A theory of male and female Sociopathy, pt 2

Note: this is just a theory, developed in reaction to recent conversations. 

As we were discussing Friday, one form of female sociopathy (at least relevant to this conversation) likely involves manipulating or coercing others into providing resources for her children.

There are a couple of obvious tropes:

1. The evil stepmother, who shunts resources away from a man’s first child, toward his later children. 
2. The cuckoldress, who tricks or convinces a man to care for another man’s children (this is not always seen as evil, since the male drive to provide for children is triggered at least partly by their proximity, since men cannot give birth, and thus men feel genuine affection for children who happen to be around them,)
3. The crazy ex, who sues a man for all he is worth, doing her best to prevent him from being able to provide for any future children. 

How crazy are women? 

22%–slightly more than 1 in 5–women have been diagnosed with a mental illness, at least according to all of the data I’ve seen. Since mental illness peaks during the childbearing ages and falls off quickly after menopause, we can also assume that this rate is closer to 1 in 4 during these years. 

(The dramatic problems our Native American communities are facing is a separate matter, deserving of its own post.)

The odd thing about this data is that mental illness rates are higher for women than men, despite the fact that mental retardation and mental disability rates are higher for men than women. Men are more likely than women to have serious conditions like non-verbal autism and schizophrenia, more likely to be homeless or commit suicide. When things go terribly wrong, the sufferers are disproportionately male (an unfortunate side effect of the Y chromosome causing greater male variability than female variability on a variety of traits.) 

So why on earth do more women than men suffer from mental illness? 

Perhaps some forms of mental illness confer some unexpected benefits on women. 

Many (perhaps most) “mental illnesses” correlate with a single personality trait–neuroticism: 

“Previously we thought that mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse, were completely separate diseases,” Ystrøm says.

But research has now shown that these illnesses are often linked. If you suffer from one mental illness, you are more likely to develop another. And if someone in your immediate family has a psychiatric illness, your risk increases not only for this disorder, but for all other disorders.

These findings have led researchers to suspect that there could be a common underlying factor that increases an idividual’s risk of mental illness, overall. … 

Ystrøm and colleagues have used new statistical methods to look for patterns in personality, mental disorders, genes, and environmental factors, among the twins in the Twin Register. 

And the answer to the question the researchers asked is: yes, neuroticism seems to be the personality trait that best describes the risk of all mental disorders. …

“This one trait doesn’t explain everything. Anyone can develop a mental illness…”

And in women, neuroticism correlates with… more surviving offspring (in at least one study): 

Taking an evolutionary approach, we use data from a contemporary polygynous high-fertility human population living in rural Senegal to investigate whether personality dimensions are associated with key life-history traits in humans, i.e., quantity and quality of offspring. We show that personality dimensions predict reproductive success differently in men and women in such societies and, in women, are associated with a trade-off between offspring quantity and quality. In women, neuroticism positively predicts the number of children, both between and within polygynous families. Furthermore, within the low social class, offspring quality (i.e., child nutritional status) decreases with a woman’s neuroticism, indicating a reproductive trade-off between offspring quantity and quality. 

What is neuroticism, in the Big 5 Personality Traits* sense? 

*Note: I am not endorsing or denying all five traits one way or another.

It’s worrying. Mothers who worry more about their offspring have more offspring–though it’s quite easy to imagine that the causality points in the opposite direction as the study’s authors conclude–poor women with lots of skinny babies have more reason to worry about their children than women with a few fat babies. 

When are women most likely to experience mental illness?

Immediately after the birth of a child. It’s called post-partum depression, and it can be very bad–one woman in my moms’ group ended up in the mental hospital after developing post-partum psychosis. Andrea Yates famously drowned her five children during a bout of post-partum depression/psychosis.

Why on earth would women develop a debilitating mental illness at the most vulnerable time in their offspring’s life? Wouldn’t natural selection select rather quickly against anything that makes women worse at taking care of their offspring? 

Let’s turn to everyone’s favorite genetic disease, sickle cell anemia. SCA is famous for being a relatively simple genetic mutation of the sort where if you have one copy of the sickle cell gene, you are less likely to get malaria, and if you have two copies, you tend to die. In areas where malaria is common, the cost of having a quarter of your children die from SCA is lower than the cost of loosing them to malaria. 

