I would make it so that 1 out of every 100,000 people could shoot laser beams out of their eyes.
I’m not really sure where to start here.
None of what you’ve posted addresses the fundamental inconsistency in your argument which I pointed out to you in my last post. Instead, you’re adding more (arbitrary) speculation.
It’s all getting quite painful to read, so I’m just going to leave it at:
I disagree that this hypothetical has anything to do with eliminating men (specifically). I think it is much more accurate to describe it as a merging.
What aren’t you getting? Your proposal reads as follows:
Make men have babies. Accomplish this by merging the sexes.
Well you can’t simply do that. To create a sexual hermaphrodite we must first retain all the necessary equipment for conception and delivering a child. We also need a form of sperm production and delivery. Still with me?
You can’t just merge the sexes, because males are specialized and unable in a lot of significant, gross anatomical ways to carry and bear children. Therefore it is sensible to start with an altered female. We will call this organism female+ or F+ for short.
F+ must be altered to have a minimal system for sperm production and delivery. In mammals that means paired testes and single penes. Assuming we modify the vulva and design an internal teste, that is a fairly minimal alteration to an otherwise typical female human. Some hormonal shifts would also be necessary, but it would really only create what we would consider (by today’s standards) a mannish female.
Such a creature would be by most basic measures, physically, and psychologically female other than it’s ability to produce and exchange sperm with another F+.
It was Cosmic Relief’s hypothetical.
But I have explicitly added the assumption that females in this hypothetical should have some method of delivering genetic material (because if men can only get pregnant via other men, it wouldn’t change much in prehistoric times for the majority of men).
To me, it’s simpler just to have one gender, but it’s CR’s hypothetical, and in it there are still two.
And here’s where we’ve diverged.
This whole thread has rested on the assumption that the aliens have virtually god-like knowledge of human genetics, the human brain and our environment.
Most of the suggestions have taken that form e.g. shooting lasers from our eyes.
If we’re going to (for some reason) be practical, then the aliens should really start by studying intersex individuals. I mean, you’ve got some of your work done for you there.
This whole thing of starting with women as a template for the new men is your (and Der Trih’s) invention, it’s just not in the hypothetical.
Just to clear the air on what I actually intended to express, it was this:
1: In the sexual act, it should be equally possible for men to conceive young.
2: Neither men nor women would gestate the young internally. They would lay eggs like birds, in a process that would be excruciatingly painful (to discourage overpopulation).
I think everybody missed that last point, which would mean that neither body plan would be at any particular disadvantage regarding reproduction. Men wouldn’t lack from not having wide pelvises, etc. Not only that but it would be trivial for people to “abort” (just stomp on the egg, if you could bear it).
I think it is really fascinating that this thread has contained all sorts of outlandish suggestions that could significantly change or destroy society. Sure, give laser-beam weaponized eyes, I’m sure prehistoric humans would be mature enough not to instantly reduce each other to smoking piles of hamburger. But suggest that men get pregnant, and everybody’s all like “OH MUH GUH IT’S MALE PERSECUTION! IT’S THE END!”. :rolleyes:
Thanks for clarifying. I still think this though:
doesn’t quite work.
Childbirth is already very painful for humans. It doesn’t discourage sex because it happens long after.
Or are you saying the egg-laying happens immediately after copulation?
If so, I think it would have some effect, but I suspect with all our other instincts the same, we’d still screw a lot. It’s just our lives would be a bit more shitty.
Now you’re talkin’!
Psychologically? Hardly; I’d expect them to be extremely and ruthless competitive; winners get to breed by just depositing their sperm, losers have to bear children. There’s a hypothesis that that’s why hermaphrodites are rare among animals, in fact; having two genders moderates the competition.
Also, if all humans are like that then there’s going to need to be a lot more of what we could call “tomboys” to perform the tasks that human males normally historically performed. And they’ll be at a disadvantage compared to real world humans for most of their history thanks to not having large, strong men to do the heavy lifting.
Odds are good that given time you’d just end up with two genders again, anyway. Over time people would be born with some masculinizing mutations that disabled their womb and bulked up their muscles, and they’d outcompete the non-specialized F+ for the male role.
And where exactly do those eggs get their nutrients? Perpetual motion? Laying eggs doesn’t save you from needing to invest enormous biological resources. Men would still need to lose nearly everything that makes them different from women, or they’d die as the eggs used up the needed resources. or they’d need to eat far more than women (which also puts them at a huge disadvantage).
I agree. I was playing along with one of the other poster’s ideas. The inertia of the dual gender system on this planet is pretty massive. I think you’d probably end up with something like two genders anyway over time as well. That is why I suggested a different solution to equalize out the power balances between the sexes, and make females venomous. It is biologically inexpensive, does not require major modifications to existing structures and should produce a more egalitarian society by giving women a natural defense against the strength and power of males.
