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Comments
Not too surprised
Darwin was wrong about a lot of things.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Not about this
Darwin made a very qualified statement that was true enough, and based on personal observation and research. The commenter cast it as a definite hard and fast rule, which Darwin had not made. This is a strawman fallacy via exclusion of the middle. It is incredibly common when people talk about Darwin, a careful writer who seldom overstated his conclusions.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Couldn't agree more Erin.
Couldn't agree more Erin. Like in Hitchhikers. Harmless amended to mostly harmless. Darwin was right amemded to mostly right.
I am amazed by some feminist arguments about gender roles. Often they quote the gender roles of insects, or hyenas as examples. Then hold these exmples up to say humans have got it wrong. So many times I have heard "male lions don't hunt" The pride's male leader does, although not always. All the other males who lives outside a pride do or they would starve.
Male elephants are pushed out of a troop as they get largr. They can be too aggressive and become a danger to calf's. They often form associations with other bull elephants. Lions do the same. They can take over prides as pairs.
Humans closest relations are chimpanzees.
Wild chimpanzee communities [11] are multi-male, multi-female and are characterized by a male dominance hierarchy in which philopatric males form the stable core of the community and defend a group territory [5]. Within these communities, adult male and female chimpanzees show distinct sex differences in behavior. These include differences in feeding and ranging patterns [12], such that females typically range and feed in small overlapping core areas [13] while males range more broadly throughout the territory. Additional sex differences in foraging include a female-bias towards gathering insects via tool use, and a male-bias towards hunting of vertebrate prey [14], [15]. In East African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii), there are distinct sex differences in sociality, such that adult females are significantly less gregarious than adult males, spending much of their time accompanied only by their dependent offspring (Gombe: [13], Kanyawara: [16], Mahale: [17]). As such, male-male dyads have stronger association indices than female-female dyads [18]. Male chimpanzees also participate in more direct physical aggression than females, both within communities during competition for dominance status and between communities during cooperative territorial defense
Sound familiar?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4049619/
Hope you are feeling better.
Leeanna
One point about Darwin that a lot of people forget
is that he was deeply religious and had to wrestle with what he'd observed about how species evolved and what it said in the Bible. Many clergy of the time regarded him as a heretic (no change there then...). That struggle made me appreciate what he observed, recorded and postulated about even more. Yes, he could be wrong but most of what he observed still holds true today and given the sort of scientific equipment he had available, it is even more remarkable.
What saddens me is that large swathes of people are actively trying to wipe him (and many others involved in scientific breakthroughs) from history and what children are taught in school.
I hope that in a few decades' time, sociologists will study a few of our current societies and wonder in amazement at how whole societies can regress to that of many centuries before and at the same time, call it progress.
Science (well most of it...) is not bunkum. If you encounter someone who says that (MTG for example) then ask them how they would live if everything in their lives that came about because of science was suddenly taken away? If those people are over 30 years of age, calmly remind them that in those societies the average life expectancy was about 3 decades. Then watch them squirm.
Samantha
I don't think Lucy was out to
I don't think Lucy was out to get Darwin because she regarded him as a hero, I see him as a genius and years ahead of his time. He was a prisoner of his culture which was dominated as it still is by dogmatic white males, having read her book, which I heartily recommend, Lucy is making the point that any animal group led by females is regarded as strange. It isn't as there are many female led groups from Lemurs to bonobos but they weren't featured in male-dominated research. At times she is a bit loose with her associations but she met some amazing female researchers and did some amazing things like catching whale poo.
We now so much more about the world and its denizens, we know that fish change sex, a fact I found fascinating when I was a teen, we have learned that insects, fish including sharks use parthenogenesis as do reptiles, which of course means that if it had happened by divine intervention Jesus should have been a girl. So far, it only happens to gods like Mithras and Jesus is largely based on the Mithras story.
Lucy tells us what we suspect that sex or gender in mammals isn't linear and she also mentions Dr Joan Roughgarden, who changed her gender, so as a scientist, I feel in good company. We have scientists who follow their own agenda and are slated by others for doing so - nothing has changed there, science is still conservative and Darwin would still have a hard time with a new theory. Women are getting some respect, but it isn't enough and I think more will come but it will take time, which is an indictment in itself.
We still inhabit a world where a minority control many things, including both culture and science; I say minority because there are more women now than men, yet they still control it. They also control the media which informs us, but only what they want us to know. Lucy's book is an effort to correct that and to celebrate the contribution women have made as have female animals. she is a feminist and like me she believes in the equality of the sexes so do read her book and then we'll discuss it, it is good.
Angharad