Gender Roles

[Bomb#20]

I'd rather not continue this particular line if discussion. ...
What policy makers? Aren't you all for individual businesses deciding for themselves, within the law, how to best accommodate their customers?

Those sentences really don't go together.

No, of course I'm not. That would imply that back in the days when catering to your racist customers' prejudices by excluding blacks was a common thing, it was the right thing to do, And it would imply that today businesses should knuckle under to the "heckler's veto", and should resolve social disputes in favor of whichever side is most stubborn.

You appear to have taken me for a libertarian. I'm an infidel. I'm against all religions, not just those of the left. What Wilson said about communism -- "Great theory, wrong species." -- is equally true of libertarianism.

See above - I've never heard a feminist critique of non-segregated restrooms in those places were they always existed, why would it become a feminist issue when a few more places decide to have them?

Um, because taking things away from people riles them up more than having grown up accustomed to never having had them.

So you're proposing to go back to an idealised past 'when the men using women's rooms were pre-op transsexuals fulfilling their "live as a woman for a year" requirement', and insinuating that my preferred solution involves "every non-op man who self-IDs as gender dysphoric" going to the ladies' room? I don't know where you're getting that from.

I didn't say that was your preferred solution; I said that was the problem created by the progressives' having been put in charge of this issue, and that I don't think most American women think doors are an adequate solution to it.

We wouldn't be having this argument if all that Emily or others in that camp demanded was that people with gender dysphoria only known to those they share it with, who would be inconspicuous as cis-males, better use the men's - that's exactly my position! I think I specifically said that, to the extent this needs to be regulated at all, the relevant bisection should be "go wherever you'll cause the least fuss". I was talking about people using HRT or (not fully passing) post-ops individuals or people with partial androgen insensitivity. People who wouldn't easily pass for cis-women when you look closely but who'd arguably stand out more in a group of typical cis-males. Saying "the women's is for women only, and women are people with a uterus and a vagina" which seems to be Emily's position, would have them sent to the men's, and saying that's not an optimal solution implies nothing about where merely self-ID'd transwomen should go.

Sorry, trying not to continue this particular line of discussion beyond answering your questions, but I can't let that stand. What you say "seems to be Emily's position" is not Emily's position.

I will say, however, that what you're saying did apply to Emily, mutatis mutandi as the Romans say: if allowing people who are not unambiguously women into the ladies' causes discomfort or reduces the feeling of safety of some cis women, send those weirdos to the gents' and everyone else and their needs can ....

False dilemma fallacy. You talk as though "people who are not unambiguously women" are interchangeable parts and we have no option for dealing with their needs other than one-size-fits-all.

I don't know where you're getting that from. Can you elaborate?

From "if allowing people who are not unambiguously women into the ladies' causes discomfort or reduces the feeling of safety of some cis women, send those weirdos to the gents'". We could consider each different category of people who are not unambiguously women on a case-by-case basis, do some sort of cost/benefit analysis of how much each sort causes discomfort or reduces the feeling of safety of some women and their actual safety and what the consequences are of sending them to the gents', and poll women as to which weirdoes they want to let into the ladies' and which they want to send to the gents'.

We men are perfectly capable of letting women tell us which classes of "people who are not unambiguously women" they want to let into the ladies' rooms and which they want to send to the gents'. But taking instructions from women seems to be an affront to our masculinity.

Emily isn't "women". Emily is Emily. There sure are other women you think like Emily, but neither of us knows how numerous they are and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

Give it a rest. I pretended no such thing. Conducting polls would be perfectly reasonable way to find out how numerous they are.

Are we talking about giving up sex/ gender segregated restrooms, or are we talking about letting (some) trans women into the ladies'?

Both. My expectation is that in the absence of an explicit social choice, the common social practice of letting the most stubborn group win is going to lead to public facilities and businesses choosing to abandon sexed facilities in the hope of just making the issue go away, solving their own problems by throwing their female clientele under the bus.

Whether the do-least-harm solution is sending trans women and people with partial androgen insensitivity to the ladies, or to the gents, or letting them pick based on their individual experience of where they are most welcome, or forcing them into a life or seclusion by barring them from both its an empirical question. Whether we care about them enough to implement measures that will make their life (much) better even if they make other people's life a little worse is a political question. The answer tu neither is fully determined by our understanding of the biology of sex - which I personally find is great because it allows us to discuss the matter as a apolitical one even if we disagree about the peripherally related political questions.

