How Come Female Animals Can Run as Fast as Male Animals, but Women can't run as Fast as Men?

More complex hormones.

Female horses don't generally run as fast as male horses...you note they kept mentioning yesterday how long it had been since a filly had won the Belmont. Also, it is not as if this was "every" male horse...there was a very limited subset of competitors. Certainly some female runners could beat some male runners.

Also, I don't know enough about horses to say, but I suspect the sex advantage might get larger with age. Three year olds are the first year the horses are considered adults, so it may be analogous to a late teen prep phenom (Hasay?) running as fast as many guys.

Are you serious?

Have you ever looked at a woman? They have more body fat per unit mass on average and a different shape, particularly in the pelvic region.

The problem with that is that for most girls, that drop in performance comes because of puberty, not just age. Horses go through "puberty" (which is considerable different from our own) much earlier than 2-3 years, so that analogy doesn't really stick too well in my mind.

But I do think you are right in pointing out that this was only the third time a filly has one Belmont ever, and the first time in over a century. Rags to Riches is a genetic freak in horse terms, who just happens to have the right characteristics to run really fast. Women like Paula Radcliffe are along the same lines- they just have some sort of innate ability to do more than most other people including men.

The real difference between horse racing and human racing is that we spend 5, 10, 15 years getting into perfect shape for that perfect race. These horses are done racing big time races by the time they're 3 or 4, so the horses genetics come very much into play, much more than in most of our careers. Of course there are some exceptions who are simply genetically superior runners, and they're the real world beaters. Or, oftentimes in this country, they're the soccer/tennis/basketball/football players who just never get tired. But thats another story.

But back to the original question, horses evolved as runners- as a prey species, there is no advantage for the males to be faster than the females. If a lion is chasing you, what good would it do a species to have the mothers bring up the rear? Horses are through and through running animals, and the lady horses are capable of being just as fast as men. Humans developed different as a species, men went out to hunt, women stayed in and raised the babies. Our species didn't need the women to run as fast as men to survive, so our modern women don't have the same athletic capabilities as men do, most notably in raw speed and strength. Being ancestors of nomads, it is not surprising that as races becomes more and more endurance based (see: Paula Radcliffe, Pam Reed) that women close the gap on men. Women may not have had to hunt, but they did have to keep up with the band when they moved, which required endurance that men and women share. Anyways, that is my take on it. And I suspect that while it may not be the whole story, I think that is at least a rough sketch of it.

So if I understand you correctly, women being slower has nothing to do with the genetics of being female and everything to do with thousands of years of cultural conditioning. Men hunt and women take care of babies.

Yet female animals have to take care of babies too. And it must be true that at the early stages of human history, early humans must have been routinely preyed upon by wild beasts. I mean before man really figured out how to master fire and manufacture weapons that leveled the playing field. So somewhere along the way it became customary for men to hunt and run around while women took care of babies. And thousands of years after this became the cultural norm, female bodies are not built to run as fast as male bodies. Yet before this became the cultural norm maybe women were as fast as men? Is this what you're saying?

But seriously, the Belmont is one of the 3 biggest races of the year and a female wins it. Do you really think that a female ever wins one of the 3 biggest track races for men? At any distance from 100 to marathon the best men have a consistent advantage over the best women.

humans, whether male or female, really don't need to outrun predators anymore - only outsmart them. i would imagine human females being slower comes from some combination of genes, evolution over thousands and thousands of years, and culture.

Actually, the age thing raises an interesting point. At eight or nine, a lot of girls do run as fast as boys. How this translates to the horse world, I have no idea. Honestly, I do not know what I'm talking about. But that makes me a typical letsrun poster, doesn't it?

The answer is sexual dimorphism (differences between sexes) due to the different evolutionary paths and influences in the history of different species. The same reason that females of some species are larger than their male counterparts, etc. A general rule of thumb is that the more competition amongst males for females, the more sexual dimorphism will occur due to sexual selection and the characteristics necessary for, put simply, fighting other dudes for chicks.

