When I see these stories taking companies to task over why they sell what they do, I always wonder why nobody holds consumers to task.
For example: why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music?
It's easy to blame the companies -- but in reality it's very hard for a single company to change the macro culture that informs their product decisions. If you want to find the root cause, look at the users and ask why they demand the products they do. In this case: "why are so few parents buying Legos for their girls?" or "why do girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos?"
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
I think Steve has the answer here. But I am just as frustrated as you are.
I've always wondered if Steve was inspired by the movie "Network":
"We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF..."
The second episode of Charlie Brooker's current Black Mirror series of scifi dramas contains elements of Network, but set in a future dystopia where people sort of live inside an ipad that's stuck running farmville. It's a lot better than I've just made it sound. In fact, it's incredible, and terrifying.
I watched this last night, really good viewing. Especially poignant was the ending where the protagonist traded in his morals for a comfortable life and fame. It evoked feelings of disappointment that he was so cheaply bought off, the same kind of disappointment i felt at the end of 1984 when Winston was re-educated.
In some ways it was a case of reductio ad absurdum, but the more you look how popular culture is evolving the more it seems like a logical, yet depressing, conclusion - people's constant pre-occupation with celebrity culture and seeking fame even if it means selling themselves cheaply. I also enjoyed how it captured how people like Simon Cowell are exploitative and manipulative when it comes to shows like the X factor, it's audience and it's contestants.
The big irony was that i watched it online, meaning the show was interspersed with adverts which i could not skip. Made me laugh, i expect Charlie Brooker foresaw this as to further solidify his vision
And here's Aaron Sorkin's first attempt at a hommage to The Network (his second attempt being, of course, The Social Network): http://youtu.be/5zyOhZsvIzI (warning: lots of cursing).
I like to rephrase that: "When you are powerless you think, There's a conspiracy. When you are powerful, you realize that people are getting what they want." With these ideas neither group has to accept any personal responsibility.
That's too much of a simplicistic view. I'll give an example.
A family brings their children to McDonald's, often. McDonald's blasts large amounts of marketing in the children's head.
The children grow up and become adults.
The adults frequently go to McDonald's.
Is fast food what they want? Or is it what the past generation's powerful marketing wanted?
It's a grey area, without any obvious answers.
Naturally, kudos to Steve for his pompous rethor... ahem, for his powerful and revealing words.
The problem is that the people who watch TV aren't the customers. Advertisers are the customers and viewers are the product being sold. To the extent that TV gives viewers what they want to watch, it's a case of optimization-by-proxy, with all the attendant pitfalls.
The Chinese gov is a bit more hands on regulating the morality and frivolity of TV. Even totally apolitical TV shows like match-making shows, which they feel degrade the moral character of the citizenry, are taken off the air by fiat.
True. I'm sure it is the same in Singapore. It is likely a (valuable?) relic of Confucianist paternalism. I'd like to know if it is similar in Japan and Korea.
I tend to agree, but there's a missing element in this economic model, though one that others have mentioned (cf. sunahsuh's comment): marketing. If you look at Marx, or even Smith, it's clear that the wants and demands of the consumers are not always organic, but are often fabricated by the companies themselves. Smith thought this was cool, Marx thought it was evil; in any case, you are right to some extent, but few people go out of their way to buy something they haven't been told they want.
Exactly. When I was a child, Lego held the patent on the plastic brick and therefore could sell bland collections of 4x2s at enormously inflated prices.
When the patent expired, the market was flooded with clone bricks at greatly reduced prices. Lego floundered a bit before figuring out their value was no longer technology but instead "brand recognition".
Since then Lego has been primarily a marketing-oriented company. In fact, "bricks" aren't even close to their main product anymore and only really exists as a branding element at this point.
It would be great if some Chinese company sold huge tubs of quality bricks for a penny each. But it's not going to be from Lego.
The person responsible for this, and much of the modern world, is Edward Bernays, the "father of public relations". He got most of his ideas from his uncle, Sigmund Freud.
Everyone interested in Bernays and how modern Marketing and Public Relations came into existence (and how they are used to control/manipulate us) should take the time and watch the four part BBC documentation 'The Century of the Self' by Adam Curtis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."
It's possible you're right, but that quote is irrelevant. That's about monopolies, specifically in the form of trade associations. Smith thought any kind of monopolies—trusts, unions, import duties—were bad, that's for sure.
I was talking about fabricated demand, which I don't have a quote for because I don't have my notes or copies of Wealth of Nations or Theory of Moral Sentiments with me at the moment. But my basic argument, even if he didn't explicitly treat the subject, would be that fabricated demand is an accumulation of capital, thereby increasing national opulence, which Smith holds as the highest good.
I blame companies instead of consumers because they market the shit out this stuff.
No one is born with an innate desire for that specific Barbie or Lego set. The companies market to you, make you feel like you want it. The companies may not be able to change the entire macro environment, but they actively profit and exploit it.
So yea, they are way more to blame than what 11 year old girls think their place in the world is. Who do you think told them?
> No one is born with an innate desire for that specific Barbie or Lego set. The companies market to you, make you feel like you want it.
True, but it's the fault of both companies and consumers at the same time. It's a feedback loop. Marketing strategies are based on what people are willing to buy, which is based on what companies market. The system feeds on itself.
The company is trying to maximise profit (NB the single use point made in this article).
It is not the 'fault' of a child to want whatever fad is current. Yes, there are broader influences from society, but to paint the child as some kind of active and equal player in this game (aside from their natural love of awesome (eg. superheroes are better than vegetables)) is disingenuous, imo.
Yeah, but they used to market stuff to girls, and generically, but they started doing analytics and switched to marketing stuff that sells more- branded toys to boys. A minor variation in natural preference is expanded by the feedback loop.
That said- you can still buy all of the plain bricks you want from their website. If you don't want the complicated sets, don't buy them. The blocks on their own are fine.
Depressing to see people blaming advertising and marketing as if they as parents are powerless to buy their daughter a lego set unless an advert says they can.
If adverts have more of an influence on your kids than you do, then you're a terrible parent.
