When those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture.
Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers.
There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.
This turn into generic gender-war predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat. Perhaps elsewhere on the Internet there is a spot where people haven't had enough of such discussions yet, but HN isn't one. Note the guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
Citing science as a defense against the current cultural paradigm is inciting a flamewar.
How the mighty have fallen.
I actively steer young entrepreneurs away from YC and HN, as it has become incredibly in tune with the echo chamber of the radical political ideologies of our time. I don't understand how this behavior encourages clear and logical thinking or produces successful entrepreneurs.
I would appreciate a response on this topic dang, as I am sincerely amazed by your response to the parent's comment.
EDIT: In case anyone wants to start asking for citations, it is equivalent to asking for citations regarding the heliocentric model of the solar system. R/K selection theory, sexual dimorphism, and sex specialization are such well understood topics as to be assumed common knowledge among any educated biologists. It only speaks to the individual's naivete when they bring up the citation requirement.
Citations are used for new and ground breaking research, not for common scientific knowledge that has been in the mainstream for a hundred years. I am constantly amazed by the sheer ignorance of the HN crowd on this extremely well understood science.
I'm always willing to help clarify how HN works, but the first four sentences of your comment are such wild projections that it's hard for me to read your request as serious. And then you posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226294, which flagrantly violates everything HN stands for.
It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify that investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.
I have a policy to return hostility in kind. The commenter DanBC was being vulgar without making any points, so I decided to respond in a manner befitting his tone.
But since you seem to be a levelheaded individual, I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly.
Let's start with the parent comment:
>When those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture. Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers. There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.
There is absolutely nothing controversial about this statement to a trained biologist. In fact, you could not get through an undergraduate degree in biology if you did not understand sexual dimorphism, r/K selection theory, and the sexual specialization that results. As such, there is nothing political about the statement. It is merely a statement of the current scientific understanding of the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.
Now let's look at your response:
>This turn into generic gender-war predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat. Perhaps elsewhere on the Internet there is a spot where people haven't had enough of these yet, but HN isn't one. Note the guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
So, the statement of scientific consensus stated by the original comment is labelled by a moderator as "gender-war" which "predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat." And you summarise with saying HN has had enough, and the debate is to be ended.
So I just want to be clear, which branches of evolutionary biology, and science in general, are off limits to discuss on HN? And how does censoring known science help critical thought and discussions regarding the current entrepreneurial markets in tech?
Thank you for your time.
EDIT: to address your final statement:
>It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify the investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.
It is a bold assertion that stating known science is "a desire to score ideological points." This line of thinking demonstrates more about the reader, and less about the material. Evolutionary biology is not an ideology, it is a science. Stating it does not make one an ideologue, but an empiricist.
In that case you can't comment here. "But he started it" is an acceptable excuse neither from 5-year-olds nor from HN commenters. It always feels like the other person started it and did worse.
> I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly
This is obviously just polemic, and boilerplate at that. We might as well "discuss" whether I've stopped beating my wife.
Ideological harangues have no place on this site, so please don't post any more of them.
As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, in this past 24 hours Dang has been attacked in a similar way from someone on the opposite side of this debate to you.
And as I also said in that comment, if you knew what a decent and thoughtful person Dang is, and how deeply emotionally invested he is in making HN a place of civility and intellectually stimulating discussion, you'd be appalled at how cruel you and others have been to him in this thread.
To be fair to the person you are responding too, he is right: your totalitarian censorship was the primary reason I did not apply to Y combinator with my startup and refuse to comment on new threads, except on special circumstances such as this.
You are a petty tyrant, dang, working for an organization actively trying to push an agenda by suppressing reason and free speech.
So this is considered a proportionate response to a person's efforts to cultivate civil discussion and hold firm in the face of escalating incivility.
You may not be aware that HN is an independent arm of YC.
Yes Dang is a salaried employee of YC, but he's a talented programmer who could probably earn a much better living doing something else.
He does this job because he loves HN and is emotionally invested in making it a safe place for intellectually stimulating discussions.
You should consider that Dang gets comments that are equally vitriolic from people on the opposite side of this debate to you. He did in another thread in the past 24 hours. So this is nothing about pushing some YC-driven PC agenda.
This is simply about avoiding topics that give people license to co-opt science or any other justification to be mean to one another and degenerating out of control, just as this one has.
If you knew Dang and knew how burdened he was by the sense of obligation to this community (not to YC) to keep it a civil and intellectually stimulating place, you'd be devastated at what a cruel comment it is that you've made here.
I think (and hope) that's more to do with it being late in the thread and flying under the radar than any kind of endorsement from any significant portion of the community.
