Michael Levin > Quotes

“So long as feminism remains institutionalized it will purvey coercion. Feminists may be beyond rational persuasion, and will continue to proclaim their errors with complete assurance. But they are, in the end, asking women to make themselves unattractive to men and to forego love and children. Feminism will be forgotten, commanding only the loyalty of barren women whose genetic lines are running to extinction.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Judged historically, the free market is the most successful economic arrangement. Permitting people to trade and associate freely for productive purposes has created unparalleled prosperity, along with support for the democratic institutions on which other forms of individual liberty have been found to depend. It is inevitable that feminists reject the free market, however, because they must interpret the expressions of sex differences facili­tated by the freedom of the market as products of adverse socialization and discrimination.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“To say that men want more intensely than women to be in a position to perform highly remunerated tasks is not to say that men deserve to do these tasks or that men do them better. There is no cosmic cashier dispensing wages for having a virilized brain. Nobody gets paid without performing. But because men try harder more often, they will, if not forcibly prevented, succeed more often than women in attaining highly-paid positions.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“While part of the reason for the scientific sterility of feminism is its failure to ask why, a further cause of this sterility is the widespread impres­sion that it is up to the nativist to prove the existence of innate sex differences, and that, if he cannot, sex differences may be presumed to be learned.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Success in extrafamilial pursuits goes against deep-seated female impulses. Women are hypergamous. They seek men of higher status than themselves, for substan­tially the same reason that females have always sought to mate with the alpha male; he has proven his ability to protect her and her offspring. The higher a woman climbs in hierarchies, the fewer men she will find appealing—and, since males prefer to dominate sexual bonding pairs, the fewer men she will appeal to.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Using culture as the all-purpose explanation of human behavior ignores the fact that culture itself is just one more natural phenomenon, a product of what is innate in man responding to the environ­ments in which man has found himself. If culture always encourages people to raise boys and girls differently, then people are innately disposed to develop cultures which so encourage them.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“The claim made in popular debate that the race difference intelligence is genetic should be taken to mean that black and white children would not develop the same mean intelligence if raised in the same environment, and, perhaps, the stronger thesis that blacks would develop lower intelligence than identically raised whites in all practically possible environments. “Hereditarianism” is a convenient label for the latter view, and its denial, the claim that identically raised blacks and whites would develop identical mean intelligence, may be called “environmentalism.”
― Michael Levin, Why Race Matters

“The intensity of feminist rage at femininity should not be allowed to obscure the universality of feminist anger. It is difficult to call to mind another social movement in which feelings of displeasure and belligerence play so prominent a role. Now, the only thing so ubiquitous in the feminist’s field of vision that she finds it everywhere she looks is herself. It is not femininity in the abstract that feminists hate, but their own feminin­ity.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“The Bell Curve might have been called Why Intelligence Matters, explaining the connection of intelligence to life outcomes; this book completes the syllogism.”
― Michael Levin, Why Race Matters

“Even if nothing were known of fetal hormonalization, cerebral lateraliza­tion, natural selection, or the behavior of infants, the failure of environmen­tal explanations of patriarchy would force the conclusion that male dominance is biologically based.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“The connection between classroom dynamics and innate gender dimor­phism was widely recognized by educators before the subject became taboo. Since girls get information from words while boys get information by mani­pulating objects, have a shorter attention span, and begin to act up when forced to listen to teachers, the classroom situation overwhelmingly favors girls.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“A natural starting point for discussing variations in intelligence and temperament is the psychometric literature. This literature does indeed reveal large group differences, [...] Black children do not perfo in school as if they are as able and motivated as white or Asian children. Black adults do not succeed in science, art, commerce, or the professions as if they were as able and motivated as white or Asian adults. On the whole, blacks encountered in everyday life, in the press, and on television news broadcasts do not behave like whites or Asians. Moreover, evidence of the equal intelligence of the races would presumably exist were the races in fact equal, and be prominently cited by the many social scientists who passionately believe they are. Yet this does not happen. [...] Everyday observation, together with the failure of egalitarians to produce evidence that the races are equal, disconfirms racial parity.”
― Michael Levin, Why Race Matters

