Our social structural theory of fame departs from prior work on fame which argues that fame is driven by creativity. (Banerjee & Ingram)
§.00 Fame and creativity have a instinctive association. It is thought that, for artists, as a general rule, the more creative they are, the more famous they will be. Evidence, however, does not bare this preconception out.
§.01 In the lengthy, richly detailed 2018 paper, Fame as an Illusion of Creativity: Evidence from the Pioneers of Abstract Art, researchers Banerjee & Ingram delve into the correlation between fame (large scale public attention) and creativity by studying the social networks of 90 artists from Europe and the US during the 20th Century (1910-1925) whose work radically departed from the norms of representational art of the time. The researchers used two measures for creativity: an expert measure of an artist’s creativity and a computational measure of an artist’s novelty. They found that the social networks of the artists in question played a significantly larger role than their creativity (as measured by the two metrics listed above) and no statistical linkage for positive correlation between creativity and fame.
Surprisingly given previous theory, we do not find statistical support for a positive
relationship between an artist’s creativity and fame. (Banerjee & Ingram, Fame as an Illusion of Creativity, p.6)
§.02 Rather than creativity, Banerjee and Ingram find that identity is the crucial determining factor for domain-transcendent success.
-our evidence reveals identity as the link between peer network and fame. (Banerjee & Ingram, p. 6)
§.03 Identity here being, not simply one’s self-conception, but one’s public image (whether authentic or inauthentic).
In effect, the outsider identity of such [aforementioned artistic] producers might contribute to others’ perception of them as rebels who are authentically creative. Audiences may reject or embrace such a challenging creative identity, but it is more likely to garner attention. (Banerjee & Ingram, p. 11)
§.04 In summation, networking and identity (branding) are more important to fame in the arts than creativity. In conclusion, it is important to note that personal fame is extremely tenuous; consider how many past social media stars are now completely forgotten. This need not be so for an artist’s works, which can endure long after their creator has passed into eternal slumber. For this reason, it is unwise for any serious artist whose goal is the upward development of his or her craft to chiefly prize fame, for in doing so, one will have, of necessity, deprioritized one’s art—when the muse is eschewed for the socialite, the fires of creation abate.
Mark B. Turner & Gilles Fauconnier. (1999) A Mechanism of Creativity. Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 397-418, Fall 1999. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1416435
Mitali Banerjee & Paul Ingram. (2018) Fame as an Illusion of Creativity: Evidence from the Pioneers of Abstract Art. HEC Paris Research Paper No. SPE-2018-1305; Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 18-74. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3258318 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3258318
Gustav Jönsson’s, High Theory and Low Seriousness (2019) — a brisk and biting critique of contemporary literary theory published via Quillette — opens with an assault upon the practice of ‘deep reading‘ (analytically interrogating a text to find overarching, underlying or purposefully or accidentally embedded meanings which may not necessarily be explicit).
Sixty years ago today, just as Henderson the Rain King was going to print, Saul Bellow penned an article for the New York Times in which he warned against the perils of deep reading. Paying too close attention to hidden meanings and obscure symbols takes all the fun from reading, he wrote. The serious reader spends an inordinate amount of energy trying to find profound representations in the most trivial of details. “A travel folder signifies Death. Coal holes represent the Underworld. Soda crackers are the Host. Three bottles of beer are—it’s obvious.” (Jönsson)
§00. Mr. Jönsson’s argument — that paying too much attention to the meaning of a text is detrimental to the experience of reading itself — whilst superficially compelling, is mistaken, as the problem in the scenario he lays out is engendered not through paying too much attention to obscure or arcane symbols, suggestions or descriptions, but rather, through possessing too little in the way of reliable heuristics for explicating them. Further, to say that plying attention “too close” to what is being said in a given text should be avoided configures a dictum that can lead to taking unseriousness very seriously (this is not, in any particular, Jönsson’s argument but it is easy to see how a rejection of literary-artistic “seriousness” can lead to superfluousness and anti-intellectualism, just as a fixation on “seriousness” can lead to a lock-jawed, grim-toned, pridefully humorless air).
