Comments on: Male vs. Female Brains

By: gamerscientist

gamerscientist — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:23:18 +0000

I liked this read. Although, you may want to make it clear that you are critiquing the cartoon before you post it. I almost didn’t make it past the very inaccurate partitioning of my brain.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:06:41 +0000

They would have called first and checked. Then asked around. Then come up with Plan B.

By: heidi schulz

heidi schulz — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:54:28 +0000

one thing’s fo sho; if women had been employed to find WMD’s in Iraq, they would’ve found them!!

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:20:36 +0000

Male vs. Female squid:

http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/courses.hp/zool250/Labs/Lab07/Loligo-male+female.GIF

By: Azkyroth

Azkyroth — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:49:30 +0000

The antipathy towards the “nature” proponents stems largely from pattern recognition. There certainly may be different trends in the innate neurological characteristics of men and women (research suggests this is the case), but there are so many confounding factors and uncertainties (the fact that there’s more than one way to approach a real-life problem, as opposed to a highly artificial abstraction meant to more precisely measure the skills assumed to be employed in solving the associated real-life problems, fruitfully is a big one that tends to be overlooked), that no rational person would try to argue that the debate is settled or that the overall answer is clear. Given this, the desire of some parties to declare the debate settled demands an alternate explanation. In the case of those who argue that all measured or perceived gender differences are clearly and obviously inborn and immutable (apparently without realizing that these are two different assertions), the fact that the majority of those who argue this position A) wish to declare the debate settled in a way that either presents males as superior or, more commonly, reinforces the assumptions used to prop up the existing social order which privileges males, and B) are male, suggests one.

Frankly, I haven’t met a single person who actually dogmatically asserts that no innate differences are possible. I have met a lot of people who are aware of the scientific community’s shameful record of “finding” results from studying certain demographic groups that reinforce popular prejudices about those groups, and are sick and fucking tired of the people who show up in a debate and try to do a verbal sleight-of-hand between “there are some differences in the way men’s and women’s brains are structured that may result in differences in certain cognitive abilities or behaviors” to “we don’t need to do anything about the lack of women in engineering – they ain’t being discriminated against, their poor little brains just can’t handle it!” as though the former proposition implied the latter.

By: AK

AK — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:19:27 +0000

@Jason Thibeault:

I think anybody familiar with the research would agree that both nature and nurture probably have a hand in the ultimate outcome. Moreover, all this is involved in determining statistical outcomes: the differences among individuals of any such group are normally much larger than the differences among group averages.

The biggest problem, IMO, is the tendency to think that the results of such statistical research mandate (or even encourage) some sort of social action.

By: Jason Thibeault

Jason Thibeault — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:04:05 +0000

It upsets me that any time someone makes any implication that sexual dimorphism in humans might have some effect on thought patterns and habits, someone comes along and screams misogyny, e.g. that any admission of difference in genders will ultimately lead to women being subjugated, and then someone else comes along and screams that obviously gender differences are the *only* factor, leading to someone claiming that down that road lies racist, sexist, classist behaviours. In my experience, reality does not conform to any extremists’ viewpoints in just about any instance, so it’s safe to say neither view is right, but some people will be swayed by one or the other.

I’m going to put my neck in the guillotine and say “men and women are different, but should be treated equally as far as human rights and the workplace are concerned”.

This will inevitably get me drawn and quartered by all parties involved.

By: Stephanie Z

Stephanie Z — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:51:12 +0000

Dammit, Azkyroth. I was going to go with “tilting at strawmen” but decided not to. Oh, well. Yours is better anyway.

By: AK

AK — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:50:25 +0000

@Azkyroth:

I suspect it’s because too often the suggestion that there might be an environmental explanation is being used as an excuse to shut off a non-politically-correct idea: that there are inherent, genetic differences between people that impact their ability to perform in this (or any) culture.

I’ll grant that there isn’t much of that here, but there are other blogs where it’s de rigueur. For those of us who’ve lived with the “politically correct” efforts to censor free speech, much less free scientific investigation, since the 70’s, this tends to be a flash point.

Evidently, in the last decade the efforts to suppress such investigations seem to have started to break down, but there’s still a lot of opposition, and many people are somewhat over-sensitive.

By: Azkyroth

Azkyroth — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:38:40 +0000

It is possible that cultural influences are not the only reason for this difference.

Can someone from the "nature" side either provide me a satisfactory explanation of why they start arguing against someone else who categorically, a priori denies any biological influence on gender difference in observed behavior and measured abilities, every time we express skepticism about the latest status-quo-reinforcing just=so story, or acknowledge that flagrant intellectual dishonesty is the norm on their side of the argument? I'm really getting sick of that straw herring.