30/1/02

BBC Injects Political Correctness
 Even Into Science Programmes

You just cannot get away from it, can you? It's like having to live in a nightmare world wherein, it seems, even those who are ostensibly intelligent and honest are debilitated by some frightening mystery virus which completely shatters their ability to link one thought with another.

In the third part of an excellent science series called "How To Build A Human" last Sunday, the BBC again ruined much of its credibility by injecting more man-hating politically-correct mumbo jumbo into the narrative via the mouths of the scientific 'experts' themselves.

Here is what we had.

1. A brain-scanning experiment was performed which showed that when men were trying to interpret the emotions of people from photographs, more areas of their brains were active than was the case with women.

The professor concluded that this showed that men required 'more effort' (more of the brain) to do the task than did women, because men, he argued, found it much harder to interpret emotions.

Oh really?

Well. As most of my readers will already know, when men and women process LANGUAGE, it is women, not men, who have more regions of their brains activated. 

And from this, it is NOT usually concluded that women require more effort to cope with language than do men. On the contrary, it is argued that this (OF COURSE) is further evidence of their innate superiority with language.

In other words, if men's brains are more active than women's for the task in question, then this is touted as evidence that the task is more difficult for men. The men just cannot do the task as well as can the women. 

But if women's brains are more active than men's for the task in question, then this is further evidence of women's superiority!

Men are put down whatever the findings.

Men are put down whatever the findings.

In this particular case, they are portrayed as emotional retards who have to get all their neurons buzzing in order to figure out what emotions are being expressed in a photograph.

But, remember, this is the BBC. 

It's pathetic.

2. Another professor gleefully pointed out that for thousands of years societies were wrong to consider men to be more important than women, and that the work of biologists now showed that women have always been more important than men.

What a load of hooey!

I would have choked on my tea if I had been drinking any.

For many thousands of years men were very definitely more important to their society's well-being, if only for the reason that if they were not treated as such ...

a. ... they would have hastened off to join a society that did see them to be more important, or they would have happily invited another society to take over their own.

or 

b ... their own society would have been wiped out by any neighbouring society which treated its men more wisely.

The only way of protecting against your own society being beaten to the ground was to ensure that your own men actually wanted to protect it.

If they didn't want to protect their own society, then their own society was doomed.

And the same probably remains true today.

The professor's main reason for proclaiming that women were more important than men was the usual one - that a single man can impregnate many women, who can then bear all the children. 

But the other way round doesn't work.

Men are therefore much more expendable in the sense that, reproductively speaking, one man can do the job of many.

But of what value was this even 2,000 years ago!?

Can you imagine an ancient society surviving a takeover from its neighbours when it had hardly any men in its ranks? - while its neighbours had huge armies of them?

Any society that lost its men LOST OUT. 

It was wiped out.

And so our professor is making precious little sense.

In fact, he is talking politically-correct hogwash.

Yes, when it comes SOLELY to reproduction, and when there is a demand to increase the NUMBER of offspring in a completely UNREAL world, a single man can impregnate thousands of women. As such, the other men are redundant.

those thousands of surplus women would soon have been carried off and plundered by any other men who wanted them

In the REAL world, however, those thousands of surplus women would soon have been carried off and plundered by any other men who wanted them, or, more likely, they would have scooted off all by themselves in the hope of finding some decent men to look after them - rich ones, preferably.

Furthermore, of course, if it was the case that men were expendable and less important than women, then Nature would not have wasted her precious time creating so many of them. 

Indeed, societies wherein more females than males were born would have evolved and taken over the planet - if such was true.

And one would have thought that an 'expert' in biology might have noticed this.

Now, of course, in a very limited sense, men were, indeed, 'expendable'. For example, zillions of them could be sent off to die in various battles while the men who stayed back home impregnated their womenfolk when no-one was looking.

But those men on the battlefield were only 'expendable' in the sense that they lost their lives for a purpose. Their individual lives were sacrificed for the 'benefit' of their societies - the 'benefit' usually being power.

In other words, the fact that the lives of individual men were more 'expendable' than the lives of individual women does not mean that 'men' - as a whole - as a gender - were less 'important' - which is what this nincompoop of a 'biologist' was suggesting.

men often contributed to the well-being of their societies by putting their lives on the line.