Moreover, deep reading is such an imprecise game that numerous dull and contradictory interpretations arise from the same passage. “Are you a Marxist? Then Herman Melville’s Pequod in Moby Dick can be a factory, Ahab the manager, the crew the working class. Is your point of view religious? The Pequod sailed on Christmas morning, a floating cathedral headed south. Do you follow Freud or Jung? Then your interpretations may be rich and multitudinous.” One man, Bellow wrote, had volunteered an explanation of Moby Dick as Ahab’s mad quest to overcome his Oedipus complex by slaying the whale—the metaphorical mother of the story. (Jönsson)
§01. Here Jönsson makes an excellent point — namely, that everyone brings some kind of ideological framework to a text, and when the contents of the latter are made to fit into the pre-conceptualized mold of the former, the scryed work’s intended and real meaning is distorted, obscured, coopted or outright destroyed.
Instead of this tedious attitude to literature, Bellow urged that people take after E. M. Forster’s lightness of heart. Forster had once remarked that he felt worried by the prospect of visiting Harvard since he had heard that there were many deep and serious readers of his books there. The prospect of their close analysis made him uneasy. In short, for Bellow and Forster, the average academic critic tried to understand literature and thus ruined the enjoyment of it. (Jönsson)
§02. A reiteration of the problem covered in §00. — enjoyment is of key importance to any literary work, however, if it is made the only criterion, then art is rendered impossible, as all good and durable literary works incite in the reader, more than mere passing pleasure (ie. terror, dread, hopelessness, unease, ideas not considered which do not, in their re-consideration necessarily engender enjoyment); for the novel to be reduced to nothing more than a mild dopamine rush is to snatch it from its pedestal as the highest and most intricate form of art and transmogrify it into what functionally amounts to slowly consumed fast-food.
The low seriousness that Bellow lamented has only increased since his complaint. Today, literary scholarship is home to some of the most impenetrable gobbledygook ever put on paper. The main culprit is easily identifiable: literary theory. Literary theory, a school of criticism with little hold outside the universities, has captured whole colleges and threatens to extinguish students’ love of reading. Imagine the dejection a student about to begin university, eager to read the best that has ever been written, feels when they are told to examine some heavy tome of unreadable theory. It drains all the fun from reading. (Jönsson)
§03. The issue of the “gobbledygook” (to borrow Jönsson’s phrase) in the academies is one which has been vexing to the linguistically and narratively concerned since the shift in literary criticism turned to interpretation during the 20th Century. Tensions around the lack of unification in interpretation were further intensified by the lack of interdisciplinary discourse between the sciences and the humanities; a problem which can be ameliorated by simply fostering more interdisciplinary discourse (and crucially, debate, public and private).
Solemn readers—especially within the academy—take the view that novels must be read in the same manner that philosophers read Principia Mathematica, namely, by “interrogating” the text’s underlying logic. Theorists see themselves as philosophers of literature. For them, the task of understanding any piece of prose or poetry means developing an array of theories, much like philosophers try to explain reality through formulised conjecture. And just as philosophers have specialised lingo to aid their job, literary theorists also require their own jargon. Hence whole dictionaries now exist to help students navigate near incomprehensible passages. Opening my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism more or less at random, I’m met by the following sentences:
[The phenotext is constantly split up and divided, and is irreducible to the semiotic process that works through the genotext. The phenotext is a structure (which can be generated, in generative grammar’s sense); it obeys rules of communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee. The genotext, on the other hand, is a process; it moves through zones that have relative and transistory borders and constitutes a path that is not restricted to the two poles of univocal information between two full-fledged subjects.]
This is not an unfairly selected quote. Literary theory is often written in language that is not much more transparent than this. To offer one more example; Fredric Jameson delivers this inscrutability:
[The operational validity of semiotic analysis, and in particular of the Greimassian semiotic rectangle, derives, as was suggested there, not from its adequacy to nature or being, nor even from its capacity to map all forms of thinking or language, but rather from its vocation specifically to model ideological closure and to articulate the workings of binary oppositions, here the privileged form of what we have called the antinomy.]
