There's no arguing with nature, it's the ultimate citation.
But nurture means that you, or somebody involved, had a choice. So the buck stops at, rather than the faceless divinity of nature, a mere human. And those are much easier to dismiss.
So we paint the opposing argument as arising from nurture rather than nature. And those arguments stick around and get cited. And a "it's all nurture" model develops.
Regular people are dismissed.
Only the faceless, invisible authority is respected.
Barring certain extreme cases, of course, such as mental illness and such.
The stereotypical US things, like no universal health care, no tuition-free education, lax gun laws, mass incarceration, death penalty etc. are also a manifestation of this attitude.
You must take care of yourself, you must protect yourself, if you make it then great! If you become a criminal, you become subhuman and can be executed and treated brutally by the police. If you become dirt poor, that's your fault, you can become homeless, there's no welfare.
Now again, I'm exaggerating somewhat to emphasize what I mean. And yes I also know the historical origins of this mentality, and as I said, there are also positive consequences, like most major innovations and scientific discoveries coming from the US, the huge dynamic market where anyone can start a new company with manageable levels of bureaucracy (compared to most European countries) etc.
And I was enlightened.
The Atoal is believed to be ~30,000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower And spears are ~400,000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amentum is rather hard to date, but it's simpler than an Atoal.
Also, a preference for guns may or may not be there. But, males having more accurate spatial reasoning due to ranged weapons, or hunting, and or fighting seems likely. The obvious alternatives are men developed better spatial reasoning due to very widespread cultural factors seems suspicious. Or women scarified spacial reasoning for some competing features.
Anyway, the important thing is not to debate this stuff it's to actually test it. Until then it's all just hot air.
As for testing, that would be great. But it turns out that proving anything about human evolution is very hard, because most of the evidence is lost.
As to testing, I suspect we are going to get good at decoding and editing human DNA fairly soon which is going to have a lot to say about these debates. This stuff is either there or not, when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.
EX: Domestic cattle are also around 500 generations old and lactose tolerance has been spreading. http://www.foodbeast.com/news/map-of-milk-consumption-lactos... lactose tolerance: 96% in Sweden, 10% in China.
I don't think new data will help. We know the changes in the human lineage; even if we knew their functional meaning, we cannot conclude whether they are adaptive or not; fixed alleles reveal little about their fixation time, etc.
It could also be due to males having larger brains.
IMO, the point is there are reasonable priors to actually start testing.
Some of these tests may be fairly simple. Do male baby's throw more things than female baby's?
> "You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."
Cordelia Fine also does a great breakdown of all of these "monkey does this, therefore women shopping men guns" arguments.
The nurture side of the debate has its "no nature" clowns, but the caricature by the top-level post is completely uncalled for in this context.
You can say men are associated with blue for purely cultural reasons, because _
A: It's a 'just so' story which we can make about anything.
B: very recently they where associated with red and pink was considered a less intense version of red.
The B is an actual reasonable argument, where A has zero predictive power.