That just makes your position even more asinine, even though you don’t think aggression threatens humanities suvival, you’ll happily risk humanity’s survival to remove it.
Now, would you kindly suggest any other modifications you think have merit。
Why do you think this?
Assuming a slug-like method of reproduction, I would expect all humans to be as fussy about sexual partners as women currently are, since every coupling potentially would involve getting pregnant for both parties.
And in this scenario, since everyone is fussy, most would not be able to simply wait for suitors; we would have to compete and impress other individuals.
I promise I’m not trying to cut off your wee-wee, so climb down off the sofa. I’m just suggesting that society might be better off if men could get pregnant. I promise that pregnancy is NOT the same as being exterminated.
Jesus. Hysterical much lately?
I would eliminate psychopathy - or rather, I would make the lack of empathy an early-terminal condition. I think this would accomplish much of what those arguing against aggression are trying to do. But we would still have that violent capacity to prevent us from becoming the slaves of our stronger and more aggressive primate cousins.
A very strong and slightly prehensile (for maintaining load balance and grip) “shelf” in the lower back just above the hips. This would allow for carrying most heavy loads in the optimal manner.
Arms would be capable of folding comfortably behind the back when cuddling up for sleep.
I would instill an instinct in young children to allow their Mothers to eat undisturbed in the absence of life-threatening trouble. There seems to be an opposite instinct, which I can only think has evolved to allow children to steal bits of food from the Mother’s plate. They seem to be internally driven to invent any number of emergencies demanding immediate response any time the Mother sits down to a meal - or indeed nears the completion of cooking one.
I would strengthen the nurturing instinct in males, and put a lower limit on the gradations of it in both sexes, such that the minimum of nurturing tendency can not go below a certain point.
Allow for conscious relaxation of a muscle. Right now we can cause a muscle to contract, but if it goes into spasm we do not have the ability to order it to relax. This would eliminate an enormous amount of unecessary pain.
I think annual estrus for two weeks for both sexes. Let’s put all that energy into something more constructive. This is not in lieu of physical enjoyment/bonding during the rest of the year, but the hormonal mega-drive, and the fertility would be limited to an annual two-week period. Culturally, I’m sure this would be a defined festival, and babysitting rates would allow for any adult in poverty to pull themselves out by simply choosing to sit out one year and babysit instead. (Kinda like when folks rent out their apartments during the Olympics.)
Too costly. In mammals, Vitamin C production require glucose (or a metabolite thereof) which would be likely low in abundance in a prehistoric diet. The human brain is under a triple-whammy: is not only dependent on glucose but is unable synthesize or store the molecule on its own. The brain can run on ketone bodies during starvation but there’ll be some degree of cognitive impairment. To prevent scurvy, you might try to have collegen synthesis depend on another cofactor that’s made in abundance like um. . . hmm… carbon dioxide.
Fascinating thread, btw. I like the idea having the body being able to respond better to cancer cells.
My own suggestions would be:
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Redesign the immune system so that minor nucleotide/amino acid differences in a virus or bacteria doesn’t evade adaptive immunity and require a whole new immune response.
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Redesign the eye so that we can adjust the cornea so we have zoom in and zoom out like a camera. Stupid it wasn’t made like that way in the first place.
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I’d also adjust the hippocampus so that humans can readily recall their dreams. It’s a tragedy that they are so fleeting. I think the human happiness factor worldwide would quadruple
- Honesty
And in fact I said that it wasn’t the same. It is however the elimination of men. There are no men anymore in your scenario, since you’ve eliminated everything that makes them different.
No, just pointing out what should be obvious. If you claim that eliminating men as something distinguishable from women would not only not cost humanity anything but would be a net positive, then you are claiming that men are a net negative. That’s a direct implication of what you are saying.
In fact I eliminate nothing. I give them an extra superpower, the ability to conceive life. The only thing I eliminated is their ability to impregnate and abandon a woman to fend for herself, without risking the same for himself.
