Just feeling really angry at all the murder, assault, rape of females that goes on

How would that account for men making up around 95% of the prison population? I'd suggest that it has more to do with men committing a much greater number of crimes.

Is that not more to do with the fact that woman generally get much shorter and more lenient sentencing.

There has been a 12% increase in the female prison population in the UK over the past decade. There are now approximately 4,200 women in gaol. The male prison population increased by 30% over the same period and now stands at around 84,000.

www.parliament.uk/Templates/BriefingPapers/Pages/BPPdfDownload.aspx?bp-id=SN04334

in reference to your first paragraf hester i hate the daily mail with a vengence.
studies on female violence are unreliable and probobly begun with an agenda, but.
i am 43 and i have never hit a partner, and i've had a few, however i have been hit, slapped a few times, not terrible beating just inpulsive Gf's who had run out of diction, but yeah, i probobly had it comming eh!
i was at the receiving end of a projectile remote controll once, that really hurt!

in reference to you last paragraf
i have no statistics to hand but arnt women are starting to fill prisons much more than they ever have?, maybe with equality come other pressures that may lead some to crime, even violent crime.

More than half of the top ten results for the proposition that women are more violent than men are links to male rights organisations, meow. And the Daily Mail.

The fight to recast the reality of who hurts whom is pervasive and despicable.

Men are more likely to be the victims of a violent assault. They are frequently also a participant in that same assault, which skews the figures. Men are also more likely to be robbed, an offense that is included in violent crime statistics.

Outside of the US, with its culture of guns and gangs, men are still more likely to be murdered, but are not the vast majority of homicide victims as claimed up thread, in most countries the difference is much smaller.

One thing that hasn't changed is that across countries, cultures and age groups, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violent crimes.

www.csc-scc.gc.ca/text/prgrm/fsw/fsw23/fsw23e01-eng.shtml

niether am i, infact some studies show that women lash out, slap, kick and hit much more than men, but men tend to do more damage overall from when they do lash out.

do you (anyone) think that the world would be a more restful, less violent place if we had a matriachy?
serious question, and i'm not claiming to know the answer.

Yeah, himalaya, I see that - I just think that if you're answering a question which is asking about the OP's anger, it's not really possible to claim your answer no longer has anything to do with the system her anger is part of.

I agree that evolution and morality are separate - but then, that's why I wouldn't try to answer what I see as a moral or at least an emotive question by citing evolutionary theories - but I think given what the question was, it's not really possible to bring in an evolutionary argument and then expect it to be understood in a separate context from everything else on the thread.

I'm not convinced men are, by nature, more violent than women, not at all.

LRD - I think evolution came up in answer to the question "why are men responsible for so much more violence than women?"

The answer of course is part nature, part nurture and I think we probably all agree on that.

These discussions always seem to kick off. I think because people want to view evolution through a moral lens which just doesn't work. So for example when I said sexual selection by women played a part in promoting the "mr nice guy" gene (figuratively speaking) you say yay because that's a morally attractive story. But when meow says that sexual selection by females has played a role in promoting male aggression everyone says that is morally offensive

That is it on the nail. Evolution is Amoral.

Probably best. If you can't avoid being offensive, don't say it

Being Offended has never been a valid argument for discovering the truth, but its been a damn good one for preserving falsehood through the ages though.

Probably best. If you can't avoid being offensive, don't say it.

i dont want to repeat it because it will probobly get deleated again

You mean, you don't have an answer and you don't dare paraphrase what you said again because it's been torn to shreds.

no messy i diddnt say that, so your not arguing with me , so i dont feel the need to answer it because it's indefenceable, but then i wouldnt have said anything indefencable

Oh, and of course evolution and morality are separate systems.

My issue is that this discussion of evolution has been wheeled out in response to a thread about feeling 'angry' and about moral responses - to then say 'oh, but we didn't mean it like that' is disingenuous.

When we're getting into parents selecting their childrens' partners (and I agree, often fathers not mothers), I think surely we have moved a long way rather fast?

There were points in this discussion when it was suggested that, because some mammals have physical characteristics developed both for violence and for sexual display (eg., antlers), we should assume humans developed in the same way.

I still have a pretty big issue with this and I don't believe for one moment it is good science to make parallels without investigating. The 'investigating' step seems to be missing in this discussion, replaced with some talk of imagining cave men being violent.

So there seems to be a pretty big weak link here.

To then move from this picture where we're talking about sexual selection as it works in animals (including primitive humans), to societies with complex social rules about partner choice that exclude the two people who will actually end up having sex, seems an even huger and more tenuous leap to me.

Is there any animal group we can compare to, where the parents of animals select mates for their children?

