Why are men, why are women

@withawhy,

Do you mean why is womens' reproductive capacity limited by 1) pregnancy and 2) menopause?

This ain't a human phenomenon. This isn't a mammal phenomenon. It's not even a vertebrate phenomenon. This is one of the most primeval features of multicellular organisms. There are a lot of variations, but this is true even of plants, and we haven't shared a common ancestor with plants for around 900 million years.

Even bacteria and protozoa have a concept of male and female, in which the male donates genetic material and the female receives it.

So that's not to go off on a tangent except to say that we have differentiation of sexes that is an ancient part of our evolutionary history, and one feature of that is that the donor of genetic material gets to spread the DNA around a lot more than the female does. It allows the fittest males to pass on genes, and it allows the females to select who the fittest males are. Beyond that, it may seem like a relic in human societies, but we're animals first and humans second.

@withawhy,

withawhy wrote:

Why can women only bring 1.5 million lives into this world while males can bring in an infinite amount?

Because women have yet to form a corporate structure suitable enough to maximize productivity. LOL! Just kidding.

But Aedes hits the question square on the head. Women are physiologically limited compared to males in the matter of reproduction. As is the case for most mammals, a female has a good deal more invested in the project than the male, who need only put in a deposit. However, I'm not entirely fantastic about the general question because it implies (though not intended) some level of deficiency in the female sex.

@VideCorSpoon,

Am i dozzy but can man bring any one into this world???

@xris,

Salaams peeps,

Is this a riddle?

Peace

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

Do you mean why is womens' reproductive capacity limited by 1) pregnancy and 2) menopause?.

I meant that women are born with 1.5 million eggs on average. I found it interesting that there is a limit.. granted 45 million years is a long time.. On the topic of reproduction,

Are a sperm and egg alive? They cannot reproduce, so apparently not.

When they come together are they alive?

What does it mean to be living? How can life come from that which is not alive? Is life the same thing as self or soul? when does a soul enter a life? Am I not more important than a sperm and an egg? Where does my importance come from?

What does it mean to have the ability to create life?

@VideCorSpoon,

VideCorSpoon;33872 wrote:

Women are physiologically limited compared to males in the matter of reproduction.

In one sense. On the other hand, male mortality rates are higher than female mortality rates in every single age group from prenatal fetuses up to the elderly, males of all ages very often have worse outcomes from common diseases (flu, pneumonia, coronary artery disease), and therefore one can easily make the case that it is the males who are physiologically limited -- and on a population level their advantage lies only in their abundance.

withawhy wrote:

I meant that women are born with 1.5 million eggs on average. I found it interesting that there is a limit

Well, there is a finite amount of sperm too, just as there is a finite amount of every other kind of cell. Keep in mind that for all their abundance only one sperm fertilizes each egg.

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Are a sperm and egg alive?

Cells can be alive or dead. They are living cells. They are not free-living organisms, however.

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When they come together are they alive?

They become a zygote when they come together, which is a living cell that under normal circumstances develops into a living human. It's the first step of a unique human organism. Whether we philosophically regard that as a "human being" in a social or moral sense is not uniformly agreed upon. But from a purely biological point of view, it is a living zygote, and it is a new unique organism.

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What does it mean to be living?

How would you answer that question? This sort of hinges on what exactly you mean by mean and by living.

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How can life come from that which is not alive?

It's biology. Forget about labels. It is what it is.

Think about the bare bones of the process. Your body is made up of billions of cells that have differentiated into everything from white blood cells to neurons to muscle cells to sperm to skin cells, etc, etc, etc.

They all have the same DNA (with caveats that some cells like red blood cells have lost their nuclei and others like sperm have a half set of DNA thanks to meiosis).

So how do you get to this point? You start from one cell that has a particular genetic code, and that cell divides and divides and divides.

Why don't we end up one giant ball of cells? Because from the beginning even an unfertilized egg has a pattern to it -- there are gradients of certain chemical messengers within an egg. So once it divides the first time, those next two cells are different than one another. And in a well-studied but extraordinarily complicated process, our cells undergo differentiation.

One of the target organs that cells differentiate to are gonads, i.e. testes in males and ovaries in females. These organs produce these new eggs and sperm that you for some reason describe as "not alive".

Well, they are alive. They are living, functional cells within a human being's reproductive system, perfectly analagous to how islet cells are living, functional cells within your pancreas.

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Is life the same thing as self or soul? when does a soul enter a life?

A soul is a metaphor, not a "thing".

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Am I not more important than a sperm and an egg?

Yes, in the exact same way that your car is more important than a chunk of metal and rubber.

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Where does my importance come from?

