It seems highly likely that patriarchy is the result of both genetic evolution and cultural evolution. There must be any number of behavioral traits and propensities that tend to promote or lessen the levels of male cooperation. Since every behavioral trait that has ever been studied has turned out to have somewhere on the order of 50% heritability.
Of course those 50% heritability numbers tend to come from studies that aren't cross cultural, so the percent heritability could be considerably higher or lower cross culturally. I would think that the genetic underpinings of male cooperation would be under strong selective genetic pressure as well as being under strong selective cultural pressure.
> In the 20th century, the societies that were good producers also won the wars. So not oppressing producers became a key factor to winning wars.
I don't know if that's a good description of Nazi Germany or the USSR. North Korea is perhaps the most oppressive regime in existence, and it still exists because it was able to fight the UN-backed south to a standstill. In the next North vs South east Asian communist struggle, my understanding is a LOT more people fled North Vietnam for South Vietnam, but the North won because their government could shrug off massive numbers of casualties without ever giving up. Nowadays the folks at Crooked Timber describe Vietnam as resembling a Marxist caricature of capitalism, a one-party state run for the benefit of shoe companies. More recently, the Taliban has retaken Afghanistan, and I don't think that's because it oppresses women less.
> 20th century societies that were open-minded enough to let women into the factories when the men fought the wars were the most successful warrior nations.
You may have bought too much into the myth of Rosie the Riveter.
There was a modest increase in female employment during the war, but there had already been a trend of increase before that, and most women were still in jobs like secretary. This is part of why by 1950 female labor force participation reverts back to the long-term trend.
> The mythologies of the Western Indo-Europeans were also more female-inclusive. For example, in western Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female (Hestia, the Vestal Virgins)
The ancient Athenians sequestered their women to a section of the house, somewhat like Afghans. The Spartans lacked seclusion of women, but that's because male Spartans were supposed to be dedicated to the military.
> I don't claim that female participation in the labor force was the sole reason for the West’s success.
Rather than "sole", I'd question it as a significant factor at all. Women working outside the home was relatively atypical even in the west until relatively recently. Most people were also peasant farmers until relatively recently.
I would question the warrior male ruling class hypothesis.
"Those with the highest potential for violence have the most freedom of action" - that seems, straightforwardly false in any but the most primitive social organisations. It's a combination of might and brains, and over time, norms that preserve society prevail. Sometimes (actually, I would say often, this seems pretty common everywhere) this involves putting down the most violent members of society (most societies, literate or not, have laws against murder and most of them executed murderers).
Murder is violence against unsanctioned targets. Every society had a way to control it's most violent members (including putting them down when needed), to direct the violence outwards at sanctioned targets!
No, I'm not satisfied with the war hypothesis. I think the answer is much more likely to be related to sedentary agriculture vs nomadic societies. In this war, the nomads lost badly - because this wasn't a war you win with violence. This was population.
My hypothesis is matriarchal societies tend to have lower birth rates. In fact, anywhere and any time women have equality, birth rates tend to be lower.
This, I think, is because women as a population are rational. Birth is extremely risky and infant mortality was high. You do not want to have babies unless you can get something out of it.
In a nomadic society, everyone produces equally - every member got their own food and fibre and whatnot. Labour wasn't segregated by gender. Men rarely had much to offer that women couldn't get themselves.
In a patriarchal sedentary agri society, men had land to grow food on and a house to live in. You get to live there if you could reproduce with him, or if you were related. Therein lies the motivation to do this incredibly risky thing - food and shelter.
But how did the original patriarchy start, such that the land rights belonged to men to start with? Or maybe that's the wrong assumption. Maybe only patriarchal sedentary agriculture societies could sustain the population growth necessary to maintain those societies! People in these societies were constantly contending with disease - the standard of living was fucking terrible. Maybe the only way these societies managed to out-breed disease was if women had to provide children as a tax. Perhaps only patriarchal societies could achieve the thing that led to the farming land ownership based society dominating the whole world - population growth, which led to the formation of sophisticated nation-states, which could beat the much smaller populations of nomads.
