The Observing Self vs The Thinking Self

[Jokodo]

I agree. By 'immediate' I more meant that the observing self is a scanner of the here and now, the present, what's happening around us. While the thinking self is a scanner of our internal memory. To literally solve problems both are needed, but the observing self is what notices that problems in our immediate environment exist.



Perhaps. In the original post I certainly wasn't claiming that this was true, rather just posing it as a question.

I do wonder how central the 'watchful eye' on children has been for the evolution of women, though. I mean, in some respect keeping your children alive is the fundamental task of a family. A man can bring home hundreds of lbs of bison, but if the child's died it's all for naught.

Again.. I'm not claiming this is true, just posing it as a question for discussion..

But keep in mind that males don't spend most of their time away from their mate and children. If they did, then other males and predators would take their mates and children. So, males spent time not only keeping a watchful eye for threats to their kids but to their mates, and the latter probably moreso than females were concerned about threats to their mates (b/c finding another male with available sperm is far easier than finding a female with an available womb).

There are just too many variables at play to have any confidence in these speculations. It's a fun way to pass the time over drinks, but it isn't science, it's story telling. On rare occasions, there are ways to test competing stories with current empirical data, then it becomes science. One of the best examples I have seen of this is this paper where they use data on phylogenetic trees, the related of various species, and when in evolution they are thought to have a shared ancestor to test competing theories about what function "romantic" pair bonding between adults (males and females in a long term relationship). By looking at how other various traits (immaturity at birth, whether the male provides parental care) covary with pair bonding across species and how those species relate to each other in the phylogenetic tree they could test the plausibility of models which assume which traits preceded others in evolution and thus which are plausible functional relationships between traits and which are merely a incidental.

I agree, that's the why of the thread, passing the time and if someone cares to make a thoughtful post, that's great. If I didn't have an unending list of things to do in both my personal and professional life I might even take a look for evidence on Google Scholar.

Maybe that's exactly what you should be doing instead of wasting our time too.

 

[Jokodo]

What we should complain about is that the question is not yet properly investigated by science, if indeed it isn't.
EB

if indeed it isn't.

if indeed it isn't.

if indeed it isn't.

Yes?
EB

Sure, you used guarded language. Yet the bulk of your post rests on the premise that it isn't.

 

[rousseau]

I agree, that's the why of the thread, passing the time and if someone cares to make a thoughtful post, that's great. If I didn't have an unending list of things to do in both my personal and professional life I might even take a look for evidence on Google Scholar.

Maybe that's exactly what you should be doing instead of wasting our time too.

Going to try to respond to you thoughtfully without inflaming further. Will probably fail.

We're on a dying message board. No one makes threads except in the politics forum, where for some reason we're still talking about whether men or women are better at sewing. Most threads that are made get minimal to no replies, except when it's American politics. We're on a dying message board. Conversation and thread making should be prized.

And as much as I would love to spend many hours carefully researching a thread subject that I'll probably gain nothing of value out of anyway (really, I actually would), I just don't have the time, so this is what you get. Beyond that, if my threads are a waste of your time you can not click on them, or respond to them. That's not sarcasm, that's a genuine suggestion. If my threads cause you frustration, then put me on ignore.

 

[Treedbear]

I agree, that's the why of the thread, passing the time and if someone cares to make a thoughtful post, that's great. If I didn't have an unending list of things to do in both my personal and professional life I might even take a look for evidence on Google Scholar.

Maybe that's exactly what you should be doing instead of wasting our time too.

Going to try to respond to you thoughtfully without inflaming further. Will probably fail.

We're on a dying message board. No one makes threads except in the politics forum, where for some reason we're still talking about whether men or women are better at sewing. Most threads that are made get minimal to no replies, except when it's American politics. We're on a dying message board. Conversation and thread making should be prized.