People who work at corporations have consciences. They are not run by robots yet. Corporations consist of people with kids of their own. They are human beings. They are not without blame just like the parents.
You speak as if 'the public' were unable to be shaped by offer, advertising, the consumption of peers, as if, in the end, consumption wasn't part of culture, and part of a grand feedback loop all of it.
Giving the public what they're asking for has no necessary relationship with morality at all. Simply because it's what they're asking for doesn't mean it's moral either.
For the downvoter(s), a thought experiment: lynch mobs.
It goes along with the "soft bigotry of low expectations". We've come to a common mental model of the world that disempowers the individual, especially in the realm of responsibilities. The state and the corporation are the sole seats of responsibility and of blame, and thus the sole seats of power.
It's more than a little disturbing to see people willingly disempower themselves in such a fashion for so little in return.
There is nothing wrong with lamenting a change that takes away an easy, beneficial option. It is tacit acknowledgement that if you make the best choices easy to make, then more people will make them.
Given this basic fact, it is our responsibility to exert pressure on states and corporations to make the better options available to us.
All I can say is my son hacks lego sets. He also hacks M4 science kits occasionally too. The fact that it is a model kit doesn't mean that after the model is done, you can't tear it apart and put it in a spare parts box that can be used for freeform building.
>"why do girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos?"
What about marketing and the outsize influence it has on culture? Companies don't just passively follow markets, the biggest ones use advertising to actively create them.
Girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos because Lego has clearly signaled it's a "boys' toy" with their marketing.
By discouraging one 50%, they are encouraging the other 50%. If the increase by encouraging the latter 50% offset the decrease by discouraging the former 50%, they get a net increase in profits. It is a lot easier to market to either boys or girls than to market to boys and girls, so marketing to one half or the other tends to be more profitable than marketing to both.
> It's easy to blame the companies -- but in reality it's very hard for a single company to change the macro culture that informs their product decisions. If you want to find the root cause, look at the users and ask why they demand the products they do. In this case: "why are so few parents buying Legos for their girls?" or "why do girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos?"
I don't believe there's a "root cause", or at least it's not on the same conceptual level as "companies" and "consumers". It's a feedback loop. Companies create markets and needs by marketing, but marketing is never done in vacuum, it's correlated with what people already need. There are lots of loops like that (concept of popularity, or TV - as the quote of Steve somewhere in this thread goes), and we have one side of the loop blaming the other side of the loop, where in fact each side is fine by itself; it's just the combination that's broken and seems to converge on something bad.
It's much easier for a single company to make some changes than it is for a single or even very large group of consumers to drive a change.
It stinks, but every complaint about products asks for an Apple comparison. I would say both Apple and Pixar have demonstrated that sticking to the purity of your craft can be both fulfilling and extremely lucrative.
You assume people want a change. I do not think they do.
Do people want an end to gender specific toys? Certainly some do. But the vast majority do not.
I firmly believe, through interacting with people in general, and my own children, that female and male brains are completely different. They are hard wired to like different things, and behave differently. I don't see anything wrong with that, and don't see any reason to pretend there aren't those differences.
We start the training with regard to gender so early that it's hard to tell what's "nature" and what's "nurture". I'm watching the choices my sister makes during her pregnancy with fascination. Gender is the earliest thing we bombard them with -- painting rooms pink, buying gendered clothes, choosing certain toys.. we don't even thinking about it because it's so normal until, for instance, you make a conscious effort to try and raise your child in a gender neutral environment.
I have 4 kids, three girls and a boy, and they play with other kids their ages, so I have a fair amount of experience with little kids. There are corner cases where you can't tell what's nature and what's nurture, but you haven't really watched little kids if you haven't noticed that little boys (i.e. 2 year olds) bounce off walls much more than little girls, and there's no realistic nurture mechanism for that difference, at least among my friends and neighbors kids. More or less none of us have televisions, and it's too young to be training them at sports (or at least I haven't witnessed any of the parents doing so).
Legos, on the other hand, seem to be nurture: my daughters play with legos more days than not, and we don't have any pastel bricks.
So here's a news story about twin boys, one of whom decided he'd rather be a girl. Pretty much essentially the same "nurture". Still want to blame society when the girl decides she wants to wear pretty dresses? I think that's a hard sell.
Given that they're identical twins, I think it's also pretty clear that this case undercuts the argument that it's all just genetics as well.
Oh, and "decided he'd rather be a girl" is generally considered offensive to trans people. She believes that she's always been a girl, and did not "decide" anything of the kind. Her physical characteristics were simply misleading regarding her true gender.
>"is generally considered offensive to trans people"
Isn't that just being delusional. If I decide that I should have been born as superman, does that mean you now all have to refer to me as the Man of Steel and ignore the fact that I wasn't born with the organs (X-ray eyes, etc.) that would make it possible for me to be said person.
Except in cases of genetic sex indeterminacy a person is born either male or female regardless of what they think they should have been or currently want to be.
You're welcome to adopt your own self-vision but imposing unreality on others is beyond reasonable expectations of society.
The heart of the matter is, what is gender? It's clearly not the case that gender is identical to being biologically male or female, eg, based on which sex organs are present, or on the chromosome. You need only read the Wikipedia pages on "intersex" and "third gender" to see some of the diversity in the world. Sex indeterminacy is only one of many possibilities.
Go back to the original Turing Test. In "The Imitation Game", the questioner must determine which of two people is male and female based only on written notes. (Presumably typewritten or some other means which doesn't even reveal handwriting.) If the only way to tell that a person who looks like a female is actually a male is through a close physical examination, then will you at least agree that they are doing a good job of acting as a female?
Of course there are many people who do that, including actors and cross-dressers, who see it as a different persona which they can put on or take off. For those who work hard at it, it's a sign of respect to be called "she" because it's a recognition of the effort needed to get the body language, and voice patterns, and dress style down.
But some people feel that being born male was a mistake, a birth defect. A cleft palate is a birth defect which is easily fixed nowadays. Nose jobs and breast implants and LASIK are usually voluntary procedures to change a genetic characteristic. Gender reassignment isn't as simple, but much easier pre-puberty. One worry is that the person, decades later, may decide that the choice made as a child was wrong, or at least deluded. That's why there's a lot of counseling involved.
