506
The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
506 points (82.9% liked)
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I'll wait until there's greater consensus in the field. These papers reek of scientists who have strong political motivations to find the answers they seek, and I'm not expert enough to critique their work.
Well you did just critique them. But without offering any meaningful criticism, just political feelings.
They aren't the one making the claims though? Burden of proof doesn't disappear because of the sensitivities of the subject matter, and biases do matter, especially where the claim is insufficiently evidenced.
I am fully open to the claims of this paper but fully unconvinced by the meagre evidence provided. I will read into it more over the coming weeks though to see if better literature exists.
No, I pointed out that they self-identify as feminists and are claiming to have found evidence of a finding feminists would salivate over. Investigator bias is a real problem in scientific research and I see some pretty obvious red flags for it here. You're the one who seems butthurt at someone not immediately accepting a political point you favor.
Yes. Your entirely baseless claims, with literally no backing at all, without providing any substance or source for you claims, are very convincing here. You "see" and "smell" all sorts of "signs" but for some reason can't name them.
You'd be literally laughed out of any reasonable credible discussion with this take. Hence why you're also being downvoted to hell for it.
You're just complaining because you don't like it or something. If you had any reasonable evidence, you would have pointed to it. Instead you're pointing to some boogeyman to try to defend your stance. You're clearly the one who's butthurt here.
I did point to it, named it. Investigator bias is not a "boogey man," which you'd know if you had any understanding of the scientific method at all. You just don't want to hear it, because you like the result being claimed in the article and don't care much about the integrity of the evidence. I'm being downvoted, because this is Lemmy and I dared refuse to accept something a feminist claimed. Surprise, surprise.
I know very well what it is, but just screaming "investigator bias" doesn't mean anything. By the "scientific method", you must submit evidence and prove it.
But you don't. Because you don't have any. So there's no reason to take your claims worth anything other than the ramblings of someone who's just angry at the findings.
I really don't care about the findings or whether they're true. It has no bearing on me. But you're acting like a buffoon.
Not the person you were responding to, but this article definitely has some big problems, the largest of which is they don't cite any sources. None. That's a significant problem for a 'scientific' article.
The first claim - Women hunted too - they present good evidence for, and a number of other studies have shown that many other societies had more integrated roles.
The second claim - Women are better at endurance than men - is shaky.
Looking back at the placements, I agree women are definitely doing well, but they're not what I'd call dominating. Women's 1st place is placing ~5-10th overall. Impressive, for sure, but not dominating. They again, provide no sources, years of the race, or names of these women.
An enormous leap. This is a great theory to test and analyze, or link to others who have tested it, but not something to state as fact in a scientific article.
Once again, I'm curious what races. I'm involved on the running scene, and have never heard of this rule before. Google results didn't show anything either. Once again, a distinct lack of sources.
Women are definitely capable of doing super endurance events, but they are not the equivalent of men on setting records for any race I’ve found. See below for a few ultra endurance races I know of.
One called “backyard ultra”. Basically you do a lap of 6.7km each hour until everyone else drops out. World records are all men by a long shot - https://backyardultra.com/world-rankings/
Fastpacking, a slower event than the backyard ultras, involve hiking/jogging through hiking trails while carrying what you need. Definitely slower pace, and I’d argue closer to what I’d imagine with a long, days-long hunt would be like for ancient tribes. FKT, or fastest known times, are often found at this website. Looking at all the times, men carry a significant lead in both supported (ie someone else carries your food/water/sleeping gear), and unsupported. As an example, look at the Appalachian Trail – https://fastestknowntime.com/route/appalachian-trail
Even the RAAM shows solo male records much faster than women: https://www.raamrace.org/records-awards
The thing the article failed to mention (and the thing I think is key) is that women excel at doing these things, typically, with less energy burnt both during and after the races. This is hinted at, implied, and signalled, but never outright stated.
Women on the whole are smaller, and tend to have better insulin responses (as mentioned in the article) which means their blood sugar stays consistent during exercise and after. Consistent blood sugar means less wasted energy. Larger heart and lungs, combined with higher type 2 muscle fibres compared to women’s type 1 (from the article) means, again, less wasted energy and more efficiencies. Less muscle damage, as mentioned in the article, means less to repair, which means more saved energy. In a hunter/gather society, this saved energy can be significant.
With modern access to food, that evolutionary advantage seems to vanish, and the article doesn’t even touch on it.
They self identify as feminists? Where? I couldn't find it in the article.
Click the links in the article to their actual research papers and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Could you highlight what areas of the papers say that?
Also, why are scientists who identify as feminists less qualified or capable of the scientific method than people who don’t identify as feminists?
I wouldn't trust someone who doesn't identify as a feminist, since feminism aims to minimize gender bias. Someone who's not a feminist would be much more suspect.
Exactly. And I wouldn't trust someone who doesn't even know what feminist means to make accurate statements about gender.
No need to spend your brainpower criticizing trash articles that are based on lies and propaganda. :)
It's been a long time since I've been in Anthropology class, but this isn't something we were taught academically. Cultural Anthro is all theory-based, academics get paid to publish theory arguments. Imo, biologically, women carried babies, men didn't, there would have been associated cultural roles to accomodate this as successfully as possible. The idea that it's popular theory this meant men hunted and women gathered is just sensationalist. It's niether competely wrong nor completely right. There are elements of both throughout many cultures. It's the idea that it's all or nothing is wrong.
Remember that the existing consensus was also created by scientists with political and social motivations who made plenty of assumptions about gender.
A challenge to the status quo isn't automatically biased just because it challenges the status quo.
Except that the "existing consensus" as portrayed in the article is phony in the sense that no anthropologist has seriously believed or promulgated binary hunting and gathering roles for men and women since at least the 1960s. That may be a notion that exists in the popular imagination, but it doesn't exist in contemporary anthropology and hasn't for decades.
I'm skeptical about the popular theory.
While I haven't checked their papers, I still do think this particular article is not convincing. They say the man-the-hunter theorists rejected data but don't cite articles that point at the flaw. It's business as usual to overlook data in real-world science. The question is, how significant the overlook was, but they don't cite anything scholarly, call it a day and move on.
Then they say traditional studies can have bias because they are done by men. This sounds shockingly unprofessional to me.