Zo ja, is het dan niet hoog tijd om deze dinosaurus eindelijk te begraven? Wir lernen die Wissenschaftler kennen, die mit ansteckender Begeisterung diese winzigen Begleiter erforschen — sehr zu unserem Nutzen. Der Autor beschreibt in seinem Buch nicht nur die Trends, sondern auch die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen sowie die Herausforderungen, die an die Unternehmen und die Mitarbeiter gestellt werden. Denn diese Zeit hat einige der Trends beschleunigt.
Katja Kurz und Jeannette Hagen. Fascinating, vital, unputdownable. A brave and significant book. The biological source of masculinity has inspired fascination, investigation and controversy since antiquity.
From the eunuchs in the royal courts of ancient China to the booming market for 'elixirs' of youth in nineteenth-century Europe, humans have been obsessed with identifying and manipulating what we now know as testosterone.
And the trend shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to this history and the methods of modern science, today we have a rich body of research about testosterone's effects in both men and women. The science is clear: testosterone is a major, invisible player in our relationships, sex lives, athletic abilities, childhood play, gender transitions, parenting roles, violent crime, and so much more.
But there is still a lot of pushback to the idea that it does, in fact, contribute to sex differences and significantly influence behaviour. We could remake ourselves.
In addition to being hopeful, Fine is also angry. We should all be angry. Testosterone Rex is a debunking rumble that ought to inspire a roar. But, Fine a This is a book that argues against the traditionalist idea that basic biology means men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and never the twain shall meet.
If I sound a little cynical, it's because I went into this book hoping that it would convince me that gender differences have nothing to do with biology and that social inequities can all be removed by social means. I would love to believe this is the case, but I don't think this will be the book to put my niggling doubts to rest.
So although I really enjoyed reading it — Cordelia Fine writes brilliantly, and made me laugh out loud several times — I am struggling with how good her arguments really were. Most of the problems seemed to come under the two headings of straw-manning and begging the question. She argues convincingly!
This turns out to be basically what Fine thinks as well, so I was left wondering why it was all being presented as such an iconoclastic approach. So far so nit-picky, but things get weirder.
Isn't this the exact opposite of her thesis? It's not the only time her arguments seem to work against her conclusions. Looking into a study on financial risk-taking, which tested betting inclinations among two tribal groups in Asia, she summarises the results: Although in both societies the females bet less than the men, the gap was considerably smaller in the matrilineal Mosuo.
OK…so in other words, even in a matrilineal society , women are less inclined to financial risk than men? Again, this seems to say the opposite of what she wants it to say. OK…so in other words, neuroscientists can tell your sex from your brain!?
That's actually news to me! This was one of those times — and there were several in the book — where I somehow came away from Fine's arguments with more credence in the opposing view than I had had going in. There is something very strange going on here; it's like her tone is saying one thing, but her actual words are saying something different.
Perhaps even more problematic are those occasions where, from my point of view, it seemed that she was missing the argument altogether. The most glaring of these came early in the book when she discussed the classic Clark and Hatfield study of , in which women solicited a one-night stand from male strangers and men solicited a one-night stand from female strangers on a college campus. Men turned down about a third of their offers, and women turned down percent of theirs.
Fine's concern, when assessing these results, is to downplay any suggestion that the disparity comes from hormonal or biological first causes. And…that's it. That's the full extent of her dismissal. I read this bit almost open-mouthed. Surely the whole point is — WHY are men more likely than women to be murderers or rapists? Isn't that violence exactly the issue that a book about testosterone should be trying to grapple with? Far from killing off the biological argument, she's just kicking the can further down the road.
It's frustrating, because in cultures with a lot of violence and cultures with very little violence, we see the same pattern: proportionally, across space, culture and time, ninety-nine percent of it involves men being violent to other men.
Not only does this book fail to explain this, it fails even to address it. Whether or not testosterone itself has any responsibility is an open question I conclude, after finishing this book. Fine thinks social factors are much more important, which perhaps they are, although, again, many of the studies she cites seem to say the opposite. I must admit, living as I now do in the countryside, it's hard for me to square her approach with such practicalities as the way farmers routinely castrate cattle and pigs to control docility.
