The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour • Hacker News Board

Re: The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour

#81

Post by globular-toast » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 9:23 PM UTC

sjducb wrote: post #80

globular-toast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the presence of risk-taking males is advantageous to the species as a whole. If our species was asexual each individual would have to be fairly risk averse as any individual lost is lost breeding capacity. But in a sexual species a lost male is fine and happens all the time. Just losing males is, of course, pointless but presumably the advantages brought by the successful ones outweighs any disadvantages b…

Natural selection operates at the gene level, not the population level. There has to be a positive expected return for the genes of the individual that takes the risks. If it’s beneficial to not take risks then populations will be full of individuals who play it safe.

The existence of gay people is a good example of something that can evolve in a population despite drastically lower chances of being passed on genetically.

Re: The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour

#82

Post by pfannkuchen » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #43

pfannkuchen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like sea-horses I don’t think it’s fair to represent an edge case, “noteworthy for being different” type species as being just one example out of many. As far as I’m aware the behavior exhibited by sea horses is extremely rare, and I recall it being highlighted as such in, at least, The Selfish Gene. Can you think of other examples?

I would not paint it that way. For fish, it is often the case the male takes care of the eggs, and the females are free of any responsibility. There are other behaviours in the sea, and they are in general so different to mammals that we can consider them as alien. I would even say mammals are the edge case, just by virtue of having a fewer number of species than fish, arthropods, insects, and almost any other clad.…

Yes, I suppose you’re right that I am only considering “species who raise their young after birth”.

I don’t see egg laying species behavior as being very representative of the game theoretic patterns in childcare species behavior, though.

Ditching after birth vs raising the young is clearly such a massively important game theoretic dimension that it likely substantially determines the workable ranges for most other dimensions. How can we make conclusions across such separate subspaces of organism game space?

Re: The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour

#83

Post by marcellus23 » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

BobaFloutist wrote: post #61

marcellus23 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have no conceivable way to know that hereditary traits contribute to any percentage of the differences. Right, that explains why we can't know what % heredity contributes. It doesn't explain why we should assume that % to be small.

Because many historical cases of what were thought to be fundamental differences between the genders turned out to be strictly socially informed. I think it's more likely that the current suite of stereotypes is also incorrect than that we just happened to finally get it right.

I disagree that stereotypes really vary over time or space as it seems like you're implying. Many of the gender stereotypes today are more or less the same as they were 2000 years ago, either here or on the other side of the world.