One of the fun things about marrying young is that you tend to share so much more… sometimes it takes the form of your bride slipping an article under your nose in order to see what shade of red you become.
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Laura tends to ‘bait’ me with juicy stories like the one that appeared in her APS Observer entitled “With the Brain is seeing believing?” , it does stimulate conversation over the breakfast table.
My first reaction was to say,”why doesn’t this woman just stop?” However, she is employing the oldest technique in the book… the ‘distraction.’
So what am I talking about? As I mentioned in a previous blog, many people who have devoted their lives to the notion that everything can be explained by cultural or environmental factors are very uncomfortable with what is being discovered in the area of genetics and brain imaging….. why? The reason is simple, it shakes their very intellectual foundations…. it’s hard being wrong. It’ll be even harder being thought of as ‘quaint.’
Pictured above, Carol Wade is clearly feeling very uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I have read her work. Carol has coauthored an Introductory Psychology Text , which we own along with others. Her text is resplendant with cultural and environmental examples to demonstrate the power of these factors, she pays lip service to the developments in science, but it is clear to me that she just brushes them aside as less significant…. if not insignificant.
Carol is quick to criticize the study of ‘brain scans’… but it is unclear as to whether or not she has ever studied them herself. Data can be such uncomfortable things when they don’t go the way you expect. In fairness, Carol does show a picture in her text of a ‘brain scan’ and does give some play to the fact that some male and female differences may exist… but this is minor.
Many of us have observed that men and women are different at the very core… and outside of the obvious physical differences … we noticed that there must be something more that explains why men and women think differently, have different abilities and often hold very different perspectives. We hypothesized that we are not taught to be boys and girls, so much, as there must be something ‘inborn’ that influences our behavior and outlook from the very start.
Science is beginning to reveal all of this, and science is confirming what many of us thought to be true all along… however, this is making others (non-science folk) very uncomfortable. A “Tsunami’ of data bringing greater understanding of how we work is already here, and more is coming…. and folks like Carol who refuse to rethink their fundamental precepts will be a mere quaint footnote in history.
Sites for Science:
Brain scans that spy on the senses
Genetic influences:
Environment and genetic influences play different roles
in boys’ and girls’ gender-role behavior
The Nature of Genetic Influences on Behavior:
Lessons From “Simpler” Organisms
Roger Freberg