This is quite a nice talk by Daphna Joel on male brains and female brains — she’s making the point that there are no such things. There are differential responses by developing brains to the environment that lead to different structures…but because it is a property of interactions between sexual factors and the environment, it’s inappropriate to call the differences simply “male” or “female”.
These are the kinds of interactions that can lead to statistical similarities within a sex, and consistent statistical differences between sexes, which fits with the known data on biological differences in the brains of males and females. Many years ago, I was involved in some microscopical grunt work on analysis of cell sizes in the nucleus magnocellularis of mice — I’d get handed the prepped brain slices, and my job was to sit for hours tallying up diameters. What I’d see is individual variation — some mice had smaller average cells than others — and that there were slight differences on average between the sexes, with a huge amount of overlap. I was doing the counts blind, but I’d also make predictions from the cell size about the sex of the mouse. Alas, I was lousy at it. The differences were not sufficiently discrete to allow one to determine sex from size, although apparently some weak correlations emerged from the stats.
But that’s exactly what you’d expect from Joel’s model. It also means that there may be other factors which play a greater role in determining the brain differences than sex, but because the whole point of this kind of experiment is to minimize the number of environmental parameters that varied, we wouldn’t see them.
I agree with the conclusion of this video — it’s a mistake to assign the cause of brain differences to the sexual genetics of the brain when we can’t distinguish that from the influence of the experiences of that brain.
Question about that;
Is there any way that we could perform experiments/research that would be able to distinguish sexual genetic effects from experiential effects (I doubt this is the right term, but I can’t think of another way to word it)? That is, without said experiment/research being obscenely unethical on every conceivable level. >_>;;
Well, what you would have to find is one set of behaviors that is independent of society, and have them linked to specific genes, that is only dominant in one sex. Good luck with your search, given the plasticity of the human brain during childhood and adolescence.
@1
I read a blog entry a long time ago about a family in Canada that was raising their child ungendered. They had gone so far as to conceal the kid’s biological sex from everyone except themselves including family. Their idea was they would raise the kid like that and let it decide what its gender preference was.
If you found a family with fraternal twins who, of their own volition chose to raise their child in that fashion, then you might be able to sign a deal with them to get some FMRI scans at developmental milestones. The challenge would be how you handle puberty since sexual characteristics would becomes socially obvious around that time unless the family did other things with the kids.
——-
An alternative might be to find special case scenarios where someone was raised as a different gender than their sex’s default. They are rare, but there are cases where liberal families have kids who are so insistent on being the opposite gender that they allow it. You could then see what characterstics an fmri study shows as being similar and different between them and population normal for their sex.
The issue both these studies would have is sample size. So mileage may vary.
Well what you do is you take some vervet monkeys and give them toys…
Could people raised in the quiverful or other cultures where the different sexes are treated and raised very differently be compared to those raised in more egalitarian cultures. I know there aren’t any fully egalitarian cultures but there are levels.
It seems to me that people at least here in the U.S. though it might hold true all over the civilized modern world that we are overly concerned with sex and race and discount all those factors PZ intimated that account for much of the differences.
We keep looking for things that corroborate our belief in the differences we look for and pick and choose in much the same way as the creationists looking for god in the world.
even if you could do a study as proposed what would you have unless you had enough data on the population as a whole and all of the influences involved you might find some correlation, which is not causation. At least that is how it looks to me.
uncle frogy
shockna @1:
Maybe a set of Fallout-style Vaults, but I doubt that’ll pass an ethics review. Your problems include:
1. Children are super-efficient culture sponges. Around age ten, most have learned the cultural attitudes around sex and alcohol; at age two, they’ve learned to associate colours with gender; and they pick up on language while still in the womb.
2. The fancy brain scanning machines you’d need are found in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries, and those people are WEIRDos, quite different from the rest of the globe. This could easily lead to cultural contamination.
3. Colonialism, global trade, and global data can lead to cultural homogenization across the planet. More than half the people living on the African continent have cell phones, for instance, and it’s predicted that three-quarters of their mobile owners will have internet plans within five years. You can’t assume they’re isolated and independent from Western culture.
Even if you could leap all those hurdles and find a biological difference between the sexes, the odds are good it wouldn’t matter. The inter-sex differences you typically hear about are all swamped by the intra-sex differences, and more precise measurements aren’t going to change that. Only two potential exceptions come to mind, throwing ability and masturbation rates, and I have my doubts about the first.
ragarth,
You are describing transgender children. There have already been small studies that have suggested that the brains of transgender individuals resemble more closely those of the cis-gendered individuals of the same gender, rather than those of the gender assigned at birth according to external genitalia.
If even those transgender people who, like me, were raised very strictly according to our assigned gender, and spent most of our adulthood trying to appear to be our assigned gender, still have brains that more closely resemble those of cis-people of our non-assigned gender, then I would imagine that children actually raised according to the gender norms of the gender they feel themselves to be would resemble the cis- version of their preferred gender even more closely.
I have very little idea how one would go about testing that hypothesis ethically; it would mean yet more trans boys being forced to grow up as girls, and more trans girls being forced to grow up as boys. We’ve already carried out that experiment, pretty much throughout history, to the great detriment of uncountable people. Let’s stop torturing people like that, shall we?
ragarth @ 1
I think you’re pretty misguided in thinking attempting to raise a child “genderless” would show much of anything. The parents would still have unconscious biases just like the rest of us and they would know the child’s gender. The child would have stresses from the expectation that they not reveal their gender. Which bathroom do they use at school, for example? What do they tell people who will inevitably want to know their gender? People outside the family will make assumptions about the child’s gender from clothes they wear or how they wear their hair or certain behaviors, etc. and treat them accordingly. I doubt that child’s experience would produce any kind of resultant brain physiology that it would be reasonable to draw any kind of conclusions from.
If you’re thinking of the same family I am, that child has older male siblings who are encouraged to pick out clothes from both the boys and girls departments. The oldest boy often wears pink or wears his hair in braids etc. He was distressed that nobody ever knows that he’s a boy. He opted to be home schooled because he didn’t like that nobody can tell he’s a boy. They were taking the kids to a zoo tour and he begged his mother to make sure the person leading the tour knew he’s a boy. So I would have serious ethical concerns about trying to do this. Forcing a child to live as gender neutral when they don’t identify that way is no different ethically than forcing a trans* child to live as their assigned gender.
Children are aware of their own gender from a very young age and begin to sort themselves accordingly. A friend has a nearly 6 year old girl whose mother kept her hair cut short (in a cut more typical for boys) until about a year ago. Because of this she was often addressed as a boy and it upset her so much that she refuses to wear pants because she wants it to be clear that she’s a girl. She was never told by her parents that only girls can wear skirts, she learned this from other children and the reaction she got from adults when she wore a skirt. There’s no real way to separate socialization from biology usefully in this context.
I have a colleague looking at brain development in mice, he found one gene specific to sex that is very important in development. It’s a hormone receptor. Unfortunately, all he had to look at were male mice and this receptor does in fact have functionality that is not sex-specific. Which is pretty much what this speaker just showed anyhow. If we don’t find it in mouse or rat models (and we haven’t yet), we’re not likely to find it in humans either. I sincerely doubt there’s anything to find at the level of gene expression.
I agree that despite their efforts, it’s very unlikely that the canadian family would be able to trully isolate the child from their own and their culture’s biases. I also suspect that in terms of gender identity, a small child’s brain is probably less plastic than an older one’s. I think it’s likely that because the brain is “emptier” of cultural and experiential stimuli, etc, a younger child’s brain is probably going to rely more heavily on the small but existing biological characteristics that affect its gender identity (which seem to be there), rather than possibly overcoming them as the brain learns new things and goes beyond what’s more basically biological and those small biological influences become even tinier and more insignificant in the ocean of new stuff that affects identity. But that’s just an opinion, really…
While reading an article about the canadian family i read the usual bullshit that gender non-conforming individuals and these families usually get flinged at them by ignorant bigots, this time in the form of:
“brainwashed into pretending that the differences between male and female don’t exist—in order to reconstruct society into some unattainable utopia of sexual and gender identicality.”
And:
“a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity—homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such ‘psychological sterilization’ is not known.”
