David Futrelle missed an opportunity! He posted about this awesomely stupid Reddit thread that asserts the biologically inferior nature of women, and then he admits to reading only a few of the comments in the resulting mess.
I do love that statement that They have very little conceptual understandings of mathematics, physics, IT or anything that matters
— so many presumptions packed into one short sentence! — and it’s amusing that this poor boy hasn’t met any intelligent women because he defines “intelligent” as being as intellectually stunted as he is.
But there are so many other comments on that thread that expose the ignorance of the participants! Reading it as a biologist made me want to send these wankers back to Bio 101, except that I realised they probably never attended it in the first place — they were too busy doing things that matter, like getting good at vidya games.
But just look at what they are saying!
Men could be viewed as testing probes, and only the ones that work the best in any given environment get to perpetuate the tribe.
In this specific regard, humans are very much a “tournament’ specie.
Anyone who is taxonomically literate cringes deep down inside when someone uses “specie” as the singular of “species”. The singular of “species” is…“SPECIES”. It’s a dead giveaway that the person babbling has only the most superficial knowledge of biology.
Women stagnate evolutionarily because they have 2x chromosomes, the fact male is xy allows for more genetic variables, which allows for different off spring. Men tend to be smarter than women but also stupider than women because of this genetic trait. By having the variability in the man who must earn their partner it ensures the best traits move forward.
Say what? Males are homozygous for essentially all the genes on the X chromosome; that makes them more likely to express inherited defects of genes on that chromosome. That’s why more men are color blind or hemophiliac than women.
The Y chromosome contains approximately 50 protein-coding genes. The X chromosome contains about 800. Only an MRA would argue that a reduction in genes represents an increase in “genetic variables”.
There’s a reason women are naturally soft and a man is naturally hard. Why men get erections which are hard and stick it inside a pussy which is soft. Society is going against nature and women are only doing themselves more harm than good.
True fact: men turn into women when they don’t have boner.
Pandas are biologically inferior, yet we try to keep them around. evolution makes no mistakes, and eliminates those unfit to thrive.
O Omnipotent Infallible Evolution! Where were you when my appendix nearly killed me when I was 9, and why do I need eyeglasses, and how the hell did biologically inferior pandas survive for millions of years without us to keep them around?
Perhaps the best sign of the power of evolution is that these guys’ attitudes are so repellent to women that they’re less likely to reproduce.
Men and women are very different despite what the media likes to say. A man’s brain is far more complex (16% more neurons and a 50% higher synaptic density). The intelligence distributions are very different, women are much more “average” while there are more men at the extremes (stupid and smart). At near genius levels there are 3x more men and at genius levels there are roughly 5-10x as many.
I read somewhere that 91.3% of all statistics are made up. I’ve never heard that nonsense that men’s brains are “more complex” than women’s before, but the numbers are not true. Men’s brains, on average, are somewhat larger than women’s because men are somewhat larger overall. We also find that large men, on average, have larger brains than small men, and large women have larger brains than small women.
Unfortunately for their thesis, there is no direct correlation between brain size and intelligence (there is an indirect one: poor nutrition correlates with short stature and reduced intellectual capacity).
Do I need to say again that I hate this irrational argument that the greater variance in males necessarily implies that there are more geniuses in addition to more idiots? It’s not true. It’s the Just World fallacy: if nature has encumbered men with a higher frequency of genetic problems, then it’s only fair that nature would compensate men with more superior individuals.
News flash: just as evolution actually does produce mistakes, nature is not fair. Nature does not care.
The reason there are more men in the top ranks of intellectual endeavor is not that they are inherently superior human beings (although they’d love for you to think so) but because they were given opportunities to prosper and grow that most women were not.
I suspect that if all human beings were given equal opportunities to learn, the statistical distribution would slowly shift, and when we looked at the biological properties of both sexes, we’d find that there are two bell curves of roughly similar shape and distribution, but that one is simply shifted to the left relative to the other. On charts of physical strength, for instance, the male curve would be shifted to the right relative to women’s.
Isn’t it odd, though, how no one argues that women’s average strength inferiority implies that because there are many women weaker than many men, that there ought to be more physically superior women in the top ranks? Shouldn’t a just world mean that there ought to be 3x as many ‘athletic geniuses’ who are women than men?
