It's pretty clear that children don't need to be encouraged to adopt most of the behaviors we associate with one gender or the other, because there are other cultures with very different gender roles that seem to be doing just fine, psychologically.
By this same logic, it's clear that children don't need food, because other cultures with very different food than ours seem to be doing just fine...
It MIGHT be the case that even though a child doesn't need any particular gender role, they may still need some gender roles of some sort provided to them, and that simply ignoring the issue completely and giving them no guidance whatsoever might be bad for them.
I have no evidence this is necessarily true, but neither have I ever seen any evidence that gender roles AREN'T needed, so we shouldn't assume either way unless research is done on it.
I guess the only other way genes determine our behavior is through the direct functioning of brain/nerve cells?
I'm no super expert on hormones, but I am an expert on psychology, and I do know FOR SURE they don't do
that (cause behavior via direct influence on brain organization). Almost everything about your brain's organization is much more context driven than gene driven. Genes stop somewhere at the level of like "here are some basic lobes and maybe some substructures, and here's a set of different cell arhictectures to work with. Beyond that, they don't do much for any brain detail. As one dramatic example, your visual cortex
doesn't actually know how many eyes you have until it starts actually getting input from X many eyes. And if you graft a third one into an animal, it will organize itself perfectly logically for 3 eyes with 3 ocular dominance column types.
This sort of thing is typical for everything else in your brain. You don't know how many limbs you have or what their range of movement is until you try to move around (twitching in your sleep and reading off the tension has also been demonstrated to provide such feedback data to the brain about its own body's structure). You don't know how many tones you can hear until the auditory organs actually start spitting in input. Think of it sort of like genes building a tomato plant frame, and then everything about where each tiny little tendril and flower grows is dependent upon a dizzying world of contextual influence and input.
Which is great! Because as you might imagine, a non-gene-reliant method is not only more efficient information storage-wise, but also more adaptive, since your brain can learn automatically to cope with defects or injuries throughout your life, versus just one plan where if anything goes wrong, the plan stops working.
Machines that man has made from blueprints usually do one thing - they dry your hair or they move you from A to B. And if you break a gear, the whole thing becomes a paperweight. Any
organism, though, built that poorly would go extinct in the snap of a finger. Humans do all of those and thousands of other things, precisely because their blueprints do not limit or determine their behavior. It's closer, if anything, to a computer. And in a computer, do you include in the manufacturing blueprints anything that fully specifies individual programs that will exist on the machine? Nope. You only specify generic mechanisms by which inputs can organize and dictate programs...
It IS hypothetically possible to have a gene-wired behavior, but it has to be super crude and usually reliant on giant, specialized nerve clusters. For example, the leg kicking reflex when hit by a rubber mallet. Yes, genes can do things like that by in that example doing something as crude as making all nerves go through the same spot in your leg. That's the sort of level you're restricted to.
You will see many complex behaviors that appear universal, like walking. But for the example of walking, it ends up being the same because your leg and basic body structure is the same, and you all experience the same gravity, etc. So as you experiment, everybody eventually finds the same maximum efficiency solution given the common context. Not because there's some "walking genes." It's very much a system set up in such a way as to reinvent the wheel every generation. This has a cost in that it takes time to reinvent the wheel. But the savings -- of what would have had to be billions or trillions of base pairs of DNA for such a behavior -- is well worth it.
As this all relates to the actual thread - gender-specific roles are all so subtle and complex that they all fall in the same category as walking or high level vision -- there's simply no realistic way they can be specified by genes. They could be remotely, wispily, through infinite twists and turns, be influenced in part by genes, absolutely. But not specified by them. And therefore, in no sense of the word whatsoever "innate."
*because gender roles are based on older gender roles, repeating into pre-history. So without a time machine or unethical multi-generation psychology experiments, we won't know how sexual dimorphism contributed to the earliest gender roles.
Meh. Gender roles between females across cultures in present day can differ by much larger amounts than gender role differences between genders in one culture.
Which implies to me that there's no solid reason to believe sexual dimorphism actually has much to do with them at all.
It
could just be that ANY sexual dimorphism of ANY type merely serves as a convenient visible difference by which to specify two different groups of people, and then that the content of the gender roles you assign to those people have absolutely no connection whatsoever to the specific facts of their dimorphism.
Author
Topic: A Strange Idea about Gender Roles (Read 56376 times)