It's kind of frightening that people are leaving university with a developed hostility toward the notion of sexual dimorphism in humans.
For instance, I learned that in every society where it was tested, men are more violent than women. But interestingly, the society itself was important as well; for instance, American society is overall more violent than Icelandic culture, and accordingly American women commit more violent crimes than Icelandic men. So there are differences in between the sexes, but the culture is a very important input if we look at how extreme the trait is.
Maybe there's also a genetic connection? ;)
Just joking.
I think overall happiness of people is also really important. The more unhappy people are the more violent they get.
People in Skandinavia are generally quite happy folks: Easy access to education, internet, food, health care, low poverty etc...
And I was enlightened.
The Atoal is believed to be ~30,000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower And spears are ~400,000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amentum is rather hard to date, but it's simpler than an Atoal.
Also, a preference for guns may or may not be there. But, males having more accurate spatial reasoning due to ranged weapons, or hunting, and or fighting seems likely. The obvious alternatives are men developed better spatial reasoning due to very widespread cultural factors seems suspicious. Or women scarified spacial reasoning for some competing features.
Anyway, the important thing is not to debate this stuff it's to actually test it. Until then it's all just hot air.
As for testing, that would be great. But it turns out that proving anything about human evolution is very hard, because most of the evidence is lost.
As to testing, I suspect we are going to get good at decoding and editing human DNA fairly soon which is going to have a lot to say about these debates. This stuff is either there or not, when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.
EX: Domestic cattle are also around 500 generations old and lactose tolerance has been spreading. http://www.foodbeast.com/news/map-of-milk-consumption-lactos... lactose tolerance: 96% in Sweden, 10% in China.
I don't think new data will help. We know the changes in the human lineage; even if we knew their functional meaning, we cannot conclude whether they are adaptive or not; fixed alleles reveal little about their fixation time, etc.
It could also be due to males having larger brains.
IMO, the point is there are reasonable priors to actually start testing.
Some of these tests may be fairly simple. Do male baby's throw more things than female baby's?
> "You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."
Cordelia Fine also does a great breakdown of all of these "monkey does this, therefore women shopping men guns" arguments.
The nurture side of the debate has its "no nature" clowns, but the caricature by the top-level post is completely uncalled for in this context.
You can say men are associated with blue for purely cultural reasons, because _
A: It's a 'just so' story which we can make about anything.
B: very recently they where associated with red and pink was considered a less intense version of red.
The B is an actual reasonable argument, where A has zero predictive power.
Regular people are dismissed.
Only the faceless, invisible authority is respected.
Barring certain extreme cases, of course, such as mental illness and such.
The stereotypical US things, like no universal health care, no tuition-free education, lax gun laws, mass incarceration, death penalty etc. are also a manifestation of this attitude.
You must take care of yourself, you must protect yourself, if you make it then great! If you become a criminal, you become subhuman and can be executed and treated brutally by the police. If you become dirt poor, that's your fault, you can become homeless, there's no welfare.
Now again, I'm exaggerating somewhat to emphasize what I mean. And yes I also know the historical origins of this mentality, and as I said, there are also positive consequences, like most major innovations and scientific discoveries coming from the US, the huge dynamic market where anyone can start a new company with manageable levels of bureaucracy (compared to most European countries) etc.
There's no arguing with nature, it's the ultimate citation.
But nurture means that you, or somebody involved, had a choice. So the buck stops at, rather than the faceless divinity of nature, a mere human. And those are much easier to dismiss.
So we paint the opposing argument as arising from nurture rather than nature. And those arguments stick around and get cited. And a "it's all nurture" model develops.
The hostility is to the tendency to attribute differences between men and women to sheer biology without a careful consideration of other factors.
I think the author meant sex, not gender, and GP meant gender, not sex.
It's easy to conflate the two in conversation, but keeping a semantic barrier between them will help maintain civil discourse without the risk of devolving the discussion into a flame war.
Affected by? Yes.
The same thing? No.
> That's why I dislike that many attack gender roles and other social gender norms indiscriminately.
Huh. That sounds like something I'd expect to read about firsthand on Tumblr moreso than something that reasonable people would do.
> At the same time there shouldn't be any room for attacking those who don't follow the norms either. And of course some norms are just harmful. It's not so easy to just throw them all out.
I think that's fair.
Take for example the correlation between feminine behavior and two X chromosomes (XX). There is high correlation between these two factors. Additionally examine the correlation between masculine behavior and XY. Again another high correlation implying the possibility of a causal connection between gender and genes.
Though correlation doesn't imply causation it lends more credibility to the hypothesis. What if we were to raise a child, born a boy, as a girl? If gender were truly a social construct there would be no issue.
I must admit my knowledge of the scientific literature around the relationship between biological sex and gender identity is limited. Have they found a genetic/epigenetic/hormonal marker that correlates with 95%+ of transgendered people yet?
They have not found a definitive biological causal mechanism that causes transgendered traits. They have found correlations between certain biological mechanisms and transgendered traits. However these findings lead to only about a 70% correlation at most.
Please note that the 70% correlation cannot be ignored. It indicates high likelihood of a causal connection. It is unwise to dismiss this correlation even if it is below a 95% criteria. My intuition tells me that 70% is only a statistic for a single causative biological agent out of several. Once all biological markers are discovered and correlated together, I believe that the number will be 99%.
Please also note that the correlation between the XX chromosomes and the female gender is above 95%, same with the XY chromosomes and the male gender. These correlations meet your criteria. There is no scientific study that proves this but you will note through common sense that males and females tend to act within their gender role over 95% of the time.
Then I propose such a scientific study be performed.
I don't like appeals to "common sense" in political matters (and unfortunately gender and sexuality is very political right now). Because, hey, if you're wrong, wouldn't that be an interesting result?
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-22/americ...
All things must often appeal to common sense regardless of the politics behind the issue. Males have penises and females don't, does a scientific study need to be conducted to prove this point? No. Because if we needed a scientific study for every possible issue without regard to common sense we would make zero progress on any topic.
What you've described is what I refer to as "sex" while totally ignoring the topic of gender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction
I'm not sure what your politics are, but a lot of people who have traveled down this path in a conversation ended up expressing very intolerant opinions towards transgendered people. If you do feel contempt for someone whose gender identity and/or assumed gender role doesn't match their biological sex, please don't share that opinion with me.