[CalRobert]

"I think women make better caretakers. A father can stay home and be the caretaker, but I think a mother will have a more positive nurturing influence on the child's life if she is there as much as she can be."

You can think that, but it is most certainly not going to be accepted as fact by the many caretaker fathers out there. Nor, I believe, can you take it for granted that mothers in heterosexual two-parent households assume they are better caretakers than their partners.

Would you argue that a child raised by two fathers is at an inherent disadvantage to one raised by two mothers?

[Diamons]

Yes. Nature and evolution itself tells us that its optimal to be raised by a mother and a father. To argue otherwise would be to argue against evolution.

[wpietri]

This is horseshit. Evolution also says you're supposed to die in your 30s, wracked with parasites and diseases. But my guess is you "argue against evolution" every goddamn day when you brush your teeth. Two obvious problems:

One is your indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, aka the is-ought fallacy. What exists tells us nothing about what's right. If it did, then change would always be wrong. It's a big philosophical mistake, especially in one built around creating technological change.

The other is you're creating the sort of evolutionary "just-so story" that Gould called out as early as 1978. You have a personal fantasy that in our evolutionary environment each child was actively raised by a mother and a father. Is this based on careful examination of hominid fossils? No. It's based on very particular Western late 20th-century ideals of what a "family" is.

What you're doing isn't science. Its dressing your unconsidered prejudices up in a lab coat. And then using the authority of science to push a particular social agenda that involves keeping women at home. That's 100% horseshit.

[hythloday]

And yet research tells us that two fathers raise children who are as well adapted in every way as ones raised by a father and a mother, and that two mothers raise children who're better adapted.

(I find it slightly hilarious that you think that children had only two raisers In The Ancestral Environment.)

[CalRobert]

Right... So when a male polar bear kills the cubs so the mother can mate again that's nature confirming your theory? Or when apes keep harems and kill or drive off competition, if you prefer primates? Or how primates with testicles as large as humans are never monogamous?

[x0x0]

All studies of outcomes ignored, naturally...