"Make other people's lives a little worse". Belittling the harm to the people you propose to throw under the bus is rarely a sign that you're achieving the do-least-harm solution. Girls are skipping school, or dehydrating themselves, to avoid having to use the boys' rooms now labeled "gender neutral", but it's boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with, who are "forced into a life of seclusion".

If you remember any place I talked about "typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with", I'd appreciate a link or quote.

Sure thing: see above, where you said "trans women". That category includes "boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with"; ergo, you were talking about them. I have issues with your rhetoric.

I also wonder whether you have any reason to believe that "girls skipping school, or dehydrating themselves" to avoid sharing a restroom with 3 individuals out of 1000 pupils who self-ID as girls though you wouldn't guess is a thing that exists in the presence of doors anywhere in the world.

The cases of this that I've read about are all in the U.S., true, so they no doubt didn't have proper doors. But I remain skeptical that doors are enough to make other countries' schoolgirls' reactions all that different from America's'.

 

[Janice Rael]

oh jeez.

"I have not rejected any claims of trauma, nor have I in any way at all asked for any details of trauma,"

Really? Not asking is the rejection.

 

[Jokodo]

Whether the do-least-harm solution is sending trans women and people with partial androgen insensitivity to the ladies, or to the gents, or letting them pick based on their individual experience of where they are most welcome, or forcing them into a life or seclusion by barring them from both its an empirical question. Whether we care about them enough to implement measures that will make their life (much) better even if they make other people's life a little worse is a political question. The answer tu neither is fully determined by our understanding of the biology of sex - which I personally find is great because it allows us to discuss the matter as a apolitical one even if we disagree about the peripherally related political questions.

"Make other people's lives a little worse". Belittling the harm to the people you propose to throw under the bus is rarely a sign that you're achieving the do-least-harm solution. Girls are skipping school, or dehydrating themselves, to avoid having to use the boys' rooms now labeled "gender neutral", but it's boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with, who are "forced into a life of seclusion".

If you remember any place I talked about "typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with", I'd appreciate a link or quote.

Sure thing: see above, where you said "trans women". That category includes "boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with"; ergo, you were talking about them. I have issues with your rhetoric.

I was talking about some trans women, in a context where I argued they're threatened at the gents' more than they could ever pose a threat at the ladies', and mentioning them in the same sentence as "people with partial androgen insensitivity". In other places, I've specifically said that the optimal bisection needs to be determined in a case by case basis, and that, to the extent this needs legislation at all, the optimal bisection for bathrooms is probably something along the lines of "go wherever you'll cause the least fuss". I have given no indication that I find the category of "trans women" as currently applied particularly useful. It should be clear from context that the "(some) trans women" I talked about are people that are readily distinguished from typical cis males, even if they may not be easily mistaken for cis females when looking closely, and do not include "boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with". Sorry if that was unclear to you, but I still don't think it should be if you include the context of the conversation and everything else I've said.

 

[Bomb#20]

If you believe that development has anything other than a sociological explanation, ie that "criminal genes" were bred out of the Irish and Jewish gene pools within a mere couple of generations, I want to see your math to show that's even remotely plausible!

There are no differences between any two groups of people, except how others treat them, and their DNA? Our lineage abandoned that whole ill-conceived abortive flirtation with "culture" when we split off from the other great apes?

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of, and I believe I've implied as much in this thread when talking about sexual orientation.

My point exactly -- I was being sarcastic. You appeared to be leaving the third possibility of internal cultural change out of your dilemma horns.

We were however discussing biology. I claimed that it is biologically plausible that otherwise male individuals with biologically female cognition (to the extent that that's a meaningful concept) exist at rates well above what one might expect from the known, more easily determined, rates of other types of mismatched phenotypes. To which you raised as a counterargument that apparently crime statistics show transwomen as perpetrators at rates more similar to cis males than to cis females. This is a valid counterargument only insofar as transwomen's crime rates relative to those other groups are largely caused by biology.

What's your point? Are you suggesting that when the statistical difference in a trait between groups A and B is due to genetic differences, it's valid to infer that the statistical difference in that trait between groups C and D is also due to genetic differences? Yes, people make that inference all the time (witness every discussion of heritability of IQ ever), but it's a fallacy.

