"Natural" is just a social construct.

Thank you for the rejoinder Pro. "I do question my opponents belief that outside of the scientific proof of said difference, the social additudes and expectations toward each gender are not manifestation of society" This is not a claim I made. I merely made the claim was that it was at least in some part due to nature, ie that it was perfectly "natural" to adopt those attitudes and expectations and that this is based upon facts about ourselves. In other words those attitudes and expectations do not vary independently of nature, they are at least to some extent (and I would argue a large extent) a product of nature. This is a defeater to the claim "Natural is JUST a social construct", not a claim that "Natural is JUST a product of the natural order". The latter was not my burden of proof. "My opponents social views (at least from what can gather from this debate) seem to be claiming that social attitudes are a naturally occurring situation, but that (in my opinion) leaves no room for changes in additudes, as if to say that social attitudes stem from a fixed point and any additudes that don't correlate with common additudes would have to be considered "deviant"" Again you are straw-manning my position. I maintain that the claims of Social Constructionism are false, w.r.t. facts about us and at least some (maybe most) concomitant emergent attitudes. I agree that there are only individual minds, but that given facts about us are common to our species, certain tropes repeat themselves as societal norms (and are thus re-enforced). Social Constructionism denies any aspect of nature down to its core, claiming most if not all societal outcomes are a result of social nurture. It does this to maintain a Marxist agenda, for its real aim of creating equal outcomes amongst the designated groups it has identified as especially deserving (Women, Black, Muslim etc). This is what is so troubling (at least to me) about the debate topic and the R1 opening as presented. The claim of this topic is a Social Constructionist claim. "Take for instance, homosexuality. Seventy five years ago, that was considered evil, and the majority of society didn't separate homosexuality from pedophilia, it was considered just as sickening, it was sexual deviance. Today, homosexuality is becoming increasingly mainstream and excepted in society. In Greek and Roman society, the only sexual taboo was when a peasant had sex with a person of stature. Social additudes are a fluid situation, and that tells me that social attitudes did not derive from some transient cosmic force, it is not set to a fixed point, it is relative." But again this is not the argument you presented. It is an argument that some taboos are socially constructed (which I agree with), not that "natural" as emergent from the "natural order" is. Homosexuality is part of the "natural order", the claims that the religious make about it being a lifestyle choice are as ludicrous as stating that the genders are socially constructed. Both ignore facts about reality and I would attack both points of view as largely unevidenced assertions, not based on reality. In other words if someone claimed that Homosexuality was "unnatural", they are making a mistake and would be making a false claim, and not making an equally valid contention based on reality. Equally if someone claimed that the reason why there are less women in Software Engineering is because of discrimination, they would also be making a false claim for the same reasons. "What I was trying to convey in the GMO segment was that neither genetically engineered farming nor traditional farming are synthetic, or from a different perspective, neither is natural, but the additude that one is natural as opposed to the other is fallacious." In this example the question really is what is the definition of Natural and Synthetic. Thus it is a question of semantics (important nonetheless), but not of ontology nor epistemology as in your debate topic. But Let me briefly digress. One could argue that anything man-made is synthetic, but then that would also apply to babies and bananas and thus that definition lacks utility. The test of whether a product is natural or not is: whether natural creatures, using processes occuring in nature, on naturally occurring products, create new products that also have a relationship to something pre-existing in nature. On that basis GMO products would fail the test of being natural because natural processes were not used in their creation (ie gene sequences were inserted where no natural hybridisation process would of acted in that way (that is there is no evolutionary process that could facilitate species A to species B whole gene sequence insertion)). Hybridisation of bananas from plantains is however natural by this same test. I think what you wanted to debate was that "what some people consider to be "Natural" (with no reference to a natural order) may infact mainly be a social construct". As a debate topic this seems to be trivially true and at least semantically easy to agree with. However the topic as presented as far bigger a set of claims. In terms of Ayn Rand, yes I know something of her work and have a admiration of it, and sympathy with it. She should be praised for putting forward a coherent agenda (philosophy) for Atheism, Libertarianism and Capitalism. She was also brave and fiercely consistent against a tide of the leftist infected Academy. She does however make a couple of leaps in her thought processes that I still cannot get my head around and is overly strident on certain hobby horses she had. Because Objectivism (at least in the Randian sense) is a closed loop after her death, it has become ironically something of a religious revelation, as opposed to being open to extension. Thus I think David Kelly et al have more to offer, than say Peikoff. However from the perspective of political philosophy, I would like to offer a shout out for Robert Nozick here, who I thought decimated the Rawlsian perspective. I have enjoyed the discussion so far. Thanks and good luck in the final round.