I would not be at all surprised if, in a hypothetical world of equal opportunity, it was discovered that women are, on average, more intelligent than men. This does not imply that every man is inferior to every woman, though, although the men on that Reddit site certainly seem to think the reverse is true.
Is it just me? Or are women biologically inferior to men?
CORRECT! They are nothing more than good for fucking and children.
I just hope that in the coming egalitarian universe we men can be judged by our relevant abilities rather than what package we carry in our crotches. Which is exactly what women would like to have right now, when men judge their abilities.
One last thing that made me cringe every time I saw it: quite a few of the commenters are responding to the claim that women are not funny by citing Christopher Hitchens’ claim that women aren’t funny. That is not evidence. Like his position on the Iraq war, this is a case where Christopher Hitchens proudly displayed his ability to be a fucking idiot, eloquently.
(By the way, I can invent an argument that’s even better than the MRA’s argument for male superiority for why women ought to be more intelligent. Processing speed seems to be an important component of success at IQ tests. Women have smaller, more compact brains than men, again on average, which means path lengths for neuronal circuitry will be shorter, so just as packing more, smaller transistors on a chip produces a faster, more efficient CPU, more compact brains ought to be more efficient.)
(That, also by the way, is a just-so hypothesis off the top of my head. Don’t treat it as evidence — it’s an example of rationalization in opposition to the rationalizations of MRAs.)
A sign of a rather specious claim to knowledge, you mean?
After reading the first sentence of the first comment: what a sad, sad little life this guy has. Probably applicable to most comments on that reddit thread.
“In this specific regard, humans are very much a “tournament’ specie”
No!! NO!! PZ, you miss the point!! He (it is a ‘He’, I take it) thinks that we are a sort of coinage, you know quarters and dimes and the like. Solid metal things that chink in the pocket and weigh a lot but (apart from two quid coins in the UK) don’t amount to much.
Obvious really!
By ‘we are’ I mean ‘he is’
…I think?…
Too bad MRAism isn’t an inherited trait. It would breed out of the species in no time.
Staggering that these guys haven’t yet figured out why no one wants to date them.
Rather than spend time pointing out every fallacy promulgated therein; when asked, [] YES it is just you. maybe in your mind. Maybe you should reconsider.
re X v Y:
gobsmacked that anyone would think that the Y gives more genetic opportunities than a X. Given that the Y is a truncation of the X. Unless one thinks that having two X’s is just redundant, the 2nd just being a backup copy of the other, while having two completely different chromes’ is more possibilities available.
re overall:
it helps when reading his “tweets” if one rewords all his tweets into the “I” phrasing, instead of “you” or “them”. EG . Read it as . IE [IOW] change his “aggressive speak” into “assertive speak”. When I did; then I read that with more sympathy than outright dismissal.
“Is it just me? Or are women biologically inferior to men?
CORRECT! They are nothing more than good for fucking and children.”
Then why do they get so upset that they can’t get women to pay attention to them? With that low an opinion of women, they should be glad that women stay far, far away from them.
I can’t remember what paper or article I read, but it was about the psychology of humor. Basically, it argued that aside from the common factors that make something funny, a lot of humor is based on shared perspective and on respect. For shared perspective, I doubt most men would be able to relate all that well to things that typically happen to women like being expected to have children or a profession that doesn’t match gender roles. For respect, I doubt that the author of that post respects any woman and so it would be difficult for him to find humor in their comedy.
@Silly, quoted MRA
Dunno… maybe because you refuse to engage with them on an intellectual level, and go out of your way to alienate those women who do demonstrate intelligence, humour or a complex inner world in your presence?
Besides, most people have very little conceptual understandings of maths, physics, or Knights Of The Old Republic 2 or Skyrim (I’m legitimately pretty sure that’s everything else that matters… maybe Roundabout, but we’ll see in a couple of months how lasting that is) but so what? I have very little conceptual understanding of biology or psychology, geology, art history or veterinary science. Different people have different interests and focusses, and the failing is entirely yours that you value nothing but a very small subset of all the available things in which to be interested.
You want to know how to meet more women who are funny, interesting, smart and fun to hang out with?