I only claim that women are at a distinct disadvantage to men in that they are saddled with reproduction and childbirth and an inescapable commitment to children (if they bear children). This is an undeniable, incontrovertible fact. Men can walk free of the consequences of sex, women are stuck with it.
Leading from that fact, we have to ask, should we equalize this burden if we had the power? I seem to be hearing several people say that women need to suffer this equality in order to preserve some unquantifiable richness of cultural diversity. This is the attitude of a sociopathic slave-owner toward his property. “I’d love to set you free, but our culture is just too grounded in this.” Very 1850.
Seriously, male pregnancy would not be the holocaust. Women survive it all the time. You would too.
A change in the junction of the airway and the esophagus that allows for speech and greatly lessens the chance of inspiration of food particles…that way we could speak and eat at the same time.
Either eliminate the sinuses, or redesign them so that drainage is much better for our upright stance. While we are at it, improve our sense of smell greatly…I’ve always envied dogs and their noticeably different perception of the world. Also be able to turn our smell perception down.
Change the location of the genital organs and make their links to the urinary system disappear. This would eliminate or lessen lots of problems like urinary tract infections and prostate problems. I could also cross my legs with ease.
Permanent hair on the head, none on the back. No increased age related growth of hair in nostrils, eyebrows, or facial hair in females. Increased resistance to skin changes associated with age and sun. (cancer and thinning of skin)
Eliminate the genetic components of Alzheimer’s disease, osteoarthritis, and several psychological disorders. (There may be some benefits to several of them…for example, you may want to have somebody who obsesses about keeping the campfire lit, and saves food for the winter)
And just for fun…increased range of eye color to include violet, purple, teal and orange.
No; you are placing them in a position where they will either evolve to be identical to women, or die.
And men are born with greater size and bigger muscles - all of which require metabolic support - a weaker immune system, and a shorter lifespan. You want to force on these prehistoric men biological demands that they physically won’t be able to support. But hey, they are men and therefore evil by definition, so who cares if they starve to death or have organ failure, right?
In other words, this is just another attempt to portray men as born evil. Just being a man is the equivalent of being a slaveholder.
I would not exist. There would be no such thing as men.
Why wouldn’t the women evolve to be identical to the men? Your self-centered perspective keeps focusing on what the men would lose, but you don’t even pause to consider that women would be losing their unique position.
I did specify external gestation, not internal, so this is an irrelevant argument.
In your own false words. Not in my words. I claim that you, specifically Der Trihs, an apparent psychopath, is expressing the same views as a slaveholder in saying that you would not grant women biological equality if you had the ability to do so, because of selfish and baseless reasons that ultimately amount to a fear that you won’t be in a biologically privileged position anymore.
People exist all the time without being men. They’re called women.
I’m just extrapolating from what we know. With the exception of a couple of fish, all vertebrate species use dual gender sexual reproduction. The most complex behaviours usually revolve around mating; be it nest-building, dances, competition, or even specialties like tool use, or coalition building in primates. The rest of the time if food supplies are adequate most animals are extremely lazy, content to simply exist. That is why I specified that it could go either way. So much of our basic behaviours are tied into securing mates it is impossible for me to fairly envision a creative drive in a species that can go either way at any time.
We currently tie male aggression and dominance into the mating act and it is difficult for me to accurately predict what a species would be like with such a drastic change. At the risk of sounding sexist, it is possible that they would separate into two genders anyway, with the aggressive ones being more “male” and giving more than receiving. Maybe they go the other way, or maybe they go nowhere since the reproductive act only requires a partner, and fitness is no longer really a standard. The whole troop dynamics would be thrown out the window. I don’t think it would be logical to speculate any further.
Leaving aside Der Trihs’s observations, the problem is that so much of what makes women and men different psychologically is biological. The hormonal differences alone cause different brain development, let alone the gross anatomical differences as adults. The massive shifts needed for a male to be able to conceive, carry, and bear children would leave them no longer what we think of as “male”.
