Darwin: mental atrophy
It is not easy to draw conclusions in the highly complex area of cerebral specialization, but it is safe to say that it is unwise to discourage those whose background is not scientific from technical and scientific pursuits. Womens' intuition for example, may enhance problem-solving in technology. It is also unwise to deter men from artistic, or intuitive pursuits, because their exclusive intellectualism becomes unproductive over the long term. No-one said it better than Charles Darwin himself:
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- This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.
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