"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

thousand years of civilization had not been anywhere near enough time for any evolutionary adaptations
to alter these mental reactions. They were still only good at the things they had been good at on the
savannah.

Anna Quibler broke the taboo on speech, as people would when all the fellow passengers were cohorts.
She said to Frank, continuing her story, “I went over and introduced myself. They’re from an island
country in the Bay of Bengal.”

“Did they say why they rented the space here?”

“They said they had picked it very carefully.”

“Using what criteria?”

“I didn’t ask. On the face of it, you’d have to say proximity to NSF, wouldn’t you?”

Frank snorted. “That’s like the joke about the starlet and the Hollywood writer, isn’t it?”
Anna wrinkled her nose at this, surprising Frank; although she was proper, she was not prudish. Then he
got it: her disapproval was not at the joke, but at the idea that these new arrivals would be that hapless.
She said, “I think they’re more together than that. I think they’ll be interesting to have here.”

Homo sapiensis a species that exhibits sexual dimorphism. And it’s more than a matter of bodies; the
archaeological record seemed to Frank to support the notion that the social roles of the two sexes had
deviated early on. These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would
be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly
non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science
and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.

These thoughts flitted through Frank’s mind as their elevator ride ended and he and Anna walked down
the hall around to their offices. Anna was as tall as he was, with a nice figure, but the dimorphism
differentiating them extended to their habits of mind and their scientific practice, and that might explain
why he was a bit uncomfortable with her. Not that this was a full characterization of his attitude. But she
did science in a way that he found annoying. It was not a matter of her being warm and fuzzy, as you
might expect from the usual characterizations of feminine thought—on the contrary, Anna’s scientific
work (she still often coauthored papers in statistics, despite her bureaucratic load) often displayed a
finicky perfectionism that made her a very meticulous scientist, a first-rate statistician—smart, quick,
competent in a range of fields and really excellent in more than one. As good a scientist as one could find
for the rather odd job of running the Bioinformatics Division at NSF, good almost to the point of
exaggeration—too precise, too interrogatory—it kept her from pursuing a course of action with drive.
Then again, at NSF maybe that was an advantage.

In any case she was so intense about it. A kind of Puritan of science, rational to an extreme. And yet of
course at the same time that was all such a front, as with the early Puritans; the hyperrational coexisted in
her with all the emotional openness, intensity, and variability that was the American female interactional
paradigm and social role. Every female scientist was therefore potentially a kind of Mr. Spock, the
rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied, and the two coexisting
at odds with one another.

On the other hand, judged on that basis, Frank had to admit that Anna seemed less split-natured than
many women scientists he had known. Pretty well integrated, really. He had spent many hours of the past