>>DNA development is mostly a random event with statistical success rather than being designed and engineered for a predicted context, contrary to what the superstitious would have us believe.<<
Well, yes, generally I would agree, but homo sapiens is unique as a species in being able to skew the probability distribution of potential genetic outcomes. For example, take a look at your teeth. Did you know that tooth size in homo sapiens exhibited a rapid and significant reduction starting about 200,000 years ago. Why? We learned to cook and large teeth capable of grinding nutrients from raw tubers became superfluous. Why exactly it was that smaller teeth, however, conferred a reproductive advantage has not been explained by current research, only that cooking made this possible. I guess we will have to resort to the theory that Neolithic babes preferred the guys with oblivious self-confidence (the ones that thought that hunting mammoths with little pointy sticks was no big deal) AND who also had small, white, shiny incisors.
As to the rest of your post, you are out of step with current political correctness, but current neuorological research is moving strongly in your direction. We poor males, for example, have wimpy, underdeveloped corpus callosa, while the female version is a veritable information superhighway, allowing the ladies' left and right brains to chat away unimpeded.
I can not agree, however, with your contention that the divide in male/female mathematics skills is educationally-based. The male brain is a relatively simple thing, adapted to the relatively straightforward tasks of roaming around looking for inspiration, focusing on the task of chasing down some hairy, four-legged food item and then calculating the potential trajectories of a variety of blunt and pointy objects. This ability to calculate trajectories required a certain amount of adaptive neurological hard wiring for the basic mathematical concepts of distance, mass, force and velocity and integrals of the same - hence the difference in this regard between men and women, who (except for the three sigma females) did not evolve tossing blunt or pointy objects at rapidly moving hairy creatures. The male visual cortex, by the way, supports these adaptations with a great ability to detect the motion of small objects far away and very little ability to take in a proximal static visual field.
This is why when you are watching the Discovery Wings channel and your wife (not my wife, I know what I'm doing) comes into the room and yells "hey, lardass, fix the faucet!" you can not hear her, because your finely-adapted brain thinks it is stalking a saber-tooth cat and so tunes out all extraneous data, particularly those that arrive on the FVM (female vocal modulation) frequency. It is also why you (not me, you) can never find your socks or the scissors, because they are close and not moving. It is also why it is very hard for you (not me, you) to do a host of domestic tasks, because if a task doesn't involve throwing objects or dragging home large bloody lumps of meat, your brain finds it difficult to comprehend its utility. |
