Recently, I was abruptly shaken (and oddly enough, slightly aroused), by the comments made by a certain bunny hopping from her locker room to ours. It was proffered in a debate with our esteemed BPP, that RP concepts fostering “strong” male traits could not be learned (or faked) in the context of a marriage. Where the wife had any familiarity at all with her mate, his actions were doomed to fail. I could see her in my mind’s eye putting her finger down her throat in a metaphorical gesture of what she thought of any man attempting to become the best version of him, and offering his wife to follow.

The argument made is always the same, Alphas are born, and not made, and that the traits of a man that make up his personality are innate and fixed by genetics and/or childhood to make him what he is. Becoming someone else is impossible, and if one's natural inclination is Beta, said Beta is simply pathetic in any attempts to change. Real women, with impeccable grooming, conservative values, an inclination toward being submissive, a finely developed intuition and meticulous vetting, will find and bond with a “Natural Alpha.” Herein lays some huge assumptions.

The bunny’s argument assumes that traits are innate, while MRP believes that attractive male traits can be learned with great effort.

The contrasting theories between innate and learned traits have a very long history. This debate is present as early as Plato’s Republic. Plato argues that the souls of men are made of different metal (gold, argent, bronze). In short, the idea is that people’s behaviors often express their inner natures; these behaviors are innate and are largely impervious to people's environment. Substitute Alpha, Beta and Omega for the metals, and you have a very similar description of what our bunny expressed in her dialogue. Of course, whether our psychology is innate or learned was also at the core of the controversy between Descartes and Locke. The point being, that the debate still exists in disciplines focusing on watching people interact, mainly psychology and anthropology.

The fact that the constructs used by philosophers and psychologists to think about the motivations of our minds have been around for 2,500 years should make one pause and ask whether these notions are really appropriate for the job. After all, one would think that the way we study and understand personality traits and development should have made some progress.

Well, progress has been made away from folk-science regarding innateness, the same way lifting has progressed away from bro-science. Currently, biology and the philosophy of biology suggest that the contrast between innate and learned is very confused by “conventional wisdom.” Following debates in ethology and the empirical models observed in nature, most biologists and philosophers of biology reject the notion of innateness. For a modern overview of this point: See, e.g. Paul Griffiths’s "What is Innateness?" (Yes, tough read, but, ya know, mansplaining requires some good science.)

What does this do to the debate? Hopefully it spurs some understanding that personality traits are not innate, that behavior can most definitely be learned and that personality can and often does change. The notion of innateness is a folk concept that illegitimately masquerades as a genuine scientific notion, and debates about innateness are pseudo-debates. Psychologists (and bunnies) should stop looking for innate traits and philosophers should stop debating about ideas, beliefs and values as if they were innate.

So, bunny, the next time you think "doomed to fail" about married men trying to improve themselves, you may want to suppress your gag reflex for more constructive reasons. Hard science, dispassionate about feeeelz, says some assumptions often made about MRP are definitely not the gospel truth.