And it struck me that in what should now be no surprise, this is an astonishing feat of projection, because that is exactly what these people making the rabid, ignorant criticisms want and not the people they are attacking them with. It’s the gender essentialists that want homogenization of each gender, bullying any variation from their ficticious norm into submission. It’s them who want two sets of identical individuals, all perfectly “male” and “female” in the image of their delusional and artificial concept. The people they are attacking don’t want a genderless world, they don’t want an homogenous society of identical copies, they want exactly the opposite, they want to tear down the artificial boundaries that we have culturally created so that each and every individual gets to be themselves without absurd limitations. That is freedom for the people that fit neatly into the cultural concepts, but also for those who don’t. The point is precisely to avoid homogenization and the systematic production of identical copies through the impossition of rigid cultural criteria, and to allow diversity to flourish.
We are living creatures, diversity is what we do…it’s in our nature.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but I’m a parent and as such I have the (dobtful) pleasure of interacting with lots of other parents and their children. One theing that will frequently happen when you talk about your children is that parents attribute almost all characteristics of their child to that child’s sex. This is most noticable when you talk to parents who have two children, one assigned male and one female. “He’s so totally different and absolutely not like his older sister”.
Duh, you’ve been treating him differently than you treated his sister. He also wasn’t born into a family where he was an only child of unexperienced parents for a long time but he was born tinto a family with more experienced parents and an older sister.
What am I supposed to say? I have two very different children, but they both identify as girls and have been assigned female at birth…
shockna @ 1,
Only someone who had not observed a baby could even ask that question. As soon as they can focus their eyes they are absorbing information. By the time they have gained some control of their neck muscles they are sucking in social information at an exponential rate like the giant information sponges they are.
We know, also, that where infants are denied this stimulation the brain develops very differently. Some parts of the brain barely develop at all.
Somehow I don’t think you’ll get ethics committee approval for your experiment.
One thing that struck me about that Canadian family trying to raise the genderless kid is a quote from the father. He said something like “when you meet a new person, you don’t ask them what’s between their legs.” But then, he’s created a situation with his kids where all anyone wants to know about them is what’s between their legs because they can’t tell by looking. By which I don’t mean to defend the idea that the kids ought to conform to gender norms but that, like it or not, society does, in fact, have expectations. It’s all good and well to try to break down gender norms but imposing that task on your young child who can’t possibly understand what you’ve signed them up for is unethical.
Exactly, Giliell! It ought to be obvious, but it’s made so invisible!
We are so swamped and permeated by these assumptions that it takes considerable conscious effort to even become aware of them – let alone perpetuate them slightly less than usual.
A lot of us here probably avoid actively stereotyping our kids as much as we can , but we’re all swimming in that ocean.
It reminds me of the gender workshop CD ran – I remember what an eye-opener it was for me when it was pointed out that a 4-year-old Shirley Temple would have had little to no agency in determining her own gender …
We start treating kids differently literally from birth based on their gender. Parents of infants identified as male will talk right over their screaming newborn and exclaim about what a great set of lungs he has, while parents of girls tend to wait til she quiets and then coo about how pretty she is.
People shown video of a baby in gender neutral clothing will perceive their emotional reactions differently based upon what gender they think the child is. For example, video of this baby reacting to a jack in the box: people who thought they were watching a girl tended to describe xir as being afraid while people who thought they were watching a boy tended to describe the reaction as angry. There was only one video/one baby. So even where parents might treat a frightened child the same regardless of the child’s gender, they’ll still unconsciously perceive children to be experiencing different emotions based on gender.
I wonder though, what makes one want a sex change, if not a factor hardwired in the brain?
tororosoba @ 17
Who said being trans* isn’t hard wired? Do you not understand the difference between learned behaviors and gender identity?
@18 If gender identity is hardwired, there is a difference between brains of different genders, I’d say.
tororosoba @ 19
Yes, very astute. Show me where anyone said that there are no differences between male and female brains.
@19: Well, yes, but that’s a rather large “if”, isn’t it?
Nobody’s saying there are zero differences at all (each mosaic of gender-coded traits being unique and all), nor that those things aren’t affected by the way you grow up and the experiences you have, only that our cultural idea that “men are men and are manly and should be in charge” is clearly a fiction.
The implications this has for folks who are trans* aren’t even discussed because one of the things to take away from the video is that “male” and “female” are not entirely discrete categories of being on a basic level and that we don’t know what they even really ARE or MEAN for the brain and its development outside the context of the culture we created around those concepts. Hence the bit at the end that you should “be yourself”, which I took to mean that we should also not pathologize people whose way of being themselves is to have a gender identity which goes against the gender identity assigned them by the larger culture.
This is how I think I understand it – I’d be grateful to be corrected:
– there are hard-wired elements in the human brain including some relating to gender
– it is genuinely impossible, not only in practice but even (I think) in theory, to distinguish a) what elements they are and b) how they relate to gender
– which is (one reason) why evo-psych as we know it is such a steaming pile of foetid horse manure.
My understanding is that culture and socialization are always going to be at work. Even if it’s possible to isolate someone from them, it would be unethical to deliberately do it. Therefor you can’t control for confounding factors if you’re trying to pin a biological cause on a particular behavior. Even where you can measure things about brain physiology or hormone levels, a lot of that can be affected by your environment and there’s no way to know to what extent because, again, we can’t isolate someone from cultural/social influences. The only test you can reasonably do is to change the culture and see what happens.
@22 – As I understand it at least, your latter two are pretty much right on but the first point is sort of a problem because, as you say, if there are such elements which relate to gender (she points out that many of the things we call “male” and “female” actually need more descriptive terms like “small”, “large”, “dense”, etc. and don’t really touch on gender as a social construct at all), it’s impossible, as you note, to know which ones they are or how they relate or how they’re affected by the experiences of the person.
Seven of Mine notes in #23 a major issue that frequently goes unacknowledged with trying to find out if something is ’caused’ by biology: the clean line people like to draw between biology and social environment isn’t real – it’s a construct and one that doesn’t really do a very good job of modeling reality. What we ingest, our exposure to solar radiation, how much time we spend sedentary versus active, what time of the day we’re awake, how much we sleep: all these and thousands of other behaviors affect our biologies, in sometimes radical ways, and all of them are at least mediated by (and in some cases almost entirely the result of) social environment.
Because we can’t raise a person in a cultural vacuum (and because even attempting to do so would be considered unethical, since it would necessarily entail denying such people the socialization necessary to function within existing human societies), the best we can do are comparative studies (cross-cultural, transhistorical) try to identify patterns linking biology and behavior that hold true across groups with very different cultural discourses. However, as Hj Hornbeck notes in #7, doesn’t actually happen all that much: nearly all research that purports to link any kind of behavior to biology is necessarily limited in its generalizability to a particular cultural-historical moment, often a rather narrow one. Even meta-analysis of similar or identical experiments performed in different countries or at different times can’t necessarily do all that much to address the problem.
Indeed, it would sometimes be impossible to test certain concepts cross-culturally. Trying to link “gender” to any kind of behavior is one such case, becasue different cultures have different ideas of gender, and not all of them are even binary. I can’t test whether observed differences between “men” and “women” here in USA hold true in a culture with three genders becasue that culture doesn’t have “men” and “women”, and substituting our categorization schema for their existing gender categorization schema is an act of colossal cultural projection that injects an insurmountable degree of bias into the research. Comparisons using individual biological metrics (say, height) are at least possible, but given the range of in-group variability, they’re not terribly useful for trying to generalize about something like gender.
@9
I wasn’t suggesting forcing a child to live that way. The question was how to do it ethically, and the only way to do such a study ethically would be to find existing cases. That was largely the point of the post. If you can find an existing set of cases that isolate what you’re interested in studying from a reasonable chunk of conflating variables, then its possible to design an ethical study.
ragarth @ 9
And my point was that you wouldn’t be eliminating nearly as many variables as you might think and probably introducing new ones.
Sorry that’s ragarth @ 26. Numbers are hard apparently.
@27
I’m not arguing that they’re *good* studies. :-)
I haven’t given much thought into how to study the issue, so the two ideas I popped up there were spur of the moment brainstorms. My reason for responding to you was just clarifying a misunderstanding. The rest of what you stated still stands, hence why I didn’t contend them in my response.