And as much as I would love to spend many hours carefully researching a thread subject that I'll probably gain nothing of value out of anyway (really, I actually would), I just don't have the time, so this is what you get. Beyond that, if my threads are a waste of your time you can not click on them, or respond to them. That's not sarcasm, that's a genuine suggestion. If my threads cause you frustration, then put me on ignore.

Personally I can't imagine what he means by "our time". Seems rather presumptuous.

 

[Speakpigeon]

What we should complain about is that the question is not yet properly investigated by science, if indeed it isn't.
EB

if indeed it isn't.

if indeed it isn't.

if indeed it isn't.

Yes?
EB

Sure, you used guarded language. Yet the bulk of your post rests on the premise that it isn't.

Factually incorrect.

The bulk of my post clearly rests on my personal experience, as described, not on whatever science does or doesn't do.

Two sentences, made hypothetical by my last remark.

Check for yourself. Read my post.

According to my own observations, thinking puts you in a sort of "mental mode" whereby your brain shuts off not only perception of most of your environment but also the usual range of the impressions you would normally have about it when you are not busy thinking.

This suggests that the brain will somehow prioritise to some extent thinking over you paying attention to your environment.

However, the brain clearly "keeps an eye" on your immediate environment all along and will interrupt your thinking if ever any unusual event should take place. The same prioritisation takes place for example when you are asleep, your brain shutting off not only your perception of your environment but also that of your own body, and even shutting off your ability to control your body, most of the time at least.

Thinking is therefore best understood as an evolutionary advantage, as seems pretty obvious. Yet, thinking can get you killed, so there has to be a trade-off between a limited number of casualties, fallen in the act of thinking, and the more general benefit of having individuals improving their own prospect for survival by thinking things through before action, and indeed improving the survival prospect of their community.

I would have though this mechanism to be worthy of a scientific study. It is indeed one of the most important aspect of our psychology. It is the one aspect that underpins and defines what it is to be human. I would guess all animal species with a brain do it, but obviously only to a much smaller extent.

It is again noteworthy that our social life allows and indeed discriminate in favour of having many people spending their professional life essentially devoted to thinking rather than acting. Surely, there has to be a reason?

And yet again, you have the usual hardcore materialist and pseudo-science crowd complaining. What we should complain about is that the question is not yet properly investigated by science, if indeed it isn't.

EB

 

[Jokodo]

I agree, that's the why of the thread, passing the time and if someone cares to make a thoughtful post, that's great. If I didn't have an unending list of things to do in both my personal and professional life I might even take a look for evidence on Google Scholar.

Maybe that's exactly what you should be doing instead of wasting our time too.

Going to try to respond to you thoughtfully without inflaming further. Will probably fail.

We're on a dying message board. No one makes threads except in the politics forum, where for some reason we're still talking about whether men or women are better at sewing. Most threads that are made get minimal to no replies, except when it's American politics. We're on a dying message board. Conversation and thread making should be prized.

And as much as I would love to spend many hours carefully researching a thread subject that I'll probably gain nothing of value out of anyway (really, I actually would), I just don't have the time, so this is what you get. Beyond that, if my threads are a waste of your time you can not click on them, or respond to them. That's not sarcasm, that's a genuine suggestion. If my threads cause you frustration, then put me on ignore.

I'm sorry, I guess I did overreact.

My issue is that you have a bit of a history of initiating threads of this kind - where you either postulate or "just ask questions" of a very specific kind. The general tenor seems to be to advocating for a blanket acceptance of all kinds of social ills as god-given, only substituting god with a caricature of evolution as an agentive, purpose-driven entity. My main issue with that is that it is an affront to science to represent anecdotal experience as data and poorly thought out post-hoc justifications as scientific hypothesis. It may be true that women, in both of our societies, tend more towards what you are calling the "observing self" than men - chances are there are no appreciable gender differences, at least you haven't presented any reason to think otherwise. If it is true, though, it is still an open question whether this a universal phenomenon or just something that happens to be so at this point of time in both Europe and North America, either because of a related social history or by unrelated historical contingencies. Further, even if it is a universal fact of mankind throughout time and space*, that still doesn't mean it is a selected trait - just as likely, it could correlate with some other (possibly selected) trait, or even more likely it could simply be down to the fact that men only have one X chromosome. It's not like color blindness is a selected trait in males, is it?

