Den harde nordmann
For some obscure reason I think you mean the exact same thing, but disagree over the wording. \\
But lets see, this is my opinion:
1. Something happens, and the culture adapts to it(Ancient babylon contra ancient Egypt, unpredictable crops amd constantly at war)
2. Cultur then adapts to it(Male warriors)
3. Something completely unrelated follows it (partial Male supremacy)
4. Another permutation follows this on (which is completely unrelated to the cause of the culture in the first place)
So basically the "biologically tied" link dies out after the first permuatations causing the social change. Even if there is something new later on, it is unrelated to what has already happened.
Hence: Gender as we view it today(mostly western world, speaking for Scandinavia), got quite the crap of legacy that we got no reason to care for anymore, but like all old things we dislike cleaning it up and reconstructing it.
I mean reconstructions as in refining what we put in the sosial termology. Genetical engineering is still partially beyond us, even if we have managed to get a narrow foothold in the field.
On-topic? Women are apparently more aggressive, and there is apparently a small cue to be more social. To be a leader apparently you need a bit of charisma, empathy, and ruthlessness. I have not seen anything that indicates either gender to be "superior" in either aspect, so meh, there is no argument for it.
The only argument "for" leadership being "masculine" is that we have had a history on it, on the other hand we have seen several times troughout history some women being a submissive wench, then gets the glimt of power, and does quite the good job on the hijack(Margaret I of Denmark?), which does discredit the entire argument in the first place.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
We both agree on that point. What we disagree on (and forgive me if I screw this up) is that she doesn't believe that there is a gender package that is installed onto gender specific hardware in utereo. Rather that it is a result of acculturation after birth.
edited 24th Feb '11 4:10:35 PM by Shrimpus
Den harde nordmann
: It depends. Either the 3 of us mean the same, but disagree over the terms or....
I think there does not exist a thing such as you phrase it, mainly because gender have little to nothing to do with how the brain works for the most. Or you could mean that we use "labels" for the sake of labels, even though it tends to have little to nothing to do with reality?
Over 10,000 dead.:<
Calm down, please smile. No need to get so frustrated about it! Carry on the torch for me until then, everybody.
Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]
Come back when you are feeling up to it. I will be waiting. Not much else to do but write and argue with people on the inter webs during a slow tour.
Not really. That is the entire basis of our argument. I am trying to convey that gender has biological roots. She is trying to postulate social roots. You are positing social roots as well.
Den harde nordmann
: I guess my problem with your position falls down to "what exact things in society is purely created by biology?", because I am having trouble finding something beyond the fact that the 2 genders have a bit different body shape and hence a bit different shape on the cloths on average(fashion and the cloths themselves is created by society however).
I am also making a fallacy: I sort of assume you hold a position where you think that the "biology" has a actual function in society besides reproduction, as in having a actual effect that is caused by biology. The only thing I can think of is rule 34 and the sexdrive, and we even have culture around that again, which again bends the argument.
I also believe that male and female brains are more or less identical, and here's my reasoning:
No matter how different our brains are by gender, they're not likely to be more different than the differences between male chimps and female chimps, just because they're our closest relative. On first glance, the differences between male chimps and female chimps seem huge, because chimp society is as patriarchal as the most patriarchal human society.
However, go over and look at bonobos, and you get radically different behavior; matriarchal, different socially in a ton of ways. Bonobos are so closely related to chimps it's incredibly implausible that their brains have changed radically from chimps. So, therefore, the most plausible explanation is that the radical differences in social organization between chimps and bonobos are more due to factors outside the brain (that is, the environment) than it is to be due to the brain. That means, then, that social organization, and specifically gender to gender organization, is mostly not specified by the brain in chimps and bonobos.
So then applying this all back to humans, if social organization is likely not specified by the brain in chimps it's also likely not specified by the brain in chimps' close relatives, or us.
This is not to say that men and women don't have differences in little things (most of the things you mentioned I would regard as little things) but the differences are relatively minor and don't really say anything about current social organization. Who really cares about the ability to rotate a shape in your head, or the ability to perceive moving objects well? The difference isn't even that big compared to known physical differences between genders (like the difference in size and strength).
