Velvet Banana

During Tuesday’s lecture, the question of why are men faster than women was raised.  A quick glance at the timed speeds of Olympic events shows the times of men are significantly faster than women – across the board.  If women were to compete with men head’s up, they would not receive gold, silver or bronze medals at all!

One journal article (American Physiological Society from August 2002 ) theorizes a sort of gendered-Darwinism explanation of lower female run speed.  “Archeological evidence suggests that human ancestors were tool users and may have had gender-specific tasks at least as much as one million years ago, possibly lessening the importance of running speed particularly in females. This analysis is strictly speculative.” So, slow cavemen were naturally selected from the population, while cavewomen stayed back in the cave and didn’t have to worry about run speed??

The rest of the journal article states that there is a negligible difference in male and female horses with respect to run speed.  The same applies to dogs.  It kind of makes you wonder if the principles of Darwinism are applicable especially for some of the physical differences.