5 ms·
Nature does not create "bins" to sort people or things. Some traits are clustered and we latch on the most visible clusters to define "races". In reality, ther
by iSnow 5y ago
Nature does not create "bins" to sort people or things. Some traits are clustered and we latch on the most visible clusters to define "races".
In reality, there is broad overlap and if you look up close, the whole concept becomes hairy. Someone with a father of Scandinavian descent and a mother with African lineage, what is that person, black, white, 50/50?
It's the same with gender/sex. While the biological substrate is clearly variable, the categories are social.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- soundnote 5y agoNot quite: Sex is very clearly split into two distinct mechanisms. There's definitely sex-linked distributions of different traits, like male and female typical ranges of height, or agreeable personality, risk-seeking/risk aversion and so on, where both sexes operate the same mechanism. Races are mostly clusters in variation within one mechanism - eg. skin color is largely a gradient of more or less melanin, and what gets selected for depends on the environment. It's not intrinsically linked to the whole cluster of race-typical traits, those just are in the same genetic bundle that gets inherited from generation to generation, and most of those traits can be mixed. Sex itself has a sharp divide from the mechanisms themselves being completely different.
- throwaway894345 5y agoTo advance your point, the ability to bear children is kind of the definitional distinction from which all of these biological distinctions derive as well as tons of social distinctions. Race has no such analogue.
- heywherelogingo 5y agoHow about cat vs dog?
- throwaway894345 5y agoI'm not following.
- heywherelogingo 5y ago"the definitional distinction".. ?
- throwaway894345 5y agoI don’t know what point you’re making, but my “definitional distinction” remark meant that “sex” is more or less defined by the ability of one group to bear children (fertility issues aside, of course). Not sure if that addresses your concern.
- heywherelogingo 5y agoThere is no "concern". Think about the other part of your comment rather than the gender bit. Good luck.
- throwaway894345 5y agoIf you insist on being unclear I'm not going to work to tease out your meaning. Have a good day.
- iSnow 5y agoWhat about infertile women or intersex persons?
- iSnow 5y agoNo, between the two end of the gender spectrum, there is all kinds of shades of grey, starting with persons with intersex genitals and all the way up to women with a more male personality, body hair and so on. Nature doesn't care about categories and will happily produce all kinds of distributions. It's us humans who try to bin them cleanly.
- soundnote 5y agoIntersex conditions are disorders of physical sex development, and the specific disorders themselves most of the time sex-specific. It is a physical medical condition, and they certainly do not create a spectrum of sex: There is not a third or an inbetween kind of breeding setup, just bugs in building the proper things. Bugs that are insanely rare. Women with more male-like personality goes into that "variation in a shared system that has sex-linked distributions": There are women that have more typically male personality configurations and the reverse, just as there are tall and short people. Nothing surprising about that, and it doesn't relate to sex itself being a binary dictated by two different reproductive mechanisms.
- iSnow 5y agoSorry, you are falling for a category system that is entirely human-made. Nature doesn't care about "disorders" but produces the whole spectrum. Nature doesn't even care about that the evolutionary fitness of many variations is zero.