Fine, fine. But, in compensation, you have to make all the women deaf-mute toothless midgets with flat-topped skulls.
Resistance to poison under these circumstances would develop incredibly rapidly. You have produced a situation with a massive advantage to being resistant, where non-lethal poisonings would be commonplace and where the species’ own genome must carry the genes for resistance.
I give 10-20 generations before every single male is resistant to the venom, and perhaps another 100 generations before males are also venomous.
I’ll wager 1,000 Quatloos on the venomous male.
Not necessarily. We could tie the genes onto the x chromosome so only that individuals expressing xx would also express the venom and accompanying structures. That would be a hard jump to make evolutionarily speaking. Another way will be to make the venom toxic rather than lethal. A painful experience rather than a lethal one would not select so hard on the population. I expect that the males will become resistant swiftly, but the point is to make overt aggression unpleasant to them. Given enough generations the social structure will rapidly adjust to reward behaviours other than physical dominance. Remember that we are adjusting prehistoric humans, who already have the capacity to learn and interact and live socially. It wouldn’t take long to realize that violence=three days of retching and pain, and despite a predicted rapid development of resistance, it isn’t that likely that they would then revert after 20 generations of adjusted behaviour.
Additionally, not all snakes are immune to their own venom for example, and certainly if we utilized something like the spitting elapids do, even resistance would be of little use in a fight situation. So what if it doesn’t blind a male so long as it allows a female to make a getaway while his eyes are inflamed? We also need to consider that it is known that in localized populations, variations of venom can swing wildly enough that populations that can interbreed often are not immune to envenomations by the other population.
Hermaphrodite species are rare among animals, but many of those that do exist have remained that way for tens of millions of years. If it is such a disadvantage, or if separation into genders is inevitable, why is it taking so long to mutate / evolve out?
I’d actually say that the long existence of such species, coupled with the quite different mechanisms / types of hermaphroditism, suggests to me it is a beneficial feature, but one without an evolutionary route.
It’s not like species get a free choice of how many genders to have. We’ve inherited two from the earliest Eukaryotic ancestor, and to have anything else requires a significant set of mutations.
(There are several hypotheses for why that ancestor made use of heterogenous elements e.g. there could have been interaction with a virus (viral eukaryogenesis theory)).
I don’t think there’s any basis for saying this.
The gender roles we have exist because of the way we reproduce, not the other way round.
Radically change our reproduction such that it is unlike most animals (let alone most mammals), and all bets are off.
Actually there is one pretty safe bet: we will be unlike current humans.
Not particularly. Genes get transposed between the sex chromosomes all the time. This is the main reason why the sex chromosomes jump around constantly
If it works, then it will represent the same evolutionary pressure regardless of *how *it works. In fact, by allowing males who are only slightly more resistant to survive, a non-lethal effect will produce resistance even faster.
Why? It’s unpleasant now, and it doesn’t seem to stop anybody. Or do you think that men actually enjoy being punched in the nose?
This appears to be a non-sequitur.
It’s not a case of reverting. It simply a case of whether males that circumvent the system in the first generation have more offspring than those who do not. If the answer is yes, then resistance will develop.
To highlight the flaws in your argument, simply ask yourself, is it unpleasant to be stung by a bee or gored by an elephant? Has this prevented humans form exploiting bees and elephants? If you agree that the answers to these question are “yes” and “no” respectively, you have demolished you own argument.
By making females produce a bee-sting, all you are going to do is select for males who treat females like they do bees. You will be selecting for males who, when they want to harm a female, will creep up on her and hit her over the head first. You are selecting for males who will train females from a very early age using aversive techniques, just as men have been training elephants. You can’t believe that your females will be more physically intimidating than an adult elephant. You will be selecting for males who never let thier guard down around females.
Your system will inevitably result in far worse and more repressive male-female relationships. Initially, the most successful males will be those who are prepared to be the most brutal. Those who incapacitate women when they want to rape them. Those who phsyically cripple any women they want as sex slaves, so that if the man becomes poisoned for three days the woman starved to death. Those who beat and rape girls from the age of three so they become psychologically so traumatised and bound to the man that they can’t think to harm him. Those who find ways of carving the venom glands out of women with stone knives. Under your system, the men willing to do these things will have the most reproductive success. And sure, some will occasionally be poisoned, but resistance will be rapidly selected for over a few generations.
At no stage will society simply “reward behaviours other than physical dominance”. That simply doesn’t make any sense. All your change has done is made any physically competition between the sexes far more dangerous for both parties. But men will still have a huge reproductive advantage in overpowering women, so they will still do it. All you have done is drastically escalated the minimum force required, and thus selected for more brutal men.