I would also agree that out of a hundred isolated societies, at least seventy-five would end up as male dominated, but that's because men are physically stronger than women and not due to anything within the brain.
I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1
Chimps, Bonobos, Gorillas and Humans are grossly different species with grossly different mating behaviors.
In nature testicular size correlates with female promiscuity and male size as compared to the female is correlated with male promiscuity. Male gorillas can peas in the sack and are roughly twice as large as their females, all females belong to the silverback no scooting behind his back. Chimpanzees have enormous testicles and males and females are equally sized. They have an orgiastic mating season in which every female in the tribe fucks every male and then they try and then create confusion as to who is the father so they dont murder the offspring. Bonobos have rape as one of their primary means of non alpha males to propagate.
Your comparison is not exceptionally valid as 1. they are seperate speciies 2. they are seperate species and 3. even tiny variances in coding can lead to huge differences in function. Humans Chimps and pigs are between 98% and 99% identical in terms of coding... and yet we all have different chromasome counts. Do not, ever take for granted that near DNA means anything in terms of anything for a species. Most of our coding has to do with functional shit on the cellular level. Heck I have already pointed out that you can have two genetically identical people and the hormone exposures in utero will change their phenotype from male to female.
Btw, just in case you were wondering human testicular size and male to female size ratio indicates that both sexes are moderately promiscuous.
And on a side note. You would have been much better off citing some very interesting anecdotal field reports that showed that a tribe of orphaned bonobos grew up naturally into a more chimp like society and alot of bonobo matriarchal behavior is actually cultural.
edited 24th Feb '11 7:35:13 PM by Shrimpus
Over 10,000 dead.:<
Uh.... oh my lord. How is it that you can type that giant rebuttle and not rebut anything? reading I you would have realized that I had already stated that in humans both sexes are sexually selective so in fact both are attracted to wasteful displays. Take the title. Leadership and Enterprisingness are mainly masculine qualities. I can sum that up as risk taking is a masculine quality.
To even begin to parse this out you need cultural context. The entire purpose of wasteful and risky behavior is to demonstrate to the opposite sex that you have power to burn. Mental structures match physical ones but the question arises then how much is because females are the dominant sexual selector? Well we can't really separate the issues all that well, but even if it entirely cultural that young men have done stupid and dangerous things to win the affection of a women across every culture in history across all of time in perfect harmony with every other male in the entire natural world (with some exceptions were males are the sexual selectors of course). Gender simply cannot be an entirely social construct. Even if it is then the reason the social construct arose in the first place was because of the biological imperative.
Either you are on board with the idea that biology provides to us a fundamental set of sexual parameters or you think that gay people can unlearn being gay.Orientation, yes, I believe is biological. And it happens to be a gender role. This is one area I am willing to concede gender roles have a basis in biological mind which cannot be unlearned. However, I think most things are cultural. And the amount of gendered behaviour which is not nurture in origin instead of nature, is negligable. I do not claim that we are a blank slate in all ways, but we are in many. In that, the human brain is a widely shared format with little differences. The brain of someone male and the brain of someone female are largely the same format with the occasional possibility of a minor code anomolomy. The most common code difference being sexual orientation.
That "code difference", where rarely it exists, does not include advanced coding for the purpose of reproduction maximization. The brain only comes with the most basic of coding for reproduction. Much less a complicated foundation for all of the supposed "universal" gender roles for all society.
Quite simply, many people in the field of Evolutionary Psychology are engaging in psuedoscience no less so that Racial and Sexual Craniometry. Evolutionary Psychology is filled with modern phrenology.
It is a stunningly ridiculous standpointUnfortunately, that Science Direct website charges money to read it's articles. And as much might even say I wish to be right enough that my very stability of love for the human species and lack of desire to not see %90 of our kind die relies on a certain racial and sexual harmony. It's not enough so that I'm willing to pay out of pocked for an article just to somehow defeat someone on the internet about it. Especially since debates like this are sadly a dime a dozen. If I could afford to pay for such things as one of those articles right now, I'd instead spend the money on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episodes on iTunes. And I'd appreciate it if instead you'd link to a source that doesn't require me to pay.