Here’s the secret: Actually pay attention when they’re talking about the things that interest them.
Why do men seem so insipidly terrified of women? Because I just read a bunch of MRA quotes, and I’m conveniently and deliberately ignoring the other men I know in order to make a snide point.
*Throws a rock*
It’s too bad that entitled male whines can’t be somehow used as an energy source.
It reads to me like he thinks that all X chromosomes are identical, so the second one is just redundant.
Can’t blame him, though. It’s hard to read biology textbooks when you’ve got your head so deeply buried in your colon.
Surely if the singular of species wasn’t species it would be specy?
(App ro poe nothing obviously…)
Actually, “specie” is a completely different word, meaning “coins.”
Just my two cents’ worth.
I like how the first commenter blames the shit state of US sex ed on the intelligence of women.
And how that other commenter seems to think men and women evolved independently.
Surely this redditt thread is populated entirely by genii.
carlie,
Agreed. If I had such a low opinion about someone, I would avoid them if at all possible.
Regarding relative brain sizes, there is also this revelation from A Scientist:
And the penguin would be far more interesting than an MRA.
Randomfactor @ 13:
I don’t want to call you a dollard or have you drawn and quartered, but richardelguru @ 3 already minted that observation.
Don’t worry, women. We are in this together with those evolutionary-stagnated, uninteresting, no variability whatsoever because they don’t have to “earn” their partners… the male birds!
@Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened (#14):
They wish…
Hey, does anyone have a working zombie serum yet? And if so, does anyone want to help me steal Grace Hopper’s corpse from Arlington?
Having fairly often been around women who were talking, I’ve learned to translate a man saying “women aren’t funny” as “women told jokes, and I didn’t get them”. Also, I’ve seen that women tend to understand a joke about women made from a man’s point of view (and appreciate it if it’s actually funny) while many men just don’t get the jokes women tell about men, especially when they’re at all arch or subtle.
This is what happens when all your knowledge about women stems from computer games and porn movies!
Thirty seconds with Rhonda Rousey, and we’ll see who’s inferior.
True Fact : This Captain Boner Dude never encountered the Clitoris
More puns, please.
Fair Witness, #23
Oh, they have an answer to that too. She’s “masculine” and not really like a woman is supposed to be (i.e. inferior by definition). It’s a pretty simple game: Just define women to be inferior and then any woman who doesn’t fit that idea must be a No True Woman.
Rousey is the target of some seriously nasty sexist shit from the hardcore MMA fanbase. Has to be up there with what Serena gets.
That thread representing such an overwhelming concentration of masculine stupidity, they handily refute their own claims straight out of the gate. At this juncture, satire is wholly redundant – nothing mocks them more effectively than simply reading their own cloyingly (and unjustifiably) arrogant, Dunning-Kruger-infested blather.
That said, the mockery is still a fun end in itself, so have at it.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Marcus Ranum @ 10;
*A scientists discusses the prevalence of whine-to-energy conversion technology in the early 22nd Century*
Energy crisis? What energy crisis? Oh, you mean the whole thing in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century? Yeah, that’s not an issue any more. After a working group of feminist scientists and engineers created the Whinatron 500 generator in 2053 we had more than enough energy to abandon all forms of fossil fuels and nuclear power sources entirely. It really was the ultimate clean energy revolution. All you need to do is find a concentration of MRAs (Reddit is a particularly rich vein) and then lure them to the generation site with fast food and poorly written misogynist screeds.
Once they are in position, insert the reactant (we have found an internet enabled device linked to feminist websites to be ideal) and the process begins, with a critical concentration of whining usually achieved within minutes, as the MRAs contact other MRAs over the internet and the level of whining exponentially increases. That patented Whinatron process can convert that whining into electrical energy. The process is only three percent efficient, but the sheer quantity of quality whining ensures that a modest generating plant can easily power a whole country on its own, and there are always more angry, entitled arsehats out there should you need more generation capacity. Even better, their obsessive, hateful nature ensures that they are never exhausted; they will continue whining without pause for hours, and after a few hours sleep they will be fully recharged and ready to whine anew.
