The more I travel, the more I see how fantastically different cultures can be, but I also see the common thread which tells me what people are really like. The fact is, men tend to think in certain ways, women in another, and then homosexual men too. Of course there's lots of variation within individuals, but I'm talking about the whole.

There isn't any culture in the world where men aren't respected more because they are better providers, or any culture where women aren't respected more because they are prettier. That's just the way it is.

I've seen so much cultural variation that is seems like the kinds of things which can change, do change across cultures. The ways in which men and women express their preferences are almost infinitely varied. But I see the same basic, yet different, male and female instincts in every country I've ever lived in.

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You're saying Saudi Arabia is like USA now? Have you even watched the TV show Mad Men? 1960s USA was different from 2000s USA.

Clearly, there are cultural differences. However, name one country that’s military is made up of significantly more women than men. Far more women in the US go to college today than men do, go back 50 years and the ratios was very different. So clearly cultural norms change, yet there is less cultural diversity than you would expect if biology was not significant.

Edit: Another vary important thing to realize is that these biological traits are not universal. For example there is a huge amount of individual diversity in the amount of hormones produced at various stages of development. Some of these produce noticeable external changes and other impact the brain far more than the rest of the body. Multiply those differences with different developmental experences and the average says very little about the individual.

This is because of biology, but it is not because of any sort of hardwired instincts. It's just that 200 men and 200 women can on average have the same number of children as 100 men and 200 women, but the reverse is not true. 200 men and 100 women can have roughly the same number of children as 50 men and 100 women.

However you’re missing the basic concept that the country that used both women and men could simply create a larger army and crush the other country. The reason this did not work historically was more to do with men’s larger size and muscle mass than reproductive issues. If you can fire an arrow and extra 20 feet you can kill someone before they can attack back. If can lift a heaver weapon with a longer range you are far more likely to win in melee combat. Such minor advantages are far less important in gathering food so sending a largely male army off to combat is simply more efficient prior to the use of fire arms. (There is some evidence that women do better in modern firefights so you could see a reversal of this trend fairly soon.)

PS: Population sizes are far closer linked to the ability to gather food and avoid disease than the ability to reproduce. In theory more women = more baby’s but you could also see 4x population growth in 30 years which does not happen.

I think the modern world is much more complex, and the rational choice in general (possibly even in antiquity) is to avoid violence if at all possible and find mutually beneficial solutions to resource scarcity.

Yes, women are not the largest ratio of militaries, however the attitude to women in military has change. Today people would balk at the idea of putting 5 years in the military, we think they should be protected, and being in the military would harm them. This used to be the attitude to women in the military.

Attitudes have changed.

You could say 200 years ago in the US many women covered their legs because of taboo's, but dig a little deeper and that taboo ties into female legs are attractive. Now days women often dress to show off their legs and 'she has great legs' is not uncommon complement because female legs are attractive. So they might be opposite behaviors, but IMO it's the same idea that leads to Muslim women completely covering themselves.

You can even study things like cheating by looking at genetic information and find culture often has less impact on behavior than you might expect. Consider, people still cheat when they risk death to do so.

This feels like a cheap shot from old-school feminists. That assumption hasn't changed, it's just not the only option. A woman's life can be fulfilled by taking care of a family.

You seem pretty confident in your claim. But, yet it goes against most of what that my freshman and sophomore anthropology professors taught me.

I'm talking about the very basic level, where women generally have nurturing roles: raising children, caring for the sick and dying, preparing food/clothing.

Obviously there are examples of cultures where men cook or women hunt, but I can't find any culture around the world where women don't traditionally have nurturing roles.

How much of this, do you figure, is survivor bias? If there were just a few dominant cultures historically who happened to have a patriarchal bias and which went on to be profoundly influential over a large volume of the planet (like, say, the Romans, the Chinese, etc), it stands to reason that male-female relationships in the many, many cultures that were shaped by them would simply happen to exhibit these traits, not because of biological constraints, but because of simple historical happenstance. Cultures which failed to fit this mold would be "civilized" when they came into contact with the dominant cultural hegemony, and relatively few counter-examples would survive.

Thus we can find in small, isolated pockets surviving cultures like the Aka, who split "nuturing roles" equally and fail to fit your hypothesis, but outside of extremely isolated cases it is hard to find cultures that run counter to what you perceive as biological norms precisely because it is hard to find any culture that wasn't extensively re-shaped by contact with one of a handful of historically dominant civilizations

However, what I took away from those classes was that gender was a very mutable 'invention' that Humans created through culture to systematically specialize labor in response to environmental forces. Some cultures invented two-genders, aligned with biology, to succeeded in environments where two specialized gender roles were more advantageous. However, other cultures of Humans invented several types of genders, and genders that crossed biology, to succeeded in different environments.

So, if those memories are even accurate, gender and gender roles in Humans are more aligned with the overarching systematic cultural forces than biology. And, even if we consider biology, there is a lot of cross-over. Humans are a very adaptive and mutable species.