OmegaMom

Remember the judge who sued the dry-cleaner for some $60 million because his pants were ruined?  Thankfully, the end result was that it was ruled in the defendant’s favor.  I had thought that Judge GimmeMoney had faded into the background (until he found a new victim), but it turns out he’s appealing the result.  Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes hard enough that they might fall out of her head.

I follow a science blogger named Pharyngula (PZ Myers, a professor of developmental biology at the University of Minnesota in Morris).  Myers reminds me in many ways of my fuddy-duddy brother.  He’s cranky, funny, interesting, writes about developmental biology and evolution, and carries on a long-standing (rather heavy-handed) harangue against organized religion of any kind.

A while back, in 2004, he wrote a review of a book called Lifecode, whose author, Stuart Pivar, claims that all embryos begin their organization based on spherical topology, and it’s the same process for every critter alive. 

PZ wrote a review of the original book (reposted in July). 

This year, Pivar revised his book and a new edition was published.  PZ wrote a couple of new reviews which were pretty scathing.

Pivar is now suing PZ Myers and Seed Magazine for $15 million for libel for, among other things, calling him a “classic crackpot”.  Luckily, almost all the legal commenters on the various posts scattered around the blogosphere related to this case have said that the case has no grounds and will likely be tossed out of court.

O Brave New World, that has such creatures in it!

(I have been quite remiss about responding to comments lately; I blame both undue stress and lack of broadband.  And then I hang my head in shame.  I do, I do like comments, and I will [I will!] respond more!  Promise!)

I have previously bemoaned the gender-stereotype-reinforcing nature of the U.S.A.’s commercial giants, who ensure that all girls’ toys and clothes are varying shades of purple and pink, and boys’ toys are primary colors and their clothes are earth tones.

Today comes reportage of a study that proclaims that women just durn naturally prefer pink.  It’s inherent.  It’s in the genes, gals!  It’s an evolutionary advantage–female gatherers being able to hone in on ripe fruits, etc.

Boy howdy!  How’d they figger that one out?

Well, let’s see.  They flashed 1000 different colored rectangles on a screen and had the men and women being studied pick (quickly) the ones they preferred.

Does this strike anyone else as…um…well, not proving the idea that the preference is inherently gender-linked?

I mean…how’d they ensure that all the men and women studied haven’t been previously influenced by all the gender-specific coloring that they’re exposed to from day one for the past 30 or 40 years?  (It’s either Granny J or Great-Grandma who says that, in her day, the preferred “girly” color was powder blue.)

Really.  It’s a serious question.  The only way I can figure that they would be able to really determine this is if they grabbed men and women from the deepest, darkest, most isolated depths of the Amazon jungle for their experiment.  Any grown man or woman in the U.S. or England or other westernized country has been bombarded with culturally determined “right” colors for their sex from the day they were born, via TV ads, newspaper ads, clothing and toy selections in stores, etc.

You can, I guess, test babies’ preferences by that old standard, “which one does the baby pay more attention to?”, like they do with questions of whether babies prefer their parents’ faces to strangers’ faces, or the scents of familiar people versus strangers.

But to claim that testing adults who have been conditioned from birth to gravitate towards certain color schemes will prove that this tendency is inherent is just a bunch of hooey in OmegaMom’s well-considered and expert opinion.