> and I am not quoting out of context
You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events. You can downvote me all you want, but I have actually read the article.
> and I am not quoting out of context
You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events. You can downvote me all you want, but I have actually read the article.
This is the paragraph. "As an example" here implies that they are talking about sports in general, not just endurance events.
Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best...
>> and I am not quoting out of context
> You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events.
No, it isn't. It's about sports, using ultra-endurance as an example. This is one of the cases where the example is the exception.
IOW, the quote uses an outlier to make claims about the distribution. This is, of course, from the same institution that claims using the word "normal" to describe a distribution is some sort of "-ist" (racist, sexist, whatever).
> Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game.
Emphasis mine.
> Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.
There are some pretty wild claims but overall, a fairly interesting article. I think they've just exaggerated an otherwise interesting point - that gender differences in hunting are not explained by differences in long-distance running aptitude (which are very small).
The examples of extant hunting techniques they themselves cited are not related to (ultra) long distance running anyway, so the connection between hunting and running is tenuous.
Jasmin Paris has won a fair number of extremely difficult ultras in mixed company, for example. Really long ultras are not an exclusively male domain. The marathon is if anything too short.
(Have a read about persistence hunting).
The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.
Persistence hunting is speculative as a guiding force in evolution. It is a very rare practice amongst modern hunter/gatherer and there's no archaeological evidence that it was common enough historically to be important.
Compare this to game drives/trapping which are both mentioned in this article and have significant archaeological and anthropological evidence.
I went and read it and it doesn't seem to matter to me that it's about ultra-endurance events? Of course differences in stride length and endurance physiology will matter for run performance.
The full paragraph:
>Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
To me both cultural and physiological differences are likely in play. I am not even sure how you could effectively seperate culture from physiology here (hard to do a randomised controlled trial on stride length - I guess Mendelian Randomisation regression might work?). Anyone confidently asserting only one or neither of these is at play is probably not stating that from a position of logic.
The claim that is being made in the article is that only cultural differences are relevant. Saying the relative effects of cultural and biological differences are hard to know would not be a very controversial statement.
Yes, which is why I am happy to state it having not read that deeply into the evidence either way. I would argue that stating "Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences" is a very strong statement that the scientific consensus has many counter-factuals available to disprove.
They even cite physiological differences themselves extensively (namely the role estrogen).
Quite so. These guys are dissing the article without reading it, and all they have is argument by ridicule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule) ... no refutation of any sort.
And of course what they are talking about has nothing to do the criticism in TFA, which they also haven't read.
Even so... in ultra-endurance sports, do women actually dominate? I'm willing to believe it, but not without some statistics.