|
"Assortive mating.
"While Harvard president Lawrence
Summers found himself hard pressed on a lee shore recently, giving up good
ground to the rocks and shoals of the academy for postulating a possible
distinction between the generic male and generic female,
Simon Baron-Cohen skips past all the worst land
mines by eschewing (admittedly useless) generalities and focusing on the
specific - men (most men) tend to think in terms of systems, while women (most
women) tend to empathize. Put aside the impulse to asses a value to either
tendency (which is, after all, only a tendency) and you'll probably have to
admit that this jibes with your own experience. Autistic children tend to max
out the tendency to systemize, often slavishly devoted to routine, and sometimes
capable of almost inhuman feats of mathematical brilliance. Characteristically
though, they tend to run short on empathy. They are the anti-woman and
maxi-man.There are outliers in
either gender's generic bell curve of course. Some women will be more systematic
than most men, while some men will out-empathize most women. Which is why
comparisons tend to be invidious, and generalities worse than useless, when you
stand before an individual. Although I am forced to point out that of the men
who out-empathize women, nearly all tend tend to be Air Force pilots.
Couldn't resist.
Sorry.Anyway, Baron-Cohen found some
fascinating alignments among the parents of autistic
children:-
(First), both mothers and fathers
of children with autism complete the embedded figures test faster than men and
women in the general population.
-
Second, both mothers and fathers of
children with autism are more likely to have fathers who are talented
systemizers (engineers, for example).
-
Third, when we look at brain
activity with magnetic resonance imaging, males and females on average show
different patterns while performing empathizing or systemizing tasks. But both
mothers and fathers of children with autism show strong male patterns of brain
activity.
-
Fourth, both mothers and fathers of
children with autism score above average on a questionnaire that measures how
many autistic traits an individual has. These results suggest a genetic cause of
autism, with both parents contributing genes that ultimately relate to a similar
kind of mind: one with an affinity for thinking systematically.
-
Much work remains to be done to test Cohen's
theory, and there will be those, who for their own reasons, find it unpalatable.
But you have to admit it is intriguing. In the short term, for all you
engineering-type gentlemen (or ladies, for that matter): Date someone
cuddly.
|
