A lot of it is testosterone. It is a hormone that makes people aggressive. Also, it is cultural. Intentionally and unintentionally, we expect men to be more aggressive, more hot tempered, more take control, more powerful. Gentle, soft, easy going men are not as favored in our society as forceful men. Even women like ‘bad boys.’
“Seem to” is interesting phrasing, OP. Do you really mean to imply that there’s 40% more murders, animal abuse, spouse killing, sex offences, and minor crimes like theft, occurring than we ever notice and even attempt to prosecute? Because if you don’t mean to suggest that women secretly commit crimes at the same rate as men but just don’t get in trouble for it because society is willing to turn a blind eye to it, it should be obvious that men commit all of these offenses at a much greater rate.
I don’t think it’s precisely aggression, but risk-taking: Men are more prone than women to taking risks. Sometimes, those risks pay off, and so the majority of politicians, businesspeople, Nobel Prize winners, and so on are men. Often, they don’t, and so the majority of failures are also men. This of course makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective, because for most of our species’ history, we’ve been better able to afford the loss of men than of women.
So, yes, testosterone, but there’s more detail to it than that.
Ye beat me to the punch: risk-taking it is.
In evolutionary terms, women have typically been the gender responsible for taking care of the family, and throughout prehistory, the females were the ones who had to do the real calculating. Women managed and monitored resources. Women had to screen mates to determine which males could actually bring home a few bison pelts once in a while, and which ones might be threats to the group. Males, by contrast, were engaged in the riskier activities of hunting animals and fighting off intruders, activities which also necessitate aggressive behavior.
We have a small flock of female chickens. When the old hens stop laying, their estrogen levels drop and testosterone manifests itself. The post menopausal birds become belligerent for the first time in their lives.
Second. This is a very well-understood and widely accepted part of natural selection theory. (Darwin even wrote an entire book about it.) Reproductive strategies of this sort have been studied in many, many non-human species.
Variation in reproductive success within a species is huge. As long as some or all of the behaviors that lead to increased RS are genotypical, we can expect those genotypes to be represented in greater numbers in succeeding generations.
E. O. Wilson and Robert Trivers (along with many others) have written extensively about this subject.
As Chronos said it well, the characteristics the OP decries are also the ones that make mankind great, and they have been selected in men by no other than women who may decry male behaviour but mostly choose Mr. Big to mate with.
Society tries to temper extreme behaviours or redirect them to what it considers non-disrupting displays of peacockiness like climbing the Everest. This has been discussed from times immemorable, and one of the beautiful models is Plato’s Chariot Allegory
BTW - assholishness of males is manifested much stronger in most other mammals.
So,
Let’s make Menkind great againsup[/sup]
Well, if you want to do the reverse of this thread, sort of, men accomplish more great things because of the same traits that cause men to do more bad things. Men are more likely to take initiative, take risks, and question the way things are.
I don’t know how much of this is physiological and how much is societal evolution. Testosterone does seem to make one more daring and aggressive, but not all risk taking is just for the hell of it, sometimes it’s quite intellectual. That half of it is probably society. As an earlier poster said, women strive to be good, whereas with men being good is a passive state. If women strived to just be who they wanted to be rather than what society expected of them, there’d be more females single-handedly changing the world.
I think this is probably true, along with the different distribution curve noted by Novelty Bobble in post #20. Also, testosterone. Also, society rewards men who defy convention more than women - in the form of the appeal of “Bad Boys”.
My only added point here relates to the point made by octopus in post #8 but with broader application than just this thread. As you note, some of these same traits also account for men being disproportionately represented at the extreme outliers of success and accomplishment. But that notion is considered unacceptable by contemporary PC society. The suggestion that women should be underrepresented as legislators, judges, BoD members and the like because they are less represented at the talent levels that these positions require is not an acceptable one, and all such discrepancies are presumed to be due to direct or societal discrimination.
