Because humans are highly intelligent, and form complex, hierarchical societies. This is such an advantage that even societies with low capitalization rates - ones that inhibit their members from reaching their full potential - were able to survive and thrive.
Plug in the hierarchy of your choice, and the outcome likely remains the same.
Because men and women are of roughly equal average intelligence compared to each other, but men on average have significantly more physical power than women.
For millenia, societies could go to war with each other, commit genocide, atrocities, etc. In that sort of brutal Hobbesian world, those with physical power trumped those who didn’t have it.
The relative peace and “civilized way of doing things” of the past century or so is a historical aberration.
Surely it was those who managed that physical power who trumped the others?
:rolleyes: This is an example of the “cultural reset fallacy”, where people assume that changes in legislation somehow magically “reset” prejudicial attitudes and cultural factors to zero. So if any subsequent outcomes remain unequal, that demonstrates that inequality is somehow “natural” or “innate”.
This, naturally, is bullshit. Women in almost all developed nations have had the vote for only about a century, and full legal equality for significantly less time than that. To expect that this brief period could have completely eradicated the ingrained influence of many thousands of years of entrenched gender inequality, so that everything nowadays is a completely level playing field, is, to put it bluntly, idiotic.
Well, what did you think of my earlier analogous question: “Why has religious belief worked for humanity?”
Ultimately, I think the core answer to both questions is basically what Human Action said: Humans are good at creating complex hierarchical societies that function very efficiently to promote their own survival. The particular conceptual structures that we build the hierarchy around can be pretty much anything: e.g., gendered social roles, religious worldview, etc. What really makes it “work” is the fact of the complex hierarchy itself.
Probably because I missed it. But that’s for another thread.
But why male-dominated?
I’m not sure what you mean by this, but the vast majority of rulers and military commanders were men, too. And if an army of women had to defend against an army of men, in that day and age, most likely the men would prevail.
Sounds like you’re segueing into a different question there. You started out in your OP asking why male domination has worked for humanity, i.e., why have male-dominated human societies survived and in many respects flourished.
And the sort-of-consensus answer seems to be something along the lines of “male domination may not in fact be the best possible system for human beings, but as long as it helped provide a basis for building complex hierarchical social structures, it was good enough to get the job done in terms of allowing our species to survive and continually develop”.
Now, on the other hand, you seem to be asking why male domination happened to be the pattern that these successful human societies followed. You’ve had a variety of answers to that question too throughout this thread, but it’s not the same question as your original one.
I’m prepared to be flamed, but, having spent years studying this subject and earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Physical Anthropology, I offer the following:
If you care to learn more about this topic, I suggest you start by reading Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. You may then want to read some of the work by R. Fisher, E. O. Wilson, R. L Trivers, and others. This material will introduce you to the basics of reproductive success, parental investment, sexual dimorphism, and many other useful concepts in understanding how humans (and other species that reproduce sexually) got to where we are today.
As human beings, we sometimes fail to appreciate that the cultural and social advances of the last hundred years represent only the smallest fraction of human history.
Finally, it is certainly NOT true that “primitive” cultures and social groups were more egalitarian regarding gender roles. To think this is pure fantasy.
That’s irrelevant. It is so for the groups in your cite (and also for every HG tribe I’ve ever studied up on). So there may be mythical HG tribes where the men hunt but the women have a magic veto over their hunting. Mythical ideal tribes aren’t my concern. Real ones are. And in real ones, division of labour necessitates inequality of at least opportunity - if women aren’t allowed to hunt, are socially excluded from that, or any, economic activity, then the word egalitarian *can not *apply.
No, it’s a foundation of the strain of feminism I was taught that women’s rights are human rights. “Separate isn’t equal” applies just as much to “primitive” women as it does to any other excluded outgroup.
I wouldn’t really know, since I can only read the abstract (hence my “As far as I can tell”).
Talking about science - how far do you think you’d get in submitting a research paper if you admitted you’d only read the abstracts of all your citations…
…or quoted The Guardian …
I don’t distrust the science. There’s nothing surprising about their findings. What I disagree with is that the situation they describe can be called “egalitarian” - "equitable, sure, “egalitarian”, not.
And I disagree that any study of modern HGs can be said to say anything meaningful about pre-agricultural lifeways absent any other evidence. That, to me, is the biggest mistake any anthropologist today can make. Modern HGs are just that - modern. And not little micro-experiments of prehistoric life. Far from it.
That’s fine, but your own claim was much broader and more like the former statement than the latter. You (and some anthropologists) go from a modern hierarchy of subsistence to a historical progress without real justification.
Organized barbarity can work until there is no place left to expand.
Did it work well for the men who charging machine guns in WWI?
Now we are close to the limits of the planet and not many people are going to Mars. So what will happen in the next 150 years?
psik
Uh, I read the paper, when it first came out: I regularly read Science. That’s why I made the argument in the first place. I just can’t link to a free copy of it, which is hardly my fault. For some odd reason journals want to be paid.
It is obvious you are using a completely different definition of “egalitarian”, one in which differences in occupation automatically = non-egalitarian by definition (saying that equality of decision-making is “irrelevant” is a bit of a clue, as was claiming that equality of opportunity in the modern West translates throughout social evolution). If you wish to replace “egalitarian” with “equitable”, have at it. It makes zero difference to the actual substance of the argument which term one uses. Why you bothered to ask me what my definition was, if you are going to ignore it when it is provided, is a bit of a mystery.
Again, you are missing the nature of the argument: that the theory, based on modeling, is at least consistent with modern evidence: it is “not disproven”, which isn’t of course the same thing as “proven”. Claiming that modern HGs have nothing to teach us about HG in general is as mistaken as the straw-man anthropologists you condemn.
The planet hasn’t crashed into the sun, has it?
Q. E. D.
It’s not that hard to find, actually. And I was right, they’re not talking about overall social egalitarianism, at all. They’re specifically using the term just to refer to equality of choice in location.
Well, yes. I’m using the standard definition you’d find in most any dictionary, viz. “believing in or based on the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.” Sex-based division of labour *automatically *cuts off equality of opportunity.
Not equality of outcome. Not equitable political power. But equality of opportunity.
Yes, it does.
I’m not ignoring it, I’m arguing against your use of it in a more general sense…
Nothing “absent any other evidence”.
A very simple answer to a very simple Question, the MALE is the superior gender and woman keep stopping work to have babies and then they want time off when their little darling has a snivel, of course MEN are superior
See how well its working so far?