Sex Differences
Category archives for Sex Differences
Bernie Sanders’ Essay
Posted by Greg Laden on June 1, 2015 
Bernie Sanders’ famous essay is below. I will reserve comment but I’d like your opinion on it. I will say that the press is handling this rather badly, at least at present, taking quotes with zero context, not addressing the meaning of the essay as a whole. Sanders says it was poorly written. Is it?…
Is my penis too small, too big, or just right?
Posted by Greg Laden on March 5, 2015 
And by “my” penis I mean “your” penis, of course. This is a perennial question. For some reason, which I do not understand, the feminist perspective (note: I’m a feminist) is often to belittle the question, but really, that isn’t fair. It is not that difficult to imagine how anyone would come to a question…
Do genes make you gay?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 18, 2014 
Of course they do. To the extent that genes make you anything in particular, though the role of genetics in human behavior is pretty limited. You’ve probably heard about the newly reported research in which a genetic link was found to homosexuality in a study of gay brothers. Kelly Servick has a good writeup on…
The Fall Olympics #Sochi2014
Posted by Greg Laden on February 19, 2014 
Remember the Fall Olympics in Vancouver? That was the year that skaters … not the racing ones but the dancing ones … were falling all the time as if they had some kind of special extra slippery ice on the skating rink. Well, this year, at Sochi II, we are witnessing the Fall Olympics mainly…
Whitey Bulger Convicted, and the Trivers Willard Hypothesis
Posted by Greg Laden on August 12, 2013 
Whitey Bulger has finally been convicted of a small percentage of all the bad things he is said to have done. The Boston Globe has the details. James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who rampaged through the city’s underworld for decades before slipping away from authorities and eluding a worldwide manhunt for more…
How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 27, 2013 Humans appear to have a great deal of variation in sexual orientation, 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 this diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to “culture” as the…
Manspace
Posted by Greg Laden on November 28, 2012 In an old colonial-looking restaurant that served ten kinds of steaks, I met up with an experienced explorer and a local farmer, to have dinner and discuss plans for an upcoming research project that would be managed by The Explorer and that would partly be on The Farmer’s land, which adjoined a rather extensive and…
Why Do Men Hunt and Women Shop?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 27, 2012 The title of this post 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 Pleistocene with today’s behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by “sound”…
Sex and Gender in An Odd Primate
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2012 The Gender vs. Sex question…referring to the meaning of those two terms in relation to each other…is standard material for discussion in Anthropology and related fields, but is often left unattended to in day to day discourse. Both terms have internal complexity, with Gender meaning something about people’s identity as well as being a linguistic…
Men = Testosterone Damaged Women!
Posted by Greg Laden on August 2, 2012 One in three or four women in the United States will have been raped or seriously assaulted sexually by the time they reach a few decades in age. That will have been done by one or more men. Most people who are killed by another person are killed by a man. This is true whether…