Personality traits, including neuroticism, generally exist on a continuum. People may become more neurotic when life warrants it, and less neurotic when they don’t need to worry. A mother with a new baby is in a very vulnerable state–she has just lost a good deal of blood, may not be able to walk, and has an infant to care for every other hour, day and night. It is not a normal state by any measure. It is a time when being extra attentive and extra aware of threats and predators is in a woman’s interest.

It is also a time when women are most in need of help from their mates, relatives, or other friends. Increased neuroticism may also prompt others to attend more closely to the new mother, helping her out. . Increased neuroticism may be so helpful during this time period that a few women getting way too much neuroticism and becoming extremely depressed or even killing their children is a cost outweighed by the increased survival of babies whose mothers had moderate levels of neuroticism. 

Let us note that nature doesn’t care about your feelings. Male praying mantises who allow themselves be eaten by their mates have more offspring than the ones who don’t, but that doesn’t mean male praying mantises enjoy getting eaten. Children who die of sickle

cell anemia don’t much appreciate that their siblings were protected from malaria, either.

An increase in neuroticism immediately after the birth of a baby may prompt a mother to take better care of it, but that doesn’t mean she enjoys the neuroticism. Neither does it mean that post-partum depression is healthy, any more than sickle cell anemia is healthy just because it’s a side effect of a trait that helps people avoid malaria. 

But wait, I have more studies!

Reproductive Fitness and Genetic Risk of Psychiatric Disorders in the General Population: 

The persistence of common, heritable psychiatric disorders that reduce reproductive fitness is an evolutionary paradox. Here, we investigate the selection pressures on sequence variants that predispose to schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) using genomic data from 150,656 Icelanders, excluding those diagnosed with these psychiatric diseases. … Higher polygenic risk of autism is associated with fewer children and older age at first child whereas higher polygenic risk of ADHD is associated with having more children. We find no evidence for a selective advantage of a high polygenic risk of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Rare copy-number variants conferring moderate to high risk of psychiatric illness are associated with having fewer children and are under stronger negative selection pressure than common sequence variants. …

In summary, our results show that common sequence variants conferring risk of autism and ADHD are currently under weak selection in the general population of Iceland. However, rare CNVs that also impact cognition are under stronger selection pressure, consistent with mutation-selection balance. The hypothesis that a selective advantage accounts for the prevalence of sequence variants conferring risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is unproven, but rather this empirical evidence suggests that common sequence variants largely escape selection as their individual effect sizes are weak.

Unfortunately, this study mostly looks at the data in aggregate, instead of breaking it down by males and females. (And I don’t know why they would bother excluding people who actually have the conditions they are trying to study, but perhaps it doesn’t make much difference.) 

Thankfully, they did break down the data by male/female in the tables–Table 1 and Table 2. These tables are confusing, but the takeaway is that mental illness has a bigger effect on male fertility than female fertility. 

Also: Fecundity of Patients with Schizophrenia, Autism, Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Anorexia Nervosa, or Substance Abuse vs. their Unffected Siblings: 

Results Except for women with depression, affected patients had significantly fewer children (FR range for those with psychiatric disorder, 0.23-0.93; P < 10⁻¹⁰). This reduction was consistently greater among men than women, suggesting that male fitness was particularly sensitive. Although sisters of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder had increased fecundity (FR range, 1.02-1.03; P < .01), this was too small on its own to counterbalance the reduced fitness of affected patients. Brothers of patients with schizophrenia and autism showed reduced fecundity (FR range, 0.94-0.97; P < .001). Siblings of patients with depression and substance abuse had significantly increased fecundity (FR range, 1.01-1.05; P < 10⁻¹⁰). In the case of depression, this more than compensated for the lower fecundity of affected individuals.

Conclusions Our results suggest that strong selection exists against schizophrenia, autism, and anorexia nervosa and that these variants may be maintained by new mutations or an as-yet unknown mechanism. Bipolar disorder did not seem to be under strong negative selection. Vulnerability to depression, and perhaps substance abuse, may be preserved by balancing selection, suggesting the involvement of common genetic variants in ways that depend on other genes and on environment.