Hegel hardly wrote anything more muddled. Of course, there are literary theories free of pseudo-philosophical gibberish. But some of the most prominent theorists write in this cryptic style. Martha Nussbaum (herself a lucid writer) criticised the prose of a celebrated theorist by saying that her elliptical and obscure writing “creates an aura of importance” but also “bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding.” (Jönsson)
§04. He remarks that literary theorists see themselves as philosophers of literature; the author seems to take exception to this, which is curious as developing theories (or hypotheses) concerning a given text is not itself the nexus of misinterpretation, but rather, formulating a insufficient hypothesis/theory. The author is on firm footing when he returns to his critique of obscurantist dialogue, a view with which I concur, as the purpose of all writing is to communicate (even if only to oneself at a future point in time, qua post-it notes) and if one is to communicate it were best one did so with as much clarity as possible. I would add that one should not be too quick to recoil from arcane words, firstly because lexiconic expansion should be encouraged (and it won’t be if every word one doesn’t understand is dismissed as fluff) and secondarily because specialized language is indispensable if it compresses and clarifies rather than obscures and expands. For example, instead of saying — as was quoted above — phenotext and genotext of [x], one could simply say, the what and why of [x] text (as the words are born out of genetics, phenotypic traits like eye-color are the what whilst the genotypic traits are the why of the what [ie. the reason why one has a certain eye coloration]. Thus, in this example, though phenotext and genotext aren’t necessarily bad terms, it is simpler to just say what and why (that is to say, to assume the form: x because y). However, there are many instances where new models are created wherein it becomes useful to create new words, and many more where old models are best described by compressor-words — for example: instead of saying “adhering to a conclusion regardless of the evidence once interrogated,” one can simply say “negatively postjudicial” instead (in the same way that one says “novel” in place of “a cultural artifact of bound paper or code, inscribed with a [largely] fictional narrative, typically divided by sections, called chapters, ranging from 70,000 words to 120,000[+] words). Thus, always the question: clarification or clutter?
In a sense, unintelligible writing is an insult to its own discipline because it suggests that it is not important for the reader to understand the content. Surely an author with something insightful to say would take care to make herself comprehensible. Why convey a thought at all if it need not be understood? Only those with nothing to say can afford to revel in opacity. In short, cryptic writing may create an aura of importance but in fact it advertises its own lack of value. (Jönsson)
§05. See: §04.
Badly written scholarship is a negative in itself, but worse, it is also an opportunity cost for it crowds out the reading of good criticism. A seminar spent discussing Althusser or Derrida is one which could have focused on Samuel Johnson or James Wood. Worse still, the examination of turgid theories takes time from truly excellent works of literature. I can remember attending a seminar on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando where the tutor seemed to view the book as an excuse to discuss Judith Butler’s theory of “gender performativity.” Something has surely gone wrong when literature is used to further theories rather than the other way around. (Jönsson)
§06. The notion that something has “gone wrong” if literature is utilized to further theories (or hypotheses) rather than the other way around, is understandable (given the doubtless nauseating performance described before it), but mistaken. There is no reason that literature should not further theories (or hypotheses) anymore than there is reason for the converse to be true. Again we return to heuristics, what kind of theories are being crafted from what works, how and why? Until these questions are answered, then it is simply impossible to make such a blanket statement as “never use literature to further theories.” Case in point: after the publication of Jules Verne’s lauded science fiction work, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (originally serialized in Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, 1869 to 1870), inventor Simon Lake became enamoured with underwater machinery and consequently, designed The Argonaut, the world’s first successful open-water submarine; Verne’s story Robur The Conqueror (1886) was also instrumental in inspiring the invention of the modern helicopter. A fairly ringing endorsement of the positive effects of utilizing literature for theoretical inception for practical application. Of course, the spineless, toothless, deconstructuralist, poststructural neocom, anarchist, gender theologizing so characteristic of the academies which the author decries is considerably more difficult (one is tempted to say impossible) to use for such inventive and civilizationally impactful ends.
The problem with literary theory is that it is not proper “theory.” At best, it is hypothesis without predictive value. There may be some descriptive capacity in literary “theories,” but they do not predict anything about prose or poetry. (What future literary developments can be anticipated by reference to Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence”?) In contradistinction to literary theories, scientific and philosophical theories are open to refutation. Science is tethered to reality and scientific conjectures can thus be refuted by empirical evidence. Literature—being fictional—cannot. This allows literary theorists to gain adherents whilst being free from worries of rebuttal. The consequence is an ever swelling canon of contradictory deepities. (Jönsson)
§07. Here Jönsson comes upon the crux of the issue — that of the fundamentally non-theoretical nature of what is called “theory” in contemporary academia (particularly in the humanities). That is to say, all contemporary critical “theories” are not really theories at all, but hypotheses. The linguistic distinction here is important, given the scientific background which informs nearly all of western discourse; anyone who is scientifically literate understands that a theory is privileged above a hypothesis because a theory can be rigorously, empirically, tested. After hypotheses make their way up to the classification of theories, they are considered true, though they are not necessarily true, but rather, have yet to be proven false (ie. evolution). The problem with contemporary literary hypothesis (as it should more properly be called) is that it is primarily concerned with textual interpretation as its standard of operation rather than attempting to hem into those facets of literature which may be objectively remarked upon, then formal-logically remarked upon, induced and deduced, rather than psychoanalytically conjectured or whimfully presumed.
