Biology Week 1 - Our Biological World

1. I think the article about multitasking and the gender divide was interesting in that it brought up a few questions for me. First, do we really know enough about our brain function to distinguish between two "modes of operation" (multitasking and single-mindedness) and to discount societal influences on behavior of participants; second, why do we like thinking about differences between men and women and is the leap from these findings to understanding meta societal structures valuable; and third, if we considered anything other than the gender binary, would the results of this study been more interesting? As for the first question, my general assumption is "no" - that we neither have an adequate grasp of our own brain function nor any awareness of how social structure influences our "innate" abilities to perform tasks. Therefore, even though I think the study is harmless and interesting, I don't know that I find it useful. As to the second question, perhaps studies of this sort are part of the effort to better understand ourselves in general, in which case I can get behind the effort, but they so often seem to rather be an attempt to confirm a social belief or observation that may, in fact, have no biological basis at all. To assume that the reason the women in study were able to more efficiently locate restaurants on a map, complete problems, answer a phone call, and search for a lost key in a field with a strict time limit is thanks to the traditional model of women at home and men out hunting seems like an absurd leap in logic. The third question, of course, has no answer because I cannot envision a world without the gender binary, but it's fun to think about!

2. Ha! Speaking of hypothesizing about the differences between males and females... the first article to turn up on the UC Berkeley evolution website was this one:  http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/140513_ychromosome, which discusses why the Y chromosome is important, too! It seems fairly clear to me that the Y chromosome would have similar functions to the X chromosome, with less information because of its small size.