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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

Jumping straight to "from an evolutionary stand point" in these sorts of things is just gross. Evopsych is pretty much BS anyway, and seems to find the most play in circles that enjoy spouting off about how women are this way, and men are that way. The New Yorker had a good article on it.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/09/17/12091...

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Sexual selection has been observed in other animals. It's inaccurate to say that all men or all women are alike but it's not far fetched to think humans have certain behavioral trends.

Sure. And when these discussions on the internet happen in a vacuum of social studies or experiments it inevitably devolves into people dumping their half-baked post hoc rationalizations on each other backed by some crap anecdotes. It also inevitably turns sexist, especially given the issue at hand.

Ah, I misunderstood you. You're right that our own opinions aren't really relevant without a study.

Yes, and evo-psych is usually unfalsifiable. So these studies probably won't show up any time soon.

Actually, it's based on the radical notion that our brains are not made out of a magical substance that's immune to genes and hormones. In a utopia where there was no gender discrimination or societal pressure to conform to expected roles, do you really think that women would commit half of all violent crimes, and would have identical mate selection criteria as men?

>Actually, it's based on the radical notion that our brains are not made out of a magical substance that's immune to genes and hormones.

There is a mind blowing Norwegian documentary on the nature versus nurture debate the HN community should watch. The show touches on a lot of taboos, which might be too controversial for some people. The first episode is about gender equality. The interviewer investigates why/how there are less women in engineering and less man in nursing in a country listed having the highest level of equality. Other episodes are about parents influence, sexual preference, violence, sexual desire/commitment and race.

According to wikipedia a producer has made the series available online with English subtitles. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xp0tg8_hjernevask-brainwash...

It's also on youtube (ignore the terrible comments as usual) http://youtu.be/KQ2xrnyH2wQ

My point is that just like some animals put off mating rituals to attact mates, we humans do so. Still, I know as much about that as I know about zoology. Zilch.

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