Tag Archives: mammals

Understanding Sex Differences in Humans: What do we learn from nature?

Nature is a potential source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane decisions such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast. When it comes to airplanes, you’d better be a servant to the rules of nature or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can at times be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach. Nature works when it comes to behavior too, but there are consequences. You probably would not like the consequences.

The question at hand is this: Should men and women be given fundamentally different rights? Would it be OK if men and women had different pay for the same job, or different access to jobs? Would it be OK if men and women were treated differently by the law in a way that accounted for the behavioral differences between them that arise from their biology which, in turn, may be partly a function of their evolutionary history? Should men and women have different status because of their gender? Similar questions can be extended to people that are biologically different in other ways, such as by age, gender orientation, physical handicap or, should it be proven a valid categorization, race. But for now, let’s stick with the basic adult male vs. female difference.

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