Gender and Sexual Orientation
Category archives for Gender and Sexual Orientation
How do you tell the women from the men in Copper-Age Eastern Europe?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 15, 2013 Apparently, the women have jugs.
“…boys are innately better at math and science than girls…”
Posted by Greg Laden on December 17, 2011 Sheril Kirshenbaum has a few comments about a piece in Science addressing innate differences between boys and girls in math. I have to say, it may be hard to accept the scientific truth sometimes, but the research really does consistently say the same thing again and again. In this latest study, the science …
Time Trauma Truth and Other Matters
Posted by Greg Laden on August 22, 2011 First of all, I want you to know that I’ve devoted my life to this blog post so now you have every reason to love it more than any other blog post. Sniff sniff.
How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?
Posted by Greg Laden on July 8, 2011 Humans appear to have a reasonable amount of diversity in their sexual orientations, in what is often referred to as “gender” and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to “genes” as the “cause” of any particular subset of th is diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to “culture”…
Driving The Patriarchy: Demonic Males, Feminism, and Genetic Determinism
Posted by Greg Laden on July 7, 2011 Behaviors are not caused by genes. There is not a gene that causes you to be good, or to be bad, or to be smart, or good at accounting, or to like bananas. There are, however, drives. “Drives” is a nicely vague term that we can all understand the meaning of. Thirst and hunger are…
Falsehoods: Human Universals
Posted by Greg Laden on January 26, 2011 There are human universals. There, I said it. Now give me about a half hour to explain why this is both correct and a Falsehood. But first, some background and definition.
Miss A and Miss W, Sexual Jealousy, and Julian Assange
Posted by Greg Laden on January 1, 2011 Almost Diamonds has two interesting posts on the Julian Assange sexual assault/rape accusation/charges. I want to make a comment on part of the second post, but this may not make a lot of sense to you until you read both of them. They are concise and compelling so you will not regret the time you…
What is the most important human adaptation?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 22, 2010 Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some…
Why do women shop and men hunt?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2010 Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)? This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The…
Caster Semenya is a valid female athlete
Posted by Greg Laden on July 6, 2010 According to those who decide these things. This is what I had assumed would happen assuming that Caster Semenya is an XY person with complete AIS. (see: Caster Semenya’s Gender: What would the science be?) The current news story, just being reported and quite incomplete (and perhaps appropriately so) is from the BBC.
Caster Semenya’s Gender: What would the science be?
Posted by Greg Laden on September 11, 2009 Well, we don’t know because the necessary detailed information has not been released. I do not personally know the Caster Semenya story, medically or biologically speaking, but there has been a lot of discussion and apparently wild speculation on this, and I may have a thing or two to help clarify.
Girls Doing Math
Posted by Greg Laden on September 2, 2009 Source and more commentary
Converting Gays to Straightitude: FAIL
Posted by Greg Laden on August 7, 2009 Clearly, the whole gay-straight thing is a false dichotomy anyway… And the APA has decided that changing sexual orientation is impossible. That is quite a shift in policy form the days when the information about homosexuality in the psychology literature was all about “abberent” behavior or “perversion” and Teh Gay was confined, in textbooks, to…
Musings on the Aquatic Ape Theory
Posted by Greg Laden on August 4, 2009 The Aquatic Ape Theory is being discussed over at Pharyngula. As PZ points out, an excellent resource on this idea is Moore’s site on the topic. Here, I just want to make a few remarks about it.
Math gender gap is not genetic
Posted by Greg Laden on June 2, 2009 Or to put it more accurately, yet another study seems to show that girls learn from their teachers, parents, and peers that they are not supposed to be good at math. Sterotypes can be fulfilled. Pleas stop doing that, everyone. Here is some press on this story. University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers continue to find evidence…
Ultimate Causes, Proximate Mechanisms
Posted by Greg Laden on May 14, 2009 Why does a soldier throw himself on a hand grenade to save the lives of a half-dozen unrelated fellow soldiers? Why does someone run into a burning building they happen to be passing to save a child they don’t know? From a Darwinian perspective these seem to be enigmatic behaviors that would “select against” such…
More emotional intelligence = more orgasms
Posted by Greg Laden on May 12, 2009 According to a study just coming out in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, “variations in emotional intelligence–the ability to identify and manage emotions of one’s self and others–are associated with orgasmic frequency during intercourse and masturbation.”