Hate Crime Hoax: The Left’s Campaign To Sell A Fake Race War by Dr. Wilfrid Reilly (The $50,000,000 Question) is an absorbing and well-detailed account of the prevalence of American hate crime hoaxes and the glaringly negative results of their perpetration. Dr. Reilly is quite forthright in laying out the fundamental purpose and aim for penning the book at the onset, writing,
‘Hoax’ attempts to do for American race relations what Glassner did for American consumer advocacy: use hard data to penetrate an intentionally created fog of exaggerations and lies, and by doing so expose a surprisingly positive reality. To an astonishing degree, many Americans today, especially on the activist Left, seem to believe that the USA is a racist hell-hole on the brink of civil war. In the mainstream media, we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: “white privilege” and “cultural appropriation” and “subtle bigotry.” —Hoax, Reilly, p. 4.
Dr. Reilly makes good on his attempt to use hard data to penetrate the fog of exaggerations and lies surrounding his subject through the deployment of personal research, independent scholars such as Laird Wilcox, FBI and BJS statistics and a bevvy of other sources.
One of the most interesting aspects about the book is the way it unearths the reasons behind the culture of fear which permeates America as pertains to hate crimes and racial animus; in contrast to being merely a few hoaxes taken out of context, Reilly advances the notion that hate, like anything else, is highly profitable, citing, NGOs (such as the NAACP and SPLC), corporate diversity initiatives, affirmative action and minority business “set asides” as examples of a broad, series of vested interest groups who would lose out if it ever became widely known that the bulk of their narratives concerning hate and racism in the US were either completely fabricated or blown out of all reasonable proportion.
In many situations where a reasonable person might well conclude that no actual racism at all exists today – Hollywood’s Oscars ceremony? – it often proves very profitable and rewarding to invent some. —Hoax, Reilly, p. 7.
The author also makes the distinction between the harmless organizations and initiatives whose work is based off the presumption of America-as-hideous-bigoted-nation and those whose effects have a potent and overwhelmingly negative effect on the populace, in part or at large. Reilly at one point notes that one of the things he has witnessed in a personal capacity working a historically black college that most holds black students back is not some great edifice of anti-black restriction but rather, those very same black students’ belief in such a edifice, despite its nonexistence.
It is not a minor and justifiable quirk that a quarter of Black people think that their government is attempting to kill them. If this were true, it would indisputably be one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history. If this were true, I myself would currently be in armed rebellion against the United States of America. But, this is not true. — Hoax, Reilly, P. 8.
STRUCTURE
The book is structured in nine chapters; Chapter 1 deals with the outline of the book itself and the main argument. Chapter 2 deals with details the broader social context in which the arguments are being made and recounts the specifics of numerous fake hate crimes which rolls over into Chapter 3 which looks at the issue as it has developed on college campuses. Chapter 4 details what Reilly amusingly refers to as the “Klan Springs Eternal” narrative, wherein minority groups continuously push the idea that some KKK-esque group is not only out to get them, but also on the political rise. Chapter 5 takes a look at the supposed hate crime cases surrounding the election of Donald Trump and his supporters. Chapter 6 documents false reporting on fake hate crime allegations. Chapter 7 takes a look back through the annals of hate crime allegation history and what it can tell us about the present. Chapter 8, diverts from its focus on the American Left and looks to one of the fastest growing trends in fake hate crimes, white Americans falsely claiming to have been the victims of acts of racial and political discrimination or violence. The book closes out at Chapter 9, which offers up advice and policy on how to detect hate crime hoaxes and bad reporting.
