Two Tribes?

[Peterkin]

31 minutes ago, iNow said:

Not according to the paint section at the local hardware store. Parents and parents-to-be all standing there buying the “right” color to paint their still unborn child’s nursery… making sure it’s pink or blue or a similar gender-based hue. 

Yuck! Who came up with the pink and blue nonsense in the first place?

I know that little girls tend to go through a phase of preferring pink and/or purple (and that phase can last into the late teens), but I'm unaware that boys have any preference -- or even colour recognition. When most men are asked their favourite colour, they're likely to say either red or blue. 

I have to wonder.... What came first? Did girls always like pink, or only since the fashion of adults giving them pink clothes and telling them they looked pretty and showering approval on them for being pink and pretty? Did boys always show such disregard for aesthetics? Did girls always want to imitate mommy in the kitchen - or only since they were barred from the garage? Did boys always disdain delicate, nuanced flavours?  If so, where did all the artists and chefs come from?    

[iNow]

21 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

When most men are asked their favourite colour, they're likely to say either red or blue. 

Citation needed. 
 

21 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

I have to wonder.... What came first? Did girls always like pink, or only since the fashion of adults giving them pink clothes and telling them they looked pretty and showering approval on them for being pink and pretty?

Isn’t the answer here obvious?

 

[Intoscience]

14 hours ago, Phi for All said:

We see a lot more diverse tendencies in cultures that allow them, so it definitely appears to be learned. Male dominance is also a LOT more toxic and competition oriented than what women do. Men will jeer at a woman who wants to operate heavy machinery (like it requires testicles and muscles to work a backhoe), but have you ever heard of female nurses deriding male nurses? The job market is heavily influenced by the worst of male behavior, mostly because men are encouraged to look at everything as a competition, even when cooperation is more profitable

I'm not sure this is strictly true. Women are encouraged and applauded around my parts for taking roles that tend to be male dominated. Though the reality is that when opportunities are available to all with no stigma or expectation, the men tend towards the heavy lifting, physically intensive roles and the females tend towards the less physical, lighter more attentive roles.

I'm not convinced that this is just learned, you see at a very young age boys playing rough and tumble (competition driven tendencies) girls playing with less physical intent. 

Basically you are saying that males can be taught to be non competitive and instead nurturing and women to be competitive and non nurturing. Maybe so, but to what extent and for the vast majority? I'm not sure.

Males in general have evolved to be competitive, for a reason, survival and to enable them to continue their gene pool. Yeah sure, we are civilized enough to identify this and learn to be different. It's going to be a difficult task to overcome millions of years of evolution.      

14 hours ago, Phi for All said:

Except when you don't. Plenty of males take care of young among different species, like penguins, marmosets, foxes, frogs, and seahorses

Is that the vast majority of species then? 

14 hours ago, Phi for All said:

I personally don't think our brains needed a lot of hardwired traits the way many animals do. I think our capacity for intelligence and learning lets us determine how to best adapt to any given situation, and would be hampered if we had too many rigid ways of thinking. We're not limited to fight or flight; humans can negotiate, bluff, or reason out even better ways to deal with our world

Needed and innate are two different things. There are many things that we don't need but are born with, appendixes for one.  I don't agree that we should not try and learn to be better and have better control over our instinctual tendencies. But before we "learn out" a tendency should we consider why, for what gains and if its worth the effort?  

5 hours ago, iNow said:

Obviously these roles and characteristics we see today are all genetic in origin. /sarcasm

So are you denying that there are general physical & phycological differences between males and females?

How boring 

[iNow]

3 hours ago, Intoscience said:

So are you denying that there are general physical & phycological differences between males and females?

How boring 

That’s not an accurate summary of my views, no. Nuance is lost here it seems 

[studiot]

8 hours ago, iNow said:

and only quoted you here as a jumping off point, this is not a reply to you directly)  

Noted and accepted, but I will offer comment on some of your points.