If gendered behaviour like aggression and competitiveness were social constructs, this would seem to be unnecessary. I note here that one usual objection to evo-psych theories — i. Social structures matter, and we can make real differences in equality by challenging them.
At this juncture, her response shifts to question — and perhaps not without reason — the motivations of those who insist on stressing this point. I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn't shy away from naming supposedly politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities.
But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and policing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they're less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive. I think she makes this point very well and it has to be taken seriously.
Arguments about biological differences cannot be allowed to shade into excuses for fixable inequality or shitty behaviour. And we know that gender essentialism is bad for society — people who believe in it are more likely to enforce gender stereotypes, be lenient on sex crimes, and a raft of other depressing things. The problem is, none of that means they're wrong, and what I wanted from this book was a reason to tell these people that they are unequivocally wrong.
The paragraph above is not a scientific argument at all, it's special pleading. This book does not give you that authority. What it does give you, buttressed by a lot of speculation and well-deployed sarcasm, is a nuanced version of the argument that both nature and nurture have a part to play. Perhaps this is news to some hardline bio-essentialists, but on the whole it seems — dare I say it — a little bland for someone presenting themselves as slaying the T-rex of received opinion.
Far from T-rex going extinct, on the evidence of this book it's just…evolved into some kind of dispiriting bird. But it doesn't seem like much of a revolutionary idea, either. View all 24 comments. Mar 14, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it it was amazing Shelves: evolution , science , gender.
This book won an award for the best science book of Delusions of Gender is a book that considers how differences in male and female brains help to explain the all too obvious differences between the sexes. What that book does for the brain, this one does for hormones. And I really would prefer it if this book never needed to be written — you see, it would be great to believe that science is the kind of hypothesis testing, self-regulating, rational, show-me-the-evidence type of endeavour that it loves to claim itself to be.
And common-sense says that the sexes are a bit like day and night, yin and yang, or an action movie vs a romantic comedy. She spends much of the book showing that this is only true if we define male risk taking in ways that seem edger than the risks that women take — but that really, in many contexts women are equal to, if not greater risk takers, than men.
When I rule the world both of her books on gender will be made compulsory reading. View all 22 comments. This has really inspired me to stop reading popular science books by random people I find under the "feminism" tag on Goodreads. How does she know?? There's no study; that's just an opinion. Once she cited a study showing that one time men and women did This has really inspired me to stop reading popular science books by random people I find under the "feminism" tag on Goodreads.
Once she cited a study showing that one time men and women did equally well on a math test. This seems obviously cherry-picky; anyone can look up statistics showing at the highest level of the math SATs boys outnumber girls ; this effect is still persistent across higher-level math in different countries. View all 18 comments. Lehman Sisters hypothesis and risk considerations are particularly well-thought out. Q: A pair of testicles hanging on a key ring is bound to capture attention; to mesmerize.
But what they would really mean is that in some important way your identity has been defined. Who you are is someone with a testicle key ring. Seriously, her son's a awesomely chill kid. Q: How could it be sexist to merely report the objective conclusions of science? In fact, are there any sexists these days? Or are there just people who recognize that our brains and natures have been shaped by evolutionary pressures responsive only to reproductive success in our ancestral past, with no concern for the future consequences for the representation of women in Formula 1 world championships, or on corporate boards?
Cahill, likewise, suggests that this compounding is akin to the way that many small differences between a Volvo and a Corvette—a little difference in the brakes here, a modest dissimilarity in the pistons there, and so on—add up to very different kinds of car. Perhaps not coincidentally, one is a nice, safe family vehicle with plenty of room in the trunk for groceries; the other is designed to offer power and status. Ah, sorry.
Nadia… Nadia! That boy over there playing with his half-brother. Almost certainly. Since this justly famous scientific revelation, researchers have come up with all manner of ingenious suggestions as to the advantages female animals might gain from multiple mates.
Proposed gains of female promiscuity include genetic benefits, healthier offspring, and the opportunity to set up sperm competitions that weed out inferior specimens. Despite apparently having nothing more demanding to do all day than resemble a stick, they only rouse themselves to take up this mating opportunity 30—40 per cent of the time.
