How many people think men and women would think the same if not for culture?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

I wonder if bumpy was flat, would we still call it bumpy?

I wonder if we stopped whacking moles with hammers, would they still live underground?

I wonder if we stopped paying SSI, would the teabaggers still bitch about the gubmint?

I wonder if we posted troll topics, would people take us as seriously as we'd like?

[tarod]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

I wonder if bumpy was flat, would we still call it bumpy?

I wonder if we stopped whacking moles with hammers, would they still live underground?

I wonder if we stopped paying SSI, would the teabaggers still bitch about the gubmint?

I wonder if we posted troll topics, would people take us as seriously as we'd like?

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
Yes. They don't like getting eaten by my dog either.
Yes, they have to have something to fear and/or hate.
Depends on how serious of a troll it is. 

[Lord Cataplanga]

I remember watching a documentary on Animal Planet about some people who worked in a reservation. They were raising endangered animals that had lost their families and the idea was that they would later be released in the wild.

They details varied with the species, but most of the time they didn't have to "teach" the animals how to act natural. Mostly they tried to interfere as little as possible and stay out of the way so the animals would grow independent and with a healthy mistrust of humans.

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

Gender is thought to be a socially constructed concept these days, and attempts to raise a "gender-neutral" child haven't panned out. Boys generally get the message that they're supposed to use every toy like a gun and girls generally learn to play house. Short of tossing young boys and girls into remote pieces of wilderness, Hatchet-style, to see how they develop without the influence of society, i don't think we can properly control for social expectations. Heck, even if we could, the fact that it's so hard to do may be evidence that we like knowing what our social expectations are, even if we don't necessarily follow them.

Balls.  I don't think it's a social construct.  I do think it is too rigid, though.  No provisions are made for children (or, hell, adults) that do not fit precisely into one role or another.

I can agree with the bit where you say they're too rigid. I like to think the female gender role has widened considerably (at least in terms of what is deemed "acceptable" for women to do, even if there's still a large gulf in opportunity) but the male gender role hasn't much changed from what is was in the 50's, and i think a lot of the backlash against feminism is old white politicians liking their own chains too much; the idea that they don't have to strive to be Don Draper or the dad from Leave it to Beaver frightens them, so they cling to the status quo like a drowning man to a piece of boat wreckage. Before you know it we have medical professionals ultrasounding abortion patients for no reason and we're supposed to pretend that makes sense.

Gender is thought to be a socially constructed concept these days, and attempts to raise a "gender-neutral" child haven't panned out. Boys generally get the message that they're supposed to use every toy like a gun and girls generally learn to play house. Short of tossing young boys and girls into remote pieces of wilderness, Hatchet-style, to see how they develop without the influence of society, i don't think we can properly control for social expectations. Heck, even if we could, the fact that it's so hard to do may be evidence that we like knowing what our social expectations are, even if we don't necessarily follow them.

Balls.  I don't think it's a social construct.  I do think it is too rigid, though.  No provisions are made for children (or, hell, adults) that do not fit precisely into one role or another.

Of course it's a social construct, as is demonstrated by the fact that different cultures have different gender roles. Sex is real, gender is an invention. In one society women own the property and work the farmland, in another women hunt and men stay home with the children. In one women make themselves pretty with paint and colored fabric and shiny decorations, in another men do.

Gender is an invention, and we have designed it to be binary in response to the idea of binary sexes, but there's no particular reason for it to be binary, and also no particular reason for it to be linked to sex.

Fun fact: there's an international study that looked at intergender conditions across many countries, and what they found was that  our idea of binary sex doesn't actually exist in nature. They found a lot of people (an average of 2% out of a worldwide sample) were born with conditions that make them not quite male and not quite female. The really interesting part is that even this 2% might be lowballing it, as the symptoms for these conditions look like symptoms you could easily mistake for some other more common condition(XXX syndrome and XXYY males can look like autism or learning impairments), not to mention the bias towards doctors not acknowledging or revealing such information, or even correcting genitalia at birth in many cases.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

Most of us don't get our karotypes (like if you are xx or xy or xxy or xyy or bleh) (?) tested anyway and there are known cases of youngsters female assigned at birth (i'll shorten both to MAAB or FAAB) who have had perfectly functional external female genetalia but the girl in question had testes sucked up in there somewhere. She had natural boobs and no obvious outside markers, but when she failed to reach menarche she had a scan and internally had testes.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

oh wait i failed to finish my point.. oops.

I wonder how many people have some kind of invisible intersex condition as we don't test for karotypes as standard.

[Dildo Argentino]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

It appears that they would.

http://www.lionalert.org/page/RPresearch

[tarod]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

It appears that they would.

http://www.lionalert.org/page/RPresearch

Very interesting. I'll have to read some more of this later.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

This reminds me of the observations by Robert Sapolsky on Baboons. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387823/

Basically, after most of the dominant males had been wiped out, the baboon troop had a major shift (culture?) in how males interacted both with males and with females. Most of the observations circle around stress and agression... but it seems interesting in the context of the OP question as well.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

It seems like the heart of your question is "is being a social animal a fundamental drive or a learned behavior" and the answer is, it's a fundamental drive. If you deprive social animals of socialization they suffer innumerate deleterious effects, from developmental damage to death.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

It seems like the heart of your question is "is being a social animal a fundamental drive or a learned behavior" and the answer is, it's a fundamental drive. If you deprive social animals of socialization they suffer innumerate deleterious effects, from developmental damage to death.

Would overcrowding them be the same thing, or does that work on a separate mechanism altogether?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC285801/

And of course, if you would like to never sleep again, there are the orphanages in Romania.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

It seems like the heart of your question is "is being a social animal a fundamental drive or a learned behavior" and the answer is, it's a fundamental drive. If you deprive social animals of socialization they suffer innumerate deleterious effects, from developmental damage to death.

Would overcrowding them be the same thing, or does that work on a separate mechanism altogether?

Utterly different.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

It seems like the heart of your question is "is being a social animal a fundamental drive or a learned behavior" and the answer is, it's a fundamental drive. If you deprive social animals of socialization they suffer innumerate deleterious effects, from developmental damage to death.

Would overcrowding them be the same thing, or does that work on a separate mechanism altogether?

Utterly different.

Okay.  The reason I asked is that a behavioral sink makes it impossible for socialization to function.

I thought there might be a link.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I wonder if lions would still form prides if they weren't raised by other lions.

It seems like the heart of your question is "is being a social animal a fundamental drive or a learned behavior" and the answer is, it's a fundamental drive. If you deprive social animals of socialization they suffer innumerate deleterious effects, from developmental damage to death.

Would overcrowding them be the same thing, or does that work on a separate mechanism altogether?

Utterly different.

Okay.  The reason I asked is that a behavioral sink makes it impossible for socialization to function.

I thought there might be a link.

Overcrowding is very relative. Humans can function quite well in crowded environments, as long as the environment is friendly and there is little hierarchichal disparity.