tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post7815412859205012753..comments2024-03-17T00:13:44.599-07:00Comments on Marty Nemko: Tim Russert, Sudden Heart Attack, and Sexism Against MenMarty Nemkohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14850388752934193821noreply@blogger.comBlogger41125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-28746403962158074002023-11-24T16:54:06.884-08:002023-11-24T16:54:06.884-08:00Thank you for the good writeup. Thank you for the good writeup. safetotositepro.JDShttps://colibris-wiki.org/avenir-scic/?safetotositepro21noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-15978320257371683682023-11-24T16:48:21.379-08:002023-11-24T16:48:21.379-08:00 I must say you are an incredible writer, I love t... I must say you are an incredible writer, I love the way that you describe the things.<br />casinositeguidecom.JDShttps://colibris-wiki.org/avenir-scic/?casinositeguidecom21noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-86497654898316827912023-11-24T16:47:33.944-08:002023-11-24T16:47:33.944-08:00 I found this one pretty fascinating. I found this one pretty fascinating.casinosite777top.JDShttps://colibris-wiki.org/avenir-scic/?casinosite777top21noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-25332202100493221862023-11-24T16:46:51.540-08:002023-11-24T16:46:51.540-08:00Such a nice post. Thanks for sharing such a valuab...Such a nice post. Thanks for sharing such a valuable features and other relevant information.<br /> casinositeone.JDShttps://colibris-wiki.org/avenir-scic/?casinositeone21noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-74474155016650416172011-02-03T11:05:47.567-08:002011-02-03T11:05:47.567-08:00Remember that time is an issue if you are experien...Remember that time is an issue if you are experiencing one or several of the symptoms. The sooner a person seeks medical attention for symptoms of an impending heart attack, the more likely it is that the person will survive. Do not try to tough it out, or wait and hope that the discomfort that you are feeling will go away. There is never any harm in seeing the doctor, and having her tell you that you are fine. However, if you don’t see a physician, there is a fairly good chance that the heart attack will kill you. Don’t risk it.how tohttp://knowledgecloset.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-55556983633418639562010-01-03T08:02:28.586-08:002010-01-03T08:02:28.586-08:00I know this is an old post but I had to comment. ...I know this is an old post but I had to comment. I think the reasons that more than just men are the disposable sex is that it is not politically fashionable to focus on men; for the past 40 years, interest in gender has focused increasingly on women to the point where it is fashionable to discuss women's topics. It is also an economic issues: politicians and businesses know that engaging women in their social needs is also engaging them in their economic needs, and that translates into $$$ for them. There is also this idea that men don't need help and that men are not disadvantaged, so making women equal to men has been the emphasis. However, as you rightfully point out, giving women the opportunities of men doesn't give men the opportunities of women. We need to elevate women and men, not just women.<br /><br />BTW, I like your column and see that you have come a long way. See my other posting (most recent on Jan 3 2010).dogoodernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-79025447869956285782009-08-24T21:23:42.089-07:002009-08-24T21:23:42.089-07:00Blogs are so informative where we get lots of info...Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!<br /><br />_____________________________<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ukdissertation.co.uk/dissertation_topics.htm" rel="nofollow">dissertation Topics</a>marryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17811643324748313696noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-73562671615932547372008-11-23T08:13:00.000-08:002008-11-23T08:13:00.000-08:00You're doing Yeoman's work, Marty.I've also had fe...You're doing Yeoman's work, Marty.<BR/><BR/>I've also had female friends tell me that men deserve to die early because of evolution. According to this line of thought, we should take away all the maternal care from women and let them die "naturally" during childbirth. Women, the "stronger" and "more important" of the species, would hardly live past their 20's. This argument, coming from feminists, is nothing but Social Darwinism in reverse.<BR/><BR/>The fact is that the pursuit to obtain equal opportunities for women in our society is only possible or even desirable because of medical advances that conquered evolutionary disadvantages for females. And no matter how much feminists will slice or dice it to rationalize it away, their attitudes towards the great inequity in men's health is just plain sexist.bbkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03656369848017438855noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-9827704796687375922008-07-01T05:18:00.000-07:002008-07-01T05:18:00.000-07:00Tim Russert and George Carlin Two beloved American...