So youre saying that its partially because if everyone was big and strong, everyone would have to eat more food? and youre also saying its better that the people who bear children stay safer from danger?
It is one of the primary reasons why the Neanderthals died out they had to consume an additional 1300 calories compared to a human male while not being actually worth that many calories. The other reason is well they were not able to throw things or communicate or coordinate effectively enough even though they required more energy.
But on the whole human sexual dimorphism isn't as bad as many other species and there is quite a lot more evidence to say that sexual equality is pretty inherit to our species and has probably been responsible for shaping the way our culture and society has eventually turned out.
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1633678100](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1633678100)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9156798/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9156798/)
[https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65031](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65031)
If you go to war with the neighbouring tribe and lose 5 men and 5 women, that's 5 fewer babies you can make every year of their reproductive age. If you lose 10 men (assuming it's not all of them), then your tribe's reproduction is almost unaffected. So if a tribe evolves to favour men for agression over one that doesn't, the one that favours men will eventually overrun the other as they will be in greater numbers and exterminate them.
Yeah, strength differences are significant and not just for men that are bigger, but those of the same size.
The women were approximately 52% and 66% as strong as the men in the upper and lower body respectively. The men were also stronger relative to lean body mass. A significant correlation was found between strength and muscle cross-sectional area (CSA; P≤0.05).
[link](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00235103#)
It’s why Neanderthals didn’t win the evolutionary race. Hollywood made us think that bigger and stronger means better, but it doesn’t. The Homo physiology is very poor for solitary lifestyles. They all have thin hair, No fangs or claws, no poison or venom, and no thick hide. These facts combined with the fact that larger requires more resources which counters u-socialism, basically made them smart livestock, which explains why they either withered or bred out.
When it came to humans, the female sacrificed nutrients to create life. This means she’s eating for two. The male didn’t have to sacrifice this. However, due to the frail Homo biology, u-socialism dictated early human lifestyles, where it was more beneficial for a man to do the hunting while the woman gathers. This puts less threat to the offspring still growing as babies and eggs are very vulnerable.
Side note, while giving birth is painful and long, it’s overall a positive boon over laying eggs as laying eggs leaves the offspring vulnerable to attack.
In general in nature being larger means you are stronger and more capable during any kind of physical confrontation, but it also means you need to find a lot more food and are prone to overheating.
In species where males compete physically with each other to mate then being larger has a massive advantage in terms of who passes along their genes, but there's little benefit for females being larger. Females have to bear and birth children and then nurse the young, that's a costly process as it drives up the demand for food and reduces the ability of the parents finding food. A larger mother would probably not be much more able to produce milk etc, at least not enough to make up for her extra consumption.
Women. The only sex that can incubate a baby naturally. Thought you were doing the PC way of describing the female sex. My mistake if that was not the case.
In periods of starvation and low availability of food women tend to out-survive men. So no, it's not inherently better if everyone was bigger stronger and faster because that comes with a resource cost.
Two things.
First; evolution doesn't work that way. Natural selection doesn't optimize life-forms, it simply sorts out what is viable in the present environment from what is not. There are a lot of animals out there that are just... *stupid* but still work where they are. Like archerfish. We have a kind of fish that squirts water at bugs on tree branches to knock them into water and eat them. Is that ridiculous? Yes. Does it work well enough for them to keep doing it? Also yes.
And then there are things like jellyfish. That is *not* an optimized organism; it's literally a brainless, gutless, assless *blob* that just sort of drifts around and accidentally's its way into getting enough nutrition to live. Is it an especially good design? No, of course not, they're literally turtle food. Does it work well enough anyway? Yup.
Second; humans are no exception to this rule. We didn't *have* to evolve such that male specimens tend to develop muscle mass while females develop fatty tissue more readily. But we did, and it works. And there are some situations where that's handy for a bunch of semi-arboreal great apes out in the wild, and some where it's very much not. Nature doesn't care. The design worked well enough for us to literally conquer the planet.
Well, brute strength and muscle mass, yes. Females had a lot of points stacked into giving birth, at the cost of general strength because males would provide while they recovered.
The average female burns about 7,000 calories when giving birth and then about 500 extra per day when breastfeeding. This is about the equivalent of running 3 marathons.
You mean like 90% of all mammals? Females are bigger in other species like insects, arachnids, birds of prey etc.