8 hours ago, iNow said:

Did you happen to notice how all of his little pajamas and onesies and jumpers (or whatever you Scottish blokes call em… maybe a romper?)… did you happen to notice they were ALL blue and white and gray. Not pink, though?

No, I am not Scottish, though my Welsh grandmother was fond of claiming roots in all four UK countries.

In those days there was no prebirth gender determination so few folks wasted money on inappropriate preparations, and bought white baby clothes.

8 hours ago, iNow said:

Sadly it wasn’t just the parents who were in on it. Apparently all of their friends showed up to the baby shower with blue and gray and white onesies and bibs and socks and hats. Not a damned one was pink though, and the baby wasn’t even born yet.

Baby showers were an american invention not popular in the UK. Hand-me-downs from the extended family were also more popular in those straitened times.

 

It has also been interesting how those junior relatives have grown up and fared.

They could not be more different, but I put the difference down to being different people, not different gender.

One last comment about Nature and Nurture.

There is an inherited heart weakness in their family, affecting at least as far back as great-grandfather, grandfather, father and my cousin but not the girls it seems.

This weakness has certainly conditioned life responses and choices down the line.

[Intoscience]

3 minutes ago, iNow said:

That’s not an accurate summary of my views, no. Nuance is lost here it seems 

Ok, so you agree that there are genetic differences that may influence tendencies and then there are social (learned/taught) differences that may influence tendencies? 

Phi seems to be implying that the vast majority of, if not all tendencies are learnt, even from a really young age. From your posts I have read and if interpreted correctly you appear to take a similar stance? 

On another thread - girls v boys there is agreement amongst most that in general girls learn speech earlier than boys due to genetics. This implies the tendency is innate not learned.  

7 minutes ago, studiot said:

In those days there was no prebirth gender determination so few folks wasted money on inappropriate preparations, and bought white baby clothes

Interestingly, we, myself and my siblings, wore hand-me-downs, the colour and style was irrelevant whether girl boy or other. There are old photos of me as a toddler in a frock, and some with my younger sister wearing my trousers.  

[iNow]

57 minutes ago, studiot said:

I put the difference down to being different people, not different gender.

I wish more people would do this. It’d at least make threads like these less common and less confrontational. ✌🏼

50 minutes ago, Intoscience said:

On another thread - girls v boys there is agreement amongst most that in general girls learn speech earlier than boys due to genetics. This implies the tendency is innate not learned.  

Not necessarily, but let’s keep conversation about that there. 

The entire concept of binary gender is fraught, as are humans trying to force square peg kids to fit into binary round holes due to socially cultural norms. 

Edited February 7, 2023 by iNow

[Intoscience]

10 minutes ago, iNow said:

I wish more people would do this. It’d at least make threads like these less common and less confrontational. ✌🏼

Not necessarily, but let’s keep conversation about that there. 

The entire concept of binary gender is fraught, as are humans trying to force square peg kids to fit into binary round holes due socially to cultural norms. 

I agree that sex & gender are often conflated, certainly so in these types of discussions. But some of the confusion arises when we are discerning the difference between biological sex, how we label such and the relationship that may have with biological/physical differences. In biology is it not so that in general there is the basic accepted model - male & female, which is binary?   

[iNow]

14 minutes ago, Intoscience said:

In biology is it not so that in general there is the basic accepted model - male & female, which is binary?   

In much the same way that astronomy used to follow a heliocentric model. Natural philosophers refused to abandon it for decades until they had no other choice. 

[Intoscience]

14 minutes ago, iNow said:

In much the same way that astronomy used to follow a heliocentric model. Natural philosophers refused to abandon it for decades until they had no other choice. 

I'm more than happy to abandon an old model for new, if it is an improvement based on evidence and logic. First we have to define and agree on all parameters. 

[iNow]

32 minutes ago, Intoscience said:

I'm more than happy to abandon an old model for new

Brains are not meaningfully aligned along some simplistic kindergarten-level male-female dichotomy. Our application of those labels is a bit arbitrary and for the most part are IMO a historical artifact.

We do it because, well… because that’s how we’ve always done it… never mind that there’s a better way.