<B>Tim Russert and George Carlin </B><BR/><BR/>Two beloved American celebrities have succumbed to heart disease before their time. The national response has been disappointment in a medical system that could allow this to happen. What could have been done differently to save the lives of both Tim and George, to avoid this fatal outcome? <BR/><BR/>To read more...<A HREF="http://jeffreydach.com/2008/06/26/saving-tim-russert-and-george-carlin-by-jeffrey-dach-md.aspx" REL="nofollow">Saving Tim Russert and George Carlin by Jeffrey Dach MD</A><BR/><BR/><BR/>Jeffrey Dach MD<BR/>4700 Sheridan Suite T<BR/>Hollywood FL 33021<BR/><A HREF="http://www.drdach.com" REL="nofollow">my web site</A>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-20933180187158239272008-06-25T18:21:00.000-07:002008-06-25T18:21:00.000-07:00I want to especially thank the anonymous commenter...I want to especially thank the anonymous commenter whose post began, "Why are your results on these queries so different from mine?"<BR/><BR/>First let me answer that question. In both PubMed and Guidestar, if you put the search term, "women's health" and "Men's health" in double quotation marks, the search engine knows to look for the term as a phrase. My guess is that you didn't do that.<BR/><BR/>Your other points also are worth addressing:<BR/><BR/>Why would you dismiss gender differences in infant and adolescent mortality? For example, should we not be doing more research as to why more peri- and postnatal boys die, and what to do about it? Should we not be concerned that teenage boys commit suicide at 6 times the rate of girls?<BR/><BR/>You dismiss the 30:1 ratio of nonprofits addressing women's health vs men's health by simply saying that gynecological health is more complicated than men's reproductive health. Do you really think that justifies the disparity, especially when men die much younger, die earlier of the top 10 diseases, and spend their last decade in worse health?<BR/><BR/>You blame men for not often-enough going for prostate exams. First of all, you state that apriori, with no data to support it, yet you feel justified to dismiss the wealth of much more broadly applicable and less cherry-picked data I've presented. Second, would you suspend programs to increase the number of females in engineering and simply say, "You girls haven't tried hard enough in science and math?"<BR/><BR/>Finally, you blame me for making it a dividing-the-pie issue. I didn't do that. The feminist machine did that: establishing mammoth gender-specific initiatives, all to benefit women: For example, last I checked, 39 states have departments of women's health, only have depts of men's health. Now, to restore a sense of fairness, I need to point out the inequities that have been done, ironically, in the name of gender equity.Marty Nemkohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14850388752934193821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-15569945087257998582008-06-25T10:47:00.000-07:002008-06-25T10:47:00.000-07:00One of the more blatant examples of bias is suicid...One of the more blatant examples of bias is suicide. From <A HREF="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/01/26/BAGHRGT0DV1.DTL" REL="nofollow">Joan Ryan's article</A> talking to the American Association of Suicidology: <BR/><BR/><I>"As much as I would love to lead the charge (in finding out why boys kill themselves), try to go out and get funding for it," said Lanny Berman, the executive director of the association.<BR/><BR/>So the association has an expert on female suicide but none on male suicide, even though suicide is an overwhelmingly male issue well beyond adolescence.<BR/></I>-.-https://www.blogger.com/profile/14436778618732876240noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-36999567486190799622008-06-24T17:09:00.000-07:002008-06-24T17:09:00.000-07:00Reparations, interesting idea.The page at http://w...Reparations, interesting idea.<BR/><BR/>The page at http://www.elderweb.com/home/node/2838 suggests that white guys should get in line behind black guys for their checks.<BR/><BR/>They are now (more or less) tied with black women in the life expectancy sweepstakes.<BR/><BR/>How much of this rhetoric would sit as well with everyone if we broke it on race as well as gender lines?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-72604502605677787042008-06-23T15:53:00.000-07:002008-06-23T15:53:00.000-07:00Everything's been mentioned here except what to do...Everything's been mentioned here except what to do about it. How about financial reparations for men? Since it is presumably women that push men to the grave via wars, stress, crime, etc. Calculate the value of one year of human life using health insurance data. Multiply by 5.3. Credit that number towards your SS contribution.