This talk by Daphna Joel on what we think of as “gender” or “sex” differences in the brain was excellent. This subject is a huge part of research related to Tourette’s Syndrome. After what I have encountered so far I’m of the opinion that nurture has a far greater impact on sex differences than most people are willing to admit, and that many traits that we associate with one sex or the other actually sort between male and female individuals when it comes to how they are expressed in personality far more often than society thinks. I have not seen a “sex hormone” or other part that relates to how the brain computes that is not shared between men and women. Lutenizing hormone for example is mostly known for how it relates to female hormone systems, but males have a standard level of that hormone as well because it’s involved in our physiology (and the levels seem to be depressed in TS). Testosterone seems to map to dominance behaviors and it looks like it performs the same function in males and females.
This field has not controlled for sex well (it’s a bit better recently), and has the bias of defaulting to studies involving male individuals when that sort of choice is made. So you will see some mentions of how male and female persons are different, and the rest of the review refers to just persons when it describes characteristics. One has to look at each study to see if “persons” are in fact all male or not and that will impact studies that involve combining data into average conclusions. Men/boys tend to be present at a 3:1 ratio with respect to women/girls in this research so male humans are over represented. There are some studies that only look at women and I am in the process of collecting as many as I can right now so I can get better at that aspect of TS research.
TS has to do with systems that involve cognition of aggression, violence, sex, and religion which I interpret as an ill-defined chunk of social behavior cognition (those are our OCB obsessions). Those features are effectively “louder” or differently present in our minds. TS more recently seems to involve neuroactive steroids, many of which are historically biased when it comes to how they are researched with respect to sex.
*Men to Women ratio, 3:1.
* Tics seem to be somewhat more common in men, while OCB (obsessive compulsive behaviors) seem more common in women.
*Women seem to experience more severe tic worsening as a function of age
*Some researchers have invoked that “masculinization of the brain” explanation
*There are widespread differences in brain structure compared to “normal” (including a lot of thinning of the cortex) and there are sex related differences in these structure changes. For example boys seem to have thinner cortex in some regions than girls (this may relate to that women having larger cortex thing in the OP).
*Patterns have been found in TS genetics that indicate some matrilinealy and patrilinealy inherited components. It’s been suggested this has to do with genomic imprinting which is solidly in the middle of the nature/nurture question.
*Boys and girls with TS are associated with increased “masculine play preferences”, associated with more gender dysphoria in girls, and associated with “masculine” performance on sex-types spatial tasks in girls.
To me the fact that TS a condition that seems to involve aggression, violence, sex and a chunk of social rule processing in both boys and girls, and girls with TS seem to prefer play that is more “masculine” as well as the boys is a good reason to look at society more than biology for the causes of the biology that relates to many “gendered” behaviors. Conditions like TS blend into the population at large until you hit “normal”. I have no provisionally accepting that the 3:1 ratio in large part reflects the fact that girls don’t get dominance and aggression experience, or experience in the social rule aspects of dominance and aggression. So fewer of them develop TS when they hit the age of seven when symptoms begin.
We simply don’t let girls be dominant and aggressive as much as boys. We certainly don’t let girls be dominant and aggressive at boys either. I think a huge amount of the pushback that outspoken women and their allies get is simply a social-emotional reaction by people that have an unconscious visceral reaction to women acting aggressive and dominant. The sheer lack of reason and logic combined with from a large part of the atheist community on this issue to me speaks of a powerful collective motivated reasoning. I can think of little else that would explain why a bunch of atheists suddenly seem to be mimicking the form of creationists and are blind to that fact.
There are differential responses by developing brains to the environment that lead to different structures…
So more exposure to pink things, and a little less roughhousing, causes, e.g., greater thickness in the corpus callosum? Really?
In #30 it should actually say,
“I have no problem provisionally accepting that the 3:1 ratio in large part reflects the fact that girls don’t get dominance and aggression experience, or experience in the social rule aspects of dominance and aggression.”
@31, Pierce R. Butler
Cheap straw enemy you have there.
Try estimating the entirety of cultural differences that will be experienced. Then try again.
OK, she makes a common error that is a pet peeve of mine: The assumption that a fetus is “default female.”
It isn’t. Sex differentiation (the hormone wash she mentions) happens at about day 53 in humans. Before then, the body is something different. For lack of a better term, it’s hermaphroditic, but even that’s a bit of a misnomer because so much is undifferentiated, being neither male nor female. Before day 53, the fetus develops all the structures needed for both male and female genitalia. At sexual differentiation, male fetuses secrete hormones that make the structures that would become the uterus and Fallopian tubes regress (Mullerian Regression Hormone) and develop the structures that will become the epididymis and vas deferens (out of the Wolffian ducts). Female fetuses, on the other hand, have the Mullerian ducts develop and the Wolffian ducts regress. The gonads are undifferentiated up until this time.
To call the undifferentiated fetus “female” is a gross mischaracterization of what’s going on. For those that claim, “But without the hormone wash of being male, the fetus will develop along female lines,” let’s look at the flip side: Mammary glands. Men have them, too. But without the hormone wash of being female, they will develop along male lines. Does that mean the genitals are “female” but the breasts are “male”? Rather that the body is more generic and being male and being female does things to the undifferentiated body.
This only goes to underscore her point: The brain is not set in stone. Things happen to it that shape it.
brianpansky @ # 33 – Try estimating the entirety of cultural differences that will be experienced.
IANA brain scientist, but what I’ve read does indicate some similar anatomic differences between the sexes, with no exceptions reported from different cultures, ages, or individual upbringing. Note for example the chart Joel provides at 7:45, which nothing in her talk challenges: differences in overall size, cortex, white/gray matter ratio, amygdala and hippocampus.
The only example she gives in any detail is that of dendritic spine density – a feature which, by her statement, can change significantly in 15 minutes. Her talk raises all kinds of questions about how scientists apparently agreed to assign gender to particular features when (if, e.g., presence/absence of a toy in the rat’s cage makes such a difference) they must have been deluged with contradictory findings.
Nothing she said, no matter how politically appealing many of us may perceive it, belies the existence of relatively large-scale sex differences in brain structure. What those differences mean seems mostly unknown, and will require immense amounts of study – as will the tendencies she points out to assign gender characteristics prematurely (at best) when the data does not justify that.
Practical observation suggests, as our esteemed host said, that plasticity and individuality are the dominant features of human brain development. Nonetheless, gender differences have their influences as well, and we should not disregard those because essentialists and social stereotyping exaggerate them.
I didn’t actually figure social information would come that fast. I don’t doubt it, but the thought hadn’t actually occurred to me. Though to be fair, I’m awful with children under 10 and try to limit exposure as much as possible. >_>
*snicker*
I somehow didn’t think so. Things like this are why I’m going into Astronomy research. It seems much easier, and less frustrating, to deal with a telescope time allocation committee than an ethics committee.
Since I was a bit cryptic about my own (speculative) thoughts, I expect whatever inherent differences exist to be miniscule compared to the effects of plasticity. Humans don’t seem to display a huge amount of sexual dimorphism, and it doesn’t seem reasonable to suggest that significant inherent brain differences exist where significant outward differences don’t. It’d just be nice to have a good study to throw in the faces of the occasional reactionary nitwit who tries to minimize the serious sexism issue in academic Physics (by claiming it’s all inherent differences). I doubt it’d change their mind, but it might at least shut them up on the “no data” claim.
shockna @36
I have 92, which should give you a start. My favorite of the bunch is still this one, however….
Hyde, Janet Shibley. “The gender similarities hypothesis.” American psychologist 60.6 (2005): 581.
… which is most effective when paired with a Cohen’s d visualizer.
@35 Pierce R. Butler
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who views this video with a touch of skepticism. Argue that there are no clear causal associations between differences in male and female brain structures and differences in human behavior and I’m in agreement. But arguing that the brain isn’t a sexually dimorphic organ seems to fly in the face of all sorts of evidence.
