Why Fossils Are Mostly Male
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Apparently, across many mammalian species, males are more likely to take risks and explore than females. This seems to be good evidence that not all gendered behavior is socialized. That would seem to be a silly straw man argument to knock down, if it were not so widely held.
Pretty sure the point was to note that the "taking risks" part of that could have been the initial aggressive stance that got them ostracized. As the GP noted, there's a specific risk/payoff to behavior in a social group that might pay off well (more social status) or be very detrimental (ostracization), and given how detrimental being ostracized could be, I think many would consider that "risky behavior".
The idea being that males tend to have flatter/wider distributions of traits, leading to higher populations at the extremes of those traits. This can include aggression, risk aversion, etc.
More at the Heterodox Academy - https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-greater-male-variability-hy...
Gender has been used as a synonym for sex for a long time. Merriam-Webster and The Free Dictionary list that meaning before the more recent meaning.
You're simply wrong to claim the way you use the word is the only way it can be used.
> You and the earlier commenters are using the word “gender” when you mean “sex.”
Clearly not everybody is using the word that way.
The most notable result I've seen is a transgender (recently transitioned) MMA fighter fracturing the skull of an opponent in an appallingly one sided and brutal fight.
Denying the most basic facts of hormone effects (muscle and bone density effects of testosterone and then the bone density sparing effects of estrogen) that have not even been questioned for decades is now unfortunately a thing.
Which is to say, we probably shouldn't be grouping athletes by gender/sex, but rather imposing a threshold of testosterone, and having a league for people with (historic) low T and a league for people with (historic) high T.
There'd likely be an interesting opportunity in the middle for co-ed athletics leagues, where the people of both physical sexes that have "average" historic T levels (i.e. who fall on the mean of T levels of all humans) could compete fairly with one-another.
Also, as a tangent: an interesting question brought up by that, is that some athletes actually have an inherent T level that would be considered "using steroids" if a person of average T took TRT to achieve that level. Should such athletes be allowed to compete, if others aren't allowed to achieve their level? (IMHO, it's a bit like a sport where tallness is an advantage allowing people with natural gigantism, but banning people who've been given limb-lengthening surgery.)
8:10 and 33:00 https://vimeo.com/19707588
(The whole piece is excellent though)
Could you describe in more detail some specific claims you've seen made that fall under this?
Sometimes the problem lies in trying to raise boys or girls to fit these "expected predispositions". Or judging someone who is "outside their gender norm".
So, yes if I pick a random boy and girl out of a crowd, I would expect differences and could make reasonable guesses about those differences.
So, it's not bad if you know these common gender differences as long as you are able to quickly discard them when you're getting to know someone at a deeper level than their gender.
First, that contrary to prior common belief, the range of possible physical strength, endurance, pain tolerance, and all types of personality expressions of women is effectively the same as that for men.
Second, that regardless of scientific evidence, the belief in differences between the sexes has been very widely used to oppress women in so many ways, including but in no way limited to prohibiting them from voting, limiting what types of job they were legally permitted to hold, and effectively treating them as the property of their husbands or fathers, with no will or agency of their own.
Until the generations that were actively involved in doing these things finish dying out, and probably the ones that were taught by them, too, claiming there is no biological difference between men and women, regardless of its veracity, will be a completely justifiable defense mechanism against being told to shut up and make sandwiches for the rest of their lives.
animals also live in societies, complex societies in cases of elephants. it can be that those behaviours are learned in those societies.
nobody says that gendered behaviour is caused by society norms only in humans.
How did they shoehorn in sexism into an article about animals? This has nothing to do with misogyny because animals are incapable of reason.
Many people were confused as to this being satire or not but one of the authors did a Q&A to help clear things up
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/qa-author-feminist-g...
My comment is about sexism, specifically misogyny (as used by the article).
You reply to my comment taking about how it can be plausible that it is misogyny.
I believe we are talking about misogyny.
The main problem here is the binomial distribution, not any other kind of bias.
Fossils are rare enough that even a small change in behavior could really stack the deck.
Do you think the was perhaps a child bias in Homo fossils caused by curators? (They're overrepresented probably for obvious reasons.)
Everyone agrees that this is not due to sexism. What's the problem with saying so in an article?
If obvious differences are very rare ("very lucky") then the bias can not come from collectors.
hmm
Just because a male might be likely to go do something risky and die young, that wouldn't explain more male fossils. After all, the female that didn't do something risky will also die. All things die.
Are they trying to claim that females who die are less likley to turn into fossils, perhaps because of the locations the deaths occurred in?
[edit]
> Are they trying to claim that females who die are less likley to turn into fossils, perhaps because of the locations the deaths occurred in?
Yes, I think that's it.
How much bigger/stronger would bones need to be for this to hold true? Also, what about the variance between species? Hypothetically, would that then go Male Large Dino > Female Large Dino > Male Medium Dino > Female Medium Dino...? We'd expect to see more females of large dinos than any medium males in that case.
For example, if you needed a bone to weigh 5kg/meter and males are 5kg/meter but females are 4.5kg/meter then you'd expect to see a very low number of females even though they're only 10% smaller.
Obviously none of this is the case, and this isn't the deciding factor on why it's happening. Just pointing out where you missed things slightly.
If we were serious about this bone mass minimum, we'd need to consider why there are fossils of smaller animals, or big but hollow-boned animals. That's a rabbit hole with many hypothetical variables.
2) not all animals die in the same places,
3) if sex has an influence on the distribution of likelihood of dying (or ending up in—water carries corpses, predators and carrion-eaters may drag them) in fossilization-friendly locations, we'd expect to see a difference in the rates of fossil discovers of that species by sex, different from whatever actual distribution there was of male & female in the original population.
Fossilization is rare. Most deaths result in recycling the animal into nutrients for other things (animals, fungi and bacteria). For land animals, fossilization involves either dying under circumstances that are likely to promote fossilization or under circumstances that are likely to quickly move your body to a location that allows fossilization. Getting stuck in a quagmire or tar pit, or getting swept away trying to ford deep, fast-moving water drives your chances of fossilization up considerably.