“The greatest discovery of feminist scholarship is so patently foolish, the arguments enlisted for it so meretricious, that, had its partisans been men unprotected by the guilt feelings of critics, it would have been laughed to silence.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Feminist relativism has three sources. One is the embarrassment caused feminists by the biological and behavioral sciences. The only remaining barrier against the tide of evidence for important innate gender dimorphism is rejection of the idea of evidence. When reason goes against a man, said Hobbes, the man goes against reason. The second source is Marxism, which also rejects the idea of a world independent of human praxis. The third is unfamiliarity with science, including the work of female scientists.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“If the overparticipation of males has distorted science, it is impossible to understand why airplanes, built on the basis of distorted male physics, should stay up.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Feminists in search of culprits might begin by looking in the mirror.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“It is sometimes argued that the biologically determined differential success rates of men and women are unjust since, had women been treated fairly over the milennia, the market would have evolved to reward female talents as much as it now rewards male talents. Trying to substantiate a conditional this counterfactual is like trying to determine whether Julius Caesar would have used atomic weapons had they been available 2,000 years ago.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“If sex roles are to be regarded as the outcome of bargaining in which men received dominance in exchange for the risk of violent death, it is hardly clear that they got the better deal.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“One thing I think this is showing us is that focusing on the brain as the source of inspiration for machine learning is derived from a very specialized architecture. I’ve been suggesting that a true general purpose intelligence is much more likely to arise not from mimicking the structure of the core of the human cortex, or anything like that, but from actually taking seriously the computational principles that life has been applying since the very beginning.

CHRISTINA: Paramecia?

MICHAEL: Even before that. Bacteria biofilms. All that stuff has been solving problems in ways that we have yet to figure out. They’re able to generalize, they’re able to learn from experience with a small number of examples. They make self-models. It’s amazing what they can do. That should be the inspiration. I think the future of machine learning and AI technologies will not be based on brains, but on this much more ancient, general ability of life to solve problems in novel domains.”
― Michael Levin

“The male advantage in dominance-aggression makes patriarchy inevitable because men will always strive harder than women to reach the top of hierarchies they encounter, and create hierarchies to reach the top of if none exist.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Men are penalized less severely for infidelity than women because of the male’s needs to know that the children he is raising are his, but also because the male’s promiscuous impulses are very powerful; society cannot in practice heavily penalize behavior that most of its male members are prone to.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Unlike male-female bonding, which excludes competing loyalties, male bonding is inclusive and builds small groups of men into effective fighting units. The brawling, drinking, athletic rough-house, vulgarity, and sexual braggadocio of young men in groups, incomprehensible to most women, are the rituals that cement the male bond. Young men in groups often risk death rather than be thought “screw ups” by their companions and male authority figures, another aspect of male bonding important in combat and incomprehensible to most women.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Subse­quent events have verified that an entire society whose males are raised without male authority figures would, for its short existence, more closely resemble a Hobbesian state of nature than an egalitarian paradise.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Feminism is an antidemocratic, if not totalitarian, ideology.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Instead of devising rigorous, testable environmental hypotheses to explain in detail a wide range of sex-typed behaviors, feminist scientific method amounts to little more than readiness to criticize the design of experiments already done and scrutinize any data for possible environmentalist reinterpretation.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Tracing chivalry to biology is not to endorse it, but it is to point out the difficulties, perhaps the impossibility, of waging war with a significantly female force.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Because the maintenance of order requires physical strength and aggressiveness, it has been a male task in every society that has ever existed.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Feminist pedagogy refuses to allow children to form their own ideas because it sees the ideas of children as manipulated in just this way by sexist ideology. The only hope for restoring autonomy to children then becomes countermanipulation, and if all education is at bottom brainwashing, the only serious question concerns ownership of the laundry.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“The nature and ramifications of gender differences are empirical questions of biology, psychology, anthro­pology, sociology, political science, and history. Their dispassionate study will differ greatly from the drawing of foregone conclusions of the sort expounded in women’s studies courses.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom

“Nothing could have produced this degree of anger at men and hatred of self but a childhood in which femaleness went unconfirmed by an ineffectual father, together perhaps with a dominant mother. Neglect and uncertainty produced profound feelings of disappointment that festered into resentment and a desire for revenge against the man who failed the feminist-to-be. Committed feminists have indeed been cheated—of a father’s love.”
― Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom