#biological evolution

[midnights-prayer]

Very well said!

Don't you realize that male and female are social constructs? They're ideas. Scientists don't even believe biological sex is a thing anymore, we're all just people. Gender is almost like religion, it can change, some people are really sure on theirs and others aren't, forcing someone into one is always wrong. Do you know why you're cis? Do you ever think about the possibility that you're not, about what it would be like to be something other then what you were born as. Would you still feel like a woman if you didn't have a womb, if you didn't have breasts or genitals or estrogen? It was a combination of contemplating these things, and mystical experiences with the goddess Hel that got me to realize I was agender. I thought I would lose certain things when becoming nonbinary and genderless, but I didn't. I don't know about you, but know you can be happy as an enby or a boy, you can be loved, and cherished and comforted as an enby or as a boy. I don't know if you're nonbinary like I am. You might find you really do identify with womanhood, but if you do really want to be a woman, then know that that's the same feeling amab women have. I know what it's like to think the way you do, I used to think that way, and I've had bad experiences with men and with the expectations society has for people with bodies like mine. But you don't have to take your pain and call it womanhood.

"Female" and "male" are two distinct sexes with distinct differences, set by science and based in reality - you saying scientists don't support the importance of sex is firstly wrong (i can see you've never read any papers written by anyone outside of your bubble) and secondly, very worrisome.

Nothing about sex is a "social construct" because the fact of being either female or male as itself is first of all: a completely neutral, innate and unchangeable fact.

woman = adult human female

man: adult human male

What society does when they attach sexist stereotypes, sex-based expectations etc. to a certain sex, like "a woman must be nurturing by character", "women can wear dresses and skirts, men don't", "it is not manly to show your feelings, you must be strong" etc. that is GENDER. I am a woman, so acording to the logic of gender ideology I must identify with society's image of what a woman has to be, has to do, act like and all of that to also label myself openly as a woman because that is what "identifying myself as a woman" means, right?

But guess what, wearing clothes from "the men's section", cutting my hair, playing football, defying all of those stereotypes does not make me male. Nothing could every make me male because I am born female (first and foremost) but the point is that being a woman or a man for that matter is just something you either are or are not. You don't have to identify with anything or be a certain way personality wise to "earn" any titles and you can also not be "stripped" of them.

Having a hysterectomy does not make you less of a woman / having to remove your testicles due to testicular cancer does not make you less of a man just like loosing a leg or an arm does not make you less of either.

Doctors need to know your sex to be able to accurately dose your prescription or to treat you with other things. Men and women can have different sex specific diseases, like ovarian cancer won't affect a man. If you walk into the doctor's office, both a man and a woman and tell him that one of you is pregnant, who is he going to do the ultrasound on? I wonder how he knows.

There are matters in this world where sex is always going to be important no matter how progressive we would become with discarding gender stereotypes. The gender paygap is sex-based. Do you think they ask you if identify as a woman before they decide to pay you less than your male peers? Female oppression is sex based. Do you think they ask the women in Afghanistan if they identify as a woman before they force them to cover up fully and never speak in public? When you walk into a clothing store, why would a woman head into the women's section? Same reason as to why she would not walk into the kid's section, the clothes there are made for women's bodies rather than that of a man. They have more waist space and are not as large. Could you buy unisex? Yes, but it will never feel as comfortable or look as flattering depending on where you want to go and want to look nice. Why all those differences? Because in this world it matters wether you are female or male. Just because you pretend that sex doesn't matter and that you can't differentiate a woman from a man does not mean the world can't. Ask a male predator why he knew exactly that his target was a woman and why her gender identity didn't matter to him.

Just like the women in Afghanistan, you think them saying they don't feel like women would save them? You cannot identify out of things like these.

I am going to reply to your question. Yes, of course I have thought about what it would be like to be a man in the face of knowing how female socilisation works. I mean, how would my life have turned out? Would I still feel like a woman if I didn't have a womb, breasts, estrogen and genitalia? Answer: Being a woman is not a feeling. Again, it is a biologic fact. No woman in this world goes around "feeling like a woman". That universal feeling you are asking about does not exist. You just are or you aren't. This is not a sensical question. Assuming you meant to ask that if I was suddenly turned into a man if I would still "feel like a woman" is just something no one on this world can answer to. If you were suddenly turned into a tree, would you still feel human?

