From the FYI Department

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From the FYI Department

The scientific community keeps getting closer and closer to a certifiable explanation to our conditions.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2687799/Man-I...

Huggs
Karmon

Comments

I think

Angharad's picture

they still have a long way to go, it's been a few years since my ancestors were algae, even one as lovely as volvox.

Angharad

Scurrilous Daily Mail says Gender is Nurture not Nature

Rhona McCloud's picture

You appear to have missed the side article which without explanation or justification states that gender is entirely learnt. From there how long do you think it will be before The Daily Mail insists GID is treated entirely by psychiatrists?

" MEN ARE NOT FROM MARS
A neuroscientist has claimed the expression 'Men are from Mars and women are from Venus' has no scientific grounding, and that instead our brains are changed by the roles society forces us to play.
According to Gina Rippon, a professor at Aston University in Birmingham, stereotypes - such as women's supposed inability to read maps, or the idea men are bad at multitasking - have no links to science.
Instead of being wired in different ways, Professor Rippon said that men and women are only dissimilar because the world we live in encourages gender role-playing.
Speaking in March she said the differences between men and women are caused by the 'drip, drip, drip' of gender stereotypes.
According to The Telegraph she said: 'You can't pick up a brain and say "that's a girl's brain, or that's a boy's brain" in the same way you can with the skeleton. They look the same.
'There is pretty compelling evidence that any differences are tiny and are the result of environment not biology.'"

Rhona McCloud

It's only one professor

Angharad's picture

and next week they'll be saying that salt and vinegar crisps are the cause of gender confusion. It's quite obvious really, in the old days with the bag of salt in a blue paper--eating them made you a boy, now with ready salted, prawn cocktail etc., eating them causes you to mutate. As women are traditionally more acerbic than men, stands to reason the vinegar in the crisps turns you into a woman. QED.

Angharad

No, no, it's aspartame.

No, no, it's aspartame. Didn't you know that artificial sweeteners cause all of the ills of mankind, physical, mental, social, and religious?


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Gender Stereotypes Are There For A Reason

With respect to human sexuality, there is a female human nature and a male human nature, and these natures are extraordinarily different...because throughout the immensely long hunting and gathering stage of human evolutionary history the sexual desires and dispositions that were adaptive for either sex were for the other tickets to reproductive oblivion.

Donald Symons, quoted in Steven Pinker's 'How The Mind Works', Penguin edition page 461.

Pinker goes further.

Many people deny that there are any interesting differences between the sexes...Symons' two human natures are dismissed as gender stereotypes, as if that were proof that they are false...In fact, researchers in sex differences have found that many gender stereotypes underestimate the documented differences between the sexes.

(Pinker's emphasis.)

Professor Rippon - who I suspect may have been quoted out of context here - ought to realise that 'environment' and 'biology' are not mutually exclusive terms.

Ban nothing. Question everything.

Your right Nikki

Rhona McCloud's picture

and it has been known for newspapers to "quote out of context". By the definition of this article (though probably not the professor's intent) which genes are turned on or off in the embryo's first 3 months count as "nurture" as much as which school the child attended.

Rhona McCloud

Too narrow focus

What these ivory tower types conveniently forget is that the world doesn't just consist of humans. Anyone who says that gender behaviour is the result of nurture only is talking a lot of bollocks.

One only has to look at almost any animal from mammals to reptiles to birds to fish to notice that for most, there are clearly defined gender roles which cannot be the result of nurture, since these creatures have no society to create those stereotypes.

It irritates me no end to see apparently intellegent people waste their time with such speculation when all they have to do is observe the world around them.

Penny

Ignore it

The best thing you can do with the Daily Mail's science section is put it in the garbage - before reading it. They're well known for not caring in the slightest about accuracy - only about how they can get it to boost circulation.

Xaltatun

I don't care much

Wendy Jean's picture

about public tripe, but I am actually curious about where I came from.

I know it is incredibly stupid, and it is!, but I would like a better handle why I was born relatively so different than my fellow human. Meanwhile I just deal with it as best I can.