One huge red flag about your story (not the only one, but a biggie) is the fact that you could just as easily argue for the exact opposite: If your prejudice and/or
"anecdotal experience" told you that women are more of the thinking type, you could just as easily come up with a story of how that was selected for, and we have no way to even gauge which one of those two opposites is more plausible. Besides folk evolutionary psychology, I know of exactly one other scientific paradigm (in the broadest sense) that can explain everything and its opposite with equal ease: GODDIDIT.

My issue is not a political one though: You may be right that there really isn't anything we can, or should, do about sexism, racism, classism, that they are just unavoidable consequences of human nature, if that's indeed what you're getting at. I hope you're wrong, but I'm not deeply invested, not much of an activist myself these days. I am however invested, in science, and using sloppy arguments to pretend "science says so" offends me.

tl;dr: Your OP is closer to "talking about whether men or women are better at sewing" than to science.



* To be fair, there appears to be quite a number of people who do evolutionary psychology for a living who frequently fail at this step, often more for a lack of trying than anything else. My favourite is a (published) paper where they claimed to have established that a gender effect they had found in answers to questionaires was universal after comparing German 20-somethings' and American 20-somethings' answers (both cohorts recruited from the collaborators' universities undergraduates, so even the class structure is presumably similar), totally ignoring that North American and European culture have been tightly linked long before people started to watch the same sitcoms...

 

[ronburgundy]

Another thing to consider before spending much time on evolutionary stories about gender differences is whether there is reliable evidence that the genders actually differ in the trait in question. In this particular case, the idea of a "thinking self" that tries to reason about information without being overly distracted by irrelevant but attention grabbing info in the immediate environment maps mostly clearly onto the highly researched concept of "working memory capacity". That name is misnomer b/c it focuses too much on memory. What those tasks, such as "complex span task" actually assess is how well a person can control their focus of attention on processing and retaining info that is important for a goal directed task in active memory in the face of other distracting information.

Meta-analysis of numerous studies suggest that there is a statistically reliable benefit for males on this task, but that it is also very small, amounting to a 0.15 standard deviation difference in means, which corresponds to the two normal curve distribution of scores (one for each gender) having 94% overlap. IOW, take a random male and a random female and test this ability and the female will score higher about 48% of the time, which while less than a random 50% means that the almost half of all men score below the majority of women.

IF there is almost no difference to begin with, then seeking an evolutionary explanation for the difference is especially a waste of time. Massive gender differences are more likely to have some functional source, even if the actual selection factors will never be known. But such tiny differences, if they are biological at all (rather than social), are more likely to be rather unimportant "spandrels" that were never selected for but are just happenstance byproduct of minor genotype overlap with completely different traits that were selected for. There are infinitely more ways for any trait or gender difference in a trait to come about by such incidental non-selection processes than there are ways for it to have been directly impacted by selection pressures. That even more true of tiny differences.

So, even if we know the difference is biologically based, the most probable answer by far for any question like "Why was this small gender difference selected for?" is "It wasn't".

 

[steve_bank]

From a cognitive psychology clqass I rember people tend to be able to quickly memorixize and hold up to around a 7 item list.

There is short term and long term memopry. It takes time to put information into long term memory.

 

[fromderinside]

So, even if we know the difference is biologically based, the most probable answer by far for any question like "Why was this small gender difference selected for?" is "It wasn't".

So testosterone estrogen nothing to them. check. What?*


*^{_{density test}}

 

[Jokodo]

So, even if we know the difference is biologically based, the most probable answer by far for any question like "Why was this small gender difference selected for?" is "It wasn't".

