Paleontologists Are Trying to Understand Why the Fossil Record Is Mostly Males
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
This leads to a higher fraction of male fossils because the preservation of remains is a very unlikely event requiring unusual conditions.
"These male mammoths—young, reckless, foolhardy—were just more likely to get into some kind of trouble and die, from getting stuck in a pit to running afoul of hunting humans. Luckily for paleontologists, some of these death sites—bogs, crevices, lakes—are pretty good at preserving remains. 'They were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits,' Gower says."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8765372-is-there-anythin...
Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YHdl4FXYpU
Lecture text: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Is-There-Any...
Therein you'll find this argument applied to humans, as well. It's fairly informative and rigorous (mostly). Good read, even if you disagree with the whole premise.
> "I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause."
But seriously. This is common behavior among competitive animals.
Male Lions have to seek out a new pride.
Don’t even begin to talk about birds who the male or the species need to do all kinds of expensive preening.
Male Monkeys commonly get thrown out of the troop.
Males (including human males) generally have a completely and substantially different life than females.
That’s why I laugh at the common modern trope that we are the same.
Animals are just more honest about it.
A rather astounding statement. Selective pressure should result a ratio appropriate for a given species of plant or animal. It’s not my field, but I haven’t seen any literature suggesting any such thing, nor do I know of any country full of sultans.
> A rather astounding statement. Selective pressure should result a ratio appropriate for a given species of plant or animal. It’s not my field, but I haven’t seen any literature suggesting any such thing, nor do I know of any country full of sultans.
This is not actually true. The math works out that there is usually an even ratio between males and females, and that this is even the case in tournament species (where one male is able to mate with multiple females.) The thing to understand is that in this hypothetical, it wouldn't be a country full of sultans, but a country full of would-be sultans. A very different proposition.
But it takes a lot of effort to make offspring, so none of them would be of a “surplus” sex. I must say that I’m surprised that the 1:1 ratio survives in schooling or herding species in which a large proportion perish. I suppose it’s insurance against an unfortunate loss of all males. There’s probably an interesting maths PhD in there someplace.
Same for lions, btw, although I don't know about their sex' birthrates.
You can do weird things with temperature to affect those birth rates, but the ratio will not reach as high as 2:1 as far as I know.
If you don't know the rate how can you say it's true?
By definition there is some sort of distribution of male/female cubs and there is presumably some sort of distribution of pack sizes. But apart from the victorian-inspired documentaries that talk about juvenile male ronins being chased from the pack I don't really know the dynamics, and I doubt anyone but a specialized community does. Where I live in Palo Alto the distribution of lone mountain lions that show up in town seems, anecdotally, to be predominantly female.
Humans are a good example: slightly more males are born but within the range of about 20-50 years of age, the sex ratio is 1:1. Humans have been basically* monogamous throughout recorded history and for whatever reasons that might be it would select for this birth ratio wouldn't it.
* Sure, there are plenty (well, a few percent) of kids whose father is not the male in a given hetero "couple" but it's the couple phenomenon itself that matters here.
Extra males are unnecessary. They exist, but could easily not exist and that wouldn't present major issues for the species
If my kids scatter toys all of the living room, I'm much more likely to step on one or more of them, then if they were in a neat pile (speaking from experience).
For all I know, maybe the bones at camp are used to make soup… /shrug
The ‘modern trope’ holds true in corporate environments, at least among the engineers, PMs and customer success agents I work with.
Obviously your average man has higher bone density and muscle mass and inability to bear children, but this only really affects activities outside of the workplace.
That said, aside from drinking more beer and working out more, my lifestyle is pretty much the same as my partner’s.
Male competitiveness plays a huge role in the corporate world, and is a reasonable explanation for why the top of the hierarchy is naturally dominated by males.
Males and females are interested in different types of work. And if we are being honest, you can find things that the average member of one gender is better at than the other. This also shows it's head in the work place.
Generalizations made about females and males are concerning the averages. On average, it's easier for a male to gain muscle mass. On average, women do better socially.
Humans are uniquely adaptable so we can become better at things through practice. This does not alter the fact that people have different starting points for any skill set.
Ignoring the differences does more harm than good.
Could you foresee this being a problem? Such as the best person for a job being passed over for someone more competitive/in the club?
I also refer you to the observed effects of testosterone in financial markets (riskier trades, bubbles) which are typically seen as pathological.
Personally I’m not extremely competitive but do suffer from the ‘testosterone-overdose’ fairly regularly which usually involves impulsivity and rashness.
If we aim for meritocracy, then yes it's definitely an issue. The most competitive males tend to have lots of negative personality traits (e.g. low empathy). That is to say: It's very often not the smartest/most creative people that make it to the top. It's the most cutthroat.
An attribute being distasteful doesn't mean that attribute doesn't make the holder better adjusted to some environments.
I made a joke about this once to her and she rolled her eyes and said it was really annoying, but it did help her get up to speed very quickly on the whose-who and what their roles were. To this day her network is much bigger than mine.
I guess you could argue that this happened because she's hot and not because she's a woman or something like that. My point is corporate environments are nowhere near equalizing.
Your hot coworker may never get the respect (or have the chance to earn it) because people only seek them out for their surface level traits and work-irrelevant things like having access to attractive women.
The behaviour is not hard to reign in either: I work with a few very attractive women with whom I have great chemistry and could probably lure into long conversations and yes, build subtle sexual tension.
However, it’s way more mutually beneficial that our relationship is based around their competence in engineering, or HR, or sales. As you pointed out, the easy route for many men is to baby or pester such women, which can even kill a company if it gets too pathological.
I’ve even seen well meaning male personalities at work cut off or talk over the more soft spoken (and IMO smarter) women. I actively try to fight that tendency when I can- without being imposing- and see surprise/appreciation when I do so.
