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Coed Half-Naked Hunting

Some archaeologists say the image of caveman as macho big-game hunter is just a figment of our 20th Century imagination. Then what were Neanderthal gender roles? Faye Flam asks in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Did primitive peoples form relationships, the males playing father to sons and daughters, or did we act more like our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins--promiscuous, violent, with males fighting over the females?"

Most likely, fathers took more care of their kids as males and females approached the same body size. Human men and women are closer in body size than chimps. "In species with males and females closer to the same size, the sexes are more likely to work in pairs, cooperate, and share the burden of protecting their young," Flam writes. "So determining how long ago we reached our current ratio should point to when our ancestors stopped organizing themselves like apes and started acting more like people."

Speaking of prehistoric gender roles, this study is about two years old, but its absurdity is timeless: A researcher at Texas A&M University somehow demonstrated that female monkeys like playing with pots and pans. "Just like boys and girls, male monkeys like to play with toy cars whereas female monkeys prefer dolls" the Washington Post reported without irony, along with about 36 other news sources. "Males also played with balls while females fancied cooking pots." They quoted the researcher, Gerianne Alexander as saying, “The differences apparently date far back in evolutionary history to the time before humans and monkeys separated from their common ancestor some 25 million years ago."

So when in evolutionary history did monkeys learn what pots and pans are all about? Actually, that discovery launched the earliest known era of stay-at-home motherhood, by enabling moms to put dinner on the stove while their boys were out playing baseball with monkey dads. I saw it in Planet of the Apes.

A few years earlier, the same psychologist demonstrated that female monkeys like pink and male monkeys like blue. Maybe the next study will prove that monkeys associate white with weddings and black with funerals. Except for Chinese monkeys, who would, if they could, wear red to weddings and white to funerals. No doubt there are mental differences between the sexes due to hormones. One recent discovery was that men pay more attention to crotches than women, as shown in this eye-tracking study. (Scroll down). But that monkey study has such blatantly unscientific bias; it’s like a university psychology department conducting research into whether or not African Americans are innately drawn to cotton.






Comments

Evolution, hierarchy, behavior and limits of thinking

What can I say more? Only , you are right; there is unfortunately a huge number of people who succeeded in getting a position of a professor etc, and being so equipped with authority of their function they do not hesitate to provided us, „stupid non-professors“ and “no function chair” individuals with stupid information. The problem is, sometimes they really do believe the nonsense they are producing.

On my blog I have already wrote about several professors like this one. One saying that animals cannot imitate, the other one saying that music was extremely important in the evolution of humans (would be nice to see a chimp composing some kind of easy music), (it was not music but it was sound and noise).

Very often professors get caught in their attempts to make “super” “perfect” definitions at the very beginning of some kind of study, like memetics. Memetics is a good science, now nearly abandoned, just because o f extremely stupid definitions provided by some professors. These professors were not willing to accept the idea of joining memetics with semiotics and thus killing memetics completely.

There are thousands of such examples in our short history, just think of Galileo, or of global warming being caused by CO2 nonsense. There were always people trying to mislead the other people in order to gain some kind of advantage: it is evolution. Another good example is marriage swindler, pretending something so well that women get caught. And now think of our politicians, all over the world, basically, they do the same. So it is no only professors, these are people who want to get high in the hierarchy of human society whatever it may cost. These are, from evolutionary point of view, “normal” people, because they go for their benefit.

People who try to help others are actually, from the evolutionary point of view” far from being normal, as they do not try to get some evolutionary advantage for themselves. It could be that these people are higher developed in evolution, trying to help the whole instead trying to get their own benefit secured.

If you want to read more of my ideas you may find them here:

www.hlavni–vos.blogspot.com

It was of no surprise that the resacher with the stupid findings was a Texan. Religion tells them the findings of their research before they even start.
The Russians went through aperiod of time when communist ideology dictated the results of the biological research and the results were disastrous for a long time. Hitler and the Nazis did the same things in their aryan research endeavors.
Wrong then and wrong now, but Texans need a long time to grow up as they are still primitive, not all just the religious crazies. Even Baylor U. is beginning to understand that there is a difference between religion and science. When catholics and evangelicals understand that merging religion into the slime of politics ends up slimeing both religion and politics then both religions will have made much progress. Now both religions seem to have forgotten that Kesus forbade such merging when he said render unto Caesar... and render unto god... Ignoring that may bring about the end of the papacy or the entire catholic religion, my religion.

Posted by: bobt on 04/16/07 at 8:56 AM  Respond

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