So testosterone estrogen nothing to them. check. What?*


*^{_{density test}}

"What?" is an appropriate response to your post. Could you try to repeat whatever point you thought you had in full English sentences? German and Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian works too, if it's not to complex, even Russian and Spanish might. You see, I'm not picky.

You bring up an important point, however: If a trait can be linked with testosterone/estrogen levels within both men and women, than that's fairly solid evidence for its biological basis even absent a direct cross-cultural information. It does nothing, however, to indicate it is a selected trait. Like every other drug, hormones have side effects.

In an abstract since, this way of treating evolution as perfect and every bug as a features smells of religious thinking: Instead of accepting nature in its imperfection, in all its fascinating complexities, god the perfect, omnipotent creator has been substituted for evolution without changing the attributes.

 

[rousseau]

Going to try to respond to you thoughtfully without inflaming further. Will probably fail.

We're on a dying message board. No one makes threads except in the politics forum, where for some reason we're still talking about whether men or women are better at sewing. Most threads that are made get minimal to no replies, except when it's American politics. We're on a dying message board. Conversation and thread making should be prized.

And as much as I would love to spend many hours carefully researching a thread subject that I'll probably gain nothing of value out of anyway (really, I actually would), I just don't have the time, so this is what you get. Beyond that, if my threads are a waste of your time you can not click on them, or respond to them. That's not sarcasm, that's a genuine suggestion. If my threads cause you frustration, then put me on ignore.

I'm sorry, I guess I did overreact.

My issue is that you have a bit of a history of initiating threads of this kind - where you either postulate or "just ask questions" of a very specific kind. The general tenor seems to be to advocating for a blanket acceptance of all kinds of social ills as god-given, only substituting god with a caricature of evolution as an agentive, purpose-driven entity.

I see your point, although in truth I'm not really thinking about these OPs too much. I was aware that it was kind of a dumb question when I wrote it, but really it's just a careless conversation starter. Actually, I didn't even really want to talk gender, and probably could have left it out. Enough time passes and I forget the side effects of not being precise and careful in an OP.

I don't know where you're getting evolution as a purpose-driven entity, though. I certainly don't believe that, nor have I hinted at it.

 

[ronburgundy]

So, even if we know the difference is biologically based, the most probable answer by far for any question like "Why was this small gender difference selected for?" is "It wasn't".

So testosterone estrogen nothing to them. check. What?*


*^{_{density test}}

"What?" is an appropriate response to your post.

Could you try to repeat whatever point you thought you had in full English sentences? German and Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian works too, if it's not to complex, even Russian and Spanish might. You see, I'm not picky.

You bring up an important point, however: If a trait can be linked with testosterone/estrogen levels within both men and women, than that's fairly solid evidence for its biological basis even absent a direct cross-cultural information. It does nothing, however, to indicate it is a selected trait. Like every other drug, hormones have side effects.

In an abstract since, this way of treating evolution as perfect and every bug as a features smells of religious thinking: Instead of accepting nature in its imperfection, in all its fascinating complexities, god the perfect, omnipotent creator has been substituted for evolution without changing the attributes.

Agreed. A trait being biologically based in no way implies that it is functional or was selected for. In fact, few psychological/behavioral traits would be, because each one is the product of so many genetic factors with every genetic factor influencing countless traits. So, the number of evolutionary functional, selected traits is inherently far outnumbered by the incidental non-functional byproducts of selection. In fact many of those byproducts can be dysfunctional in themselves, but are preserved in the genome b/c their negative impact is outweighed by the more influential positive functional effects of the genetic factors they have incidental overlap with.

Many who accept evolutionary theory believe that it's elegance and power come from it's ability to tell us why everything is the way it is, but the real power comes from the fact that makes "by random happenstance" and "For no damn good reason" perfectly acceptable and deterministic answers to most such questions.