Oh for fuck’s fucking sake. She’s not arguing that. Nobody is fucking arguing that. She showed fucking images of differences on average between male and female brains. Why would she do that if she was trying to argue that there are no differences? The point, which of course sails right over your heads, is that you can’t just look at an image of a brain and say “yep, definitely male” or “yep, definitely female.” That we know culture and socialization are there and that they have measurable effects on brain physiology and we can’t tell where culture stops and innate biology starts so it’s fucking useless to attribute behaviors to male vs. female brains. Because it fucking is.
Jesus fucking fuck, I’m so tired of this strawman.
@20
Professor Joel seems to be making that precise point. Actually, there are no male and female brains according to her talk.
tororosoba @ 40
I asked you to show me where, not to just make the assertion again. She clearly says there are differences on average but that environmental factors can cause a measurement of a female brain to look like what you’d expect in a male brain and vice versa and that these environmental factors are at work pretty much from conception. The result is that you can’t just look at an image of a brain and know it’s male or female. You need more information. Which means it’s not very useful to talk about male brains vs. female brains. Which is not even remotely close to saying there are no differences between male and female brains.
@21
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Well, with the the first three words anyway.
So if this is about the fact that everybody has “male” and “female” aspects, it’s a bit trivial isn’t it. There are aggressive women, and there are caring men, and it would be wonderful if we all embraced both our male and female sides.
tororosoba @ 42 and elsewhere,
If you intend to continue the discussion at this “bear with me, I’m only 7” level then you’ll need to quote all the examples not just use the obvious ones as a get out of thinking card.
By the time you’ve added in the mathematical women (Lovelace, Hopper, Cartwright etc) and the woman general leading the defence of Kobane – is she still alive? – and then the women fighter pilots in the RAF in Afghanistan and several generations of women academics the you’ll see the picture is a little more nuanced.
Now, let’s include all the men who are brilliant cooks or nurses and the men who are exceptional knitters or quilters (Kaffe Fassett for a start) and the ones who lead on the caring role within the family.
Then we’ll add all the people who do not identify as male or female – be they trans* or intersex or those who simply find that having a gender as their primary identity gets in the way of their ambitions.
See what’s happening? We may now have more exceptions to the rule than we have subjects in your “study” which gets us back to exactly where Prof Joel was at the start of this discussion – that the idea of a male brain and a female brain is no use at all. It may actually prevent an understanding of what we are supposedly studying objectively.
Are you reacting to this with the idea that I’m bossy and aggressive? Yes, I’m quite good at doing both of those.
Excuse me now as I have to do the finishing on a piece of patchwork I’ve been making for a friend.
tororosoba @ various:
This is why you are arguing against a straw man:
That doesn’t say that there are no gender-based differences.
It does, however, say that we have no way of knowing what differences are inherent to gender differences, and what differences arise as a secondary consequence of the environment of gender perceptions*.
And it also says that until we can know that, assigning a specific aspect of behavior to one or the other is an error.
(*Actually, this isn’t completely true – we certainly know that discouraging a child from pursuing a specific field of learning tends to reduce their ability in that field, and we know that girls are steered away from hard sciences far more often than boys. So we know, certainly, that at least some of the gap between boys and girls in science is due to environment. What doesn’t follow is that the rest is inherent.)
These points aren’t hard to grasp unless you have your mental hands folded.
@39 Seven
You can’t look at a single image of a single isolated structure of a brain and know whether it’s male or female but based on multiple images of multiple regions then yeah, the literature would argue that you can. What you can’t do as you say is attribute specific human behaviors to innate as opposed to culturally/socially acquired differences. Had this video just been making the latter argument I’d have no problem with it.
chris61 @ 45
It was making that argument.
@46 Seven,
Let me try this one last time. I agree with the conclusion but I disagree with the argument Joel uses to support the conclusion. There ARE ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains as distinguished physically but there are too many factors contributing to human behavior to categorize any particular behavior as exclusively ‘male’ or exclusively ‘female’.
@chris61 47
Quote the specific argument.
Because if as you say there are too many factors contributing to human behavior to categorize a particular behavior as exclusively ‘male’ or ‘female’, I’m certainly not going to take an assertion that a collection of such characteristics can be forced into the same box. Experience can just as easily have shaped those structures though social bias as well.
@48 Brony
http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v14/n11/full/mp200979a.html
chris61 @ 49
At what point did professor Joel argue against anything in that paper?
@50 Seven
Professor Joel didn’t argue against anything in the paper but she did draw a conclusion ostensibly based on the paper that wasn’t supported by the data in the paper.
chris61 @ 51
…
She mentioned exactly one specific paper. It wasn’t the one you linked. What the fuck conclusion do you think she came to which contradicts the data in that paper? Did you even watch the talk? Seriously, what the fuck is your point? She did not say there are no differences between male and female brains. She, in fact, listed many differences between male and female brains, on average. Throughout the talk she spoke of men and women being remarkably similar; not identical. Then she explained that external factors can change brain physiology in certain regions from typically female to typically male and vice/versa and that everyone’s brain is, in fact, a mosaic of typically male and typically female characteristics. She explicitly said there are sex differences and they’re important but that they’re not the whole story. The point of the talk is that male vs. female is not a useful framework in which to try to understand human brains.
Quote something from the talk that you disagree with and make an actual argument in your own fucking words for why or shut the fuck up.
@ chris61
I said quote the specific argument and referred to your words. It seems strange that I need to tell you the meaning of your words but here it goes anyway. When you say “…the argument Joel uses…” I’m saying that I want you to quote what professor Joel said that you disagree with. You did precisely the opposite. If you assert that there is a problem with something specific that professor Joel said, you will need to show me specifically what she said that you are referring to in order to see if you have a point. Doing the opposite of what people need you to do to figure out what you are talking about is just plain rude.
You also happen to be speaking to someone who pays very close attention to the issue of how experience alters brain structure. There isn’t a major system that is spared some alteration in my head and the issue of cause and effect is a major one that I read about. Some of the changes are from the “cause”, and some are compensatory changes that are effects. So don’t think that I’m just going to accept someone literature dumping. You need to be able to explain the meaning and importance of the prenatal differences. If you are willing to spend the energy contradicting the important efforts to eliminate cultural bias in brain science, you are going to need to do better than what you have done so far.
*How do the prenatal differences result in specific meaningful differences in this context?
*Are you taking into account different developmental paths to the same computational abilities, paths needed because of alterations established in sex fate? (male and female human seem to have all the same cognitive abilities after all)
*Are taking into account that some of those differences will be from transgenerational inheritance effects, and that generations of shoving the sexes into specific modes of existence will be reflected in biology at some point? Additionally are you taking into account that if the social pressure was taken off of the sexes some of these differences will normalize?
@ 52 Seven
I agree with you that is the conclusion that she came to and that is the conclusion that I’m saying neither the research she was referring to nor any of the tens of thousands of other papers in the literature support.
I have listened to the talk and I’ve read the research. Have you done the latter? If so, then by all means quote from the research (the original research not someone other than the author’s interpretation of said research) where the conclusion is reached that everyone’s brain is a mosaic of typically male and typically female characteristics. Then we can discuss whether there is data to support that conclusion. I’ll be back to see how that went.
chris61 @ 54
Oh you’ve read 10s of thousands of papers have you? Bullshit. You linked one fucking paper, completely sans any commentary on why you even think it’s relevant, which not only doesn’t contradict Joel, it doesn’t even speak to her claim. You don’t even fucking understand that one paper so why the fuck would I believe you’ve read the other 49,999 Joel spoke of, let alone understood them?
@55 Seven,
Joel may have read tens of thousands of papers but she uses exactly one to justify her conclusions and I’ve read that one. Have you? If so we can discuss the merits of her conclusions.
It speaks to the claim that there is no such thing as a male or female brain or the implication that brains are so plastic that experience or social conditioning can change one into the other. I added no commentary because I thought it was obvious why it was relevant.
Your paper says there are differences. Joel says there are differences. Your paper doesn’t even mention the concept of brain plasticity. Your paper does not contradict Joel. Yes, I read the paper she cited. Quote something from it that you think contradicts her.
