husband's theories, evolutionary psychology and feminism

over morning tea, husband remarked that he felt that intuition was a realm that women had appropriated as their exclusive domain. his theory is that this is quite unfair from an evolutionary standpoint. if women were home in the camp, minding the hearth and keeping things organized, that required greater organizational skills - they became adept at packing and arranging and moving and setting up and unpacking and well, generally being organized. men, on the other hand, were hunters - ranging far out on the savannas, tracking animals and using their intuition to help guide them to when and where the best hunt might be. men should have honed their intuition skills to a much greater degree than women did.

i didn't have much argument for this because this morning, i woke up wrong. not on the wrong side of the bed, just wrong - do you know what i mean? the alarm went off at the wrong point in my sleep cycle and i was jarred awake at the wrong point, leaving me feeling heavy and a bit dull. so i just thought, "whoa, good argument, husband, but hey, SCORE for women to finally appropriate something that rightfully belongs to men."

then i had a great craic with judith about it (yay for gmail video chat) and she brought up the very interesting point that women actually did a lot of small game hunting around the camp and therefore had quite a developed sense of intuition - also as related to plants and what to eat and what not to eat. we concluded that the main problem was a tendency of evolutionary psychology (i never had a name for it before, but many of husband's theories are of this school of thought) to try to tidily chalk our behavior all up to biology, but that ultimately intuition and emotions are really quite thin in the archeological record, so it was pretty much impossible to guess at the intentionality of many things. most of all human behaviors. if it were up to the archeologists, everything would be chalked up to some kind of primitive ritual, when in actuality, maybe there have been a lot of people through the ages who just woke up wrong.

ok, i'm aware that got a little weird there at the end. but honestly, when you wake up wrong, it sets the tone for the whole day.

happy monday one and all.

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p.s. i managed to get rid of that stupid new difficult captcha word verification thingie on the comments, but the new blogger interface doesn't make it easy. in fact, it's impossible in the new blogger interface - you have to revert to the old one to get rid of it. now that's a pain in the ass, wouldn't you say? (what were you thinking blogger?) but it should make it easier to comment again now.