So IMO, when postulating theories such as are being bandied here, it’s worth considering the other implications of these same theories.
No offense but this seems to me like self justification bias.
The fact is, male aggression due to mostly biological factors and social factors causes problems in society. Most mass shooters are male, Most wife beaters are men, the 19 hijacker’s on 9/11 were men, most homophobic. transphobic violence is caused by men. I know someone will say ‘Oh but think of all the firefighters on 9/11, they were all men!’ True but the point is, reducing male violence would reduce the need for male saviors.
IMO, If today’s world was still in the middle ages people with no technological developments, people would still be trying to justify the need for ‘masculinity’ forced on men. I’m not saying men are useless but the idea that we need men to invent is just BS.
An interesting question about mass shooters specifically Elliot Rodger; would he have gone on a mass shooting if he was female? His sister hasn’t done anything criminal. What about Kip Krinkel? He had a sister who’s not in jail and didn’t murder anyone? If their parents both had two daughters, a few people would probably be alive.
I would be extremely happy if the classes of people you mentioned would be at least average in their talent levels. Unfortunately many seem to be outliers mostly in their pathologies, and very much less in their brain power or morality.
Hear, hear…
Not quite to the part in parentheses. Because men have only one X chromosome, if there’s something wrong with an allele on it (and it’s usually a recessive allele) there’s no counter to it.
A woman might have a “bad allele” on one X chromosome but a normal one on her other X chromosome. Many genes are “haplosufficient” (you only need one working copy) so she’ll be fine. There’s a lot of easily observable physical effects (eg some forms of color blindness) where this is obvious. Women can be red/green colorblind, it’s just rarer because the likelihood of her having two recessive alleles is pretty slim.
I have a hard time believing a lot of crime is “caused” by genetics, however. It’s choices. Testosterone can provoke more aggression but you can still (usually) choose not to act that way. (I guess there’s “roid rage” but you need to be actively abusing anabolic steroids to suffer from that. I would hold someone responsible for a crime committed during a “roid rage” as the criminal willingly chose to inject themselves with the steroids.)
Testosterone is the main reason. Also given males generally larger physical stature they are more likely to exploit their advantage when angry. In cases where women have a physical advantage, like adult women verses children, you see that women kill more children than men.
This is not something to be taken seriously.
If you compare male-male violence with female-female violence your theory does not hold up. (Women kill more children - if true - because they have access to a lot more.)
That’s because men are from Mars who smell like candy bars while women are from Venus who smell like pretty flowers.
I recall a saying - something to the effect of - “Women don’t go bad as often as men, but when they do, they are worse than bad men.”
Not in the sense of serial killers, but more in the sense of malice or emotional bullying or the desire to cause suffering and in ingenious ways.
Testosterone is a huge part of it. When my friend transitioned F-M, he said it totally changed his outlook on almost everything. His sex drive shot through the roof, but he also found his temper becoming less controllable, rage coming to the forefront much more often. Eventually he talked with his doc and got on a slightly lower dose of T, and it eased the problem.
That, and the fact that from babyhood on, boys are taught that expressing themselves through violence is, if not “okay”, at least to be expected. “Oh, he’s such a rough-and-tumble little dude”, “The reason he’s mean to you is because he likes you.” And they’re also taught not to express their emotions any other way, that even having emotions beyond lust and rage - the ones that are testosterone-influenced - is unmanly and therefore bad.
So yeah. Some biology, some cultural, just like everything else.
I don’t know what percent of the animal kingdom’s copulations would pass the bar for Western ideas of consent. Certainly one of the advantages of being “Mr. Big” is getting others to do what you want. Moreover, assigning agency to evolutionary ingrained instincts doesn’t seem tenable. Peahens just really like big tails and they don’t know why. Men really like certain hip to waist ratios and they don’t know why. If women are attracted to the dark triad, well, they don’t know why either. Good for their genes, possibly bad for the human race as a whole. That’s a bit of a philosophical rabbit hole though, free will and all that.