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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27293 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/

It's hard to trust Scientific American when they mix communicating real, good science with blatant contradictory nonsense. Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances. But then it also has a this paragraph about gender vs sex.

Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. "Sex" typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms "female" and "male" are often used in relation to biological sex. "Gender" refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen. For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses "female" and "male," so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms "woman" and "man" are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but it is difficult to add that nuance when citing the work of others.

How many pre-historic humans would actually have any seperation between the concept of a "female" and a "woman"? Not to mention they way they actually bring up "women in social roles" doesn't acknowledge their own distinction- you're never going to get a pregnant trans women, but you could get a pregnant trans men. We don't know anything about "gender" as progressives view it in pre-historic societies- we only know about sex, what we observe through things like skeletal remains and inferences from behaviour of human-like animals. The article would've done better to solely use female and male the whole way through and not try to seperate sex and gender.

Later, there's a paragraph about how athletic studies don't do enough research on females that wasn't relevant to anything else in the article. A non-sequitor that wasn't relevant to the article since we do know enough about female biology to determine their relative advantages and weaknesses at physical activities compared to men.

The article does have some good informative material in it.

Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles—marbling if you will—which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males.

Correspondingly, the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males. Females have more type I, or "slow-twitch," muscle fibers than males do. These fibers generate energy slowly by using fat. They are not all that powerful, but they take a long time to become fatigued. They are the endurance muscle fibers. Males, in contrast, typically have more type II ("fast-twitch") fibers, which use carbohydrates to provide quick energy and a great deal of power but tire rapidly.

Females also tend to have a greater number of estrogen receptors on their skeletal muscles compared with males. This arrangement makes these muscles more sensitive to estrogen, including to its protective effect after physical activity. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues.

But then later it had this infamous paragraph:

Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

I had never seen that paragraph in context before. Knowing the context, that they just explained the inherent biological differences, then denied them right after, makes it worse! Right after they broke down in detail how females have hormones and muscles built for stamina over power! The reason why male pacesetters aren't allowed for women's endurance running is because the male pacesetter would be setting the pace too fast for the women, who are built for going a longer distance at a slower pace than men, as they had literally just explained earlier in the article.

They also downplay the evidence that "Man the Hunter" was accurate, but at least they include it.

Males living in the Upper Paleolithic—the cultural period between roughly 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe—do show higher rates of a set of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than females to throw spears. But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

In conclusion, their own conclusion perfectly demonstrates their own double think:

Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kinds of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food. And ancient women and men appear to have engaged in the same foraging activities rather than upholding a sex-based division of labor. It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

They claim at the same time that females are biologically optimized to perform certain activities better than males, but also that females and males performed the exact same activities in an egalitarian society.

A lot of old anthropology like the original "Man the Hunter" article this article is a response to, is flawed. But at the same time, modern anthropology is just as if not more biased than the anthropology of the 60s. Their intro has a line saying,

Bystanders might be left wondering whether portrayals of women hunters are trying to make the past more inclusive than it really was—or whether Man the Hunter-style assumptions about the past are attempts to project sexism backward in time.

The reason why bystanders are so confused is because that's exactly what organizations like Scientific American are trying to do. If they really were just trying to correct a mistaken historical record, bystanders who don't do deep dives into human pre-history could safely trust pop sci and wouldn't be so skeptical. But when Scientific American blatantly tries to push an agenda, bystanders rightly grow skeptical.

Every once in a while we find yet another uncontacted tribe of people somewhere in the world. The most recent one I read about was in the Amazon.

Now, if these tribes were previously unconnected to the rest of the world, whatever "patriarchy" the rest of the world follows would not affect them. It's an unbiased sample. All of the published pictures I'm seeing are all men and no women.

The thing is that, in general, these tribes all seem to follow generally the same social schemes... the men seem to do the hunting, and the women tend to do the child-rearing and non-hunting activities. Now I'm sure there are some outliers where women are also doing hunting, but generally this isn't a thing.

From a purely physical perspective (and I'm assuming this isn't a controversial stand), being pregnant, giving birth, and the first year or so after giving birth to a child is hard and energy-intensive endeavor that would preclude many strenuous activities. Seeing as women are the only members of humanity that can do this, it would follow that societies would be set up around this. To be super specific, when I'm saying "women," I mean members of the human species who are adults and with a body form intended to produce the larger gametes we call "eggs" and gestate offspring internally and can produce nourishment for said offspring. The fact that I need to write this out, I find silly.

Men and women are different. Both men and women are needed and valuable. The progressive stance that men and women are entirely interchangeable and indistinguishable is laughable in my opinion. Men and women are different, and that's a good thing.

On the topic of SciAm, well, I dropped my subscription when they endorsed a candidate for the presidency last time around. To have science mix with politics takes away from the science aspect. Science is the search for truth -- not just "truth" that meshes with currently popular ideas.

This is true, however I’d just point out, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon usually do have contact with other tribes.

The word used in countries where these tribes are typically found is more accurate, people who are in “voluntary isolation”.

Not saying this to make any point one way or another, just because the subject interests me.

Point taken. Some of the pics from the linked article have cow skulls strung up on a stick, so there's some contact with the outside world. But that said it still says something that the only photos of the tribe only have men. However, I sincerely doubt that the interaction with outsiders caused a shift in gender roles for this (or other) tribe(s).

It all reeks of starting from a conclusion and working backward to make an article to support it.

Another thing I just thought of which is unrelated to this: insurance rates. I'm a guy in my early 50s, which means at some point in the past I was a teenager. I've also worked in insurance for quite a while -- not the actual underwriting, but I had plenty of interactions with the people who did. There's a vast disparity between the accident rates for young men compared to young women, which leads to the disparate amount charged by the companies. There's something pretty obviously different in the behavior, in the aggregate, between men and women from a purely behavioral standpoint concerning risk-taking.

Similarly, all one has to do is look at the prison population and note that the vast majority of inmates are men. Some of this is caused by women getting lighter sentences for the same crimes, but that doesn't explain the order of magnitude difference between the behavior of men and women.

Even discounting differences in physical strength, there's something fundamentally different in our wiring.

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