We speak with academic psychologist Dr. Cordelia Fine. Her new book, Delusions Of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, challenges the assumption that gender roles are wired into our brains, and shows us how ubiquitous cultural stereotypes are mistaken for actual fact.
and
On “Everything You Know is Sort Of Wrong,” Greg Laden asks if modern hobbies are an evolutionary consequence of prehistoric gender roles.
An oldie but a goodie:
This video shows how to dress for South Pole weather conditions during the winter (down to -100ºF). Filmed in the library of the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station during winter 2010.
Continue reading Winter’s coming, time to take stock of the cold weather gear…
I dare you to tell me that this is not an argument for stricter control over access to firearms:
I was under the impression that “Reason” magazine was a libertarian neocon climate denialist rag. I could be wrong, but that’s what I thought. I was also under the impression that JREF was pro-science and at this point had gotten beyond the whole “let’s remain skeptical about global warming” thaing, especially since Randi stepped in it a while back and accidentally forgot that only paid-off or delusional scientists denied AGW. But now we find the JREF site pushing Reason magaazine in a post on their site.
Someone please help me understand what I’m seeing here.
This should come as a surprise to no one. Byron Williams, known as the “Highway Shooter” for his 12 minutres shootout with CHIPS officers earlier this year, described the connection between Glenn Beck and his activities to a John Hamilton of Media Matters.
… Williams details what he saw as an elaborate global conspiracy [and points to] specific broadcasts of Beck’s show for information on the conspiracy he describes. … Beck’s show provided “information on the conspiracy theory that drove him over the edge: an intricate plot involving Barack Obama, philanthropist George Soros, a Brazilian oil company, and the BP disaster.”…
…”Williams also points to other media figures — right-wing propagandist David Horowitz, and Internet conspiracist and repeated Fox News guest Alex Jones — as key sources of information to inspire his ‘revolution.'”
This Friday’s Skeptically Speaking will feature …
… academic psychologist Dr. Cordelia Fine. Her new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
, challenges the assumption that gender roles are wired into our brains, and shows us how ubiquitous cultural stereotypes are mistaken for actual fact.
That will be a life discussion with Desiree Schell.
Also, this Friday’s edition of Skeptically Speaking will have the latest “Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong” in which Greg Laden (whoever the heck that is) asks if modern hobbies are an evolutionary consequence of prehistoric gender roles.
Desiree and I just finished recording that, and it went fairly well considering that we are both in the latter stages of a very nasty upper respiratory viral infection. I’m sure she can edit out the coughing and hacking.
Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)?
This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today’s behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by “sound” you mean “sounds good unless you listen really hard.”
I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument with numerous little sub-arguments, and one about which I could write as many blog posts as I have fingers and toes, which means, at least twenty. (Apparently there was some pentaldactylsim in my ancestry, and I must admit that I’ll never really know what they cut off when I was born, if anything.)
Before going into this discussion I think it is wise, if against my nature, to tell you what the outcome will be: There is not a good argument to be found in the realm of behavioral biology for why American Women shop while their husbands sit on the bench in the mall outside the women’s fashion store fantasizing about a larger TV on which to watch the game. At the same time, there is a good argument to be made that men and women should have different hard wired behavioral proclivities, if there are any hard wired behavioral proclivities in our species. And, I’m afraid, the validity from an individual’s perspective of the various arguments that men and women are genetically programmed to be different (in ways that make biological sense) is normally determined by the background and politics of the observer and not the science. I am trained in behavioral biology, I was taught by the leading sociobiologists, I’ve carried out research in this area, and I was even present, somewhat admiringly, at the very birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in Room 14A in the Peabody Museum at Harvard, in the 1980s. So, if anyone is going to be a supporter of evolutionary psychology, it’s me.
But I’m not. Let me ‘splain….
Continue reading Why do women shop and men hunt?
Here is an article on the original study form Sociological Inquiry, which I’ve not read and about which I have no comment other than that it is cool if it annoyed Fox New.