Now, this study gets interesting in its graphs: 

From Fecundity of Patients with Schizophrenia, Autism, Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Anorexia Nervosa, or Substance Abuse vs their Unaffected Siblings

In every case, mental illness has a bigger effect on male fertility than female–and in the case of depression, it has no effect on female fertility. 

But wait: 

Same source.

This graph is confusingly labeled, but it is breaking down the correlation on the brothers and sisters of people with mental disorders. So the first dot represents the brothers of people with schizophrenia; the second dot represents the sisters of people with schizophrenia. 

None of these effects are huge, and some of them changed when “comorbidities were included in the analysis,” though it’s not clear exactly what that means–the word comorbidity in this context refers to people with more than one diagnosis. 

For the objectives of this study, we first analyzed each disorder separately without accounting for comorbidities. A secondary analysis was then performed that corrected for comorbidities by analyzing all disorders simultaneously.

So when you analyze all of the disorders together, sisters of schizophrenics had no increased fertility, and neither did the siblings of people with bipolar. Depressed men had average fertility, while depressed women actually had slightly above average fertility. The results for anorexia, substance abuse, and autism didn’t change. 

And from Spain: Seven Dimensions of Personality Pathology are Under Sexual Selection in Modern Spain: 

Personality variation is increasingly thought to have an adaptive function. This is less clear for personality disorders (PDs)—extreme variants of personality that cause harm in most aspects of life. However, the possibility that PDs may be maintained in the population because of their advantages for fitness has been not convincingly tested. In a sample of 959 outpatients, we examined whether, and how, sexual selection acts on the seven main dimensions of personality pathology, taking into account mating success, reproductive success, and the mediating role of status. We find that, to varying extents, all personality dimensions are under sexual selection. Far from being predominantly purifying, selective forces push traits in diverging, often pathological, directions. These pressures differ moderately between the sexes. Sexual selection largely acts in males through the acquisition of wealth, and through the duration (rather than the number) of mates. This gives a reproductive advantage to males high in persistence–compulsivity. Conversely, because of the decoupling between the number of mates and offspring, the promiscuous strategy of psychopaths is not so successful. Negative emotionality, the most clinically detrimental trait, is slightly deleterious in males but is positively selected in females, which can help to preserve variation. 

It’s interesting that the invention of birth control may have inadvertently selected against promiscuous psychopaths–rather similar to the theory that abortion is responsible for the decrease in crime since the early 90s. 

“Negative emotionality” is likely equivalent to “neuroticism.”

There are two obvious reasons why mental illness might have more of an effect on males than females–one is that mental illness might simply be mores severe for males than females, on average. The second is that mental illness interferes more with holding down a job than with being a housewife, so women with mental illnesses have more options than men. 

Less obvious, though, is that some of these traits might actually be beneficial–in small quantities–for women.

That’s enough for now; let’s continue this discussion on Friday. (Wednesday is book club.) 

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A theory of male and female Sociopathy pt 1

Note: this is just a theory, developed in reaction to recent conversations. 

Let us assume, first of all, that men and women have different optimal reproductive strategies, based on their different anatomy. In case you have not experienced birth yourself, it’s a difference of calories, time, and potential death. 

In the ancestral environment (before child support laws, abortion, birth control, or infant formula):

For men, the absolute minimal paternal investment in a child–immediate abandonment–involves a few minutes of effort and spoonful of semen. There are few dangers involved, except for the possibility of other males competing for the same female. A hypothetical man could, with very little strain or extra physical effort, father thousands of children–gay men regularly go through the physical motions of doing just that, and hardly seem exhausted by the effort.

For women, the absolute minimal parental investment is nine months of gestation followed by childbirth. This is calorically expensive, interferes with the mother’s ability to take care of her other children, and could kill her. A woman who tried to maximize her pregnancies from menarchy to menopause might produce 25 children. 

If a man abandons his children, there is a decent chance they will still survive, because they can be nursed by their mother; if a woman abandons her child, it is likely to die, because its father cannot lactate and so cannot feed it. 