Womanhood does not mean pain and pain doesn't mean womanhood. Unfortunately female oppression exists under the wings of patriarchy but trying to identify out of it does not help you nor anyone else. There are better ways of combating this.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Robert Lynch

Published: April 7, 2023

In my first year of graduate school at Rutgers, I attended a colloquium designed to forge connections between the cultural and biological wings of the anthropology department. It was the early 2000s, and anthropology departments across the country were splitting across disciplinary lines. These lectures would be a last, and ultimately futile, attempt to build interdisciplinary links between these increasingly hostile factions at Rutgers; it was like trying to establish common research goals for the math and art departments.

This time, it was the turn of the biological anthropologists, and the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a lecture for which he was uniquely qualified — infanticide in Chacma baboons. Much of the talk was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior and when it was time for questions the hand of the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, shot up and demanded to know “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I see that this was the beginning of a broad anti-science movement that has enveloped nearly all the social sciences and distorted public understanding of basic biology. The assumption that sex is an arbitrary category is no longer confined to the backwaters of cultural anthropology departments, and the willful ignorance of what sex is has permeated both academia and public discussion of the topic.

Male and female are not capricious categories imposed by scientists on the natural world, but rather refer to fundamental distinctions deeply rooted in evolution. The biological definition of males and females rests on the size of the sex cells, termed gametes, that they produce. Males produce large numbers of small gametes, while females produce fewer, larger ones. In animals, this means that males produce lots of tiny sperm (between 200 and 500 million sperm in humans) while females produce far fewer, but much larger, eggs called ova (women have a lifetime supply of around 400). Whenever scientists discover a new sexually reproducing species, gamete size is what they use to distinguish between the males and the females.

Although this asymmetry in gamete size may not seem that significant, it is. And it leads to a cascade of evolutionary effects that often results in fundamentally different developmental (and even behavioral) trajectories for the two respective sexes. Whether you call the two groups A and B, Big and Little, or Male and Female, this foundational cell-sized difference in gamete size has profound effects on evolution, morphology, and behavior. Sexual reproduction that involves the union of gametes of different sizes is termed anisogamy, and it sets the stage for characteristic, and frequently stereotypical, differences between males and females.

My PhD advisor, the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, was at that doomed colloquium at Rutgers. It was Trivers, who four decades earlier as a graduate student at Harvard, laid down the basic evolutionary argument in one of the most cited papers in biology. Throwing down the gauntlet and explaining something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin, he wrote, “What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring.” In a single legendary stroke of insight, which he later described in biblical terms (“the scales fell from my eyes”), he revolutionized the field and provided a broad framework for understanding the emergence of sex differences across all sexually reproducing species.

Because males produce millions of sperm cells quickly and cheaply, the main factor limiting their evolutionary success lies in their ability to attract females. Meanwhile, the primary bottleneck for females, who, in humans, spend an additional nine months carrying the baby, is access to resources. The most successful males, such as Genghis Khan who is likely to have had more than 16 million direct male descendants, can invest relatively little and let the chips fall where they may, while the most successful women are restricted by the length of their pregnancy. Trivers’ genius, however, was in extracting the more general argument from these observations.

By replacing “female” with “the sex that invests more in its offspring,” he made one of the most falsifiable predictions in evolution — the sex that invests more in its offspring will be more selective when choosing a mate while the sex that invests less will compete over access to mates. That insight not only explains the rule, but it also explains the exceptions to it. Because of the initial disparity in investment (i.e., gamete size) females will usually be more selective in choosing mates. However, that trajectory can be reversed under certain conditions, and sometimes the male of a species will invest more in offspring and so be choosier.

When these so-called sex role reversals occur, such as in seahorses where the males “get pregnant” by having the female transfer her fertilized eggs into a structure termed the male’s brood pouch and hence becoming more invested in their offspring, it is the females who are larger and compete over mates, while the males are more selective. Find a species where the sex that invests less in offspring is choosier, and the theory will be disproven.

The assertion that male and female are arbitrary classifications is false on every level. Not only does it confuse primary sexual characteristics (i.e., the reproductive organs) which are unambiguously male or female at birth 99.8 percent of the time with secondary sexual characteristics (e.g., more hair on the faces of men or larger breasts in women), it ignores the very definition of biological sex — men produce many small sex cells termed sperm while women produce fewer large sex cells termed eggs. Although much is sometimes made of the fact that sex differences in body size, hormonal profiles, behavior, and lots of other traits vary across species, that these differences are minimal or non-existent in some species, or that a small percentage of individuals, due to disorders of development, possess an anomalous mix of female and male traits, that does not undermine this basic distinction. There is no third sex. Sex is, by definition, binary.