If someone considers themself a female, takes on female gender roles, and to every extent possible acts like a female, then can you see why there's some offense that some side effects of some stupid little chromosome still make others call them a "he" instead of "she"?
That person may still be deluded. The question for you is, how do you tell the difference between a delusion and (what you consider to be the impossible case of) actually being born as the wrong sex? What are the negatives and benefits of encouraging vs. denying that delusion? Bear in mind that clearly a number of transgender people are happier having made that change.
As to your Superman example, "Superman" is a specific person from a fictional world. But suppose you thought you were Kryptonian, and you underwent hypothetical genetic tinkering and technological augmentation to get x-ray vision, super-strength, and so on. Then yes, I would call you a Kryptonian, or a human transformed into a Kryptonian if I wanted to be more precise. Just like my Dad, born Canadian, is now a US citizen. But if you just decide one day that everyone should call you "Superman", without making any effort at it, then don't be surprised if people don't agree with you. What would that effort look like? I saw a Superman impersonator on the Strip in Vegas, and would have no problems calling that person the Man of Steel.
Gender is entirely a social construct very loosely tied to biology but not at all determined by it.
This doesn't sound plausible.
[tl;dr: If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization.]
It may be the case that gender could be very loosely tied to biology in a philosophical or theoretical sense, but in the world that we're in right now, there are very strong adaptive reasons that gender expression and reproductive sex tend to stay close (statistically, of course) in any sexually dimorphic species, which I'd call a very strong "tie to biology".
Evolution 101-wise, gender can only be allowed to diverge from reproductive sex to a limited enough extent that it's more or less irrelevant to reproductive success. Evolution will make sure of that on a long enough time scale (at least up until the modern era, where we can to some extent decouple reproduction from sex).
If the two diverged commonly enough that animals were often foregoing sex with reproductively compatible partners in favor of incompatible ones that nevertheless matched the gender role they were interested in, then an adaptation that better facilitated reproductive matchings would easily emerge and dominate the population.
Note that such a compensating adaptation might even emerge as some form of social behavior, even if the impetus to that behavior was genetically driven; IMO, this doesn't make it any less tied to biology.
As an example, one suggestion [1] to solve the "gay problem" in evolution (why has full homosexuality, where a person is not at all attracted to members of the opposite sex, not been eradicated from the gene pool, since it should be so devastating to reproduction rates?) is that getting rid of the "gay gene" (or genes, or whatever) is actually a very difficult task for evolution to carry out (I'm anthropomorphizing evolution here for ease of speaking, not because I don't realize why that's wrong) for some reason. Difficult enough so that accepting the ~10% homosexuality rate was a better option, though obviously not ideal. So instead of getting rid of homosexuality, evolution tried to mitigate the "damage" that such behavior causes by enhancing an inclination for people to disapprove of it, which meant that even when people/animals were fully homosexual, they still tended to mate with members of the other sex due to social pressure. Thus the seemingly fitness-devastating 10% homosexuality rate was bumped down to a more ignorable number via social effects, and the presence of the gene was a net win. This is not to say that there's a "homophobia gene"; if this theory is correct, I'd guess that evolution more likely leveraged existing social behaviors (like wanting to fit in, or hating people that act differently) and turned them up to a slightly higher level.
In the case of gender identity, I suspect that there is a heavy dosage of social conformity involved in training people to signal their reproductive sex through gendered behavior. But I think it's biologically driven, or at least that it would be extremely surprising if it wasn't, since it's such low-hanging fruit. I'm sure that these biological imperatives are somewhat flexible, and that if pink was considered a boy color then boys would flock to the pink section of Toys R Us, rather than these things being hard-coded into the genome (though certain behaviors are definitely going to be hard-coded, since sex signaling had to take place before higher-level thought centers could be leveraged). But the inclination to figure out what these socially derived sex-signaling behaviors are is not a social construct - that's an evolutionary imperative, so while we may be able to change the particular expressions of gender that we see in the world, it's probably going to be rather difficult to prevent people from seeking them out and conforming to them.
This is why I'm always uncomfortable with nature vs. nurture questions - the environment that evolution optimizes any particular genome to succeed in includes the entire existing social structure, which was also influenced by previous rounds of evolution. So picking apart what is a "social construct" and what is "biological" is really a fool's errand, when it comes down to it - there's a delicate interplay between the two, and they always play off of each other.
[1] I should mention, there are other theories as well, the simplest being that even with the "gay gene", a person is only sometimes fully homosexual (twin studies have shown that homosexuality is definitely not 100% determined by DNA, though it's not 0%, either), so they do rather limited damage, and if tied to useful adaptations, there would be no particular evolutionary imperative to get rid of such a gene; the point, though, is that such arguments only hold up to a point, and if a large percentage of the population was gay, there would be much more selection pressure against that behavior, tamping down the ratio rather quickly to a lower level.
"If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization."
That's not how evolution works! Evolution works at the level of genes, and not individuals. It's easy to construct a model where a 10% gay population ends up being overall better for a population. Consider this made-up hypothesis: gay people are better at caregiving than non-gay people, so a population with gay people ends up with healthier adults who are able to have more, and healthier, children. For this scenario, gayness won't be "optimized" away because that leads to worse reproductive success for the population of genes involved. Nor is the presence of gay individuals "damage", because the result is an evolutionarily better population than one without gay individuals.
As another example, why does Down's syndrome exist? By your logic, shouldn't evolution have optimized that case away? That it hasn't means that changing how the 21st chromosome works is much harder than the impact of having a 1:733 failure rate. Why do you assume that any genetic component to being gay would be easy to change, without having negative consequences elsewhere in the population?
So your error is the belief that evolution emphasizes the reproductive success of individuals, when it deals instead with the reproductive success of genes. Some individuals don't need to reproduce so long as the overall gene population reproduces itself.
BTW, 100 years ago, pink was a boy's color, and young boys wore dresses too. Quoting from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-St... "yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral."
