
Widespread sex differences in gene expression in the human brain (2013) - crassus
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131122/ncomms3771/full/ncomms3771.html
======
FD3SA
It is my sincere hope that this understanding becomes pervasive in society,
such that the inane social movements based upon naught but angry emotional mob
mentality become part of history.

As it stands, young boys are medicated with psychiatric drugs for beings boys,
and this is deemed acceptable by society. Boys are failing at every step in
public institutions, with higher drop out rates at all levels of schooling.

All of this based upon the misguided idea that a Y chromosome is equivalent to
an X chromosome, such that sex differences are "socialy conditioned". This
madness must stop now, before our children are harmed any further.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as it often does. It's fallacious to
assume that there are no inborn differences between men and women. It's
equally fallacious to insist (as many do and will, probably citing this study)
that there are vast and uncrossable gulfs between men and women, and that
anyone who crosses those gulfs anyway must be some sort of deviant.

Humans are complex, the product of both nature and nurture. We need to
recognize and encourage natural differences, but we also need to shut down
social conditioning that attempts to enforce a particular set of differences
without regard for individual context.

~~~
maratd
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what your comment actually means.

What gulfs?

Men and women are complimentary. The masculine and the feminine interplay
between each other and cooperate toward mutual benefit. There is no gulf.

I reject the notion that we somehow have to eliminate the feminine and the
masculine, to be left with some sort of androgynous average. That's just
nonsense.

And yes, some men can be feminine and some women can be masculine, and we all
certainly have characteristics that can be described as one or the other, but
they can and should be described as one or the other. Not as some gender-less
PC nonsense.

There is nothing wrong with being a masculine man. There is nothing wrong with
being a feminine woman. And there is nothing wrong with the array of all the
other possibilities. There are no gulfs that need bridging.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
No, there aren't, but a lot of people are firmly convinced that there are.
Feminism and "political correctness" and your alleged "angry emotional mobs"
exist as a necessary backlash to the (historically overwhelmingly popular)
idea that Man and Woman are as complimentary and irreconcilable as opposite
poles of a magnet. These people don't just assert that "boys, on average,
prefer trucks to dolls," but that boys _shouldn 't be allowed_ to play with
dolls, or wear dresses, or cry, or like other boys. It's that gigantic,
history-long engine of oppression that we're fighting against.

Yes, some people may occasionally take it too far in the other direction, as
humans tend to do. Forcing a boy to play with dolls against his will is just
as bad as forcing him not to. But that's nowhere near as large or widespread a
problem as traditional gender-enforcement still is today.

~~~
einhverfr
I actually disagree with you both with regard to the complementary nature of
the sexes and the basis of feminism. I will deal with feminism first because I
think some historical background is worth looking at.

The typical narrative we are fed regarding women's rights is that women
decided one day they didn't like being oppressed as they had through the ages
and fought for equality which they got. The problem is that this narrative
doesn't actually work. It supposes a sort of oppression a few centuries ago
that is really hard to support on the evidence, and it supposes an equality
today which is just as far off. Also not all feminists have adopted this
narrative. Many post-modernist feminists (for example Robbie Davis-Floyd) have
not.

It is worth remembering that Jefferson's campaign called Adams (in 1800,
_LONG_ before the 19th Amendment) "a hideous hermaphroditical figure, lacking
the force and firmness of a man, and the gentleness and sensibility of a
woman." Far from the oppressed narrative here, this quote strongly suggests
women having important roles in the political discourse. We see this also from
letters in the day. Similarly there were whole industries dominated by women
before they were industrialized (interestingly depending on time and place
this included not only textile manufacture but also brewing, midwifery, and
more). So before industrialization, women had businesses. They were
entrepreneurs, and strong active players in both politics and the economy.

What happened though is that the women's industries were the ones which were
industrialized most heavily and consequently between this and urbanization
women were kicked out of the economy. I strongly suspect _also_ that women's
political institutions (which were relatively informal but no less effective)
were also destroyed. Feminism, women's suffrage, etc. to my mind is a reaction
to _that_ sort of inequality that industrialization brought.

On to the issue of complementary natures. The question I think is the question
of an aversion to essentialism which is generally seen as constraining. This
is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon. Essentialism which presupposes
that women are by nature both more gentle and _sensible_ than men, but that
men are more _predictable_ is not so oppressive and that's the sort of
essentialism one sees in pre-industrial America. This was not new. Chris
Faraone in his excellent study "Ancient Greek Love Magic" talks a lot about
drama and love spell formulas in ancient Greece in terms of complementary
forms of misogyny and misandry (and contrary to what the male Greek writers
thought, women had a _lot_ of power in ancient Greece).