We just think we are above all animals in that respect. We are not.
Of course no one wants injustices. Duh.
But when in the name of curing injustices you deny the biological imperatives — a-la todays modern social justice warriors. This is when the problems and conflicts start.
We're monkeys with jobs and computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
"This “us” vs “them” outlook is also mirrored in human behavior. While the Gombe Chimpanzee War isn’t exactly identical to human war, it is strikingly similar in brutality and allegiance to a tribe." https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/a-brief-histor...
"Animal groups do compete over resources, sometimes in an organized way, but “war” implies something more formal, Dan Dembiec, supervisor of mammals at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens" https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/160130-an...
Both monkeys and humans require oxygen to breathe. That is, as you requested, one example of a constraint which applies to both. Perhaps you'd care to move the goalposts a bit?
You’re not paying me to do so. Instead you would be looking to attack my examples.
Instead go and google how monkey troupes operate and look at the analogies in human society.
I did it, so surely you can too!
Normally, people want an answer so they can just attack it. So why bother.
I'm sorry if it came across as me wanting your money.
Anecdotally, when I went hiking in Yellowstone two years ago down a long nature trail through the woods, I was surprised to see a large male bison trodding alone in the opposite direction down the trail, towards me. I slowly backed up towards the tree line just to give him some space to pass, but I was rather surprised to see a herd animal by himself in such a vast park like Yellowstone with such a big population of bison.
I assume that this behavior in males is probably essential. It's risky for a herd animal to travel alone. However if a male is successful in migrating to another herd, and earning his way in, it improves the cross-pollination of dna. Also, males in the animal kingdom regularly push each other out to secure local dominance over local females. Many are therefore forced to leave as well.
WTF?
The arbitrary, common and accepted bigotry of women in 2022 is beyond pale.
Even arbitrary deaths of animals, must be due to:
"Misogyny (/mɪˈsɒdʒɪni/) is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women."
Thankfully the author Sabrina Imbler, was able to realize that it wasn't mostly misogyny, but something else.
I mean, misogyny being a key component, obviously? Because everything is?
I read that as a tongue-in-cheek bit at first but after reading it several times, I don't think it is.
How can any academic maintain any kind of credibility with this kind of rubbish?
Why would anyone read past the first paragraph where an academic literally used a term denoting 'hatred of women' to be a possible reasoning of animal behaviour?
I can't wait for someone to try this on me so I can enjoy early retirement after a nice, giant lawsuit.
More likely a situation where an editor who saw the obvious inappropriate implication, would be fearful to call it out given the risk of being perceived as 'being on the wrong side'.
This is pernicious language, it needs to stop, I doubt people realize how damaging it is to their own cause and how they're probably losing more 'allies' than otherwise.
Because it can be, that's why. Population bottleneck is female reproduction. You can impregnate X females with X males, or 0.5X males, or 0.25X males. Wiping out males has a much lower effect on the future population of a group than wiping out females, so over time a group that loses a lot of males is better off than a group that loses a lot of females, and has more members to die and become fossils.
In Russia after WW2 the ratio of female:male was 4:3
Imagine what that ratio would have been after a war in olden times.
If I had to guess I would have to assume it's something in the nature of how bison die. Say from male-on-male competition far from predators that may break the bones to digest the bone marrow. Or it's possible that predators prefer preying on females because it's relatively more safe than males.
Or it could just be the small sample size, of course.
But if I had to guess, I would say Osteoporosis, since my understanding is, that tends to hit Females worse than Males.
So, what about the collection method itself; if only 5% of the ancient DNA was usable for this analysis, perhaps it could be because that DNA lies protected within the sex with the largest, strongest, thickest bones?
While males have more of those materials required to make the bones and their DNA last.
As someone with zero experience in these areas, I'd posit that females get osteoporosis, and so their remains deteriorate moreso than males do.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
This is the relevant quote from the discussion section of the article: “ Perhaps the simplest explanation in the subfossil datasets is a taphonomic artifact, where male bones in sexually dimorphic species such as bison are larger or denser and more likely to be better preserved or identified as likely to contain DNA. If this was the case, male bias might be expected to correlate with factors associated with postmortem DNA preservation, such as sample age, average DNA fragment length, and cytosine deamination rate. Greater bone density might also be expected to inhibit microbial intrusion, and thus increase the proportion of endogenous DNA (host species vs. microbial DNA). However, no such trends were observed here (Table 2), and it is reasonable to conclude that DNA preservation is equal between the sexes.”
Like, how likely do you really think it is that the reason they haven't figured it out is because it simply never occurred to them to investigate your reason?
I don’t get what you don’t get. Engaging one’s brain is the best way to understand the shape of a problem.
And yes, that involves asking “basic” questions.
This ciding you do here assumes bad faith from the person asking the question. Some people ask questions because they want to know the answer, not to demonstrate how much better they are than a whole field or whatever you are assuming here.
> Like, how likely do you really think it is that the reason they haven't figured it out
Who cares how likely is it? Are we only allowed to ask questions which have not been studied before?
If it has been studied before: great! It is much more likely one can just read answers in their paper.
The comment doesn't say that.
> never occurred to them to investigate your reason?
The comment doesn't say that.
I've been in a tech meeting with 10 devs (about 150 years exp) trying to solve a problem for days. The founder of the company (a non dev, but smart guy) walked in at one point and said. What if we just did X instead. We all collectively slapped our heads and tada solved it.
In particular when the test population is so different from the expected living population and experts have no explanation, some kind of non-linear thinking is likely going to be needed.
It's one of those things that we don't want to talk about but has been and will be true for the immediate future till some other trait better for the species becomes more attractive.
Until that time we are stuck with t and risk taking.