Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes

I picked this up on someone's recommendation that I have now completely forgotten, with the pitch being “it gives an extremely accurate description of what it feels like to be each sex.” My partner and I started reading it with that in mind, thinking we might gain some deep understanding into one of life's deeper mysteries. My partner couldn't hack it, and put it down after a chapter or two.

Foolishly, I persevered. In retrospect, I wish I had had the wisdom that my partner did—recognizing a lost cause when I was presented with one.

Fundamentally, there are three things wrong with this book: it is chocked full of factual errors, it is based on lots of extremely suspicious psychology research, and its central thesis depends firmly on group selection. We'll go through these in order.


## Bad Facts

There are lots of (often unimportant) claims in this book that are simply wrong. For example:

> The highly successful Japanese Pokemon card series presents another example, with cards with names such as Enraged Muka Muka, Infernal Incinerator, Creeping Doom Mantra, Malice Doll of Demise, Indomitable Fighter Lei Lei, Cyber Archfiend, Terrorking Salmon, Tribe-Infecting Virus, Nightmare's Steelcage, Invitation to a Dark Sleep, Mad Sword Beast, Dark Driceratops, Gross Ghost of Fled Dreams, Pitch-Black Warwolf, and Dragon Zombie.

These don't sound like any Pokemon I've ever heard of. A little googling shows that these are in fact Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Or how about this one:

> Massively multiple online role-playing computer games, such as the hugely popular World of Warcraft, allow many players armed only with a computer to cooperate from around the world to hunt down and kill one another, team against team, in completely realistic contexts.

I think it's hard to call pretending to be an Orcish Death Knight a “completely realistic context.”

On the topic of things that should have been caught by an editor, we have this gem:

> If another female requires a better territory, more food, or assistance fighting a competitor or predator, a high-status female can lend a helping hand, or mouth or foot.

Lending a mouth doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would help someone else get more food.

> A study in the US Midwest found that bullying followed a predictable pattern. High-status boys bullied low-status boys. In turn, low-status boys bullied high-status girls.

As a low-status boy in school, who was friends with a lot of other low-status boys, there wasn't any bullying of high-status girls. In fact, we were the ones being bullied by high-status girls. My female friends say they never saw any of this bullying of high-status girls either. Of course, this doesn't prove anything, but it certainly doesn't pass the sniff test.

Then there's lots of weird claims like this one:

> If another man is trying to compete, he generally does it in public. He openly bests his competitor, then helps himself to his competitor's food—or his wife.

uhhhh.... that... doesn't seem to be... how competition works in any part of the world I've ever come across...

There is lots of crap stuff like this in the book. None of them really matter, but they do not lend credence to Benenson. If I can't trust her to spot that role-playing as an elf who must drink blood to strengthen his magic might not be realistic, or that men don't actually compete with their wives as collateral, then why should I trust anything else she has to say? Gell-mann amnesia can only take you so far, and we passed that exit a long time ago.


## Very Suspicious Science

There are lots of claims in this book that I highlighted thinking WTF. I didn't open up any of the citations, but a lot of the things referenced didn't seem to be relevant to the point at hand. I don't have any examples right now, unfortunately, and I'm too lazy to pull them up. But, in reading the titles, I also read the years, and almost all of the WTF-enough citations I cared to click on were from the 90s. I'd like to point out that the replication crisis came to our attention in the early 2010s, and it seems likely that it was precipitated by lots of bad research in the 90s.

It's hard to say here whether this is representative of all the citations in the book, or merely the most WTF ones. Nevertheless, here are some quotes from the book I took umbrage with, and my commentary on why.

> The ratio of young men (15–29 years) to older men (30+ years) in a country predicts quite accurately war-related fatalities. In their study of 88 countries from all over the world, Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener [51] showed that as this ratio of young to older men increases, the number of fatalities during conflicts increases enormously.

I hope Benenson is misquoting the study here, because if not, she's saying “a country that has more young men has more causalities in war.” This is presented as a knock-down argument for why men are more violent and “warrior-oriented” than women. Alas, as stated it forgets to account for the fact that if you have more young men, you can send more of them into war. If you have more people at war, more people are going to get shot at, and there will be more casualties than if you had fewer people at war.

This book has lots of examples of misunderstanding data and of ignoring obvious confounders. Like the following:

> Boys raised [in an Israeli orphanage] were more likely to participate in the riskiest and most violent aspects of military service. A full 54% of them volunteered for units with fighting requirements, whereas only 16% of boys raised with their own families did so. Boys raised [in an Israeli orphanage] also displayed the most valor in battle. It is no accident that these were boys who were raised with other boys and away from their mothers.