> "If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization."
I think this is actually a pretty reasonable statement, as long as it includes the caveat "on average" or "most of the time". Just as Down's syndrome isn't a huge problem for a population -- as long as it stays relatively uncommon.
A population comprised largely of people with Down's syndrome would likely be poorly adapted, and that's probably the case with a population comprised largely of gay people or transgender people as well. (Obviously, this is complete speculation, so I could be utterly mistaken.)
But yes, a population with a certain percentage of gay people could be better adapted just for having them, or alternatively, it could be better adapted because the same genetic diversity that leads a percentage of the population to be gay could be desirable in other ways.
I think this is actually a pretty reasonable statement, as long as it includes the caveat "on average" or "most of the time". Just as Down's syndrome isn't a huge problem for a population -- as long as it stays relatively uncommon.
Certainly. In the field of evolution, "on average", "statistically", or "most of the time" should be assumed to attach itself to almost every sentence (including this one).
All of this can be made much more precise, by the way, I just didn't mention it above because I already put up a huge wall of text. When it comes to deleterious mutations, there's a rule of thumb in evolution, which is to some extent mathematically provable: one mutation, one death. Statistically, what that means is that a single bad mutation will kill (where by "kill" I really mean "cause to not pass on one's genes to the next generation"), on average, one creature, no matter how bad the mutation is. If it's critical, then it will kill the first carrier before it's born; if it's not so critical, something like poor eyesight, then it will spread much further throughout the population before it kills (on average) one being.
This applies even in the face of mitigating factors. Taking the eyesight example, the fact that we have eyeglasses, and can correct poor vision, means that because poor eyesight kills less often than it did before eyeglasses the genes that cause it will spread much further throughout the population. The presence of the mitigating factor (eyeglasses) allows a potentially deadly gene to spread much further, so that on average it still kills one person per mutation.
So the fact that homosexuality has spread relatively far throughout the population either indicates that a) it is not a deleterious mutation overall (there's some significant benefit to the gene(s) that outweighs the lack of reproductive drive), b) that the mutation happens fairly often, so there are a lot of deaths due to it (this is the case with Down's syndrome), or c) that some damage-control mechanism exists so that the "death" rate is fairly low compared to the incidence of the gene.
In reality, it's probably some combination of all three possibilities; like I mentioned above, everything in evolution is statistical, so it never helps to look for single right answers.
I'm a bit doubtful about the statistics, and I think I know why. There's a circularity to your use of "deleterious mutations" and "bad mutation."
Is the mutation which causes sickle-cell anaemia a "good mutation" or a "bad mutation"? It increases reproductive fitness in places where malaria is or was common, so it must be good, in an evolutionary sense.
How many deaths has it caused once the population of people carrying the haemoglobin gene mutation migrated to a location without malaria? Is that mutation now "good" or "bad"? How do you incorporate those numbers into your statistics?
Is the loss of eyesight a deleterious mutation? Definitely for a bird of prey, but not so for cave-dwelling creatures living in absolute darkness. For that matter, some people are attracted to people who wear glasses (and wearing zero-prescription glasses is such a turn-off!), so it might increase reproductive fitness.
Evolution doesn't know the future. If a population loses genetic resistance to a disease that's seemingly extinct, is that a "good" or "bad" mutation? How long does it take to judge that? After 1,000 years, should some thawed carcass reintroduce it and the species become extinct, does that count finally as a bad mutation and a single death?
For a real world example, consider the birds of New Zealand. They filled ecological niches which elsewhere were filled by mammals. Were these good mutations or bad ones? And when rats and weasels and cats and more were introduced to New Zealand, helping make many of those species extinct, then did those mutations retrospectively become deleterious?
If a genetic madness affects the leader of the US Strategic Air Command to issue orders which end up nuking a dozen Soviet cities, then what are the other cases which make that average out to one? If the nuking didn't occur, then what would the average have been?
What of a mutation which causes a speciation event? Is that a good mutation or a bad one? It's better for one environment and worse for the other.
There's a 10^-9 chance (1-in-a-million) that a "bad" mutation will mutate again back to the "good" form. With nearly 7 billion people in the world, that almost certainly happens a few thousand times every generation. In a generation we may be able to cure some genetic diseases through genetic engineering, so a "bad" mutation can be fixed.
With all those in mind, I can't figure out a way to get the numbers to come out "1" unless the definition of deleterious is defined to make it come out that way.
Yes, the one-mutation-one-death idea is vastly oversimplified when it comes to the real world, so I shouldn't have presented it as being more meaningful than it is. But while it can't be taken as a mathematical truth in the unsimplified real world, the "moral of the story" will holds (that worse mutations can't spread as far as less bad ones).
It's rather simple to prove in the simplified case, it's just a typical steady state assumption. If a population is in an equilibrium state, then the rate at which any mutation is introduced has to be equal to the rate at which it is removed from the population. So if one mutation has a 1% chance to kill its owner each generation, then to maintain equilibrium (in other words, to make sure the prevalence of the mutated gene in the population is stable), every time the mutation shows up anew, it must spread to 100 people, killing one of them. One mutation, one death.
Yes, that's super simplified, it neglects the possibility of multiple mutations, positive or neutral ones, back-mutation, interactions between members of the population, non-equilibrium states, etc. These will change the details of the math, sometimes quite substantially.
But the basic idea, that the worse a mutation is the less prevalent it will be, should hold.
Beneficial and neutral mutations are essentially left out of the equation - they would spread to 100% of the population, so in the steady state, the probability of mutation newly creating a beneficial mutation has to be 0% (since it's already present in every member).
The motivation for ignoring beneficial mutations (and back-mutations to beneficial states) is that they're extremely rare as compared to deleterious ones - most selection pressure in nature is aimed at merely preserving the functionality in the genome, weeding out new deleterious mutations rather than supporting new beneficial ones (though that is a critical role in the very long term, of course).
I still think that your definition of beneficial and deleterious is defined post-hoc as "survives/does not survive long enough to reach the stable state."
In my example earlier regarding extinct bird species on New Zealand, were there ever any beneficial mutations? After all, the genes no longer reproduce.