I'm downloading Adobe Reader right now for the second one. I'll be back with a response to that once I'm finished.
Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]
"In humans while both sexes select vigorously females are the more selective."
My first post in this thread.
As to the rest of your massive post let me sum it up in twenty five words or less.
I concede that biology influences gender but I have decided to go with Moving The Goal Posts.
And finally please stop telling me to what I think. I never made any quantitative statements. As to the degree to which biology influences gender, merely the qualitative statement of presence and a refutation of insidious quasi science of learned gender.
Over 10,000 dead.:<
I don't see where I told you what to think.
And it's entirely possible than females in society tend to be "more selective" due to cultural norms. And that the cultural norms were formed without a strong biological basis. Or, at least not psychological nigh-instinct. Women in many societies were oppressed in did not hold much power, and much of society had arranged marriages and things like dowry's. It's entirely possible, and I think likely, that many of these things had a bigger impact than some kind of heritable psychological state in our DNA.
If you live in an extremely patriarchal society and are not allowed to make financial gain on your own, you have the disadvantage of not being able to provide for a child without a man, and a man, if they want their seed to survive, in such as society, must accomodate, or their child they have helped create by sticking their seed in a woman will wither and die. So it makes sense in that frame for women to be more selective. Since they are not give a choice. That would affect society and give people lasting cultural beliefs that women should be more selective. Victorian era gender morals were particularly distopian and have joined into popular gender discussion for this reason. Feminists often refer to particularly sexist mores as "Victorian". There are plenty of Sociological reasons for the Double Standard s we see today, often at least moderately on the decline since our cultures is changing and away from sexism and racism.
When someone says "ah, but those cultures were grounded in innate psychological difference between men and women", I have reason to be suspect. Not all cultural things form because of innate universal psychology. Evolution has only so much to give to psychology. There aren't evolutionary reasons for the belief in religion. A lot of people misuse "evolution", and "selection", this has been going on since Social Darwinism. In evolution, some things get deleted, a lot of which is useful does not get deleted. But a lot of which is not useful also does not. There are only so many adaptions one can make and most of our culture comes from how we happened to develop it, not because of selection. A lot of people out there see a cultural norm and say "hey, it must be evolution!". But to actually prove it is, you have to prove a LOT of thing. Showing a correlation is pretty much meaningless.
You haven't shown an exact degree to which you think biology influences gender, but you've come awfully close without giving specifics. And you've made general statements of the biological determinist leaning. Since the very crux of our argument has been from the very beginning the degree to which biology influences psychological gender and behavior, I'm happy to be inching you ever closer to admitting what you actually believe.
I am currently reading the .pdf link you gave me as your second link, I'll come back and give my response to it once I'm finished.
Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]
You keep implying that I have some hard on for defining what one gender or another can or cannot do. I do not appreciate it. I only speak statistically. There is something that med students are taught in diagnostics. "If you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras". I am also, not a huge fan of Evo psych. It is witch science for the most part. BUT only when it talks about "why" the actual underlying observations are essentially factual. I don't care why unless it is probably causal, I care about what is. Eve psych is fun but essentially empty calories.
And by the by almost all credible research journals are behind pay walls. If you use that as an invalidating criteria you won't get hardly any research from the last twenty years.
Just read the abstracts. You aren't qualified to judge the method or the results anyway. Btw if you had actually read even the abstract on the first paper on that list you would have seen that it was a study that explored the fact that jealousy reactions lit up entirely different areas of the male and female brain and to different degrees.
And by the way, there have been a bunch of interesting studies into religion and neurobiology. There was one fascinating study that showed people who have seizures that focus in the temporal lobe of the brain have profoundly religious experiences. There are also some very interesting looks into pattern recognition and data extrapolation functions of the brain and religion.