Nomadic women had no such tax to pay - they reproduced pretty much exactly enough to keep their population going, and if the native born tribeswomen didn't want to have enough kids, they'd raid one of those agri societies, kidnap some peasant girls, so they wouldn't run out of people. Modern society is similar (minus the part about kidnapping peasants) - when given a choice as to how many children to have, educated, financially stable women usually want between 1 to 3 (I actually think childfree is a minority - most people want children). This is when the risk of dying in childbirth and losing children to high infant mortality isn't a factor.
(While we no longer kidnap women in raids, we entice people from other places with promises of better standard of living, and take our pick of the candidates - skewing young, able bodied, and culturally compatible)
OK Tove! After digging carefully through Evans' sources and making it halfway through her article, I reached a point where I blinked and asked myself why I was doing that. Although I really love Wrangham as a stimulating source of ideas, Evans' work seems pretty cloudy and I have no idea how she made money from Scott Alexander to produce any of it. So I gave up and just read your own article on its own terms.
This may well be what I should have done to begin with! You've done a wonderful job of taking an extremely broad topic and giving it a thorough yet condensed overview, taking into account biological, economic, military, historical, and practical issues.
Your conclusion is probably most interesting, and touches on this question that many people are starting to ask - is the Western ideal viable? You say, "Currently, it looks like gender equality is a great contraceptive." But is this really true? The Apple Pie family isn't much of a patriarchy, and somehow I have trouble imagining that Anders spends much time telling you what to do, either. Both of our families seem to take sexual equality (or at least, sexual complementarity) as a given, and we've had plenty of kids. So is the idea of female emancipation *really* what makes most Westerners forego having children?
So I'm still looking at this, and I still don't know how convincing I find Evans' idea, but her source material (Wrangham, 2021) mentions something extremely interesting:
"Moral feelings associated with fairness were once thought to be present in non-humans such as capuchins (Cebus apella) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003). Experiments show, however, that only humans have a tendency to sacrifice personal gain for the sake of equality, whereas non-humans’ apparent concern for fairness reflects other motivations such as efforts to manipulate an experimenter (Engelmann et al., 2017; McAuliffe & Santos, 2018). Accordingly traits associated with fairness such as senses of responsibility, obligation, duty, guilt and shame appear to be restricted to humans, making their evolution a particularly interesting puzzle (Tomasello, 2016). In contrast moral emotions concerned with sympathy, such as compassion, concern and benevolence, are evidenced in non-humans (de Waal, 2006)."
These behaviors are not even universal in humans; rejecting unfair offers in the ultimatum game is much less common outside of WEIRD societies.
I came up with pretty much this analysis too. Notice the traits of toxic masculinity like repressing all emotion except anger, not showing weakness etc. - these are the ideal warrior traits.
Then the kind of guy who is used to gutting other guys on the battlefield is probably not averse to beating up his wife and then pretty much assured he is the head of the household.
Also the origin of war is either capturing sex slaves or looting wealth so one can afford a wife.
Today we can afford feminism precisely because we do not need to train most men into becoming warriors.
You know, one society that has sort-of worked through some of the issues with reproduction and equality is religious Judaism. I say "sort of" here for all of the obvious reasons. But if we look at modern Israel, we see a state with a mix of religious and secular traditions where the religious traditions are strong enough to influence overall birthrates and the state has, so far, maintained military superiority over its neighbors and universal conscription.
Unlike other conservative religious groups, Judaism has no particular norm of isolating women (at least not in the way of conservative Muslims,) because it's normal for Orthodox women to work in order to support their families while the men study Torah. The one stay-at-home-dad I know whose wife works to support the family is Orthodox Jewish. Last time I checked they had 4 kids, all quite young, and dad was holding down the hearth.
