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Comment by anotherman554 | Hacker News Reader

Among gorillas and baboons, species in which males fight for reproductive opportunities feature males twice as big as females, while among pair- bonded gibbons that fight much less, males are just 10 percent bigger than females.

As I understand it men have greater strength because they are optimized to fight other men for reproductive opportunity. This doesn't increase their opportunities for survival since fighting other men can get you killed. It increases their opportunities to reproduce.

Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.

So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.

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You seem hell bent on asserting some false equivalency between the physical prowess of men and women. What possible reason you'd have for making such patently ridiculous claims is truly beyond me.

> So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.

False dichotomy. Also, what fraction of explorers do you think were men? Pretty much fucking all of them.

We don't get pregnant, so having children is not a physical inconvenience and (as I mentioned elsewhere) half of us can die without impacting the next generation's population.

If you think that men and women had the same evolutionary imperative to develop the skills required for navigating strange environments then you're not adequately considering the innumerable trade-offs involved.

Do explorers survive better than people who migrate to new locations with their families, or something?

> Do explorers survive better than people who migrate to new locations with their families, or something?

No, they die far more often. Because they enter unknown risky situations.

Humans explore in search of new lands and resources, and in search of safe paths.

When they take the more vulnerable members of the tribe, they generally have a better idea of where they're going, what the path is, and what risks are involved.

If a path is too dangerous then they don't tend to take pregnant women and small children.

So because it is primarily adult or adolescent males that go on the more risky adventures, they're the ones that have the costly adaptations required to maximise the likelihood of survival.

Now show me the records from 300,000 years ago that you based your above post on.

> Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.

Have you ever made a tool with your hands? Physical strength--especially grip strength--not just dexterity, is required for tool making. There are no vices or pliers in the Wild.

Men have a huge advantage in grip strength, and hence tool making. This study[1] suggests that elite female athletes in athletic disciplines that require grip strength only rank in the 25th percentile of grip strength when compared to men as a population.

oops. Forgot the link and too late to edit!

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/

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