Cordelia Fine and Carole Hooven at Aeon Magazine:
A unique aspect of human developmental systems are our rich, cumulative cultures, which we inherit along with our genes. Thousands of years of gendered cultures, together with our evolved and unparalleled capacity for social learning, might have reduced the need for genes to be the ‘carriers’ of sex-linked behavioural features. Instead, as John Dupré, Daphna Joel and I have suggested, these traits could stabilise through norms that tell us what it means to be a woman or a man, and that are transferred across generations. If a male California mouse reliably inherits a father who will huddle and groom him, that’s a developmental resource that doesn’t have to be redundantly locked into genetically inherited biology. And if a male human reliably inherits a rich gendered culture that provides ample information and instruction about how to be man, along with minds tuned to acquire, enforce and internalise those norms, there’s much less need for genetic mechanisms to enforce the development of gendered traits, beyond a neural capacity for learning.
more here.
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