So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones.
Sex hormones are actually a huge factor in human developmental biology and the interaction with genes is interesting; the overall contribution of chromosomal differentiation to sex differentiation is pretty minor in humans (note that this is not a generalizable statement about other living things; birds might be considered to have rather more definitively-linked chromosomal sex traits, and some species don't depend on chromosome structure directly, often using outside factors like temperature during development to influence this). Trivial example: this is why when a person assigned male at birth doses with exogenous estrogen during puberty, their breast development will tend to resemble that female-assigned relatives -- testosterone vs oestrogen during the pubescent phase is the big regulator of mammary tissue growth and clustering sites for subcutaneous fat; genetics influences the potential range of that growth.
Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other species, people still notice that women have these skills somewhat better than men.
Yes, but why? There's not a gene for verbal skills; there's not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about -- Broca's area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it's possible -- but that idea isn't particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait. So a well-reasoned evolutionary scenario, no matter how compelling it might sound, shouldn't be taken as a firm foundation on which to start making overconfident, connotationally-loaded statements like that and then billing them as science.
...Yes, but why? There's not a gene for verbal skills; there's not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about -- Broca's area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it's possible -- but that idea isn't particularly rigorously-supported by the available evide
I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.
Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed. and others...
But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.
How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.
But will the scientific community pull it off?
Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8