What sort of social differences do you see coming from this though, and do you figure that it's to the same measurements as men and women thousands of years ago?
How big of a difference do you see those physical traits making?
Sexual dimorphism is a powerful thing. Humans are relatively less dimorphic compared to other animals, but this still significant when we consider neurological differences and the cognitive consequences of it. The example I mentioned of the corpus callosum being larger in males is a highly stable pattern in primates; even rhesus monkeys exhibit this.
Dimorphism itself is a reflection of successful mating and survival patterns. It seems most likely that women evolved to have more social intelligence, because bearing a child is a huge investment. Women may also have been facilitators of peace in tribes. These mechanisms don't shut off because we're in a new environment. When reading body language, women use 14-16 different regions of the brain. Men use 4-6, comparatively.
To be more clear answering your first question, we have the same "hardware" as we've had for the last 60,000+ years. I think it plays out for us as clear as day in stereotypes, i.e. the chit-chatty gossip girls and the dull as a doorknob guys.
Do you deny that evolution exists, that Darwin's full of it? Are you saying that men and women were simply designed differently, perhaps by God, and could not end up becoming more like each other? Women could have ended up like this over years of being in the position of learned helplessness, pushing that value further through those being the women who primarily achieved breeding, and religion and culture did women no favors there, none at all. A woman who doesn't have personal autonomy becomes easier for men to breed with by comparison to warrior women, so women of warrior status were effectively on birth control.
It's more that I don't believe evolution works in the way you describe it. For one, many animals are rather stubborn when it comes to evolution. Nature tends to fine tune what it has in very subtle ways, rather than overturn it. One also has to consider the genetic volume of a species and what factors narrow that volume. That alone makes gender inversion impractical, but we can entertain the idea that it is made to happen regardless.
Let's say that there was some pressure that consistently made it so that reproduction became contingent on females who exhibited more masculine traits, and the converse for males. At this point with how big the gene pool is, there would have to be a large culling of the population and genetic drift to make any of this possible. It would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not more, to fully realize these changes.
The mechanisms we have in place are so tuned that we exhibit artifacts that go way back to primates we are barely related to. A change in culture would not make a dent in our cognitive profiles.
I'd argue based on historical fossils, that women in different cultures were not all sold on the Neotenized Gregarious patterns of Learned Helplessness. Vikings from the looks of it valued both genders for their combat prowess, their skills, and if that became their criteria for breeding it'd be more likely to produce warriors for both genders rather than as drastic a split as you're otherwise used to seeing.
On fossil records or on archeological records?
I'd argue as such that the natural state of woman is not one of cooking, cleaning, and squishing out children just because of their lower muscle output with higher fatigue resistance and recovery, but that rather much like our slave breeding practices of old that we've made women into this, and that with enough centuries or maybe even genetic engineering we could undo the damages. As such I'd conclude that the natural state of woman does not exist, but rather that it's morphic in nature much like men, much like how our nails and teeth are changing to meet more current needs, or how we've seen wolves rendered dogs purely to suit the needs of man.
Do you think chimpanzee males created a patriarchy that keeps the female chimps down and confined to child-rearing?
...did s/he have balls still? I'm wondering how this compares to history's eunuchs, and it'd affect T-balances that don't go into high gear until puberty.
I'd have to assume not, since he was raised as a girl without knowing he was ever a male.
While I do agree that gender identity is a learned aspect of culture, I see it more as a filtration system based on our overall chemical makeup rather than purely gender politics. Men thinking they're women and women thinking they're men is less over having the other gender's soul in them or some nonsense, but rather over how their self-construct cobbles together in the wake of modern labels.
For my point, I'd argue that we could rid of the concept of gender norms entirely with ease, but that's perhaps best left for another time since the debate is otherwise over their natural state, how they began before having to adapt as a species. I'm mostly using the capacity for gregarious change in conjunction with Darwin's theory of evolution to conclude that this is simply where we've found ourselves, rather than this being a fated outcome of the past, present, and future to come.
Much of history is lost, which limits our means of looking towards how woman began (and for that matter how men did). As such we're stuck with a short span of rough, comparative history, and how much it's dawning on us how we don't have to conform to it if culture otherwise allows for the shift. Enough history is lost to us that we cannot use enough of the past to see where women began, so I'd argue that we're instead stuck with how capable it is of changing as a comparative model across the vast expanse of lost history for the sake of assumed odds.
I see what you're saying here.
I'm not too invested in gender being prescriptive of what people should do. Biology largely does not play a role in how I think society ought to be structured. There are some opinions I have, such as that women probably should not be in combat. I say this because men are prone to "white knighting" (to keep things basic) and would probably be more willing to blow a mission to save a woman than to save a man. I can't really think of many other examples.
When people say things like "nature of women," I get that they often mean that women should to be confined to the traditional feminine role. I think that generally women are more predisposed to those roles based on how they're designed, but by no means does that mean they should be relegated to that.
The Natural State of Woman is our point of debate, and my argument over it is that it's natural state is morphic rather than a harshly defined set of traits. You can go on about the state of woman as it is now, but I'd argue that the state of women we're seeing is a transitional one rather than rigid, set in stone traits, and that our hopes of seeing "the natural state" of women, even of men, is beyond our grasp.
I'm mostly pointing out what I see as the differences, but again I don't see that as prescriptive of what people ought to do. We may not even fundamentally disagree on anything important.
As a side point, would you say it is natural for women to argue, natural for them to accept guidance, or neither?
I'll give the super red pilled take to make it interesting.
Men argue more about things related to objectives. Women argue more about disharmony. Women tend to keep a check on the pulse of the social systems they are in, which is why they gossip more and talk about their feelings more often. Men often see this as emotional nagging, because they fail to see that the feelings often have to do with a discontent on how things are arranged.
Women tend to seek more guidance from a proper source, usually one that is protective. This can be from a man or a woman, though I think most women long for it to be from a significant other.