<BR/><BR/>Naturally, the life expectancy disparity, currently at 5.3, can float so there is an incentive for women to help men live longer.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-80966591688868640552008-06-23T11:42:00.000-07:002008-06-23T11:42:00.000-07:00It's like this... You open the sports pages, and ...It's like this... You open the sports pages, and you see a heading for "Basketball" and a heading for "Girl's Basketball". It works the same way with heart attacks -- there are "symptoms of heart attack" and "symptoms of heart attack in women."<BR/><BR/>15 years ago, my sister-in-law's mom went to the doctor with the classic "symptoms of heart attack in women". Since she was not having "symptoms of heart attack" it never occured to the doctor that she might be having a heart attack, and so he gave her drugs to treat her "bronchitis". She died two days later.<BR/><BR/>The multi-year longitudinal study which showed the value of aspirin in preventing heart attacks had exclusively male subjects. Decades later, more studies showed that the studies also applied to women. <BR/><BR/>The studies that showed the correlation between high blood cholesterol levels and heart attack risk where also exclusively on male subjects. There it made a difference -- the conclusion was wrong, because it confounded high cholesterol with high "bad" cholesterol. Higher "good" cholesterol is correlated with <I>lowering</I> heart attack risk. And the difference between men and women is that women are more at risk from low levels of "good" cholesterol and less at risk from high levels of "bad" cholesterol. So if you have a patient whose total cholesterol goes down because his "bad" cholesterol stayed the same while his "good" cholesterol went down, then his heart attack risk <I>increased</I> rather than <I>decreased</I>. On the other hand, if you have a patient whose total cholesterol goes down because her "bad" cholesterol stayed the same while her "good" cholesterol went down, then her heart attack risk went up by a lot more than his did. So, if medical research is so biased towards women, why is it that everybody "knows" <I>total</I> cholesterol numbers, and thinks that a high total number is bad and a low one is good, and takes drugs to lower their <I>total</I> number and is happy when their <I>total</I> number goes down, and argues about standards for when to use cholesterol-lowering drugs with those standards based on <I>total</I> blood cholesterol (<I>i.e.</I> 200 vs 175 vs 150.) Total cholesterol is a kinda ok approximation for men, but not for women, yet the country is full of doctors who are ignoring the HDL and LDL breakdowns from their women patients and treating only the total. I guess that means that the <I>evidence</I> is that, at least for cholesterol, the research isn't biased <I>enough</I>! <BR/><BR/>Men die earlier than women because the pre-menopausal hormonal milieu provides substantial protection against many diseases, and for diseases which are cumulative, it gives the disease a substantial head start in men. We used to think that we could reproduce the pre-menopause benefits with post-menopause hormone replacement therapy. It turns out that it didn't work, though. Maybe some time in the future we will figure out something that does work, and then men can take it, too. <BR/><BR/>Oh, and a small point, happy tic... Breast cancer is to some extent a lifestyle disease. A woman who refuses to feed her baby human milk, or switches to artificial human milk after a few days/weeks, has a significantly higher risk of breast cancer than a woman who feeds her baby herself.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-29806343833804865792008-06-22T15:29:00.000-07:002008-06-22T15:29:00.000-07:00Why are your results on these queries so different...Why are your results on these queries so different from mine? In your pubmed search for men's health, you claim to have only found 586 listings. I did what I think is the same query, and got 2158, four times your number.