In the 50 years since Trivers’ epiphany, much has tried to obscure his crucial insight. As biology enters a golden age, with daily advances in genotyping transforming our understanding of evolution and medicine, the social sciences have taken a vastly different direction. Many are now openly hostile to findings outside their narrow field, walling off their respective disciplines from biological knowledge. Why bother learning about new findings in genetics or incorporating discoveries from other fields, if you can assert that all such findings are, by definition, sexist?

Prior to 1955, gender was almost exclusively used to refer to grammatical categories (e.g., masculine and feminine nouns in French). A major shift occurred in the 1960s when the word gender has been applied to distinguish social/cultural differences from biological differences (sex). Harvard Biologist, David Haig documented that from 1988 to 1999 the ratio of the use of “sex” versus “gender” in scientific journals shrank from 10 to 1 to less than 2 to 1, and that after 1988 gender outnumbered sex in all social science journals. The last twenty years have seen a rapid acceleration in this trend, and today this distinction is rarely observed. Indeed, the biological concept of sex in reference to humans has become largely taboo outside of journals that focus on evolution. Many, however, are not content with limiting the gender concept to humans and a new policy instituted by all Nature journals requires that manuscripts include a discussion of how gender was considered in all studies with human participants, on other vertebrates, or on cell lines. When would including gender be appropriate in a genetic study of fruit flies?

This change is not merely stylistic. Rather, it is part of a much larger cultural and political movement that denies or attempts to explain away the effects of biology and evolution in humans altogether. The prevailing dominant view in the social sciences is that human sex differences are entirely socially constructed. In that interpretation, all differential outcomes between men and women are the result of unequal social, economic, and political conditions, and so we do all we can to eliminate them, particularly by changing our expectations and encouraging gender-neutral play in children. This received wisdom and policies based upon it, however, are unlikely to produce the results proponents long for. Why is that?

Because sex differences in behavior are among the strongest effect sizes in social, and what might be better termed, behavioral sciences. Humans are notoriously inept at understanding differences between continuous variables, so it is first useful to define precisely what “statistical differences between men and women” does and does not mean. Although gamete size and the reproductive organs in humans are either male or female at birth in over 99 percent of cases, many secondary sexual characteristics such as differences in upper body strength and differences in behavior are not so differentially distributed. Rather, there is considerable overlap between men and women. Life scientists often use something called the effect size as a way to determine if any observed differences are large (and therefore consequential) or so small as to be ignored for almost all practical purposes.

Conceptually, the effect size is a statistical method for comparing any two groups to see how substantially different they are. Graphically, it can be thought of as the distance between the peaks of the two distributions divided by the width of those distributions. For example, men are on average about 6 inches taller than women in the United States (mean height for American women is 5 feet 3 inches and the mean height for American men is approximately 5 feet 9 inches). The spread of the height distributions for men and women, also known as the standard deviations, are also somewhat different, and this is slightly higher for men at 2.9 inches vs 2.8 inches for women. For traits such as height that are normally distributed (that is, they fit the familiar bell curve shape), one standard deviation on either side of the mean encompasses about 68 percent of the distribution, while two standard deviations on either side of the mean encompass 95 percent of the total distribution. In other words, 68 percent of women will be between 60.2 inches and 65.8 inches tall, and 95 percent will be between 57.5 to 68.6 inches. So, in a random sample of 1000 adult women in the U.S., approximately 50 of them will be taller than the average man (see figure above).

A large effect size, or the standardized mean difference, is anything over 0.8 and is usually seen as an effect that most people would notice without using a calculator. The effect size for sex differences in height is approximately 1.9. This is considered to be a pretty big effect size. But it is certainly not binary, and there are lots of taller-than-average women who are taller than lots of shorter-than-average men (see overlap area in figure). Therefore, when determining whether an effect is small or large, it is important to remember that the cutoffs are always to some degree arbitrary and that what might seem like small differences between the means can become magnified when comparing the number of cases that fall in the extremes of (the tails of their respective distributions) of each group.