The fundamental truth here is that you aren't really all that knowledgable about this subject. I have maintained a peripheral interest in neurobiology for the last ten or fifteen years and most of the stuff I am citing comes from glancing asides in various journals and science publications and the odd jaunt into self study. I have a good enough grasp of gross anatomy but I specialize in cardiology not the brain so the hurdle to beat me at this game shouldnt be that high, but you just don't seem to have any biological grounding whatsoever. I feel like I am having a one sided convsation with someone that learned everything that they know about human neurophysiology from a sociology text book. I mean good lord, you brought up the genetics issue again! Genetics have almost nothing to do with gender differences in thought or rather we all have essentially the same set of coding and it is the exposure to hormones that tell what parts of the coding to activate. This is genetics 101. Identical genes doesn't mean identical phenotype because of certain alleles not being activated. Hell there was just a study that showed that if a mother fasted while she was pregnant the fetus would have greater fat conversion rates than a fetus that was fed well in utero.
edited 25th Feb '11 8:05:17 AM by Shrimpus
Over 10,000 dead.:<
I'm not sure I would use such vulgar words, but you seem to at least believe it a lot more than I do.
Also, brain patterns can actually change with experience. Culture actually affects the brain quite a bit. Do people with Post-Traumatic Stress disorder not have different seeming brains when shown under the magnifying glass, so to speak, as those without it? It may be true that the study does show a few men and women with different brain pattern reactions to "cheating" and other relationship dynamic events. This doesn't mean it was heritable. How many people were studied, is it a sure thing that the "lit up brain" differences are independent of sociological conditioning?
I couldn't read that first one, again, because it costs money. I just got into a car wreck recently, so I'm in no position to be paying to argue with people on the internet.
This is the abstract, it mentions nothing of brain lighting up differences and diversity.
People are motivated to self-present to their potential romantic partners. We hypothesized that due to the uncertainty of paternity, one of the self-presentational behaviors that human females engage in when they are motivated to attract a long-term mate is designed to communicate to prospective partners that they are likely to be faithful. In previous termStudynext term 1, we show that females in a long-term-romance mindset are less likely to agree to going to a concert with another female known to be unfaithful (cheater) than with a female known to have many sexual partners (player) or a non-flirtatious control female (control). Females in the long-term-romance mindset are also less willing to be the unfaithful female's friend and less willing to indicate that she is similar to them. In previous termStudynext term 2, we show that the effect is gender specific. In particular, we show that in the presence of a potential long-term partner, females (but not previous termmales)next term express more rejecting emotions towards a same-sex acquaintance who reveals a predilection to be unfaithful. These previous termstudiesnext term provide strong support for the role of uncertainty of paternity in the female self-presentational behaviors in the context of mate attraction.The fundamental truth here is that you aren't really all that knowledgable about this subject.And I never said genes have anything to do with gender differences. I probably said something about it having nothing to do with gender differences. But I probably do need to stay out of this topic for a little while. Not because I'm wrong and uneducated, but because there a better ways at me promoting against gender norms than being in here. I came in here, said gender was a construct and did my thing, there's only so much more I can do without absolutely proving sociological foundations for things. Unfortunately this makes it a source that people can use to stab me. But I can always drown it out. What I can do here fruitfully right now is largely done. I should be out doing other things to destroy the memes Evolutionary Psychologists believe to be true and creating new better ones, instead of taxing along here when I already stated a lot of my stance.
Good job trying to demoralize someone. God, you're aggravating. After being told basically "hey kid, go away and get an education and let the adults talk about issues they know about" is the last time to need a break. But I don't have the patience for this again. Leaving on a note like this is the worst, after being told to "step down, I know more about this than you", to want a break and go away. But I am in no mental state again to be even thinking about this. I need a break, I have much better things to think about since I want to get rid of gender roles than to argue in a thread with already a lot of controversy about how hardwired they are into people and how much they're learned. Mark my words, one day I will defeat you and your kind. I will destroy gender if I have to live 400 years. Ugh, I feel sick. What kind of kind of note and defeat have I allowed myself to walk away with just because my mind can't take anymore?
edited 25th Feb '11 10:59:42 AM by Ukonkivi
Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]
Brain patterns change with experience? I hope you mean synapse configurations because brain patterns change every second. Or maybe you mean neuronal outgrowth and repurposing? In which the brain rewires itself with new jobs tasked to old areas?