<BR/><BR/>On guidestar, I see 1350 matches for men's health, 3542 for women's health. Neither a one minute pubmed nor a one minute Guidestar query amounts to actual data that bear on your argument. <BR/><BR/>The actual data, you are choosing to ignore; these are the data provided by looking at what happens when you eliminate the slightly higher rates of infant mortality and the much higher rates of adolescent mortality. <BR/><BR/>Once you've done that, a lot of the 5.6 years you refer to drops away. <BR/><BR/>This is addressed well in a Mary Pat's comment. And that delta in infant mortality and adolescent mortality is disproportionately focused on the poor. It's a national scandal that there are zip codes in the US with infant mortality rates that are higher than those in many districts in Latin America. I suspect a lot of the gendered life expectancy difference can be found in those zip codes. (If memory serves, Washinton DC has about 24 deaths per thousand live births in the first year, verus about 6 in Marin County.) <BR/><BR/>If you actually look at some of the hits for women's health in Guidestar, it's obvious that both women's health and men's health are marketing terms; the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania and Brigham and Women's in Boston (a very famous hospital with a really old name and really distinguished history) both turn up under women's health. Neither is specific to female patients. <BR/><BR/>There are a lot specialty nonprofits which mostly bill under Title X for reproductive care. Many of these have 'women's clinic' in the name, and yes, men are not likely to go in for care there. Gynecological care is more complex than male reproductive care, in part because many problems which are symptomatic in men are either asymptomatic or subtle enough in women that patients are very unlikely to see them. <BR/><BR/>Some of these clinics have gender neutral names, are embedded within community health centers, and also offer Title X services to men. <BR/><BR/>Clinics fitting that description typically see caseloads that are 80-90% women even in settings where they are billed not as 'women's clinics' but as 'teen clinics;' a lot of the equivalent care is provided during a question and answer session during a physical for a guy. The girls are coming in because they have to see a doc to get a prescription for birth control, and their partners are unreliable about holding up their end of taking ownership of that. <BR/><BR/>On prostate cancer; how many guys do you know who go in on time for their prostate exams? Most of the women I know submit to very invasive gynecological exams for decades longer than men submit to being 'scoped. <BR/><BR/>Colon and prostate cancer in men are often detected late because men are noncompliant with medical advice on going in for screening.<BR/><BR/>Maybe you should try to wax rhapsodic about the joy of colonoscopy on your next broadcast. And that would be a TINY step compared to the work women chose to do. <BR/><BR/>Are you prepared to endure the decades of finger-pointing and laughing that chunks of _Our Bodies, Our Selves_ and similar self-awareness work has engendered for encouraging women to actually know what their reproductive organs look like? That the performance artists who've done very similar work onstage have endured? <BR/><BR/>Quite seriously: the consciousness raising phase of getting women able to talk about any of this stuff continues to be brutally satirized in the press and at bars around the country. You are (I hope) aware that "hysteria" was a medical diagnosis of women until quite recently, and that hysteria and hysterectomy come from the same root? It was that medical mindset that was being overcome by the women's health movement. <BR/><BR/>A men's health movement is not a bad idea; starting it by complaining about the success of the women's health movement, rather than by learning what works, seems counterproductive. <BR/><BR/>Don't try to nick someone else's piece of the pie; lobby for healthcare funds to address real issues. <BR/><BR/>Identify the issues with actual data, not misleading Pubmed searches and misleading lifespan data. Do consciousness raising but be aware that you're going to need to get nitty and gritty to make changes in how men live their lives in relation to their healthcare providers.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-1184967677342820952008-06-22T10:06:00.000-07:002008-06-22T10:06:00.000-07:00Two more responses to Anonymous: How do you disput...Two more responses to Anonymous: <BR/><BR/>How do you dispute that the finding that on Guidestar, that comprehensive database of nonprofits, there are 30 TIMES as many nonprofits that posted their nonprofit using the keyword "women's health" than "men's health?" <BR/><BR/>Do you really want your argument to hang on the absurd notion that all "Health" nonprofits are men's nonprofits? That's no more valid than to say all chemistry research is organic chemistry research.Marty Nemkohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14850388752934193821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-58910625156752802662008-06-22T10:00:00.000-07:002008-06-22T10:00:00.000-07:00The recent anonymous comment criticizing one of th...The recent anonymous comment criticizing one of the data points--the survey of PubMed--is obfuscatory. <BR/><BR/>Fact is, undisputed. men die 5.3 years younger than women. And men die earlier of ALL 10 of the top 10 causes of death. Yet, much more gender-specific health care research is done on women. <BR/><BR/>That comment was exemplary of what academics do when they find a