So my alternative explanation is that the same gene can produce slightly different (but still observable) results in the male and in the female body, because of a presence of sex hormones.
Sex hormones are actually a huge factor in human developmental biology and the interaction with genes is interesting; the overall contribution of chromosomal differentiation to sex differentiation is pretty minor in humans (note that this is not a generalizable statement about other living things; birds might be considered to have rather more definitively-linked chromosomal sex traits, and some species don’t depend on chromosome structure directly, often using outside factors like temperature during development to influence this). Trivial example: this is why when a person assigned male at birth doses with exogenous estrogen during puberty, their breast development will tend to resemble that female-assigned relatives—testosterone vs oestrogen during the pubescent phase is the big regulator of mammary tissue growth and clustering sites for subcutaneous fat; genetics influences the potential range of that growth.
Even if men and women both have verbal skills tremendously superior to other species, people still notice that women have these skills somewhat better than men.
Yes, but why? There’s not a gene for verbal skills; there’s not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about—Broca’s area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it’s possible—but that idea isn’t particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait. So a well-reasoned evolutionary scenario, no matter how compelling it might sound, shouldn’t be taken as a firm foundation on which to start making overconfident, connotationally-loaded statements like that and then billing them as science.
Yes, but why? There’s not a gene for verbal skills; there’s not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about—Broca’s area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it’s possible—but that idea isn’t particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait.
I’m not sure what position you think you’re arguing against. The ev-psych position is that the presence of a Y chromosome ultimately causes the difference in verbal skills (along with a lot of other things) between men and women. (Most of this influence probably passes through the SRY gene and the presence of sex hormones, but that’s less certain than the effect itself.)
Your counter-argument appears to be that there isn’t a single node in the causal diagram that corresponds to just the the effect on verbal skills. I agree that there probably doesn’t exist such a node but fail to see why we should expect it to exist if ev-psych explanation is correct.
Sex hormones are actually a huge factor in human developmental biology and the interaction with genes is interesting; the overall contribution of chromosomal differentiation to sex differentiation is pretty minor in humans (note that this is not a generalizable statement about other living things; birds might be considered to have rather more definitively-linked chromosomal sex traits, and some species don’t depend on chromosome structure directly, often using outside factors like temperature during development to influence this). Trivial example: this is why when a person assigned male at birth doses with exogenous estrogen during puberty, their breast development will tend to resemble that female-assigned relatives—testosterone vs oestrogen during the pubescent phase is the big regulator of mammary tissue growth and clustering sites for subcutaneous fat; genetics influences the potential range of that growth.
Yes, but why? There’s not a gene for verbal skills; there’s not even a gene for language use, nor any single smoking-gun neuroanatomical correlate of it. The ones you may have heard about—Broca’s area, FOXP2 -- are pretty broad in function and do a bunch of things, a failure of any one of which would clearly impair the ability to perform spoken language.
Is it possible that the trait we think of as verbal skill is rooted in some ultimately-genetic factor? Sure, it’s possible—but that idea isn’t particularly rigorously-supported by the available evidence, either. Meanwhile there are all these other possible contributing factors that could influence such a trait. So a well-reasoned evolutionary scenario, no matter how compelling it might sound, shouldn’t be taken as a firm foundation on which to start making overconfident, connotationally-loaded statements like that and then billing them as science.
I’m not sure what position you think you’re arguing against. The ev-psych position is that the presence of a Y chromosome ultimately causes the difference in verbal skills (along with a lot of other things) between men and women. (Most of this influence probably passes through the SRY gene and the presence of sex hormones, but that’s less certain than the effect itself.)
Your counter-argument appears to be that there isn’t a single node in the causal diagram that corresponds to just the the effect on verbal skills. I agree that there probably doesn’t exist such a node but fail to see why we should expect it to exist if ev-psych explanation is correct.