Equality comes with a price

The fifth lecture of the Political Biology lecture series at UWO featured Professor Gillian Baker from the department of philosophy. Her topic was evolution, gender and human possibilities.
Baker began with three interesting quotes. These were about human possibilities, what humans can aspire to do and cannot, in gender and the amount of change humans allow accepting in society in order to evolve. The main message of these quotes where that humans by nature are selfish, stubborn, and malleable to a certain point. And that if we want an equal society of generosity, altruism and gender we need to be able to pay a cost and give up some of our happiness.
Baker explained standard sexual selection of males and females. Things like women tend to marry rich men because for stability to their high-cost offspring while males are promiscuous as their offspring is inexpensive. She talked about how there are lots of books on how education, career and love should be organized based on gender.
Some philosophers encourage that equality is not for us, and that being female or male is a type of genetic determination. Beaker criticized metaphors that philosophers have about how the mind works. Metaphors such as “blank slate” and “hardwired brain” are not effective, In the case of blank slate philosophers wanted to show that our minds are blanked when we are born. The things we know are acquired by learning instead of having any innate qualities. Bakers says that the blank stale is wrongly translated, it supposed to be waxed stale and when you write on the stale what changes is the shape of the wax and not the stale.
She said that we need to think in ecological terms, which is the relationship between organism and the environment. If we don’t think like this we’re prone to erroneous metaphors, such as DNA regarded as blueprint and now it’s more thought of as a recipe. But even then is not enough because DNA phases variable conditions while recipes have set conditions.
She proposed a better metaphor of a scaffolding tree; where stability of the tree is based on turning points of the scaffold and not where the tree was planted. She defined niche construction, which means that we are creators of our own development and evolution. This could be regarded as a turning point or a scaffolding for development and learning in our life.
In my opinion, I agree with the three quotes that said that we need to pay a price to obtain equality. If the IQ curves of males and females are similar, I don’t see why we cannot achieve equality. I agree with the concept of niche construction I think we are responsible for the mythologies that we have about gender such as dressing girls in pink or boys don’t cry. Finally, this lecture made me think that the world is so busy caring about women’s rights and equality that we forgot how to equipped men to adapt to the women of today that is why equality has not been fully accepted, because men don’t want to give up some traditions from the past such as feeling inferior or stop being the main provider. I think that everyone no matter race, gender or appearance have the potential to do whatever they set their mind to do, no matter genetics or standards, I believe the mind is very powerful and just like in the movie Gattaca where Vincent the main character was not genetically fit he was able to achieved his dream based on his desire and the power of his mind.