Animals also have much more simply organized societies. Reproduce, feed and raise offspring, rinse and repeat. They have no analogue of the complex human culture with its multiple, non-obvious facets.
The seed of the human gender roles, as I mentioned, may well lie in the residual animal qualities retained in hunter-gatherer societies. The rest is memetic.
Yeah, I’ve already noticed that you hold this opinion, but I don’t understand why. What’s your evidence for the assertion that human gender roles are mostly memetic? For example, take the division of responsibility where the dad finds food while the mom takes care of kids. It would be a truly amazing coincidence if swans behaved this way for genetic reasons, but humans behaved the same way for a completely different set of reasons.
I didn’t claim that this particular division was memetic—quite the contrary.
But the point of my post is that most such divisions are completely arbitrary and have nothing to do with our animal ancestry. Perhaps I should have been clearer and given some examples in the post. Short versus long hair, pants versus skirts, and blue versus pink are among the first few that come to my mind.
Indeed, pink vs. blue flipped within the last 100 years; while short vs. long hair used to signify something unrelated (noble vs. common status) in some societies. And neither is universal.
Animals also have much more simply organized societies. Reproduce, feed and raise offspring, rinse and repeat. They have no analogue of the complex human culture with its multiple, non-obvious facets.
The seed of the human gender roles, as I mentioned, may well lie in the residual animal qualities retained in hunter-gatherer societies. The rest is memetic.
Yeah, I’ve already noticed that you hold this opinion, but I don’t understand why. What’s your evidence for the assertion that human gender roles are mostly memetic? For example, take the division of responsibility where the dad finds food while the mom takes care of kids. It would be a truly amazing coincidence if swans behaved this way for genetic reasons, but humans behaved the same way for a completely different set of reasons.
I didn’t claim that this particular division was memetic—quite the contrary.
But the point of my post is that most such divisions are completely arbitrary and have nothing to do with our animal ancestry. Perhaps I should have been clearer and given some examples in the post. Short versus long hair, pants versus skirts, and blue versus pink are among the first few that come to my mind.
Indeed, pink vs. blue flipped within the last 100 years; while short vs. long hair used to signify something unrelated (noble vs. common status) in some societies. And neither is universal.
I agree that those are probably arbitrary/memetic. If such divisions are all your post talks about, then I apologize for misunderstanding.