conclusion they don't like--they nitpick small subcomponents of the data to avoid looking at the central point. I'd bet that that had my assertion been that we need to devote more attention to women's health, he would have not used this ploy.Marty Nemkohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14850388752934193821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-22039377305144537742008-06-22T09:19:00.000-07:002008-06-22T09:19:00.000-07:00For dsatat from 1990 to 1994 at http://cancercontr...For dsatat from 1990 to 1994 at http://cancercontrolplanet.cancer.gov/atlas/time.jsp?c=BRE&o=f&fc=time&chart=time&ac=1&ss=US<BR/><BR/>The rate of prostate mortality is higher than breast cancer mortality.Charleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06787136957355921949noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-679339477049803442008-06-22T08:29:00.000-07:002008-06-22T08:29:00.000-07:00abysmal methodology on the 'men's health' versus '...abysmal methodology on the 'men's health' versus 'women's health' searches in pubmed. If one searches for just 'health,' the number of articles is 1.7 million. <BR/><BR/>By Nemko's methodology and the claim of argument 3 -- health research is men's health research by default -- that would suggest a close to 80-fold greater investment in men's health than women's health. <BR/><BR/>So, let's look at some more gender-specific searches. <BR/><BR/>a search for breast and a search for ovar* in Pubmed gives about 380,000 articles together. <BR/><BR/>a search for testic* and for prostat* gives about 170,000 articles together. <BR/><BR/>Now we've swung from a 20 to one bias for women (I found men's health to turn up 2158 times, women's health to turn up 39518 times), to an 80-fold bias for men, to a 2 fold bias for disorders that are typically gender specific. (There are rare instances of breast cancer in men.) <BR/><BR/>Moving away from obviously gendered terms, consider heart studies. <BR/><BR/>Cardiac gives 995719 hits, and coronary gives 1008315. <BR/><BR/>Accepting Nemko's argument that heart studies are particularly of interest to men's health, those studies outweigh the studies on women's health by a factor of perhaps 40 or 20 to 1 (20:1 if we assume that both coronary and cardiac are likely to turn up in keywords for a single study.)<BR/><BR/>So, what does the see-saw mean? It means the original methodology is broken. That with the right search terms you can find what you like if you don't plan to do any actual reading. <BR/><BR/>The problem is these are all 'any fool can see' searches that take about a minute to do, from thinking of them as a rhetorical device to typing them up. Their only value is brevity, in the doing and in the explaining. <BR/><BR/>If I wanted to actually make an argument about these kinds ofresults, I would commit before I started to randomly select some fraction of abstracts and papers to read from each of my searches, and actually go off and read the materials and methods sections from these studies to see what they were about. I'd also come up with a scoring methodology before I did the bulk of the reading. Perhaps I'd develop it on the basis of five or six papers widely considered classics - papers that would come up in my searches, but were available ahead of time from a different methodology.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-58925239397888562472008-06-22T03:45:00.000-07:002008-06-22T03:45:00.000-07:00Just a few facts on mortality rates -- I am an act...Just a few facts on mortality rates -- I am an actuary, and have looked at mortality tables (mainly U.S. Social Security tables) going back to 1900, and there are some patterns by sex that have a big impact here:<BR/><BR/>- in modern tables, at every age, males have higher mortality than females. It has been like this for a long time. I suppose maternal mortality hasn't been a huge factor in the last 100 years.<BR/><BR/>- the life expectancy gap is highest from birth, which are the stats you usually hear about. It narrows at higher ages. If you'd like to try this out, check out this life expectancy calculator:<BR/>http://soa.org/research/pension/research-simple-life-calculator.aspx<BR/>(disclosure: I wrote that calculator)<BR/><BR/>- a contributor to the gap is heightened mortality in the younger ages.... especially in ages about 13 - 25. Mortality bumps up in what I call the reckless or stupid period. Yes, you can say it's putting men down, but there's little excuse for having higher mortality at age 25 compared to age 30, given what the cause of death is. These deaths are mostly violent or accidental (car accidents). Male adolescents are more likely to engage in risky behavior that can end in them dead than female adolescents. Years ago, you might blame this on war or dangerous occupations that mainly young men and boys pursue; but now military mortality is not a big contributor here - it's mainly