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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

You're right. I would never want to hang out with someone who, because of a single difference in opinion about dolls, would conclude that I am "sick in the head" and therefore socially worthless.

And I'm not even touching your "female DNA" comment, though I'm sure if we dug our heels into that we'd find several more reasons you're no good to be around.

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I get that the female DNA comment might sound ignorant, but I was going down a rabbit hole about why girls play with dolls and came across the article below. It says that there might be some biological factors why girls gravitate towards things like dolls. Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys. Obviously, it’s not 100% guaranteed what your kid is going to like based on DNA, but I thought it was an interesting article anyways.

https://www.romper.com/p/do-little-girls-really-prefer-playi...

> Basically, girls might be wired to prefer “socially interesting” toys whereas boys like “mechanically interesting” toys.

If we try to generalize findings of primatologists onto humans, namely what Franz de Waal writes about chimpanzee, than I'd rather say that boys prefer toys that model objects, while girls prefer toys that model subjects. Chimpanzee males seek power and control, they play political games forming coalitions, breaking from them out, they are friendly when it seems beneficial for them and hostile when needed. Chimpanzee females seek stable relationships, their relationships last longer, easily they could last for life. I mean, if we think of chimpanzee as of humans, then how we model the mind of a male? He sees his neighbors as objects which should be manipulated for his benefit. While females see others as subjects: it helps to respect their needs and to be respected back, it allows understand each other needs, and to form a long-term relationship based on a cooperation.

See how it nicely fits together? It is not a some kind of a science theory, it is just my own unfounded speculations. What I want to say, that it one of the reasons because I doubt that all the difference between boys and girls preferences could be explained by a nurture. Some of it must be a nature thing.

You know that "female DNA" is a fact right? XX vs XY anyone? Do you really believe that human beings are 100% blank slates, biology has no effect whatsoever?

So is it the extra X or the absence of the Y that you're suggesting is the reason for a preference for dolls?

Not only this diference per se, but the XX XY difference is a simple way to show that there is, in fact, a thing called "female DNA". The preference for dolls by girls is just evolutionary behavior, females are the ones that bare the responsibility for raising the offspring, in 99.9% of animal species, so it is just logical that the female cubs of humans and chimpanzees would "practice" raising babies. If you can't see this self evident truth, only ideology can explain it.

That doesn't really make "female DNA" a thing, because XX vs. XY does not tell us enough to know for sure if someone is male or female in the sense that the words are normally used. There are natural XY females who have a mutation in the SRY gene, XX males who randomly got a functional SRY on one of their X chromosomes, and other XY people whose bodies can't process testosterone and thus are female in almost every respect except lacking a uterus and having underdeveloped testes where ovaries would be. Most of what we think of as "female biological traits" seem to come down to that one gene and how the body (any body) reacts to hormones, rather than an overall difference in DNA.

This is not to say that there aren't biological aspects to gender, just that if such a thing does exist, it doesn't seem to be as simple as "female DNA" or "XX vs. XY."

There's are days during the year when the sun doesn't set at all around the arctic circle. No one would argue with the statemet "the sun sets at night".

More directly, there being extremely rare exceptions to a general rule doesn't make the rule false. There's a reason the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" exists.

I mostly agree, but I don't think that's responsive to what I said. My point was that, to the best of my understanding, the idea of "female DNA" just doesn't seem like a good way of conceptualizing biological sex, to the point where it doesn't seem useful to me for explaining anything.

The actual changes needed to flip an embryo from male to female are fairly tiny. On the other hand, the number of genes related to sex characteristics is large, but they're mostly shared between both sexes and not uniformly expressed in members of a given sex (hence why transgender HRT administered before puberty results in development largely indistinguishable from a natural puberty). So proposing "female DNA" as a cause for some observation seems unenlightening to me.

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