This is the problem. You might call it ad hominem but it is nearly impossible to have a meaningful debate on the biology of this subject because you don't know what the fundaments of the field are. This is a relatively high level debate over a very fussy sub section of a very complex field. I make a point of not sticking my nose into subjects that I am not qualified to have an opinion on. I don't debate economics and I don't debate about the more advanced aspects of particle physics.
You are perfectly entitled to have a opinion on whether or not we should try and change or deconstruct gender roles. But you aren't helping your cause when you try and dictate the science. If you want to disprove evo psych then get a degree, do some counter research. You could even go out and start a campaign to crack down on bad science like that Boddington chap in the UK.
Finally, I don't know why but instead of going for the social psych paper which is a pretty crappy field in terms of any form of legitimate research you didn't browse the relevant number one hit which is not some weird holistic crap but a showing that the amygdala and hypothalamus light up in men and the posterior temporal sulcus lights up in women.
Here is the conclusion of that study.
"Our fMRI results are in favor of the notion that men and women have different neuropsychological modules to process sexual and emotional infidelity"
And by the way, people with PTSD have brain reaction associated with combat, a flight or fight response that links a hippocampal memory with rest of the limbic system. It isn't a neuroplastic change. It is a neuroassociative change. It links the memory with a physical response. Just like people who get into fights will sometimes get a adrenalin rush when they see the guy they fought with years later. Just a lot worse.
And this is the issue. You throw out terms and associations and I have to spend half my time trying to convince you that things don't work that way. I have to argue with you about well established theories because you haven't done the grounding research needed to have a discussion about this. Hell I could do a better job supplying you with the evidence you need to make a decent study of this just to spare myself having to go through this fumbling.
Here, like I was mentioning above you might want to investigate bonobo orphans. You might want to investigate stroke recovery and brain plasticity in the retaking of hemispheres. You might want to look into the effects of hormones on behavior, especially the effects of testosterone on men and aldosterone on women. All of these paths have a chance of yielding some decent fruit in your argument that our thoughts are more a product of our environment than our construction but none of them are going to help you out with the biological determinism issue, because as far as science is concerned that is a closed book. Our body Skews our thoughts, period.
Over 10,000 dead.:<
Great, I made another response and my power went out again. It's amazing, as if the universe is trying to stop me from posting here.
People generally do have debates where people know more than another side. And fundamentals are easy to cite. Almost all religious debates seem to be of Atheists trying to teach religious people fundamentals of scientific fields they don't understand. Like that of thunderf00t.
It's true, there is a lot I have to learn. However, the biology of race and gender is a morally loaded field. It's true that I don't understand as much as I'd like, like much of the human species, I an emotional investment in the issue. Just like Antifa groups have an investment in Anti-Racist politics.
I know little enough that I haven't got into much of the nitty gritty areas, but enough that understand there is a controversy, and most of what I've read has claimed that these such claims are rooted in scientific sexism. You started this debate in the first place. And you certainly didn't avoid using any logical fallacies the whole time. There's no need for me to assume you're right just because you claim I am ignorant, and trample over a bunch of things to do with gender roles.
You're wearing me out all right. And unfortunately doing a good job of wearing me down with terrible babble and leading me unto a confused mess. The last thing I need to tax my mind with right now is more of this, but this is the last thing I need to end a note on. The last debate about Race and Intelligence where I tried to claim the same thing about Social Construction I essentially ended out on a note like this. I simply couldn't take it anymore and I repeatedly got told how I was wrong and that I clearly didn't know a thing about science or I would agree with their "Race Realist" position. I've regretted it since, since other users took up my same side and didn't back down when other people told them "you clearly don't know science", they called each other psuedoscientists all day and I got lost in the sparks flying.