That result is equivalent to simply stating that males are superflorous and should be done away with, because what you would end up with is a world without males. You might have gradations of female over time, but none would be even remotely close to a male today. A better way to tie males to children might be a simpler hormonal shift that causes them to bond more strongly to their partners, and lactate when young are produced. By the time the nursing period is over, children are normally interactive and interesting to males and the hardship period, (biologically speaking), has been shared.
What do you mean Tenticles - we cant deal with the 1 we have never mind multiple ones…
Because that would be impossible. Where are they going to get the food?
Apparent psychopath? :rolleyes: Because I don’t agree that men are some plague upon the land that should be erased from history, I’m an “apparent psychopath” and no better than a slaver. And you aren’t giving women equality, you are giving them superiority by burdening men with an attempt to make them serve to specialized functions at once.
Somehow I suspect that if someone was promoting a plan to create an equal society by having an all-male culture with women replaced by replication vats that you wouldn’t so causally dismiss the loss of an entire gender as unimportant. But then, you are clearly one of those people who look at women as people and men as troglodytes undeserving of existence.
But I am a man, and you want to eliminate men.
I think tying “dominance” and “aggression” into the mating act itself for humans may be misleading.
A deer’s antlers aren’t there for subduing doe – they are there for fighting / displaying against other bucks. And it’s similar for many mammals. The size difference between the genders isn’t (for the most part) about being a more effective rapist.
Now, there’s no question things would be very different if men could get pregnant.
But your assertion before that there would be less competition for mates I think is unsupportable. There’s always going to be competition for mates while a significant proportion of individuals are reaching reproductive age. The specific nature of that competition however may change.
or female.
I think in this hypothetical so much has changed about the dynamic between males and females that the evolutionary pressures would be very different. IMO whatever results would quickly diverge from much of what we think of as masculinity or femininity.
This is why it seems such a non sequitur to me that this hypothetical is “anti men”.
Not necessarily, remember we are altering early humans, not going back to the shrew-ancestor and letting things take their course. By this point early humans have already had millenia of ingrained social interactions based upon a two gender system with significant sexual dimorphism. Suddenly altering that is going to cause a HUGE problem within their group dynamics. No doubt in time it will work itself out, but it could easily prevent the rise of the species as help it out. That is why I declined to speculate too hard on the “slug-human”: reproductive method. It is something so alien from all higher vertebrates, their biology and resulting behaviour that their simply isn’t enough info to do so logically.
As for it being “anti-men”, the logical extension is that men are not needed. Broadly speaking, this is true. However, in the absence of mammal model to extrapolate from we are left with personal interpretation. His position is no more logical or illogical than any other this far out into fantasy. It is like arguing whether or not female dwarves have beards.
I said this? Naturally, if you’re not lying, you’ll easily be able to go back through my posts and quote anywhere I said men are a plague on the land. I’ll go ahead and hold my breath while I wait for you to address something I actually said, rather than this fabrication you’re trying to attribute to me.
Well you can’t have it both ways.
You can’t say there’s not enough time for gender characteristics to change and that maleness / masculinity will disappear.
I still think we need to look at tentacles . . . or, at least, into making certain pseudotentacular appendages motile and prehensile.
Of course you can. We are altering the genetic code of all the early humans. In one generation we will have completely eliminated the old model. If we assume a female standard with a minimally functional testes and penis,(All we would need to continue the species) we have eliminated a traditional male human entirely. They are all now female+. The female biology will be totally dominant since the structures necessary for carrying and delivering young are more important than those needed to produce and deliver sperm. If you want me to speculate, you’d probably end up with larger, slightly more muscular females than we see today as a base. Some would swing more in one direction than others, but nothing would resemble or function biologically like the eliminated male population. I’m not going hazard a guess as to how the social rules would function in such a population.