Saturday, January 21, 2006
GIRL MONKEYS KNOW THAT DOLLS ARE BETTER THAN CARS
WASHINGTON — Just like human boys and girls, male monkeys like to play with toy cars while female monkeys prefer dolls, a research project has shown.
This intriguing discovery is one of many signs of deep-rooted behavioral differences between the sexes that scientists are exploring with the latest tools of genetics and neuroscience.
Researchers report significant differences in the structure and functioning of male and female brains — in humans and in animals — that show up in different behaviors.
The differences apparently date far back in evolutionary history to the time before humans and monkeys separated from their common ancestor some 25 million years ago, according to Gerianne Alexander, a psychologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the monkey experiment.
Continue reading...
It's interesting, but I'm having a hard time understanding why a monkey would prefer a doll to a stuffed dog, given the smooth surface of a doll compared to the furry surface of the dog. If the object the female monkeys took to was a stuffed monkey, that would be different. But mostly what I get from this is that there must have been some sort of bias on the part of the researchers, or they completely missed some other important manifestation. Either that, or we had better avoid the money cages when we take our daughters to the zoo.
Thanks to a reader for the article.