The claim here is that the presence of women makes men less violent. Maybe. Or maybe it's just that people without families or normal upbringings have less to live for, and valor is the obvious thing to strive for if you don't have many ties to safety or much in the way of prospects back in the civilian world.

There is more like this.

> In business and science, high-status women invest less than high-status men in lower-status same-sex individuals [181, 182, 4]. Recently, my colleagues and I asked young women and men how much money they would share with a less powerful same-sex ally with whom they had worked on a joint project. Women gave much less than men did.

Notice the sleight of hand here. They asked how much people would share; they didn't actually observe people sharing. But the conclusion is that women give much less than men do. Again, I haven't read the study, and maybe it fares better than its presentation here, but given the rest of the red flags in this book, I have no reason to expect it to.

Occasionally, the book gifts us a gem like this one:

> Unsurprisingly, men are more likely to get divorced when they have been married longer, whereas the opposite is true for women.

Unless Benenson is making unrelated commentary on homosexual marriage in the midst of her point, this claim is not even wrong. Men and women are married together, for the same amount of time, and therefore they get divorced after the same amount of marriage.


## Weird Stereotypical Sexism

I'm hesitant to use the word “boomer” immediately under a subheading of “weird stereotypes,” but I'm going to do it anyway. This book has all sorts of weird stereotypes that I've never heard anyone actually espouse, except maybe in meme format on Facebook shared by embarrassing relatives. Things like:

> Probably almost every mother who has ever lived has screamed in her home and commanded, insulted, made fun of, and otherwise acted superior to her family members at times.

My mom didn't. Either this is a knock-down refutation, or Benenson isn't actually saying anything here and has a motte and bailey where she can always retreat to “at times.”

A personal favorite of mine is Benenson's weird fixation on the fact that men are forgetful, irresponsible, and love SPORTS:

> Even where fathers take care of children, many are not certain how old their child is, what day their child was born, where to find their child's doctor, or the name of their child's teacher [14]. None of these fathers, however, has any memory problems when it comes to recalling the names, ages, and statistics of the players on their favorite sports team.

and

> A careful inspection shows that fathers can be distractible when it comes to children. While a father may dutifully push his baby's carriage, his attention is easily distracted by a pretty girl walking by, deliberations with fellow fathers about last night's baseball game, or a new business deal.

and

> Boys, regardless of whether they are educated, grow up to be men, who just don't invest as much in their families. Often, men will choose to spend their money on alcohol and tobacco or leisure activities as much as on their families.

It's comical how meme-y these ideas are.


## Bonus Taylor Swift

Presented unironically:

> Jenny wasn't really interested in a boyfriend, but she still like hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of make-up and miniskirts.


## Group Selection

Let's get down to brass tacks. While it's fun to dunk on this book, this is where the serious structural problems in the argument rear their ugly head. Paraphrasing the synopsis of the book in a few sentences:

> Men and women survive in life via different skills. These different skills are so in-grained that they are biological in nature.
>
> Women are responsible for raising children, and thus have evolved to take good care of themselves and others. This involves WORRYING A LOT.
>
> Men, on the other hand, are all about WAR and FIGHTING ENEMIES. They can impregnate lots of women with very little work, and therefore can dedicate the rest of their energy to fending off enemies for the good of the tribe.

Ignoring the fact that the conclusions don't stem from the premise (tending children is one more thing to worry about, and thus lowers your chance of survival, and fighting is necessarily bad for your health) there is a keen misunderstanding of evolution at play here.

In particular, the argument here that men are warriors because they can get someone pregnant and then lay down their lives for the good of the group is repeatedly hammered home throughout the book:

> A young man will sacrifice his life, most immediately for the other young men in his group who are standing right next to him in battle. That is what his emotions tell him [1, 17, 18]. That is what I believe allows his genes to survive. If he survives, his genes will be more likely to be passed down to his children. If he dies but his community survives, then at least some of his genes, those residing in his closest family members, will be passed down to his nieces and nephews.

and

> If you belong to a boys' group, your allies may not remember your birthday, but they know very well if you can run fast, hit well, respect rules, and make good decisions. They may be competitors, but when things get tough, they're also the ones who will protect you and root for you, and maybe even die for you.

Different, but along the same line:

> [Fathers] know the mother of their children will almost always be there for the children. Of course, around the world, stealing another man's wife or girlfriend is probably the number one cause of murder within a community [192], even in hunter-gatherer societies [22]. But a man doesn't worry as much about this, as long as his wife can care for his children.