Yeah, they are. If youhave any evidene to the contraty thenplease presentit. Form a physiological point of view, it’s hard to see how a creature could survive if it were unable to dispose of its own metabolites.
Women can throw sand in in aman’s face now and achieve this. Why would spitting be any more effective or evolve any less effective defences? Once again, all you’ve done is selected for men who will ensure that women are incapacitated before raping them. So rather than simply holding a woman down, the most reproductively advantaged men will be those who beta women to the point of unconsciousness first.
Under the current system, those men who use minimum force are most favoured, since that has the least effect on the ability of the woman to carry the child to term and comes with little to no risk. But since rape is essentially “free” from a male point of view, it is still better to successfully rape three females, and have two of them die, than not to rape any.
So your system is providing an extremely strong selective pressure for the most brutal males.
That could only happen in situations where such envenomations are rare. You are proposing situation where it is ubiquitous.
Evolution doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t see some goal and then move towards it. You might just as easily point out that lots of land animals can’t survive dessication, so therefore this must not be disadvantageous. Of course it is disadvantageous, but evolution doesn’t work towards a goal, it works with what it’s got.
Not in any way correct. Our ancestors were true hermaphrodites at least up to the common ancestor we share with annelids. Moreover our vertebrate ancestors were almost certainly alternating hermaphrodites right through to the fish stage and probably even the early mammals were well differentiated, certainly monotremes have a radically different system for sex selection which suggests that sexual separation occurred well after mammals evolved. Even today many fish alternate between being male or female depending on conditions.
So animals didn’t evolve from dioecious into hermaphrodite forms, rather it was the other way around. Most species abandoned the hermaphrodite pattern. A small number don’t seem to have been able to do so, and in some a tiny number of cases some seem to have re-evolved it.
No, the two reinforce each other, but it’s almost certainly a case that we initially adopted this means of reproduction because of gender roles, rather than the other way around.
If you take a hermaphrodite population, and one individual becomes female sterile while maintaining male sterility, then that individual has a massive advantage if it becomes sexually aggressive and tries to stimulate mating as often as possible. Similarly if one individual becomes male sterile, it has a huge advantage in being highly mate selective and maximising returns on each union.
IOW the way we reproduce, with differentiated sexes, female selection, large eggs and small sperm are all the inevitable result of the evolution of gender roles. Had the male gender role been one of incubation or nurturing, then our reproductive system would be radically different to reflect that fact.
Not really. There are still a lot of basic rules that need to be followed.
Blake, I think that when you play around with anything you take the chance of a negative reaction. It is no more or less likely than the positive one I predicted. Too many variables. I’m betting on course of least resistance winning out rather than hyper aggressive sneaky males. If males who play nice don’t get bitten, they will mate more often. More importantly, since we are dealing with a sentient, or near sentient species at this point, I’m betting on social awareness taking over quickly and driving selection of more gentle males.
Not that any of this really matters though. I would assume we would conduct trials on any idea before doing it to a whole population!
As for the envenomations, There is at least one reliable report of cobra self envenomating and forming a lethal abcess, though it did not go into full asphixia like a prey item would. Check out THIS link for the treatment and surgery. This type of wound has been reported in other elapid species and is fatal without treatment. Similar effects have been noted in other elapid populations, Crotalid intra-species bites seem to be nasty but self resolving. Other pit viper species have conflicting reports.
It’s a good thing I didn’t say that.
In fact, one thing I did say is perhaps there is no evolutionary route for hermaphrodite reproduction to become established among existing two-gender species (implicitly showing an awareness that evolution is not directed).
The context of all this is that some are saying that if Homo sapiens were essentially made into one gender they would quickly separate out into two genders again.
It’s quite relevant to this point to point out that some species have remained hermaphrodite for tens of millions of years.
A completely spurious comparison.
In fact, the exact opposite observation in your analogy is much closer to my point:
The few species that have gained that feature, have retained it for millions of years. It’s probably beneficial for them, and the reason that more species do not have that feature is because is because there is no clear evolutionary route towards it and the set of mutations required is too improbable.
I take that part back. I don’t know too much about the early evolution of sex selection, and I had got confused over that point.
OK, but I would describe this as essentially the genders (in simplified form) appearing first and then promoting particular behaviours. There was no “need” for distinct male and female roles; the roles appear once there are different kinds of fertile organism in the population.
This plus telekinesis would be my major mods.
Minor mods: agree with the wisdom teeth, etc. and I’ll add perfect vision that never changes throughout lifetime. No astigmatism, near- or far-sightedness, etc.