Skirmishes like this aside, on the whole I find things good and continually getting better here in terms of civility and interesting content.
But my God, what it must be like for Dan to have to go to sleep with the thought "today a person told me that he hopes I rot in hell because he disagreed with the way I went about trying to hose down a flame war".
Sexual dimorphism is real. Your impotent rage and ridiculous ideologies will never change that fact. I will be greatly amused by your kind's zealous need to tilt at windmills.
Men are larger and stronger than women, women are flooded with hormones during pregnancy that force a bond between them and their children. That is literally your biology encouraging a role.
>There are 'baked-in' DNA traits, that have emergently caused cultures to adopt those gender roles in their historical contexts.
Evolution is random chance leading to mutations that improve fitness. Cultures didn't wake up one day, notice that the men were stronger than the women and the women had stronger bonds with their children, and allocate people accordingly. The divergence in traits happened naturally over millennia, because specializing the genders for different roles resulted in improved fitness over keeping them identical, and thus, more likely to survive and produce offspring.
>'Baked-id' DNA traits are now emergently leading to the abandonment of gender roles in the context of western cultures & economies.
A liberal swing in culture is trying to encourage people to abandon their traditional gender roles, is upset when the majority of people want to stick to relatively traditional roles, and is confused when the people that do buck the traditional roles usually end up unhappy about it (working mothers sad because they don't get to spend enough time with kids, kids developing poorly because they didn't get to bond enough with their parents, etc).
You probably think I'm advocating the 50s status quo of men working all day and never seeing their children, women not being allowed into the workplace, and children spending the majority of their time being indoctrinated by the state; far from it, and that's not even a traditional lifestyle in any sense of the phrase. I would much prefer a lifestyle in which fathers and mothers can both work and spend time with their children, as was the norm prior to the industrial revolution. But passing judgement on modern lifestyles wasn't my point.
All I'm saying is that biology has a great influence on the roles people take up, and you can try to fight it all you want, but if you try to claim that the influence isn't there and it's all just a whim of culture, then you are engaging in the exact same kind of willfully ignorant anti-scientific thinking that people ridicule flat earthers and climate change deniers for. You have chosen your hypothesis and your conclusion and will ignore any evidence or train of thought that might lead you astray from it. The only difference is that the pendulum of liberal vs. conservative values has not yet swung back far enough for society to call you out on it.
@clevernickname and @shkkmo you both have valid points and if you read carefully what you say you could agree. clevernickname is right on his points on sexual dimorphism; the hormonal and genetic differences that lead to changes in body shape/function and structural brain differences with certain tradeoffs do shape two different forms of our species geared towards different tasks. Now gender roles will depend on the environment that you throw the humans into (if shkkmo mentioned that, it would make sense). Is the environment hostile and hunting requires bringing down big strong animals? Then if women need to hunt alongside with men, this has an impact in the number of offsprings that can be reared (neanderthals). So in that case it was beneficial to have a structure where males hunt and women were gatherers this in turn may have selected for genes that make males better hunters and women better gatherers further increasing sexual dimorphism. In any case if humans are put in an environment where females have a more important role then cultural adaptations that would free up time for females to pursue this, would ensue as it has probably already happened in several occasions in the past as shkkmo mentions.
> Now gender roles will depend on the environment that you throw the humans into (if shkkmo mentioned that, it would make sense)
I believe I did:
>> "There are 'baked-in' DNA traits, that have emergently caused cultures to adopt those gender roles in their historical contexts."
However,
> you both have valid points and if you read carefully what you say you could agree
The only thing that I am disagreeing with him on is whether "it is safe to assume that gender roles are baked into our DNA".
Gender roles are a complex property that emerge from the interaction between our DNA, our culture and our environment.
To claim that gender roles are 'baked in' to our DNA indicates that gender roles are determined by our DNA in such a way as to be inflexible and unchanging. Assuming this is true is a dangerous assumption that is not backed up by history or science and does not encourage sexual equality.
>The only thing that I am disagreeing with him on is whether "it is safe to assume that gender roles are baked into our DNA".
Ah, now I understand. You're practicing the common internet commenter behavior of picking out a single strongly worded statement and ignoring everything else the person said. Uncharitably reading my comments as "hurr durr women belong in the kitchen" instead of putting some faith in the author that they might have simply meant "hey, maybe it's not just a whim of culture that women are traditionally the caretakers in just about every single successful society." All because I didn't wrap a particular sentence in 3 paragraphs of qualifications and apologies.
Thank you for understanding what I'm getting at, but I think you are misreading @shkkmo. They seem to completely reject the idea that there are sex-specific genetic factors that influence psychology and neurochemistry, or that gender roles and their genetic predisposition can be a self-perpetuating system.
