Comment by kaonwarb
4 hours ago
This quote was when I know something was seriously wrong with the magazine I read assiduously as a child:
> 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.
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-m... - and I am not quoting out of context)
You are quoting it out of context. The article made reference to endurance events prior to this as well. Also, it’s extremely relevant to idea that Neanderthal have similar wear patterns on the bones. This article is in reference to hunter gatherer theory. Our modern concepts of male/female physical characteristics may make our judgments of prior humans inaccurate.
“ 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. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
As other people are pointing out, we are going to great rhetorical lengths to avoid the empirical fact that in almost every major event based on physical strength or endurance, men outperform women. Are suggesting that every data point from every cultural, ethnic, national background in the world is contaminated by sexist bias?
> 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.
But that's obvious nonsense. It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running. We're talking about many, many data points, all pointing in the same direction: in practice, men outperform women in distance sports [1].
To even begin to argue against this mountain of evidence, you have to resort to slippery rhetorical tactics, like this:
> As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
So, the argument being implied here (but not actually made!) is that the performance difference we see throughout the history of the marathon is due to...pace setters?
Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?
This reminds me of the old expression: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
[1] I'm talking about distributions here. Obviously, there are going to be many women who outperform many men on an individual basis.
> men outperform women in distance sports
Boy, you sure picked the wrong category. It's women who are better at endurance events.† Men have an advantage in power events.
† Here's just 2 recent ones off the top of my head:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/05/us/american-solo-rowing-hawai...
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/a74192266/catherine-...
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“Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?“
Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
You want to believe things are simple, but they’re not.
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> We're talking about many, many data points
Many of those data points are contaminated by a long tradition of sex- or gender-segregated races.
Here are a couple of interesting studies, which I assume are the ones the SciAm article is referring to, but I haven't checked.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38684111/ :
> "There is a prominent sex-based difference in athletic performance such that males outperform females by 7%-14% in races from 100 m to marathon. In ultramarathons, the difference is often much smaller, leading to speculation that females are "built" for the sport. However, data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race. This study compared data from two ultramarathons where males and females competed in comparable numbers. [...] In conclusion, the sex-based performance discrepancy shrinks to 1%-3% in ultramarathons when males and females compete in comparable numbers."
A key point in the above quote is "data are confounded by the low number of female participants; just 10%-30% in any given race." This calls the "many, many data points" that you mentioned into question.
Another study, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12068597/, of 56 suitable races, found that "pacing was not consistently affected by sex or age."
Re keeping an open mind, the corollary is that if you're not willing to ever question your assumptions - a.k.a. biases - you're not going to be able to update your understanding based on the facts.
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> It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running.
And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get? Also, as you are saying yourself: this is about distributions, not necessarily about the top 0.1% of the world. The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then. You might disagree with this, but the article is more nuanced, and reducing it to the rage-bait comment above does not do it justice at all.
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The worst thing about this article is it seems to fail to understand the basic of hypothesis-testing, the bedrock of science.
Title: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
Subtitle: The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence
Saying there isn't enough evidence to prove a hypothesis is not the same as proving its negation. Failing to reject the null hypothesis is not the same as proving it.
I can't help but wonder if publishing this was a desperate but calculated play for attention. I bet it's their most shared and discussed article ever.
Genuine or not they abandoned their readers who genuinely wanted to learn.
The reputations of many institutions that took decades to build were destroyed in a few statements during that period.
Good grief, the level of ignorence is astonishing but add that that was in a science journal...
The level of ignorance of people dissing the article without reading it is not astonishing, it's par for the course.
> The level of ignorance of people dissing the article without reading it is not astonishing, it's par for the course.
I feel that's an unwarranted assumption on your part: I read the article, even quoted from it in my comment, and my take agrees with your parent comments.
Your comment smells a lot like "They disagree with the article, so obviously they didn't read it, because anyone who read it would agree".
The quote is accurate and stupid. The emperor is naked, we can all see it.
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My first computer science professor claimed women could not have been the first programmers because they were physically incapable of learning something this complex. Sadly this is exactly what I expect here.
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I'd posit that it's not primarily ignorance, but the idea that ideology can bend reality. This idea is quite successful at spreading, in part due to ignorance, but there are other factors too.
> and I am not quoting out of context
You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events. You can downvote me all you want, but I have actually read the article.
This is the paragraph. "As an example" here implies that they are talking about sports in general, not just endurance events.
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. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best...
>> and I am not quoting out of context
> You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events.
No, it isn't. It's about sports, using ultra-endurance as an example. This is one of the cases where the example is the exception.
IOW, the quote uses an outlier to make claims about the distribution. This is, of course, from the same institution that claims using the word "normal" to describe a distribution is some sort of "-ist" (racist, sexist, whatever).
> Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game.
Emphasis mine.
> Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.
There are some pretty wild claims but overall, a fairly interesting article. I think they've just exaggerated an otherwise interesting point - that gender differences in hunting are not explained by differences in long-distance running aptitude (which are very small).
The examples of extant hunting techniques they themselves cited are not related to (ultra) long distance running anyway, so the connection between hunting and running is tenuous.
Jasmin Paris has won a fair number of extremely difficult ultras in mixed company, for example. Really long ultras are not an exclusively male domain. The marathon is if anything too short.
(Have a read about persistence hunting).
The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.
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I went and read it and it doesn't seem to matter to me that it's about ultra-endurance events? Of course differences in stride length and endurance physiology will matter for run performance.
The full paragraph:
>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. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
To me both cultural and physiological differences are likely in play. I am not even sure how you could effectively seperate culture from physiology here (hard to do a randomised controlled trial on stride length - I guess Mendelian Randomisation regression might work?). Anyone confidently asserting only one or neither of these is at play is probably not stating that from a position of logic.
The claim that is being made in the article is that only cultural differences are relevant. Saying the relative effects of cultural and biological differences are hard to know would not be a very controversial statement.
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They even cite physiological differences themselves extensively (namely the role estrogen).
Quite so. These guys are dissing the article without reading it, and all they have is argument by ridicule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_ridicule) ... no refutation of any sort.
And of course what they are talking about has nothing to do the criticism in TFA, which they also haven't read.
Even so... in ultra-endurance sports, do women actually dominate? I'm willing to believe it, but not without some statistics.