From how much you help other people and from how you see yourself.

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What does it mean to have the ability to create life?

It means you are past puberty.

@withawhy,

A sperm and an egg come together because they were built that way, they have a very clear drive and I see no other purpose for them.

A consciously self aware being has similar hard wired sexual drives to come together and procreate. Is the purpose of a human the same of a sperm and egg or does one's purpose grow when they become more conscious?

@withawhy,

withawhy;34016 wrote:

A sperm and an egg come together because they were built that way, they have a very clear drive and I see no other purpose for them.

The medical term is physiology. They're part of the function of an organ system.

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A consciously self aware being has similar hard wired sexual drives to come together and procreate. Is the purpose of a human the same of a sperm and egg or does one's purpose grow when they become more conscious?

Purpose is self-defined. And it's a developmental process that gradually comes into being after fertilization and continues to develop throughout human life. And reproduction is hardly our only purpose -- many people choose not to; and we all choose to do other things than simply procreate.

@Aedes,

From the biologic point of view, I think that we cant say any sex has the advantage, because while women have to do nearly all the job and have part of their body space "wasted" with the reproduction system, men are more expendable since you need just one man to keep an extremelly large amount of women pregnant, wich means that they are the ones who get sent into wars and stuff... Smile

As for all those philosophic questions: In teory nobody has any kind of importance, because nothing has a reason to be, but since one cannot live winhout goals and we got those nice emotions to tell us what to do, we can use then to chose a goal Smile

Your body is built for the sole purpose of reproduction, but this doesnt means you cant chose to help the species in other ways instead as it is flexible enough to allow you to do so. You can think about what is your higher purpose in afterlife, since you will be needing a new one there anyway Smile

@manored,

manored;34673 wrote:

while women have to do nearly all the job and have part of their body space "wasted" with the reproduction system, men are more expendable since you need just one man to keep an extremelly large amount of women pregnant

We're so much more complicated than that, as you know. I'm a new parent, and also incidentally a pediatrician, and we're not exactly like frogs or fish. Human babies are completely helpless and need a loooooong childhood of nurturing and parenting. Mothers and fathers have different relationships with their children, and this is not constant even across families, but what's clear in terms of social and developmental outcome studies is that a two-parent family is optimal.

Thus, fostering the success of the next generation is categorically NOT a simple numbers game of how many children a man can have versus a woman.

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Your body is built for the sole purpose of reproduction

Really? In 34 years I've had one child, but I've climbed many mountains, I've read many books, I've kayaked many rivers, I've played many songs on guitar, I've seen many movies, I've mowed many lawns.......

Our bodies do many things. Yes, on a population level the bodies that persist through evolution are the ones that can and do reproduce. But you can make that argument for everything from archaebacteria to red algae to filamentous molds to diatoms to vascular plants to sea sponges to jawless fish to humans.

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

Our bodies do many things. Yes, on a population level the bodies that persist through evolution are the ones that can and do reproduce. But you can make that argument for everything from archaebacteria to red algae to filamentous molds to diatoms to vascular plants to sea sponges to jawless fish to humans.

Its a good marker of how advanced a species is - how many things do they do that are not about reproduction.

@Salo phil,

Salo;34771 wrote:

Its a good marker of how advanced a species is - how many things do they do that are not about reproduction.

I guess it depends what you mean by advanced. Even bacteria have complex physiology and processes that are not directly part of reproductive biology. I mean many of them (like sporulation and toxin production) are for protection and others (like locomotion) are for nutrition, but even in that case they do things other than reproduce.

@withawhy,

Its interesting to note that women add no new genetic material to the species, from what I have heard. Her eggs are fully formed when she is still in the womb herself. She does however have the choice of mate, so she can decide which mate has viable potential, so she does indirectly choose the genetic material consciously.

Its a division of labour.

Men are always trying new things, trying to evolve new ideas, trying to accomplish new physical feats, men's genetic material advances as he does. Women just pick the winner.

So long as you think being saddled with maintenance is winning.

@Poseidon,

Poseidon wrote:

Its interesting to note that women add no new genetic material to the species, from what I have heard. Her eggs are fully formed when she is still in the womb herself. She does however have the choice of mate, so she can decide which mate has viable potential, so she does indirectly choose the genetic material consciously.

Its a division of labour.

Men are always trying new things, trying to evolve new ideas, trying to accomplish new physical feats, men's genetic material advances as he does. Women just pick the winner.

So long as you think being saddled with maintenance is winning.

what do you mean by this? women contribute as much to the genetic make up of their children as a man does.
as to the second point there is just an easy argument to be made that women are the creators and anchors of society- wheras men may sometimes push things forward they are mostly under the control and subject to women.