I don't want to do this again, and the last thing I need to do is make a person look right by going away when they call someone else ignorant. By I need to get away from this for a time again. It's hurting my mind. I've read way too much biological stuff about race and sex as it is, my mind needs another break. There's also sort of Evolutionary Psychologists who want to pin gender roles on biological inheritance out there for me to get into it with at a later time. For now, I'll concede defeat again. I don't know enough to say that Race and Intelligence disparity isn't biological in origin, I don't know enough to prove that races don't necessarily prefer mating with their own biologically, I don't know enough to prove that women prefer more powerful men biologically, but know this, I have a teetering moral opposition to sexism and racism. And you can think whatever you want, I am the enemy of anyone who will stop and argue against female empowerment, race mixing, and the like. I will always hold out a flame of opposition as long as I have a working mind. My very love for the human species rests on the idea these terrible things aren't true. And I'm not the only one. If it's not true that races and sexes are so different and unequal, you can be sure the ones who know what they're talking about will take it down!
I'm out... I have no mental capacity left to do this. My mind is throbbing.
Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]
Personally I do believe that the widespread belief in gender roles originate from a real difference in gender biology, whilst the actual 'gender roles' are a very inaccurate representation of said difference, but this is a simple belief and I think that Shrimpus is just being arrogant about the whole thing and is acting like you have to a freaking neuroscientist to know what your talking about.
There is no actual non-counterable proof that men and women are infact born mentally different, any 'difference' between the brain of a man and a woman could be becuase of their lifestyle.
I assume men and women are born mentally different (usually) becuase so many other creatures have recognisable 'gender roles', whilst a great deal of that is probably learned too, it makes the probability of a real 'difference' highly likely. I don't actually care if there is or there isn't, knowing wouldn't increase the quality of life or crud like that.
I do care that there's always some 'know it all' that pops up and starts being a Jerkass about it.
edited 25th Feb '11 1:39:23 PM by Mysteria
WHARRGARBL
Geez, I'm reading through this thread, and I'm seeing two extremes. First, you have people like Shrimp arguing that everything about your behaviour can be explained biologically, and stuff like my preference for pineapples over mangoes can be traced back to specific codons in my DNA, and then we have people like Ukon who are arguing that nothing about your behaviour is biological, and if it wasn't for the Evil Patriarchy, men and women would be carbon copies of each other. Can I take a third option?
Obviously, men and women are different. I don't think anyone (except Ukon) disagrees. Of course, there are differences in brain chemistry and whatnot, but I think some of you guys are severely overestimating these differences. Ever heard of "variation between the sexes is far less than the variation within each sex"? Usually, when people say "Men biologically are better than women at X," it means "Men have a structure Y in their brains that women lack that responds to neurotransmitter Z, resulting in reaction W and which, in the end, gives men a .1% advantage over women when it comes to doing X." Most differences in behaviour between the sexes we see is a lot bigger than a slight increase in some neurotransmitters in the brain could achieve, which leads me to believe that most big differences between the sexes today are probably not caused by biological differences, but societal expectations.
Also, you guys seem to be forgetting that averages are worse than useless in determining the behaviour of individual people. It might be reasonable to say "Men are on average better leaders than women," but not "This person will be a poor leader because she's a woman."
In conclusion: yes, there are differences in biology. No, not all gender roles are purely social constructs; however, I have no doubt in my mind that gender roles are severely exaggerated when compared to the biological differences they are based off of, e.g. men might on average have a 1% better chance of being a good leader and attaining a position of power, but this is no reason to expect all women to stay at home and be good little house servants.
@Ukon: Honestly, that bit that you said about arguing with racists explains more about your posts than anything else you've posted.
So, to directly counter that: just because someone is arguing that there are psychological differences between genders doesn't mean that they're evil or sexist. Argue against the argument they're making, not the argument you suspect they want to make.
@Shrimpy: That PDF was partly convincing, but I notice that the difference between societies on any graph that compares them is as great or greater than the difference within a society.
I also notice there seems to be no instances there of going out to find people who have no contact or nearly no contact with modern society and culture, which further taints the conclusions of the paper. I didn't see one culture in that paper that didn't currently believe in one God or less, but obviously that's not inherent to the human brain. The author says right out"mutual attraction/love emerged as one of the most valued qualities in a spouse worldwide" which is maybe true right now but has certainly not been true for all of history. And of course some of those studies were conducted on American college students only, which is a horrid sample for a subject that's purporting to find things inherent to all human beings and thus can be safely ignored.