@53 Brony and @57 Seven
Male brains express a number of Y linked genes and are exposed to a different complement of sex hormones than female brains and no amount of transgenerational inheritance, experience, social conditioning or anything else you care to postulate will change that. That’s not to say prenatal and postnatal experience doesn’t affect brains but it doesn’t make a male brain a female brain or vice versa.
@57 Seven
Joel says the data in the paper shows male brains become more female in response to stress (or vice versa, I’m not going to listen to that damn video again!). Unless you found a different paper than I did, the authors did not come to that conclusion. Did they specifically say that wasn’t the case? Of course not so obviously I can’t quote something that contradicts her. However, if Joel considered it such a paradigm shifting conclusion that she pulls it out from the thousands of papers she read, you’d think the authors of that paper would too. They don’t because that’s not what their data, taken in their entirety and in the context of the rest of the literature show and taken in their entirety and in the context of the rest of the literature is how data should properly be interpreted.
@ chris61 58
It’s now fair to assume that you in fact did not see professor Joel say anything that you object to. Otherwise you would have no problem pointing me to a time point and giving an explanation, or typing up what she said. Since you do not have anything specific from professor Joel that bothers you I’m going to assume that you simply are having a knee-jerk emotional reaction to someone fairly pointing out that there is a lot about brain science that is colored by our biases with respect to gender.
As for the rest, I’m quite aware of how development works when it comes to gender. There are hormone spikes at many points from conception to adulthood and unless you can tie some of those spikes to more than establishment of physical sex in a meaningful way there is no reason to take you seriously. The establishment of physical gender by different events does not guarantee anything about what those signals are doing when it comes to brain development and function. There is good reason to doubt a lot of our assumptions about what constitutes “male” and “female” brains and behavior.
Men and women have levels of every hormone. Testosterone maps to dominance and competition in men and women. Men have estrogen levels. These hormones are synthesized in multiple places in the brain and body and what makes the sexual parts is not necessarily tied to anything specific in cognition.
Utterly illogical and unreasonable. Even assuming that the authors of the paper did not note the response to stress in the the way that professor Joel describes it, nothing prevents other researchers from noticing implications of research that the presenters of the research may of missed.
If you want to make this argument you need to open up the paper and show how professor Joel’s interpretation of the research is wrong. “cause the authors never mentioned it” is a terrible bit of motivated reasoning.
Your opinion is not evidence. Citation, or you bullshit.
Then shut the fuck up. No evidence you claims are dismissed without evidence.
And you problem with people dismissing unevidenced opinion is????
Chris61, your presupposition is that the gender of the brain is soley determined by genetics. That is the same type of presuppostion that creationists use, namely their imaginary deity exists. You need to back that up with some link to the scientific literature. Because brains during childhood are very plastic, including forming folds that show musical training. Why not plasticity in other structures that are used to measure gender? Which is why you must evidence your claims.
@59 Brony,
Do you suppose that every paper in the field of evolutionary biology includes the disclaimer ” this data does not support creationism” or every paper in the field of climate change or HIV includes disclaimers specifically stating the data can’t be used to support climate change or HIV denialism? Do you further suppose that in the absence of a specific disclaimer it is reasonable to cite that paper as evidence of creationism or denialism? If so then congratulations – you are a neurobiology denialist!
@60 & 61 Nerd,
Nerd your presupposition that by cherry picking a few select pieces of data from amongst a vast array of data you can refute the idea that the gender of the brain is determined by genetics is also very reminiscent of creationists. Just as evolutionary theory is supported by many lines of evidence, the observation that mammalian brains, including those of humans, exhibit sexual dimorphism is also supported by many lines of evidence. The notion that brain plasticity might turn a male brain into a female brain or vice versa is driven by ideology, not science.
You are making the extraordinary claim – I suggest you support your claim with some relevant evidence. Evidence of brain plasticity such as changes associated with musical training is not evidence of gender change.
@ chris61
Here is the paper professor Joel’s discussed.Sex differences and opposite effects of stress on dendritic spine density in the male versus female hippocampus. You now have the opportunity to see if your assumptions about the authors interpretations mean anything with respect to professor Joel’s interpretations.
Just to get a little more specific about the paper you posted.
What does this mean? Why is this important in a controversy involving social bullshit that tries to tie large swaths of human behavior to one physical sex or the other for no good reason. This is your list, why is it important? I can think of some hypotheses that make this list meaningless when it comes to what is different between the sexes.
For example men only have one x-chromosome. While most of one x-chromosome is inactivated in adult women, that barr body is not just sitting there. There is gene transcription, protein interaction and lots of other processes that might need to be accommodated in cells without two x-chromosomes.
That first gene on your list RPS4Y1 is there as a second form of RPS4, where the other form is on the X-chromosome. The two forms seem functionally identical. I’m suspecting dosage issues. Sure I could be wrong but at least I’m not pretending that this actually means anything with respect to professor Joel’s video. Can you say why this gene matters?
PCDH11Y also has a cousin on the X-chromosome. Genecards says “The protein is thought to play a role in cell-cell recognition during development of the central nervous system.” so why is this important chris61? What is this doing that you find it so important to bring up in the face of combating shitty assumptions when it comes to brains and gender? Or are you just waving it around like a cross at a vampire?
How about the rest? Can you say why they are important? Why do they matter when it comes to what people here are really worried about?
At no point has anyone here said that sex and brains are totes unrelated. The subject has been about unreasonable assumptions with respect to sex and what gets called gendered behavior. We are far more alike than we are different and if you can’t say why the differences you are pointing to actually matter with respect to professor Joel’s talk you basically let the part of your brain that responds to sex convince you to do something that looks stupid.
@ chris 61 62
You definitely have a motivated reasoning problem. You are insisting that professor Joel can not or should not have different interpretations of a paper’s data than the original authors. When we challenge a creationists interpretation of a paper we actually open it up and and show them why their interpretation is wrong.
This talk of disclaimers is another bullshit excuse to hide your obligation to explain your reasoning about why she can’t reach different interpretations, and cite parts of professor Joel’s talk that give you icky feelings. It’s not even remotely logical anyway, creationists can try to use data from papers to try to support what they believe. That it does not support what they believe is a function of reality and independent of your irrelevancies with respect to a social phenomena like a disclaimer. If you are right in your reasoning you can point to her talk, and something in the paper.
@ 64 Brony
Okay. Why does the data not support her interpretation? What does the data in that paper show? It shows that dendritic spine density changes in response to stress in both male and female adult rats. The change in males is in the opposite direction to the change in a subset of females. That subset being females in estrus (so the difference is a difference likely due to sex hormones ). Dendritic spines in females not in estrus look more like those in males although the increase in spine density in response to stress is much reduced. So changes in response to stress are different between males, females in estrus and non-estrus females. Dr. Joel’s presentation says that this change in response to stress makes a male ‘structure’ more like a female ‘structure’ (albeit a female in estrus) thus all brains are a mosaic of male and female ‘structures’ (for which she presents no evidence and nor does the paper) and so there are no male and female brains. It doesn’t follow.
Nor does your evidenceless presuppositional opinion. I agree with her interpretation not yours.
chris61 @ 58
I knew it. I knew that was your issue. The authors of the paper didn’t specifically say “male form to female form.” Even though that is, in effect what they did: the addition of stress caused brains to assume a form that was more typically associated with the opposite gender. No, fuckwit. I wouldn’t think the authors of a single paper about one very specific thing would come to the same conclusion as Joel did after reading their paper AND thousands of others and finding a trend.
chris61 @ 65
Except she doesn’t, you dishonest fuck. She read thousands of papers and saw similar things happening: specific brain structures assuming a typically opposite gendered form after some simple manipulation. From that she concluded that male vs. female is not a useful framework for understanding brains. As Brony pointed out, the fact that Joel spotted an implication in the dendrite study that the authors didn’t mention, doesn’t mean the paper doesn’t support Joel’s argument.
@ 66, 67, 68 Nerd and Seven,
The data taken from the paper
Dendritic spine density:
Male – stress ~11
Male + stress ~19
Female in estrus – stress ~9
Female in estrus + stress ~11
Female in D2 – stress ~14
Female in D2 + stress ~11
So how do you conclude that a spine density of 11 is a “male” structure (when females in estrus without stress have an even lower spine density) while a density of 19 characterizes a “female” structure (when only a female in D2 without stress has a density more than 11 and even that is significantly lower than 19) ? What a reasonable person concludes is that male and female response to stress is different in this particular measurement and moreover that the response in brains of females in estrus is different from those of females in D2.
