Is There Anything Good About Men?

Previous submission with a lot of comments and interesting discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634955

The problem with this essay is that is paints us as slaves to our genes. Since Dawkins became fashionable, it is now normal to portray human beings as nothing more than meat-based mechanisms for storing and transporting DNA.

This idea is dangerously embedded in society now, and it risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of barbarism. What possible motivation does one have for behaving in a manner other than that of an animal, if society is telling me that I cannot do so, and that any internal experience I might have of doing so is an illusion? How is it even possible to behave in a non-animalistic manner once you have internalised these ideas?

Look into the history of George Price, one of the key figures in actually developing a lot of the stuff that Dawkins popularised:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/George_R._Pri...

The interesting part is how he spent the latter part of his life systematically giving away all his possessions to the poor in a guilt-ridden attempt to deny his own theories and to act against the interests of his genes. He eventually killed himself. The graphic method he chose to do so also comes across as an attempt to visibly deny his own ideas.

On an entirely separate note, all this talk of inter-gender differences is useless without some consideration of their scale relative to intra-gender differences.

Once you realise that the range in behaviour between members of the same gender is bigger than the difference in behaviour between members of different genders, by quite some way, this whole argument becomes a lot less compelling.

> Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

Does anyone know what research he's referring to?

Previous submissions and interesting discussions at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634955

The first submission points to http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm (which has the same post with better formatting than this submission)

"In the 19th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output."

Well, I'm convinced!