(Also, nitpick: we never split off from "the other great apes". We split off from panini (like the Italian bread, indeed), that is the lineage that would become chimps and bonobos; the other other great apes had split off long before that.

Of course we split off from the other great apes; that they'd split off from one another first doesn't change that. I suppose if I said I broke a twig off a tree you'd "correct" me that I'd broken it off a branch of the tree. A branch of a tree is still part of the tree. Cladists need to get over themselves. They have a dialect, not a privileged insight into reality.

That might actually be more relevant than it seems at first sight, especially when talking gender, sex, and sexual behaviour, areas in which humans and bonobos are both pretty weird in their own, but overlapping, ways: even if chimps are more of a standard ape than either of us, parsimony doesn't dictate that it's more likely we evolved the trait separately. Humans and bonobos independently switching to state B from an ancestral state A preserved in chimps and shared with orangs and gorillas requires no fewer steps than chimps reverting to state A from an LCA that was more human and bonobo like.)

Hmm. That depends on the extent to which "state B" is really a state, rather than two states we aren't taking care to distinguish. In any event, since our lineage didn't actually abandon culture and all the great apes have it, states A and B don't appear to bear on the argument that transwomen probably commit crimes at male rates due to marginalization. If I'm missing some subtlety here, it would probably help if you elaborated on what states A and B are,

 

[Elixir]

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of

What about ants?
Sorry, never mind, carry on.

 

[Bomb#20]

I said that, to the extent that "biologically female cognition" is a meaningful concept, which I find a highly debatable notion,

Every notion in science is debatable -- that's kind of the difference between faith and science -- but if you mean you find it unlikely to be correct, that strikes me as a reversion to pre-Copernican attitudes of human centrality. "Biologically female cognition" is a perfectly meaningful concept in lions, in ducks, in alligators, in lemurs, in baboons, in gorillas. Why the heck would it suddenly stop being meaningful in humans? The opinion that it isn't meaningful in humans appears to be a politically motivated meme.

it is biologically plausible that otherwise male individuals with a "biologically female cognition" exist at rates well above more visible intersex conditions and make up a significant share of the m2f transgendered community. To this, @Bomb#20 (not me) raised the objection that crime rates among m2f transgendered individuals seem to suggest otherwise. My objection to his objection is that it seems to have the hidden premise that crime rates among transgender identified males are the same as those of other males because of "biology", a premise I don't think we can take for granted because there are other things that aren't equal between the two groups, some if which are independently known to affect crime rates.

Not asking you to take it for granted, just to be realistic about your Bayesian prior for the hypothesis. We see higher rates of male than female violence all over the simian clade. In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, biology is the more parsimonious explanation.

 

[Bomb#20]

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of

What about ants?
Sorry, never mind, carry on.

Oh, I can think of an extant species more shaped by culture than humans were...

 

[Jokodo]

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of

What about ants?
Sorry, never mind, carry on.

Oh, I can think of an extant species more shaped by culture than humans were...

By *human* culture...

 

[Bomb#20]

Emily isn't "women". Emily is Emily. There sure are other women you think like Emily, but neither of us knows how numerous they are and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

Emily is rather tired of men telling women what women should be happy with, rather than actually granting us the basic humanity of forming our own opinions without male oversight.

I'm seeing a lot of different positions among women in discussions like this, including in this thread. I'm also seeing a lot of men who are quite vocal in the "keep the trannies out" camp, some of them with a history of advocating strongly anti-feminist positions on other topics. Painting this as an issue where (all or nearly all) want one thing and men push against them is either naive or dishonest.

I wasn't speaking as if this is a universal issue. Note that I said I was tired of it. I suppose that me referring to myself in the third person was confusing, but I really thought it was pretty clear.

Maybe you weren't. Bomb was.

I thought I'd repeatedly made it clear I'm not in the "keep the trannies out" camp but the "respect women's preferences" camp, and that I was reporting the preferences of the women who've shared their opinions with me. To whatever extent women want to let the people you call "trannies" in, they have my blessing. If the women in my monkeysphere are an atypical minority and most women are less upset by self-ID practices than the ones I know, so be it -- my friends don't own the world's ladies' rooms -- but I will not take any man's word for it that that is the case.