But in regards to your hypothesis that changing society will change our (self-imposed) fitness criteria and result in a more convergent evolutionary path for both sexes, I partially agree. Partially, because 1. while evolution can and does happen on short time scales, its most prominent effects are shaped over aeons. Just because we are not hunter gatherers living in the woods today, does not mean that the evolutionary pressure that all of the generations of our ancestors underwent in those conditions can be subverted on a timescale meaningful to us.
And 2. because no matter how postmodern and liberal you think your culture is, we still need to have babies and raise them into functioning adults. If women are both gifted in this role and feel a psychological need to perform it, it makes no sense for them not to do it. That doesn't mean that women should be barred from the workplace, but it might mean that women taking less involved and prestigious roles in the workplace so that they may have more time to raise their children or look after grandchildren or what have you could be a good thing for society and not something to squawk about.
> They seem to completely reject the idea that there are sex-specific genetic factors that influence psychology and neurochemistry, or that gender roles and their genetic predisposition can be a self-perpetuating system.
Where did I reject that?
> we still need to have babies and raise them into functioning adults. If women are both gifted in this role and feel a psychological need to perform it, it makes no sense for them not to do it. That doesn't mean that women should be barred from the workplace, but it might mean that women taking less involved and prestigious roles in the workplace so that they may have more time to raise their children or look after grandchildren or what have you
The child rearing role is valuable and we should support people who choose to make that their role in life, regardless of their gender.
Gender does have a genetic impact on the traits that assist with child rearing. Like physical traits such as height, there is a large amount of overlap and thus there are many women who are less suited to child-rearing than the average male.
I would guess that it is likely that in a world with full equality for both genders, that you would still find some gender disparity in some roles. (See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11220916)
However, if you think that the current gender disparity is not primarily the result of gender inequality and disparate expectations, you need to take look at the data and talk to some of the women who have left the field.
Thus this disparity is not a good thing for society and is something we should squawk about because we are missing out on optimally utilizing a large portion of our population and we are discouraging them from realizing their full potential
> All I'm saying is that biology has a great influence on the roles people take up, and you can try to fight it all you want, but if you try to claim that the influence isn't there and it's all just a whim of culture, then you are engaging in the exact same kind of willfully ignorant anti-scientific thinking that people ridicule flat earthers and climate change deniers for.
Whoa, now that's some giant leaps you're making there.
First, that biology has an influence does not mean that it has a great influence. History shows that the responsibilities of the sexes have varied significantly over time and over geography. That society is a great influence is well-known (seeing how many behaviors change over time and place); the degree of influence biology has is uncertain, and so I'd argue that making that seemingly subtle leap from "some influence" to a "great influence" is more science-denying than downplaying biology. You are making up scientific results, while the other side simply concentrates on the results we do have (i.e. that society has been found to have a great role in this issue).
Second, while it's true that women have usually been the primary carers of children, in some cultures (even in Europe) they have also been the primary breadwinners. Your leap from "affinity to children" to "role in the workplace" is completely unjustified, and also lacks imagination regarding possible social structures. Which brings me to:
Finally, and most importantly, you are associating a negative ethical value with "fighting biology" in this case, which is not only unjustified, but very biased. Evolution has not designed humans to fly, yet we've built airplanes and found them very useful. In fact, all of technology, from wheels to augmented/artificial intelligence, is about "fighting" biology. Yet you seem to associate a negative value only with the attempt to change what you see as a natural difference between the sexes, a difference that consistently allots women far less power than men in society. I think that even assuming you are right about the biology (although I see no good scientific reason to believe is the case), this is no less worthy-a-cause to "fight" with nature than any other battle we face with it. Nothing can be more scientific (and human, and generally positive) than the will and ability to "fight" nature (in fact, it is the climate change deniers who deny our society's ability to affect nature).
To summarize: 1/ there's nothing to be willfully ignorant of, as we don't have results showing biology's great influence in this area; 2/ whatever biological effects are there, they have little to do with the social structure we're fighting, and 3/ even if nature is found to play a major role somewhere in this equation, "fighting" nature is what technology and humans in general constantly do, there is hardly anything more scientific, and this is as good a cause you could come up with.
P.S
> A liberal swing in culture is trying to encourage people to abandon their traditional gender roles, is upset when the majority of people want to stick to relatively traditional roles, and is confused when the people that do buck the traditional roles usually end up unhappy about it
We are not upset -- far from it. In fact, we've expected nothing less. Society never takes change kindly, and we don't expect it to. And yet, in spite of these growing pains, society keeps changing, and often for the better.
