Give me equal equality in equalness, or give me death!

[estameguapo]

I want to bring this back up!Not that these findings say anything or our conclusions contain verbage about who is more intelligent or valuable or capable, because our study does not contain anything about that, because men and women are equally profound and brilliant in profoundness of cognoscence and intelligence and profundity of equality in

Comments

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[lasttoknow0]

Now two brains that are so different and so the same coevolved independently?
Pardon me if I missed a part of the article but it doesn't seem to be the case that men and women have two different brains. Both sexes have both grey and white matter present, and the difference is in the amount of usage in each type. Not two different brains, but two different types of the same brain. Not evolving independantly either; I'm not sure where that came from.

How often has this happened? How many male and female critter brains are totally different and also the same?
I have no idea. But if it happened with us, I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in a lot of other species.

If brains are evolving independently, wouldn’t equality be a fluke? Wouldn’t it be far more likely to have one gender be superior to the other in brain function?
You bet. But if you have two sexes of the same species, who are in no way evolving independantly, how surprising is it that their somewhat different brain usages are kept balanced by whatever selective forces are at work?

Why aren’t there males that are pretty much mush because the gene differences that make them male scrambled their brains, and females that do all the thinking and work of proliferation? Or the other way?
Why would having one sex be a mush-head be anything but a disadvantage to a species? Why would this be the result of natural selection?

If independent factors are developing different brain plans in the two genders of the same species, how do these independently developed brains stay so very comparable? Especially in so many species.
How many species? Did the article mention anything besides humans? Why would it be a surprise to see the same behavior emerge in multiple species?

[Re-ordered for a snappy finish]How on earth do you make one brain that functions? Let alone two different brains that are almost perfectly comparable in output.
You evolve them!

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[estameguapo]

Both sexes have both grey and white matter present, and the difference is in the amount of usage in each type.

The structure is all different too though, I suppose that could be the result of one little gene change that did a sort of brain-module-relocation-thing, but I dont know.

I still dont like it! I would be happy to come up with all sorts of stories about how it could be selectively advantageous to have an immobile brainless gender. I expect we would have to revisit our conversation about predictions though. I wonder if that conversation might make a mess of your arguments too.

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[lasttoknow0]

I suppose it doesn't take much to make a mess of my arguments. It makes me prickly though when you assume that its already been done. Speculating about an alternative path for evolution does us no good; we have clear evidence from our existence that equally smart sexes at least works. I'm not sure how talk of predictions changes anything I've said.

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[lasttoknow0]

I suppose prickly is a good way to describe my reaction to the same sort of assumption about any thinking outside of the evolutionary box. My understanding of the incongruities is no doubt thin, but the foundation of many of them is that I keep bumping into a few assumptions that are so subjective that they must be made almost as a matter of personal preference, yet they are the bedrock of the entire paradigm for the interpretation of modern scientific data. And to subjectively choose another assumption is stonewalled offhand as ancient superstition which, through rock solid irrefutable fact, has long passed from the mind of modern man. That said, I don't mean to be offensive, please feel free to tell me to calm myself, and I will.

I am pretty sure that my assumptions are good ones, but I do know that they are assumptions. I get prickly when it seems like the crowd who assumes the other way seems to believe theirs are not assumptions. No doubt you do too.

As for predictions, I was more worried about fitting explainations to available data, which I thought we agreed was inferior to making a prediction before hand. Not a lot inferior I think, but a little.

It seems to me like saying "the most adaptively superior way to do brains in genders is exactly the way they are done, because adaptive superiority is what created them, and this is how they are done" is making post observation assumptions. Fitting a story to what we see.

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[lasttoknow0]

I agree that this is not a result that was predicted given what we know about evolutionary mechanisms (that I know of). As such, I would say that it does not strengthen the case for evolution. However, neither does it present an explicit contradiction, and thereby diminish the case for evolution.

As for my assumptions about any thinking outside the evolutionary box, I try to be as unbiased as I can, but there is no way to assure myself that I have not been blinded by pride or what have you. I would like to think that if I were presented a viable alternative theory I would consider it. This has, in my opinion, not been put to the test however; for reasons which I have outlined elsewhere I do not consider your ideas to be viable.

Finally, I do suppose it was a bit improper to complain of prickliness given the tone of my original post. pashionflower started it ;-P