Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

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this is a bit condescending to teens to write them off as that. Biologically we are not programmed to sit in a classroom, teenage girls are programmed by evolution to do something not too dissimilar to HS (show off their new found sexuality and attract a mate), boys on the other hand are better suited to hitting stuff with sticks. That's exactly the kind of mate you want if you're a teenage girl, someone who can go off and bring nice big juicy protein sources for all those babies that are coming soon enough after flaunting their newly grown hips and breasts that signal sexual maturation.

About the only times that boys get to be what evolution programmed them for is during war time. When boys race their cars and do crazy shit we think of it as delinquent behaviour, but those are the exact same skills that made for the best pilots.

Algebra and Shakespeare didn't feature much in evolution's "plan". Even Shakespeare would rather have been shagging Queen Elizabeth than writing Elizabethan soap operas, but he needed to put food on his table... And let's not forget where Richard Feynman did some of his best work - in a strip club. The modern world sadly is something that will take us a long time to biologically catch up to.

Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'. It's merely the name for a process, like 'the water cycle' or 'the bessemer process'. Evolution can result in things, like any process, but it doesn't design, and it's wrong to characterise it this way.

This being said, if you're looking to the behaviour of primitives, the male-heavy roles were not 'war', but 'hunt'. And no, we're not all driven by sex - some of us are driven heavily, others driven lightly, and others still are asexual. And even those who are heavily driven by sex find time for other things in their life.

Anyway, it's ironic that you ping me for 'writing them off' (I don't see where I do that, seriously), but then turn around and say that they're only doing what 'evolution planned for them' - particularly your stated role for what teenage girls should be doing.

> Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'.

Literally true but the effect is "as though" it designs or plans. See eg "Why evolution is true" or any evolution text book eg "Evolution" by Douglas Futuyma.

As for war versus hunting, the levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies were astronomical with death rates from violence typically in the 30-50% range. So yes 'war' though not usually on a very large scale.

There were some exceptions. For example San people (formerly known as the Bushmen of the South African desert) had as weapons bows and arrows with slow-acting poisons. A full-on war would result in everyone getting killed (mutually assured destruction). So they tended to avoid doing that.

The effect isn't 'as though' it designs or plans at all, any more than clouds 'plan' to rain on the plains. Evolution is better described as 'survival of the fittest' than 'programmed to -foo-'. Keeping it phrased correctly also helps keep specious Intelligent Design arguments at bay - by talking about 'design' or 'programming', you're implying a sentient cause. And you don't actually need to say things like 'programmed by evolution' anyway. It's better to say 'resulting from evolution' or similar. Makes the same point, but keeps it correctly phrased.

'survival of the fittest' is also misleading because fittest doesn't mean how buff you are, but how successfully one fits into their current environment.

Being ripped doesn't save you from the plague, but it might help later against the zombies.

no, please stop spreading such misleading information, it is not survival of the fittest at all. go read about evolution please. You're right, evolution is not sentient, we're passed that, it is useful to think of it in that light when looking backwards at the process (as we can only really do anyway), we've all read the Blind Watchmaker and don't need this obvious point made over and over when it's been explained why we are doing so.

to be honest I can't follow what you're even trying to say. It's making no sense, and in general just inaccurate.

I'm not talking about individuals, but in general, and in that regard we are all sex driven. Of course evolution isn't sentient, but when you think about it, it's a reasonable way to think about it because the results are the same. It just depends which way you're looking at the process, looking forward, you cannot refer to evolution as a design process, but looking backwards you can. The design we see today is the result of the evolutionary process. It's tiresome having to explain all this.

hunting skills are much the same as war skills and man certainly hunted (I believe that's what I said) but we are also a very violent species.

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