@Poseidon,

Poseidon;35068 wrote:

Men are always trying new things, trying to evolve new ideas, trying to accomplish new physical feats, men's genetic material advances as he does. Women just pick the winner.

Aside from your post's considerable scientific demerits, this is perhaps the most misogynistic post I've ever seen on this forum. Why do you think it's acceptable to just casually dismiss women as if they're some subspecies?

Furthermore, women contribute MORE genetic material, because our X chromosomes are much larger than Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA is MATERNALLY inherited.

The fact that your gonads make a billion or whatever new sperm a day is hardly an argument for your superiority; it only illustrates the fact that your gametes have a much lower chance of success than a woman's ova (which are present from birth because they have to undergo a decades long development process to actually be physiologically functional as eggs).

Considering the accomplishments of women in this world, despite having to deal with attitudes like yours, and considering the barbarity, butchery, and stupidity that men regularly contribute to humanity, perhaps you should revisit what it means to be a leader or a follower.

Oh, by the way, I just saw a talk by Julie Gerberding, who is the head of the CDC; the dean of Duke's medical school where I'm on faculty is a woman; my former department head at Harvard is a woman; there have been plenty of female scientists to win Nobel Prizes; the structure of DNA which was "solved" by Watson and Crick was all but stolen from Rosalind Franklin -- and the list could go on. But why bother.

@Aedes,

Poseidon wrote:

Its interesting to note that women add no new genetic material to the species, from what I have heard. Her eggs are fully formed when she is still in the womb herself. She does however have the choice of mate, so she can decide which mate has viable potential, so she does indirectly choose the genetic material consciously.

Poseidon, that's one way to look at it. However, without the balancing of woman, man would be nothing. Everything on this planet is balanced sexed opposites of different structure. There's a male/female in everything nature expresses in balance. You may be a man but every is both male and female and likewise with every female. So to assert that all a woman does is choose, is going to ruffle a lot of feathers around here.

There's no way to deny the equal importance of both male and female in this universe.

@Aedes,

Aedes wrote:

We're so much more complicated than that, as you know. I'm a new parent, and also incidentally a pediatrician, and we're not exactly like frogs or fish. Human babies are completely helpless and need a loooooong childhood of nurturing and parenting. Mothers and fathers have different relationships with their children, and this is not constant even across families, but what's clear in terms of social and developmental outcome studies is that a two-parent family is optimal.

Thus, fostering the success of the next generation is categorically NOT a simple numbers game of how many children a man can have versus a woman.

Really? In 34 years I've had one child, but I've climbed many mountains, I've read many books, I've kayaked many rivers, I've played many songs on guitar, I've seen many movies, I've mowed many lawns.......

Our bodies do many things. Yes, on a population level the bodies that persist through evolution are the ones that can and do reproduce. But you can make that argument for everything from archaebacteria to red algae to filamentous molds to diatoms to vascular plants to sea sponges to jawless fish to humans.

Thats because our culture didnt evolved that way, mostly because we dont need to sacrifice large numbers of men in order to keep the species alive. thats why I mentioned "from the biologic point of view". But we do have a tendence to sacrifice men over women, and I dont think its just because women are usually weaker.

Being built for a sole purpose doesnt makes it impossible to do anything else... have you ever heard of towels? Smile

@manored,

manored wrote:

Thats because our culture didnt evolved that way, mostly because we dont need to sacrifice large numbers of men in order to keep the species alive. thats why I mentioned "from the biologic point of view". But we do have a tendence to sacrifice men over women, and I dont think its just because women are usually weaker.

Being built for a sole purpose doesnt makes it impossible to do anything else... have you ever heard of towels?

Your theory- that men are disposable because theoretically it requires only one man to fertilise however many women, is flawed. One of the most ancient human concepts is that of marriage- mating once and for life is found even in the animal world. Marriage easily predates war.

@avatar6v7,

avatar6v7 wrote:

Your theory- that men are disposable because theoretically it requires only one man to fertilise however many women, is flawed. One of the most ancient human concepts is that of marriage- mating once and for life is found even in the animal world. Marriage easily predates war.

The theory is flawed but for a different reason. If a species relies on only one individual male to fertilize all available females, then the gene-pool is limited and the species becomes prone to harmful mutations. Effectively, everyone born would be at least a half-sibling to everyone else.

Mating once-and-for-life is found in a few limited species in the animal world (it's actually much more common in birds than mammals), but is far outnumbered by the number of species which mate for a season only. Breeding with many sexual partners actually benefits the species because it increases the diversity of the gene-pool and lowers the risk of some harmful mutation creating a genetic disease which wipes out the species.

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