I suspect there is a substantive disagreement lurking here. Specifically, as much as it hurts my liberal feminist heart to say it (or it did hurt, before I got jaded), I’m going to have to deny this:
But for any given observed behavioral difference, it’s sensible to assume it’s a learned behavior lacking strong evidence otherwise
Maybe we’re tripping over this word genetic? When I say that the number of shared genes doesn’t matter, what I’m getting at is that while SRY may “just” be “one gene,” it triggers this entire masculinizing developmental process, and while I haven’t studied the details (yet), it doesn’t look trivial. Obviously culture exists, but the capacity to generate and transmit culture is a specific ability of human brains that happens in a specific manner, and if there are innate sex differences in human brains, then we are not justified in assuming that a given behavioral sex difference is a strictly cultural artifact that could have just as easily gone the other way. Culture is—I don’t have the word for it—informed, constrained?---by human nature. We have to reason these things out on a case-by-case basis. Suppose—suppose American males score better than females on a test of mental rotation by eight-tenths of a standard deviation, and suppose we don’t have any cross-cultural data, however dearly we might wish for it. I can’t bring myself to presume a social explanation.
I suspect there is a substantive disagreement lurking here. Specifically, as much as it hurts my liberal feminist heart to say it (or it did hurt, before I got jaded), I’m going to have to deny this:
Maybe we’re tripping over this word genetic? When I say that the number of shared genes doesn’t matter, what I’m getting at is that while SRY may “just” be “one gene,” it triggers this entire masculinizing developmental process, and while I haven’t studied the details (yet), it doesn’t look trivial. Obviously culture exists, but the capacity to generate and transmit culture is a specific ability of human brains that happens in a specific manner, and if there are innate sex differences in human brains, then we are not justified in assuming that a given behavioral sex difference is a strictly cultural artifact that could have just as easily gone the other way. Culture is—I don’t have the word for it—informed, constrained?---by human nature. We have to reason these things out on a case-by-case basis. Suppose—suppose American males score better than females on a test of mental rotation by eight-tenths of a standard deviation, and suppose we don’t have any cross-cultural data, however dearly we might wish for it. I can’t bring myself to presume a social explanation.