-----
However, I think there are a number of flaws in your argument (thank you for labelling the parts in that way, that makes it much easier to speak clearly amongst each other).
------------
To begin with the question you address: you quote Curan speaking, and then say what Curan said, but what you quote and what you say he said don't seem that related. I don't know what Curan meant, but if he meant to say what you said he said, he said it very poorly indeed, as I don't believe that is the natural interpretation.
He wonders what the underlying cause is for male-biased hunting (ie. "this effect"). "This effect" is naturally the effect that he quotes immediately before that sentence. He distinguishes "this" from "the aforementioned", which makes it clearer. He says that most "answers" to the meme are conjectural. You seem to read this as saying that most explanations of the existence of the meme are conjectural. Maybe he meant this, but it seems more natural to read him as saying that most explorations of the bases for the meme are conjectural - ie, that proferred "underlying causes" are conjectural, which ties in very nicely to him wondering out loud what those underlying causes might be. To me, this is what an "answer" is here - what you say when someone says the belief, ie when you explain why it is true (or false).Curan wrote:I wonder what the underlying cause would be for this effect. Most "answers" that are given to the aforementioned meme strike me as conjectural at best.Rad wrote: It is pretty common in most hunter gatherer cultures yes.
Anyway, I don't want to argue over this. I don't know what Curan really meant, and maybe you read it as he intended. But if so, he worded himself very badly (ie ambiguously) and oddly (ie I've never seen "answers" used in that way before). In any case, I hope that explains why I didn't understand what question you were trying to answer at first.
--------------
Getting to the gist of it: Your proposition B is arrantly false. It is false for two reasons. Firstly, (Bi) the only "observable facts" presented in this thread so far show that societies with male exclusive (or virtually exclusive) hunting outnumber those with merely male-dominated hunting by 841 to 14. Perhaps you have other evidence that you are declining to show us, but this invisible evidence cannot be assumed as known by everyone!
More importantly, (Bii), even if it were true, "in most societies, most hunting is done by men; women do some hunting, but appreciably less than is done by men" is NOT in anyway in contradiction with the stated meme, "most societies naturally divide labour so that men hunt and women gather"! (your formulation; Torco's is more or less the same). In ordinary (ie non-formal) speech, the noun without an article refers to a general, average, ordinary, or prototypical referent. This is not the same as an absolute universal quantifier, and this distinction is very important and relied upon.
It is true that the evidence does not support "in all societies, all hunting is done by men and none by women". Your putative evidence, if true, would disprove "in most societies, all hunting is done by men and all gathering by women".
But, returning to your Proposition A, while it may be true that there is the general belief that (A1) "most societies naturally divide labour so that men hunt and women gather", it is emphatically not true that there is general (or even commonplace) belief that (A2) "most societies naturally divide labour so that ONLY men EVER hunt and ONLY women EVER gather". Indeed, I have never encountered this transparantly false and frankly ridiculous belief.
Please note, regarding (Bii): both the actual evidence presented (Ea) and your putative evidence (Ep) support the general belief (A1); even though it is true that (Ep) (though not (Ea)) would conflict with (A2).
--------
Regarding your Proposition C: I don't disagree, but you are clouding the issue. Yes, we might say (although I'd rather not, because it's metaphysics and innuendo) that there is some vague "association" in our society between women and domestic functions, which underlies and perhaps in some way "explains" some real-world phenomena (or, more realistically, has been used to explain/justify those phenomena). However, I don't believe that this amounts to any belief that women "naturally" should gather food. I don't see food-gathering as within the scope of domestic functions. You mention, for instance, paid employment, but paid employment is not the same as hunting, and domestic labour is not the same as gathering. By definition, neither hunting nor gathering is domestic! So I accept for sake of argument (Ca), that there is an "association" made between women and domestic labour (and likewise with food production, healing, etc), but I have never seen evidence for (Cb), that there is such an association made between women and gathering.
-----
Regarding your Proposition D: even were we to grant (Cb), this would not be ethnocentrism, only a restatement of the problem. Because ethnocentrism is the background belief that other societies function as our own do, where not otherwise specified. And in our society, a) gathering is not an important function at all, and b) to the extent that historically it has been important, it has traditionally been a male role, if there was any differentiation. So the putative belief that women are associated with gathering is not the ethnocentric basis for beliefs about other societies, as it is not a belief about our society!
In other words, all you have done is move from "women in most societies are associated with gathering" to "women in general are associated with gathering". As the latter is a) not actually believed, and b) would be baffling enough by itself, given that it is not supported by actual behaviour in our society, the latter can hardly explain the former!
In fact, if anything, what you are pointing to here is "ethnoeccentricism" - the belief that somehow because women in many cultures are associated with gathering, there must somehow exist an association between women and gathering in our own society, even though it is not reflected by any social reality!
-------
Let's summarise. An ethnocentric argument would be:
1. X happens in our society.
2. Other societies are naturally like our society.
3. Therefore, X naturally happens in other societies.
However, nobody believes 1: "women in our society gather food". So you use a proxy, 1b: "women are associated with gathering in our society". Except this isn't true either, so you use a proxy of a proxy, 1c: "women are associated with domestic labour and healing things". But even if you accept 1b, if you plug that into the ethnocentric argument, you end up with "other societies, women are believed to be naturally "associated" with gathering", which doesn't mean that they actually do gather - as demonstrated, if we accept 1b, by our own society! So, as the conclusion is not what was to be produced, clearly the argument is not the one being used.
Moreover, there is no explanatory power even if we accept this explanation. Because you've explained (Q1) "in our society, we believe women naturally do the gathering" by (Q2) "in our society, we believe women are naturally associated with gathering". This is moving from the possibly true to the clearly untrue, but more importantly the "explanation" explains nothing, as it is nothing more than a rephrasing of what we believe, not a motion to a level of EXPLAINING those belief. If anything, Q2 should be explained by Q1!