car accidents, homicides, and suicides. <BR/><BR/>- That said, actuaries have seen greater mortality improvement for men than for women in the past 30 years. Treatments such as Lipitor and non-invasive heart surgery has really improved things for men (and women). Those getting treated for prostate cancer have many more choices than previously. At least for older ages, I see mortality rates getting closer. So the trends are actually positive for men.meephttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08893035949118989768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-78160183885248924502008-06-22T00:31:00.000-07:002008-06-22T00:31:00.000-07:00I think SwampWoman is right and Ken is wrong: More...I think SwampWoman is right and Ken is wrong: More women die annually from breast cancer than do men of prostate cancer. However, the funding for breast cancer is disproportionately much larger than the death ratio.Marty Nemkohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14850388752934193821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-7544497372612874812008-06-22T00:04:00.000-07:002008-06-22T00:04:00.000-07:00Anonymous, your words are true, however, over the ...Anonymous, your words are true, however, over the years, men found ways to overcome their disadvantage. These safety nets are all but gone nowdays, and men are left with the deep feeling of being used, abused, and then thrown to the dogs.<BR/>How can anyone hope to have a functioning society where half the population feels this way, is beyond reason.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-4270746262355378592008-06-21T21:08:00.000-07:002008-06-21T21:08:00.000-07:00I do medical/clinical research for a living. On e...I do medical/clinical research for a living. On every grant we submit, we have to specify and justify why we include/exclude women, minorities and children. On every grant we review, we have to include if the investigator truly justified the inclusion/exclusion women, minorities and children. <BR/><BR/>But the one study you will not get approved is the study about men's health, other than those that are on organs that are men specific (e.g. prostate). You can get a study funded about women's sudden cardiac death, but not men's sudden cardiac death.<BR/><BR/>It's a sad comment, but it is the reality - and as a researcher, we were taught that as we were being groomed to submit our grants.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-30437549210879360292008-06-21T15:51:00.000-07:002008-06-21T15:51:00.000-07:00Indeed, evolution is generally crueler toward male...Indeed, evolution is generally crueler toward males, as many have noted above. The problem with that argument is that most of humanity's organized endeavors in the last couple of hundred years - both medical and political - has been focused on reducing or eliminating the injustices and discriminations that evolution has put upon us. Yet now, all of a sudden, we're supposed to just throw up our hands and say, "Oh well, it's just the way humans are designed"?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7821345570811107481.post-67834315319188801912008-06-21T15:35:00.000-07:002008-06-21T15:35:00.000-07:00For those putting forth evolutionary reasons, you ...For those putting forth evolutionary reasons, you are assuming evolution is an intelligent system, which it isn't. Evolution is a "dumb" system; it's random, no one is there to monitor and say "well, we need fewer men, so let them die early." So it isn't necessarily true that men die earlier because of evolutionary reasons. (Although if you can show me some scientific research that concludes that, I'm open to adjusting my position.)<BR/><BR/>This is a common way of thinking that reflects an old Christian belief that everything is part of some grand design and must make sense. In evolution, there is no design, not everything makes sense, and some things that seem to make sense will be false (correlation does not imply causation).<BR/><BR/>Also, evolution is all about reproduction. Male or female, if you are too old to reproduce, you are most likely irrelevant to evolutionary processes. In that sense, since men can reproduce at later ages than women, it might make sense for men to live longer. After all, if all the young males die in a war, the old guys can keep the tribe going, but the reverse is not true for women. (I'm not saying that's true; I'm again pointing out that just because we can offer a reasonable explanation doesn't mean that it is true.)<BR/><BR/>Finally, the idea that men are disposable makes no evolutionary sense. "Evolution" doesn't care. We are ALL disposable. If the god Evolution cared about the human species surviving, he/she/it might make females a little more robust, but both genders are essential to the survival of the species. One is NOT disposable.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com