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Is There Anything Good About Men?

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Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#111

Post by mitcheme »

scott_s wrote: post #104
mitcheme wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nocipher, his analysis of women's creativity is wrong because we know women have created art throughout history. We don't actually know how much art, unfortunately, because historically, the bulk of women's creative expression was not considered "real art". It wasn't signed by its creator, and its recipients didn't treat it with that extra level of care to prevent it from being destroyed. That's a big issue when you'…

Interestingly, the Mosuo have a different model of the family than most of the rest of humans. In Mosuo culture, men take care of their nieces and nephews, not their sons and daughters. (I had to look this up on Wikipedia to verify it, but I guess it was true based on your description of their sexual relationships - such an arrangement is not stable otherwise.) So, two points. One, this kind of culture is the excepti…

I think you're mistaken about the model of family that "most of the rest of humans" have. There is way more variation than arguments like this tend to give credit to. Traditional Hawaii, everyone your age is a sibling and everyone your parents' age is a parent. Other parts of traditional China, the family group you belong to depends on your father entirely. Your biological mother is not related to you, since her father was part of a different family. Parts of Native America, your mother's sisters are also your mothers, and your father's brothers are your fathers, but your father's sisters and mother's brothers are aunts and uncles. These are just basic systems of reckoning, it gets quite a bit more complicated once you look at the actual living arrangements that go with them (where do couples go to live, where do the children live, how do marriages or whatever other sexual arrangements work). By population, nowadays there are fewer that vary from the western norm, but if you count up what was going on pre-globalization, we are not in the majority. These different family systems are fading away because of modern-day western influence only, and I think that might have a lot more to do with the military (and more recently, economic power) than the custody arrangements. You can't simply point to everything western and say, "this is why we won".

I don't believe it is consistent. Based on the Masuo you can see that women will have less sex if they start being treated like western women. You can't look at how women behave in western culture and use them as proof that women have a lower sex drive, because we know that evidence has been tainted.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#112

Post by Daniel_Newby »

run4yourlives wrote: post #70
iamwil wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All heritable behaviors that lead to men or women not reproducing don't stay in a population very long. It's not so much slave to genes as it's a boundary condition. That doesn't take away from your daily experience as a human. You can still do whatever you want, day to day, year to year, not giving much thought of your genetic viability and still be a happy, healthy human being. Just because you know how a rainbow w…

>All heritable behaviors that lead to men or women not reproducing don't stay in a population very long I'm not sure about this. What I mean is that I can clearly see the logic here, but I'd love to see a discussion for instance on the continual existence of evolutionary destructive traits such as homosexuality, which by all accounts has not only been around for a great deal of human existence, but also other species…

... I'd love to see a discussion for instance on the continual existence of evolutionary destructive traits such as homosexuality ...

Parasites. Parasites frequently manipulate the host to change its behavior. Toxoplasma gondii, for example, is associated with a 6X increase in car crashes among human drivers. Parasites also cause variety to evolve in the host immune system and other body systems, resulting in a variety of oddball genetic variations and autoimmune disorders.

There is also an effect called frequency-dependent selection. Some gene variants are useful if you get one copy of the variant, but harmful if you get two. Evolution multiplies the useful gene in the population to the point where the good effects on reproduction balance the bad. Examples of this include sickle cell anemia (one copy protects against malaria, two copies give crippling sickle cell attacks), and the sphingolipid storage disorders (a small influence causes higher IQ, more influence causes lethal degenerative changes of the brain).

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#113

Post by ezy »

cefarix wrote: post #108
ezy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You should really read more before pontificating. Feminism did not arise because we suddenly stopped valuing women as mothers. It arose because that is all we valued in women[1]. The history, if you bother to read it, bears this out. Hell, even today, certain attitudes bear this out, although with the help of feminism, we see less of it in modern culture. Do you think a woman should be allowed to become a doctor?…

Feminism arose because women did not like the way they were being treated. Society did actually stop valuing motherhood. It was an indirect result of society valuing doctors, physicists, CEOs, etc, yet restricting women from those same things. Only women can be mothers, and when women are restricted from those things society values, they become more defined only by being a parent, and when the value of women falls, s…

You're not being very clear here, because it seems you've just said the precise opposite of what you posted previously in the first paragraph.

Initially, you said feminism arose because we started valuing other (more flamboyant?) occupations more than the more mundane, which essentially boiled down to motherhood in your post.

Now you're saying that, no, motherhood wasn't valued any less, but woman were discouraged from entering those more flamboyant occupations. This, in turn devalued motherhood through its association with people not involved in high status occupations, thus feminism arose as a reaction to the lessening of status.

This re-raises the question of why women were discouraged from entering high-status occupations initially. And as far as I can tell, you've completely closed your argument in a circle.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#115

Post by munificent »

> Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men specialize in the larger group. If you make a list of activities that are done in large groups, you are likely to have a list of things that men do and enjoy more than women: team sports, politics, large corporations, economic networks, and so forth.