But whether he is the human biological equivalent of the well-antlered stag, his spotless luxury car the counterpart of the shimmering, biologically extravagant tail of the peacock—that is another matter altogether. Consider, Einon posits, a woman who on average has sex once a week for thirty years. Now suppose she bears a generous brood of nine children. As you can easily calculate for yourself, on average she will have sex times per child. First, the man has to find a fertile woman.
For the benefit of younger readers, it may be worth pointing out that throughout most of human evolution the Tinder app was not available to facilitate this. Nor, as observed in the previous chapter, was there likely to have been a limitless supply of fertile female vessels for men to access. In historical and traditional societies, perhaps as many as 80—90 per cent of women of reproductive age at any one time would be pregnant, or temporarily infertile because they were breast-feeding, Einon suggests.
Of the remaining women, some of course would already be in a relationship, making sexual relations at the very least less probable and possibly more fraught with difficulties. Next, he has to prevail in the intense competition created by all the other men who are also hoping for casual sex with a fertile woman, and successfully negotiate sex with her.
Say that takes a day. In order to reach his target of one hundred women per annum, our man then has just two to three days to successfully repeat the exercise, ninety-nine more times, from an ever-decreasing pool of women. All this, mind you, while also maintaining the status and material resources he needs to remain competitive as a desirable sexual partner. For healthy couples, the probability of a woman becoming pregnant from a single randomly timed act of intercourse is about 3 per cent, ranging depending on the time of the month , from a low of 0 to a high of nearly 9 per cent.
On average, then, a year of competitive courtship would result in only about three of the one hundred women becoming pregnant. Although a man could increase his chances of conception by having sex with the same woman repeatedly, this would of course disrupt his very tight schedule. In these unrealistically ideal conditions, a man who sets himself the annual project of producing one hundred children from one hundred one-night stands has a chance of success of about 0. And they say feminists are wishful thinkers.
This is logically cally impossible, since heterosexual coitus requires the presence of both a woman and a man. His father protested strongly against me sleeping in the same bedroom as his son, given our unmarried state. His wife listened respectfully, then suggested that if this was how he felt he had better get the ladder, climb up to the attic, find the camp bed, carry it down the ladder, clean it off, mend the wobbly leg, set it up in the study, find some bed linen and make it up for me.
At the core of this inequality are the whisperings of evolution. I know it may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that spending eighty hours a week in a science lab becoming increasingly pale and weedy, and possibly developing rickets, will make you more attractive to scores of young, beautiful, fertile women, but trust me on this.
Instead, to women, evolution is whispering Are you sure all this hard work is worth it? Oh, and maybe brush your hair a little? This absence of male enthusiasm for painful and expensive physical enhancements points to the possibility that deficiencies in reproductive potential can be, and are, forgivingly overlooked when it comes to sexual attraction.
And they are also traits that have little to do with tax brackets, luxury European cars, or corner offices. They are dependability, emotional stability, a pleasing personality, and love. First, they identified around ten of the largest sex differences in each sample.
Even this preliminary exercise challenged popular understanding in a couple of ways. First of all, contrary to the view that the brains of men and women are strikingly different, none of these differences were particularly substantial.
Other animals are fascinating, to be sure. Many are highly flexible and adaptable. Researchers drew the same conclusion a few years later in a study that deliberately recruited people on the basis of their affinity to a particular kind of risk: like skydivers, smokers, casino gamblers, and members of stock-trading clubs.
So gamblers, say, unsurprisingly stood out as the most risk taking when it came to questions about betting. But they were no more risk taking than the other groups, including even a group of health-risk-averse gym members, when it came to questions about recreational or investment risks.
The pure, unadulterated daredevil no doubt exists, but such individuals are statistical exceptions to the general rule that people are fascinatingly idiosyncratic and multifaceted when it comes to risk. The study of the skydivers, gamblers, smokers, and stock traders came to a similar conclusion.
Rather, they perceived greater benefits in their particular pocket of risk taking, and this explained why they took risks that others avoided, and took one kind of risk rather than another. Chinese women were every bit as risk taking as the men when unobserved. But in line with gender norms, men increased their risk taking when supposedly observed by an attractive other-sex observer, while women decreased it. Would you sign this copy of your book that I carry around with me?
