painting rooms: blue vs pink

these couple days i'm painting over the rooms of my two little cousins, sisters aged 7 and 4, while they are away. it got me thinking about genetic/physiological programming vs environmental conditioning. proponents of the latter like to say that girls like pink because they're taught to like pink and boys like blue because they're taught to like blue et cetera. i currently hold the view that genetics and physiology are the dominant determinants of behaviour (a view i am betting will be validated by scientific discovery as we fine tune the resolution at which we study the brain) but that there is natural variability about the genetic baseline due to environmental conditioning. (i call it the battle between hard wiring and soft wiring.) what does this have to do with painting rooms? well the thought train was stimulated by the request by the sisters to have their rooms painted pink and blue, with princesses and footballs on the wall, respectively.

presumably these sisters, raised by the same parents and grandparents, should not develop drastically different personalities if environmental conditioning was a very dominant factor. but after watching these two younguns varying responses to the same stimuli i hypothesize that a person's genetic or physiological predispositions strongly affect which information is processed/prioritized (makes sense as a first principle as information assimilation is a physical process regulated by neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin.) thus it controls what environmental conditioning is possible and comes to be the dominant factor is determining a person's behaviour. (if this is untrue then mightn't christians be right about being able to condition the gay out of homosexuals?)

the older sister loves pink and princesses and flowers and nature and is quiet and passive. the younger sister loves blue and karate and football and is loud and very physically aggressive. the older sister (in my opinion) has a more feminine looking face than the younger one, who has already been classified as a "tomboy" by adults in the family. and to further add to my amazement (though not surprisingly) the younger sister appears to be more of a systemizer than an empathizer, delighting in dismantling and reassembling my pens or interfering with my cellphone while the older sister sits enthralled by barbie/mermaid/fairytopia on tv. if i had to guess i would say the baseline differences between them were set in stone since development in the womb but lots of folks would probably want to chime in otherwise. it will be interesting to see them grow older.