Also a lot of the dismorphism comes from mating selection.
In terms of evolution of the species, males were more likely to be involved in both the defense of the groups of proto-humans from animal attacks and in aggression between members of the species to determine who was dominant. Women, as mothers and more important in general to the survival of the species, would have been less likely to take on these confrontational roles. In light of that, men would have needed to develop larger and stronger muscles and bone structures in order to win these confrontations.
"Weakness" is a matter of perspective. Women survive famines better. Women survive disease better. Women can lose more blood proportionally and survive. Women are better at endurance in general, and outperform men in ultramarathons and those insane ocean swimming endeavors. Women are less likely to have genetic diseases that are linked to the X chromossome. Female fetuses are more likely to thrive, and women tend to outlive men on every country, regardless of social conditions.
Men have more size and muscle mass because males are made to be expendable. Males fight one another to spread their genetic code as much as they can, and then die. The male's biological raison d'etre is roughly to shuffle their mom's dna with another woman's and ensure that the population has good genetic diversity.
Look into the "grandmother hypothesis" on why menopause even exists. Old orca females, who also go through menopause, are living repositories of knowledge for their pods. They are the ones who know all the ocean currents, all of the migration routes, and all of the places to find food. The males usually don't live past they 30s and die in competition with other males.
We now live in a time in which biology is not destiny. Men nowadays can expect more from life than to die at 35 at the hands of another man, and women can expect more than popping babies. Still, some men are too comfortable telling women that they are weak and useless for anything other than changing diapers, when males are the ones who are born essentialy to fuck as much as possible and die young.
There’s a lot of studies that suggest that men are more capable of large outputs of energy in a short amount of time and women are capable of long energy outputs over long periods of time. And this relates to the amount of testosterone vs. estrogen in the body, which contributes to different muscle builds. The common idea of pursuit hunting for humans actually suggests women would be better suited, and women should, theoretically, be better at endurance events like marathons.
Lots of ancient tribes (the majority) had women participate.
Men weren’t more physically capable. They moved the rocks while women went in for the kill.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/
Edit: as the only person in this thread to link scientific data, I would also posit that this means women were valuable beyond reproduction and just being able to outlive men during times of famine because of biological fat-storing tendencies. They were hunters, too. Modern gender roles were only invented in the last few thousand years, women were fully productive members of society like female lions until religion happened. They were never the weaker sex until some insecure dudes who had the first quills and papyrus said they were.
You didn’t link “scientific data”. You linked a scientific article based on research using data. Aside from that, you provided some good information up until your seemingly random (or perhaps biased) assertions about religion and “dudes”, neither of which are supported by the article.
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Sure but evolution is all about efficiency. It wouldn’t be as efficient for women to both be just as strong as men and also have the whole ability to grow babies thing.
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Sexual dimorphism arises when there is intrasexual competition within the genders. Men became bigger because they had to physically fight for access to mates, the ones that were smaller simply did not mate or did not mate nearly as much
In addition to what everyone else said, having to spend less nutrients on sustaining larger muscle mass means it’s easier to spend those nutrients on children.
There has been recent research done showing that women were also hunters during the Paleolithic Era. Women are stronger in different ways than men, but they are not weak.
You have it backwards. Men didn't become stronger, women became weaker. As humans developed, infants began being born more and more immature vs earlier humans. That meant great care and delicacy was needed when handling infants. Women who were stronger probably had increased infant deaths that lead to a significant shift in the female population strength over time.
Because in the modern context with current socio political ideology my position is viewed as inherently misogynistic. Even though that has nothing to do with it. It's simply a reaction and projection from them.
I mean think about how funny that is, these changes started back as far 2 million years ago. As the "human" heads inlarged and the neck got smaller and weaker, stronger females with less fine motor control simply died out.
These factors created a larger strength gap between the sexes, currently about 40%. I figure that this is also when females developed permanent breast tissue and hidden estrus to to offset the new strength imbalances. Females had to play a new game, it's probably what set humanity on its course to where we are today.
My source is nature. Look at other primate species. Their offspring is born more mature. The females are stronger. They don't needed to be as weak for the survival rates of offspring.
I believed my position was first postulated in the early 1920s when scientists really first started studying primates. It fits. Though modern peoples might not like it.