In other words, men and women may, on average, be quite similar on a given trait but will be quite different in the number who fall at the extreme (low and high) ends of their respective distributions. This is particularly true of sex differences because natural selection acts more strongly on men, and males have had higher reproductive variance than females over our evolutionary history. That is to say that a greater number of men than women have left no descendants, while a very few men have left far more. Both the maximum number of eggs that a woman produces over the course of her reproductive life versus the number of sperm a man produces and the length of pregnancy, during which another reproduction cannot occur, place an upper limit on the number of offspring women can have. What this means is that males often have wider distributions for a trait (i.e., more at the low end and more at the high end) so that sex differences can be magnified at the tail ends of the distribution. In practical terms, this means that when comparing men and women, it is also important to look at the tails of their respective distributions (e.g., the extremes in mental ability).

The strongest effect sizes where men tend to have the advantage are in physical abilities such as throwing distance or speed, spatial relations tasks, and some social behaviors such as assertiveness. Women, meanwhile, tend to have an edge in verbal ability, social cognition, and in being more extroverted, trusting, and nurturing. Some of the largest sex differences, however, are in human mate choice and behaviors that emerge out of the evolutionary logic of Trivers’ parental investment theory. In study after study, women are found to give more weight to traits in partners that signal an ability to acquire resources, such as socioeconomic status and ambition, while men tend to give more weight to traits that signal fertility, such as youth and attractiveness.

Indeed these attitudes are also revealed in behavior such as age at marriage (men are on average older than women in every country on earth), frequency of masturbation, indulging in pornography, and paying for sex. Although these results are often dismissed, largely on ideological grounds, the science is rarely challenged, and the data suggest some biological difference (which may be amplified, indeed enshrined, by social practices).

The evidence that many sex differences in behavior have a biological origin is powerful. There are three primary ways that scientists use to determine whether a trait is rooted in biology or not. The first is if the same pattern is seen across cultures. This is because the likelihood that a particular characteristic, such as husbands being older than their wives, is culturally determined declines every time the same pattern is seen in another society — somewhat like the odds of getting heads 200 times in a row. The second indication that a trait has a biological origin is if it is seen in young children who have not yet been fully exposed to a given culture. For example, if boy babies are more aggressive than girl babies, which they generally are, it suggests that the behavior may have a biological basis. Finally, if the same pattern, such as males being more aggressive than females, is observed in closely related species, it also suggests an evolutionary basis. While some gender role “theories” can attempt to account for culturally universal sex differences, they cannot explain sex differences that are found in infants who haven’t yet learned to speak, as well as in the young of other related species.

Many human sex differences satisfy all three conditions — they are culturally universal, are observable in newborns, and a similar pattern is seen in apes and other mammals. The largest sex differences found with striking cross-cultural similarity are in mate preferences, but other differences arise across societies and among young children before the age of three as boys and girls tend to self-segregate into different groups with distinct and stereotypical styles. These patterns, which include more play fighting in males, are observable in other apes and mammal species, which, like humans, follow the logic of Trivers’ theory of parental investment and have higher variance in male reproduction, and therefore more intense competition among males as compared to females.

If so, why then has the opposite message — that these differences are either non-existent or solely the result of social construction — been so vehemently argued? The reason, I submit, is essentially political. The idea that any consequential differences between men and women have no foundation in biology has wide appeal because it fosters the illusion of control. If gender role “theories” are correct, then all we need to do to eliminate them is to modify the social environment (e.g., give kids gender-neutral toys, and the problem is solved). If, however, sex differences are hardwired into human nature, they will be more difficult to change.

Acknowledging the role of biology also opens the door to conceding the possibility that the existence of statistically unequal outcomes for men and women are not just something to be expected but may even be…desirable. Consider the so-called gender equality paradox whereby sex differences in personality and occupation are higher in countries with greater opportunities for women. Countries with the highest gender equality,24 such as Finland, have the lowest proportion of women who graduate college with degrees in stereotypically masculine STEM fields, while the least gender equal countries such as Saudi Arabia, have the highest. Similarly, the female-to-male sex ratio in stereotypically female occupations such nursing is 40 to 1 in Scandinavia, but only 2 to 1 in countries like Morocco.

