Not sure, but between being able to be the choosier gender from a mating/marriage standpoint would be a nice change of pace. That being said, being able to pee standing up is a big perk to being a guy so maybe it comes out even in the end. I’d need a 2nd run at life and a different biologic conclusion to see how life as a woman is.
According to a radio commercial I heard, most men are suffering from Low-T. And we have less testosterone than our father, and he had less than his.
Then the commercial ended with 30 seconds of side-effects from whatever drug they were selling.
^ I’m slightly mystified by all the adverts about low t? are they basically selling legal steroids?
this is an interesting topic and bi-polarization of gender roles is certainly a trend. I’d attribute the “feminist” movement with leading the charge on this front, and conversely, leading most of the women to unfilled, unhappy lives. There is one thing to like certain activities that can be more male oriented (i.e hiking, climbing, mechanics, etc) but there is another to chastise formerly female activities (baking, sewing, etc).
My girl personally loves to hike/climb, but also loves baking, sewing, arts/crafts (i think a lot of women like the latter but are forced to say they are not bc of the movement and this causes an internal problem). With that said, i know for a fact that she would not be with me if i wasnt the old soul, missing link ape that i am. so perhaps it is one-sided, being that women are now able to say they enjoy certain topics which would have been looked down upon in the past.
I love repeating what I hear from gaywad Milo
I buy into the theory that humans will split into 2 species. There will be the small elite which is rich, super smart and healthy, and then their counterpart will be the horde of mentally challenged individuals living in an idiocratic society. It would be similar to how things are right now but more extreme.
So, basically the Elois and Morlocks.
^could be. Income inequality and trends in pairing off seem to support this. Then again it could be cyclical.
I wonder how this will happen. Historically the elites have literally domesticated the regular folk through the application of law. Individuals who posed a threat to the state were eliminated, resulting in a more docile populace. Things like gun control are an important part of this effort and a reason why the 2A must be curtailed.
Definitely curious to see where it goes. 
Warning: giant post coming. I just find the topic really interesting.
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I don’t think there’s any way (nor any reason) to deny that genetics and hormones have a big influence on people. But there’s still a huge variation in how those things affect personality and behavior. Throughout history, plenty of men have been called effeminate or sissies, and women have been called tomboys too. Russian women can kick ass and get sh!t done, as do secular Israeli women and German women. So there’s no doubt in my mind that there is both nature and nurture going on, and I do suspect that we tend to overly ascribe nurture-type outcomes to nature, perhaps as a justification to continue nurturing according to whatever tradition a given society holds to.
I played with dolls as a kid, but my dolls were Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Darth Vader, and they were called “action figures” rather than dolls. I don’t think I pulled their heads off as often as the girls did with their Barbies and Ken dolls. It’s true that I never gravitated to dolls of babies, although I thought it was kinda neat how some of them closed their eyes when you lay them down.
I generally preferred Legos, though.
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When you’re talking about evolution, there are three dynamics worth paying attention to. Natural selection is about whether you are healthy enough to survive your environment to reach reproductive age and produce fertile offspring (and to the extent that care of young is required, to help your young survive). If you are not healthy enough, natural selection will take you out of the gene pool because you die.
Sexual selection is about - once you reach reproductive age - whether anyone will choose to mate with you. Things like for birds, whether they have a particularly nice shade of blue spot or something or whether you can kill, beat up, or fool that other male who wants to mate with your intended. For humans, it’s about things like whether they come from a particular social class, dress well, have deliciously suckable SRK abs, can shoot a duck at 50 yards, or can quote poetry or something.
One of the interesting things about sexual selection is that in the animal kingdom, the vast majority of females will be able to mate, whereas only a tiny fraction of most males will get to pass on their genes. Humans have more or less developed monogamy as a standard (even if it is often broken), and one of the interesting features of this is that a much larger number of human males who reach reproductive age will get to pass on their genes. This may in fact reduce the need for male aggression in humans compared to other animals and allows us to be more social. Humans are reaching an interesting point today in that increasing numbers of females choose not to reproduce, which is something I do not think happens much in the animal kingdom.