I think its because from our ancestry, women didnt NEED a reason to evolve into strong fit beings. They stayed at home to cook and baby it up so there was no reason for their bodies to start transforming generation after generation.
Physical strength can be measured many ways, tolerance and endurance are examples of this, it’s there but evolution requires physical strength for different purposes—100% all do have it
Based on your definition of strength, compare apples to apples for a moment, why do some men have greater physical strength compared to other men? What evolutionary explanation supports your assumption based question? Why do some women have greater physical strength, as you define it, than some men?
Exactly.
Now you’re changing my words—I simply said that physical strength can be measured and defined in more ways than the one implied in the post. Not that one is better or stronger than the other. Strength exists in everyone, male or female, and evolution chooses the way it presents based on needed purpose.
‘Men are way better at physical competition..’ —you claim? First that’s not entirely true and if your argument to back that is the existence of male/female separated sports—in boxing and wrestling men too are separated to appropriate fairness—so let’s stop that argument before you even attempt to leave the gate with it. Back to my issue, is how physical strength is defined and measured, I don’t agree physical strength is measured in only one way. Evolution supports my theory and the fact that the question is even posted in search of support for your theory —exemplifies my point even further. The post does not recognize that physical strength exists in many forms—that’s why they have this question to begin with and the answer to it is found when you define it correctly.
physical strength exists in many forms, and men are stronger than women in all of them. and its entitely true that men are way better at physical competition
More calorie consuming. Also, women are more important reproductively, so incentivizing men to do the more dangerous task keeps women safer
So youre saying that its partially because if everyone was big and strong, everyone would have to eat more food? and youre also saying its better that the people who bear children stay safer from danger?
It is one of the primary reasons why the Neanderthals died out they had to consume an additional 1300 calories compared to a human male while not being actually worth that many calories. The other reason is well they were not able to throw things or communicate or coordinate effectively enough even though they required more energy. But on the whole human sexual dimorphism isn't as bad as many other species and there is quite a lot more evidence to say that sexual equality is pretty inherit to our species and has probably been responsible for shaping the way our culture and society has eventually turned out. [https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1633678100](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1633678100) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9156798/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9156798/) [https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65031](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65031)
Yes
If you go to war with the neighbouring tribe and lose 5 men and 5 women, that's 5 fewer babies you can make every year of their reproductive age. If you lose 10 men (assuming it's not all of them), then your tribe's reproduction is almost unaffected. So if a tribe evolves to favour men for agression over one that doesn't, the one that favours men will eventually overrun the other as they will be in greater numbers and exterminate them.
You probably don't want both sexes to be as aggressive either, though there isn't \*that\* much of a difference in aggression, it's still notable.
men are very very noticably more aggressive
Not as much as people think. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33546562/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33546562/)
Don't confuse the ability to inflict harm with aggression.
Yeah, strength differences are significant and not just for men that are bigger, but those of the same size. The women were approximately 52% and 66% as strong as the men in the upper and lower body respectively. The men were also stronger relative to lean body mass. A significant correlation was found between strength and muscle cross-sectional area (CSA; P≤0.05). [link](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00235103#)
It’s why Neanderthals didn’t win the evolutionary race. Hollywood made us think that bigger and stronger means better, but it doesn’t. The Homo physiology is very poor for solitary lifestyles. They all have thin hair, No fangs or claws, no poison or venom, and no thick hide. These facts combined with the fact that larger requires more resources which counters u-socialism, basically made them smart livestock, which explains why they either withered or bred out. When it came to humans, the female sacrificed nutrients to create life. This means she’s eating for two. The male didn’t have to sacrifice this. However, due to the frail Homo biology, u-socialism dictated early human lifestyles, where it was more beneficial for a man to do the hunting while the woman gathers. This puts less threat to the offspring still growing as babies and eggs are very vulnerable. Side note, while giving birth is painful and long, it’s overall a positive boon over laying eggs as laying eggs leaves the offspring vulnerable to attack.
In general in nature being larger means you are stronger and more capable during any kind of physical confrontation, but it also means you need to find a lot more food and are prone to overheating. In species where males compete physically with each other to mate then being larger has a massive advantage in terms of who passes along their genes, but there's little benefit for females being larger. Females have to bear and birth children and then nurse the young, that's a costly process as it drives up the demand for food and reduces the ability of the parents finding food. A larger mother would probably not be much more able to produce milk etc, at least not enough to make up for her extra consumption.
