Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.
We have a lot of marathon data. There is a large, consistent difference showing the opposite. This article is horrendously unscientific, so many claims, assumptions, and over summarizing and simplifying
Author does address this, btw. I still think it’s a bad argument. I just couldn’t fathom that they would say this and not further clarify.
they make claims and assumptions to address it, they dont really cite anything. Shit like this “The 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.” is a hypothesis, but it is not being stated as one, it’s being stated as fact. It’s a testable hypothesis, they could have controlled for the variable of pace setting runners that they bring up by only looking at statistics of running events that do not have this variable.
And like, the whole premise could be true, that women were also hunters, modern runners with modern sports medicine arent ideal evidence, that kind of endurance might not have been needed for their hunting, women are still humans and humans have the greatest running stamina of any animal. But besides capability, ancient humans also could have had roles determined by sex, it’s at least prevalent in other apes like gorillas. Either way is possible without more solid evidence and it’s pretty crazy to say one way or another is scientifically true.
It took me literally less than a minute to google and disprove that claim in this ‘article’:
The Olympic records for the event are 2:06:32 hours for men, set by Samuel Wanjiru in 2008, and 2:23:07 hours for women, set by Tiki Gelana in 2012.
This article is not scientific, its simply an opinion piece and should be treated as such. And honestly I don’t even think it was a good opinion piece. And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
It took me literally less than a minute to google and disprove that claim in this ‘article’:
The Olympic records for the event are 2:06:32 hours for men, set by Samuel Wanjiru in 2008, and 2:23:07 hours for women, set by Tiki Gelana in 2012.
1.Wikipedia is not a scientific source.
- You are, if anything, showing that men are faster than woman. The claim the authors make is about endurance.
I found this study that seems to support their point.
“Men Are More Likely than Women to Slow in the Marathon”
This article is not scientific, its simply an opinion piece and should be treated as such. And honestly I don’t even think it was a good opinion piece. And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
I can’t read the article so unfortunately don’t have the grounds to agree or disagree with you. But I’d be carefull voicing my option like this when your only source is Wikipedia and isn’t speaking about the claim you are trying to disprove.
Edit: incase anybody is interested in reading some more real evidence instead of Wikipedia, this study goed deep into mens vs womans endurance and highlights a few problems with research focusing on males as the baseline.
Sex Differences in VO2max and the Impact on Endurance-Exercise Performance
Men are faster than women in a marathon because they can maintain a pace for longer without slowing, that’s called endurance.
I can’t believe the superior endurance of men can even be up for debate, but clearly no one does enough exercise anymore for the self evident to reveal itself.
Endurance is not speed. If I can go 4 hours at 5 miles per hour before I have to take a break to rest and you can go 2 hours at 10 miles an hour before you have to stop, you’d be much faster than me in a 2 mile race. But that doesn’t have anything to do with endurance.
Why are you changing 2 variables. Endurance is your ability to perform at a certain level for a period of time. Kipchoge has more endurance than me because he can maintain my 800m pace for 26 miles. Speed is literally only a consideration for sprinting. As soon as you’re performing past that, it’s all endurance. And when we look at all tests of endurance; iron man, ultra marathon, military fitness, triathlon, etc etc. Men come out on top.
And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
Because if you say things like this enough, people believe you
Men tend to be taller, so I’d think longer limbs are an advantage. I don’t pretend to know anything beyond that.
This explains why my legs get tired when my wife drags me out shopping…
This doesn’t shock me at all. My wife will hunt with me any day. She’s a champ and I’d be nothing without her.
Okay, but it’s not just size and strength. Women have better color discrimination, better landmark sense. Men have better time/speed sense. While pregnant the long gestational period makes the woman more at risk.
Women certainly can hunt, men can certainly harvest berries, but these other traits came about for reasons. If we were wrong as to why, that doesn’t change the differences.
Colour discrimination sounds super important to finding camouflaged prey animals and landmark sense sounds super important to wide ranging and unpredictable hunts. I dunno dude, unless you can cite experts in exolutionary biology supporting that inference, I’m going to say you’re taking out of your arse.
Landmark Sense
Lol…phew…lol.
Really should not be a surprise to anyone. The patriarchy has done serious damage over the many many past and present generations
if you don’t want patriarchy you need to replace it with something else that maintains invested fathers or you end up with Fight Club.
What are some other -archies we could do? Matriarchy, obviously. Anarchy. Monarchy. Any other -archy?
Malarchy
Now listen here Bub.
assumed evolution was acting primarily on men, and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress.
