This quote was when I know something was seriously wrong with the magazine I read assiduously as a child:
> Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
You are quoting it out of context. The article made reference to endurance events prior to this as well. Also, it’s extremely relevant to idea that Neanderthal have similar wear patterns on the bones. This article is in reference to hunter gatherer theory. Our modern concepts of male/female physical characteristics may make our judgments of prior humans inaccurate.
“ Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
> Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
But that's obvious nonsense. It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running. We're talking about many, many data points, all pointing in the same direction: in practice, men outperform women in distance sports [1].
To even begin to argue against this mountain of evidence, you have to resort to slippery rhetorical tactics, like this:
> As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
So, the argument being implied here (but not actually made!) is that the performance difference we see throughout the history of the marathon is due to...pace setters?
Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?
This reminds me of the old expression: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
[1] I'm talking about distributions here. Obviously, there are going to be many women who outperform many men on an individual basis.
“Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?“
Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
You want to believe things are simple, but they’re not.
> Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
Come on. Think things through to the end. If it were actually true that the pace-setters could run faster than the competitors for the full marathon, then the pace-setters would win the event.
What you want to say is that the pace-setters are capable of running a faster pace than the competitors for a shorter distance. Maybe that's true (I doubt it), but it's not responsive. Pace setters are there to set a pace, like a metronome. If the competitors feel this pace is inadequate, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from running faster, or demanding a faster pace-setter.
Where did I say “for the whole marathon”? The point of pace setters is that they run shorter distances faster and then drop out. They’re given a tempo to run by the lead group, yes, and they enable that lead group to run faster by providing shelter. This is true from the 1500 upwards; look at Josh Kerr’s recent mile record, the Breaking 2 project, etc.
> It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running.
And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get? Also, as you are saying yourself: this is about distributions, not necessarily about the top 0.1% of the world. The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then. You might disagree with this, but the article is more nuanced, and reducing it to the rage-bait comment above does not do it justice at all.
> And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get?
So what? The gap exists. Saying that it diminishes with distance is interesting, certainly, but it's a far cry from evidence that the gender gap is due to something other than biology.
> The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then.
This is sophistry. In reality, even on average men are faster than women.
> The level of ignorance of people dissing the article without reading it is not astonishing, it's par for the course.
I feel that's an unwarranted assumption on your part: I read the article, even quoted from it in my comment, and my take agrees with your parent comments.
Your comment smells a lot like "They disagree with the article, so obviously they didn't read it, because anyone who read it would agree".
My first computer science professor claimed women could not have been the first programmers because they were physically incapable of learning something this complex. Sadly this is exactly what I expect here.
I'd posit that it's not primarily ignorance, but the idea that ideology can bend reality. This idea is quite successful at spreading, in part due to ignorance, but there are other factors too.
> You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events.
No, it isn't. It's about sports, using ultra-endurance as an example. This is one of the cases where the example is the exception.
IOW, the quote uses an outlier to make claims about the distribution. This is, of course, from the same institution that claims using the word "normal" to describe a distribution is some sort of "-ist" (racist, sexist, whatever).
> Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game.
Emphasis mine.
> Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.
There are some pretty wild claims but overall, a fairly interesting article. I think they've just exaggerated an otherwise interesting point - that gender differences in hunting are not explained by differences in long-distance running aptitude (which are very small).
The examples of extant hunting techniques they themselves cited are not related to (ultra) long distance running anyway, so the connection between hunting and running is tenuous.
Jasmin Paris has won a fair number of extremely difficult ultras in mixed company, for example. Really long ultras are not an exclusively male domain. The marathon is if anything too short.
(Have a read about persistence hunting).
The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.
This is the paragraph. "As an example" here implies that they are talking about sports in general, not just endurance events.
Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best...
I went and read it and it doesn't seem to matter to me that it's about ultra-endurance events? Of course differences in stride length and endurance physiology will matter for run performance.
The full paragraph:
>Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
To me both cultural and physiological differences are likely in play. I am not even sure how you could effectively seperate culture from physiology here (hard to do a randomised controlled trial on stride length - I guess Mendelian Randomisation regression might work?). Anyone confidently asserting only one or neither of these is at play is probably not stating that from a position of logic.
The claim that is being made in the article is that only cultural differences are relevant. Saying the relative effects of cultural and biological differences are hard to know would not be a very controversial statement.
The worst thing about this article is it seems to fail to understand the basic of hypothesis-testing, the bedrock of science.
