But because there are already plenty of women out there debating the evolution of the female thought process, it behooves an XY chromosome pairing to concentrate long enough to get the man-brain thing straight.

For those who missed a very interesting piece in the Sunday Citizen ("What's really on a woman's mind and why everyone should care"), the latest information on the role that nature and nurture play in the reasons why men and women do the things that they do features two scientists who have offered up more data about the natural inclination.

Philippe Rushton seems to conclude, by my reading, that men are smarter. I should probably stop here, declare victory and head back to the couch. But sadly there is more.

Louann Brizendine was a feminist in the 1970s, but she couldn't understand why so many intelligent women were rearing children instead of taking promotions, so she focused her research on the mysteries of the The Female Brain, the title of her recent book. It's all in the hormones and the synapses, she says. Her research indicates women are smarter.

We pay a lot of attention to natural impulses and structures in a bid to explain why we do certain seemingly mystifying things. But it is equally important to remember that we can learn behaviours as well as inherit them.

For example, as an adult I have learned to love vacuuming. I did not like this task as a boy, having demonstrated that by once, in a particularly feral moment, distracted by some thought or other, hoovering up live coals from the family fireplace, destroying a perfectly good Kenmore. I was not trusted with the machine again.

But today my behaviour choice finds me happily attacking dust and dirt and getting in touch with my feminine side -- something that by nature I shouldn't really be capable of because of my Big Fat Man Brain.

I know that the good professors very likely know about the importance of nurture and take learned behaviours into account, but in our simplistic way, the rest of us humans might really actually like to forget the nurture part of life because therein lies responsibility. To be able to blame something on testosterone is an easy way out of a difficulty, but we probably shouldn't do that very often.

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