The third thing about evolution that some people forget about is that species and their environments often co-evolve. Species need to adapt to their environment, but some species have a larger impact on their environment and change it; they then need to adapt to the new environment they have in part created in order to survive. Humans definitely have a big impact on their environment and especially inside of cities (where approximately 1/2 of the human population now lives) where a very large portion of the environment is manufactured by us, and so how we adapt both in terms of natural selection and sexual selection can be strongly influenced by both technology and social fads.
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Now back to the original question “Is gender erosion an evolutionary step?”
I’m not sure what you mean by “gender erosion”. I assume it means the acceptance of gender fluidity without pushing it into the traditional divisions of labor and associated social roles/performances. To the extent that gender fluidity is a product of genetic factors (which it might well be), it might also mean the increased representation of the number of people with the genetic factors that lead to that kind of stuff (i.e. maybe we let those people reproduce, whereas in the past they would not have passed sexual selection, so now there are more genes like that floating around).
Although this tends to get lumped in with liberal discussions about whether gender fluidity should be tolerated or not, and BS has made some of those linkages in his post, I’m not really sure what a “liberal” view on the science would mean. Both liberals and conservatives observe varieties of androgyny, but they seem to differ on the extent to which androgyny should be tolerated vs. pushed back against, and the degree to which people should feel free to feel revolted or attracted to it.
As far as the science goes, I sense that conservatives want to argue that there is a “genetically male” personality that is immune to nurture, and a “genetically female” personality type too. People are just naturally male or naturally female, and those who want to be a gender that is different than their anatomy would suggest are just confused and need to be educated back into their roles or ostracized because of their choices. And yet this very attitude suggests that nurture can have a big effect on their behavior. If nurture through correction can make those behaviors change back to the standard roles, then why wouldn’t nurture also be pretty relevant in creating those roles in the first place. And why wouldn’t the varieties of machoness in men and femininity in women across cultures be better explained by those cultures than their genetics (particularly if you can observe how immigrant families change when children are raised in new cultural environments).
I think the more likely item is that conservatives are just frustrated about being told that it isn’t nice to make fun of those people just because they are different like that, and so the real question is “why are you asking me to be nice to people in the first place, it’s a free country.” That is in fact a legitimate (if uncomfortable) question. At what point does asking people to be courteous represent a genuine impingement on human liberty. I don’t think liberals really have an answer to that. I think many conservatives are asking, “Why do I have to keep my own emotions under check, when I’m being asked to worry about another social group’s emotions. That doesn’t seem fair.” In the past, I think liberals have felt that the opportunities of whoever is least privileged are what tips the scale in one direction or another. This works when the inequities are gross, but when they start to moderate, it becomes much harder to answer.
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The other question is what does “an evolutionary step” mean? Do you mean it is an improvement to the species? Is it just an experiment that might go right or wrong? Is it some kind of nature or social adaptation to the fact that our environments are increasingly less “natural” and more “man-made”
It certainly is the case that hunting tigers is less critical to community survival these days, and being a good tiger hunter is unlikely to improve my chances of passing my genes on today the way it might have been 30,000 years ago. Even the ability to be a superior warrior seems to have lost a good portion of its competitive value in the West over the last 80 years, although it still retains a fair amount of cachet in certain circles. I grew up in an age where being a nerdy geek was something met with a fair amount of scorn and ridicule, and yet today I watch hipster programmers in their skinny jeans scoop up some impressively attractive women (and yes, I do ask myself WTF is that all about). So in the West, we’ve created an environment where a lot of the traditional macho characteristics don’t pay off the way they used to and people are evolving behaviorally into it. To the extent that such behavior has a genetic driver, then the genes might adapt too, but I suspect that the genes and the behavior are only moderately correlated (remember that a correlation of 0.7 means that only 49% of the variance in a dependent variable is potentially explained by it), so there could be a decent correlation for genetic factors but still more than half of the observed results come from other - presumably environmental/social - factors.
It does seem to be the case that female brains are more fully integrated and have a larger number of interconnections than male brains, and this might explain why women report much greater difficulty in viewing situations without engaging an emotional context and meaning. Traditionally, we’ve explain human intelligence by noting the number of interconnections our brains can make and the pattern recognition that these connections can make, but traditionally, we’ve stopped valuing increased brain connections at the point that we conclude that women have more of them than men. In the past, this sense has fueled the conclusion that women are temperamentally unsuited to certain types of things that involve rationality and impartiality and the ability to ignore emotional context.