Title: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
Subtitle: The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence
Saying there isn't enough evidence to prove a hypothesis is not the same as proving its negation. Failing to reject the null hypothesis is not the same as proving it.
Get an issue of Scientific American from the past few years and compare with one from the early 90s. It will become obvious why Scientific American no longer has readers.
I used to subscribe to SciAm, just looked at their website after around 3 years, and the lead article is "Why partisan politics may be changing people's accents."
The Atlantic went the same way, but as more mainstream magazine, that's kind of okay. Not acceptable for SciAm.
The Atlantic did not shroud itself in glory during the pandemic. Better than SciAm, certainly, but they publish a lot of dubious stuff right next to decent articles.
Which, regardless of what you feel about Fauci, is at least against type for the Atlantic. But in 2020, they had no problem publishing garbage like this:
I've been thinking a lot about this example of decline, and the conclusion I've come to is that as print media has lost relevance and power, the only people willing to fill the remaining roles are those people who have ideological axes to grind.
Basically, formerly great media empires have declined to the point where only people willing to work for low wages in uncertain careers will accept positions writing for those institutions. So we mourn the loss of the brand, but if anyone actually cared about the brand in practice, it would not employ these people.
Great thought. Inline with this - I think the form of media changing has also changed the demographic of people who are drawn to produce it, and that reflects in the quality and ethics of the entire medium as a whole. In turn we have a society that rewards attention over the truth or what's right and wrong and only seems to continue to worsen day by day.
I suscribe to Le Scienze, which was founded in 1968 as the Italian translation of Scientific American. You might find that weird but knowledge of English was not common back then. Furthermore it contains local articles and other local content. However it's still mostly a translation of most of the articles of SciAm, from one or two months before. Sometimes I read them in advance in English from the links here on HN. It's run by an Italian editor, they've got a contract with SciAm but they are not part of the same business group.
It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine.
However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition.
Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.
I've been a continuous subscriber since the early 1980s.
The magazine's low point was the infamous op-ed in 2021 about E.O. Wilson a few days after the biologist's death. It was basically a woke hit piece accusing him of scientific racism and white supremacy, with no evidence from his body of writing. It also criticized the genetics community at large for the term "normal distribution", which it took as offensive for implying that anyone outside the peak is "abnormal". (Never mind that "normal" has a technical definition in statistics.)
It's improved a lot over the last few years.
Still, I fear it may soon go the way of BYTE. Not because the need isn't there or because the market is gone, but because people get information in such different ways now.
Reading the comments I hear about disagreements with science. Headline and articles. I don’t hear any objections the facts or refutations. You don’t have to like Science, but stop claiming that Scientific America isn’t using it unless you have proof.
It's really funny how it is always right-wing backlash and how the magazine's independence is at stake when the owners want it to remain neutral.
The sheer idea that people from all political sides could be complaining because they don't want politics everywhere never comes to mind.
Also the fact that Helmuth fundamentally altered the magazine's course by pushing politics is completely ignored.
Instead, when the owners have to forcefully correct the course it's being sold as threatening the magazine's independence.
You'd expect this from totalitarian regimes where even the most mundane cultural output becomes a vehicle for ideology. When you read a book about raising babies in Nazi Germany, you're actually learning how to raise obedient, emotionally hardened citizens. When you watch a romantic musical comedy in Stalin's Soviet Union, you're actually watching a celebration of the supposed superiority of Soviet society. Hell, my own dad who studied music in an east German conservatory had to write his thesis about Marx perception of classical music.
Somehow, this ideology achieved this without any of the pressures of a totalitarian regime - just by being an intransigent minority.
> Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash.
The magazine chose to go more political. When the political winds changed direction they found themselves on the wrong side of the new administration.
Remaining purely apolitical was an option for them.
The timing was sadly important too. She started 2020. The pandemic had disputed origins. I would say one can guess which side her editorial take took, but one doesn’t need to; she openly mentioned her views on lab leak in a handbook for scicomm editors she authored.
“Trumped-up controversies about where the novel coronavirus originated have fueled racism and given cover to politicians who withdrew funding for international collaborations with China.”
That handbook was her leaving her indelible mark on all western scicomms editing.
Old school magazines and newspapers have not adapted well to the internet at all. I don't entirely understand the psychology of it, but somehow it was a lot more satisfying to buy a print magazine and hold it in your hand than take out an online sub. I think it was partly because I tended to buy individual issues based on the cover or contents, rather than buying them blind.