He was superimposing the idea of male superiority through hunting onto the Ainu and into the past.
This fixation on male superiority was a sign of the times not just in academia but in society at large.‘’
At that time, the conventional wisdom was that women were incapable of completing such a physically demanding task
Scholars following Man the Hunter dogma relied on this belief in women’s limited physical capacities
Today these biased assumptions persist in both the scientific literature and the public consciousness.
“Powers of Estrogen” infographic.
This is quite the charged language and I’m not even halfway through. Throw in a bunch of other stuff about the Boston marathon and gender presentation in movies, yeah this isn’t that good of an article.
Before I’m downvoted into oblivion, we probably all took part in hunting. They’ve found the speed differences in running between ages and gender are not extreme, so we likely all went out running and hunting together. But men probably took on the more dangerous and physical aspects, but everyone with a spear is a more capable unit.
I read most of it, not bothering with full paragraphs when I could see the idea at the beginning, and from what I saw it doesn’t get any better.
It points out that the only physical sport activity they women excel at is ultra marathons. it then goes on to day that flexibility when it comes to family roles was important for survival. And this I absolutely agree with and it is certainly the case that women can hunt too.
But the author just seemingly completely ignores the argument that women can still fill the role, even if there is some kind of specialization that makes one sex generally better at one task then the other. The fact that we are different almost certainly means this is the case.
the only physical sport activity they women excel at is ultra marathons
And men still have much better record times at every ultra-marathon distance. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.
The author’s argument isn’t that women are faster but that they can sustain physical exertion for longer. I have no idea if that’s true, but citing marathon times really misses the point.
I’ll wait until there’s greater consensus in the field. These papers reek of scientists who have strong political motivations to find the answers they seek, and I’m not expert enough to critique their work.
Well you did just critique them. But without offering any meaningful criticism, just political feelings.
No, I pointed out that they self-identify as feminists and are claiming to have found evidence of a finding feminists would salivate over. Investigator bias is a real problem in scientific research and I see some pretty obvious red flags for it here. You’re the one who seems butthurt at someone not immediately accepting a political point you favor.
This is far from the first paper indicating this, despite how the media is framing it. There’s been more and more re-investigation of findings from the past century and earlier, with much of it not only finding that a number of the “warrior” skeletons discussed in the past were women, but also a lot of the physical evidence otherwise showing that women were involved in these activities.
Both men and women gathered and both men and women hunted. Often together and they may have had different overall skillsets depending on personal body structure and endurance. But there’s often enough of an overlap anyways that everyone could be involved in everything in some fashion.
The long-standing claim that women couldn’t be involved in hunting because of biology is like claiming that women can’t be muscular or lift weights because of biology. It’s a ridiculous claim.
I think there are two sets of claims in the article. The first set - women hunt - is blindingly obvious and it was stupid to ever think anything different. The second set - women are better suited for endurance activities is dubious and weakly argued.
Timothy Noakes is as good a scholar as we have in endurance exercise, and he points out that all of the ultramarathon evidence is a bit dubious because the sport does not attract the best runners. So East African runners dominate the marathon scene (especially the Kalenjins) but are virtually absent from the ultramarathon world. Why? No prize money or sponsorship. So the fact that European ancestry dominates the longer distance is more a function of who’s running than it is a difference in physiology.
So looking at the role of estrogen in race times requires some deeper understanding of who’s running and what their overall potential is. I’ll note that the ultra scene is generally populated by an older crowd who are following the " if I can’t go faster I’ll go longer" approach. So maybe men maintain competitive marathon times later into life so are slower to join the ultra scene?
Noakes also points out that a smaller body size works for women in several ways - smaller bodies use less energy to move, generate less heat, and shed heat more effectively. So without correcting body size, sex based comparisons are not deeply informative.
and that’s why old women are always cold, while their husbands are boiling and turning down the thermostat.
Why do all those “findings” read like borderline retards trying to make HBO show plotlines into historical fact?
That was a theory? I was under the impression Male/Female size differentiation was from men fighting men.
Apes fighting apes, maybe. AFAIK, size differences between the sexes has not increased since we first evolved. It’s part of our pre-human genetic heritage, not an evolutionary pressure on homo sapiens.
I rather doubt that, because you see much larger male/female size differentiation in certain ethnicities than others, almost like there was some sort of pressure or selection geographically.
It’s either rage bait or a sad example of incredibly stupid ‘woke science’.
Facts don’t care about your feelings.😎
