Butthurt white guys, an Asian virgin and an angry lesbian walk into a bar...

Is it time for an intervention?

Neanderthal men cooked and reared children, while the women hunted and played roller derby.

Looks like I've got a lot to catch up on, but I just want to point out to tanooba, that if you're looking for an instinct to claim doesn't affect us anymore, hunger might be the last goddamn one you should go after. Not only is it still clearly a driving force, but it's one of the few with an actual physiological result if you ignore it. Stop eating for half a day and, apart from a general feeling of "hunger", you'll start to get abdominal pain. The instinct is so engrained in us that obesity is an epidemic in the developed world. Because, guess what? If we were still roaming around on the plains of Africa, those fatties would be the clear winners. The rest of us who aren't fat have to often make a conscious effort to counteract that instinct to consume by staying active and eating less, more nutritious foods (The fact that this is a conscious decision is not conceding a point, because the instinct is still STRONG). That choice is usually driven by the instinct to be attractive and find a mate.

By your ill-conceived hypothesis, leave an adult with complete amnesia to their own devices and they'd starve to death

Tanoomba_sl said:

People don't have to "shun" their gender identity or whatever inclinations are associated with that. Whatever inclinations people have, you'll see great enough variation among members of the same gender that whatever general variation exists between the genders is inconsequential.

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So being gay is a conscious decision? Being trans is a conscious decision? Or do you think it makes more fucking sense that it has to do with androgen exposure in the womb?

"inclination". Interesting choice of word. Where do you suppose this "inclination" comes from? Can you think of another way to describe an inclination?

Tanoomba_sl said:

What's deeply ingrained? Like I said, HUNGER is as deeply engrained as any human desire we could possibly have, but even hunger has virtually no influence in the important decisions we make, such as what career to pursue. Hunger is obsolete. We feel hunger as a biological necessity, one that forced us into action on a daily basis in primitive times, but it's moot now. You could literally sever the connection between your brain and your stomach so you'd never feel hungry again and, as long as you kept feeding yourself (which you would do, since you already know it's essential to your survival), you'd be totally fine.

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And since you asked, the reason this is fucking pap is because your "thought experiment" is so flawed I have no idea how you thought it was a good idea to share it with us. First off, what the fuck does the instinct to eat have to do with picking a career? Did the instinct to eat stop a beaver from building a dam? How is hunger moot now? Do you not eat when you're hungry? Just because you know WHY you eat, doesn't mean it's not an instinct. I know why I breathe. "sever the connection between your brain...blah blah" is one of the worst arguments I've ever had the mispleasure of reading. First off, what is it even meant to show us? That if you didn't have hunger pains, you'd still eat because you know you have to? Do you have an example where they've done that? How do you know you wouldn't continue to eat regardless? Do you have an example of a stomach/brain connection being severed and the creature starving to death or did you just pull it out of your ass? You can't just remove an essential mechanism put in place through evolution and say "see? It doesn't work". And to completely put waste to this piece of shit thought experiment, quadriplegics can tell when they're hungry despite not having any feeling. Thanks for wasting my time

Mist_sl said:

This is like saying "Human brains are made of meat, therefore everything is purely biological." That's blatant handwaving.

As a metaphor, everything a computer does is in binary, but we don't code in binary and interface with computer by typing 1s and 0s into it and reading 1s and 0s off the screen. We have better frameworks for getting information into and out of a computer, or understanding what's going on inside the computer in order to program it. We have better and more predictive frameworks for understanding human behavior than just the biological responses of a bunch of meat cells.

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A metaphor is just that; a metaphor. You can't use that to support your hypothesis. It's like the idiot creationists trying to break down the "bridge" of evolution... it's not actually a fucking bridge.
Also "a bunch of meat cells" is pretty intellectually bankrupt of you to say. Throwing those words around makes you sound a lot like the creationists. "I ain't no monkey" "I didn't come from no slime". I think you're probably better than that and you know it

Mist_sl said:

You're the idiot who can't tell the difference between an illustrative metaphor and actual evidence for an argument.

The brain IS a bunch of meat cells, and every function does is biological at it's basis. But as high level computer code is a powerful method of changing the internal state of a computer (that's what you're doing when you program a computer), language and social programming is a powerful and useful method of changing internal the state of the brain.

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Keep stretching that metaphor....

And it was a dumb metaphor to begin with. What were you trying to illustrate? How did it relate in anyway to instincts? 1s and 0s? What the fuck are you talking about?

I get her original argument. But that metaphor is a mess

She still hasn't addressed how her social hypothesis of gender roles relates to homosexuality and transgender. It's all learned, then?