 

[rousseau]

"What?" is an appropriate response to your post.

Could you try to repeat whatever point you thought you had in full English sentences? German and Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian works too, if it's not to complex, even Russian and Spanish might. You see, I'm not picky.

You bring up an important point, however: If a trait can be linked with testosterone/estrogen levels within both men and women, than that's fairly solid evidence for its biological basis even absent a direct cross-cultural information. It does nothing, however, to indicate it is a selected trait. Like every other drug, hormones have side effects.

In an abstract since, this way of treating evolution as perfect and every bug as a features smells of religious thinking: Instead of accepting nature in its imperfection, in all its fascinating complexities, god the perfect, omnipotent creator has been substituted for evolution without changing the attributes.

Agreed. A trait being biologically based in no way implies that it is functional or was selected for. In fact, few psychological/behavioral traits would be, because each one is the product of so many genetic factors with every genetic factor influencing countless traits. So, the number of evolutionary functional, selected traits is inherently far outnumbered by the incidental non-functional byproducts of selection. In fact many of those byproducts can be dysfunctional in themselves, but are preserved in the genome b/c their negative impact is outweighed by the more influential positive functional effects of the genetic factors they have incidental overlap with.

Many who accept evolutionary theory believe that it's elegance and power come from it's ability to tell us why everything is the way it is, but the real power comes from the fact that makes "by random happenstance" and "For no damn good reason" perfectly acceptable and deterministic answers to most such questions.

Can you give a few examples of traits that are biologically based but haven't been selected for?

Note my use of 'haven't'. Not necessarily functional now, but may have been functional at one time, therefore selected for.

 

[ronburgundy]

From a cognitive psychology clqass I rember people tend to be able to quickly memorixize and hold up to around a 7 item list.

There is short term and long term memopry. It takes time to put information into long term memory.

Working memory that I was referring to is neither of those. It refers more that one's ability to control the focus of attention on a subset of goal-relevant information in the face of distracting stimuli and non-relevant information. In fact, gender effect in short term memory are the opposite of working memory, with females showing slightly better short term memory than males. But even this is qualified by the fact that what is being remembered impacts who remembers it best, with males having better short term recall if the information is visuo-spatial in nature. That is actually interesting, because visuo-spatial information is something that the "observing self" is most concerned with, which contradicts the OP notion of females being more about the "observing self".

Also, the whole 7-item in short term memory thing is grossly oversimplified, because people can and do "chunk" information in highly variable ways, such that a list of 30 words might be 30 distinct "items" for one person but only 5 for another person.

 

[ronburgundy]

"What?" is an appropriate response to your post.

Could you try to repeat whatever point you thought you had in full English sentences? German and Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian works too, if it's not to complex, even Russian and Spanish might. You see, I'm not picky.

You bring up an important point, however: If a trait can be linked with testosterone/estrogen levels within both men and women, than that's fairly solid evidence for its biological basis even absent a direct cross-cultural information. It does nothing, however, to indicate it is a selected trait. Like every other drug, hormones have side effects.

In an abstract since, this way of treating evolution as perfect and every bug as a features smells of religious thinking: Instead of accepting nature in its imperfection, in all its fascinating complexities, god the perfect, omnipotent creator has been substituted for evolution without changing the attributes.

Agreed. A trait being biologically based in no way implies that it is functional or was selected for. In fact, few psychological/behavioral traits would be, because each one is the product of so many genetic factors with every genetic factor influencing countless traits. So, the number of evolutionary functional, selected traits is inherently far outnumbered by the incidental non-functional byproducts of selection. In fact many of those byproducts can be dysfunctional in themselves, but are preserved in the genome b/c their negative impact is outweighed by the more influential positive functional effects of the genetic factors they have incidental overlap with.

