Yahoo News posts a piece from The Telegraph (U.K.) reporting research on newborn children. It turns out infant girls and boys pay attention to different things before they've had a chance to be taught to behave differently.
Infant girls pay more attention to human faces, newborn boys pay more attention to intriguing objects. Their differences are not trivial. This finding addresses the nature vs. nurture controversy, coming down on the "nature" side.
----------
It is clear to me human males and females are differently specialized because that has had great survival value during the long hunter-gatherer period of our evolution - tens of thousands of generations. Specialization by gender gave us additional "bandwidth" as a species.
Our long pre-adult maturation period demands extended childcare. We aren't the fiercest, the fastest, the strongest, nor indeed the most armored species, but we are the most adaptable and the cleverest. Over time, those characteristics have made us the apex predator on this planet, and are now taking us off-planet and beyond.
Ad astra.