Of course the truth is probably more abstract than was seen by any time and
place, but some patterns are unavoidable. If women's political work is behind
the scenes, then reliability and keeping one's word becomes very specifically
an important male trait (because it is what assures a woman that her interests
will be protected), and it means that men largely navigate a social world
created by the social entanglements of women.

The complementary natures are not "stay at home and raise kids" vs "go
accomplish stuff" but rather "working together and socially" vs "going off by
oneself to work alone." This one pattern is extremely common.

~~~
bluekeybox
The narrative of oppression is a very important one, and like all grand
narratives (thanks critical theorists, for once at least) not always correct.
It's starting to become an example of "rule by victimhood" (c.f. "rule by
decree"). Whole terminology has been devised by feminist and other similar
movements so as to make the oppression narrative appear untouchably true. For
example, the word "sexism" (as well as a few other similar "-isms") has been
defined as something one-directional, something that only men can afflict on
women and not the other way around. This is considered to be valid because
there supposedly exists an "institutionalized oppression" that makes sexism
possible, and that therefore sexism in the opposite direction is impossible.
In other words, the very definition of a word contains an _a priori_
assumption, with the net effect being that repetitive use of aforementioned
word in ideologically correct context engenders constantly consuming this
assumption at face value.

I could go on for hundreds of pages, but I will stop here.

~~~
einhverfr
Fortunately that narrative is starting to fall apart, due to folks who have
taken on critical studies of these topics and gone on for hundreds of pages
each.

One of the recurrent problems though is defining oppression. What usually
happens is that folks project assumptions about the way society works based on
the US today to times and places that are very different.

Two things I have come to conclude though:

1\. In most times and places, power relationships among women have greater
variety, complexity, and nuance than power relationships among men (and
therefore defy formalization to a larger extent) and

2\. Almost anywhere you have patriarchy you also have matriarchy. The two,
instead of being opposites, tend to go together.

~~~
bluekeybox
Any examples of (2) -- or links to something that discusses this phenomenon?
Thanks.

~~~
einhverfr
Sure. Here are a few examples.

1\. In Middle Eastern cultures, the husband's mother has a very strong
matriarchal role to play in the family. These are formally some of the most
patriarchal cultures in the world, and in particular the young wife is one of
the lowest-status members of the household. (But the highest status is that of
the husband and of his mother.)

2\. This may seem very anecdotal, but if you have ever watched "My Big Fat
Greek Wedding" there is this discussion about head of household vs neck of
household. My wife (Chinese-Indonesian) always points to that scene as how
women operate in Chinese-Indonesian culture.

~~~
jessedhillon
This is the saddest thing on this thread. Purportedly about a scientific paper
detailing findings of genetic research. Somewhere along the way, we find you
writing a lengthy objection to what you think feminism is, which
unsurprisingly makes all the good points on your side and all the wrong points
stacked on the opposite side. I can't even begin to object to your
characterization of feminism, as your rendering is so beyond recognition that
I can't accept that you would even be honestly interested in that line of
thought.

First, that you have made it so far in life with such a thorough and
articulated idea of what feminism is without even considering that you might
have a slightly lopsided perspective, that perhaps your rebuttal to feminism
perhaps coincides a little too conveniently with what you believe and doesn't
seem to challenge you in any way -- that should be applauded as a feat of
human obstinance par excellence.

Also unsurprisingly, when given a chance to substantiate your very large
claims you provide an absurd caricature of Arab cultures, and some comment
your wife made while watching a movie. It is literally amazing to me that --
unless you are posessed of remarkable self-awareness -- you are able to, given
this evidence, continue to adhere to a worldview which is predicated on the
supremacy of your beliefs, and that you can continue to believe in that
supremacy even having looked over your own writings.

Literally, the only substantiation you have provided are abject speculations.
You have simply declared your interpretation of a Jefferson quote to mean
whatever you want it to mean, you have not at all demonstrated that women
possessed political influence at the time, nor have you attempted to show how
very obvious mechanisms against those efforts -- e.g. lack of suffrage,
complete lack of female representation -- are mitigated or made irrelevant by
any of this.

Your recollection of the history of feminism is pure fantasy, a Potemkin
village constructed solely to assuage yourself apparently. That you cannot
apparently analyze even to a first order your arguments herein and find them
lacking suggest that to me that you are predisposed to accept the products of
your own prejudices without much deliberation.

The facile composition of your argument coupled with the smug manner in which
you present them, the certitude that you have reached meaningful conclusions
with this lazy thinking -- well, I am left astounded.

~~~
einhverfr
Instead of a longish reply, I have decided to leave it at a citation you are
looking for and a simple observation. (This is edited, so if there are posts
to it that seem like a "Good Day, Fellow" "Axehandle" conversation that's my
fault).

The citation is "Etching Patriarchal Rule" by Elaine Combs-Shilling, which
discusses henna ceremonies and family structure in Morocco.