The above numbers are consistent with cross-cultural research that indicates that women are, on average, more attracted to professions focused on people such as medicine and biology, while men are, again, on average, more attracted to professions focused on things such as mathematics and engineering. These findings are not a matter of dispute, but they are inconvenient for gender role theorists because they suggest that women and men have different preferences upon which they act when given the choice. Indeed, it is only a “paradox” if one assumes that sex is entirely socially constructed. As opportunities for women opened up in Europe and the United States in the sixties and seventies, employment outcomes changed rapidly. However, the proportions of men and women in various fields stabilized sometime around the early 1990s and have barely moved in the last thirty years. These findings imply that there is a limited capacity for outside interventions imposed from the top down to alter these behaviors.

In the cold logic of evolution, neither sex is, or can be, better or worse. Although this may not be the kind of equality some might want, we need to move beyond simplistic ideas of hierarchy.

It is understandable, however, for some to fear that any concession to nature will be used to justify and perpetuate bias and discrimination. Although arguments for why women should be prohibited from certain types of employment or why they should not be allowed to vote were ideological, sex differences have been used to justify a number of historical injustices. Still, is the fear of abuse so great that denying any biological sex differences is the only alternative?

The rhetorical contortions and inscrutable jargon required to assert that gender and sex are nothing more than chosen identities and deny what every parent knows require increasingly complex and incoherent arguments. This not only subverts the public’s rapidly waning confidence in science, but it also leads to extreme exaggerations designed to silence those who don’t agree, such as the claim that discussing biological differences is violence. The lengths to which many previously trusted institutions, such as the American Medical Association, go to deny the impact that hormones have on development are extraordinary. These efforts are also likely to backfire politically when gender-neutral terms are mandated by elites, such as the term “Latinx,” which is opposed by 98 percent of Hispanic Americans.

Acknowledging the existence of a biological basis for sex differences does not mean that we should accept unequal opportunities for men and women. Indeed, the crux of the problem lies in conflating equality with statistical identity and in our failure to respect and value difference. These differences should not be ranked in terms of inferior or superior, nor do they have any bearing on the worth or dignity of men and women as a group. They cannot be categorized as being either good or bad because it depends on which traits you want to optimize. This is real diversity that we should acknowledge and even celebrate.

Ever since the origin of sexual reproduction approximately two billion years ago, sexual selection, governed by an initial disparity in the size of the sex cells, has driven a cascade of differences, a few absolute, many more statistical, between males and females. As a result, men and women have been experiencing distinct evolutionary pressures. At the same time, however, this process has ruthlessly enforced an equality between the sexes, ensured by the fact that it takes one male and one female to reproduce, which guarantees the equal average reproduction of men and women. The production of sons and daughters, who inherit a near equal split of their parents’ genetic material, also demands that mothers and fathers contribute equally to their same- and their opposite-sex children. In the cold logic of evolution, neither sex is, or can be, better or worse. Although this may not be the kind of equality some might want, we need to move beyond simplistic ideas of hierarchy, naively confusing difference with claims of inferiority/superiority, or confusing dominance with power. In the currency of evolution, better just means more copies, dominance only matters if it leads to more offspring, and there are many paths to power.

The assertion that children are born without sex and are molded into gender roles by their parents is wildly implausible. It undermines what little public trust in science remains and delegitimizes other scientific claims. If we can’t be honest about something every parent knows, what else might we be lying about? Confusion about this issue leads to inane propositions, such as a pro-choice doctor testifying to Congress asserting that men can give birth. When people are shamed into silence about the obvious male advantages in almost all sports (but note women do as well or better in small bore rifle competition, and no man can match the flexibility of female gymnasts) and when transgender women compete in women’s sports, it endangers the vulnerable. When children are taught that all sex differences are entirely grounded in mere identity (whether self-chosen or culturally-imposed) and are in no way the result of biology, more “masculine” girls and more “feminine” boys may become confused about their sex, or sexual orientation, and harmful stereotypes can take over. The sudden rapid rise in the number of young girls diagnosed with gender dysphoria is a warning sign of how dangerously disoriented our culture can become.

Pathologizing gender nonconforming behavior often does the opposite of what proponents intend by creating stereotypes where none existed. Boys are told that if they like dolls, they are really girls trapped with male organs, while girls who display interests in sports or science are told they are boys trapped with female organs and born in the wrong body. Feminine boys, who might end up being homosexual, are encouraged to start down the road towards irreversible medical interventions, hormone blockers, and infertility. Like gay conversion therapy before, such practices can shame individuals for feeling misaligned with their birth sex and encourage them to resort to hormone “therapy” and/or surgery to change their bodies to reflect this new identity. Can that be truly seen as progressive and liberating?