The answer is our large brains. The enormous size of a baby's head means that there is a huge disparity in pelvis size and shape between males and females. Other animals do not need very wide pelvis' to birth their young, and thus are able to run as fast, or nearly as fast as males of their species.

The differences between male and female running speed is not found in the hips, but rather in a myriad of factors, influenced by hormones: amount of muscle, amount of fat, amount of red blood cells, thickness of tendons, etc. If you inject a woman with a lot of testosterone, you'll notice the speed gap narrowing rather quickly.

Not saying that hip width isn't a factor, but it wouldn't be the primary one.

Rags to Riches wrote:

So if I understand you correctly, women being slower has nothing to do with the genetics of being female and everything to do with thousands of years of cultural conditioning. Men hunt and women take care of babies.

Culture and genetics are not mutually exclusive explanations. Cultural factors influence genetics in this case.

We're also probably talking about a couple of million years, at least.

Thousands of years of "cultural conditioning" = natural selection = evolution = genetics.

[quote]biologist wrote:

Thousands of years of "cultural conditioning" = natural selection = evolution = genetics.

[quote]

Not to beat a dead horse (ha! I kill myself), but now I'm really confused.

If the above is true, there is no biologically predetermined reason a human female should be slower than a human male? So if the cultural conditions change, women can be as fast as men in a few thousand years?

What about gorillas? Are female gorillas as fast as male gorillas? Because they have pretty big heads too.

It is because WE hold the door for them. If social tradition had women taking care of the little mister, men would be slower than women.

Rags to Riches wrote:

As a Filly won the Belmont yesterday, it got me wondering what makes humans so different?? I don't get it.

That was the first filly to win at Belmont in about 100 years. So I think you might want to check your supposition.

luv2run wrote:

Rags to Riches wrote:

As a Filly won the Belmont yesterday, it got me wondering what makes humans so different?? I don't get it.

That was the first filly to win at Belmont in about 100 years. So I think you might want to check your supposition.

I don't think I need to check anything. The Belmont is one of the most talented fields of the year. That's like a woman beating a men's Olympic final field in the 1500. There is no chance at all that could happen at the present time or at any time in the foreseeable future.

Predation is sexy to talk about but in the big picture isn't all that important. Sure, you -- zebra, eland, early or modern human -- can get taken by a predator.

But locomotion is complexly related to not just predation, but foraging, subsistence, gender, migration, etc. etc.

You can't overlook social organization in something like this. You don't expect to find M/F locomotor differences in herd animals, where the herd tends to move as a unit. Everybody's got to go at about the same speed.

The same thing is true even of many social species ("social" has a specific meaning: a group composed of males and female, young and old, which stays together for long periods of time).

An example here would be baboons, a ground-dwelling African monkey. Baboon are social but their group does not split up under normal circumstances. Everybody goes together everywhere. You ask about predation-- baboons take the "stand and fight" approach. You do not want to go one-on-one with an adult male baboon.

The Patas monkey, also a ground-dweller, takes the Monty Python Holy Grail approach: run away! run away! But they do it in all directions, which confuses a predator.

OK. Keeping this short, what we find with human beings and some other mammalian species (wolves are a notable example and always of great interest) is a social species that has what's often called a "home base," which usually goes along with what's called "sexual division of labor." Species with social units that have a home base are free to break up and recombine over time or over space. Everybody gets back together again at the base. So you can get different subsistence strategies, depending on what's happening.

Put simply, a home-based social species can send men out for some purposes, while women with or without dependent offspring can go elsewhere, go nowhere, etc. Different kinds of tasks according to gender.

There will not be many circumstances where everybody needs to be on the move together, at the same speed.

So it's not hard at all to envision prehistoric circumstances, likely as far back as early Homo (habilis, ergaster, rudolfensis) where men were the long-distance foragers (unincumbered by dependent offspring) while the women foraged nearer to the home base.

There's a lot to be talked about here and probably letsrun.com isn't the best place for it. I'm wondering which adolescent or adolescent-minded adult will be give us the first riff on "sexual division of labor."

There's a lot of literature and much of it is in paleoanthropology.

lady animals don't have to take time doing their nails or hair?