METHODOLOGY
Given the topic, it is important to clearly and concisely lay out what one means by “hate crime,” this Reilly does at the beginning of the book by noting that he utilized the official FBI designation: a felony or misdemeanor offense based on or caused by bias against the victim’s “race, color, religion, national origin, gender/sex, sexual orientation (real or perceived), gender identity, or disability.” With his terms firmly laid out, Dr. Reilly then compiled a detailed list of 346 different hate crime allegations across America. After combing through the specifics of each case with a fine-toothed comb Dr. Reilly discovered that only 100 of those 346 cases were either unverified, unverifiable or outright untrue hoaxes. Somewhat later, in 2017, Dr. Reilly, compiles a base data-set of 409 different confirmed hate crime hoaxes, hyperlinks to which, the author graciously offers to any who ask for them. What is important to note is that Hoax is a principally a qualitative work and the author says quite explicitly that statistical number-crunching – while important – was not the main purpose of the book. He stresses however, that it is indisputable to know that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is very large, which can be deduced from his own data set of over 400 hate crime allegations, along with a fellow researcher’s list of 333 recent allegations, which were both coupled with Laird Wilcox’s 1994 research on around 400 allegations and then stacking those over 1100 different hate crime allegations against the FBI total of 5,850 (2015). This compilation of information is then compared with 2016 study information from the ‘Hate Response Team’ of the University of Wisconsin (LaCrosse) who discovered that 28 of 192 different reports of negative bias campus incidents either were hoaxes or had not occurred at all. Dr. Reilly then judiciously works through all the potential or outright stated motivations of the hoaxers throughout the various different cases, motivations which range from malevolence, to a desire for insurance money to wanting sympathetic attention. Reilly’s total case-study period ranged from 2013 to 2017.
STYLE & CONTENT
Outside of the subject matter and the methodology used to obtain all pertinent information, another important consideration of any book is the distillation of that information. Dr. Reilly has a unique style of voice which avoids a lot of the problems common to most contemporary academic writing, chiefly a proclivity towards colleague referentialism and in-house vocabulary (ie. anthropocene, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, Lacanian, etc) that is utterly impenetrable to the general public. Dr. Reilly’s book is straightforward and exhibits a clarity of explanation even when tackling fairly complex topics which confounding dates and expansive data-sets, which makes it not just informative, but often, highly amusing. It also bears noting that in addition to just examining in detail various different hate crime hoaxes, Dr. Reilly looks also to the broader socio-political context in which they occurred and pays specific attention for what he terms “the continuing oppression narrative,” which he believes to be a strong driver of hate crimes hoaxes among minority communities and, more recently, among white Americans as well. This is, in our estimation, one of the most interesting aspects about the book, as it isn’t just a list of different things that have happened and why – that is descriptive – it is also a highly prescriptive work, which suggests various way to better handle such situations moving forward.
There are certainly viable solutions to the problem of widespread false reporting of hate
crimes. Probably the two most critical are (1) Prosecutors must put political correctness aside and enforce the law, seeking at minimum jail sentences for anyone convicted of falsely reporting a hate offense or similar serious crime; and (2) we must all begin to challenge the narrative, pointing out as often as possible from the highest possible podiums the ACTUAL rates of real hate crime, fake hate crime, and for that matter inter-racial crime and police violence against Blacks and others. Interestingly, success in achieving Objective (2) – removing the unnecessary veil of tears created by false perceptions of oppression – would be the best possible thing for minority Americans, and the widespread proliferation of non-MSM new media may make this achievable in the near future. — Hoax, Reilly, p. 29-30.
CONCLUSION
If you are at all interested in hate crime hoaxes as well as the politics of US race relations and how they are often artificially strained, then we’d highly recommend Hate Crime Hoax.
Note: Hate Crime Hoax is currently available only for pre-order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble with a release date of Feb 26, 2019. Furthermore, we should like to thank Dr. Reilly for the advance draft-copy of his excellent book which he so graciously gifted to Logos before its public release.
.
The realization of the trend-association between The Feminine, The Masculine and The Earth1, from prehistory to (post)modernity, is important in so far as it stands in opposition to synthetic union of the two (male and female) and vice-versa, for no stable and self-improving social ordering (if that is to be the project) can be achieved in the midst of such an eventuality. Thus, a firm understanding of such concepts will allow those who are so inclined to shape the synthesis of these battered, archaic and spectral excogitations.