Obviously Orthodox Judaism is "patriarchal" and "oppressive" by the standards that liberal westerners are used to, but it's lightyears different from places like Afghanistan where the Taliban forbids women from working outside the home and women whose husbands aren't bringing in $$ literally face starvation for themselves and their children.
You are definitely on top of things - I just clicked Evans' article, and 30 seconds later, checked Wood From Eden to find this post!
Although I'll have more to say in a bit after I've read more, it's odd that her own article had no mentions of "matriliny" or "matrilineality," "uxorilocal," "virilocal," or similar anthropological terms; only "patrilineal," with no obvious sense of the correlates of patriliny or alternatives to it. Possibly she didn't need to discuss them? I'd recommend anyone interested in the topic check those terms in wikipedia and google scholar.
So then, there is a possibility for women of a tribe to band together and create a matriarchy by taking advantage of men that don't band together. But that hasn't really happened. Maybe testosterone plays a part?
It's interesting that Dr Evans brings up a theory that the patriarchy started 300k years ago. This is 285k years before there is evidence of warfare emerges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
"In theory, human females could create strong coalitions and through sheer numbers stay in power in their respective groups." I wonder if this was the case before some cognitive developments allowed men to use their advantage for warfare.
It's controversial but not rejected to say that there was an abrupt phase change in Theory of Mind for humans sometime in the last 100k years. If we also accept that women have better Theory of Mind, it makes sense that they reached the phase change first. Would have fascinating implications for the balance of the sexes. We do see women far more represented in art up to about 15k years ago (no male analog of Venus Statue complex), maybe they were also better at forming alliances. We don't see warfare in that time period.
It seems highly likely that patriarchy is the result of both genetic evolution and cultural evolution. There must be any number of behavioral traits and propensities that tend to promote or lessen the levels of male cooperation. Since every behavioral trait that has ever been studied has turned out to have somewhere on the order of 50% heritability.
Of course those 50% heritability numbers tend to come from studies that aren't cross cultural, so the percent heritability could be considerably higher or lower cross culturally. I would think that the genetic underpinings of male cooperation would be under strong selective genetic pressure as well as being under strong selective cultural pressure.
> In the 20th century, the societies that were good producers also won the wars. So not oppressing producers became a key factor to winning wars.
I don't know if that's a good description of Nazi Germany or the USSR. North Korea is perhaps the most oppressive regime in existence, and it still exists because it was able to fight the UN-backed south to a standstill. In the next North vs South east Asian communist struggle, my understanding is a LOT more people fled North Vietnam for South Vietnam, but the North won because their government could shrug off massive numbers of casualties without ever giving up. Nowadays the folks at Crooked Timber describe Vietnam as resembling a Marxist caricature of capitalism, a one-party state run for the benefit of shoe companies. More recently, the Taliban has retaken Afghanistan, and I don't think that's because it oppresses women less.
> 20th century societies that were open-minded enough to let women into the factories when the men fought the wars were the most successful warrior nations.
You may have bought too much into the myth of Rosie the Riveter.
https://youtu.be/7XhK4QqkgSI?t=599
There was a modest increase in female employment during the war, but there had already been a trend of increase before that, and most women were still in jobs like secretary. This is part of why by 1950 female labor force participation reverts back to the long-term trend.
> The mythologies of the Western Indo-Europeans were also more female-inclusive. For example, in western Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female (Hestia, the Vestal Virgins)
The ancient Athenians sequestered their women to a section of the house, somewhat like Afghans. The Spartans lacked seclusion of women, but that's because male Spartans were supposed to be dedicated to the military.
> I don't claim that female participation in the labor force was the sole reason for the West’s success.
Rather than "sole", I'd question it as a significant factor at all. Women working outside the home was relatively atypical even in the west until relatively recently. Most people were also peasant farmers until relatively recently.
I would question the warrior male ruling class hypothesis.