The push for a biologically sexless society is an arrogant utopian vision that cuts us off from our evolutionary history, promotes the delusion that humans are not animals, and undercuts respecting each individual for their unique individuality. Sex is neither simply a matter of socialization, nor a personal choice. Making such assertions without understanding the profound role that an initial biological asymmetry in gamete size plays in sexual selection is neither scientific nor sensible. 

-

Robert Lynch is an evolutionary anthropologist at Penn State who specializes in how biology, the environment, and culture transact to shape life outcomes. His scientific research includes the effect of religious beliefs on social mobility, sex differences in social relationships, the impact of immigration on social capital, how social isolation can promote populism, and the evolutionary function of laughter.

==

I've said before that I learned more about evolution as a result of combatting evolution denial from the religious than I ever did at school. It's similarly true that I've learned more about sex, biology, chromosomes, genes and hormones as a result of the sex-denialism and anti-science attitudes of the gender cult.

[corin-tuckers-left-one]

Watching münecat's video essay on evolutionary psychology

Selection 👏 is 👏 not 👏 the 👏 only 👏 mechanism 👏 of 👏 evolution. Not to mention differing modes of selection or genetic hitchhiking (an allele that's physically close to another under positive selection can 'hitchhike' on the other, even if it has a detrimental effect, as long as the overall effect is to increase fitness).

Not every trait is even adaptive, nor are they necessarily completely genetically heritable (there's often an environmental component), and most are polygenic (the result of many genes interacting).

Obviously, there's a cultural and societal aspect to behaviour as well, but there's also the fact that evolutionary fitness depends on the environment, and the environment isn't constant. As the environment changes, what qualifies as 'fit' also changes, and for any selective pressure there will be multiple possible adaptations. The idea that a particular behaviour or preference is universally optimal is just laughable, let alone that it's even universal in the first place.

Anyway, evolutionary psychology radically misunderstands fundamental aspects of evolution and genetics and — at least if münecat's right, which she seems to be — is largely just confirmation bias from people intent on giving the appearance of academic rigour to their shitty misogynistic and racist worldviews.

[sleeplessphantom-0]

The timeline of biological evolution is crazy to my mind. The numbers for just developing an adaptation are so staggering that I can’t even fathom the depth of time a branching out species could take. All the while still living day by day like we do.

Shits wild

[factflick]

Chapters of Life - Evolution: From Chemistry to Complexity

Chapter 1: The Primordial Soup – Where It All Began Once upon a time, about 3.8 billion years ago, the Earth was a very different place. Volcanoes roared, oceans boiled, and the atmosphere was a cocktail of gases. In this seemingly inhospitable environment, a miraculous event occurred – the birth of life from non-life, a process known as abiogenesis. Picture a warm, shallow pool or a deep-sea…

[consuetudinari0]

The Role of Humans in Evolution

[ricisidro]

🦠 The Origin of the COVID-19 Pandemic

SARS-CoV-2 viruses circulate in the wild all over China. Viruses naturally jump species. It's part of the biological evolution.

Scientists released a pair of extensive studies Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, published in the New York Times on February 27, 2022.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/26/science/covid-virus-wuhan-origins.html

[mahdidarkdrop]

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin 🧬🦠🐟🦎🦡🐒🦍🧔👩⚕

#theoriginofspecies #charlesdarwin #evolution #theoryofevolution #biologicalevolution #🐟🦎🦡🐒🦍🧔👩⚕ #mahditamashii #mahdikhalwachi

[shushmal]

Eddie: Hey, Steve... Steve: Mmm? Eddie, slightly buzzed: What... What are we? Steve, high out of his goddamn mind, eyes filling with tears: Dude... Dude, I don't know?? Eddie: Wha— Steve: Dustin says we're monkeys, Eddie!! MONKEYS! What does that even mean???

[elbiotipo]

Finally read All Tomorrows last night and I know why people recommended it to me all the time, it was a very interesting piece of *biopunk* speculative evolution with a fascinating overarching story. It was also a breeze to read, I expected it would be long and a bit tiring (like Man After Man) but no, it was very illustrated and in fact it left you hungry for a bit more, I love the way it lets you fill in the gaps.