It just means that many men often contributed to the well-being of their societies by putting their lives on the line.

Or perhaps the professor was trying to suggest that soldiers, construction workers etc etc etc are just less important than anyone else.

And, of course, when it comes to thinking about a species as a whole, to argue that females are more important to it simply because they are the ones to bear the offspring - which is the case in all mammals - is about as daft as suggesting that the most important part of a computer system is the wire to the socket because it carries the electric current.

Yes, offspring and wires are very important indeed, but only a simpleton would say that these are the most important components when it comes to understanding what makes humans - or computers - 'successful' compared to other evolving entities that might be competing with them.

gay men and women must be the most useless groups of all,

Finally, I just cannot resist making the point that if the importance of a group of people to their own group is to be assessed simply on the basis of how fruitful are their reproductive efforts - as per the politically-corrected views promoted by the BBC and its little scientist friends - then, presumably, gay men and lesbian women must be the most useless groups of all, while heterosexual male rapists and philanderers are the tops!

So, BBC, stick that in your politically-corrected pipe and smoke it!

3. The programme also informed its viewers that humans were basically female - and that the male gender was a "mere modification" of the female form. Needless to say, the clear implication was that males are, somehow, a corrupted and inferior version of the female form.

But one could also argue that women are just modified chimpanzees, which are modified mammals, which are modified fish ....

And by looking at matters in this way, the male gender - modified from the female gender - then sits at the very top of the tree.

The ultimate in modification!

But the biologist did not notice this.

Indeed, to suggest that a male is merely a modified female is equivalent to suggesting that the magnificent Taj Mahal in India is merely a modified building.

The biological reality seems to be that the 'default' position for the human body is that of the female form. The male form is the female body with extra bells and whistles. Some of these are enhancements, and some are the reverse.

But, following the same lines of woolly thinking exhibited by the 'professor' in computer terms, it would be just as valid to claim that women are more like the humble version of Windows called 3.1, whereas men are more like the sophisticated Windows XP that was derived from it.

 it is the male gender mostly that leads, directs, controls, creates, invents, and, indeed, shapes the society

Also, of course, with regard to the relative importance of males and females insofar as 'society' is concerned, it must be obvious even to biologists that both historically and in the present day, it is the male gender mostly that leads, directs, controls, creates, invents, and, indeed, shapes the society in which its people live, and it is also mostly the male gender that is likely to damage or destroy it.

In either case, therefore, when it comes to the relative 'importance' of the genders in the past, the notion that women were more important than men is risible; because it is the men who have had the greater influence on how society will be.

By force, if necessary.

Indeed, there has never been a successful society or civilisation wherein the men have not been dominant over their women.

Not even one!

(Besides which, of course, how can women possibly have been 'oppressed' for thousands of years and yet still have been more 'important' than men, eh?)

Finally, since I am feeling mischievous, it is an evolutionary principle that the more intelligent is an animal, the longer does it seem to remain in an immature state. In the human case, males take longer to reach maturity than do females, and so it seems quite likely that human males are more intelligent than their females. (And, indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that this most intriguing possibility is, in fact, the case; e.g. see Men are More Intelligent than Women?)

Of further interest ...

It was also shown in the programme that the comparative lengths of a person's ring and index fingers gives an indication of how much testosterone and oestrogen were present at various foetal stages in their development. (These two hormones promote maleness and femaleness respectively.)

The longer is the ring finger compared to the index finger, then the more was the foetus exposed to male-promoting testosterone effects. Conversely, the shorter is the ring finger compared to the index finger, the greater were the effects of oestrogen.

Longer ring finger = Man. 

Longer index finger = Woman.

Macho men should have much longer ring fingers compared to their index fingers. Feminine women should have the reverse.

In well-balanced folk - such as my good self - the two are found to be very similar in length.

On a TV program recently, a group of six male athletes (runners) were asked to run a race of about 800m. Prior to the race, a scientist measured their finger lengths to the nearest mm. This was the only information that he had about the athletes. He then predicted the order in which the athletes would finish the race.

His prediction can be portrayed as follows ...

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

And the actual outcome of the race was ...

1, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6 

Not bad, eh?