Here’s one among many recommending a more meaningful multi-dimensional mosaic.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763420306540

 

Edited February 7, 2023 by iNow

[Peterkin]

9 hours ago, iNow said:

Citation needed. 

I said 'likely' as a conclusion form my own experience, not scientific fact. And it turns about I was wrong about red. https://www.theedigital.com/blog/the-color-differences-between-men-and-women-infographic

 

10 hours ago, iNow said:

Isn’t the answer here obvious?

Not to everyone at the same time or for the same reason; therefore, no.

7 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Is that the vast majority of species then? 

The number of species is less significant than which species. I should think the nearest ancestors have the most influence on human development.

[CharonY]

I have not gone through all the posts, so I am sorry if I am being repetitive. However, it seems to me that there still quite a bit of back and forth on the nature vs nurture thing. And I think the evidence we have in general on that matter is that it  is almost always not a "vs" but an "and" situation. Biological systems in general are highly dynamic and responsive to external and internal inputs and often do not behave in a strictly deterministic way (which is why I dislike the way "nature" as a term is used in this context). Even the behaviour of very simple systems, like cells can be difficult to predict unless you control virtually every environmental input. And even then we see differences within a clonal cell population.

Development, especially of the brain, is highly interactive and even cues during fetal development can affect the outcome. As such, for virtually any trait we have a certain proportion of genetic vs developmental/environmental component. However, figuring the exact distribution is extremely difficult.

It also does not help that there is a lot of assumptions regarding gender or sex preferences which often introduce bias in studies. Dissecting cultural effects (or impact by the test system, like the clever Hans effect) can further muddy the waters. The reproducibility crisis in psychology, which at least in part is related to a big narrative with little data issue and the fact that sometimes the studies are poorly standardized.

Either way, as with most biological systems we are clearly looking at a continuum of behaviour that has to be explored quantitatively. Trying to force a clear binary system out of it tends to be problematic and is likely going to boil down into semantic exercises. 

[TheVat]

6 minutes ago, CharonY said:

 And I think the evidence we have in general on that matter is that it  is almost always not a "vs" but an "and" situation. Biological systems in general are highly dynamic and responsive to external and internal inputs and often do not behave in a strictly deterministic way (which is why I dislike the way "nature" as a term is used in this context). 

Thanks for pointing this out.  I was suggesting earlier that culture/nurture is likely to act as a magnifier of fairly small initial differences.   

Another problem is that sometimes researchers will "find" neurological differences that they are looking for, and which later prove unfounded.  The notion of females having a functionally different corpus callosum, for example, became a sort of pop science myth which persisted after later research rejected it....

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9353793/

(it's handedness, actually, that makes more of a difference in thickness of those fiber bundles)

 

 

[Peterkin]

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Biological systems in general are highly dynamic and responsive to external and internal inputs and often do not behave in a strictly deterministic way

This brings to mind the caste system of ants

Quote

The queen is the founder of the colony, and her role is to lay eggs. Worker ants are all female, and this sisterhood is responsible for the harmonious operation of the colony.

Their tasks range from caring for the queen and the young, foraging, policing conflicts in the colony, and waste disposal....

A female ant’s fate to become a worker or queen is mainly determined by diet, not genetics. Any female ant larva can become the queen – those that do receive diets richer in protein.

 

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Another problem is that sometimes researchers will "find" neurological differences that they are looking for, and which later prove unfounded.  The notion of females having a functionally different corpus callosum, for example, became a sort of pop science myth which persisted after later research rejected it....

Much of it is due to the way hypotheses are set up and/or our tendency to create categories to make data and experiments easier to handle. The good news is that with better technology we also get more quantitative data. The downside is that new insights often have trouble penetrating public perception, which often prefers simple categories and narratives (for obvious reasons).

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Thanks for pointing this out.  I was suggesting earlier that culture/nurture is likely to act as a magnifier of fairly small initial differences.   

I suspect it can also go the opposite way. I do not think that we can always expect that cultural norms necessarily follow the direction hinted at by biology.