My point is that there is no stable state, so it's better to have a shorter-term definition of "beneficial" and "deleterious" based on relative reproduction fitness compared to others in the species population over a short time frame.
Additionally, beneficial and neutral mutations do not always spread to 100% of the species population. A Y-linked trait won't spread without a male lineage.
I still think that your definition of beneficial and deleterious is defined post-hoc as "survives/does not survive long enough to reach the stable state."
Yup, that's a pretty good description of the assumption/definition, for all the good and bad things it brings with it; I mostly agree with the rest of what you've said.
FWIW, I've mainly seen the one-mutation-one-death rule applied to arguments that attempted to place informational speed or capacity limits on the process of evolution, and in most cases it has turned out that these arguments fail when applied to the real world because of precisely the types of arguments that you've made against this rule (sexual recombination and the fact that evolution is never in a steady state tend to be the biggest problems).
An aside on the topic of defining beneficial/deleterious mutations: the problem is a very difficult one, because in reality the effect of a mutation is at best distributional and not measurable along a single axis of goodness/badness. I don't know much about the state of the art here, but if I was going to sit down and try to figure out a way to try to estimate "benificial-ness" of a mutation (even as a distribution), I'd say you've put your finger on exactly the right question to focus on, that there's a tension between what might be immediately beneficial and what would be beneficial in the longer term. For instance, a gene that made someone have babies like crazy by always sacrificing one's grandchildren for nourishment would be fantastic for 1-generation-out fitness, but terrible for 2-generations-out. Similarly, in an environment where pre-reproductive death was very common, an adaptation that decreased the likelihood to have children by a small factor but significantly increased the ability to keep them alive would be very beneficial at 2-generations but deleterious at 1. So pure-local effects measured 1 generation down the line won't necessarily tell us enough (though in the vast majority of cases, it's probably good enough).
On the other hand, a purely-global view is not right either, because as you've mentioned, environmental changes or genetic shifts within the species can turn previously helpful traits into "bad" ones. So measuring regret after the fact will not suffice, and further, it misses the fact that at the moment the mutation happens, there is some distribution that describes the likely outcomes of that mutation given the current state of the world, using no information from the future (even if we don't know it or can't feasibly calculate it). The extinct bird species definitely had beneficial mutations even though some freak event wiped them out later, and we need to account for that. So something more subtle is required.
In order to do better we'd probably have to make some assumptions to eventually cut off the familial dependencies, like perhaps that the presence or absence of a gene in an N-th grandparent can have no direct causal effect on the survival of the animal in question (i.e. direct nurture effects are limited in time - even this assumption is questionable in the face of things like family wealth). We'd also have to assume that we could quantify the expected changes in the environment into some sort of distribution, including distributional assumptions for expected changes in the rest of the population (luckily these changes should be rather slow, when measured in generations). Then we could in theory compare the expected size of a family tree branching from a member that possesses a new mutation after that N-th generation, to the base case, the family tree without that mutation. Of course, the "expected size" is a trivialization of the real distribution, which would better describe the possible effects of a mutation (and the details of that distribution might strongly effect the population dynamics).
It quickly gets messy, and requires a lot of assumptions. And even after all that, we wouldn't have a very clean number to work with, i.e. we couldn't easily continuous-ize the situation and write down an ODE that took the "beneficial-ness" of a mutation and showed us what would happen, because other details of the distribution would be important, as well.
That's not how evolution works! Evolution works at the level of genes, and not individuals.
Yes, of course, though in many cases genes achieve their own survival by boosting the survival and reproduction rates of their hosts.
It's easy to construct a model where a 10% gay population ends up being overall better for a population. Consider this made-up hypothesis: gay people are better at caregiving than non-gay people, so a population with gay people ends up with healthier adults who are able to have more, and healthier, children.
You're invoking group selection here, which is exactly what The Selfish Gene debunked in great detail; given your comment above, I'm surprised that you would make this argument.
From the point of view of the gene, in a society that contained a 10% gay population who were better at caregiving, a gene that selfishly reduced the probability of its host's homosexuality would thrive, because not only would its carriers benefit from the caregiving boost thanks to the other members of society without that gene, they would not suffer from the reduced reproductive potential. Only in the long term, as the gene spread throughout the population, would the caregiving benefits start to fade, and that's not a present-enough change in fitness to apply any evolutionary pressure against the gene (more precisely, it can't apply evolutionary pressure because it depends on the prevalence of the gene in other members of the population; it's a classic prisoner's dilemma situation, and if you're going to take one lesson from Dawkins, it's that evolution always chooses to defect).
As another example, why does Down's syndrome exist? By your logic, shouldn't evolution have optimized that case away? That it hasn't means that changing how the 21st chromosome works is much harder than the impact of having a 1:733 failure rate.
Down's syndrome would be exceedingly difficult to optimize away, because it falls into the category of commonly-reproduced-mutation; it is not the result of code that specifically causes Down's syndrome, it's the result of our genetic material being evolutionarily close to a state that results in Down's syndrome, so whenever something goes wrong, the maladaptive trait is rediscovered over and over. Same thing with most other chromosomal disorders (most of which end up filtered out very quickly, well before birth).
FWIW, that's another common theory about how homosexuality has survived, that normal people are "one mutation away" from being gay (or rather, of having the mutation that makes them potentially gay). Both of these cases still presume, however, that the negative consequences of the trait, when combined with the probability of the trait manifesting, are negligible enough compared to the genetic changes that would be required to move us more than "one mutation away".
Why do you assume that any genetic component to being gay would be easy to change, without having negative consequences elsewhere in the population?
I quite explicitly assumed exactly the opposite. My whole comment on that matter was predicated on the assumption that it is not easy to change susceptibility to homosexuality, and that social mitigation was a workaround.
The main reason I brought up homosexuality at all was that it is often pointed to as a counterexample to the idea that reproductively negative traits are weeded out of the gene pool; I wanted to make the point that evolution doesn't necessarily need to weed out such traits directly as long as it can find some way to control their side effects.
BTW, 100 years ago, pink was a boy's color, and young boys wore dresses too.
