We speak with academic psychologist Dr. Cordelia Fine. Her new book, Delusions Of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, challenges the assumption that gender roles are wired into our brains, and shows us how ubiquitous cultural stereotypes are mistaken for actual fact.
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On "Everything You Know is Sort Of Wrong," Greg Laden asks if modern hobbies are an evolutionary consequence of prehistoric gender roles.
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This Friday's Skeptically Speaking will feature ...
... academic psychologist Dr. Cordelia Fine. Her new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, challenges the assumption that gender roles are wired into our brains, and shows us how ubiquitous cultural…
It looks like I have to add another book to my currently neglected reading list. In an interview, Cordelia Fine, author of a new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has a few provocative things to say about gender stereotypes…
The podcast of Desiree Schell's interviews with me (recorded) and Cordelia Fine (author of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference) ... is now available here.
Check it out!
Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael Hiltzik
Deep Blue Home:…
Greg, you are the interviewer?
No, I do the "everything you know is wrong" spot, already pre-recorded. Desiree Schell is the interviewer.
Nice job on the show. This topic has spawned a spin-off question for me: how much is behavior influenced by hormones, and how much do differences in the hormone levels in the bloodstream influence observed differences in behavior? Since behavior also influences hormone levels, it would seem difficult to isolate causal relationships.
Jac, I think that hormones are mostly downstream of where the real action is going on. I see differences in hormone levels as more of an effect than a cause. Most of the effects of hormones are local, that is within the same tissue compartment that they are generated (where the levels are a lot higher than in the peripheral circulation). What is measured in the blood stream has little to do with what the levels in the different tissue compartments where they are important (which is just about every tissue compartment, where the levels are all different).
Hormones are not doing âone thingâ, they are doing hundreds of things simultaneously and differentially in the various different tissue compartments.
The effects of hormones are non-linear, so a bolus dose of hormone X every time t, does not have the same effects as the same dose over a different time scale. Physiology also responds to hormones, and that response is complex and idiosyncratic.
Nice to see you as a regular on one of my favorite podcasts. :)
However we do know that in the womb the presence of a hormone makes the fetus male, absence female. (This is apparently only true in mammals, birds and reptiles do it differently, and fish are able to change (see parrot fish)). The more we learn about the natural world the more we see that nature tries everything to find what works best.