Re: THR FEMINAZI PROBLEM

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

regnirps@aol.com (Regnirps) wrote:

>supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:
>
>>regnirps@aol.com (Regnirps) wrote:
>
>>>Talk less, watch more. Who does the throwing, stabing, poking, etc? And I
>>>wonder why? Don't tell me you don't believe in evolution?
>>
>>OK Charlie, you want to know what studies show your theories wrong?
>>I'll do a scientific literature search and post the results tonight.
>
>I'll say one thing about extrapolating behavior of 1 million year old
>creatures. American Indians, Aborigines, Borneo, New Guinney (criminy! how do
>you spell that), various African tribes with thousands, tens or hundreds of
>thousands of years of sex differentiation in their division of labor. I guess
>it is the great world wide and ancient male conspiracy after all. If it were
>not for males, ability would determine behavior, not culture. Then it would be
>based on size or strength and there would be the ancient big persons
>conspiracy?

It gets better.  Homo erectus, a scavenger, lived 1 million years ago,
so the idea that modern men have better coordination because of
some ancient evolutionary hunter heritage is wrong.  You can read
about this in "Origins Reconsidered" by Richard Leakey and Roger
Lewin, ISBN 0-385-46792-3.  The Leakeys (Richard Leakey and
his parents) discovered many key fossil species including "Lucy,"
Australopithecus afarensis (4 million years ago) and Homo erectus.

It was Homo sapiens' emergence that tools became hunting tools.
However, it is now known that women as well as men participated
in hunting.  You can read about this in the April 1988 issue of
Discover magazine.  It is the cover story "New Women of the Ice
Age."  Ancient humans hunted not by strength, but by intelligence
(if it were by strength, do you think a group of humans can
overpower a woolly mammoth?)...they, for example, set fires to
drive herds over cliffs and feasted on the carcasses.  Some
26,000 years ago, humans still lived like this.

The division of labor you speak of began after humans began
taking up agriculture.  While there is no difference in terms
of intelligence in the genders, men have a stronger physique
because of the action of testosterone.  As a result, men
began to do the heavy work while women did finer work
requiring more manual dexterity.  However, this division does
not reflect intellect at all.  You can read about this in "The
Third Chimpanzee" by Jarrod Diamond.

Today, we live in a technological civilization.  Engineering
and applied math are things that don't require heavy muscle
power.  The division of labor as it was no longer makes
sense.  There is no innate difference in intellectual capacity
due to gender.  The only thing holding change back is culture,
cultures based on an ideal rooted in the early days of
agriculture.

If there is any difference at all to gender bias in math and
spatial abilities, it is due to the environment.  Parents
raising children in ways based on cultural expectations.
Did you know that if a baby is not spoken to for the critical
years from birth up to the early teens, that child will never
be able to learn language?  It is true.  You can read about
an actual case in "Genie, a scientific tragedy" by Russ
Rymer.  Here, a psychotic father locks up his daughter
in a room where no one even spoke to her till police found
the child when she was 14.  They tried to teach her how
to speak, but she could never learn the grammar.  I don't
know if math or spatial skills have a similar critical period
as language, but I'm willing to bet if you play ball with your
daughter from the time she was a small child, she'll throw
it as well as your son can.  Same thing with math.

Finally, males and females start off at the fetal stage as
the same form.  Only from the action of hormones do
they differentiate.  There are some individuals that are
male (XY) but have a mutation that causes all their cells
to not respond to the hormone testosterone.  So these
genetic males, during the fetal stage, can't receive the
signals to shift development to a male body plan (in the
absence of such signals, the body follows the default
plan...female) so they are born looking female.  This
disorder is called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. So
these "women" are actually genetically male, but not
even their parents know that they are male.  They are
raised female, perform on standardized tests like females,
and they act like females...as they are raised to believe
they should act and think BY THEIR ENVIRONMENT.
You can read about this in "Biopsychology" by John
P.J. Pinel.  I can send you some graphics and diagrams
of differentiation from the same form to male and female
and also an example of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome
if you wish...

Looking at the above sources, we can see that differences
in math ability, spatial skills, and what not, must be due
to the environment...peer pressure, the media, the way
parents raise the child...our CULTURE.  It is not anything
innate.

Whether or not Apple hired unqualified women is one thing.
There is probably still a shortage of qualified women
engineers.  This is CULTURAL.  If we can truely raise our
children gender blind, such differences would not exist.
If Apple tried to rectify this cultural problem by hiring
unqualified individuals, then that is wrong.  At the same
time, we should not be blind to the fallacy of gender difference.
The sooner we abandon these notions, the better ALL
children are encouraged to do their best in math and the
sooner we'll see more qualified engineers, etc.

Thomas Jefferson, who was himself a scientist, commented
more than a century ago that "it cannot be denied that even
the most intelligent of Negroes is less so than the least
intelligent White."  To Jefferson, this looked scientific.  His
sample was the black people of America and they looked
to him to be less intelligent than white people.  We now
know that Jefferson's views were flawed...he neglected to
see the effect of ENVIRONMENT.  Today, we know that
intellectual ability has no correlation with race.  I can see
you know this from your reply to Don Wilson (who we both
know is a racist).  Now apply the same thing to the gender
issue...