Yup, that doesn't surprise me. I absolutely believe that much, if not most, of what signals male/female in today's society is arbitrary. However, I think that the existence of some set of traits that each sex uses to signal reproductive class is very much innate.
bermanoid wrote: "You're invoking group selection here" ... "it's a classic prisoner's dilemma situation, and if you're going to take one lesson from Dawkins, it's that evolution always chooses to defect)"
It's kin selection, not group selection. Consider Dawkins' "Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection" wherein he writes:
"To stick my neck out a little, it seems to me that, far from genes for altruistic behaviour being implausible, it may even be that a majority of behavioural mutations will turn out to be properly describable as either altruistic or selfish." ... "A gene for altruism, then, is any gene that, compared with its alleles, causes individuals to benefit other individuals at a cost to themselves." ... "But the kind of mutation that could lead to such altruistic restraint could be ludicrously simple. A genetic propensity to bad teeth might slow down the rate at which an individual could chew at the meat. The gene for bad teeth would be, in the full sense of the technical term, a gene for altruism, and it might indeed be favoured by kin selection."
The example I gave seems perfectly aligned with this definition of altruism and kin selection. Indeed, it's a weaker but analogous form of what leads to eusociality. You say "it can't apply evolutionary pressure because it depends on the prevalence of the gene in other members of the population", .... and I think I understand why we disagree. I wrote "population" but sometimes meant "species population" and at other times meant "gene population."
In an extreme hypothetical case, suppose that having a gay sibling help to raise a family meant a 5% improved chance that each child would live to adulthood and children in turn. Suppose also that having two gay siblings meant a -1% improved chance (perhaps because the person consumes more food, which could otherwise go to the children). Then there's strong kin selection here to have some, but not all, gay children. The descendants then become a larger part of the species population.
In this case, I don't see how homosexuality would be a "reproductively negative trait" for the gene, only for some of the individuals carrying the gene.
Ah, you're absolutely correct, I did misunderstand what you were saying - indeed, your argument is a classic example of kin selection, I'm just so used to hearing group selection arguments that I jumped the gun [1] (when I wrote "given your comment above, I'm surprised that you would make this argument" that should have been my first clue that you did, in fact, know better). You're 100% right that help-out-those-with-the-same-genes altruism is not only possible, but expected, and your argument makes perfect sense in that light.
Personally, my suspicion is that homosexuality is more directly linked to a positive physical trait in the individual, though I don't have much to really back that up other than a vague sense that kin selection effects in evolution are rarely as strong as direct expressed ones. But yes, the "gay uncle" effect could explain it, too, and it's definitely an interesting enough phenomenon to be worth keeping in mind.
[1] In fact, I probably shouldn't react as negatively as I do against most invocations of the group selection argument, because oftentimes the points would be valid if expressed as kin selection arguments instead.
Being proven wrong once is worth being right a hundred times; it's only when we realize we're wrong that we learn anything useful. In this case, I was reminded of an evolutionary fact that I hadn't thought about in quite a long time, and that's fully worth being wrong.
What I've always wondered is which particular assumption of Aumann's agreement theorem is usually lacking on the Internet: honesty, rationality, common priors, or simply the willingness to continue the conversation long enough to resolve the disagreement.
I lean very much against the idea of rationality, in the precise economic sense used by Aumann and others. I find the work of the behavioral economists more believable. I believe there is some truth in the saying that the only people who make economically rational decisions are economists and sociopaths.
BTW, in this thread I learned that I need to be more careful about how I use the term "population." :)
Culture is not determined by biology though. If it did, third-generation Chinese immigrants would be more Chinese than American.
The problem here is that culture determines gender. Some cultures have two, some three, some even have more. Many cultures treat children as genderless and initiate them into genders in rites of passage. In some cases gender is contextual, so among the Norse and among the Greeks, there was a specific gender-based stigma attached to being the penetrated partner in male-male sex. Male-male sex was not stigmatized, only crossing the gender line and being penetrated as a woman.
I think it is a grave error to look at one's own culture and assume that it is biologically determined.
As for the "gay problem" we have to recognize at some point that every culture addresses human sexuality differently, and human sexuality is remarkably malleable. For example there are tribes in Papua which make young boys give oral sex to tribal elders as a part of a rite of passage as a way of them literally ingesting manliness in order to become men.
Once we look at our own sexual taboos involving who and what we are forbidden to have sexual relations with, and we recognize that these are socially contextual, not innate taboos, things change a great deal.
The problem here is that culture determines gender.
Absolutely. I never claimed otherwise.
All I think is that some sort of robust signaling mechanism that displays a person's (or animal's) reproductive "team" should be expected to exist in any sexually dimorphic species. In many animals, this is hard coded, but I suspect that in humans that was generalized to a high level imperative, "figure out what sex you are, and clearly display the appropriate characteristics so that mates can find you".
Once we look at our own sexual taboos involving who and what we are forbidden to have sexual relations with, and we recognize that these are socially contextual, not innate taboos, things change a great deal.
But this is exactly my point: the fact that these social sexual taboos so often go against behaviors that reduce evolutionary fitness suggests that supporting those social behaviors may, in fact, be precisely the way that evolution ended up most easily controlling those behaviors.
To be very clear about this: the fact that behavior is influenced socially rather than genetically does not necessarily mean that it's an accident of history. It very well could be a direct evolutionary adaptation that leaned on social behavior to implement itself. Nature tunes nurture, and nurture tunes nature, so arguing for one to the exclusion of the other is usually wrong.
That doesn't, of course, mean that we shouldn't try to overcome such evolutionary imperatives. But we should be aware of the fact that in such cases, the social behaviors are not completely arbitrary, and that we have an uphill battle to fight.
Structuralists and Post-structuralists though tend to see most cultural constructs as arbitrary on an atomic level, and to the extent they are useful to a group that comes out of context with other cultural constructs. So for example the fact that we associate pink with girls and blue with boys is entirely arbitrary. It could be (and indeed historically has been until surprisingly recently) the other way around.