...open source?

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#116

Post by bermanoid »

geebee wrote: post #91
bermanoid wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secondly, the author doesn't make a convincing argument that the fact that the reason why men get all the risk and all the reward is because of something innate, instead of a self-perpetuating social system that actively encourages one gender to risk it all and reap the rewards, while holding back the other gender to mediocrity and risk-free existences. The author may not have gone into it, but the argument exists, b…

Female reproduction isn't as limited as it might seem at first glance, because you need to consider the reproductive success of her offspring as well. If we're going to see life as DNAs way of making more DNA, Genghis Khan's mother did just as much reproducing as his father. I've read that female bonobos, for instance, take a great interest in the mating success of their male offspring: " http://www.indstate.edu/news…

If we're going to see life as DNAs way of making more DNA, Genghis Khan's mother did just as much reproducing as his father.

I absolutely agree with you about that, and in fact, the genes that made Genghis Khan reproduce so wildly may have even come from his mother. They may not have been linked to sex at all, and might be expressed equally in his male and female descendants.

None of which changes the conclusion, though, which is that if there are any sex-linkages (either by presence on the Y chromosome or by preferential expression) amongst the genes controlling risk (reproductive risk, especially), then they will tend to accumulate in such a way that the high risk male genes are much more strongly selected for than female ones (which will be mostly neutral if they're not deleterious).

Put another way, the "risk-seeking" phenotype is not the same as the "encourage male offspring to be risk-seeking" phenotype, and while the former is only beneficial to male genes, the latter is beneficial to everyone's. And the end result is that male risk seeking is encouraged in the gene pool in many ways - in fact, what you've suggested is that the social reasons that male risk-seeking is encouraged are actually quite strongly selected for individually, which puts the conclusion on even stronger genetic grounds (as opposed to what comes up often as the more PC theory, that it's just an accident of history that society decided to bring up males that way, not an evolutionary imperative).

The stuff about bonobos is quite interesting, I hadn't seen that before. They have a quite different power structure that makes things very unusual (almost inverted, in many ways), and it's very interesting to see that increased reproductive variance there is not linked to dominance, but to keeping a good position within the female hierarchy. It makes very clear the point that while a lot of (human) male traits may be evolved in order to increase reproductive variance, those traits do not necessarily achieve that goal (or any positive goal) in general, but only within the context of our other evolutionary peculiarities. As usual, it's difficult to evaluate anything in a vacuum.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#117

Post by charlieflowers »

mitcheme wrote: post #28

What I dislike about these kinds of "evolutionary" arguments is that they tend to assume that the differences between the genders are genetic, even when there's no evidence for that. Even as late as the Victorian ages, several of the traits we now think of as immutable part of being male or female were swapped around. For the Victorians, blue was for girls and pink was for boys, and all women had the potential to bec…

"Even as late as the Victorian ages, several of the traits we now think of as immutable part of being male or female were swapped around. For the Victorians, blue was for girls and pink was for boys, and all women had the potential to become insatiable, incurable beasts for sex, one reason it was so important to keep chaste. This model of sexuality fit what the people experienced in their daily lives, just as ours does to us, and they had their studies that revealed women who enjoyed sex far more than was proper."

Enjoyed your post. In particular, I am very interested in knowing what your sources are for this info about the Victorian period. Thanks.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#118

Post by qubit »

JonnieCache wrote: post #4

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…

We are slaves to our genes plus our conditioning, both of which are greatly influenced by our ancestors and completely influenced by things outside of our control.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#119

Post by olalonde »

lionhearted wrote: post #39
bh42222 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wikipedia entry only very briefly touches on some of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boer_Wars#Controversy_and_signi... But saying only that To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies. is VERY simplistic. No sentence describing the British empire should start with "To make a long story short".

> To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies. is VERY simplistic. No, it's not. By pretty much any reasonable metric, the British Empire has contributed more net good to humanity than any other nation in history. Plenty of bad, too. But overwhelmingly more good than bad. Much of the good is taken for granted until you realize all the mess they cleaned up that isn't…

> By pretty much any reasonable metric, the British Empire has contributed more net good to humanity than any other nation in history.

From an utilitarian point of view, correct.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#120

Post by gnaritas »

forensic wrote: post #69
sliverstorm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to live in a world where instinct in animals is readily accepted as heritable, and yet whether or not humans can inherit behaviors is hotly contested. Almost seems like another round of people looking to maintain the illusion that humans are separate from animals. What was the last one we had, tool use?

Instinct is by definition inherited genetically. All experts in this field agree that humans inherit behaviour genetically. For example, the rooting reflex.

Or in humans, the language instinct.
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