

Peculiar human sex differences - tokenadult
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/peculiar-human-sex-differences

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goodside
"Women generally go out in groups and search for good sources of roots, ripe
berries or nuts, which they use their acute powers of observation to spot and
collect. Without knowing it, [...] shoe retailers are setting up a sort of
ersatz echo of the gathering field."

I'm a big fan of ev-psych, but this argument sucks. You could name dozens of
counter-examples of "spot and collect" activities that are not only gender-
neutral (e.g., buying music or DVDs) but also heavily male-dominated (trading
cards, comic books, coins, stamps, electronics). There are even collection-
simulating video games like Pokemon, which is pretty clearly a young male
demographic.

There's obviously some non-random structure to what it is that men and women
choose to hoard, but to suggest that evaluating and gathering in general is a
female-specific adaptation is just silly.

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whimsy
Agreed; this sounded very post-hoc to me. The point about golf throwing back
to projectile-hunting seems off to me, too. If anything, I would think we're
wired for exhaustion-hunting... that is, running after prey until they
collapse from exhaustion. That seems to be what we're good at, right?

~~~
goodside
Regardless of their relevance to golfing, hunter-gatherers do use spears and
projectile rocks extensively for hunting. They're ubiquitous among modern
hunter-gatherers, and archaeologists have uncovered wooden spears from over
400K years ago. For scale, agriculture didn't become important until 10K years
ago. This is _much_ more than enough time for humans to develop complex
functional adaptations specifically related to projectile weapons.

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henrikschroder
Evolutionary psychology can sometimes provide useful insights, but "women like
shoe shopping because it is similar to foraging" and "men like golf because it
is similar to hunting" is weaker and hand-wavier than usual.

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mahmud
I have had my fair share of orgasmic fits inside boot shops.

Tony Lama was my crack-dealer until I found out they're now a Berkshire
Hathaway company. No kidding. Buffet bought a family boot company.

<http://www.tonylama.com/en/guys_boots.html>

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hugh3
Weird graphic design point: the way each blue paragraph is separated by a
strip of white makes each paragraph look like an entirely separate point, and
destroys the flow of the writing. Usually Matt Ridley is one of my favourite
writers, but this was painful to read.

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zeteo
"It was only reinforced when the invention of the placenta and the mammary
gland gave male mammals a gigantic prize to compete for: nine months and
several years of somebody else's bodily efforts."

There are plenty of species, humans included, where male parental investment,
over the life of the child, is comparable with that of the female. The average
human child receives significant investments of time and effort from his or
her father, not only in the form of playing catch and going on trips, but also
because that father will spend a good portion of his working week earning
resources to be used for the child's benefit. And weigh that with the fact
that, until recently, it was even impossible for the man to know for sure that
the child was his.

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tokenadult
The Facebook friend who told me about this link is a tall woman. She says that
when a woman is shopping for size 11 shoes, it's more of a hunt than a gather.

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kasharoo
How about the toilet seat up/down difference?

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BerislavLopac
Oh come on, that one's at least obvious. It comes down to laziness.

Both sexes take a pee more often than they take a dump; but while women do
both activities the same way (sitting), men do them differently. So for women,
it takes more sense to keep the seat down, so it's ready for them the next
time; for men, up is a more practical position, as they need to sit only a
fraction of times.