With humans though the linking of physical sex and gender is not as simple as you suggest. As I have said, some cultures (like ours) have two genders. Some have three, with children being genderless, and some have more genders than three. To pretend that gender is only about display of sex-based characteristics is to gloss over the fact that in most cultures it doesn't really work that way, nor does it really even in our own.
Gender is instead a social category and a social position. It affects division of labor and all sorts of other things. Different genders often have different taboos and these are often aimed at preventing gender-crossing, as well as maintaining a symbolic order between genders.
This is a very broad category of anthropology, and it's dangerous to assume that everyone structures their society around two genders fairly closely tied to biological sex, since this is not really the case.
As people who have been in certain kinds of accidents or been treated for certain kinds of medical conditions can tell you, having a certain set of body parts is not a requirement for being a member of either gender.
The overwhelming majority of people are born with a certain set of chromosomes, a set of parts between their legs, and an idea in their head that all agree with one another on what gender they are. It's a large enough majority that it's easy to think that these are the same thing, because for most people, they are.
But for trans people, these things disagree, and the gender that they think of themselves as in their heads wins. Since they are being treated by the world at large as something they don't consider themselves to be, they take steps to correct how the world views them by transitioning. Given money, access to treatment, and other constraints, this may include surgery, hormones, etc. But even in the absence of these things, they can still be trans people who know what their true gender is.
I don't know what "true gender" means scientifically. Physical characteristics are objective. I would expect something we can say is intrinsic, like true gender would also be, but I can't find a way of determinign it objectively or even intersubjectively, can you?
In fact, anthropologically I am not even sure anyone is born with a gender.
I expected people would take issue with it. Unfortunately some people reallyreally want it to be the case that girls and boys are only different because of their environment.
Given the way evolution works, doesn't that seem ridiculously unlikely?
Given the way we evolved to have clearly defined roles, and how we have obvious physical differences to enable that, doesn't it seem pretty obvious that we evolved our brain power differently also? eg men lots of brain power for spacial awareness for hunting etc.... women caring nuturing, far more brain power for language, communication etc
The other funny thing is that it's usually the same set of people who firmly believe that you are born homosexual, and that you can't be made homosexual by your upbringing. They believe sexual orientation to be biological. But at the same time claim that being 'girl' or 'boy' is something that you've been taught by culture??
Your grandparent post took the argument farther than just saying that evolution has given men and women certain tendencies or proclivities (as an aggregate, allowing for the massive range of individual differences that are possible). You flat-out claim that men and women have brains that are hard-wired a certain way. If there's anything evolution has given us as humans, it's brains that are amazingly adaptable and plastic. Research has shown that things like basic perception differ across cultures (see, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion). You make an apparently logical assumption based on what you understand of evolution and biology (and how the human brain works) but I proffer that there's a fair amount of evidence that those assumptions might be wrong. (For instance, we have this recent study questioning the widely-held belief that men are by nature better at spatial reasoning: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/women-math-science...)
> But at the same time claim that being 'girl' or 'boy' is something that you've been taught by culture??
You misunderstand the argument. The argument is that what it means to be a boy or a girl has been taught by culture. That being said, I do personally believe there's more room for inquiry into the nurture side of the equation and that the "entirely biological" argument is something that's currently politically expedient to counter the people claiming that it's entirely a personal choice. On a personal note though, my earliest memory of having a crush on another girl was in 2nd grade and my uber-religious parents certainly weren't nurturing such notions in me (nor was anything else in my environment explicitly).
You make an apparently logical assumption based on what you understand of evolution and biology (and how the human brain works) but I proffer that there's a fair amount of evidence that those assumptions might be wrong. (For instance, we have this recent study questioning the widely-held belief that men are by nature better at spatial reasoning: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/women-math-science...)
The problem is, there's a "fair amount of evidence" on both sides, and it's universally shoddy research.
On the "innate difference" side, the most that can usually be done is to show that a discrepancy exists, and that it exists broadly in a statistical sense, argue that it exists broadly enough to posit that the effect is at least partially biological.
On the "no innate difference" side, the most that can usually be done is to pick out a couple of instances where the claimed effect doesn't exist, argue that if it doesn't exist everywhere then it's not real, and claim that this exception proves that it can't possibly be biological at all.
The "innate difference" folks then reject the debunkings as relying on cherry-picked data (in some cases this is fair, in some cases probably not, and unfortunately the level of statistical rigor in most papers on both sides is horrendous, so it's hard to say for sure), the "no innate difference" people disagree, and nothing is ever resolved.
The problem, of course, is that there's absolutely no realistic way to do a study that removes the effect of people growing up in a world that has the current set of gender roles, so both sides are right, in a sense: none of the "innate difference" papers actually prove that the differences are primarily biological, and none of the debunkings prove that they're not.
So everybody falls back on their priors. And our priors on these matters are pretty naive, more based on emotion and the minimal set of observations that we each personally have than anything else. Women that are good at math, feminists, and those that generally side with nurture assume that the burden of proof is on the "nature" folks to prove that there is an innate difference (because it's "obvious" that men and women are equal intellectually), and the nature types assume the burden of proof goes the other way (because they look at the observed statistical discrepancies and assume that they should be taken at face value until debunked). So we all end up arguing over what set of assumptions is more reasonable, throwing meaningless references to studies at each other as if the studies actually prove anything, which they usually don't.
It's quite the mess. I would ask, at least, that everyone on either side of this try to think of at least a few experiments that would actually change your mind on these matters. They're actually kind of tough to come up with, because it's so difficult to separate culture from the equation...
On top of that, you have an epistemological problem. How can you separate culture and biology in something like this without repeating the same experiment in a wide range of people in different types of cultures?
Is it not possible that it's a bit of both? Given this scenario, which is clearly very likely, enforcing gender stereotypes could dissuade a child from walking a certain road down which their nature would have led them.
Boys and girls are naturally different, yes, but as demonstrated by the many women in science, that doesn't mean that all females want to grow up to become hairdressers or models.
Stereotypes do affect a child's development. Please don't limit their potential.
One interesting experiment is to try HARD to create a realistic person of the other gender in an environment like Second Life. It's remarkably difficult but once you do, it's quite an interesting experience to see how socially conditioned so many things are.
