Such as?
>This isn't scientific, but if I don't have another philosophy to go off of then I will at least reference that model for ideas on how people will behave.
I don't understand your point. If you say it's not scientific, what exactly are you "verifying" ?
Unfortunately, as science becomes the hegemonic source of authority in our world, pseudo-science becomes the preferred language for demagoguery and bullshit.
The greatest crime of the modern scientific community(in some disciplines at least) is to viciously betray the skeptical roots of scientific thought by ignoring the value of understanding and admitting what we DO NOT know.
My personal bias is that a shitty model with 0 statistical validity should not be treated as gospel because 'It's the best we've got.' I believe that it is better to accept ignorance and act with according caution in some areas of life. But then again I have no scientific justification for that, anymore than people do for the reverse.
The development of male features in foetuses is triggered by a massive release of testosterone. The second stage of gendered differentiation, puberty, is similarly driven by the release of sex hormones in both men and women. Noticeably, adolescent boys with a malfunctioning endocrine system do not display typical male features (lowered voice, facial hair, etc), lesser tendency to masculine psychology (like risk taking and aggression), and don't develop sex drive (straight or gay) unless they start taking injections for life. It should be uncontroversial to say that sex and gender differences, both physiological and psychological, are tied to hormones.
Next up, the brain: the most complex and expensive organ we have, a complex system of feedback loops, again driven and regulated by secretions of hormones and peptides and so on. To say that evolutionary psychology is false and just anecdotes, you'd have to argue that, despite all the other visible changes that sex hormones make, somehow, the brain is entirely unaffected by all of that. That gender is mostly (or as some claim, entirely) a social construct, determined by something as subtle as a tone of voice or the presence of 'patriarchal gender roles'. Even though studies show children and teenagers are more affected by their peers' behaviours and attitudes than their parents'. Even though there is no culture where gender roles are truly swapped, and the 'Norwegian Gender Paradox' remains true.
Not only does the science show nature plays a significant role in the "nature vs nurture" debate on sex and gender, but policies based on denying it have failed to work.
I'm not an evo psychologist, or a biologist either. But it seems a lot more reasonable to me than what's coming from the supposed equality camp.
What I'm being skeptical about is that we can take that all the way out to surface characteristics and then make blanket statements, or that we can concoct untestable fables based in current evolutionary models and then use those to justify those blanket statements.
There certainly is gender dimorphism (the right term) in humans, but it's also very hard to separate genes/development, environment, and culture. It's also very hard to go from the cellular and hormonal level all the way up to, say, how people tend to behave in job interviews.
The reason I get so skeptical in these areas is that history teaches us that human beings will rationalize their prejudices using whatever system of belief they find around them. Historically that's usually been religion, hence it use to rationalize gender and racial stereotypes. Now we live in a scientific age (supposedly), so we should be on guard for pseudoscientific attempts to do the same with scientific-sounding language. Indeed the "social Darwinists" were on that beat a century ago already. So whenever I smell an attempt to explain or justify a social prejudice or a class system, my skeptic hat goes on.
That was rambling... need coffee..
Very well put.
That's all right as far as it goes, but you need to consistently remember that what you're doing is not science, it's philosophy.
Sometimes I get the (rather cynical) sense that there's an inverse relationship between the merit of an idea and its virality.