Gurdur

An interesting collary is the case of fundamentalist Islamic Turkish women in Germany.

Since the slowly-growing radicalization of the Turkish community in Germany ( 4 million strong), there have been ever more cases of Vitamin D deficiency noted ----- because the women are wearing heavy headscarves, and the sunlight is weaker in Germany than in Turkey, so they're simply not getting enough sunlight.

Goober

But our ability to learn does not mean we do not still have instincts. Rather, our learning complements the instincts we already have.

In the case of language, many believe that the learning of language has an instinctual component. After all, children instincitvely know that their parents are talking and not just making random noises, and they instinctively know that these sounds are split up into verb like words and noun like words. They don't have to learn things like this; otherwise learing to speak would be almost impossible.

We probably even have innate grammar modules that take care of even more basic things than subject-object order, things like 'if bikes is the plural of bike then snakes is the plural of snake'. We don't need to learn to infer this, we do it automatically and only need to learn exceptions.

Without these instinctive assumptions, it would be impossible to learn to speak a language. However, the language itself is learned, which is why we see such a wide variety of words and sounds, and why we see that children always speak the language of the people they grew up with, even if they are from different cultural groups. Instinct complements learning.

Amit Misra

sci girl, gurdur:
the digression about nutritional (and sunlight!) discrimination was intended to highlight the fact that gender issues in human societies have political underpinnings.
sorry, i can't even tell you that these nutritionally deprived girls get to eat green veggies: potatoes and onions, apart from cereals, lentils and suchlike form their staple diet. no wonder that we have such a high incidence of anaemia, blindness, osteoporosis, low birth weight babies-- you name it.
And, lpetrich, milk is not as scarce a resource for many of these families as one would think. one of the major occupations around there is dairy farming (mainly water buffaloes).
Goober, was the comment on "bizzare-ness":...addressed to my post? Sorry, I couldn't follow either of those "thats"!

Goober

Yes, I was talking about the 'women not allowed to drink milk' thing in your post, Amit. I was trying to find out if they had a reason to justify it.

Sorry if that was unclear.

Amit Misra

The "justification", if I dare call it that, of not letting girls drink milk is that these girls belong to a gender that has traditionally been politicaly subjugated by another.
Sociologists and anthropologists document several instances of politically subjugated classes of humans being forced into humiliating and downright debilitating patterns of behavior. In the gender debate, I'd like stress that gender is defined more by politics than by biology, wherefore this digression on the milky way...
amit