BoysToys

Slow some studies showing that castration did not affect aggression:
Tamarins
Squirrel monkeys
Cichlid fish
Voles - aggression increased in castrated males rather than decreased

There are of course other studies showing different effects, but they don't change the conclusion. If the hypothesis is that testosterone underlies aggressive behaviour, then castration should reduce or remove aggression. This hypothesis has been repeatedly falsified.

There may well be some relationship between testosterone and social behaviour, but it's part of a complex interconnected web of other hormonal interactions and epigenetics that isn't currently well understood. It's definitely not the simplistic case that testosterone = aggression, however.

*My "anecdotal" evidence includes the millenia of human history and animal husbandry.
*
And of course you were there for all these millennia recording everything objectively? I assume you're joking when you call that evidence.

Speaking of animal husbandry, there could be something interesting in domesticated animals responding differently to castration than non-domesticated animals. That is, selective breeding may have favoured the trait of becoming more docile when castrated (with the trait selection being passed down through closely-related breeding animals, not the castrated ones obviously!). Might be worth a proper study.

Funnily enough, I did try to shelter ds as much as possible from guns and fighting. But then, I took self defence lessons and enrolled ds on them as well. We do a lot of play fighting now. Although it's mostly towards defending/controlling rather than attacking.

The cat's bum face was describing her very obvious judgement of me and the fact that we allowed our children to play with the toys of their own choice. I actually laud my friends stance on pacifism. But unfortunately they weren't able to influence their little boys on this when it came to violent weapons

Ab aside but do parents still try to ban toy guns and swords? I tried it ; it didn't work. We had an armoury of plastic weapons. In reality my son as a child was , and as a man is, as gentle as his father and uncles.

I find it surprising that parents wouldn't find toys they wanted. Unless they got tired parent syndrome.
Or the shops behaved like those supermarkets that put things in random places for people to browse and buy things they don't want.
Sections:
Dolls
Action figures
Cars
Puzzles
Superheros
Construction

It's not brain surgery.

"That doesn't mean we should leave them to it because we all know that male sexual violence is a huge problem globally. And we also know that culture can either minimise or maximise that innate violence because some cultures are vastly more violent and aggressive than others." Absolutely.

"Toy shops that have experimented with getting rid of stereotypical boys sections and girls immediately suffer precipitous falls in revenue and annoyed parents as well as children for not being able to find what they're looking for." Of course they did! That much would be obvious. It would have to be an extensive thing done on a large scale over a long period of time (hence me suggesting a couple of years but probably would require longer) to break the conditioning with parents as well as children.

I didn't think it was too bad in that it considered and showed some evidence of testosterone as consequence rather than cause.
But, thanks, I'm not prepared to analyse all the studies now, so happy to learn about it. :)

Lweiji that article is an example of the kind of spin that gets put on high-profile studies in this area. For instance, the social dominance stuff is part of the camp of studies that don't replicate well and have been seriously questioned. The article is also pretty inaccurate in places, such as where it claims that castration studies have shown testosterone is "necessary for violence". Oh dear, no...

There is a an interesting theory regarding how socialisation underpins apparent testosterone associations. Since higher testosterone leads to more stereotypically male secondary sexual characteristics - greater muscle mass, more body hair, etc. - much men may be socialised into behaving more aggressively when a particular society considers aggression to be a stereotypically male trait. Or in other words, society condones aggression in the most male-looking men, and so a correlation emerges between circulating testosterone and aggression. The jury is still out on that one, though it is a plausible mechanism. There is some support in that administering testosterone doesn't make individuals more aggressive.

Whether or not boys are more innately aggressive is nothing to boast about anyway!

Let's suppose they are. That doesn't mean we should leave them to it because we all know that male sexual violence is a huge problem globally. And we also know that culture can either minimise or maximise that innate violence because some cultures are vastly more violent and aggressive than others.

This review piece suggests testosterone may be as much or more a consequence of human violence as a cause.
And that testosterone may be more involved in competition and dominance than violence per se. But, still, cause or effect?
www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-testosterone-alone-doesnt-cause-violence/
It's fairly old now, so maybe there's more recent evidence?

Boys have mor testosterone than girls (even before puberty).

No, they don't. It was thought at one time that they did, and not just testosterone but a broad range of androgens, but more recent large-scale studies have found no differences.

There's even a point before puberty onset (at around 8yo, I think it was) where girls have higher androgen levels than boys. It reflects the fact that both boys and girls experience a rise in androgens at puberty, but girls reach this point before boys.

What happens with men who were castrated as young?
There used to be some who were traditionally harem guards and opera singers (the castrati). The castrati could sing higher notes that are now sung by women. I presume they were castrated very young.

Is there any evidence of what the lack of testosterone did to their aggression levels or preferences?

SlowFJH. I'll take experimental evidence over anecdotes any day.

If you castrate any male mammal before puberty, you are utterly changing the normal course of development of the body and brain. The difference between a castrated bullock and bull are more do do with their totally different physiologies (which genes were expressed or not over the course of development) than their differing levels of testosterone. Castrate an adult male bull and he will probably (but not always) stop chasing cows, but he won't necessarily be any more docile.

Castrated adult humans - and there are some cases - do not appear to have different levels of aggression or mood. Certainly nothing consistent.

Roid rage isn't really a fact either, lots of people who use steroids do so without any increase in aggression. From what I've read they generally magnify already existing personality traits.

My mother also banned guns. She had all girls.

So we hit each other with pokers instead.

No no no no no Boys and girls aren't innately different, the monkey study is tiny and has been criticised loads as stated above, and everyone needs to read Cordelia Fine.

Testosterone in humans (linked to aggression and competition for resources and mates) mean that males (throughout history) are more likely to be the ones who develop and use weapons and basic tools (e.g. clubs) to more complex tools (such as shaped stones, sharpened sticks and then much later - slings, bows and arrows and eventually the wheel).

Noooooooooo! Sorry OP, but statements like this - typically from the popular science end of evolutionary psychology - are just plain wrong. They do a disservice to both evolution and psychology as they are massively more bias conjecture than evidence.

Testosterone in humans brings about secondary sex characteristics and other physiological changes. However, there is no good evidence that it increases aggression or competitiveness or any other social behaviours. There are a few high-profile studies that have claimed such effects, and they get a disproportionate amount of attention in the media, blogs, gender punditry, etc. But the reality is that testosterone experiments tend to produce inconsistent results and many of the high profile studies don't replicate well (and so may well reflect a false positive).

And extrapolating those finding into the evolution of human social behaviour is unwarranted; just bad science. I know one particular branch of evolutionary psychology (the kooky cousin of the academic family...) does it all the time, and makes bite-sized evolutionary claims from very flaky data, but it really doesn't represent the evidence or the wider view of the field.

Rant over, honest. It just hit on one of my professional bugbears (I'm a scientist in a very closely related area; some of my colleagues work on this topic).