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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27312 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.

I think the whole thing stinks of presentism. The thing I observe about history is that the farther back you go, the more literal people seem to take things. In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.

And even in other forms of thought. It just doesn’t seem like up until Plato or Socrates that there was any sort of meta analysis going on. No real thought about categories or how to think about the world. It was all very much rooted in practical, realistic, and everyday sort of concerns. I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought, or what makes a woman a woman.

As such, I don’t think modern ideas like sexuality or sex/gender descriptions are even possible n the remote past. The ideas are simply too abstract and complicated for a mind that deals mostly in the here, now, and the physical. It’s a product of our time, something we do because we are used to meta thinking and abstractions and symbolic thinking. We are no longer bound to what we can see and touch. In fact I suspect that AI is starting the next level of abstraction for human minds. Not just dealing in logical and symbolic abstract reasoning, but thinking about how we think, and thinking about what kinds of thinking will do the most good.

In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.

Are you sure about this? I've been doing a bunch of research on Plato for personal reasons recently, and this really doesn't match up with what he seemed to believe. From my reading of ancient religions, I get the impression that a lot of ancient people understood religious myths as metaphorical, and they most definitely understood the importance of symbols and symbolic meanings - just look at the Eleusinian mysteries.

I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought

They don't quite date back to the Bronze Age, but the Pythagoreans came before Plato and were famous for their belief in the transmigration of souls, and advocated vegetarianism on the basis that inflicting suffering on a living being unnecessarily diminished the human soul. Those concepts also showed up in the early Orphic religions as well, to the point that several authors said that Pythagoras was just repeating what he'd learned from them.

, or what makes a woman a woman.

The story of Tiresias directly presents an example of someone changing sex but retaining their identity as a man (despite giving birth to a daughter) and then returning to masculinity. Just to be clear I'm not saying that they would endorse modern gender ideology, but they most definitely understood the idea that you could have an inner self whose gender/sex didn't match up with your body.

Are you sure about this? I've been doing a bunch of research on Plato for personal reasons recently, and this really doesn't match up with what he seemed to believe. From my reading of ancient religions, I get the impression that a lot of ancient people understood religious myths as metaphorical, and they most definitely understood the importance of symbols and symbolic meanings - just look at the Eleusinian mysteries.

The people and faith clearly could think metaphorically or as God as a transcendent being before Islam.

@MaiqTheTrue is probably right in the sense that if you wanted to pick up the canonical texts and not run into an embodied God you'd fail with the OT and NT (assuming Jesus is God). They have a lot of language about an embodied God - just as they have more transcendent visions - because the books were written over a long time and don't agree with each other or even themselves.

Islam as a late redaction that emphasizes strict monotheism can cut out a lot of the embarrassing references (when the author even knows about them). It polemicizes against the other religions because of this too. Qur'an 5:75 rejects the deification of Jesus and Mary (why Mary is added is a question for another day) by pointing out that they can't be deities because they "both ate food".

This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e.

Well, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that re: the Christian texts.

Jesus is treated as a taking on of flesh by a God who is not material. And the old testament has things like Jeremiah's, "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" among others. I'd be inclined to argue the deliberate lack of depiction in the design of the ark etc. is gesturing towards God's immateriality as well, which would make it hard to argue that it's some late development. The New Testament, at least, you can't pass off as a contradiction between different authors. It's just a more complex position.

Yeah, Jesus' eating food isn't a problem; the contrary position would be worse, in light of Hebrews 2:14 and 17.

This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e

Interestingly, Islamic doctrine contains quite a bit of self-contradictory falsehood about what Christians believe. In Mohammed’s time there were definitely Christians in Arabia, so it’s unclear why.

Not just Christians. There's the claim that Jews think Ezra is the son of God that people have puzzled over since.

The likely reason is that the author didn't have the Bible in front of him but was going off oral tradition (which explains the stew of both canonical sources and apocryphal ones, and straight up legendary elements or how the Qur'an could conflate two Marys). Reynolds also suggests that the author is weighing in on theological debates nearby churches had, things could have become extra garbled by disagreement by the time they got to the author.

Mohammed’s time is too late for massive theological disagreement- my main point was ‘the Quran is definitely not dictated by the angel Gabriel, and probably not double checked either(like the kind of book an illiterate man makes up)’.

There are a lot of Christians in America today, but there are a ton of false beliefs (both by non Christians and even sometimes by other Christians) about what they believe. I'm not too surprised that sort of thing happened in Mohammed's time as well.

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