@68 Seven
reference please to even one of those papers showing any manipulation (other than administration of sex hormones) that causes specific brain structures to assume a typically opposite gendered form such that all brains are a mosaic of male and female ‘structures’.
@ chris61
I’m still waiting on that citation from her video.
Nothing you point out here actually creates a problem for her. Her point is that since both males and females have both fewer or more numerous spines depending on the environmental interaction, neither form can really be called a “male form” or “female form”. It’s biology + experience that create patterns.
And that is the sort of thing that people like to grab on to and extend to culture without reason. Since it happens in estrus there are those that would call that pattern a “female thing” which is our concern here. The spine patterns found are still things that can be present in both males and females so referring to a “male form” or “female form” makes no sense.
Bullshit. Because the forms were things that could be present in both sexes they are literally not associated with one sex or the other. it makes no sense to refer to them as “male form” and “female form”. Her example discussing the fetus responding to the mothers stress was fine. If different parts of the rat’s brain are switching forms based on experience, speaking of a particular form as male or female makes no sense. Both the male and female offspring get a mosaic based on experience.
Also this was an example. A single example and she mentioned that there were many features of the brain that can cause a form to flip to a form normally associated with the other sex. If all the forms can be found in both sexes at different times and under different conditions the forms can’t really be called “male forms” or “female forms”.
I would agree that there is no such thing as a “male brain” or a “female brain” based on what normally gets called male and female. What do you mean by male and female beyond physical sex? Is an aggressive brain male or female? Look at my #30 again. Girls with Tourette’s also have aggression issues and have a preference for what is thought of as “masculine play”. They suffer gender dysphoria because of the conflict between a society that says they should be one thing, and their nature which wants another. All of that will be represented in anatomy at some point. Are those male or female brain structures? Neither since the existence of women with TS and their characteristics indicates that women can also have aggressive dispositions so the role of experience (socialization here) is a perfectly reasonable thing to look at. Until we understand the impact of culture associating aggression with male makes no sense based on the diversity seen in different people.
Also I screwed up my link in #63. Here it is.
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/21/16/6292.long
@ chris61
Moron. The whole point that professor Joel was making had to do with referring to structures as male or female forms. Where did she deny that the responses had differences between the sexes? The structures are not male or female.
@ chris61
Here is her paper where she outlines her argument in more detail. She cites other characteristics that she mentions.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176412/
@73 Brony,
Thank you for the link. I’ll take a look at those other characteristics though I have to say I’m not optimistic that her other examples will be any more persuasive when the single example she used to illustrate her point in her video was such an unconvincing example.
@ chris61
You don’t, fuckwit. That’s the entire fucking point, fuckwit. She used the male/female labels to illustrate her point, fuckwit. Which she explicitly said in the talk, fuckwit: that the labels don’t make sense but I will continue to use them because it illustrates the point. Which was that it doesn’t make sense to call either dense or sparse dendrites male or female since both males and females exhibit both states under the right circumstances, fuckwit.
It’s only unconvincing because you’re completely fucking invested in not being convinced by it.
This is a presuppositionalist talking. Shut up. You have no point other than your biases.
@75 Seven
And you’re completely fucking invested in being convinced by it.
@76 Nerd
Not my biases but the fact that if you gave me a few grams of fresh human brain (or mouse or rat for that matter) I could do a transcription profile and tell you whether it came from a male or a female. Arguing that brains are intersex is kind of like saying that because bats have wings or whales have fins , they must be some kind of intermediate between mammals and birds or mammals and fish.
@ chris61
So your argument now is “no u”? Q. E. fucking D. amirite?
chris61
That’s nice. Only, uhm, from the paper linked by Brony:
So it looks to me you’re kinda missing the point, chris61.
Can you use that knowledge to figure out what said brain can or cannot do?
The whole “but surely you agree that this and that is the results of genetics” argument is always a stepping stone to justifying some aspect of the status quo or current culture as a direct result. So chris61, why don’t you fucking stop beating around the bush and tell us right away what you think wimminz can’t thinky because ladybrainz. I’ve no patience for the umpteenth rendition of this opera of vagueness.
@75 Seven
Re-reading your comment @75 I see the issue. No, you can’t conclude by looking at a dendritic spine that it comes from a male or a female but you can’t extrapolate from that observation to conclude that brains are interest which is what Joel wants to do.
@79 pentatomid
Actually i think you’re missing the point. Joel says we can’t predict brain morphology based on sex and therefore brains are intersex. I would say morphology is just one line of evidence for sexual dimorphism in brains, as the fossil record is just one line of evidence supporting evolution. For brains to be considered intersex the preponderance of evidence would have to point in that direction and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t.
That is your interpretation. I read it as there isn’t a sufficient dichotomy to be able to make assignment of gender based on brain structure. Which is why your argument is presuppositional. You must see that it can show gender differences.
The cite on girls with TS if anyone wants it.
Testing the prenatal hormone hypothesis of tic-related disorders: gender identity and gender role behavior.
I’m still trying to get my own copy (it’s not a free paper). When I saw this I thought it was powerful evidence against a lot of features normally thought of as “masculine”. What is affected in TS is a cognitive system. That system normally gets tied to reactions to what is in perception in a different manner that suggests context sensitive application of aggression (among other things). That TS results in more aggression in girls and boys suggests that aggression is a natural part of both sexes. That girls with TS suffer from dysphoria suggests a reaction to how society forces them to act contrary to their natures. How aggression is expressed in humans is largely culture.
The more I read in brain science, the more similar we all get. It must be some powerful social bullshit to make people like Harris with access to the same data come to such utterly irrational assumptions.
This particular line is interesting.
I’ve seen that mental rotation ability tossed around before by men desperate to have something to use to assert superiority. I find it fascinating that in TS that pattern is flipped. It’s meaningful, but that range of ability in mental rotation is not “male” or “female” anywhere along its axis since all the patterns can be found in men and women.
@ chris61 74, 77, 81
Given that you can’t seem to be able to show what she said that you don’t like, and the fact that you had to move from what she was talking about (structures) to something she was not (responses) I’m still fine interpreting your opposition as an emotional reaction that you don’t even understand. That you approach her paper with prejudice is just icing on the cake.
Seriously. What do you think you are doing here that is useful? What injury did you feel was being done to you or society by the content of professor Joel’s argument? In #38 you are concerned about what you perceive as a denial of sex-based differences in the brain. Since the bias in our society that assumes irrational connections between sex and behavior does real damage to people, what is the damage you feel is worth preventing even though it suppresses our message?
So fucking what? Even if true would do nothing to take away from the evidence that your emotional investment is affecting your ability to defend your assertions. You still have not quoted a part of her talk. This should be trivial if there was really something in there that bothered you. Emotions in arguments don’t bother me, people can be emotional and rational and logical. Evidence that emotions have compromised one’s ability to argue does bother me. Obvious distraction is obvious.
You are changing the subject from the fact that professor Joel was discussing structures and not responses.
This observation does not even help you. If the transcription of a gene from the Y-chromosome was suppressed would you call that transcription profile the “female form”? What does this do that’s actually useful socially, since you are trying to use this as a persuasive weapon? Hell, the very paper you cited mentioned that many of these genes are present in both sexes or the other sex in other species. What will you do if it’s discovered that some of these are present in women because of translocations? Will this shatter what you think of as gender? If not then why the hell is it so important to you now? What is pointing to this doing for you?
If they are considered literal tissue level species intermediates you would be right. However, given that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny there are clear developmental forms that give meaningful information about development and relationships between species. Look up the name of this blog.
Development involves many things being switched from one form to another and there are many things currently being called “male” or “female” due to statistical distribution only. Statistics that are affected by social factors. That is a good reason to reclassify the structures as intersex because that captures the reality of the people falling outside of the mean.
