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Comment by forgetsusername | Hacker News Reader

>Isn't this a little like saying that men and women are different due to their differing precious bodily fluids?

I get your point, but what else are we but a bunch of bodily fluids?

Um, all the things that are not bodily fluids. And anyway you picked one particular bodily fluid, not even essential to the functioning of a body.

Are you positing that an enormous differential in genetic supply will result in no difference in reproductive strategy and therefore no difference in evolved psychology?

Or put another way, that everything we know about supply/demand curves and evolution is wrong?

I happen to be an evolutionary biologist and I said nothing about reproductive strategies. You would first need to establish a link between reproductive strategy and psychology (evolutionary psychology is a bit of a joke science, I'm afraid) and then between psychology and brain structure.

>You would first need to establish a link between [...] then between psychology and brain structure.

You can alter psychology of a person by altering brain structure, surely that link is well established even if the finer details aren't known?

You can change the way a program executes by interfering with the hardware. You can also run different programs on the same hardware.

That's a link between the program and the hardware, which is the analogue of the demand that was set.

You can run the same program on different hardware, and run the same program on the same hardware and get different results. I'm not sure the analogy gets us very far.

Hopefully far enough to illustrate that "altering brain structure changes personality" isn't the same as "different personalities have to have a basis in brain structure."

I didn't "pick" anything.

The argument was made that "bodily fluids" can't be a differentiator between men and women.

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