"Those with the highest potential for violence have the most freedom of action" - that seems, straightforwardly false in any but the most primitive social organisations. It's a combination of might and brains, and over time, norms that preserve society prevail. Sometimes (actually, I would say often, this seems pretty common everywhere) this involves putting down the most violent members of society (most societies, literate or not, have laws against murder and most of them executed murderers).
Murder is violence against unsanctioned targets. Every society had a way to control it's most violent members (including putting them down when needed), to direct the violence outwards at sanctioned targets!
No, I'm not satisfied with the war hypothesis. I think the answer is much more likely to be related to sedentary agriculture vs nomadic societies. In this war, the nomads lost badly - because this wasn't a war you win with violence. This was population.
My hypothesis is matriarchal societies tend to have lower birth rates. In fact, anywhere and any time women have equality, birth rates tend to be lower.
This, I think, is because women as a population are rational. Birth is extremely risky and infant mortality was high. You do not want to have babies unless you can get something out of it.
In a nomadic society, everyone produces equally - every member got their own food and fibre and whatnot. Labour wasn't segregated by gender. Men rarely had much to offer that women couldn't get themselves.
In a patriarchal sedentary agri society, men had land to grow food on and a house to live in. You get to live there if you could reproduce with him, or if you were related. Therein lies the motivation to do this incredibly risky thing - food and shelter.
But how did the original patriarchy start, such that the land rights belonged to men to start with? Or maybe that's the wrong assumption. Maybe only patriarchal sedentary agriculture societies could sustain the population growth necessary to maintain those societies! People in these societies were constantly contending with disease - the standard of living was fucking terrible. Maybe the only way these societies managed to out-breed disease was if women had to provide children as a tax. Perhaps only patriarchal societies could achieve the thing that led to the farming land ownership based society dominating the whole world - population growth, which led to the formation of sophisticated nation-states, which could beat the much smaller populations of nomads.
Nomadic women had no such tax to pay - they reproduced pretty much exactly enough to keep their population going, and if the native born tribeswomen didn't want to have enough kids, they'd raid one of those agri societies, kidnap some peasant girls, so they wouldn't run out of people. Modern society is similar (minus the part about kidnapping peasants) - when given a choice as to how many children to have, educated, financially stable women usually want between 1 to 3 (I actually think childfree is a minority - most people want children). This is when the risk of dying in childbirth and losing children to high infant mortality isn't a factor.
(While we no longer kidnap women in raids, we entice people from other places with promises of better standard of living, and take our pick of the candidates - skewing young, able bodied, and culturally compatible)
OK Tove! After digging carefully through Evans' sources and making it halfway through her article, I reached a point where I blinked and asked myself why I was doing that. Although I really love Wrangham as a stimulating source of ideas, Evans' work seems pretty cloudy and I have no idea how she made money from Scott Alexander to produce any of it. So I gave up and just read your own article on its own terms.
This may well be what I should have done to begin with! You've done a wonderful job of taking an extremely broad topic and giving it a thorough yet condensed overview, taking into account biological, economic, military, historical, and practical issues.
Your conclusion is probably most interesting, and touches on this question that many people are starting to ask - is the Western ideal viable? You say, "Currently, it looks like gender equality is a great contraceptive." But is this really true? The Apple Pie family isn't much of a patriarchy, and somehow I have trouble imagining that Anders spends much time telling you what to do, either. Both of our families seem to take sexual equality (or at least, sexual complementarity) as a given, and we've had plenty of kids. So is the idea of female emancipation *really* what makes most Westerners forego having children?
