesn't ring true to me. The prevailing concept is that genetic potential interacts with environment to create the phenotype from the genotype. In this case, pheontype = behavior. This is not an additive relationship, but more of a multiplicative one. In other words, if either term in the equation is 'zero', the whole thing is zero. Using human intellect as an example, whatever the genetic potential of an individual, it can only be enhanced by a rich learning environment during development. If Einstein had spent his whole life isolated in some dungeon, I doubt he could have conceived of relativity.Closer to home, I have to say that I credit a great deal of my own academic accomplishment to the fact I had educated parents who provided me with a highly enriched learning environment from a very early age. My father used to bring home Voltaire, Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle etc. from the time I was in second grade. I consider my wife to be just as intrinsically intelligent as I am, but her intellectual development (and academic accomplishment) lags far behind my own for the simple reason she was severely limited by her environment during childhood and adolescence. Neither of her parents were educated and she had no opportunity for higher education until much later in life. We have often reflected on just what she might have accomplished with more intellectual opportunity earlier in life. If you are refering to Trivers' 'parent-offspring conflict' hypothesis, remember that there is a lot of overlap in the interests of parents and offspring early on. It is only as the offspring becomes able to fend for itself that the parent is selected to begin withholding resources in the interests of distributing them to other, younger offspring. It also relates specifically to *resource distribution* by parents - not whether children may know better than their parents what is good for them.

Yes. Granted it was a while back and not at all my major. Since then I have been an unofficial student of Psych. One gf was in psych and her mother a professional psychologist, and my current gf is studying psych (neuro). I tried to keep up on material and my run in with evo psych recently had me reading quite a bit.I suppose I might approach things with an extra critical eye as my official social science background was in sociology, including social psych, and I had not heard that 50% was automatic to the human condition (or genetics). Sorry to ask you to do some leg work but could you point to any particular study or meta analysis which states this?I am curious how they measure "behavior", much less link it to genetic factors, even if they have twins (assuming they have been separated) to work with. My gf informs me I have already read some of Pinker's work (I am pretty bad with names so I had forgotten), but I will look up more stuff by Pinker.I have not seen one compelling argument for evo psych and at this point I have read a number of papers by its prominent paper producers. It smacks as one hairs breadth away from ID.I would welcome debate on that subject at the thread Parsimonious abandoned. I believe it was titled "Third Rampage of Evolitionism: Evo Psych". If you go there, skip to the end posts between me and Parsimonious, the beginning was mainly ranting by Syamsu. Yes, I really would like you to take this debate to the other thread. You are making some very basic mistakes I was already dealing with (have answered) with PR.To recap lightly: Our brain which controls automated nervous activity, was unquestionably formed by evolution. The apparent evolutionary trend was toward greater autonomous, or noninherently hardwired activity.This means that brains slowly gained capacities for adaptation to events within a lifetime, rather than instincts passed on and so adapted over generations.Defining whether any particular psych mechanism (behaviour) is a result of one kind of adaptation or the other, or a combination of the two, would require some amount of genetic and neurological work, and not merely positing possible evolutionary advantages and then looking for possible correlations to that hypothesis.In short, once brains evolved to the point where they can change or adapt "behavior" to events within a lifetime, it becomes too difficult to analyze the cause of a behavior from correlation studies.As an aside, I asked my gf about your claim and she says that her first year courses did not teach your position at all. She says you cannot generalize as you have done, and it only would start making sense with narrow focus on how one defines "traits". For example is schizophrenia a "behavior" or "trait"?We can take this to the older thread, or you may start a new one.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Holmes,Yes, I meant to reply to you. Sorry, I'm still rather new here.

I don't know, is it? Isn't the stereotype of the Irish that they're lazy, quarrelsome, and drunk? I mean I'm sure they're as industrious as anybody else is likely to be - that is, not very - but how great can their productivity be when half of their population has to raise all those kids?Note about the above: based on no known facts whatsoever. That's about what I've always expected; kids more or less raise themselves.

I hate to tangle with Holmes, because it never seems to end well, but... It is, perhaps unfortunately, the case in Western society that adaptation to the culture of work is, for the majority of people, a prerequisite to making ends meet. You can't live on welfare. You can barely live on a bottom-end job, and holding those jobs requires punctuality, submission to rules, and other indignities.I mean I don't find that in the least bit contentious. That's what it takes to work at McDonalds. Being an iconoclast is a privlege of the rich. Ever hear how rarely that happens, especially these days, with upward class mobility in America the lowest it's been in 6 decades? I will grant you that the article is more than just a little goofy. From a few reasonable premises it stretches an argument so thin you can see right through it.