Of course, like always, it falls in the same old trope that biotechnology = bad and gross. It doesn't fall straight into saying biotechnology is evil, but the element of body horror is very, very, very much present in all the book. The fact that being warped into abominations is shown as the big event of human evolution reminds me of Man After Man, where "human evolution" doesn't occur "naturally" or as a result of, well, human selection, but as a result of a higher power messing with humans. All those strange beings we see in the book were not the ultimate result of environmental pressures, "artificial" selection or people bioengineering themselves. They were the result of fucked-up eldritch beings who wanted to make fucked-up humans. Which is kind of dissapointing if you are looking for a book that actually talks about future human evolution.

Which brings me to a discussion of the future of human evolution. Because, obviously, humans are evolving today. But I don't think we can see the real effect of biological evolution in the timescale we are managing as current humans. From a quick search, there have been only 500 generations since the arrival of agriculture and thus of all recorded or remembered history as we know it. That's not nearly enough biological time to see any major changes. Yes, there have been changes. And the development of human intelligence and brain size was quick and monumental, with many things we still don't really understand (like the origin of language and abstract thought). But do notice that the body plan of a modern human does not radically depart from Homo erectus, 2 million years ago.

Some authors like Olaf Stapledon (one of the great grandfathers of science fiction) in Last and First Men (which could be considered the 1930s version of All Tomorrows, in fact All Tomorrows to me is the modern Last and First Men) thought that we would continue to have evolutive pressures like natural selection and our species will continue evolving over millions of years. This is true as all species are still evolving including us, but in just a few decades we have discovered genetic engineering, and it won't be too long before, somehow, it is used in the path of our evolution. All Tomorrows of course talks about this with the Star People and later the Asteromorphs, but I believe it leaves out the prospect of humans guiding their own evolution for the (admitedly interesting) plot twist of the Qu changing them themselves.

What would have happened (or rather, what WILL happen) if humans are left to evolve by themselves? I'm sure that we will find somewhen. And I think that cosmetic genetic modification will be part of it, which is why I personally found the depiction of the Star People so boring. Now, I don't think every human will genetically modify themselves into supermodels, for starters, our parameters of attractiveness are based on culture and material conditions, and people will always seek variety, but I do think "sexual selection" would be a major part of human evolution, and that some forms like the Star People, as practical(?) as they are, just don't have the appeal. The utopia of the Star People should have been just as interesting as the dystopia of the Qu, with people experimenting new ways to adapt their bodies and self expression. Not to mention people adapting to the many strange environments of space by themselves (an old sci-fi trope). And of course, there would always be humans who don't want any of that, preferring to stay as they are, or return as they were. None, none of the Asteromorphs desired that at all?

Even in my own biopunk setting, however, the future of human evolution is something I only can see as far as a couple centuries on the future. Anything more than that, with the infinite possibilities of genetic engineering, makes me dizzy to contemplate. So I think All Tomorrows, for daring to do this billions of years in the future, is an amazing book.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[nochd]

This came across my dash via the #lgbt tag yesterday. I don't want to engage with the OP because that would get me into fights on radfem tumblr and I don't have the energy for that. But the post itself I think is worth answering, just because it's so neatly and exactly wrong.

(Not that my answer is going to spread very far, because I have 37 non-bot followers, of whom I think roughly 35.5 are just here for the nude photos. But anyway.)

Even if I agree just for argument's sake that the existence of intersex people proves that some people can have "nonbinary" sexes, or "third" sexes, and that "sex is a spectrum," how does that have any relevance to people who are not intersex? Like okay, let's "agree" for the moment that intersex people are something other than male or female. How does that make YOU, as a person who is not intersex, something other than male or female? Saying that intersex people's existence somehow makes sex "complicated" for you specifically is like saying that the issue of whether or not you can hear is "complicated" because some other people who are not you suffer from hearing loss or deafness. Like sorry but for 99% of the human population it is not "more complicated" than born with perfectly normal male genitalia = male and born with perfectly normal female genitalia = female, and chances are you fall into that 99%. Sex is not a social construct or a nebulous enigma of a concept. It is not debatable and made up in the manner that gender is. You cannot philosophize about whether there are two sexes any more than you can philosophize about whether humans have two kidneys. Someone having a missing or malformed kidney or accessory kidneys does not change the fact that humans as a species have two kidneys. Humans are gonochoric just like nearly all other animal species on Earth.

