i thought as much.
but if one just substitutes "left/right" with "rational and calculating faculties part / imaginative and intuitive part", it still makes sense, right?
prehistory/early civilization/mythology
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i thought as much.
but if one just substitutes "left/right" with "rational and calculating faculties part / imaginative and intuitive part", it still makes sense, right?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Joseph LeDoux said:
Hahaha, nerdgasm!
But Shlain's thesis seems to be that one of these is an inherently 'male' way of thinking, the other, inherently 'female'. Which is much more problematic (without even going into whether literacy privileges one way of thinking over the other). I know plenty of women who'd be incensed to learn that their pretty little girly brains are inherently predisposed to thinking in emotional, intuitive terms and not at all cut out for the hurly-burly of masculine rational thought.
Anyway, this male = verbal, female = visual dichotomy doesn't even stand up to a cursory examination. Don't educational experts generally agree that women tend to be better than men at verbal comprehension, just as men are better at spatial reasoning? And in terms of what men and women like in erotica, it's usually said that men prefer visual stimuli while women like stuff to read or listen to (hence: men look at porn, women read dirty novels).
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nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Yeah, and on top of this, the jury's still out on whether these traits are entirely the result of endocrinological differences between men and women, or whether cultural conditioning plays a role. There's lots of evidence to suggest that cultural conditioning factors into what we can measure as "female" and "male" traits.
Conflating "verbal" with "rational" is also quite a leap.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
No, because these holistic faculties aren't associated with "parts" of the brain. Your entire brain is responsible for "rational" thought, but it's also at times imaginative or intuitive.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Is that a book? Or just a website?
I think j meant this.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
http://www.erikweijers.nl/pages/translations/psychology/the-origin-of-consciousness.php
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
http://www.erikweijers.nl/pages/translations/psychology/the-origin-of-consciousness.php
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Well, Jayne has a point, from an evolutionary point of view. Jayne is also not making a strange binary opposition, he's hypothesizing about how consciousness and language probably came into being simultaneously.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I think this is begging the question a bit, though. Why would there be an assumption that there are "male" and "female" traits, or indeed differentiated gender roles generally, of not for some degree of inborn psychological (and therefore neurological/endocrinological) differences between men and women? I mean, human brains, or at any rate pre-human mammalian brains, have existed for millions of years before the advent of any human culture. Has there ever been a society that does not distinguish, in some way or another, between gender roles?
Note that this is a very far cry from there simply being a "linear, rational, male" way and a "holistic (whatever that means), intuitive, female" way of thinking - I think it's far more subtle and complex than that. But then, this is just my intuition, so it's probably best taken with a pinch of salt...
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Right...so even the "hardwired" endocrinological-neurological differences are, ultimately, the result of the different "roles" men and women had to fulfill in order to survive. That doesn't mean these don't exist, just that they aren't handed down from God in the Garden of Eden. They are the result of millions of years of evolution and therefore subject to change/variation/variability.
Edit: So, really, a lot of our "male" and "female" traits were around before we became homo sapiens (and even before we became mammals--there are male and female bacteria ffs). And then they changed after we became homo sapiens. Our secondary sex characteristics, for example, (which includes our relative hairlessness, breasts, larger penis, etc) are very pronounced compared to those of other primates.
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I think I saw that in a personal ad once.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
ha
Well it's the truth. Humans have stupidly huge breasts and penises. We have sex drives that are a little out of proportion with our own ability to procreate. We're the bimbos of the animal kingdom. Except we also think we're really smart.
Well it's the truth. Humans have stupidly huge breasts and penises. We have sex drives that are a little out of proportion with our own ability to procreate. We're the bimbos of the animal kingdom. Except we also think we're really smart.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yes, it could be a continuous feedback loop, couldn't it? Phenotypical and instinctive-behavioural traits will have an influence on learned behaviour (ultimately becoming codified into 'culture'), which will influence survival and reproductive fitness, which affects the genetic make-up of a breeding population, which determines phenotypes and instinctive behaviours; meanwhile culture carries on evolving according to its own selection criteria.
I think it's really cool that 'culture' has been observed in non-human primates.
I think it's really cool that 'culture' has been observed in non-human primates.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Have you read about biosemiotics yet? Basically, everything in the natural world is encoded or structured something like a language, with information flows everywhere in nature right down to DNA/RNA and all the way up to the most meta- macro levels you can imagine.
Those news items make me excited to be going into a biology program. Even though I just registered and I'll have 25 hours of class per week. With two 3 hour labs :slanted:
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Heh, nice one Josef.
Yeah, I even heard a hypothesis to explain the apparently unique shape of the human penis, which is that it's an adaptation to scoop out the semen of a female's previous partner, thus to improve the likelihood of the (ahem) newcomer's own semen impregnating her. Which just goes to show that what utter evolutionary sluts we all are.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Not in so many words, although it sounds something like Dawkins' 'memetics' hypothesis. Not in the sense of memes simply as ideas or cultural entities, but thinking of genes themselves simply as biochemical instances of memes.
Good luck with your biology classes.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Well, yes, and there are also "blocker" sperm (I can't think of the sports position name for this--) that are meant to go in, and then lie horizontally, which effectively blocks sperm from competing males.
Male sperm swim faster but die more quickly than female sperm, which swim more slowly but live longer. So if you want to have a girl, you should have sex a few days before ovulation--by the time the egg makes it down the tubes, the male sperms are mostly dead and more females are left..
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Thanks. I was going to ask you--which is better, calculus based physics, or the other kind? I have to choose between taking "university physics" or "college physics" next term, and university physics is apparently calculus based. I have to take calculus anyway to graduate, so I'm thinking I could take university physics. The only difference is probably that it's harder than the college section? I'm not sure.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Ok, that's what I thought... I'm guessing the "college physics" is just for pre-med majors who don't need to really learn physics, but who need an A on their transcript for med school admissions. Either that, or it's a course for "non-majors" who are doing a bullshit humanities Science, Technology & Society major.
Ahh, the U.S. educational system.