The reason that looking automatically at genes to explain human behavioral variation is because we know for a fact that humans are incredibly plastic, in behavior and development and brain organization. I have no doubt that there are, for instance, differences between men and women. However, genes are over-used as an explanation. First, every society is not like ours. There are ones where women are considered the competent, unemotional ones, and societies where men primp and gossip all day. There is a group where women hunt wild boars with babies strapped to their backs, and have a better hunting success rate than the men. Who’s to say that our society is not the exception? After all, modern, intensive-agriculturalist societies are very recent for us as a species, while the Agta (the lady hunter group) live in the same way that humans evolved living.
Secondly, studies show that differences we’ve chalked up to genetics could be better explained by culture. For instance, playing video games increases hand-eye coordination. When comparing girls to boys after a set time of playing games, the boys still did better in spatial relatioinship tasks, but the girls had improved more than the boys from pre-playing to post-playing. That tells us that a larger chunk of women’s lesser spatial abilities might just be due to the sort of things we grow up doing. Even today, gaming is considered a predominantly male activity, even though there are numerous female gamers. We don’t know where spatial ability or athletic ability (another place where women’s performance is increasing faster than men’s) will finally even out. I’m betting that, at least for athletics, women will end up a bit lower than men in most things, since most athletic events are geared towards men’s strengths, not women’s. However, we don’t yet know how far apart we’ll end up being, or if that gap will even exist.
It’s easier to show this with gender, because, while that, too, is a cultural construct, most if not all societies recognize the two categories “man” and “woman”, and any other genders are considerably more rare. Race, however, is completely a social construct and the definitions of race are not even all the same right now. It’s harder to do cross-cultural comparison because of that, but it does exist. Hey, in those articles I keep talking about, even. Consider this, please. Your citations so far have been popular works that are demonstrable flawed and have not been peer-reviewed. I’ve been citing the AJPA, the premiere journal for biological anthropology. I can’t remember the other cites (sorry, other people), but it’s pretty clear who has science on their side.