The observation is that every one of us has lopsided views that, for sake of
getting everything done, we must generally assume to be mostly correct.

~~~
jessedhillon
The critique is not that you have a lopsided view. It's that you have put
forward just an incredibly simple perspective but apparently have derived such
significant meaning from it, and such weighty conclusions. Even now, you think
that quoting someone adds heft to your evidence when the even more obvious
question -- why are you limiting your analysis to intra-household dynamics
only? -- doesn't seem to enter your mind.

(Also, I have lived among several cultures.)

I mean, you're correct that nobody can possess true objectivity. But the
conclusion to be drawn from that, the better conclusion to me it seems, is
that your own ideas need to pass through much more rigorous filters from
multiple -- even antagonistic -- perspectives before being suitable for
consideration by others.

About supremacy of one's own ideas -- yes we all have this bias. The point is
that, knowing that you have this bias, it seems to me that you have not
attempted to correct for it at all. As you have presented them, these ideas
fall down to even basic opposition.

~~~
einhverfr
It seems to me that any reasonable length comment is incapable of capturing
the complexity of any viewpoint.

> why are you limiting your analysis to intra-household dynamics only?

Because before industrialization:

1\. Most households were businesses, and

2\. Society largely functioned as a union of households, not a union of
individuals (Indonesia is still this way, btw). Interestingly this was the
basis of Aristotle's social theory and is generally considered to be
representative of the Indo-European world before industrialization. From this
perspective democracy would mean "one household, one vote" which is a fair
summary of the pre-19th Amendment status quo, actually. Obviously this doesn't
work if votes are private (and secret) or if women don't have the keys to
power by collaborating to get agendas passed.

So intra-household dynamics is the question of power where those are the case.

Edit: the other problem is that extra-household dynamics and gender before
industrialization leads to all kinds of apple/orange comparisons. How do you
compare political assembly membership with collective plotting on political
issues while washing laundry down by the river? Does it matter if the man's
wife will likely know how he voted?

------
discostrings
It's disappointing to see so many people here read the title of the article
and immediately start the see,-social-differences-are-the-result-of-vast-
differences-between-the-binary-sexes wheel rolling again. It's nowhere near a
valid conclusion from the article's content. There are racial differences in
gene expression (though much smaller), too, but I doubt anyone would upvote it
or start a similar conversation about race if an article about it were posted
here.

There are clearly differences between the physiology of the average man and
the average woman, but those differences appear to be more of a spectrum than
a binary split. Given that, I don't understand how people with an axe to grind
against the "gender is cultural" idea would like society to look. Why argue
against the idea that individual differences are vast, and that the best
approach is not to create groups that are defined at birth? What's the
alternative being suggested?

~~~
agentultra
I expected it but am no less disappointed.

Anyone with an extreme emotional investment in the "gender respresentation"
issue isn't even going to read the article before proselytizing HN with their
beliefs.

This is an article about gene expressions and their correlation to the
development of various neurological disorders.

However it mentions differences between males and females... so it's going to
trigger a completely off-topic flame war.

~~~
kyberias
It mentions? Mentions? Come on now. It's stated in the beginning of the title
of the article, and right in the beginning of the abstract, for crying out
loud. "Widespread sex differences"

~~~
agentultra
I beg your pardon then. Yes, the trigger is right in the title.

------
thecosas
New research title:

"People cite title of article to support existing opinions while admitting
TL;DR."

------
fnl
From the article:

> We show that sex differences in gene expression and splicing are widespread
> in adult human brain, being detectable in all major brain regions and
> involving 2.5% of all expressed genes.

While I don't have a similar number, inter-racial differences of gene
expression will be quite similar, if not even higher. This is the reason why
RNAseq experiments these days in some cases can even find _opposing_ evidence,
given the genetic background of the subjects, such as in the recent bladder
cancer publications regarding the role of STAG2 [1].

Please do not claim (or, rather, proselytize...) the "evidence" for sex
differences based on a Nature article most people taking positions in that
respect probably do not even quite comprehend.

[1]
[http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v13/n12/full/nrc3631.html](http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v13/n12/full/nrc3631.html)

------
plg
Not to be too cheeky here, but what was the null hypothesis? That male and
female brains would look exactly the same? Seems a bit like a so-called "straw
man" (or straw woman?) hypothesis to me.

~~~
toufka
In hard science, the null hypothesis is often 'straw-man-like', and that's
usually just fine. Because, oftentimes the straw-man haunts by being kind of
true, sometimes. Reality is so strange that doing en experiment that controls
well enough to (near-) conclusively exclude even a trivial hypothesis is a
_good_ experiment. Not the best experiment, but a good experiment.

~~~
vacri
You don't need a null hypothesis to do science. If you want to measure the
strength of the Moon's gravitational pull, no-one's going to complain that you
haven't outlined a null hypothesis.

There's all kinds of good science done that doesn't use the null hypothesis -
it's a myth that if one isn't presented, then it's "not science".

