Boys and toys, Girls and dolls

I tried to grasp the world of nature, what makes us tick and what doesnt..
A research study showed that Chimp "Girls" Play With "Dolls" Too—First Wild Evidence..and Chimp "Boys" play with cars..

Over a 14 year study in Kibale National Park in Uganda, researchers wanted to see if hormones played any parts in the primate behavior..

Young females of the Kanyawara chimpanzee community in Kibale National Park, Uganda, use sticks as rudimentary dolls and care for them like the group's mother chimps tend to their real offspring. The behavior, which was very rarely observed in males, has been witnessed more than a hundred times over 14 years of study

"The stick serves no immediate function, they just carry it—sometimes for a few minutes, other times for hours," study leader Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, said via email.

"Carriers regularly take sticks into the nests they rest in during the day, something that isn't done with other objects. Individuals are [also] known to play with their sticks while in their nests."

Love of Dolls Learned or Inherited?

The research represents the first time wild animals of different sexes have been observed playing differently with objects, a practice well known among human children and previously observed in captive vervet and rhesus monkeys, Wrangham said.

For instance, young female monkeys in captivity have been known to favor dolls as playthings, while their male counterparts prefer "boy" toys like trucks.

"The fact that captive monkey males and females prefer typically masculine and feminine human toys, respectively, suggests that there is something biologically different about the sexes that makes them gravitate to different types of toys."

Source - National Geographic

Evolution is not political correct

It's racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on

To make life better, humans have to admit that everyone is not the same. There are patterns to evolution, embrace them, don't ignore them

a reply to: thinline

Your opinion of a statement?

a reply to: tikbalang

Welcome to nature. That most girls prefer dolls and most boys prefer cars is part of our natural programming, but there are variations to this programming, and just because most girls are predisposed to like dolls doesn't mean that we all must prefer the same. Life is full of variations, and we should celebrate our differences, not use them to divide us.

We put our kid down in front of the toy department and let him go where he wanted ... big surprise! He ended up spending most of his time with the toys that interested him the most. These happen to be cars and robots, now mostly robots and LEGOs. He does detour through the girls' aisles to check out shopping carts every now and then because when we shop, his daddy drives the cart.

But we did not tell him anything about what were boys' toys or what were girls' toys, and this was before he was paying real attention to colors or pictures on packaging.

He likes what he likes and it happens to line up with what most other boys like. There is no shame in that. The real shame is in denying that our genders tend to point us at certain play patterns, and I say that as a girl, now woman, whose play patterns broke the traditional mold. But I recognize that and understand that people will be outside the traditional norms too. It's OK.