I keep on hearing those words with respect to brains. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
Brains are not "hard wired" for much. They are really quite malleable and adaptable. They are affected by many things in the environment; experience, culture, training. The biggest differences between male and female children will come about from how they are raised, not innate differences. Once they hit puberty the hormonal differences will have more of an effect, though nothing that could be described as "hard wired", it's more a question of predisposition.
You state these things as if they are fact. I disagree. People are born with different strengths and weaknesses. They may have particular skill in certain areas.
If brains are just "general" "maleable" "matter", then why as a man am I attracted to women and not men? I certainly didn't "learn" that. I'm attracted to women, because my brain was hard wired like that.
I actually don't think people are born gay or born straight. I think there are biological factors in sexual orientation but these are hardly determinative. Instead most people are born somewhere along the bisexuality spectrum and end up defining themselves as gay or straight as a way of dealing with unacceptable sexual urges.
The fact is that if you look at male-male sexual relations in a place like Greece or Rome, the differences in structure and approach to gender and sex are markedly in contrast to how we approach things in our society today.
I personally think that one element of the argument that people are born gay, in the context of a culture which aggressively sells the idea that heterosexuality is normal, is to tell people, "you aren't born gay, are you?"
Edit: I could point people to longer write-ups I have done on this subject but the above I think is a fair summary of what cross-study and trans-historical comparisons have lead me to believe.
Sure, different people will have different strengths and weaknesses. But that's different than "hard-wired." You may have some natural talent or predisposition, or you may have some particular disability or difficulty with something. But most of those can be melded and shaped by your environment, your culture, your experiences, your hormones, practice and learning, your desires, and the like.
I've known several people who have transitioned between genders. Were they "hard-wired" the way you claim they are? One of them, who transitioned to being a man, took testosterone as part of the transition (and presumably still does). He reports that the testosterone was significant in changing some of his behaviors to being more masculine; when upset, he has a harder time crying than he did before. Now, is that what you would call "hard-wired"?
I don't pretend to know whether you are born gay, or if it's something environmental during your childhood, or whether it really is more flexible than some people like to admit. Surely there is a predisposition to be attracted to the opposite sex; but that doesn't meet the criteria I would use for "hard-wired."
"Hard-wired" says that something is absolute; immutable. It cannot be changed. There is a binary; you are either this way, or you are that way. And that's just not how people work; at least, behaviorally, for the vast majority of behaviors. Really, there are multitudes of different axes on which people's behavior differs; and while their sex might influence their behavior a bit, the results tend to be overlapping bell curves with slightly different averages, not two entirely different sets of behaviors.
The whole "women do this, men do that" or "hard wired" type of reasoning is an over-simplification, which is amplified culturally.
(sorry for the late followup, I didn't see this comment until just now)
And yet there are plenty of kids who are gender atypical, sometimes in a few ways, sometimes in many ways, sometimes such that they identify with the opposite gender.
The reality is not that there are hard categories of things that we can simply say a person's brain is "hard wired" to be either A or B, but that there are clusters and statistical probabilities. Some people are one or more standard deviations removed from what we think of as "gender typical."
There's definitely an element of truth to the "hard wiring" thing -- you can't change a child's personality and enthusiasms simply by wishing it so or trying to "train" them. But the picture is far more complicated than you seem to think.
I am not sure that "gender" (as opposed to 'sex') is a biological state, though. Gender-atypicality may have a lot to do with navigating between social ideals of normality and a need of individuality.
Well, yeah. But it's no excuse for some witless profit-maximizing / revenue-stabilizing Danish corporate drone to subsume all nuance into Boy and Girl.
Here's the main quote from the post I replied to: "why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music?"
It references gender once and movie tie-ins not at all.
I actually think movie tie-ins are pretty reasonable especially from one of the best movies ever made (Star Wars, not the pre-quels) as well as some of the best animated story-telling and characters ever made (Pixar).
The conclusion that my wife (both a programmer and a female) came to is that she has to have the crazy features to make the clothes look right at scale and still have working fasteners.
With Barbie, the clothes are the real toy and the doll is just an accessory.
It has never occurred to me that girls don't play with Lego. My five year old daughter loves them. Hardly a tomboy either, she uses Lego to build little rooms for some little dolls to play in. She has made little desks and beds. Then she play acts with the dolls like any little girl will.
Of course, it did start with me(her dad) having fond memories of Lego as a kid and wanting to make sure my daughter had a chance to build with them. But the fact that she actually likes using them is up to her.
"Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? "
Really? After the early attempts were basically just cover projects doomed to be cancelled? After car companies bought up streetcar companies in the US in order to run them down and close them? You really think consumers should be taken to task over Big Oil and the Big Three?
Interesting list. Where I live there are electric vehicles, and McDonalds sells salad. There are even record labels that sell not so shitty music. You're probably rigth on a global level with respect to Barbie though.
I don't think companies are of the hook here, especially large ones who control large segments of their industry. It might be hard for them sometimes to change what consumers want, but at the same time they often are the ones resisting change. Often times change in market preferences means that the company has to do extra work and spend extra money to adjust and offer new products. Sometimes they see that it would be cheaper to disrupt the change instead. Marketing and lobbying, as others have pointed out, are tools they use for that purpose.
because facing up to the fact that other people have different values from you and most of them SUCK is intellectually easy to grapple with, but on a gut level not so much.
LEGO has and has long had a line of sets that are focused on girls and traditionally feminine fantasies/archetypes. pink and ponies and kitties and hair brushes, etc. and if anyone wanted to buy them they can, and if not, they don't. a guy could get a "pink" set and a girl could buy/get a guns/trucks/cops/ships set. there's no evil conspiracy or gun pointed at anybody's head, honest.
For example: why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music?
It's easy to blame the companies -- but in reality it's very hard for a single company to change the macro culture that informs their product decisions. If you want to find the root cause, look at the users and ask why they demand the products they do. In this case: "why are so few parents buying Legos for their girls?" or "why do girls feel a stigma about playing with Legos?"