~~~
1457389
You are talking past his point, perhaps willfully...

They are saying that in hard science it is _often_ useful to start with a null
hypothesis, and report anything that diverges from that as potentially
significant (assuming statistical significance of the divergence).

------
spellboots
Oh dear, trainwreck comments here.

------
pygy_
Note that some of the differences in expression may be the result of
environmental factors.

It should also be noted that the average age at death was around 60 years old,
which means that most women were post-menopause. The effect of estrogen on
gene expression is thus underestimated.

------
1457389
It is really annoying me that biology papers so rarely use SD as opposed to
SEM. As a researcher I know the pain involved in making your hard fought data
look any less significant, but please include some SD values because otherwise
we have no clue about individual variation in the sample.

I'm just looking at all these comments saying "there is a spectrum of
individual variation" and it is infuriating that the paper offers no way to
confirm or deny this assertion, despite its importance to the conclusions.

------
egocodedinsol
Worth noting is that the median age was 58, and the minimum age was 16.
Apparently there were no differences pre-post menopause, but an interesting
question is whether gene expression, splicing, and regulatory networks are
initiated via external factors in early youth, or in development via more
automatic mechanisms.

There might be reasons this isn't the case, but it is apparently true that
maternal behavior influences which parent you express genes from in mice
([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20616232](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20616232)).
I'm not sure (and not qualified to answer) whether similar mechanisms are at
play here, but it does suggest that evolution has found a way to use early
experience to modulate genetic expression. That might be the case here, too.

------
xamebax
Citing the article: "These findings suggest that sex differences in gene
expression in human brain relate and may even help explain well-recognised
differences between men and women in disease incidence and presentation"

I think that's a useful study, since male and female organism react
differently to some illnesses (check out sex differences in heart attack
symptoms; here ignorance can literally be lethal).

What I do find funny is how quite some people here didn't bother to read the
article and, upon seeing the title, so happily shout "FINALLY! DIE FEMINISM,
DIE!" Sorry guys, wrong cue.

------
aydinghajar
I think I just read that gender impacts gene expression in the human brain.
Ummm, great that they observed evidence to to confirm that, but, duh?

------
gaussdiditfirst
There is currently very little evidence linking the measured expression of
specific genes in the brain with phenotypic traits such as personality.
Scientists find it hard enough even to link almost certainly genetic
attributes (such as various cancers and other disease) to a consistent set of
genes in analyses of differential gene expression.

------
cwaniak
What? You say men and women are not identical? I'm sure that this must be news
for Leftists over here...

------
GrahamsNumber
Stong independent womyn don't read no man's study

~~~
bluekeybox
Yea, better burn that oppressive cis-heteronormative literature before it
triggers a micro-aggression. Also don't forget to send the authors to a Gulag.

------
mudil
That's exactly why we don't have many women in tech and most readers of HN are
guys. All this political correctness and attacks on PG are simply BS: men and
women are different. Not better, not worse, just different.

It's evolution of sex, stupid.

PS. My previous comment on this topic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041221)

~~~
mudil
Those of you who downgrade my comment should put that PC stuff aside, and
consider reading about the evolution of sexuality. Such as "The Red Queen: Sex
and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How
Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.

All your wishful thinking will never make women and men the same.

~~~
acdha
You weren't downvoted for making the tautological observation that men and
women aren't the same but for attempting to use science as a cloak for shoddy
reasoning:

There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some
sort of effect but your response begs _huge_ questions such as how low-level
differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition,
how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive
abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming
is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different
individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels.

There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done
for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that
hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains
the gender distribution across an entire profession.

~~~
mudil
Maybe you should educate yourself in general evolution, and evolution of sex
in particular, and then figure out the obvious: men and women gravitate toward
different things. Women are (generally) not discriminated in tech, they just
don't gravitate towards it. They are not discriminated on HN, or in Trekkie
conventions, they are practically not present there. They don't play computer
games, they do social networking.

And when in evolution, we say "they", we don't mean any individual members, we
mean proportions. So women in general don't do some things that interest men.

Now, if you guys want society to spend effort and probably money to push women
in some roles that don't interest them (or vice versa for men), so be it. My
opinion is that doing this will not make women/men any happier or even will
not be good for society...

~~~
acdha
Your ignorance of science is matched only by your willingness to flaunt your
ignorance of what women do or do not want to do (try listening more). I'm just
glad gender is known to be such a small component of intelligence — otherwise
we'd have to worry about your posts reflecting on men in general.