So I'm still looking at this, and I still don't know how convincing I find Evans' idea, but her source material (Wrangham, 2021) mentions something extremely interesting:
"Moral feelings associated with fairness were once thought to be present in non-humans such as capuchins (Cebus apella) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003). Experiments show, however, that only humans have a tendency to sacrifice personal gain for the sake of equality, whereas non-humans’ apparent concern for fairness reflects other motivations such as efforts to manipulate an experimenter (Engelmann et al., 2017; McAuliffe & Santos, 2018). Accordingly traits associated with fairness such as senses of responsibility, obligation, duty, guilt and shame appear to be restricted to humans, making their evolution a particularly interesting puzzle (Tomasello, 2016). In contrast moral emotions concerned with sympathy, such as compassion, concern and benevolence, are evidenced in non-humans (de Waal, 2006)."
These behaviors are not even universal in humans; rejecting unfair offers in the ultimatum game is much less common outside of WEIRD societies.
I came up with pretty much this analysis too. Notice the traits of toxic masculinity like repressing all emotion except anger, not showing weakness etc. - these are the ideal warrior traits.
Then the kind of guy who is used to gutting other guys on the battlefield is probably not averse to beating up his wife and then pretty much assured he is the head of the household.
Also the origin of war is either capturing sex slaves or looting wealth so one can afford a wife.
Today we can afford feminism precisely because we do not need to train most men into becoming warriors.
You know, one society that has sort-of worked through some of the issues with reproduction and equality is religious Judaism. I say "sort of" here for all of the obvious reasons. But if we look at modern Israel, we see a state with a mix of religious and secular traditions where the religious traditions are strong enough to influence overall birthrates and the state has, so far, maintained military superiority over its neighbors and universal conscription.
Unlike other conservative religious groups, Judaism has no particular norm of isolating women (at least not in the way of conservative Muslims,) because it's normal for Orthodox women to work in order to support their families while the men study Torah. The one stay-at-home-dad I know whose wife works to support the family is Orthodox Jewish. Last time I checked they had 4 kids, all quite young, and dad was holding down the hearth.
Obviously Orthodox Judaism is "patriarchal" and "oppressive" by the standards that liberal westerners are used to, but it's lightyears different from places like Afghanistan where the Taliban forbids women from working outside the home and women whose husbands aren't bringing in $$ literally face starvation for themselves and their children.
You are definitely on top of things - I just clicked Evans' article, and 30 seconds later, checked Wood From Eden to find this post!
Although I'll have more to say in a bit after I've read more, it's odd that her own article had no mentions of "matriliny" or "matrilineality," "uxorilocal," "virilocal," or similar anthropological terms; only "patrilineal," with no obvious sense of the correlates of patriliny or alternatives to it. Possibly she didn't need to discuss them? I'd recommend anyone interested in the topic check those terms in wikipedia and google scholar.
From what I've read, female bonobos show high rates of gender solidarity, while female chimpanzees don't. https://www.insidescience.org/news/bonobo-matriarchs-lead-way
But this also depends on the male bonobos not also have gender solidarity, or else males in solidarity could subjugate females in solidarity.
But in humans, women do display strong ingroup preferences for other women, while men don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15491274/
So then, there is a possibility for women of a tribe to band together and create a matriarchy by taking advantage of men that don't band together. But that hasn't really happened. Maybe testosterone plays a part?
It's interesting that Dr Evans brings up a theory that the patriarchy started 300k years ago. This is 285k years before there is evidence of warfare emerges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
"In theory, human females could create strong coalitions and through sheer numbers stay in power in their respective groups." I wonder if this was the case before some cognitive developments allowed men to use their advantage for warfare.
It's controversial but not rejected to say that there was an abrupt phase change in Theory of Mind for humans sometime in the last 100k years. If we also accept that women have better Theory of Mind, it makes sense that they reached the phase change first. Would have fascinating implications for the balance of the sexes. We do see women far more represented in art up to about 15k years ago (no male analog of Venus Statue complex), maybe they were also better at forming alliances. We don't see warfare in that time period.
edit: oh, Evan's own work does emphasize the patriarchy in the last 10k years: https://www.draliceevans.com/post/did-alpha-male-alliances-institutionalise-patriarchy-over-300-000-years-ago