Posted: Dec 24, 2012 6:45 pm
Mr.Samsa wrote:Interesting angle. But how are the environmental factors influencing the males of most mammal species so very different from thos influencing the females, that this learning would be so consistently stratified along sex lines?
The males and females of most species have significantly different physiological designs (e.g. males tend to be larger), and this would necessarily produce consistent gender differences. These differences can result in different rewards and punishments for engaging in different acts, for example, male infants are able to play rougher without hurting themselves as much as smaller females, and so the males will tend towards activities of that nature and the females will tend towards quieter activities. In chimpanzees, for example, this occurs when young males start hanging out with the older males and imitate charging displays, whereas the young females hang out with the older females and practice taking care of the young.
But if that were the basis for it, we would see typically male levels of typically male traits, in those females who just happened to have been born as physically large as males. And typically female levels of typically female traits, in those males who happened to be physically small.
Nothing like this is the case in reality. Degrees of both kinds of traits do of course vary among both sexes, but not in simple ratio to physical size. You would have to be seriously resistent to the idea of innate male-female differences to postulate this as more likely than them, when it s contradicts the observed evidence.
Then you would need further explanations for things like differences in sexual behaviour etc, which account for their remarkable consistency across different cultures - while also allowing that the sheer extent to which individuals resemble those of the opposite sex, is no indication of how much they behave like those of the opposite sex.
As we have seen and have documented evidence of, however, certain hormone levels ARE such an indication.
Mr.Samsa wrote:Beatsong wrote:But the point I was making was that there is no necessary reason for us to think that we should expect to find them. There are good reasons to suspect that there may be differences, like you mention, but I don't think this justifies a strong claim like "we should expect to find them".
We may be interpreting the phrase "expect to find them" differently. I didn't see that as suggesting that there is positive, undeniable proof of them; only that the likelihood that they are there is higher than the likelihood that they are not. I saw "expect to find" as referring to where we think we are most likely to find the evidence, in the absence of having sound the evidence YET.
It wasn't the "expect to find" that I was interpreting as making a stronger claim, but rather the "should" part of that sentence. Reeve can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he was actually asking whether we should expect to find differences, rather than whether it's possible there are differences. To the former I'd still answer 'no', and to the latter I'd say 'yes'.
The statement that we "should expect to find" something only indicates that it is more likely than its opposite. The fact that the sun comes up every morning meant that prehistoric people - even without the scientific knowledge we have of why it happens - "expected to find" that it would do the same the following morning. They didn't just say "oh, we don't fully understand it, so it must be a 50/50 chance."
You don't seem to recognise any state between "both are possible, but we have NO idea which is more likely so we must make no statement either way", and "we know with absolute certainty which is correct". This is strange - the reality of human knowledge is that we are often somewhere between those states, making an estimation of which answer is more LIKELY, given the incomplete nature of our knowledge. (Indeed one could argue that that is what we do most of the time, even when we fool ourselves that our knowledge is "certain").
There is far more evidence for there being some innate differences between male and female behaviour than for there being none. I've presented some in this thread, as have Cali and others. There's a lot more out there. I don't see any real evidence for there being none, other than some rather implausible accounts of how the divide could be accounted for by things like physical size - even though the behaviours we're looking at don't vary along those lines, they just vary by sex.
Mr.Samsa wrote:I think we're putting the cart before the horse a little here though: before claiming that we need good reasons to not expect differential behavior between men and women to have a genetic, hard-wired, component, I think we first need to find a sex difference.
I don't understand this. There are loads of well documented differences in behaviour between human males and females - the only question is whether they're hardwired or not.
We also have to take into account the fact that most sex differences in other species are instinctual, and humans have no recognised instincts (excluding physiological reflexes like the knee-jerk response). This means that any innate sex difference would be the result of a much vaguer genetic predisposition and so will be heavily affected by our learning capabilities, which could result in many actual innate differences disappearing when we get to the behavioral level.
Of course humans have instincts. All of our babies would long ago have starved to death if we didn't.