Similarly no instances appeared (though there might've and the paper didn't mention it) of going out to polyandrous societies or societies with other strange mating behaviors and collecting data on their thoughts. As far as I could tell, all cultures mentioned in the article currently have monogamous mating practices. Maybe the effects mentioned are a side-effect of monogamy in the same way that currency tends to cause more trade.
Oh, and on the subject of currency, there obviously cannot be genes that code for "good financial prospect", because there was no such thing as financial prospect when they were evolving. I suspect what they were really looking for was "high status", but then that turns it into a cultural thing, since (in Western culture; I'm assuming for now Zambia is similar) beautiful women have high status, and similarly rich men have high status. That doesn't indicate a difference between the genders; it indicates that each gender looks for high status in mates, whatever that means culturally.
It still therefore seems that the major differences between men and women as far as mate selection go are just as likely to be because of the pervasiveness of Western culture as anything inherent in the human brain.
I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1
In the immortal words of Harry S Truman, kitchens. Heat. Position in space. I didn't bring up your lack of knowledge until it became obvious and started getting in the way of the debate.
I'm sorry that I offended your sensibilities. You don't have to be a neuroscientist but you need to know the facts. I make no apologies for feeling that basic knowledge is a requirement for discussion and that advanced knowledge is a requirement for debate. We make allowances for ignorance because no one can encompass the whole of the knowledge needed, but a certain level of proficiency is required so that the varied points can be weighed.
. I never made any argument that everything about you is determined by gender, or for that matter biochemistry. Simply that it is a factor. The entire tack of my argument has been a refutation of the idea that gender and sexuality is an entirely social construction. In the end most of the differences between the genders can be overruled with practice and training. It only shows in the statistical majority and at the most bleeding of extremes. Sort of how despite an average male advantage in muscle I could never hope to compete with any serious female athlete, and the difference between her and her male counterpart is slight but consistent.
. That is a general study on human mating behaviors. If you want I can go find the more specific studies of polyandry in Nepal.
edited 25th Feb '11 3:50:29 PM by Shrimpus
Go ahead. (It's only one of my arguments, mind, but go ahead anyways.)
I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1
Den harde nordmann
: There is a small thing bothering me: I don't think you have specified why Ukonkivi is wrong yet. Can you sum up an argument in 2-3 lines please?
Because she supposes that gender differences are entirely sociocultural. And I have shown that in addition to the obvious gross physical differences there are fundamentally different neural reactions to stimuli. There are wiring differences between the sexes.
Den harde nordmann
: That is stating, not arguing. Do you have a actual fact based argument beyond "it might have an effect, if we get into a very specific situation", because that is currently your argument.
edited 25th Feb '11 4:54:23 PM by del_diablo
A guy called dvorak is tired. Tired of humanity not wanting to change to improve itself. Quite the sad tale.
Excuse me, but I think that people in this thread are misconstruing "masculine" with "held only or mostly by men".
Uh.... oh my lord. How is it that you can type that giant rebuttle and not rebut anything?
First off, I said women are attracted to wasteful displays but if you had actually been reading I you would have realized that I had already stated that in humans both sexes are sexually selective so in fact both are attracted to wasteful displays.
Second Off, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleListURL&_method=list&_ArticleListID=1655257527&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=58196ceef5c06649a56bfc5b412da1fe&searchtype=a
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/pdffiles/Human%20Mating%20Strategies.pdf
Now, let me break this down to you in the simplest possible way. Either you are on board with the idea that biology provides to us a fundamental set of sexual parameters or you think that gay people can unlearn being gay. This is what you are essentially telling me right now. That nothing about human sexuality is inherent hardware, that everything is software. That I could with sufficient time and effort learn to be attracted to goats.
It is a stunningly ridiculous standpoint to not acknowledge that sex and gender are not at least partially rooted in biology.
EDIT: Still can't quite work on html formatting. Just copy the block and it produces the abstract.
edited 24th Feb '11 4:04:20 PM by Shrimpus