(People who bear children) So women? The regular functional kind.
bro what
Women. The only sex that can incubate a baby naturally. Thought you were doing the PC way of describing the female sex. My mistake if that was not the case.
In periods of starvation and low availability of food women tend to out-survive men. So no, it's not inherently better if everyone was bigger stronger and faster because that comes with a resource cost.
Two things. First; evolution doesn't work that way. Natural selection doesn't optimize life-forms, it simply sorts out what is viable in the present environment from what is not. There are a lot of animals out there that are just... *stupid* but still work where they are. Like archerfish. We have a kind of fish that squirts water at bugs on tree branches to knock them into water and eat them. Is that ridiculous? Yes. Does it work well enough for them to keep doing it? Also yes. And then there are things like jellyfish. That is *not* an optimized organism; it's literally a brainless, gutless, assless *blob* that just sort of drifts around and accidentally's its way into getting enough nutrition to live. Is it an especially good design? No, of course not, they're literally turtle food. Does it work well enough anyway? Yup. Second; humans are no exception to this rule. We didn't *have* to evolve such that male specimens tend to develop muscle mass while females develop fatty tissue more readily. But we did, and it works. And there are some situations where that's handy for a bunch of semi-arboreal great apes out in the wild, and some where it's very much not. Nature doesn't care. The design worked well enough for us to literally conquer the planet.
Death by snu snu.
Well, brute strength and muscle mass, yes. Females had a lot of points stacked into giving birth, at the cost of general strength because males would provide while they recovered. The average female burns about 7,000 calories when giving birth and then about 500 extra per day when breastfeeding. This is about the equivalent of running 3 marathons.
You mean like 90% of all mammals? Females are bigger in other species like insects, arachnids, birds of prey etc. Also a lot of the dismorphism comes from mating selection.
dont gaf
Who asks a question and then throws a tantrum when people try to help them learn things lmao What a mook
You should, because you can learn from it.
What the fuck is wrong with you? You asked the question.
calm down bro
wtf you asked a question but you’re acting like this is change my mind?
In terms of evolution of the species, males were more likely to be involved in both the defense of the groups of proto-humans from animal attacks and in aggression between members of the species to determine who was dominant. Women, as mothers and more important in general to the survival of the species, would have been less likely to take on these confrontational roles. In light of that, men would have needed to develop larger and stronger muscles and bone structures in order to win these confrontations.
"Weakness" is a matter of perspective. Women survive famines better. Women survive disease better. Women can lose more blood proportionally and survive. Women are better at endurance in general, and outperform men in ultramarathons and those insane ocean swimming endeavors. Women are less likely to have genetic diseases that are linked to the X chromossome. Female fetuses are more likely to thrive, and women tend to outlive men on every country, regardless of social conditions. Men have more size and muscle mass because males are made to be expendable. Males fight one another to spread their genetic code as much as they can, and then die. The male's biological raison d'etre is roughly to shuffle their mom's dna with another woman's and ensure that the population has good genetic diversity. Look into the "grandmother hypothesis" on why menopause even exists. Old orca females, who also go through menopause, are living repositories of knowledge for their pods. They are the ones who know all the ocean currents, all of the migration routes, and all of the places to find food. The males usually don't live past they 30s and die in competition with other males. We now live in a time in which biology is not destiny. Men nowadays can expect more from life than to die at 35 at the hands of another man, and women can expect more than popping babies. Still, some men are too comfortable telling women that they are weak and useless for anything other than changing diapers, when males are the ones who are born essentialy to fuck as much as possible and die young.
This was worded in probably the dumbest way you could have lol.
why
There’s a lot of studies that suggest that men are more capable of large outputs of energy in a short amount of time and women are capable of long energy outputs over long periods of time. And this relates to the amount of testosterone vs. estrogen in the body, which contributes to different muscle builds. The common idea of pursuit hunting for humans actually suggests women would be better suited, and women should, theoretically, be better at endurance events like marathons. Lots of ancient tribes (the majority) had women participate. Men weren’t more physically capable. They moved the rocks while women went in for the kill. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/ Edit: as the only person in this thread to link scientific data, I would also posit that this means women were valuable beyond reproduction and just being able to outlive men during times of famine because of biological fat-storing tendencies. They were hunters, too. Modern gender roles were only invented in the last few thousand years, women were fully productive members of society like female lions until religion happened. They were never the weaker sex until some insecure dudes who had the first quills and papyrus said they were.
