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)
News
23305 readers
3709 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, it's also unlikely to be true. The difference between male and female bodies is the equivalent of years of high end steroid use.
If you wouldn't let a man who had taken steroids for a decade and still takes them compete with other men, then you already acknowledge the biological advantage men have over women at physical sports.
I mean we also see a lot of what I would define as "outlier behavior" from men more generally. We see crazier olympic world records being set and broken, we see higher rates of suicide and violent crime, that sort of shit, which I'm personally kind of interested in figuring out the reason for. If you took some theoretical "average" man and some theoretical "average" woman I think they'd probably be a lot closer in terms of strength and stamina and shit than comparing athletes of different sexes to one another, I think the gap would be smaller.
They would not. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.
The difference between the average man and the average woman is the same as the difference between a man who's been taking steroids since he was 12, and an average man.
Estrogen is also a hell of a drug... It's actully a point in the article that people give testosterone too much credit and estrogen not enough credit when it comes to how they affect the physique.
Your argument being founded on the effects of testosterone is not a good one...
It's nothing compared to testosterone.
For example I am an average height and weight guy. I had never gone to a gym in my life, but at 25 decided to start powerlifting with some friends for fun. Within 3 months I was already lifting nearly as much as the world record lifts by women in my weight class.
I started going to my university powerlifting competitions, having lifted for less than a year, and was definitely lifting poorly compared to the other men, but I out-lifted every woman there most of whom had been training for years.
I don't think you understand the average difference in strength between men and women, it's rather large.
I don't think I'm arguing against your evidence. It's your idea that this difference in men and women's strength is simply explained by a difference in testosterone. This claim does not nullify the questions posed in the article.
Both biology and the environment play roles in defining people's personality and physique. Higher testosterone is only a piece of biology's role, but it's only loosely related to environment's role. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis to claim society's artificial rules placed on women might have had an effect on women's physique through things like sexual selection. This is why scientists still explore these things.
Testosterone is a hell of a lot of the explanation though. When people inject more testosterone they get a hell of a boost to muscle development and strength.
Although past sexual selection may have led to women being smaller and having less testosterone and ability to develop muscle mass, it does not change that women are indeed smaller and have less testosterone and ability to gain muscle mass than men, leading to the average woman being slower and physically weaker than the average man. My replies have been directed at the assertion earlier that men only hold records because of outliers, and the average man and woman are close in strength and speed, but that is just not true.
In that case, there may be a flaw in argument. Your anecdotal story doesn't disprove their point. The moment you started powerlifting training for 3 months, you've already became stronger than the average male. Most men on Earth don't do any sort of strength training, and it's not unreasonable to think that these men are not much stronger than the average woman.
And most women on Earth don't do any strength training, and are much smaller than the average man.
Hell I was way stronger than the vast majority of women I knew well before I started any strength training, my point was a few months of training had me on par with the strongest women in the world in my weight class.