Copyright 2010 Roberta Osborn. All rights reserved.
My Essays
Mothers’ Foresight, continued
The second presumption is that planning is not a factor of other human activities, women’s activities
in particular.
Is there no higher level thinking associated with gathering? Is it really a mindless opportunistic roving
across the landscape, like grazing? I feel that it is an expected but unimaginative male bias to
discount the intellectual effort involved in:
-remembering where to find food (inspection, observation, memory)
-navigating to where food was in the past (memory, navigation by landmark)
-remembering when food items will be available and
not missing seasonal opportunities (memory, awareness of time and natural cycles)
-discriminating between plants based on small observed differences
(inspection, observation, classification)
-avoiding toxic materials (deductive reasoning, foresight)
-observing beneficial effects of plant materials (deductive reasoning, foresight)
-observation of how plants grow, resulting in development of agriculture
(observation, memory, deductive reasoning, foresight)
-developing multi-step food preparation processes, including those to remove toxic elements
(observation, inspection, deductive reasoning, quantification, foresight, invention)
-coming up with new uses for found objects and materials (invention, imagination)
There are probably many advanced intellectual processes involved in or resulting from women’s
gathering activities, but while these are extremely important and overlooked, these are not the
primary drivers of human intelligence either.
The argument that men have a very special mental capacity, (3-D visual modeling), which therefore is
the source of our human intelligence (What comprises that again? Oh yes… self awareness, empathy,
linguistic capability, foresight…), is not scientific. Why isn’t the male (emerging as he is purported to
be in intelligence) superior in self awareness, empathy, linguistic capability, foresight? It is far more
rigorous to look for the source of advancing human intelligence in the mental attributes of women.
The differences in the level of integration of the brains of females and males, combined with the fact
that women have more of all four characteristics, points to a primary female activity as the source of
the emergence of these factors.
I submit that the necessary advancements in the organization of the female brain to secure her
children’s survival, being a more complete and robust expression of those attributes that we associate
with human intelligence, have actually led to the general advancement of the male brain, and not the
opposite. I submit that the escalating, self perpetuating driver of human intelligence is, get this,
mother’s foresight.
Who foresees (anticipates, imagines, prepares for) the very next step the baby is taking? Who
anticipates what the child might do next and removes the stumbling block, picks her up to prevent her
from entering the fire, doesn’t let her eat a bad thing, keeps her from walking into the creek?