Burn this book
Posted by Greg Laden on May 3, 2009 … well, not really, you should not burn any book. But don’t just leave this one around for your kids to accidentally read. Source of book. Hat tip
Grasping the function of the human penis
Posted by Greg Laden on April 28, 2009 Gallup has taken on the task of explaining, in ultimate terms, the evolutionarily designed features of the human penis. He works this as an engineering problem from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, which is always a little bit dangerious, but gallup isn’t quite the arm waiver that a lot of other EP’s are, so he…
Finches Determine Sex of Offspring
Posted by Greg Laden on March 25, 2009 As you know if you read my blog, Trivers Willard is an important theoretical construct which has been tested numerous times. TW works in some species, not in others, and overall, that should be predictable (accroding to TW). It turns out that finches control the sex of their offspring, and do so in a way…
The curious case of penile vaginal intercourse and depression in women
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2009 I’m starting to worry that the last few Friday Weird Science write-ups by Scicurious (who seems, these days, to be the primary blogger at Neurotopia) have been of papers that I happen to have read. Just so you know: Thousands of papers are published per week across the diverse sciences, and although Scicurious tends to…
I’m a little worried
Posted by Greg Laden on January 23, 2009 The following is a proof developed by a number of economists at Harvard. It is a proof of the inability of women to understand technologically complex problems, math, engineering, that sort of thing. it is claimed that it almost always works. Now, I’m not saying that Larry Summers was party to this proof, or even…
The natural basis for gender inequality
Posted by Greg Laden on December 31, 2008 Naturalism 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.1 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…
Great Googley Moogley: When Prospective Employers Check You Out on the Internet
Posted by Greg Laden on September 12, 2008 Even if your facebook page is all about home improvement, you could be royally screwed by the intertubes… As part of a recent discussion on what to do about boobs, one commenter (on some site, somewhere) made note of a female scientist who eliminated possible post doc supervisors based on whether or not the prospective…
Precarious Pettiness of Sexual Politics In the Blogosphere: An uppity response to the perspicacious Dr. Isis and an appeal to get serious about sexual aggression and exploitation
Posted by Greg Laden on September 11, 2008 Dr. Isis the Scientist at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, has written an open letter to our sister, Zuska, regarding (in part) the exchanges between my Sbling and myself. Dr. Isis points out that she has had a long term academic interests in breasts, which is primarily political and pragmatic as it turns…
The Male Boob Gaze
Posted by Greg Laden on September 10, 2008 The Sexy Hawt Bodies discussion is back, and Zuska is in full iconic form, hypocrisies included. Well, maybe hypocrisy is too strong a word. Let’s just say bending the truth when not really necessary to make her point, and shutting out allies and reasonable voices by being, well, sexist. Zuska: I puke on your shoes.…
If Marriage is a Sacred Bond between Man and Woman ….
Posted by Greg Laden on June 23, 2008 This finger needs a ring! (soure) … then it’s OK if the ‘woman’ is a guy in drag, right? The couple walked into a Norfolk courthouse on a spring day, exchanged a few words, and within 10 minutes, were seemingly husband and wife. It was an unremarkable ceremony – except that several weeks later, officials…
Female Coders Do It With Consideration
Posted by Greg Laden on June 17, 2008 Check it out: Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty…
The Phalarope: Not just another polyandrous bird…
Posted by Greg Laden on May 17, 2008 MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its “reversed” sex-role mating behavior. For at least some species of Phalarope, females dominate males,…
Geographic Patterns of Genome Admixture in Latin American Mestizos
Posted by Greg Laden on March 24, 2008 Significant cultural and physical differences … the stuff of race and ethnicity … are prominent when people move across continents or between them. Eventually, the ponderous events of history, which involve occasional foldings in the continuum of human variation, causing apparent patchiness, are offset by the frequent events of human activities, resulting in genetic and…
, which is now available for the 
