maybe we should pull from brown's list?

condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler...nivers.htm

I think maybe we should use aggressiveness. Men being more aggressive and competitive. There is a lot of variation (women who are aggressive, men who are passive), it seems likely to have biological (less flexible) and cultural (more flexible) components but on the average men do seem to be more aggressive than women. Could we agree on that ?

Please don't misunderstand me, I am NOT saying that women are not aggressive or competitive, just that on average men are more so.

"See, i don't think the fear is sayign that our brains are different, but saying it based on current cultural norms, and not on (as stated, un proveable) facts. When we say "women's brains are more developed in teh left hemisphere (is that the artistic/communication one), then we are actually begging the question that the brain came that way, and didn't "develop" that way. It could just as easily be that when you encourage your girls to talk, and your boys to think - it stimulates different parts of teh brain, and developes teh brain from there on out - differently.

As for selection, i'm always dubious of this only because my limited understanding is that it takes thouands upon thosands of generations (not 100's) to code changes into the animal in question. Human Society as we know it, has been around 6000 years, human "culture" another 20-70,000 depending on how you define it. is that enough time to truyl change our biology? I really don't know, cause i don't knwo the science."

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I think the problem is if we say the difference is biological, then where is the impetus to work towards equality or equal opportunity? And will women (or men) who are different from the norm for their gender be lumped with everyone else and never really be allowed to develop fully? And you're absolutely right, the fact that an adult brain show more development in one hemisphere than another could be environmental, in the same way that being muscular could be environmental.

Strong selection on a trait could be much more rapid. I've done simulations that show a trait becoming fixed in a population in less than 100 generations but that was a very simple trait determined by one gene. The types of traits we're talking about are more likely to be quantitative traits that are determined by numerous genes, in those cases selection could take a very long time but some of these traits could have been under selection for as long as 100,000 years.

"See, i don't think the fear is sayign that our brains are different, but saying it based on current cultural norms, and not on (as stated, un proveable) facts. When we say "women's brains are more developed in teh left hemisphere (is that the artistic/communication one), then we are actually begging the question that the brain came that way, and didn't "develop" that way. It could just as easily be that when you encourage your girls to talk, and your boys to think - it stimulates different parts of teh brain, and developes teh brain from there on out - differently. "

yes, and the genetic architecture is actually more environmentally sensitive than some people now -- epigenetics, namely. it's not lamarckian, but it is a burgeoning field that's quite interesting.

you point out the issue quite well here, but there are limits to development as well. for example, you're not going to evolve a mouth on the back of your neck most likely. neurological development does occur within constraints, but neuroplasticity has been proven more in recent years to be amazingly wide, and we even make new neurons in our lifetime -- something we didn't believe occurred just a decade or so ago.

an example might be sexual orientation -- could everyone be queer if they were in a queer-positive environment? could everyone be straight? it doesn't look like that right now.

so the question again really is, what kind of constraints are there or statistical trends in brain development connected to sex?

80 pages on one word? I think I would lose my mind. I definitely love being on the science end of things. Obviously, the world is very complex and certainly what we are looking at is complex but I think it is helpful to reduce things to bare bones for the purpose of clarity.

Why don't we parse it down to initiating sex, and use the definition of initiation to determine whether a behavior qualifies, or not? An individual may initiate sex in a more subtle manner (playing with hair, etc.) but we can still consider it initiation. We're not going to actually measure the behavior so I don't think we necessarily have to hammer out all the details, but initiating sex (or attempting to) is certainly something that *could* be measured. Initiation simply being "to begin, set going, or originate".