Again, she is discussing describing brain structures as intersex because they are present in both sexes. From an anatomical perspective we have no reason to rule any structures as male or female. But even going to gene transcription of Y-chromosome genes (which you really don’t fucking get to do because you are then talking about things professor Joel did not) what is the fucking point? What does this pathetic display do for you? This insistence on having tangible thing that you can use to create a division is only a proxy for something else. You are doing this for a reason.
Personally I think you just don’t like seeing gender concepts challenged on a emotional level. The fact that you have to drag this into things that professor Joel did not discuss and can’t actually cite what she said that you don’t like is good evidence. The fact that you can’t get out of this general “intersex brains” and have to keep gesticulating at gene transcription when you know that the context is anatomy and determining sex based on structure is worth pointing out. She’s not even saying that there will be no structures that go along with one sex or the other exclusively, just that there are no examples now and the ones the field likes to think of as “male” or “female” are not actually male or female structures making them effectively intersex features.
Then point to a morphological feature that is limited to one sex or the other. Put your money where your mouth is. Gene transcription is a derail since she is talking anatomical and cellular morphology. Just the feature all by itself with no environmental component because the requirement of environmental effects is what professor showed is needed to actually create something that does go along with sex. That is what you need to show that she is wrong or that there are exceptions to the pattern she is demonstrating. Get out of “intersex brains” in general and acknowledge the context.
@ Brony
My point was that morphology is just one line of evidence. Gene transcription is another and taken together gene transcription and morphology (and behavioral studies) indicate brains aren’t intersex. Gene transcription would only be a derail if anatomical and cellular morphology dictate gene transcription but in fact, developmentally, gene transcription dictates anatomy, cellular morphology and the biggie, function. The fact that brain ‘structures’ show even an on average association with male and female is remarkable as far as I’m concerned. All that gene transcription (probably somewhere in the order of 15,000+ genes) being regulated both temporally and specially in a brain that at the end of development consists of several billion cells and only a very few genes that exhibit sex specific differences and nonetheless one can still see some brain structures that exhibit sexual dimorphism. That the ‘structures’ (that arise as the result of interactions between thousands of genes differentially expressed in millions of cells) are imperfectly sexually dimorphic is true but really a trivial observation (and that’s the beef I have with the video). On a population basis, male and female brains exhibit differences in terms of structure, gene expression and behavior. Just because there are people out there who think that means that the sex of a brain can be used to dictate behavior in any given individual (which it doesn’t) doesn’t mean scientists should just ignore a reality.
Which behaviors? Stop wasting time with all this round trip. What wimminz can’t thinky because ladybrainz?
Chris61, you arrogant idjit. If everybody else is telling you, you are wrong, and nobody is agreeing with you, what does it take for you to admit you are wrong?
AND YOU ARE WRONG.
@86 Nerd,
Really? Are you by chance mansplaining to me?
@85 vaiyt
In general I think ladybrainz work quite well. Menbrainz, I’m not so sure about.
chris61 @ 84
How many times are you going to need to be reminded that nobody is disagreeing with this before you stop saying it as if someone is denying it? Just give me a number and in my next post I’ll give you the required number of copies. Maybe then you’ll be ready to say something specific.
Alternatively you could just shut the fuck up.
@ chris61 84
I don’t have to accept your point because professor Joel is not talking about genes and morphology. This is about morphology and anatomy. You are asserting that genes matter to sex in brain morphology. Why should I care what sex the organism is when the method of categorization is physical appearance of cell or structure, or complex behavior of cell/structure/human? You will be ignored and we will keep acting like professor Joel is correct on this point.
We call them Medium Spiny Neurons, not “Male MSN” or “Female MSN” as a conceptual set. Do you want me to make the names pink and blue too?
It remains a derail until you demonstrate that this has to do with what professor Joel is trying to address. Especially when you still can’t quote her. We call it the Corpus Striatum, not the “Male Corpus Striatum” or “Female Corpus Striatum”. A structure present in both means the extra identifier remains independent of the morphology.
That’s a lot of meaningless information without knowing why you think this is important enough to deviate from professor Joel’s interest. Why is this a problem for calling structures intersex when you have not demonstrated that these differences are meaningful to morphology alone? Gender neutral names for morphology and anatomy that are present in both physical sexes if fine. Since the morphology as an object does not depend on the sex, it’s literally not a rule and inappropriate for a scientifically objective technical name. It’s the Default Mode Network, not “Male DMN’ or “Female DMN”.
Show me the beef. You are beef-less as of comment 84. It’s not trivial if you actually know anything about architectonics as it applies to the brain. It’s a Nerve, not a “Male Nerve” or a “Female Nerve” as a conceptual object category at it’s simplest.
The very last paragraph in 89 is me, not chris 61.
@89 Brony
This is a statement of such colossal misunderstanding of biology that I am left speechless. Have a good weekend.
chris61
You are an asshole.
Bless your heart.
chris61 still got nothing but smoke and mirrors? What a surprise. -_-
It seems the chris61brainz can only speak in vague cowardly statements.
@ chris61 91
And that is a post of such profound ignorance of the practice of biology that I hope you are nowhere near any laboratories. The need to parse apart objective things is separate from how the things get related in studying reality.
Thank you for this opportunity chris61. I rather enjoy exploring the lengths people go to when those social emotions are the only thing supporting irrational connections in reality. You came in, emotionally gesticulated in the direction of the thing you did not like, refused to say what was bothering you, tried to get us to defend things professor Joel was not talking about (and are rationally separated by how science is done), criticized things no one talked about, selectively responded to what people were saying, and flounced on out of here.
@ 95 Brony
I have no idea what that means.
Actually I explained exactly what I disagreed with about professor joel’s talk – that the data she cited did not support the conclusion she drew from it; namely that brains are intersex. If neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, molecular biology and behavioral studies were in disagreement over whether male and female brains are different then I would expect the researchers in each respective field to defend their evidence. But they aren’t in disagreement as far as I can tell. professor joel is in disagreement and I disagree with her for the reasons I’ve already stated.
We obviously share an enjoyment of watching people use emotion to defend what to each of us appears irrational. So thank you for the opportunity as well.
@ chris61
Then ask some intelligent questions. Is it the vocabulary?
What it means is that brain science has a ridiculously detailed system of describing the parts of what it studies, a system that I have had to get proficient at over the last five years. There are enough examples of cells, structures, systems and more that are technically different when you look at statistical differences between the sexes and have non-gendered names to make you look like a fool. What professor Joel describes is deciding that the structures gets given a non-gendered name (hopefully explanatory of what it is or does as generally as possible) because the structure is present in both sexes. It perfectly fits in with what already exists.
Oh fuck that bullshit. You can only disagree with specific things. You never stated your specific thing you disagreed with, and jumped to objections that had nothing to do with what she was describing. To resolve the dispute you need to point to the specific things she said. Obfuscation seems to be your goal otherwise. You make a bunch of solid looking objections because you use a lot sciency words and a paper, but you don’t post your specific objections to what she said that we can tie your objection to. That looks cowardly and dishonest.
Coward. Point out your specific quoted objection, and additionally point out the studies you are talking about. The one you pointed to is still unacceptable because dendritic spine morphology has not been tied to your paper in a meaningful sense. This boils down to “The things I have looked at don’t agree with what I think.” Human bias demands you get specific.
Without stating what you disagree with. I am allowed to disregard, reject and mock all of your contributions that are not based on a specific objection. Namely everything you have posted. If you want to use science that is still in progress to support your points, you are subject to the same standards as the professionals. Cite the specific object of your objection so we can line your objections up with it.
Seeing as I am quite happy to discuss how brain science organizes what it studies and you run away in terror from getting specific about your objections, empty social equivalencies are obvious. You are all bark and no bite.
Quote the specific portion of professor Joel’s talk you disagree with or be revealed a coward. The only reason this is not off topic is because if you can actually describe the boogieman you fear, we can proceed to see if your objections actually matter to the analysis of structures that appear in both sexes under different conditions.
QFMFT. And provide citations to the peer reviewed scientific literature to back up your objections. If you can’t/won’t do that, you are merely trolling, which I suspected very early on. And you never improved your position to that of a sincere and scientific disenter. Merely another presuppositionalist, like the MRA’s, or anti-choice fuckwits, who try to sound sciencey to fool those who don’t know how science is done.