Unfortunately, when these pubs' readership started to decline, so did their revenue and they would have started taking money from "philanthropists" with an axe to grind. (Not always in the obvious areas. I used to read a local sports magazine which has ended up little more than a promotion for various private schools.)
There was always an element of soft power about Scientific American, and it was tailored partly to people without specialist expertise in whatever field, but it did not feel like political propaganda back in the nineties.
“It wouldn’t be the last conflict between Helmuth and Springer Nature. Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash. This time, facing pressure from Springer Nature, she resigned.”
So, an activist editor in chief focused on social justice nonsense and identity politics instead of on science, the resulting distraction ran it into the ground, and what used to be a respected institution is now struggling to recover from this disastrously poor leadership. A familiar story.
I used to enjoy SciAm. A few years ago I picked up an issue and was annoyed by several articles that used the mantle of “science” to push social, political and cultural issues. Articles about how mathematics is misogynistic and how some other field was racist or white supremacist, etc. The same bullshit as the rest of the media, frankly. So I put it down and haven’t read it again since. Too bad.
I don’t think it’s woke that killed it. If they’d embraced the right with similar zest, the result would be the same. I think it’s ‘go divisive, go broke.’
Lowest denominator politics like this is what dominates social media and none of it improves anything. Choosing to focus on publishing objectively rigorous science is inherently speaking truth to power and does far more good than almost anything else. Of course, anyone can see the value science has as a way of providing objective understanding and wants to use it to justify their issue du jour.
There is a difference between being taught and being preached to. Intelligent people are particularly sensitive to this distinction, and that category of people happens to be the audience of the magazine.
Come on, some things just aren't worth reading. Political content masquerading as science is at the top of that list.
>Instead you doubled down on remaining ignorant. Not even that, but you think it's worth bragging about on the internet!
All that condescension to hide the fact that you haven't made a point. Stop insulting people and point to something in the magazine you think is worth reading. Or have you not read it either?
> Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-m... - and I am not quoting out of context)
“ Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
But that's obvious nonsense. It doesn't even pass a sniff test, if you know even the first thing about running. We're talking about many, many data points, all pointing in the same direction: in practice, men outperform women in distance sports [1].
To even begin to argue against this mountain of evidence, you have to resort to slippery rhetorical tactics, like this:
> As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.”
So, the argument being implied here (but not actually made!) is that the performance difference we see throughout the history of the marathon is due to...pace setters?
Y'all realize that the competitors can run faster than the pace setters, right?
This reminds me of the old expression: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
[1] I'm talking about distributions here. Obviously, there are going to be many women who outperform many men on an individual basis.
Generally they can’t - the pace setters run at a pace above typical max for the distance (but within max for the shorter distance they are running), sheltering the people they’re pacemaking for.
You want to believe things are simple, but they’re not.
Come on. Think things through to the end. If it were actually true that the pace-setters could run faster than the competitors for the full marathon, then the pace-setters would win the event.
What you want to say is that the pace-setters are capable of running a faster pace than the competitors for a shorter distance. Maybe that's true (I doubt it), but it's not responsive. Pace setters are there to set a pace, like a metronome. If the competitors feel this pace is inadequate, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from running faster, or demanding a faster pace-setter.
You didn't, which is exactly the point. It's a critical piece of information for evaluating the truth and relevance of your argument.
And yet, it seems you do not know that the gap between men and women shrinks the longer the distances get? Also, as you are saying yourself: this is about distributions, not necessarily about the top 0.1% of the world. The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then. You might disagree with this, but the article is more nuanced, and reducing it to the rage-bait comment above does not do it justice at all.
So what? The gap exists. Saying that it diminishes with distance is interesting, certainly, but it's a far cry from evidence that the gender gap is due to something other than biology.
> The article makes the claim that on average, women would perform better in ultra-endurance events, supporting their thesis that women actually did the hunting back then.
This is sophistry. In reality, even on average men are faster than women.
Genuine or not they abandoned their readers who genuinely wanted to learn.
I feel that's an unwarranted assumption on your part: I read the article, even quoted from it in my comment, and my take agrees with your parent comments.
Your comment smells a lot like "They disagree with the article, so obviously they didn't read it, because anyone who read it would agree".
You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events. You can downvote me all you want, but I have actually read the article.
> You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events.
No, it isn't. It's about sports, using ultra-endurance as an example. This is one of the cases where the example is the exception.
