> a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology
That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that.
Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.
I'd settle for any society where women built the huts. Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes to mind.
Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.
> I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.
I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way.
So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.
But you have to ask why men step up to take the dangerous jobs? We didn't sit down and have a Socratic discussion about who takes which job. I posit that it's more than merely logic, that the motivations are rooted in our intuition.
It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women.
Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do.
Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often.
There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.
There are significant behavioural differences between the sexes in basically every animal. Even among mice the males are more inquisitive and take more risks than the females, so you find many more males than females in traps etc. Female animals tend to care much more about children. There is no reason to believe that humans evolved past this and all our differences are just us planning it out rationally.
> If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine.
I think this is motivated reasoning. From what I can tell, the "grilling is manly" thing started in the '50s (well after cooking stopped being dangerous) and is mostly limited to the United States (instead of being universal, as we would expect with something biologically-motivated). And what's the difference between frying, roasting, and grilling? All involve using a gas-operated cooking device to cook meat (assuming you own a gas stove); they're all equally safe.
Not only does this strike me as being cultural, this strikes me as obviously cultural. And yet you dismiss that out of hand and go looking for a biological explanation ("grilling is extra dangerous") that doesn't really line up with the facts of the example. So it seems to me that you're engaging in motivated reasoning — assuming that masculinity can't be a product of culture, reaching for biological explanations even when they don't really make sense.
FWIW, as an amateur historian I did a high-level talk on the history of barbecue, especially as it relates to the grilling styles found in California (popularized as "Santa Maria BBQ"). Long story short, men were running the pits not only in the 1950s, but also the 1850s, 1750s, 1650s, etc. Why? It might have been because meat was the product of the hunt. It might have been because running a barbecue could mean many hours of hot, smoky, dirty work that often involved physically strenuous activity. For quite a lot of American history, barbecues were often conducted for large numbers of guests and may have started the day before with transporting fuel, digging a trench, pre-heating the trench overnight, processing one's pigs, mutton, poultry, beef, or what have you, making your coals and keeping the supply up throughout the cook, etc. Also, the cuts of meat used were often far larger/heavier than we're used to — the original Santa Maria Barbecue cooks used top blocks of beef and similarly large cuts, not itty bitty tri-tips.
Famed barbecue "masters" were universally men, though if everyone is being honest much of the hard work at many large barbecues (with hundreds of guests) was actually performed by black men (or Californios, or what have you depending upon the location). Large barbecues were generally tied to political efforts or organizations, festivals, and the like. During the Depression there were large government-subsidized barbecues so everyone could get some meat in their bellies and enjoy one another's company during those tough times, and there again we see men and women typically taking on disparate roles in the cooking process.
Contemporary accounts of the barbecues of years past generally have women inside doing not easier work, but different work. Making pies, side dishes, baking, etc. Even the pre-Columbian/Spanish Chumash tended to split their work pretty strictly, with women doing things like grinding acorn flour in bedrock mortars with the kids, while the men fished, hunted, gathered shellfish, etc. Contemporary drawings of various indigenous peoples show them smoking/grilling fish and iguana, but again everyone in the images are male. I confess I don't firmly know what kind of sex differences existed in the roles played in the cooking American slaves did for one another, something I really should remedy, but when it came to big gatherings the differences were apparent and as I wrote above.
I can't really speak to causality, but in terms of time scale the M-F patterns seem to substantially pre-date the 1950s.
Oh, and fun fact: the offset smoker was invented in Texas in the 1970s. That little factoid seems to blow people's minds...
The discussion here is: what parts of culture are motivated by biology? It's obviously cultural. But what is motivating the culture?
Also interesting to me that grilling is manly started in the 50's. That seems to be about the time that household appliances like microwave were getting popular, no? Maybe men who liked to cook needed to find a manly outlet.
> Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields
The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes.
Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".
That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that.
Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.