As far as "a history of advocating strongly anti-feminist positions on other topics", if you're talking about me, I don't know what history or positions you're referring to. It's true I'm not a feminist, but let me be very clear on that point. In my long-ago formative youth, there wasn't yet any "feminism" in the general meme-scape; there was just women's liberation. Likewise, there weren't any "sexists", just male chauvinist pigs, nor "racists", just bigots. It was a saner time. This modern insistence on turning everything and its brother into an "ism" is a pathology. I am absolutely a women's-libber. If you think I have a history of advocating strongly anti-women's-lib positions on any topic, show your work.

 

[Politesse]

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of

What about ants?
Sorry, never mind, carry on.

Culture is minimally defined as a recognizeable pattern of learned, shared behavior. Ants meet two of those criteria, but not the third.

 

[Jarhyn]

I thought I'd repeatedly made it clear I'm not in the "keep the trannies out" camp but the "respect women's preferences"

By deciding to side with specific women over other women, to the extent you decide some of those women must be kept out of womanhood, you very much are in the "keep the trannies out" camp.

Trans women ARE women, and YOU are making the decision here to exclude them, as is Emily, when other women decide abjectly differently.

Of course, the whole point was to "divide" feminism itself on the fracture point of radical misandry here so that feminists would be weakened, and the side that wants this happens to be the side most intent on seeing trans women excluded... Strange how that works out.

 

[Bomb#20]

Clearly, as more than one person has observed, you HAVE.

Clearly, proof-by-capitalization and proof-by-two-people-agreeing are invalid argument forms.

I thought I'd repeatedly made it clear I'm not in the "keep the trannies out" camp but the "respect women's preferences" camp,

By deciding to side with specific women over other women, to the extent you decide some of those women must be kept out of womanhood, you very much are in the "keep the trannies out" camp.

Trans women ARE women, and YOU are making the decision here to exclude them, <snip>

If you have a scientific argument for that contention you'd like to share with us, knock yourself out. If all you have is a shift-key, pressing it over and over is unlikely to stop anyone from perceiving the contention as a religious doctrine.

 

[Jarhyn]

Clearly, as more than one person has observed, you HAVE.

Clearly, proof-by-capitalization and proof-by-two-people-agreeing are invalid argument forms.

I thought I'd repeatedly made it clear I'm not in the "keep the trannies out" camp but the "respect women's preferences" camp,

By deciding to side with specific women over other women, to the extent you decide some of those women must be kept out of womanhood, you very much are in the "keep the trannies out" camp.

Trans women ARE women, and YOU are making the decision here to exclude them, <snip>

If you have a scientific argument for that contention you'd like to share with us, knock yourself out. If all you have is a shift-key, pressing it over and over is unlikely to stop anyone from perceiving the contention as a religious doctrine.

As I've said, and we've gone around this circle of yours more than once: "woman" is a social construct so your demand for science outside the realm of sociology is not warranted.

The nature of social concepts is that they are given only and exactly as much power as people give them investiture: People deciding between themselves what woman is decides what a woman is. That's how it works.

So you deciding which people who identify as "women" are "women" means you are in the act of making that decision.

That's how social concepts work. It's fucking basic sociology. It's the sociological equivalent of the mathematical theorem of arithmetic.

As Jokodo has discussed here, and I discussed in the last 15 threads on the topic, this basic social concept is not sufficient as a dividing line for a vast array of purposes including but not limited to bathrooms, prisons, or sports, and because individual decisions generate such social concepts, they cannot be solidly defined.

I have presented things that can be solidly defined, but none of these are exactly "man" or "woman"; and "male" and "female", while solidly defined, are defined solidly only as imaginary statistical objects, and in different ways among different fields of inquiry even as such.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Clearly, as more than one person has observed, you HAVE.

Clearly, proof-by-capitalization and proof-by-two-people-agreeing are invalid argument forms.

I thought I'd repeatedly made it clear I'm not in the "keep the trannies out" camp but the "respect women's preferences" camp,

By deciding to side with specific women over other women, to the extent you decide some of those women must be kept out of womanhood, you very much are in the "keep the trannies out" camp.

Trans women ARE women, and YOU are making the decision here to exclude them, <snip>

If you have a scientific argument for that contention you'd like to share with us, knock yourself out. If all you have is a shift-key, pressing it over and over is unlikely to stop anyone from perceiving the contention as a religious doctrine.

I guess we ought to just ignore all culture then, it's all made up anyway, even the concept of money. But that's not how human societies work. There are made up cultural concepts everywhere and that doesn't make them a "religious doctrine". In fact I would even argue your position is more akin to when religious people try to deny atheists are atheists.