Many who accept evolutionary theory believe that it's elegance and power come from it's ability to tell us why everything is the way it is, but the real power comes from the fact that makes "by random happenstance" and "For no damn good reason" perfectly acceptable and deterministic answers to most such questions.

Can you give a few examples of traits that are biologically based but haven't been selected for?

Note my use of 'haven't'. Not necessarily functional now, but may have been functional at one time, therefore selected for.

It would be far easier and faster if you could give the list of traits that are biological and for which there is clear scientific empirical evidence of how it was selected for. Note that the existence of stories about plausible functionality is not empirical evidence. Everything not on that very short list will be something that was likely not selected for. That includes variability in most human cognitive traits.

You don't seem to be getting that for the vast majority of behavioral traits there is no possible empirical evidence that can demonstrate past selection, and thus most such speculations are outside the realm of science. What we do have is empirical data on how almost all behavioral traits in humans are the result of countless genes that each with multiple alleles, and that most alleles have many traits that they impacts. We also know that all that evolution requires for an allele to remain in the genome is that the net impact of any allele averaged across everything it impacts is not negative, thus it can range from neutral to positive. From there we don't need empirical science to apply deductive logic (really just basic math) to know that there number of ways that any particular allele variant which causes variations in multiple phenotype traits to have been selected for due to any one particular phenotype variation that it causes is far lower than the number of ways that the allele could be preserved within the genepool without selection for that particular phenotype variation.

IOW, the basic science of genetics and how evolution operates logically imply that most particular variations in traits were not selected for due to their own impact on reproductive success, but b/c they happen to be part of a network of alleles that produce countless variations on many traits, and the aggregated impact of that is not harmful to reproductive success. So, the scientific default answer to "why was this selected for?" is "It wasn't". And that remains the only rational position until actual empirical evidence shows that a particular variation in a trait is one of the minority of instances where it's impact on reproductive success was sufficient to determine the net impact of all the countless impacts of the countless phenotype effects that increasing that allele in the genepool would have.

 

[rousseau]

In an abstract since, this way of treating evolution as perfect and every bug as a features smells of religious thinking: Instead of accepting nature in its imperfection, in all its fascinating complexities, god the perfect, omnipotent creator has been substituted for evolution without changing the attributes.

I haven't been implying that at all, not sure where it's coming from.

If there has been any implication it's that every feature of the body, and every testable gender variation, at one point in our evolutionary history, has had survival value. Not that evolution has purposely created these features and there is a reason for their existence in the here and now. Those are two very different implications.

I'll grant that my example in the original post is basically nonsense, and that stories not being plausible evidence is obvious. It was just a throwaway question.

**Although I'll add that when we're talking about psychological traits, a lot of the emergent features are indeed by-products of some deeper system.

 

[rousseau]

Can you give a few examples of traits that are biologically based but haven't been selected for?

Note my use of 'haven't'. Not necessarily functional now, but may have been functional at one time, therefore selected for.

It would be far easier and faster if you could give the list of traits that are biological and for which there is clear scientific empirical evidence of how it was selected for.

Every essential organ in the body, sensory, reproductive, endocrine, nervous etc. While I couldn't point you to any papers, these features of the body are being selected for every time they produce a functional human that can reproduce.

I wasn't trying to be combative, just interested in where you were taking the conversation.

 

[rousseau]

In an abstract since, this way of treating evolution as perfect and every bug as a features smells of religious thinking: Instead of accepting nature in its imperfection, in all its fascinating complexities, god the perfect, omnipotent creator has been substituted for evolution without changing the attributes.

I haven't been implying that at all, not sure where it's coming from.

If there has been any implication it's that every feature of the body, and every testable gender variation, at one point in our evolutionary history, has had survival value. Not that evolution has purposely created these features and there is a reason for their existence in the here and now. Those are two very different implications.

I'll grant that my example in the original post is basically nonsense, and that stories not being plausible evidence is obvious. It was just a throwaway question.

