Yoshie posted from Ruth Hubbard:
>*Differences, be they biological or psychological, become scientifically
>interesting only when they parallel differences in power.*
This seems to me wrong. Let's say we wanted to figure out whether agriculture was brought to the British Isles by a conquering group (the migration of which we would also want to chart) or simply by cultural diffusion from the Near East. We could then attempt to study differences in DNA (usually done on the Y chromosome in such cases) before and after the development of agriculture. The interest here would be historical reconstruction, not power. Of course myths buttressed by power may be undermined in the process. But maybe not. The interest would be to use all evidence that can be obtained for the purposes of objective historical reconstruction.
>We do not frame
>scientific questions about differences between tall people and short
>people, although folk wisdom suggests there may be some. Nor do we, in
>this society, pursue differences between blue-eyed, blond people and
>dark-haired, dark-eyed people. Yet the latter were scientifically
>interesting differences under the Nazis.
Cmon we do pursue questions about group variation in suspectibility to various diseases. And why shouldn't we? Why is the study of all group variation political in the Nazi sense?
>Now, Ruth Hubbard agrees with Stephen Jay Gould, Thomas Laqueur, Will
>Roscoe, & Anne Fausto-Sterling that sex is a political interpretation of
>biological facts and that gender is an ideological expression of
>oppression. If women gain total control over our own bodies, especially
>our temporary reproductive capacity, achieve equality, and thus abolish
>gender, we'll look at the idea of "opposite sexes" as disdainfully as we
>now dismiss that of telegony.
But we'll still have to take on the 'disdainful' task of explaining why general sexual dimorphism ("opposite sexes") evolved the way it did--or why there is sex at all (a real problem for selfish gene theory). The answer to these questions may not be relevant at all to how society is or should be organized. But that doesn't make the question any less interesting. eg. the Margulis vs. the Maynard Smith debate.
Yours, Rakesh