Holding a patent and actually inventing something are rather different things, as anybody following the patent-troll company wars knows.

Since this is an anthro/archeo thread, lets talk a little prehistory history. Women almost certainly invented stitched/cured clothes, baskets, weaving, unfired pots (by extension), fired pots (if they were doing the cooking), horticulture, and maybe even animal domestication. As immediate solutions to immediate problems. Gathering and child care have their own demands and solutions, and what makes you think that human sexes are two different species, with one incapable of solving their own immediate problems, like for instance carrying tons of crap all over the place? (Baskets Help! Re-seeding a plant bed works next Fall!)

Here's some stupid EvPsych for you: women carry big purses full of crap because they have evolved to carry tons of crap around, and the more crap they can carry around, and the more creatively they can carry it, the obviously better procreative partners they will be, so I bet undergraduate male psychology students will find female undergraduates with big purses full of crap more sexually attractive. Want to run a study on that one? Probably not, good headlines but just may not confirm traditional sex-roles. Gotta love EvPsych.

When inventions become trade-goods/money-makers involving economic specialization, then historically the men stepped up, and quit fooling around with spears and bows. Professional craft jobs like potters, joiners, fletchers, weavers, etc. do seem to be male dominated professions. Men are evidently better at specialization and monetization of intellectual property, and process engineering for that matter, than fundamental innovation. Because they aren't dealing with so much day to day crap that need an immediate solution. Amazing what you can do when you don't have to gather and child-care. Maybe we should run some EvPsych theory by that idea too. Do women go for dudes who rip off and improve their ideas and then sell them back to them?

Its the old part-time amateur witch vs full-time professional shaman paradigm, and who always wins that one?

But do not deny the creativity and capability of half the population. According to you trolls, they are smart enough to totally bamboozle and rip-off everybody with a Y chromosome after all.

Dear BroadSheet, close & delete this thread please.

I had three or four thoughtful (I hope), and relevant to the article, things to say. But I cannot contribute to this stinking thread without attempting to argue with the outrageous indefensible vileness, which would be to grant it a kind of legitimacy it does not deserve.

Some of it is clearly the raving of mentally ill persons to be sure, but some of it purely blind hatred. In some jurisdictions some of this stuff could pretty clearly be prosecutable as hate-crime. In the US it is legal I suppose, but there is no law that says Salon has to tolerate it in any form.

Nuke it.

I was always a big fan of Dr. Spock. His advice pretty much amounted to:

1. Calm down, it usually isn't that serious

2. Trust your instincts

3. Here are the various competing theories, but see 2. above.

My feeling is that every child is different, need different things, and different things work. That was certainly my experience with my own kids.

The stunt is a version of the "classic" version of the venerable Indian Rope Trick, which involves an accomplice kid and shaved dismembered monkey parts (hack 'em up enough they look pretty human). Pretty old-fashioned stage magic, no real witchcraft about it.

One thing about magic and witchcraft, not only does it explain a lot and offer easy to digest comforting explanations, rather like like Creationism & Intelligent Design, it also makes this humdrum world more entertaining to live in.

That affluent people tend to have less children than poorer people. It is kind of what third world development is all about.

But it is odd and disturbing to see it traced to greed instead of female empowerment and access to contraceptives.