One thing that is interesting about modern life is that algorithms and computers are even more able to be impartial and completely rational than men, and so one of the implications here is that the value of a human being being able to be unemotional may be decreasing, at least in the workplace as automation takes over. That does suggest that as pure rational and unemotional-driven tasks get automated by computers and robots, those tasks that have value precisely because of their subjective, emotional, or human contact aspects are the ones that humans will still be compensated for (although increased competition for those jobs by those displaced from automation may mean that they are compensated at increasingly lower wages). If that is the case, then it may indeed be that men moving closer to gender patterns traditionally associated women are part of society adapting to the new work/reward environment we have created.
Women taking on more traditionally masculine roles may also be a response to the work/reward environment of the modern age, but I suspect it might be a reaction to different dimensions of it, such as the need for two-income families, the likelihood of marriages dissolving, the fact that women may find that being more aggressive/assertive/unemotional is just a necessary survival skill for them to be taken seriously in the modern workplace. I suspect it is not genetic, but again - to the extent that successfully implementing these behaviors has genetic componentes - there may be a mild selection effect that increases them in the next generation.
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So, summing it up, if you remember to consider co-evolution of species with their environments and recognize that in human evolution, the social environment can be as influential as the natural environment, then some of this gender fluidity may be an adaptation to the environments we have constructed for ourselves in cities and technologically sophisticated rural areas. It need not be a genetic adaptation, although there are perhaps some weak linkages. A lot of it may just be that social environments don’t punish straying from traditional gender norms as much as they used to. Depending on your point of view, that may be a good thing or a bad thing.
And social environments can change relatively quickly, so just because there is more fluidity today than yesterday doesn’t mean there will automatically be more tomorrow than now.
Why should this have genetic evolutionary implications if reproduction is no longer tied to career success? Does Bill Gates have 100 kids?
^^I’m pretty sure we’ll be evolved enough to answer this question by the time it takes to read bchad’s post (interesting thoughts aside from the lack of sophistication in your political generalization).
A sophisticated political analysis would take up another few pages. Perhaps you missed the part where I acknowledged that conservatives have legitimate concerns.
OP,
if I may be politically incorrect, IMO evolution favors gender separation and male domination rather than erosion and equality.
Lower order animals have no clear-cut gender boundaries. They do exchange DNA to ensure diversity but there is no designated male or female. Move a bit up, earthworms have both types of genitals and mate with another earthworm using both… again, no designated male or female. Move up, insect females are typically lerger and stronger than males, males mainly reproduce and die off. They are not as important. Move up the order, birds have males and females but the female egg decides the offspring’s gender based on X vs Y chromosomes. Finally in humans, male sperms decide the child’s gender and men are physically bigger and stronger.
Having said that, there are several ways to take yourself out of the biologically ordained “survival rat race” and still enjoy a productive and fulfilling life. Gay penguins do it. Why not she-males?
It makes me laugh when Christians pretend to know what God wants and how he hates fags. (Notwithstanding the fact that his son went around with 12 men and kissed them liberally.)
Also, in several cultures in history, people have bent gender “rules” (or norms that are prevalent today and seem normal today.) To sum up, we have seen this movie before.
As the saying goes, women weren’t created to do everything a man can do. Women were created to do everything a man can’t do. And trust me, there are many things men can’t do. We complement each other.
Wow,Bchad! Your gender “dissertation” was the most enjoying part of my evening. What a satisfying synthesis of ideas. *applause*
I looked at that post and said no way. Just put me down as seconding whatever Ohai said.
I’m stuck on this word ‘erosion’. NG says revolution and you say erosion? When I think of erosion, I think of a beach being washed away. The waters rise up and take away the sand. The foundation of a house on the beach is gradually swept away by the erosion. I don’t think gender is being eroded. People express themselves in different ways and act differently; they still reproduce and our planet is not slowing down in population growth by any means. If there were erosion in gender, wouldn’t population increase rates be affected?