What is a man?
Gender diversity has long been a feature of our species. Those that deny this are ignorant of evolution’s history.
A recently published meta-analysis in the journal PLOS One found that women have historically been hunters. The longstanding myth of hunters versus gatherers, that only men take down large game while women squat to collect plants and nuts seems to be a romanticized notion of labor division between genders. The truth is more complex.
Scouring 150 years of ethnographic data, the researchers discovered that women hunt anything from small to large game in the majority of the 1,400 societies studied. Intriguingly, women's hunting strategies are more flexible and social than those of men. The "survival of the fittest" ethos — one constantly cited and championed in today's manosphere podcast world — isn't as gendered as we believe.
Even evolution's pioneering scientist Charles Darwin knew that. First off, the term was coined by English polymath Herbert Spencer after he read "On the Origin of Species." Darwin only began using "survival of the fittest" in the book's 5th edition. Still, the catchphrase has trickled down as a historical truism. Strong men, the narrative goes, propagate the species and are most responsible for civilizational successes.
But Darwin wasn't so sure. A dozen years after his opus caused tsunamis in the biological and social worlds, the naturalist put forward a divergent path for evolution. In "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex," he speculates that sexual selection wasn't as simple as "man hits woman with club before dragging her to cave." In this rendering, women play a dominant role in mate choice, and therefore evolution.
And what drives female behavior, according to Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, is beauty. Yet, as Prum writes, this latter theory has largely been ignored, and outright scorned:
Aesthetic evolution by mate choice is an idea so dangerous that it had to be laundered out of Darwinism itself in order to preserve the omnipotence of the explanatory power of natural selection.
Darwin didn't rule out natural selection, his original term for "survival of the fittest." He just didn't believe it told the complete story. Being an inquisitive scientist, he kept searching for clues that spell out how we became the animal we are.
The problem has always been that the phrase 'survival of the fittest' is pretty much an empty tautology because the definition of 'fittest' simply means 'those who survive'. What the social Darwinists like Spencer meant by 'fittest' was 'the most aggressive and dominant'. But even those terms have nuance---that's why we have terms like 'passive-aggressive' and interpersonal strategies where dominance results from things like political whisper campaigns instead of bare-knuckle brawling.
The theoreticians of biology have understood this from the beginning. I understand that the anarchist thinker Prince Kropotkin wrote a respected paper in the field where he showed that many biological organisms use cooperation and mutual help as a survival strategy.