nonethefewer | I am in lust with science. (Reply)

My book today is Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax. I am in ♥s with this book.

Basically, Dr. Sax discusses the differences between boys and girls, focusing on those in the birth to teen age range. What he seems to seek is to both show that raising children in a gender-neutral environment may be actively harmful to both genders and that different doesn't mean better. I really appreciate the effort he's going through to emphasize that he's looking to improve how each gender is educated, not necessarily what.

Some of these differences are deeply neat. I'd heard before of the fact that girls can generally hear better than boys, or that boys tend to be more aggressive than girls. What I hadn't heard was this:

Apparently, there are rods and cones in one layer of the retina. Rods are black/white sensitive, and cones are colour sensitive. The rods and cones talk to the ganglion cells. There are two types of those, magnocellular (large) and parvocellular (small); M cells talk to the rods, and P cells talk to the cones. M cells send their information to the region of the cerebral cortex that handles spatial relationships, and P cells send their info to the region that handles texture and colour.

Every part of that above is different in males and females. "We're not talking about small differences between the sexes, with lots of overlap. We're talking about large differences between the sexes, with no overlap at all. Every male animal had a thicker retina than any female retina, due to the males having more M cells…"

That is fascinating to me. All of this book is fascinating to me. And I haven't even gotten to his chapter of LGBTE (exceptions) kids yet. *delighted*