Humans are Similar

maxusxavier:

zenosanalytic:

Lately it occurred to me that, in all the “Humans are Weird/Great/Space Orcs” genre of posts I’ve seen, I haven’t seen any yet that deal with the relatively low level of sex-related morphological difference in human bodies, compared to other species. Like, things as simple as the length of a particular human’s hair, or the pitch of their voice, or their vocabulary can confuse other humans, with brains evolved to analyze these differences, as to the sex of said particular human. History is filled with examples of men and women posing as the other through the simple expedients of clothing and grooming. For that matter, history is filled with examples of people assigned male or female at birth living as the other through the same expedients. And then there’s all the complexities of gender presentation and identity. And then there’s all the ways environment mucks up conventional “gender differences”. And then there’s the obvious fact that, the minute technology allows humans a new way to experiment with gender and sexual anatomy, they jump at it.

I think, ironically, aliens might end up being better at just referring to people as they wish to be referred to if only because, to them, all humans look basically alike and it’s just easier to ask each person and stick with what you’re told. I’d imagine they’d view all the gender-enforcement common to some human societies as being pretty ridiculous and impenetrable.

no like morphologically humans are very similar to each other. we have only two states of physical polymorphism and there both sexual and have very few differences. Apart from that the only obvious differences between two groups of humans are skin color, hair color, and eye color, and any human can have any combination of this three traits. Most insects have three kinds of polymorphism (worker, breeder, and male) at a minimum often much more( soldier, architect, queen servant etc.) all of which have traits that only they can posses. Many furry pack predators have dozens of different fur patterns and colors, many creatures have uniques patterns of stripes or dots, etc. many species can change physical sex characteristics, skin color and even skin texture at will often as a form of communication or in response to external stimuli. We have to have an entire global fashion industry to come close to the diversity that can be found in other species, and those changes are temporary and superficial, and would at best make it even harder for an alien to distinguish between two humans. We on the other hand can identity and remember a stunning number of faces, body builds, voices, hairstyles, etc. even though the details separating any two of them are very slight and easily missed. Even when many of the other identifiers are temporary, fluid, and superficial.