British Orienteering has peaked!

Because you seem to have misinterpreted - the sex advantage held by males has zero to do with navigation.

What on earth do you mean by that? 🤣

I think I had the most truculent horse in history. If it started to rain, she planted all four feet and refused to move. You can’t always drag half a ton of fuck you stubbornness. I know, I’ve tried.

@SoImAHorseThenTed - "Tbf sometimes the horse is very helpful, sometimes you have such a disagreement it is easier to get off and drag them behind you like a recalcitrant teenager." 😂 This reminds me so much of Maximus, my favourite Disney horse.

I could have been a judge if I'd had the Latin.

I'm with Lady Catherine De Bourgh - "If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient."

<Sigh> Intelligence is an inherited trait. And then it is how you apply that trait that influences your abilities. I’m not sure how much more I can explain this - if you are born with it, it is a genetic trait. If you are not born with it, it is an ability. You are born with blue eyes, you cannot acquire them by trying hard. But you are not born knowing how to play chess. You are born with a degree (or not) of intelligence, and if you LEARN it you can become a chess player of varying levels. Anyone can actually learn how to play chess, it is a learned ability. But people who were born with the right sort of intelligence, a genetic trait, can apply that to learning chess and could become better at it than less intelligent people, but there is a possibility that a less intelligent person who has been brought up with chess and who’s family plays it often will acquire the ability to play it very well. People who do unusually well in things are often people who have had the good fortune to be born with genetic traits and then combined them with hard work and applied learning.

The British Olympic Go for Gold program from a couple of decades ago, which saw the rise of the cycling, rowing and skeleton teams in Summer and Winter Olympics employed this to great success. They invited people to be tested for natural abilities - and these natural abilities were parameters such as thigh length (genetic,) height (genetic,) explosive speed (acquired, but with a genetic element,) and so on. They fed the results into a computer program which identified if this person would be a good rower, cyclist or skeleton racer, regardless of whether they had ever done that sport before.

I know an Olympic gold medallist’s mum, and she said her daughter had never even heard of skeleton when she applied to be tested. I also saw a rower win gold in Rio, she had been a teacher before selection and had never rowed. They
were not born with the ability to win these sports, they learned how to win at them, using genetic traits.

Going back to your chess champions/musical prodigies/maths Olympians, those people are not born that way. They have been born with genetic traits that will give them a natural advantage. But the maths and music are learned abilities.

Many abilities are also genetic. Otherwise we'd all be chess champions/musical prodigies/Maths Olympians.

Map reading is an ability, not a genetic trait. Skin colour is a genetic trait, not an ability. They are 2 completely different things. One is passed down by inheriting genetic material from a parent (this is ‘nature.’) The other is a taught/learned thing passed from one generation to another (‘nurture.’) Both will confer advantages in the right environment, but they cannot be considered the same. You can inherit dark skin colour from a parent, but cannot learn it. You can learn map reading from a parent or other teacher but cannot inherit it. In communities where knowing where things are is vitally important to survival, children will learn these things from their elders and parents without realising it from a young age, but it is as a result of seeing what these elders do and copying them, not because they have map reading genetics material.

And as an aside, @FlirtsWithRhinos is correct. Dark skin is a benefit in regions where protection from the sun’s rays is environmentally advantageous. Pale skin is a benefit in countries where better ability to absorb the sun’s rays for vitamin D production is an advantage. Neither is ‘better’ in the wrong setting, but the ‘right’ skin type in the right setting would have carried an evolutionary advantage and better survival rates. This is ‘survival of the fittest.’

And if you’ve had even the briefest of encounters with genetic studies you would know it is possible to inherit a genetic trait from one parent, it does not have to be both. I won’t even get into genotypes and phenotypes, where you can inherit a genetic trait from a parent but not outwardly show the inherited physical attribute, but your child can. It gets very complicated! But a quick example would be hair colour. My dad had black hair, my mum had brown hair. Between me and my siblings we have blonde, red and brown hair. All of our hair colours are as a direct result of genes we have inherited from our parents, even though neither of them had red or blonde hair.

Tbf sometimes the horse is very helpful, sometimes you have such a disagreement it is easier to get off and drag them behind you like a recalcitrant teenager. Admittedly you can see a lot more from up on their backs which helps with identifying useful terrain features, and travel much faster. My horses are trained to be ridden from seat and leg so my hands are free to fiddle with map and compass. It’s when the horse decides they want to set a faster speed than you are comfortable with, or stop for a snack, that problems can occur. My current horse is relatively young but learning quickly. But when I first got her she would dive into every front garden we passed as though saying ‘this place looks nice! We could live here!’ It was a struggle to keep her in a straight line but we are getting there. My retired horse used to nod in the direction we needed to go in as though to say ‘there are judges behind that hedge. So we should go that way.’ It’s a real partnership and very rewarding when your horse works with you.

