
What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure? - jseliger
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/admitted-children-sex-primarily-pleasure-81691
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jseliger
One could profitably read this against "Lies We Tell Kids:"
[http://paulgraham.com/lies.html](http://paulgraham.com/lies.html)

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yellowapple
While I agree with most of that wonderfully-written article...

"But I was mystified about Carver. He seemed to have done stuff with
peanuts... It's obvious now that he was on the list because he was black"

He was on the list because he was an accomplished botanist who sought to
relieve the effects of a cotton-planting monoculture (namely, on the
deprivation of soil nutrients resulting from said monoculture) by persuading
farmers to plant peanuts (or other legumes) instead of or alongside cotton,
and did so by developing a very large number of novel uses for peanuts, thus
increasing demand for them and encouraging farmers to follow his advice.

I get what the author's trying to say - that a lot of folks only remember
George Washington Carver because he was a black scientist - but it comes
across as entirely ignorant of his actual accomplishments in botany and
agricultural science.

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duncan_bayne
No, what the author is trying to say that the only reason that Carver is
listed alongside Einstein and Marie Curie is that he was black, and that it
was considered politically necessary to include him for that reason.

His accomplishments, while real and greater than mine and probably yours (no
offence), aren't in the same league as those two.

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yellowapple
No offense taken :)

However, I'm still getting the impression that botany/biology/etc. are being
viewed as somehow "lesser" than the sorts of physics Einstein and Curie did.
Would you object to, say, Gregor Mendel being on that list? They're roughly
comparable, after all (highly-respected botanists with Christian faiths and
rather-groundbreaking (pun intended) discoveries in botany).

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duncan_bayne
Ah, now that's a different discussion :) Yes, I was wondering about that.
Mendel I think would belong on that list; I _think_ membership in it depends
upon fundamentally changing a field, rather than 'just' significantly
improving it.

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informatimago
[https://vimeo.com/12915013](https://vimeo.com/12915013)

