Readable, sensible, scholarly, convincing. (5 b&w illustrations)
Australian physician Rogers (Neuroscience/Univ. of New England) argues in clear, crisp prose that discussions about differences between the sexes must consider environmental as well as genetic and hormonal factors.
Rogers establishes immediately that her account is not just about the science of sex differences: “It is also about social attitudes and prejudice.” She recognizes that research into gender differences has long had a political as well as a scientific component: “When society wants to maintain inequality, biological explanations can be used to justify it.” Repeatedly, she states that the mere identification of differences does not explain their origins. If men and women, for example, do indeed process language differently, it does not follow that this difference is necessarily genetic or hormonal; the culture may teach boys and girls to process language tasks differently. Rogers has no use for reductionist explanations of human behavior. Accordingly, the search for individual genes to explain alcoholism or homosexuality does not impress her; nor does the entire field of sociobiology, which she believes emerged in the 1970s as a backlash against feminism. She devotes an entire chapter to the interest in identifying a so-called “gay gene,” an enterprise she believes is nonsensical. (She points to studies of identical twins—one gay, one not. How can sexual orientation be genetic, she asks, if genetically identical people can differ so fundamentally?) Rogers razes a number of traditional theoretical edifices—e.g., the notions that men and women differ in “spatial ability” and that the levels of testosterone in the blood of men determine the intensity of their libido (neither case is so, she claims). To demonstrate the power of environmental influences on sex differences, she employs the arresting example of mother rats, which lick the anogenital area of newborn males more frequently than of females, stimulating subsequent male-rat behavior in the recipients.
Readable, sensible, scholarly, convincing. (5 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-231-12010-9
Page Count: 129
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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