In sum, for men, random procreative acts (ie, sex) are extremely low-cost and still have the potential to produce offspring. For women, random procreative acts are extremely costly. So men have an incentive to spread their sperm around and women have an incentive to be picky about when and with whom they reproduce.  

This is well known to, well, everyone. 

Now, obviously most men do not abandon their children (nor do most women.) It isn’t in their interest to do so. A man’s children are more likely to survive and do well in life if he invests in them. (In a few societies where paternity is really uncertain, men invest resources in their sisters’ children, who are at least related to them, rather than opting out altogether.) As far as I know, some amount of male input into their children or their sisters’ children is a human universal–the only variation is in how much. 

Men want to invest in their children because this helps their children succeed, but a few un-tended bastards here and there are not a major problem. Some of them might even survive. 

By contrast, women really don’t want to get saddled with bastards. 

We may define sociopathy, informally, as attempting to achieve evolutionary ends by means that harm others in society, eg, stealing. In this case, rape and child abandonment are sociopathic ways of increasing men’s reproductive success at the expense of other people. (Note that sociopathy doesn’t have a formal definition and I am using it here as a tool, not a real diagnosis. If someone has a better term, I’m happy to use it.)

This is, again, quite obvious–everyone knows that men are much more likely than women to be imprisoned for violent acts, rape included. Men are also more likely than women to try to skip out on their child support payments. 

Note that this “sociopathy” is not necessarily a mental illness, (a true illness ought to make a dent on one’s evolutionary success.) Genghis Khan raped a lot of women, and it turned out great for his genes. It is simply a reproductive strategy that harms other people. 

So what does female sociopathy look like? 

It can’t look like male sociopathy, because child abandonment decreases a woman’s fertility. For a woman, violence and abandonment would be signs of true mental defects. Rather, we want to look at ways women improve their chances of reproductive success at the expense of others. 

In other words, female sociopathy involves manipulating or coercing others into providing resources for her children. 

But it’s getting late; let’s continue with part 2 on Monday. (Wednesday is book club.)

The Female Problem

 

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in their laboratory, 1912

As Pumpkin Person reports, 96% of people with math IQs over 154 are male (at least in the early 1980s.) Quoting from  Feingold, A. (1988). Cognitive gender differences are disappearing. American Psychologist, 43(2), 95-103:

When the examinees from the two test administrations were combined, 96% of 99 scores of 800 (the highest possible scaled score), 90% of 433 scores in the 780-790 range, 81% of 1479 scores between 750 and 770, and 56% of 3,768 scores of 600 were earned by boys.

The linked article notes that this was an improvement over the previous gender gap in high-end math scores. (This improvement may itself be an illusion, due to the immigration of smarter Asians rather than any narrowing of the gap among locals.)

I don’t know what the slant is among folks with 800s on the verbal sub-test, though it is probably less–far more published authors and journalists are male than top mathematicians are female. (Language is a much older human skill than math, and we seem to have a corresponding easier time with it.) ETA: I found some data. Verbal is split nearly 50/50 across the board; the short-lived essay had a female bias. Since the 90s, the male:female ratio for scores over 700 improved from 13:1 to 4:1; there’s more randomness in the data for 800s, but the ratio is consistently more male-dominated.

High SAT (or any other sort of) scores is isolating. A person with a combined score between 950 and 1150 (on recent tests) falls comfortably into the middle of the range; most people have scores near them. A person with a score above 1350 is in the 90th%–that is, 90% of people have scores lower than theirs.

People with scores that round up to 1600 are above the 99th%. Over 99% of people have lower scores than they do.

And if on top of that you are a female with a math score above 750, you’re now a minority within a minority–75% or more of the tiny sliver of people at your level are likely to be male.

Obviously the exact details change over time–the SAT is periodically re-normed and revised–and of course no one makes friends by pulling out their SAT scores and nixing anyone with worse results.

But the general point holds true, regardless of our adjustments, because people bond with folks who think similarly to themselves, have similar interests, or are classmates/coworkers–and if you are a female with high math abilities, you know well that your environment is heavily male.

This is not so bad if you are at a point in your life when you are looking for someone to date and want to be around lots of men (in fact, it can be quite pleasant.) It becomes a problem when you are past that point, and looking for fellow women to converse with. Married women with children, for example, do not typically associate in groups that are 90% male–nor should they, for good reasons I can explain in depth if you want me to.