> Men are larger and stronger than women, women are flooded with hormones during pregnancy that force a bond between them and their children.
Strength/size is a physical trait, not a gender role. Hormone release is a physical process, not a gender role.
>"A liberal swing in culture is trying to encourage people to abandon their traditional gender roles"
If you think that gender roles haven't changed repeatedly undergone significant change multiple times in the last several hundred year, you are living in a fantasy world.
> "people that do buck the traditional roles usually end up unhappy about it"
False. Please go do some research and re-evaluate your assumptions.
> "All I'm saying is that biology has a great influence on the roles people take up,"
No, you claimed that gender roles are baked into our DNA.
Biology has a great influence on everything, including people's choices of gender roles.
> "You have chosen your hypothesis and your conclusion and will ignore any evidence or train of thought that might lead you astray from it. "
Please provide said evidence, because it sounds like you are talking about yourself.
> Strength/size is a physical trait, not a gender role. Hormone release is a physical process, not a gender role.
Where do you think gender roles come from?
The most common job in the US is truck driver. It's not software developer money but it pays better than you might expect. Truck drivers are overwhelming male and you might not see an obvious reason for that and want to blame "gender roles" or sexism.
But truck drivers get paid by the mile. So after you drive your truck to a loading dock, you're then standing around not getting paid while 20,000 pounds of freight is loaded or unloaded. You want to get back on the road doing the thing that makes you money, so the truck driver helps with the loading and unloading (which is what everybody expects you to do), and suddenly the population of truck drivers skews toward people with more physical strength which skews heavily male.
Then the truck driver is away from home all the time so the truck driver's spouse is the one who takes primary responsibility for the kids, and now we have gender roles even if society didn't start with them.
> if you need to lift that much weight, you'll be using a crane, in which case your strength is a moot point.
You don't typically lift all 20,000 pounds at the same time. The typical case is that you have twenty or so pallets with a thousand pounds on each of them and you use a pallet jack, which goes under the pallet and has wheels. That's how one person can move 20,000 pounds of freight at all. But you still have to overcome inertia and rolling resistance against 1000 pounds and have enough left in you to do it 19 more times. And do it fast enough that your truck leaves on schedule or makes it out soon enough to beat rush hour.
> Assuming strength does matter for loading/unloading, the real culprit is how truckers are paid, not the strength of the driver.
It isn't how they're paid. It's the fact that when a truck driver gets to a loading dock they're inherently standing around unable to go anywhere else until the freight is loaded or unloaded, so the efficient thing is to have them move the freight (whether you pay them separately for it or not).
You know, I don't think "sexism" is a good argument if you spend 95% of your job alone inside a truck and calling a industry "sexist" is just rubbing salt into the wound which actually worsens the perception of the industry without offering a solution.
Chill out. AnthonyMouse makes a perfectly valid and well-expressed point. Pulling a "wow" at someone else's "naive little worldview" is neither convincing nor constructive.
I don't know about a 94%/6% breakdown, but I know that if truck drivers are paid as described, by-the-mile, the workforce must skew heavily male, since pay will be higher for physically stronger individuals. It is not that women are not physically strong enough - it is that stronger people are paid more for doing this job, and therefore the people most incentivized to pick truck driving will be those who are strongest, and the upper echelons of that measure are exclusively male. Not the entire top 3.5 million that it would take to fill every truck driver job in the US, and of course some strong people will choose to do other things, and some less-physically-gifted individuals of both sexes will choose to do it despite not being compensated as well as others with the same job.
So. If 94/6 doesn't seem reasonable to you, what does?
>Pulling a "wow" at someone else's "naive little worldview" is neither convincing nor constructive.
When some people have no reasonable argument left to make, their last ditch effort is to shame the person they are arguing with for the opinions they hold.
Once again, you completely ignore the arguments of the person you are responding to, and your counterarguments scarcely amount to "it's 2016, come on!"
Outside the just world of your delusions, where everyone is kind and good except the evil white males leeching off the world by the right of their "privilege", there are people that would kill you and take your property in a heartbeat. Truck drivers are trusted with transporting and protecting substantial sums of property with every trip they take. I would absolutely trust a big strong man to transport my cargo over any woman, for the same reason that I would not trust a young boy to do so. Thieves (who are mostly strong men themselves) aren't scared of women or boys.
My first guess would be that those studies are probably poorly executed.
If they were indeed properly double-blinded and used good statistical analysis, I would find that to be and extremely interesting result that would warrant further investigation.
Is that supposed to be a citation? Try as I might I can't seem to find any further details on this study, which seems like it was conducted as part of a TV program rather than as a research paper.
Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers.
There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.