And the best part – they think they are on the general internet, spouting their hatred to the world at large and cyber stalking innocent women, but actually they are on a closed network that is part of the Whinatron’s mechanism, and all the non-misogynists they think they are mistreating are actually simply chat bots, so there is no pollution.
Even more excitingly, a modified Whinatron generator is planned to be the power source and engine for the first rapid interstellar travel capable space craft, now that it has been discovered that sufficiently concentrated whining can distort spacetime…
When talking about sex chromosomes like this, the sense of scale is so disproportionate. The X chromosome is 155 megabases. The total size of all chromosomes is 3,234 megabases. The X chromosomes are only 4.8% of a woman’s genome in terms of raw nucleotides. The X chromsome has something like 800 genes, which is around 3% of our total genes. And we ALL have at least one copy, so any variations in the X chromosome are shared by entire human population.
The Y chromosome is tiny (59 megabases/1.8%), with very few genes (around 50/.2%.) It’s the chromosome with the LEAST total variations in the genome. There’s just not much going on on the Y chromosome, and I’m not even accounting for the fact that humans have two copies of all of the other chromosomes here.
Pure speculation on my part (just extrapolating from what I know of population genetics) I would guess the overall variability in the X chromosome completely dwarfs the variability present in the Y chromosome. Not only is the X chromosome much larger, there are also more than twice as many of them in the human population. That means that the last common ancestor of any two randomly chosen X chromosomes is MUCH older than the last common ancestor of two randomly chosen Y chromosomes. Any two X chromosomes in the human population are going to be VERY different. Most Y chromosomes, on the other hand, are very similar.
My guess (again, just speculating) is that if you randomly chose a man and a woman and tallied up all of the phenotypic differences between them, more of them would be the result of differences in their X chromosomes than the man’s having a Y chromosome instead of another X chromosome.
If anyone knows of any research about this kind of thing, I’d be fascinated if you care to share.
Blergh, get your stinking paws off my precious biology!!
It’s such a pet peeve of mine when ignorant morons who don’t understand even basic concepts in biology, besmirch the science in an attempt to clumsily justify their ridiculous, made-up, emotionally driven horseshit.
Although i have to admit, it’s pretty funny to see them talking about this nonsensical, factually incorrect fiction, thinking that pretending that “men” are better at something, means they are better by association. Nope….even if it were true and men were statistically better at all the shite they mentioned, pathetic little turds like them would still be pathetic little turds…you don’t get to claim superiority for yourself. But i suposse if your greatest achievement consist on obtaining actual Steam achievements, you need to lie to yourself about how great you are because of how great you imagine people with dicks to be…
These people should be sentenced to public slaping at the hands of biologists. Not really, but it’s fun to imagine…
@ Frog #5
If they were capable of that level of self-reflection, they wouldn’t be MRAs.
@Saad #26
I agree, it seems like some people apply a simple pattern match to decide what is acceptable to them. I think a person has to have rich exposure to all the variability in the world to appreciate humanity as a spectrum instead of a dichotomy. This is an education that you won’t get while playing computer games in your basement.
It’s ironic and childish that when women try to compete in a “man’s world” they get criticized for being too “manly”.
More tidbits of idiocy:
I like the last one. Yeah, someone didn’t pass a biology course here…
Correct me if I am wrong PZ, but don’t you mean ‘hemizygous’ here? Or perhaps there is some subtle detail that I am missing?
Women are biologically inferior to men, hat’S why we tend to outlive them for some.
I’m not sure what it means to “stagnate evolutionarily,” but I want to meet this population of men that can apparently reproduce without women and thus form a lineage that diverges from women.
It’s not impossible— I recall PZ once posted about a species of invertebrate where the two genders effectively split into separate species, and as a well-off white Western college-educated man, I know that I am the default standard on which literally all life is based so if something on the planet can do it then obviously I can.
microraptor@29:
But they’re so intelligent with their big man-brains! You would think they could figure out some way to get women to like them!
They human ability to self-delude is staggering.
So far I’ve only met 1 girl who is funny, smart, interesting and fun to hang with
Now, this might be me reading into this: perhaps Redditor is so sure other women aren’t funny because he’s got a crush on unnamed object and has put her on a pedestal. So of course all other women do not compare, so they are unfunny, because his crush has to be exceptional.