A few months ago, a young woman named Kathleen Rebecca Forth committed suicide. I didn’t know Forth, but she was a nerd, and nerds are my tribe.

She was an effective altruist who specialized in understanding people through the application of rationality techniques. She was in the process of becoming a data scientist so that she could earn the money she needed to dedicate her life to charity.

I cannot judge the objective truth of Forth’s suicide letter, because I don’t know her nor any of the people in her particular communities. I have very little experience with life as a single person, having had the good luck to marry young. Nevertheless, Forth is dead.

At the risk of oversimplifying the complex motivations for Forth’s death, she was desperately alone and felt like she had no one to protect her. She wanted friends, but was instead surrounded by men who wanted to mate with her (with or without her consent.) Normal people can solve this problem by simply hanging out with more women. This is much harder for nerds:

Rationality and effective altruism are the loves of my life. They are who I am.

I also love programming. Programming is part of who I am.

I could leave rationality, effective altruism and programming to escape the male-dominated environments that increase my sexual violence risk so much. The trouble is, I wouldn’t be myself. I would have to act like someone else all day.

Imagine leaving everything you’re interested in, and all the social groups where people have something in common with you. You’d be socially isolated. You’d be constantly pretending to enjoy work you don’t like, to enjoy activities you’re not interested in, to bond with people who don’t understand you, trying to be close to people you don’t relate to… What kind of life is that? …

Before I found this place, my life was utterly unengaging. No one was interested in talking about the same things. I was actually trying to talk about rationality and effective altruism for years before I found this place, and was referred into it because of that!

My life was tedious and very lonely. I never want to go back to that again. Being outside this network felt like being dead inside my own skin.

Why Forth could not effectively change the way she interacted with men in order to decrease the sexual interest she received from them, I do not know–it is perhaps unknowable–but I think her life would not have ended had she been married.

A couple of years ago, I met someone who initiated a form of attraction I’d never experienced before. I was upset because of a sex offender and wanted to be protected. For months, I desperately wanted this person to protect me. My mind screamed for it every day. My survival instincts told me I needed to be in their territory. This went on for months. I fantasized about throwing myself at them, and even obeying them, because they protected me in the fantasy.

That is very strange for me because I had never felt that way about anyone. Obedience? How? That seemed so senseless.

Look, no one is smart in all ways at once. We all have our blind spots. Forth’s blind spot was this thing called “marriage.” It is perhaps also a blind spot for most of the people around her–especially this one. She should not be condemned for not being perfect, any more than the rest of us.

But we can still conclude that she was desperately lonely for normal things that normal people seek–friendship, love, marriage–and her difficulties hailed in part from the fact that her environment was 90% male. She had no group of like-minded females to bond with and seek advice and feedback from.

Forth’s death prompted me to create The Female Side, an open thread for any female readers of this blog, along with a Slack-based discussion group. (The invite is in the comments over on the Female Side.) You don’t have to be alone. (You don’t even have to be good at math.) We are rare, but we are out here.

(Note: anyone can feel free to treat any thread as an Open Thread, and some folks prefer to post over on the About page.)

Given all of this, why don’t I embrace efforts to get more women into STEM? Why do I find these efforts repulsive, and accept the heavily male-dominated landscape? Wouldn’t it be in my self-interest to attract more women to STEM and convince people, generally, that women are talented at such endeavors?

I would love it if more women were genuinely interested in STEM. I am also grateful to pioneers like Marie Curie and Lise Meitner, whose brilliance and dedication forced open the doors of academies that had formerly been entirely closed to women.

The difficulty is that genuine interest in STEM is rare, and even rarer in women. The over-representation of men at both the high and low ends of mathematical abilities is most likely due to biological causes that even a perfect society that removes all gender-based discrimination and biases cannot eliminate.

It does not benefit me one bit if STEM gets flooded with women who are not nerds. That is just normies invading and taking over my territory. It’s middle school all over again.

If your idea of “getting girls interested in STEM” includes makeup kits and spa masks, I posit that you have no idea what you’re talking about, you’re appropriating my culture, and you can fuck off.

