Don’t burn me at the stake. I have a simple question.
My nephew just turned 2 years old. For his birthday, many of us gave him little cars. Because, we knew, this was precisely what would please him. Said nephew loves small cars, he can’t go more than two minutes without asking for one. Confiscating it would be pure provocation.
A few months ago I finished the trial The human bugby neuroscientist Sébastien Bohler. A work which, essentially, shows that the human brain, inherited from evolution, pushes us to adopt certain self-destructive behaviors.
Bohler, through the prism of evolution and biology, also addresses behavioral differences between the two sexes.
For example, the French author explains that, evolutionarily speaking, men tend to adopt a reproductive strategy that favors a greater number of sexual partners since they want to maximize the transmission of their genes.
Women would have less motivation to adopt dominant behaviors, because these do not necessarily offer immediate reproductive benefits. On the contrary, behavior focused on care and support would be more beneficial for the success of their offspring.
Bohler points out, however, that these generalizations do not apply to all individuals and that sociocultural factors play a crucial role in how each individual behaves.
But still. If we are to believe his (scientific) thesis, the behavioral differences between men and women would have, among other things, a biological cause. Not everything would therefore be a social construction.
Is it just a coincidence that my nephew likes small cars, like so many other little boys his age? Have we — through our way of speaking to him and the way his parents raised him — indicated to him that it is more appropriate for a little boy to like small cars? Or was he born with a propensity to like small cars?
Could it be that biology influences behavioral differences between men and women, but that these same differences are exacerbated by environmental, social and cultural factors? Can we admit that these differences arise from both essentialism and social constructivism? I’m not sure, but, humbly, it seems to me so.