How tragic for him that she put him in the Friend Zone, all because he never actually made his romantic interest clear and instead just sort of idly hung around. She should have been psychic in addition to a somewhat interesting person. THEN he wouldn’t objectify her into this thing that has his attention, but treat her like a real person.
I just want to know how these wimmenz “deduct information” at all, even if it’s (borderline) slowly. Like, on their taxes or something? Is there an information credit I’m missing?
Also, that bit before the comma is an orphaned fragment; was that intended as a command to halve the things they say, as in to cut them in half somehow?
(Someone’s gods, there’s so much stupid here it would take hours to fisk it all.)
Oh my god. So much fail. At some point, SIWOTI syndrome is impossible: you see so much fucking wrong that your brain just overloads, you just throw up your hands and say “fuck it” and go on with your day, because even the strongest urge to argue against bullshit can’t overcome the sheer mind-fucking mountain of idiocy before you.
All I can muster is that the first quote is a tremendous own goal: it illustrates quite clearly the kind of humorless, idiotic, shallow, uninteresting, and unpleasant men that exist out there. He makes this clear about himself, and reminds us of all of those qualities in many other men we have had the displeasure of meeting, while appealing to stereotypes to Prove that All Women have those qualities. Fucking horrible, stupid human beings.
Yeah, women outlive men. And I remember reading somewhere–have no statistics and my information could be wrong, correction appreciated–that they tend to endure extreme physical and emotional stress better than men do. Hypothermia. Concentration camps. Prison.
And then there’s the little matter of childbirth, which these sooper jeenyuses briefly acknowledge and dismiss. Gestation, childbirth, lactation.
But men do tend to have greater muscle strength. Men are usually a lot better at furniture moving. And sportsball. And war. You know. The important stuff.
Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
I remember in the ’60’s reading a short book, written by a man, in which he described the many, many ways in which women were SUPERIOR to men: better immune systems, more tolerance for temperature extremes, greater pain resistance, lower incidence of heart attacks, fewer cancers, less mental illness, less drug addiction . . . .
And then in late ’80’s after nearly thirty years of Women’s Liberation: women were having stress-induced heart attacks as much as men, incidence of mental illness increased as more women entered f/t work . . .. etc. etc.
In other words, when women and men were put under same environmental/societal pressures, their illnesses and mortality rated converged!
Why, why, (sputter) it’s almost as though women were completely . . . human!
Clearly the intelligent women have got together and put all these idiots on their “do not approach under any circumstances” list.
@ Donnie #24
“True fact: This Captain Boner dude never encountered the clitoris.”
True fact: he never encountered a vagina during orgasm either, since he’s convinced that “pussy is soft”, and hasn’t realised how much strength is hidden inside.
anthrosci@21:
I think you’re being too generous. I remember when Christopher Hitchens was doing his “women aren’t funny” schtick and someone asked him “well, what about Dorothy Parker?” and he replied that she wasn’t funny at all. Now, I happen to find Dorothy Parker incredibly funny — and even more tellingly, I find her sense of humour to run extremely close to Hitchens’: that is, dark, sardonic, full of wordplay and uncompromising (sometimes even vicious) moral appraisal. It wasn’t that Hitchens didn’t get her humour, it was that he refused to find her funny because she was female.
Well, he’s right that evolution doesn’t make mistakes…but that’s because evolution is a mindless, purposeless process in which random events play a huge part, thus rendering “making mistakes” a completely meaningless attribute.
I have known funny women throughout my life, but, in the past 3 years, I have been learning improv (at the Westside Comedy Theater in Santa Monica), and there I have encountered a high concentration of extremely funny women. Improv, of course, naturally attracts funny people, which is one of the reasons it attracts me. Another reason is that it gives me strong opportunities to work on some of my personal weaknesses. But that is for another blog.
Anyone who says women are not funny either are looking in the wrong places or are the type of person who repels funny women. Probably both.
@ ryancunningham #28
3x more, surely?
@ Hairhead #42
Fuck me, it’s almost like gender essentialism is bullshit.
I was about to beg you to go and present this research over at the redditt thread in question (if you could stomach entering that den of iniquity), but they’d probably just use it as a reason to put women back on a pedestal. “It’s good for them! They have less health problems!”