
Neurosexism: The myth that men and women have different brains - laurex
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x
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sadris
Narrator: there are gender differences in the brain.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031866/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031866/)

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tsukurimashou
Men and women are different at many levels, physically and mentally.
Recognizing that doesn't mean you're sexist. These differences doesn't mean
one is better than the other.

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freedman1611
Anybody that's been in a relationship for a period of time knows that it's
true. Women will tell you that all us men are stupid lmao, and we'll say they
overreact to everything. As the world keeps turning.

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mehh
I'm sure I read once that they literally have a slightly different
weight/volume (can't recall which) on average (even after you factor in body
size). Also don't assume that means anything in regards to intelligence.

Would love to know if that is actually true, if anyone out there really knows
this stuff?

~~~
rijoja
More neurons on average in a male brain by quite a large margin. I expect this
to be fairly well understood and proven by now, as neurons would be a
fundamental concept in modern neuroscience and if they can not manage to get
this straight everything else is to be put into serious consideration on
account of this.

It's important to note though that DNA is optimized to use as little
information as possible. Hence all the symmetry in the body, since it almost
cuts down information requirements in half. This would talk against having
vastly different brains in the genome as that would require storing the
blueprints for two different brains.

That being said cultural but perhaps more so influences from hormones might do
their part. So to clarify I'd find it extremely unlikely that the brain would
be fundamental different just as the heart or the kidney would be similar
between sexes and from data requirements in the DNA it would be impractical
out of an evolutionary perspective.

The article mentions that in newborns there is little or no difference in
brains, which seems to fit with my rule of thumb idea above. Then again in a
culturally imposed straitjacket she continues to completely ignore the impact
on hormones on the brain. Considering the fundamental ways that females differ
from males this seems totally ridiculous and to me it looks like a striking
example of ideological kneejerking.

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speedplane
> Considering the fundamental ways that females differ from males this seems
> totally ridiculous and to me it looks like a striking example of ideological
> kneejerking.

Her point is not that there are no differences, it's that those differences
are negligible compared to societal influence, and people claims to the
contrary are often doing so to rationalize their own place in society. We went
from loin cloths to rockets with the same genetic code, yet, those differences
are often dismissed in the face of minute differences in genetics/nature.

> a culturally imposed straitjacket she continues to completely ignore ...

This even proves the point. If you're right, and culture is powerful enough to
put someone in a "straitjacket", then it can surely explain many of the
differences that many claim to be explained by slight genetic/natural
differences.

~~~
rijoja
My point being that even though the brains are similar at birth, the hormones
are bound to have effects on it while the individual grows up. As such ending
up with a male or female brain, categorized by the amount of testosterone it
have been subject to. Anything else is sounds utterly absurd to me. Had I been
suggesting that stress-hormones in teenagers would cause changes in the brain
I'm sure you wouldn't fall into this predictable nonscientific dogma that
everybody is exactly the same.

> This even proves the point You could go even further and say that I was
> critiquing her for trying to replace one set of cultural dogma with another.
> Nobody questions the influence of cultures upon human being.

Not a discussion that I intended, but is it not a good thing that society
prepares individuals with fundamental physical differences in different ways.
Wouldn't in a sense a culture that failed to inform it's offspring on the
fundamentals of their existence be amoral at best and disastrously inefficient
at worst?

> We went from loin cloths to rockets with the same genetic code, Did we
> really, this is an exciting scientific discovery that you've made. Please
> enlighten us on exactly when evolution in human beings stopped?

Last but not least I take great offence of being accused of being someone with
the hidden agenda of trying to oppress and control half of the human
population, for my own benefit. Had I've been doing this for my own self
interest I probably had not dared publicly criticized, what many feels to be a
controversial issue.

~~~
speedplane
> My point being that even though the brains are similar at birth, the
> hormones are bound to have effects on it

Okay, so you're now saying that hormones are the major factor differentiating
men and women? Larger than society? So from 1920 to 1970, the changes that
have taken place between men and women can be explained by changes in their
hormones? Similarly from 1970 to today?

I suppose it's possible that we could have real genetic and hormonal changes
in the human body in the past 100 years (3-4 generations), but it's pretty far
fetched. What's far more likely is that society itself has changed. That
change has altered the human experience far more powerfully than chemistry can
in such a short time period.

On short time-scales, recent history alone is enough evidence that nurture is
far more powerful than nature.

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chippy
I was listening to the radio the other day on a programme about this as they
said (like the article) that the brain is like any other organ like the liver
and kidneys and that all observed structural changes was due to nurture and
culture.

However they said that there was one rarely studied difference in the chemical
(or hormonal?) soup that gets given / produced as a baby and that these
different chemicals haven't been examined enough when it comes to the
difference in brains between men and women. Can anyone expand on my limited
and hazy understanding of what I might have heard?

edits - I can't find the programme, it might have been during a morning news
show on radio 4.

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speedplane
There is so much discussion today about the natural or genetic differences
between groups of people, couched as science, but it's pretty bad science.
Humans are genetically identical to what they were 1000 years ago, even 10,000
years ago, yet we've moved from wearing loin cloths to putting people on the
moon. I'm sure genetic differences exist, but any nature is ridiculously out-
weighed nurture and society, on the scale of 1000 to 1. Folks just look for
nature based answers because it gives them an excuse to not examine their own
place in society.

~~~
sadris
Everything you said was incorrect. There isn't a single trait ever examined in
which the impact of shared environment is larger than the genetic impact. In
other words, the heritability of every trait ever examined is vastly larger
than the effect of the shared environment (nurture). It's literally the second
law of behavioral genetics: The effect of being raised in the same family is
smaller than the effect of the genes.

And about evolution, also wrong. We have evolved 100x faster in the past 5000
years than in the Pleistocene.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion)

People like to believe in falsities like yours because they don't want to
admit than ability is mostly innate and there's nothing we can do about it.

~~~
belorn
Most people misunderstand heritability, but there is an excellent video I can
recommend by professor Robert Sapolsky:
[https://youtu.be/RG5fN6KrDJE?t=2427](https://youtu.be/RG5fN6KrDJE?t=2427)

A common finding is that if you want to explain data around a trait and you
can only know the environment or the gene, the environment is usually the
better choice.

The interaction between genes and traits is very counter intuitive for most
people. As an example from the lecture, if we asked people how heritabile the
number of fingers a person has we would expect the answer would be 100% since
it is very rare for a person to be born with 4 fingers. But if we asked if
genes or environment is the best method to explain why some people have 4
fingers, genes are a very proof explanation since finger amputation are caused
very rarely from genes. The variation of fingers among humans has thus a very
low (almost 0%) heritability.

Heritability == the observed variation in the data set that can be explained
from genes.

~~~
sadris
Correct. That's why I explicitly said shared environment (the "nurture") and
not all environment (which includes non shared environment).

When comparing nature vs nurture it's going to be always nature. When
comparing total trait variance, the genetically explained variance is on
average 50% (averaged across all traits).

A fraction of the remaining 50% is non shared environment (randomness) and a
minute/neglible amount is shared environment (nurture).