This book is a mostly a critical review of the research and meta surveys into some issue of gender such as male and female reproductive strategies, but the over arching theme is the role of testosterone.
Fine takes issue with and points out empirical problems in assuming that testosterone in male bodies is the cause of social differences between men and women - in some species higher levels of testosterone are in fact the consequence of more aggressive or dominant behaviours, and not there cause This book is a mostly a critical review of the research and meta surveys into some issue of gender such as male and female reproductive strategies, but the over arching theme is the role of testosterone.
Fine takes issue with and points out empirical problems in assuming that testosterone in male bodies is the cause of social differences between men and women - in some species higher levels of testosterone are in fact the consequence of more aggressive or dominant behaviours, and not there cause as can be demonstrated through experimentation.
Fine is targeting two related ideas in this book, firstly that there is an observable physiological basis for the social differences between men and women, and secondly the habit of attributing social problems or social ideals to physical differences. She takes us light-heartedly through a review of many studies and much research, she points out poorly designed experiments, poorly analysed data sets, cognitive biases, and other fun, not least of which are those experiments used to support claims of profound differences between men and women which where actually only carried out on Americans, and when repeated in other countries throw up very different results.
Fine's conclusion is that social differences in gender have social causes, while there are, as you may have noticed, differences between men and women, links proposed from those to behavioural differences are tenuous and tendentious - it is a field apparently still available and open to future study.
I found the book though a bit of a struggle to read, Fine's style was a bit too bright and breezy for my glum and overcast nature. For the reader who is feeling oppressed by arguments that gender based inequality in their society is natural and inevitable because of human physiology, evolution, psychology, or some combination of any of these, then this may well be worth a read.
Weaving together interlinked claims about evolution, brains, hormones, and behavior, it offers a neat and compelling account of our Wouldn't it make sense if testosterone This is Testosterone Rex : that familiar, pervasive and powerful story of sex and society.
As Cordelia Fine explains in her controversial but enlightening book, Testosterone Rex , the role of testosterone in The influence of testosterone Much of the field of research in sexed brain differences between males and females has Dr Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Rex In it, Fine demonstrates that the evidence for aggression, including sexual aggression, risk taking and violence being caused by testosterone is more tenuous than we realise.
Dowse, Sara. Psychological Bulletin : —, Fine, C. Her book entitled ' Testosterone Rex ' lists the many reasons that people have for wanting equality of the sexes but also reminds us of a stubbornly resistant element of society who think that sex equality is a lovely idea in principle, Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour.
Nature, , — Fine, C. Testosterone rex : myths of sex, science, and society. Semenya to be not a woman, the authorities in this case the IAAF looked at Semenya's testosterone levels. Skip to content. According to this false-yet-familiar story, the divisions between men and women are in nature alone and not part of culture.
Drawing on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy, Testosterone Rex disproves this ingrained myth and calls for a more equal society based on both sexes' full human potential.
We should all be angry. Testosterone Rexis a debunking rumble that ought to inspire a roar. Fixed in an ancestral past that rewarded competitive men and caring women, these differences are supposedly re-created in each generation by sex hormones and male and female brains.
Testosterone, so we're told, is the very essence of masculinity, and biological sex is a fundamental force in our development. Not so, says psychologist Cordelia Fine, who shows, with wit and panache, that sex doesn't create male and female natures. Instead, sex, hormones, culture and evolution work together in ways that make past and present gender dynamics only a serving suggestion for the future - not a recipe.
Testosterone Rexbrings together evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience and social history to move beyond old 'nature versus nurture' debates, and to explain why it's time to unmake the tyrannical myth of Testosterone Rex. For fans of Fine - whose Delusions of Gender'could have far-reaching consequences as significant as The Female Eunuch' Viv Groskop, Guardian - and thousands of new readers, this is an upbeat, timely and important contribution to the debate about gender in society.
Testosterone Rex is a debunking rumble that ought to inspire a roar. Instead, sex, hormones, culture and evolution work together in ways that make past and present gender dynamics only a serving suggestion for the future — not a recipe. Fascinating, vital, unputdownable.
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