Let's start with the arithmetic. If 99% people are of binary sex, that leaves 1% of people who aren't. There are approximately 8 billion humans on Earth. 1% of 8 billion is 80 million -- about sixteen times the population of my entire country. Even just the number of intersex Americans is something like two-thirds the population of my country. This is not a negligible number of people.

There's a deeper error here, one that goes to the root not just of this misunderstanding but of many. Biology is always complicated, at every scale and at every level of explanation. It's messy, it's fuzzy, and it's always bottom-up, never top-down. Everything biological is the way it is because it grew that way. Biology never does the same thing twice.

Why does it seem like it does? Because, of all the ways you can arrange the parts of a living body, only an astonishingly tiny fraction of them actually make a living body. Any genetic mutation that nudges an organism outside of that fraction dies out and doesn't get passed on. Embryonic development is a gruelling tight-rope walk over a vast pit of non-existence.

Now for most of the body's systems, evolution has only had to produce one arrangement that works and survives. There's not an alternative plumbing plan where the oesophagus goes to the lungs and the trachea to the stomach. But for the reproductive system, evolution has to allow for two arrangements that work and survive, and it has to grow them both from the same starter kit.

What it does, therefore, is grow a body plan that works with a continuum of possible arrangements that includes both of those two. Various other points on the continuum may or may not be capable of producing viable gametes, but they're all survivable.

What biology doesn't do -- what biology never ever does -- is run new products on a conveyor belt stamping them into shape with cookie-cutters. The only things made that way are artificial constructs.

[holy-sturgeons]

Onwards to my next class. Now it's Biological Diversity, Ecology, and Evolution, which I'm actually really excited about. I picked the green sturgeon for my course project species and I'm thrilled to get to learn more about them during my research.

I had a long shift at work today so my energy for class work isn't great. I made potato and leek soup for dinner and added beech mushrooms, carrots, parsley, and thyme that we snagged from the farmer's market on Saturday.

Before settling into my note taking, I took a nice hot shower, washed my hair, and did a nice deep skin cleanse. I use a vitamin C + collagen cleanser, a cute Hello Kitty strawberry milk toner, and a divine little rosehip oil to finish it off. I'm using a carrot oil body butter, as well, that smells like mint and coconut so I just feel exquisite~ ✨🍵✨

[clannfearrunt]

hey, so you have both wild sharks and humanoid sharks. What does that imply with the shark taming aspect of Shiver's family? I understand that they probably don't try to tame sentient beings, but I'm just curious. Otherwise, I'm just going to assume they just take more aquatic sharks instead of land-going ones. Also I really like your shark designs! They're really cool! :D

First of all thank you! I'm glad people have been enjoying my beasts... I had fun with them :)

To answer your question first I have to. So while I held off for a long time because I wanted to keep my spec bio setting relatively grounded in some semblance of reality, due to EVENTS and FACTORS both related and unrelated to Return of Mammalians I merged my Splat Bio setting with my Kirby bullshit setting. Which doesn't matter to the Splatoon side of things much except for the very crucial detail of "magic is real, even if earthlings don't call it that". The really overt stuff is rare on Earth and most people don't know about it.

The respective families of Deep Cut are all on genuine, closely guarded wizard shit. The Hohojiro family has a long history with a Mysterious Fucking Thing that likes to take the shape of an aquatic shark. Every prospect for the head of the family has to tame this Fucking Thing to prove their skills. In the modern day "Master Mega" is more or less a family secret. Doing this has allowed me to avoid so much headache about Master Mega Logistics, in general, so while I still cringe slightly at the sentences I am typing this is for my own good. This option allows Master Mega to continue functioning mostly as he does, in the game. It's good for me,

On the more public facing side, the family has a long standing relationship with one of the local shark clans as well. It goes back longer than either party can really remember, nor do they have real records of what even started it, but they consider eachother close friends. In the past they also did some performances utilizing tame sharkbeasts, but probably not these days. Caring for largely carnivorous wild animals takes a lot of work and money and Legal Stuff that they don't quite have access to anymore (there are no domesticated sharkbeasts). In-universe languages probably have different words for animals sharks and Shark People, so there's probably less weirdness around the "shark tamer" thing as well anyways.

Anyways if you showed Master Mega to most people, or even the Shark clan the Hohojiros are friends with, they'd be like

[er-cryptid]

Kennewick Man

Patreon

[ambiguouspudding]

Redrew some old art

The original was supposed to be fanart of the worm people from all tomorrows, but lookin back I strayed quite a bit from the source