**Although I'll add that when we're talking about psychological traits, a lot of the emergent features are indeed by-products of some deeper system.

And to add: in our theoretical example I would assume propensity for observation isn't psychological or behavioral, but rather an intrinsic part of our nervous system.

 

[ronburgundy]

Can you give a few examples of traits that are biologically based but haven't been selected for?

Note my use of 'haven't'. Not necessarily functional now, but may have been functional at one time, therefore selected for.

It would be far easier and faster if you could give the list of traits that are biological and for which there is clear scientific empirical evidence of how it was selected for.

Every essential organ in the body, sensory, reproductive, endocrine, nervous etc. While I couldn't point you to any papers, these features of the body are being selected for every time they produce a functional human that can reproduce.

I wasn't trying to be combative, just interested in where you were taking the conversation.

Notice how your list is basically tautology? "essential organs" are by definition things that humans cannot exist without and thus, by definition, humans without those things could not survive to reproduce.
Also, that only explains the simplistic binary presence or absence of such systems. Each of those systems vary in countless ways and have specific features that don't need to exist and could have been replaced with an infinite number of alternative "specs". The reason that the specs are what they are is not b/c that is the most functional way for them to be. It is usually b/c the many genes and alleles that give rise to any particular "spec" also give rise to countless other specs and the net benefit of all the other specs impacted by the set of alleles that give rise to that one particular spec determine was gets passed on and thus force that spec onto the a given system whether its functional for that system or not. In addition, what about all of the variation in each of those specs? Both individuals and groups (like genders) vary along many dimensions of those specs and they almost all survive to pass on those variations. Thus, there is nothing essential or particularly functional about having one variant over the other.
The fact that humans can observe at all or think at all likely has a functional basis that was selected for. But the exact ways in which we do so and the variations in those ways are not likely to be functional or selected for.

Also, note that your list includes no specifics about the millions of traits that impact exactly how humans process information and who processes it differently. Because, the "evidence" of trait selection is limited to most broad categories of traits that are essential to the person even surviving the first year of life. But within those "traits", i.e., broad "systems", are actually millions of other traits, most of which went along for the ride on the backs of those things that were essential or of major importance to survival.

Here is one last try to dispell the religion of "biology means adaptive function". This time using formal logical structure and showing that your own premise that a given biological trait was selected for requires that you also accept that most other biological traits were not.

Let's say we accept a particular functional argument for a trait in the form of the following premise"
P1"The specific impact on trait Y is what caused Allele X to be propagated in the genepool".

Basic genetics and evolutionary mechanisms confirm the following additional premises:
P2"Allele X has many other impacts other than it's impact on trait Y."
P3"If the specific impact on trait Y is what caused Allele X to be propagated in the genepool, then all those other traits impacted by Allele Y would also be propagated in the species, regardless of their functionality and relation to selection pressures."

Then basic math tell us
P4 "Many traits are many more than one trait."

Conclusion: There are many more traits produced by Allele Y that were not functionally selected for than there are traits produced by Allele Y that were selected for.

Since the above logic applies to all Alleles, we can further conclude that for every genetically based trait variations within a species there are many more genetically based trait variations that were not selected for.

So, either you must reject the most basic facts of genetics and evolutionary mechanisms, or or must accept that most biologically based traits (which includes all variations of human thought and behavior shaped by genes) were not themselves selected for a particular function.

 

[Jokodo]

In an abstract since, this way of treating evolution as perfect and every bug as a features smells of religious thinking: Instead of accepting nature in its imperfection, in all its fascinating complexities, god the perfect, omnipotent creator has been substituted for evolution without changing the attributes.

I haven't been implying that at all, not sure where it's coming from.

If there has been any implication it's that every feature of the body, and every testable gender variation, at one point in our evolutionary history, has had survival value. Not that evolution has purposely created these features and there is a reason for their existence in the here and now. Those are two very different implications.

Most bugs are just bugs, not deprecated features.