 

[Jokodo]

I said pretty explicitly I'm only speaking for myself. But so are you. I have no idea whether there's a cultural difference between Austria and Yankistan in 2024 in terms of what does or doesn't constitute a definite turn-off for a typical heterosexual male, I've no idea how typical my reaction is for Austria, and I don't think you have good grounds to claim to know how typical your reaction is for America.

Fair enough.

What I do know is this: the reactions, whether in Austria or in the US, are strongly modulated by culture. "Heterosexuality" in an invention of the late 19th century, and was invented after "homosexuality". That's trivially true when talking lexicology, but I believe it may well be true in a deeper sense. Throughout much of Western history, sex with women vs sex with men was a bit like whiskey and gin to us. Some people like one more, some people the other. Men tend to like whiskey more, but when they feel they really need a shot and there's no whiskey in the house, many (most?) will take gin. Sure, some will go without their goodnight shot if there's only gin, but even those you won't hear saying "I can't, I'm not one of those pervy gin-drinkers."

You say that like Western culture was tolerant until homosexuality was "invented". I can't speak for Austria, but it was very much the other way around in the English-speaking world. The "invention" of homosexuality was part and parcel with the entire culture-wide change of thinking we call the Enlightenment. Prior to that, gay sex was defined as a sin against God and a crime against the State. People were assumed to do it because they'd chosen to be wicked. The American colonies inherited laws against "sodomy" from Britain, and people were executed for it; during the American Revolution Thomas Jefferson tried to get the penalty reduced in Virginia but failed to convince the legislature; states didn't start repealing the death penalty until several years after independence. Back in Britain people still got hanged for it into the 1830s.

A lot of things were or are sins against God, or the Gods. Depending on time and place, these might include: eating beef/pork, getting your hands dirty on a Sunday/Saturday, taking off/not taking off your shoes/hat when entering certain buildings, wearing clothes that don't cover your ankles as a woman, or speaking any language other than Latin and Greek in church. People have been killed by mobs or sentenced to death by a formal court for each of these; people are being killed for most of these in 2024 in some places. The righteous who thought these offences worthy of death, however, didn't conceive them as something normal people are repelled by, that only weirdos works ever think of doing. I don't know about Southern Baptists and Anglicans (or Jews, Muslims, Hindus), but in Roman Catholicism, it is kind of a central tenet that every person is a potential sinner and resisting Sin is constant labour. The idea that only Gay People are tempted by gay sex is not a natural fit to that ideology. What makes a good man good, in a traditional Catholic worldview, isn't that he's straight, but that he has the strength to resist whatever hot ass the devil may throw his way!

"Inventing" homosexuality amounted to belatedly recognizing that same-sex attraction isn't a choice. Medicalizing it was progress.

Saying that homosexuality and heterosexuality as binary categories (with a small number of in-betweens that are more perverted than both of them put together) is a modern fiction doesn't imply that the real life consequences of that fiction for people with predominant same-sex attraction are worse than those of the premodern fiction that same-sex acts are a sin against God.

This is presumably the same nonmagical mechanism that would make the person not going to be your first choice for a long term relationship. If it doesn't equally scrub your interest in a one-night-stand, that would appear to be because you're a swinger, not because you're het.

i have no idea what gave you the impression I'm a swinger.

Sorry, no offense intended; maybe I perceive the category too broadly due to being a square; but I got that impression from the implication that you'd have sex with someone you didn't want a long-term relationship with.

Most het males are not into ass stuff and doing strap-on stuff and liking it.

I'll give you strap-on stuff, maybe, but I'd be very surprised indeed to learn that it's true in any interesting sense for ass stuff. This is an area where anything relying on self- reporting needs to be taken with a huge gain of salt. When asked about what arouses them, people will invariably report a mix of what actually arouses them and what they feel they should be aroused by, given that they're het and all. That includes conversations with close friends. Heck, it even includes what people about to themselves!

Fair point.

The most valid kind of data would be measurements of physiological correlates under conditions of various stimuli types, but there's still the question of interpretation: if a heterosexual male is aroused by depictions if anal sex, how do we know whether he's aroused by the penis-in-anus, or by the hot ass itself? There is, however, an experiment you can do at home: open any mainstream porn site in a private tab. I bet you a crate of beers, or whatever it is they use in informal bets in post-prohibitionist Yankistan (it's def a crate of beers in Austria, 20×0.5l in refundable glass bottles to be precise), that among the first 20 suggestions on the landing page, 5 or more videos will include anal sex.

