Victoria Pendleton

I kind of see where you're going with this now. For me, biological characteristics, such as beards, breasts, body fat, voice etc. are a given (although as an aside, I work with a lot of trans people who would argue that in spite of having male or female biological characteristics, they are in fact female or male...), whereas behaviours and traits (aggression, submission, competitiveness...) are not.

I understand that it would be lovely if it were true that behaviours lack biological causes, but sadly it is not. It is a complete fantasy.

How would you explain the complex behaviours of animals (bees, birds, insects, whatever you want really) that lack a society or the brain power to be "conditioned"? Bees don't do a lot of conceptual thinking, and they don't watch TV and read magazines, but they do exhibit strongly deterministic and ordered social behaviour. How could this be caused other than biologically?

Sure, that's bees, we're people. But as you get closer to humans and look at primate behaviour you can see that there is a continuum between learned and biologically programmed behaviour. We've been evolving for millions and millions of years, and for most of it we weren't smart enough to reason, so it was our biology that did the work of setting our behaviour. just because we've managed to improve slightly in the last 100,000 years or so (that's being generous - we've only had towns for a few thousand years) doesn't mean we can just ignore millions of years of biological impulses. We're pretty much the same as we were in the Stone Age, and our behaviour is conditioned by our genes, like it or not!

But hey, there's hope! there are a lot of people in this world, and a big fucking long continuum of biological interactions and variances. It's not as if there are two (gendered) categories of behaviours and we're either in one or the other. People overlap, have different biological construction, respond differently to situations, wa-hey! We're obviously not all clones of each other rolling off a giant genetic factory, and admitting that our behaviour has biology behind it doesn't force you to admit that. Social conditioning is all well and good, but it's only part of the story.

BUT i still think you should go and do some more reading. you might even find it interesting. Srsly.

this is the best/funnest discussion i've had on here for ages.