| I had mixed feelings about _The_Human_Animal_ show. on one hand
I appreciated seeing it on prime-time TV introduced by a personality
sure to draw a large audience (I wonder if it actually did though).
On the other hand, most of the footage they used I had seen before
on PBS, mostly Nova, where they had gone into greater depth.
The "Nature/Nurture" segment, however, was done well.
The last segment "The Family" bothered me, not because of the tragedies
portrayed, but because I thought it just didn't belong. It wasn't
about "the human animal" and it's need for family and the forms
the family has assumed over the millenia, etc. It didn't
examine "the family", it examined three families in deep trouble.
The stories were important, and tragic, and it is necessary to face
these problems, but it just didn't fit in with the rest of the series.
It would have been better to have a seperate series on the family,
traditional families, non-traditional, families in crisis, hope
for the future.
I'm sure to get in trouble for this one.
sm
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| I've seen the "Nature/Nurture" segment, but I haven't seen
the last two (regarding sex differences and the family, I
believe - they're waiting for me on my future-sister-in-law's
video tape). I was not impressed.
The most well-produced part seemed to be that guy who was
a risk-taker. They scanned his brain and found it low in supply
of a certain substance, and that made him restless. Then they
made the assumption that he was born that way.
That seems to be the big thing with findings made by neuro-
physiological psychologists that make their way into the media:
the assumption that a biological state is inherent.
I was also unimpressed with the segment on aggression,
which touched on nature/nurture issues and made the same errors.
<_Jym_>
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| Nature vs. nurture is one of the 'hot' topics in physchology. The
question was given new impetus at the completion of the now world
famous studies of twins reared apart. The study was completed about
5 or so years ago and created shock waves throughout the psychology-
sociology worlds. Here they finally had two genetically identical
beings raised in different sociological circumstances. The upshot
is that they found much more was attributed to nature than they
had imagined. Twins reared apart, never having met one another,
had carved out amazingly similar lives for themselves! And come
to think of it, I think NOVA did a story based on this research.
This doesn't clearly answer the question of whether or not women
are "better at verbal skills, terrible at math, underachievers,
whatever", because they are women or because they are raised to be,
but I'm sure some PhD candidate out there is trying to find identical
twin women, one of whom was raised traditionally, (read sexist),
and one of whom was not. I personally would LOVE to see the results
of that study because it would put a lot of our questions to rest.
I believe that raising any segment of society to subjugate itself,
defer and believe that another class is "better" is going to wind
up passive, reactive and certainly without the self confidence to
make the same kinds of gains as the "priviledged" class.
Sandy
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