Please take a moment to appreciate just how terrible this “Project Mc2” “Lip Balm Lab” is. I am not sure I have words sufficient to describe how much I hate this thing and its entire line, but let me try to summarize:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with lib balm. The invention of makeup that isn’t full of lead and toxic chemicals was a real boon to women. There are, in fact, scientists at work at makeup companies, devoted to inventing new shades of eye shadow, quicker-drying nail polish, less toxic lipstick, etc.

And… wearing makeup is incredibly normative for women. Little girls play at wearing makeup. Obtaining your first adult makeup and learning how to apply it is practically a rite of passage for young teens. Most adult women love makeup and wear it every day.

Except:

Nerd women.

Female nerds just aren’t into makeup.

Marie Curie, fashionista

I’m not saying they never wear makeup–there’s even a significant subculture of people who enjoy cosplay/historical re-enactment and construct elaborate costumes, including makeup–but most of us don’t. Much like male nerds, we prioritize comfort and functionality in the things covering our bodies, not fashion trends.

And if anything, makeup is one of the most obvious shibboleths that distinguishes between nerd females and normies.

In other words, they took the tribal marker of the people who made fun of us throughout elementary and highschool and repackaged it as “Science!” in an effort to get more normies into STEM, and I’m supposed to be happy about this?!

I am not ashamed of the fact that women are rarer than men at the highest levels of math abilities. Women are also rarer than men at the lowest levels of math abilities. I feel no need to cram people into disciplines they aren’t actually interested in just so we can have equal numbers of people in each–we don’t need equal numbers of men and women in construction work, plumbing, electrical engineering, long-haul trucking, nursing, teaching, childcare, etc.

It’s okay for men and women to enjoy different things–on average–and it’s also okay for some people to have unusual talents or interests.

It’s okay to be you.

(I mean, unless you’re a murderer or something. Then don’t be you.)

Antagonistic Selection and Invading Armies

We don’t naturally look like this

Evolution is a fabulous principle, but it can only do so much. It has yet to give us titanium bones or x-ray vision, nor has it solved the problem of death. It even gives us creatures like praying mantises, who eat their mates.

Genetically speaking, men and women are actually quite similar, at least compared to, say, trees. There’s a great deal of overlap between male and female instincts–we both get hungry, we both fall in love, we both think the Ghostbusters remake was an abomination.

While evolution would like* to code for perfect men and perfect women, since we are the same species and ever male has a mom and every female has a dad, genetics ultimately can’t code for perfect men and perfect women. *yes I am anthropomorphizing

Remember, there are only two chromosomes which code for sexual development, the so called XX (female) and XY (male). Both men and women have at least one X, but no women have a Y.

It doesn’t work out that men are, like, expressing half female genes and half male genes, since the Y chromosome blocks the expression of some of the female genes. However, men still have those genes.

Sexual antagonism or “sexual conflict” occurs when a genetic trait that makes one sex better at reproducing makes the opposite sex worse at reproducing:

Interlocus sexual conflict is the interaction of a set of antagonistic alleles at one or more loci in males and females.^[6] An example is conflict over mating rates. Males frequently have a higher optimal mating rate than females because in most animal species, they invest fewer resources in offspring than their female counterparts. Therefore, males have numerous adaptations to induce females to mate with them. Another well-documented example of inter-locus sexual conflict is the seminal fluid of Drosophila melanogaster, which up-regulates females’ egg-laying rate and reduces her desire to re-mate with another male (serving the male’s interests), but also shortens the female’s lifespan reducing her fitness.

From: A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture

In humans, for example, women benefit from being thin and short, while men benefit from being tall and bulky. But a short, thin woman is more likely to have a short, thin, son, which is not beneficial, and a tall, bulky man is likely to have a tall, bulky daughter–also not beneficial.

Whatever instincts we see in one gender, we likely see–in some form–in at least some members of the opposite gender. So If there is–as some folks around these parts allege–an instinct which makes women submissive to invading armies, then it likely affects some men, too.

For the few men who do survive an invasion, not protesting as your wife is gang raped might keep you alive to later reproduce, too

Hence the recent rise of cuckoldry fetishes.