The Feminine and The Masculine aspects of the manifest image which we have hitherto excavated should not be thought of as mere aesthetic conventions but rather as mutably valid descriptor-encapsulations; that is to say, non-static and continuously snapshoted (and updated) groupings of normative gender behavior. Thomas Haigh’s Masculinity and Machine Man: Gender in the History of Data Processing2 here is useful for the purposes of reifying the validity of our basic conceptual structure. It is a widely held belief that women are rarely to be found within STEM3 work due to the instantiation of exclusionary norms initiated by the western (white) Christian patriarchal monastic system upon which modern universities are based4; whilst there is some truth to this, such a schema can not account in the slightest for gender parceling in science work which has risen up outside of the university system (nor can it account for any other field of work which arose outside of the monastic influence, either past or present). One science field which is not deeply tied to the university system is data processing. In Masculinity and Machine Man, Haigh illustrates the fact that women were present but scarce in STEM computing fields since the inception of the field, citing a 1960 survey conducted by Business Automation which looked at 500 data processing company’s and discovered that out of that number only two companies had female managers and only one company reported a female as a programming supervisor. Slightly under 15% of all programmers in the survey were women. Structural reasons account for the mass of male labor in the field, given that both forerunnering fields to administrative programming – punched card operation and system analysis – were staffed primarily by men; hence, a preexisting gender surplus. Yet, the fact that there are so few women in STEM cannot be adequately explained by only looking to one environmental factor in one particular field at one particular time, especially since women have, in more recent decades, proceeding the 60s, been highly encouraged and incentivized to take up positions in the sciences which were primarily the domain of men. Though the body of research on this issue is vast, much of it ignores potential or realized biological inclinations as a possible reason why, though roughly equally present in high-school science classes, women tend to pursue STEM majors in significantly lower numbers than their male counterparts5. As a general rule, women tend towards people-oriented fields whilst men tend towards mechanically-oriented fields; this is clearly a biological impulse with a number of evolutionary advantages but it is upon the issue of biology that many past and contemporary scholars falter. The aforementioned Mr. Haigh, for instance, only looks to environmental explanations (pay differentials, gender discrimination due to traditionalist attitudes, ego-spatial issues, corporate culture, etc) to account for why so few women in the 60s were to be found in elevated positions within the field of data processing.
For females on the plains of our ancestors, a proclivity towards people-orientation would be required for child-rearing and the mitigation of inter-tribal strife (proto-counseling); for males, a proclivity towards machinic invention would invariably aid the development of hunting, defense, warfare, foraging and domicile construction techniques. Then there is the matter of childbirth; women can get pregnant, men cannot, thus, in so far as a given population has sexual intermingling there will always be coupling and thus pregnancy and thus less women in the workforce, as they will need to take time off to have and care for their nestlings. Before proceeding we must deal with the false binary commonly referred to as “nature vs. nurture” when both attributions are part of a more complex whole; that is, genes express themselves differently in disparate environments6 (hence, race and along great timescales, species), but do not markedly differ along short-timescales. Consider the famous study of mono-zygotic identical twins Harold and Bernard Shapiro, both of whom went on to become the heads of major universities, Princeton for former and McGill for the latter7. Then there is the case of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren; not only did both take up careers in newspapers, both specialized as advice columnists and bore remarkably similar political opinions8. Why these cases are so compelling for the purposes of demonstrating the centrality of the composition of the organism is through the fact that mono-zygotic twins are those who developed out of a single sperm which fertilized a single egg, which means they share the same genetic makeup. We shall not belabor the point; the biological expresses itself in tandem with its environment but the biological is the locus of any and all changes which can conceivably take place, whether it is expressed or not. Those who would contest this conclusion can only do so by spuriously trancendentalizing the mind (or biology generally), by reconceptualizing the human brain and it’s production (thought) as something nebulous which is, at most, only tangential to the organ.
2Chapter for ‘Gender Codes,’ ed. Tom Misa, IEEE Press, 2010.
3STEM stands for: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmatics.
4Some worshipers of the Mother Goddess believe that neolithic societies were completely gender-egalitarian due in part or whole to the nature of their religion. Due this belief; they thus look to such societies as models for the future.
5Catherine Hill, et al.,Why So Few? Women In Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, p. xiv
6For further reading on this subject see, Garland Science, Chapter 8, Control of Gene Expression.
7Twin Studies: What Can They Tell Us About Nature & Nurture. p. 1
/////Logos Literature 