BlogWonks

The notion that children’s taste in toys might somehow be genetically determined has long been disparaged by psychologists, pooh-poohed as unscientific, sexist or both. But a study by researchers in the United States suggests that when it comes to choosing between trucks and cuddly stuffed animals, chromosomes could make a difference.

As we progress forward in science, the choice of proceeding forward for the truth, or holding steady to preserve ideology will become more and more critical. If history is to be an example, holding steady will create lysenkosit type science again.

One thing most people havent realized yet. The pronouncments of ideology came 40 years before the science was available to even make that guess. It also was being made by areas that have no truck with genetics, or even pharmaceuticals.

What history will eventually do is see this for what it is. Ideological manipulators attempting to stake out the answer as their territory (and they bet the whole farm on it too). Their biggest vanity will end up being their biggest farce and evidence to show that they didnt know what they were talking about, asserting, nor even considering. All they had was the more easy imagined path of “if its like this, then we can justify the ends easier, if its not, then we may not be able to justify our ends at all”.

We are finding almost daily that our genes are truly the arbiters of everything. Even “how adaptable” is a variable they play with. The fact that a grown human has more than 60 trillion cells and that every cell has a final and specific end address that stems from a specific lineage should have told them that nothing is left to chance other than where its a good thing to do so.

The evidence of such a strong definition of self is all around, but ideology will prevent one looking for refutement in favor of a confirmational bias that drives many to lie for the agenda over the truth (Kinsey, Meade, etc).

One only has to read the work of Alexander and Ann Shulgin, to realize just how much our genetics creates the machine that creates “mind”. The fact that pharmacology has done in a few years what sitting on the couch couldnt do in a lifetime is also key. EVen recent scans of our brains using fMRI shows that not only are we different in appearance, ability, but we are very very different in how we think and how our brains are constructed to think.

Boys will be boys, even if they’re monkeys: study

There have been hundreds of studies that sought to distinguish acquired from innate behaviour patterns in small children.

But by the time kids are old enough to choose and play with toys, they have also been socialised — picking up cues from their parents, peers and television — on how little girls and boys should behave, making it impossible to tease the two influences apart.

So a team of scientists led by Kim Wallen of the Yerkes national Primate Research Centre in Atlanta, Georgia decided to offer typical “male” and “female” toys to rhesus monkeys to see if preferences aligned with sex.

Much to their surprise, they did. The 11 male monkeys headed straight for the wheeled toys, such as dump trucks, leaving the plush toys more-or-less unmolested. The 23 females were more curious, and played with both.

“They are not subject to advertising. They are not subject to parental encouragement, they are not subject to peer chastisement,” said Wallen.

The results support an earlier study at Texas A&M University, with green vervet monkeys, which also showed a distinct preference among male monkeys for “masculine” playthings.

Wallen’s study was first published in the journal Hormones and Behaviour, and reported in NewScientist.