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Comment by andonisus | Hacker News Reader

> "This has less to do with misogyny"

How did they shoehorn in sexism into an article about animals? This has nothing to do with misogyny because animals are incapable of reason.

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The sexism would be coming from the people collecting fossils and curating the museums. Later in the article they mention that human biases affect the gender ratios of collections of extant organisms (although not for sexist reasons) so it's not a completely absurd thing to rule out.

So the argument would be the the (male) paleontologists, museum curators, etc. had such a burning hatred for women that they chose male specimens to cultivate and display?

or simply that male subjects are for some reason or another easier to present in an interesting way, as decided by curators etc of any gender.

How would that be a case of misogyny, then?

It isn't. No one is saying that it is.

You've got it, there's even a paper on this regarding glaciology see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030913251562336...

I (unfortunately) cannot access this paper because it is behind a paywall, but surely it must be satire?

Someone saved you the trouble of reading it https://ricochet.com/320028/archives/i-read-the-famous-femin...

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...

Please do not flame the discussion with strawmans. This is a very uncharitable interpretation of what OP wrote. It is not about hatred, it is about minor subconscious preferences that if they exist, the can cause noticeable effects in aggregate.

What I wrote is not a strawman, it is the definition of misogyny. Perhaps you are conflating this with sexism. The article used the word misogyny, so that is what I am using.

The article said there was no misogyny. My comment also said that. No one is arguing that people were being driven by misogyny.

The article starts by mentioning "less to do with misogyny".

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.

My comment was that it's not completely absurd to rule out sexism because human biases have affected the gender composition of similar collections. That's pretty far from making a specific argument about how misogyny is involved.

It is completely absurd as you have absolutely less than zero evidence to support it has occurred.

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.)

If there is less than zero evidence to support that something happened, isn't that an appropriate time to rule it out?

Everyone agrees that this is not due to sexism. What's the problem with saying so in an article?

No, the argument is that this didn't happen.

That theory is excluded earlier in the article: If you’re lucky enough to have a whole bone, such as a skull, the size, shape, and dimensions might differ between male and female. In the case of fragments, researchers might have to dig into DNA

If obvious differences are very rare ("very lucky") then the bias can not come from collectors.

The sentence about misogyny not being the cause is the start of the second paragraph. The sentence you're quoting is in the third paragraph.

it's a joke

Or is it?

the plot thickens

I don't see the humor.

Explaining the joke to you: Whenever we discover unexpected bias due to sex we usually first assume sexism at work, but that's funny here because ancient megafauna aren't sexist.

I understand why it might be considered a joke, but it doesn't make sense (and is not funny), because the subject in question is not human.

Is it possible you are too caught up in being triggered about gender issues to find anything funny, anymore?

not everyone has a sense of humor

> because animals are incapable of reason.

hmm

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