Minor derail but this is a bugbear of mine.

Dark skin is always presented as sonething that evolved in response to the sun, as if we started out white and some of us become black.

But humans evolved in Africa. We started out with the sun. We started out Black. it is the paler skins which are the later adaption.

So the question isn't so much "why do some humans have dark skin", it's "why don't all humans have dark skin?". (And the answer is that pale skin is probably an adaptation to allow us to make enough vitamin D in climates with less sun, but what I'm trying to highlight is the question is usually implicitly framed as if humans are baseline white and we aren't.)

Sorry, very off topic and I realise no malice intended at all, but it does bother me!

That was 250 miles and we've long known women have more stamina over extremely long distances.

Most orienteering events are not 250 milles! Men have a clear power/strength advantage which does very much male a differences over more "normal" distances.

The advantage men have in orienteering is nothing to do with maps and everything to do with their greater speed and stength.

Rachel Entrekin is amazing but she wouldn't have won over 5k or marathon distance.

I'm not sure but I think sense of direction and map reading are different. I don't have a great sense of direction... which is why I think I like maps. I can look at a map and then understand how things all fit together.

My mother wasn't good at map reading but she had an astonishing sense of direction - she didn' tknow north from south but she could point, for example, to where our house was from wherever she was - and was also very very good at remembering how to get places.

When we were children/teens, we never ever had to remind her of the address for person x's house for pick up - if she'd been there once, she'd remember forever. And even when she used to visit us after we moved away, I was quite surprised to realise that when her and my dad were travelling around our local area, they weren't using maps (after the first time) because Mum would direct because she could remember where sainsburys was, or how to get to the DC school or whatever.

Sadly, I did not inherit that from her, hence my reliance on maps. If I look at the map I can then understnd how it all fits together and find my way.

Back to orienteering shall we do a big mumsnet meet at the Royal Holloway University next Easter?

Ooh, can I come? Just for a bit. Then slope off on a pub crawl. Which, I will have you know, requires map-reading skills.

You are probably right, @Lougle - abilities can be heritable within families without being an evolutionary trait attached to men or women. Think for example of skin colour. Dark skin colour is helpful in some environments, and is inherited from your parents - but it's both of them, not passed down from father to son only.

I mean, I used to be geotechnical technician who took measurements, maps, test results, soil and terrain information to draw out cross sections, plans, elevations across very long motorway, bridge, roundabout construction projects, then print them out on the old blueprint A0 printers (do it on a Friday so the smell goes by Monday morning),fold them when dry all on my own, and these went on to become plans and designs that were not only built, but are still there. You've probably all driven on roads I drew out or worked on if you've driven anywhere between Scotch Corner and Dover Docks.

Had to stop obviously when my tits grew as I couldn't reach the drawing board, obvs.

I can fold engineering drawings up to A1 size to the British Standard so they end up A4 size with the title block showing and can be hole punched so they fit in a folder but can be unfolded without taking them out of the folder.

I really want to try orienteering now.

What the absolute hell are you on about?

Also, in the UK there is no weird societal pressure about women and map reading 😂

I accept your knowledge on this. However, DH has a brilliant sense of direction, etc., despite not being very academic. DD2 is also not naturally academic. She has never been taught to read a map. She was able to remember routes and direct me to places from a very early age. I think it's possibly that she had a good visual memory for landmarks?

I struggle partly because everything looks so different in different seasons, times of day, etc., so in my mind it's different.

Its funny but I've always had a decent sense of direction and an ability to hold directions in my head from reading a map, long distance journeys on the continent. My dad however is another matter. Of course traveling in convoy as the older man he always led the way. It was a running joke that if I disappeared from the rear view mirror he had to work out where he went wrong.

Dh will not drive on big strange roads or on the wrong side of the road, he just seems to have a complete mind block about it and doesn't believe he could so won't even try.

Back to orienteering shall we do a big mumsnet meet at the Royal Holloway University next Easter?

I'm just in awe of @SoImAHorseThenTed who can not only read a map competently but do it while steering a horse - it's like Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred did, but in high heels and backwards. Blimey.

Oops, sorry

Many satnavs are able to do this for you automatically. I prefer north at the top for mine, but my son likes the map's orientation to change according to the direction in which he is driving.

We are both competent to read maps either way, though. And one of my daughters had to do map-reading and orienteering as part of her job, and caused mild consternation when the instructor discovered she already knew how to do that, and had done since she was about ten and was let loose on Dartmoor in charge of family expeditions.

My DF taught me to read maps that way. Turn the map to direction you are going. I do the same with my phone.