My impression of human societies in which parents choose mates for their children is that parents do not often care about the very basic things that we'd expect sexual selection to be motivated by - eg., marrying a woman to a man long past the ideal age to father children is often common. Marrying a man to a woman near menopause is common. The marriage of children is common, leading often to such dangerous births that the mother is made infertile.

I find it highly improbable that the selection of partners for a child by its parents should follow the same evolutionary motivations, as selection of one partner by the other.

This is completely off topic but the term 'top dog' keeps coming up and someone told me the other day where it came from.

In days of old to saw a fallen tree trunk up you needed a long saw with two people at either end, on pushing one pulling.

The person at the top was of course ' Top Dog'

The person underneath getting covered in saw dust was... 'Under Dog'

sorry, as you were...............................................

Meow, nah, calling me a 21st century liberal isn't going to make me see the error of my ways. I'm not disagreeing with you because what was said was morally (I'm sure you in your mind are not blaming women at all) but because it's inaccurate.

Lets review what you said. Can't find the quote exactly because it was deleted. It was something like - women mate selection is responsible for male violence

But such a bold statement ignores the following

1. that the vast majority of men aren't violent
2. that female mate selection doesn't always mean a choiceful selection but a choice imposed (semantics but important) and
3. that being bigger isn't necessarily a way to attract mates but to be able to overpower them or to establish one's dominance as the only one able to gain access to mates. Which turns out to be not quite such a successful strategy because of female infidelity keeping other "types" of male continuing down the bloodline.

So, you see, things turn out to be slightly more complicated than your original statement.

Now, onto the moral justification part. Your accusation of my moral "cherry picking" is ignorant of the fact there are quite a few cherries in your basket. I know it's fashionable to adhere to this cynical, "I'm just telling it like it is", Thatcherite, survival of the fittest way of thinking. It's been fashionable for centuries but it ignores the actual truth.

Yes, everyone has had to survive, but being top-dog isn't always the way to survive, because both altruism and social cooperation have always had strong evolutionary advantages, as alluded to by Darwin himself. It's not all "right wing politics" (although obviously sometimes it is). The "dog eat dog" idea may be fashionable amongst right-wingers who like to pride themselves on being realistic, but the truth is they're not being realistic, because they're only partially correct.

Himalaya, I'd like to go back to a previous post of yours that has been niggling at me - Someone upthread said that female mate choice can have had no significant impact on male evolution because of arranged marriage, rape etc... In evolutionary terms choosing the mate your parents choose for you is still mate selection.

It's taken me a while to work out - it's the word 'parents' that is bothering me because it implies that mothers and fathers have historically had an equal say in who their offspring pair up with. Is this really the case? My impression is that if you have a system where it's the women who are traded (and so are separated from their birth families), where wealth is accumulated along the male bloodline and where a man's daughters (and sons) and the woman/women who bore them are considered to be the man's property, the mothers are not going to have a huge say in choosing their daughters' mates - certainly not the final say.

I suppose this goes to the very heart of what is meant by the Patriarchy - rule by fathers. This still doesn't look like women doing the choosing to me.

Meow and Himalaya, I don't think evolution has a moral lens. I just don't think it is a significant factor in the actions and decisions of individuals, say, the UK and that socialisation is a much bigger factor.

another excellent post hymalaya, yes it's the moral lens thats the problem, it's allmost like explaining evolution to a group of creationists.

the fact is evolution has no plan, no one sat a desk and design it, you either get selected or you dont, live or die.

natural selection and sexual selection are forces millions of years old and brutaly right wing ( if i can describe them as having politics) and you cant cherry-pick the bits that fit into your 21st cenury liberal theories. they are what they are.
this doesnt mean they justify anything, especialy violent and criminal behavoir.

Messy -

Actually I wasn't disagreeing with meow. Humans are adaptable - both male violence/aggression and "nice guy" strategies can have evolutionary advantage. One doesn't disprove the other.

These discussions always seem to kick off. I think because people want to view evolution through a moral lens which just doesn't work. So for example when I said sexual selection by women played a part in promoting the "mr nice guy" gene (figuratively speaking) you say yay because that's a morally attractive story. But when meow says that sexual selection by females has played a role in promoting male aggression everyone says that is morally offensive.

Both are likely to be true. The point is you cant judge evolution by moral standards, and you can't see evolutionary reasons as justifications. They never can be.

SGM, yes, terrible threats against you, interesting about the decompression time also.

SGM - I am really sorry about the horrible threats you received.

All the data I have seen says that men are more at risk of violent crime (apart from rape). Women are more at risk of DV, men are more at risk of homicide.

If there are statistics that say different then I am interested to see them. I had a search on google for "the majority victims of violence are women" and it returned "no results found"

In fact the first result it returned for the words without quote marks was this one from feminist journal ...which says " women are not the most common victims of violence, most violence is committed by men on other males."