IOW, the quote uses an outlier to make claims about the distribution. This is, of course, from the same institution that claims using the word "normal" to describe a distribution is some sort of "-ist" (racist, sexist, whatever).
And of course what they are talking about has nothing to do the criticism in TFA, which they also haven't read.
Emphasis mine.
> Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.
There are some pretty wild claims but overall, a fairly interesting article. I think they've just exaggerated an otherwise interesting point - that gender differences in hunting are not explained by differences in long-distance running aptitude (which are very small).
The examples of extant hunting techniques they themselves cited are not related to (ultra) long distance running anyway, so the connection between hunting and running is tenuous.
(Have a read about persistence hunting).
The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.
Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best...
The full paragraph:
>Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
To me both cultural and physiological differences are likely in play. I am not even sure how you could effectively seperate culture from physiology here (hard to do a randomised controlled trial on stride length - I guess Mendelian Randomisation regression might work?). Anyone confidently asserting only one or neither of these is at play is probably not stating that from a position of logic.
Title: The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
Subtitle: The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence
Saying there isn't enough evidence to prove a hypothesis is not the same as proving its negation. Failing to reject the null hypothesis is not the same as proving it.
The Atlantic went the same way, but as more mainstream magazine, that's kind of okay. Not acceptable for SciAm.
For example, they publish this, now:
"The Revelatory Cringe of Anthony Fauci"
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/07/anthony-faucis-emb...
Which, regardless of what you feel about Fauci, is at least against type for the Atlantic. But in 2020, they had no problem publishing garbage like this:
"Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice"
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...
Basically, formerly great media empires have declined to the point where only people willing to work for low wages in uncertain careers will accept positions writing for those institutions. So we mourn the loss of the brand, but if anyone actually cared about the brand in practice, it would not employ these people.
It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine.
However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition.
Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.
The magazine's low point was the infamous op-ed in 2021 about E.O. Wilson a few days after the biologist's death. It was basically a woke hit piece accusing him of scientific racism and white supremacy, with no evidence from his body of writing. It also criticized the genetics community at large for the term "normal distribution", which it took as offensive for implying that anyone outside the peak is "abnormal". (Never mind that "normal" has a technical definition in statistics.)
It's improved a lot over the last few years.
Still, I fear it may soon go the way of BYTE. Not because the need isn't there or because the market is gone, but because people get information in such different ways now.
The sheer idea that people from all political sides could be complaining because they don't want politics everywhere never comes to mind.
Also the fact that Helmuth fundamentally altered the magazine's course by pushing politics is completely ignored. Instead, when the owners have to forcefully correct the course it's being sold as threatening the magazine's independence.
Same old, same old...
Somehow, this ideology achieved this without any of the pressures of a totalitarian regime - just by being an intransigent minority.
> Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash.
The magazine chose to go more political. When the political winds changed direction they found themselves on the wrong side of the new administration.
Remaining purely apolitical was an option for them.
https://ksjhandbook.org/editing-controversial-science/about-...
“Trumped-up controversies about where the novel coronavirus originated have fueled racism and given cover to politicians who withdrew funding for international collaborations with China.”
That handbook was her leaving her indelible mark on all western scicomms editing.
Why oh why destroy something so precious to so many people.
Spewing politcal hate is not the best way to win friends it seems.
Unfortunately, when these pubs' readership started to decline, so did their revenue and they would have started taking money from "philanthropists" with an axe to grind. (Not always in the obvious areas. I used to read a local sports magazine which has ended up little more than a promotion for various private schools.)
There was always an element of soft power about Scientific American, and it was tailored partly to people without specialist expertise in whatever field, but it did not feel like political propaganda back in the nineties.
So, an activist editor in chief focused on social justice nonsense and identity politics instead of on science, the resulting distraction ran it into the ground, and what used to be a respected institution is now struggling to recover from this disastrously poor leadership. A familiar story.
I used to enjoy SciAm. A few years ago I picked up an issue and was annoyed by several articles that used the mantle of “science” to push social, political and cultural issues. Articles about how mathematics is misogynistic and how some other field was racist or white supremacist, etc. The same bullshit as the rest of the media, frankly. So I put it down and haven’t read it again since. Too bad.
Somtimes it matters a great deal, yes. Sometimes. Not all the time. Not every time. Sometimes.
>Instead you doubled down on remaining ignorant. Not even that, but you think it's worth bragging about on the internet!
All that condescension to hide the fact that you haven't made a point. Stop insulting people and point to something in the magazine you think is worth reading. Or have you not read it either?