NReed

I had a bit about how it was possible that some animals had gender but decided that was probably nitpicky detail that overcomplicated the issue, which was that the original response to me was confusing sex and gender. Though it's also possible that some of the animals that you're discussing actually are just intersex, or that the entire issue is just us anthromorphizing animals, attributing personality traits to be gendered at all because we're so entrenched in biological determinism that we're willing to spew that social baggage on everything we touch.

Hmm. I'm getting a bit of what you're getting at with biology, and you might be right. But sociology doesn't become less true when it's harder to study it, and I'm throwing in my chips with the side that is guessing that most of the time genetics matter less than most people think on issues that can also be effected by societal conditioning.

The sex/gender thing was a correction, you were talking about gendered animals, and animals don't have genders, they just have sexes. Gender is the societal construction, sex is biological. It's just a definition/clarity issue-- sorry to sidetrack with it!

I wasn't saying I was basing my opinions based on that, but that the context that people are coming from-- being treated like shit by people on the internet who profess to be using evolutionary psychology but are really using pseudoscientific bullshit to defend the fact that they are misogynist and/or racist asswagons-- often is why people have such an emotional reaction to evolutionary psychology when brought up, particularly when it's brought up in discussions of sex, gender, race, and sexuality. It's not something against evolutionary psychology as a whole-- these people aren't really even using good science of any kind-- but a warning that using the term evolutionary psychology tends to get hackles up. I meant it as a sideline so people getting into discussions of evopsych with feminists know the connotations that evopsych and biological determinism have with a lot of people.

I could see that being the case, yeah.

I assume that those differences are slighter than one would assume, that society may necessarily point us in directions in which the evolutionary "purpose" of our traits are harmful (and so we should not privilege those evolutionary traits as inherently good or excuses for behavior which is societally harmful). I know that working from the viewpoint in which all of gendered behavior is culturally constructed will have me wrong sometimes, but the trend of history makes me think I'll be less wrong by keeping that viewpoint as opposed to the contrary one.

Also, you probably mean sex, not gender-- gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs. (It's more complicated than that, obviously, but that's the pneumonic that's been useful for me.)

In that case, feel free to substitute any issue in which there is a technical definition for a word that varies distinctly from culture to culture, can change dramatically over time, and discusses issues of subjectivity as applied to rationalist koans.

If that's the case, then they should be the approximately 450-495s and the approximately 520-570s, but there are lots of languages where green and blue are one color. See also history of blue; for anecdata see the link I posted in my original post in which the child who wasn't taught the sky is blue regularly calls it colorless or white.