![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Billion Wicked Thoughts
Nov. 5th, 2011 11:04 amMan, I had such high hopes for this book.
The questions "is this biology or environment?" or "is this genetics or environment?"* is dumb. It's like asking whether the dots on my screen are caused by the hardware or the software. The answer is that it arises from a complex interaction between several pieces of hardware and software, and changing either one would produce different dots on the screen. That said, it's totally valid to ask "how much of the difference between thing A and thing B is caused by the software, versus the hardware?" If all I do is change the contrast on my monitor, it's 100% hardware. If I run a different program but leave all the hardware settings the same, it's a software issue.**. If I upgrade from an SNES and Super Mario 2 to a Wii and Super Mario Galaxy, it's both hardware and software: A Wii can't make SM2 look any better because its graphic algorithms expect much weaker hardware, and an SNES doesn't have the hardware to run SMG's graphics algorithms.
When one of the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts was on Savage Love and not only got this, but added to my understanding of it, I was pretty impressed, and the book went to the top of my queue immediately. It's not a bad book, but it's not everything I hoped for.
It's hard to figure out how much I should criticize them for simplifying. Simplifying is necessary, and not everyone has a degree in behavioral biology. Nonetheless, it rubbed me the wrong way. I felt a one-time warning that "just like men are taller on average than women doesn't mean all men are taller than all women, men like X and women like Y doesn't mean a given man likes X more than a given woman" was insufficient, given that they didn't even use the word average in the remainder of the book. Additionally, while their solution to the age old problem of getting honest data about sex is ingenious and should be celebrated, they seem to have mistaken it for a solution to the other age old problem of disentangling genetics and environment. The most interesting parts of the book for me were the cross-cultural comparisons that shed a little light on this issue.
However, the book is extraordinarily well written. I'm prone to checking "how many pages to go?" in slow sections, and I didn't do it once with A Billion Wicked Thoughts. So possibly it's a perfectly good book that just isn't what I wanted it to be. It's far more scientific and generally better than Sex at Dawn, although there are hints the authors committed the opposite fallacy of believing cavemen lived in monogamous nuclear families.
*Which are not the same question.
**Modern computers are blurring this more and more: my monitor actually has software in it, and many programs have the ability to mess with your video card settings. But pretend we're in a simpler time.
The questions "is this biology or environment?" or "is this genetics or environment?"* is dumb. It's like asking whether the dots on my screen are caused by the hardware or the software. The answer is that it arises from a complex interaction between several pieces of hardware and software, and changing either one would produce different dots on the screen. That said, it's totally valid to ask "how much of the difference between thing A and thing B is caused by the software, versus the hardware?" If all I do is change the contrast on my monitor, it's 100% hardware. If I run a different program but leave all the hardware settings the same, it's a software issue.**. If I upgrade from an SNES and Super Mario 2 to a Wii and Super Mario Galaxy, it's both hardware and software: A Wii can't make SM2 look any better because its graphic algorithms expect much weaker hardware, and an SNES doesn't have the hardware to run SMG's graphics algorithms.
When one of the authors of A Billion Wicked Thoughts was on Savage Love and not only got this, but added to my understanding of it, I was pretty impressed, and the book went to the top of my queue immediately. It's not a bad book, but it's not everything I hoped for.
It's hard to figure out how much I should criticize them for simplifying. Simplifying is necessary, and not everyone has a degree in behavioral biology. Nonetheless, it rubbed me the wrong way. I felt a one-time warning that "just like men are taller on average than women doesn't mean all men are taller than all women, men like X and women like Y doesn't mean a given man likes X more than a given woman" was insufficient, given that they didn't even use the word average in the remainder of the book. Additionally, while their solution to the age old problem of getting honest data about sex is ingenious and should be celebrated, they seem to have mistaken it for a solution to the other age old problem of disentangling genetics and environment. The most interesting parts of the book for me were the cross-cultural comparisons that shed a little light on this issue.
However, the book is extraordinarily well written. I'm prone to checking "how many pages to go?" in slow sections, and I didn't do it once with A Billion Wicked Thoughts. So possibly it's a perfectly good book that just isn't what I wanted it to be. It's far more scientific and generally better than Sex at Dawn, although there are hints the authors committed the opposite fallacy of believing cavemen lived in monogamous nuclear families.
*Which are not the same question.
**Modern computers are blurring this more and more: my monitor actually has software in it, and many programs have the ability to mess with your video card settings. But pretend we're in a simpler time.