This doesn't show most heterosexual men are into ass stuff. It does however show tat among those that aren't, few are turned off by it, or else those sites would be chasing away much of their most numerous consumer demographic.

Hmm. Do those sites indicate that they're ass videos before the client watches them? If a site doesn't make a customer actually watch the ass stuff in the process of searching for whatever stuff excites him I'd be surprised if its mere appearance in a list of options would turn off the customer enough to make him lose interest in whatever he came looking for.

If you look closely, you'll probably find some indication in the tags, but I don't think it's always made very obvious.

 

[Jokodo]

Emily isn't "women". Emily is Emily. There sure are other women you think like Emily, but neither of us knows how numerous they are and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

Emily is rather tired of men telling women what women should be happy with, rather than actually granting us the basic humanity of forming our own opinions without male oversight.

I'm seeing a lot of different positions among women in discussions like this, including in this thread. I'm also seeing a lot of men who are quite vocal in the "keep the trannies out" camp, some of them with a history of advocating strongly anti-feminist positions on other topics. Painting this as an issue where (all or nearly all) want one thing and men push against them is either naive or dishonest.

I wasn't speaking as if this is a universal issue. Note that I said I was tired of it. I suppose that me referring to myself in the third person was confusing, but I really thought it was pretty clear.

Maybe you weren't. Bomb was.

I thought I'd repeatedly made it clear I'm not in the "keep the trannies out" camp but the "respect women's preferences" camp, and that I was reporting the preferences of the women who've shared their opinions with me. To whatever extent women want to let the people you call "trannies" in, they have my blessing. If the women in my monkeysphere are an atypical minority and most women are less upset by self-ID practices than the ones I know, so be it -- my friends don't own the world's ladies' rooms -- but I will not take any man's word for it that that is the case.

As far as "a history of advocating strongly anti-feminist positions on other topics", if you're talking about me, I don't know what history or positions you're referring to. It's true I'm not a feminist, but let me be very clear on that point. In my long-ago formative youth, there wasn't yet any "feminism" in the general meme-scape; there was just women's liberation. Likewise, there weren't any "sexists", just male chauvinist pigs, nor "racists", just bigots. It was a saner time. This modern insistence on turning everything and its brother into an "ism" is a pathology. I am absolutely a women's-libber. If you think I have a history of advocating strongly anti-women's-lib positions on any topic, show your work.

I wasn't referring to you there. The "in this thread" qualifier was attached to "women with different positions", not to "men with a history of advocating strongly anti-feminist positions", those are only claimed to live "in discussions like this". We've had a handful of posters who regularly started threads with the general tone of "feminists bad bad" over in PD but would go all feminist when talking about Muslims and trans people. Not sure if they're still active, I avoid that place.

 

[Elixir]

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of

What about ants?
Sorry, never mind, carry on.

Culture is minimally defined as a recognizeable pattern of learned, shared behavior. Ants meet two of those criteria, but not the third.

Huh?
* recognizable, check
* shared, check
* learned? Hmm. Now we could get into what is learned, what is learnable and what is not. I could try to make a case either way. Not just for ants, but for humans.

 

[Politesse]

* learned? Hmm. Now we could get into what is learned, what is learnable and what is not. I could try to make a case either way. Not just for ants, but for humans.

There is no evidence of ants learning anything, and not because the issue was never studied.

 

[Elixir]

* learned? Hmm. Now we could get into what is learned, what is learnable and what is not. I could try to make a case either way. Not just for ants, but for humans.

There is no evidence of ants learning anything, and not because the issue was never studied.

The scope of their capabilities changes over time once they are hatched. Just like humans.

 

[Politesse]

* learned? Hmm. Now we could get into what is learned, what is learnable and what is not. I could try to make a case either way. Not just for ants, but for humans.

There is no evidence of ants learning anything, and not because the issue was never studied.

The scope of their capabilities changes over time once they are hatched. Just like humans.

This is simply incorrect. Ants do not learn new patterns of behavior from other ants over their lifetime. They do have some interesting "learning-proximate" behaviors, like budding (using a series of changing pheremone trails to "teach" another ant to avoid one trail in favor of another). But no information is actually being transferred in this exchange as you would see happen among primates, ceteceans, corvids, and other organisms with true cultures.