https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax9070
What is this? It looks unrelated, there's no discussion of sex differences in that.
The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#12Yes, yes - it looks like the Giant Evil Patriarchy is yet again telling lies about women's abilities and participation in higher-status, male-dominated activities. OTOH - notice the longer-term advantages, for most historical agrarian societies, of pushing a "heroic male hunter" stereotype. If warfare is all-too-common, losing wars is generally disasterous, and you can convince your males (especially the younger and…
Can you please make your substantive points without resorting to the flamewar style or ideological battle? Those things are not what HN is for, and destroy what it is for. We want curious conversation here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#13I can see merits to this. A pet topic of study of mine is of the Donner Party expedition. A thing scholars of this interesting historical episode have noted is this is a very good example of the human body being stretched to its absolute limit of endurance with a decent sample size exposed to relatively similar conditions. Interestingly, a decent majority of the survivors were young women. It’s been theorized that th…
It's a different topic, though. Women are the bottleneck of population growth, men are not, therefore women having better survivability makes perfect sense.
Men being stronger and dying younger makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective, and disagrees with the article. Sex-based division of labor makes total sense, otherwise men's mammary glands would actually work.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#14Wow, the headline is a pretty terrible summary of the article.
To counter the claim that men were predominantly hunters and women gatherers is a scientific exploration of physiology, showing women are capable of hunting and have some attributes that are better than men.
Then it talks about edge cases where societies where women were predominantly hunters (though still the exception) or cases where societies where men were predominantly hunters there were rare examples of women also hunting.
Is it just me or does that argument fall pretty flat?
It’s like saying men don’t have more muscle mass because of the few examples of weak men and strong women.
The exceptions don’t disprove the rule.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#15From the article: “The 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”
I don’t see how this claim can be made based on the available evidence. It could be proposed as hypothesis, but stating this as a fact shows that the author is pushing an end independent of the evidence.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#16Wow, the headline is a pretty terrible summary of the article. To counter the claim that men were predominantly hunters and women gatherers is a scientific exploration of physiology, showing women are capable of hunting and have some attributes that are better than men. Then it talks about edge cases where societies where women were predominantly hunters (though still the exception) or cases where societies where men…
> It’s like saying men don’t have more muscle mass because of the few examples of weak men and strong women.
You’d think that’s absurd, but back when I took a feminism course at Stanford (that was a long time ago), that bit about strength, as well as height, was literally part of required reading and “discussed” in class (discussed is in quotes because no one was willing to discuss when I brought up statistics). There’s no arguing with those people.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#17Is this the new standard boilerplate / disclaimer? > 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…
Unfortunately yes, this idea has taken over academia like a wildfire. Those dissenters who point out things like, isn't it regressive and inaccurate to reduce women and men to a set of sexist stereotypes, are censured and harassed for doing so.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#18Is this the new standard boilerplate / disclaimer? > 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…
One can defer woman as those that reproduce. Asexual reproduction still have female, mother, ... etc. There is certain requirement even if man can bring children, or machine doing it (tube-mum). And that affect a lot like change in physical and chemical etc. features of the bearer. What is the implication and the bias towards this group is a separate matter. Let us fix the basic definition first.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#19I can see merits to this. A pet topic of study of mine is of the Donner Party expedition. A thing scholars of this interesting historical episode have noted is this is a very good example of the human body being stretched to its absolute limit of endurance with a decent sample size exposed to relatively similar conditions. Interestingly, a decent majority of the survivors were young women. It’s been theorized that th…
Do you have any reading on this? I'm curious because of
> they exhausted less quickly
In what situations? It seems like there'd be very different expectations of heavy labor based on gender.
Re: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
#20From the article: “The 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” I don’t see how this claim can be made based on the available evidence. It could be proposed as hypothesis, but stating this as a fact shows that the author is pushing an end independent of the evidence.
It’s not an unreasonable claim with long distance running. Combine that with theories about persistence hunting, and how we see many traditional people choosing very lightweight weapons when hunting even very dangerous game.