One reason I am as adamant about genetics playing the larger role is that it has been borne out time and again in research. Twin studies, where they study twin siblings separated at birth, are quite revealing - personality, aptitude, talents, temperment, preferred spouse body type and career field - all turn out to be basically identical even though the twins were raised in vastly different environments.
And also the David/Brenda sex change case, in which one of a pair of twin boys had a botched circumcision, and they decided to raise him as a girl.
It was supposed to be the crowning achievement of the nurture supporters. If this boy could be raised alongside his twin brother as a girl, and turn out normally, then it would prove that environment is the cause of the gender roles we play.
Instead it proved exactly the opposite. Brenda was always unhappy with her assigned gender, made primarily male friends in her peer group, suffered from extreme depression, and when she learned that she had been a boy at birth opted to have a sex change to return to being a man.
After that he lived a relatively happy life.
(Edit : And since I have a feeling Ken G will try to paint this as an isolated case and thus "inadmissible" :
What about transgendered people? They ignore the gender role they are supposed to play according to society. Clearly, their gender has been programmed differently from their physical body. I can certainly think of no person who would *choose* to endure the excessive humiliation, shunning, loss of family and friends, financial ruin, and dangerous surgery that accompany the transition from one gender to another. Unless it was simply programmed in to them, and they could not feel right until their sex matched their gender.)
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Originally Posted by Ken G
I'd say it's a complete no-brainer that the hypothesis that women are innately and genetically caused to be less adept in math, either on the average or at the top end, is as completely unsubstantiated as the hypothesis that UFOs have been conducting experiments on farmers.
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Maybe I'm just a product of my upbringing (pun intended) but I don't find the comparison apt at all. I asked a woman today, who happened to be a psychology major, if she thought that the idea of women and men developing different aptitudes because of hundreds of thousands of years of separate roles was a sexist idea.
I even mentioned specifically spatial acuity, sense of direction/navigation, logic, and calculation.
She agreed that this was the case based on what she'd learned in school, and that no it wasn't sexist at all, it was just reality.
She was however quick to point out the advantages that women have, in the areas of language, communication, and social relationships.
To me it seems far more credulous to disbelieve gender differences than to see them when they stare you in the face. But that's probably because I was raised in an environment where free thinking was not stifled and "politically correct" was said more as a curse than it ever was as a blessing.
Other may not have been so fortunate and I understand that. It's hard to go against what you've been raised to believe - no matter what the evidence confronting you happens to be.