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Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Morality and Gender Identification
"Is there a chemical in our brain which makes certain people act in a reasonably moral way while others are hopeless social deviants?"
I am inclined to believe that the chemicals in our brain do influence the way we act. If they didn't, then antidepressants, OCD, ADD, ADHD, etc medications would be compeltely out of business. This would suggest that we can scientifically rehabilitate peope's behavior, but I don't know if it's meant to be in accordance with "morals." I guess morals are in and of themselves subjective, when you really get down to it. Is giving someone antidepressants conforming their mental state to a moral code, since you are biologically interfering with the way they operate? Do a person's morals change once on these kinds of mood-changing medications, since the goal is, ultimately, to change one's actions/ways of being in the world?
This ties in to one of the New York Times articles I was reading, the one called "Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn't Clear." It's basically about how (some) parents are encouraging their children to explore different possibilties of gender identification before making a "final" choice about which gender to identify with. Some parents put their children on medication to delay puberty in an attempt to give their child enough time to "find" her/himself. At first, I thought this was a brilliant idea, maybe only because any kind of avoidance of the confusion and embarassment of puberty seems worthwhile. I think these parents are ultimately delaying the inevitable, though, and fail to realize that figuring out which gender you identify with may be a lifelong process, and may even change during the course of your life. Is medication really worthwhile in this instance? How exactly does this medication affect the behavior of these children? And couldn't there possibley be emotional side effects from staying a "child" while your peers enter maturity?