[finnh]

My son's incredible fascination with buses and cars arose with ZERO outside influence, starting when he was maybe 1 year old (he's 2 1/2 now). At the time I don't think he even owned any toy cars, but he would hear a bus driving by our house and shout "bus! bus!" ... it was one of his early high-usage words.

I'm not saying this is down to gender - he could have had the exact same reaction were he a girl - but I am saying this is a genetic predisposition evident in him. Nothing cultural about his love for cars.

Whether this (and other) inherent traits correlate with gender is a question whose answer I don't know. My only point is that culture is not everything - clearly genetics play a big role in what people are interested in.

[nerfhammer]

primate studies have consistently shown monkeys and chimpanzees have similar sex-based toy preferences as humans

e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18452921

[djur]

What mechanism do you suggest for a genetic predisposition for interest in a technology that was invented in the last handful of generations? How could there possibly be a "car gene"?

[gbog]

There could be a predisposition for males to be attracted by noisy or fast moving things, because that is what they will have to care about when they grow up, in a hunter gatherer society. Have you seen kitten chasing things? They are obviously predisposed to grab and chase and their early games prepare them for hunting in adult life. There could be a "car gene" as much as there could be a "play with a doll" gene. Wishful thinking cannot remove such a possibility.

[nerfhammer]

see sibling comment