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RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: MrMind 13 July 2015 06:55AM

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Comment author: Salemicus 13 July 2015 02:57:58PM 5 points [-]

Woman is the biological default. That's why women have redundancy on the 23rd chromosomal pair, whereas men have a special "Y" chromosome - leading to much higher rates of genetic disorders in men. That's why in infant male humans, the testicles have to descend. And so on. Both from an encoding and from a developmental point of view, a man is a woman altered to be masculine. And testosterone is what does that altering.

Yes, it could have been different. We can imagine a species with a neutral default, which then gets altered to be either masculine or feminine by different sex-encoding hormones. But that's not how humans came about.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 13 July 2015 04:22:06PM 3 points [-]

a man is a woman altered to be masculine

You could with equal sense (i.e. very little) summarise the same empirical observations as "a woman is an incompletely developed man."

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 14 July 2015 09:22:59PM 2 points [-]

No quite because 'development' at least suggests that the change happens 'later'.