Thanks for that post.
There's a lot of evidence that we build up our brain's representation of space by moving through it," Denckla tells WebMD. As anyone who spends a significant time around children knows, boys tend to get a lot more practice "moving through space" -- chasing a ball, for instance -- than girls do. "My hypothesis is that we could possibly erase this difference if we pushed girls out into the exploratory mode," Denckla says. She predicts that as more and more girls engage in sports traditionally reserved for boys, like soccer, the data on spatial ability will show fewer disparities between females and males.
This is precisely what I'm trying to point out to M Winn. The data keeps coming in, generally in hints, that development plays a very significant role in what we might attribute instead to genetics.
It is not just mental abilities either. There have been a number of studies recently, showing that childhood exposure to germs of various sorts (romping through cowpies, having pets, being in daycare so you catch lots of colds, etc) ends up conferring a very significant immune system improvement in adults. Now suppose that this behavior, or the lack of it was cultural. Then along comes some scientist and generates the adult response numbers and says, Oh my gosh, group X must have a genetically superior immune system to group Y, just look at these very statistically significant numbers. Sure, the adult members of group X are say 40% better off than those of Y, but it so happens, that it is not genetic. You can't say it is genetic until you have narrowed it down to some genetic component, or at a minimum conducted experiments which you think (and that is about all one can hope for) rule out other sources. The latter can be rather hard if you don't know what the other sources might be. |
