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re: Differences between men and women
ER — (archived)

Girls like to play with dolls. Boys like to play with guns. Some of this may be culturally induced, but I think it also carries a strong genetic component.

Civilization is making the need to violently protect the tribe less of an issue, even modern warfare is carried out by technicians who have to be trained and drilled into carrying out their killing at a distance on an industrial scale. In the old days, warfare was like the combat of the apes in "2001", mostly bluff and bluster with very few casualties. The tough guy badasses of the Iliad were always a minority in ancient armies and are not the model for modern soldiers.

Technology and civilization are also changing the traditional woman's role, with institutions replacing many of the traditional family functions along with legal guarantees and controls over reproduction. Most modern labor does not require a man's brute physical strength, there's no reason why woman can't run a company, work on an assembly line, or fly the space shuttle.

But it's going to take some time for the new realities to overcome hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, perhaps as long as it took for mankind to make the transition from hunter-gatherer to plow agriculture.

As far as sexual politics is concerned, this is determined by one fact and one fact only: Men can broadcast their DNA most effectively by having as many sexual partners as often as possible. They can potentially father a child a day for most of their lives.

Women can only have one child a year over a shorter child-bearing span, and their reproductive success is best assured by acquiring a strong and influential male to service her and that child. Human babies are high maintenance and even with our institutional and technological aids they are labor intensive (no pun intended). Of course, it doesn't really matter to the woman's DNA if the father of her baby is actually the one helping support it.

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