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Originally Posted by footfootfoot
Where do tomboys and homosexuals fit in your paradigm? Nature or nurture?
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Both. A complex stew of factors including the initial set of cards dealt through the brain, the learning experiences that brain goes through, the hormonal landscape, genetic inheritance etc etc etc.
My problem with the male brain/female brain idea is that it gives too great a role to the differences between genders instead of the much greater distinctions between individuals. And it assumes a much greater impact from those differences in terms of behaviour, talents and proclivities than they actually seem to have, judging by much of the current research in this area.
The human brain and the way it develops is significantly more elastic and responsive than that model would suggest.
Nurture necessarily plays a large part. Or more accurately, experience and learning interact with other factors to shape the brain. The notion that women are less spatially aware than men, for example, may be purely down to our assumptions that that is the case. Girls who are expected to develop spatial awareness skills and treated from an early age as if that is the case are likely to be spatially aware (or so it appears from recent studies in learning and development in children).
As human beings we are highly advanced in a number of areas: we are endowed from the start with the capacity and will to learn. Big skulls, helpless babes, we get the starter software, the thing that allows us to reach conclusions about ourselves and our world without having to have a wide range of instinctive behaviours and responses programmed in from the start. And we are sophisticated social creatures. Not only do we instinctively learn, but we instinctively learn about where we sit in and how to interact within our group.
That includes gender roles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
If societal, learned gender roles predominantly determine genderish behaviors, where did society learn them from?
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From our forebears. From their forebears. From their forebears. from ourselves and from each other. Because they are, on the whole, useful to us.