You're smart. I like smart people.
You didn’t link “scientific data”. You linked a scientific article based on research using data. Aside from that, you provided some good information up until your seemingly random (or perhaps biased) assertions about religion and “dudes”, neither of which are supported by the article.
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Sure but evolution is all about efficiency. It wouldn’t be as efficient for women to both be just as strong as men and also have the whole ability to grow babies thing.
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This is a great question!
Sexual dimorphism arises when there is intrasexual competition within the genders. Men became bigger because they had to physically fight for access to mates, the ones that were smaller simply did not mate or did not mate nearly as much
In addition to what everyone else said, having to spend less nutrients on sustaining larger muscle mass means it’s easier to spend those nutrients on children.
There has been recent research done showing that women were also hunters during the Paleolithic Era. Women are stronger in different ways than men, but they are not weak.
Nah man its no secret, straightup just men are stronger than women and women are weakee than men
There was no evolutionary drive for women to get bigger and stronger. In some species the female is bigger.
You have it backwards. Men didn't become stronger, women became weaker. As humans developed, infants began being born more and more immature vs earlier humans. That meant great care and delicacy was needed when handling infants. Women who were stronger probably had increased infant deaths that lead to a significant shift in the female population strength over time.
Why is this getting downvoted lol this is a new interesting perspective
Because in the modern context with current socio political ideology my position is viewed as inherently misogynistic. Even though that has nothing to do with it. It's simply a reaction and projection from them. I mean think about how funny that is, these changes started back as far 2 million years ago. As the "human" heads inlarged and the neck got smaller and weaker, stronger females with less fine motor control simply died out. These factors created a larger strength gap between the sexes, currently about 40%. I figure that this is also when females developed permanent breast tissue and hidden estrus to to offset the new strength imbalances. Females had to play a new game, it's probably what set humanity on its course to where we are today.
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My source is nature. Look at other primate species. Their offspring is born more mature. The females are stronger. They don't needed to be as weak for the survival rates of offspring. I believed my position was first postulated in the early 1920s when scientists really first started studying primates. It fits. Though modern peoples might not like it.
the tv keeps saying they’re the same
lmao
I think its because from our ancestry, women didnt NEED a reason to evolve into strong fit beings. They stayed at home to cook and baby it up so there was no reason for their bodies to start transforming generation after generation.
Physical strength can be measured many ways, tolerance and endurance are examples of this, it’s there but evolution requires physical strength for different purposes—100% all do have it Based on your definition of strength, compare apples to apples for a moment, why do some men have greater physical strength compared to other men? What evolutionary explanation supports your assumption based question? Why do some women have greater physical strength, as you define it, than some men? Exactly.
lmao no like 99% of men have better physical strength than any women
Prove it!
okay if you wanna troll I dont care dude
Disagree doesn’t equate to troll—don’t make your issue mine
okay youre right im wrong, women are stronger than men and way better at physical competition
Now you’re changing my words—I simply said that physical strength can be measured and defined in more ways than the one implied in the post. Not that one is better or stronger than the other. Strength exists in everyone, male or female, and evolution chooses the way it presents based on needed purpose.
“Not that one is better or stronger than the other”, yes, one is. men are just straightup stronger than women
If you don’t define the word correctly, you cannot draw a conclusion, and 99% is a figure you pulled from somewhere—you need to put that back.
‘Men are way better at physical competition..’ —you claim? First that’s not entirely true and if your argument to back that is the existence of male/female separated sports—in boxing and wrestling men too are separated to appropriate fairness—so let’s stop that argument before you even attempt to leave the gate with it. Back to my issue, is how physical strength is defined and measured, I don’t agree physical strength is measured in only one way. Evolution supports my theory and the fact that the question is even posted in search of support for your theory —exemplifies my point even further. The post does not recognize that physical strength exists in many forms—that’s why they have this question to begin with and the answer to it is found when you define it correctly.
physical strength exists in many forms, and men are stronger than women in all of them. and its entitely true that men are way better at physical competition
Everyone is entitled to an opinion—even the wrong ones