@97 &98 Brony and Nerd
okay. you don’t care about all the data, just the data professor joel references.
from this paper by Joel
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3176412/
She wrote : For example, Shors et al. (2001) found that exposure of adult rats to acute stress (a) reversed a sex difference in the density of the apical dendritic spines of pyramidal neurons in area CA1 of the hippocampus (see Figure
Figure1A
Now go to Shors et al (2001) and look at Figure 2 which is the data she is referring to. Do the figures look the same? No they don’t. Firstly, she has taken only one set of the female data and second she has drawn the stressed male result to look just like the unstressed female result which it doesn’t. Not like either group of females. This is clearly a misrepresentation of the data. And there is your citation to the peer reviewed literature, Nerd. Or rather her citation.
@ chris61
Oh, I care about the data. It’s just that I care about relavent data much much more. If you make an assertion like,
I’m going to want some fucking justification. Like quoting the original bolded portions. I will respond to what you offered, because I can and enjoy it, but if you don’t quote what professor Joel said in her video you are still a fucking coward incapable of nothing more than growling in a random direction. We are owed it on a general human level, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave without it. I’ll be here until PZ tells us to end it, or you finally find the spine to give us what I am owed.
Yep, I see it.
That paper you linked only has one figure. Unless you mean Figure 1B, and if you do mean Figure 1B I would seriously consider giving this up as a lost cause. If you can’t realize that your opponent requires such specific information in a disagreement involving scientific data there is not much more that I can do but beat you about the logic and rationality some more.
Anybody who quotes, rather than simply links, is hiding something. I don’t have time to look at the primary literature, due to taking care of the Redhead, but your whole pattern of argument is not convincing in any way. What is obvious to me, is that you MUST have genetic based differences in brain structures at all times, no matter how plastic the brain is in reality. And, at times, those structures may become indeterminate. Which is why you aren’t believed.
@ 100 Brony
My apologies. I see that Joel’s figure 1 is not a reference to Shors et al figure 2 but to Shors et al figure 4. In figure 4 it is true that the stressed male apical dendritic spine density does look like the unstressed female although Joel has still exaggerated the difference between stressed and unstressed conditions and has failed to note that figure 4 is not showing results with all females but only females in one stage of estrus (and figure 2 showed that females in different stages of estrus have different dendritic spine densities as well as different responses to stress). The structure Joel refers to as a ‘male’ structure would actually be a male-or-female-not-in-proestrus structure were one to refer to refer to it in that manner at all, which Shors et al don’t.
As far as Joel arguing that the brain isn’t sexually dimorphic you need go no further than the title of Joel’s paper “Male or Female? Brains are Intersex” In the video I believe she refers to it as brains being a mix of male and female characteristics. I still maintain that neither Shors’ data nor the preponderance of other data in the literature support that conclusion.
@ chris61 102
For the first bolded bit, where is professor Joel exaggerating the difference? In text. Until you show me where you believe she exaggerated and why it was an exaggeration I am free to reject your feelings. The difference is simply number of spines on a dendrite. If both males and females can have few and many then number of spines as a specific feature is not a sex based pattern.
[Many Spines] and [Few Spines] are not sex related so speaking of “male form” and “female form” makes no sense if a form is an object. To see a sex relation requires other factors.
For the second bolded bit, why is it important that she did not mention this? How does this take away from her main point? She is pointing out that the idea of a “male brain” and a “female brain” is a matter of statistics. Lots of little patterns that exist in both sexes that accumulate (again, statistically) to produce different structural and functional outcomes. If these patterns are individually present in males and females the patterns themselves are not gendered, and calling the accumulation of the patterns “male” or “female” is simply wrong. Especially since the environmentally sensitive patterns (social effects are environmental) and sex insensitive patterns will be interacting with the ones that are sex sensitive.
If you cannot go to individuals with this standard in your head called “male brain” and “female brain” and actually see reality line up with it on an individual level, it’s a shitty standard. It’s useless because we don’t tend to interact with a cloud that forms an average, we interact with individuals. A valid standard gives you accuracy when you interact with individuals. So the best standard in this case is for male, female, number of spines, and stress to be separate standards that are individually considered.
Her point is totally accurate. If a structure is present in both, it’s intersex. If lots of structures are present in both, they are intersex. If the environment produces a collection of patterns in each sex, it’s not sex it’s sex + environment and both need to be in the identifier for accuracy. “The brain” is the whole fucking thing. Accuracy, which science is concerned with, requires these to be the minimal set of accurate terms that are combined into a descriptor,
male/female, stressed/unstressed, few/many, spines, estrous
You can accurately apply those individual independent terms to individual mice, and even then their reality is a spectrum of things that are standardized experimentally. There is no way in which “male brain” and “female brain” can be usefully used to functionally do anything without breaking those two words down into everything that they signify. Those terms are a statistical cloud of nature and nurture that create very real bigotry when they get used. They are functionally (as in how they are used to do work) useless bigotry. If the use of terms only grants accuracy some of the time there is discrimination and prejudice in there.
@103 Brony,
She exaggerated the differences because if you compare her dimensionless figure with the figure from Shors paper that she derived it from you will see the relative heights of the bars are not the same. Of course you may argue that by removing the dimensions and the error bars she was free to represent the data however she saw fit. If that’s your argument, then I still think it’s deliberately misleading. If you have another argument, by all means make it. The significance of ignoring the females in other stages of the reproductive cycle is that she was already looking at a structure in the brain that isn’t a marker of sexual dimorphism. As you have pointed out there are many such structures but the fact that many or even most structures/features of the brain don’t exhibit sexual dimorphism, doesn’t negate the existence of features or behaviors that do. If she wants to make the argument that neuroanatomists and electrophysiologists and molecular biologists are wrong about sexual dimorphism and the brain then she should make it using some characteristic that those researchers currently consider sexually dimorphic rather than creating a straw man argument. The conclusion of Shors paper was that in this particular region of the brain female rat brains respond differently to stress depending upon where in the reproductive cycle the female is and female brains respond differently than male brains. Not that the brain is sometimes one sex or the other or that there is an overlap between males and females but that brains of the two sexes respond differently to a specific environmental cue. Nothing Joel says or shows can reasonably be used to refute that conclusion. (In my opinion of course.)
I would disagree there are no ways in which ‘male’ brain and ‘female’ brain can be used to functionally do anything. They can hopefully be used to understand sex ratio skewing in specific neuropathologies by identifying innate versus socially acquired differences.
@ chris61 104
Well lookie what I found for you. Now you don’t have to go through the trouble of looking at her video, holding her words in your working memory, and transferring them to a page. You can do the copy/paste thing.
Seriously? She made a copy of the graph for her paper and the fact that it’s not perfectly accurate is your beef? Precisely how does her copy of the graph undercut her argument? She is speaking of relative numbers and individuals having high or low spine density. What you point out is not remotely a problem. A casual comparison of the two images side by side shows that her description of the data does not misrepresent anything, the tiny difference produces literally no problem of reason or logic. This is pathetic.
If you want to assert that she exaggerated anything you need to show consequences in text (the reason or logic problem created by the “exaggeration”).
She used it as an example of morphology that can change form between sexes, but where the same morphology can be present in both sexes. Her point is that if multiple forms of a structure are present in both sexes, they are not sexed* structures. She did not need to include the information about females in estrus to make that point.
Structures present in males and females = not sexed structures
Structures present in males, females, and females in estrus = not sexed structures.
It’s the same fucking thing in this context! No relevant information is lost! You can’t just point at a thing and insist it’s a problem without explaining your logic. Show me precisely how what she did undermines the reason or logic of what she said. Your words and the graphs right in front of me do not support your assertions.
*A physical sex alternative to gendered in this context.
No one here has said that there are no fucking sexually dimorphic structures! No one is negating anything!
The whole point is that referring to a “male brain” or a “female brain” is utterly lacking in descriptive precision, and reinforces destructive social biases. You can’t point to an organ present in both sexes and give it a term that connects the whole thing with physical sex and expect that term to have much utility that outweighs what it stereotypes. The truly sexually dimorphic features are a small part of what brains are. The terms are basically most useful to sexists and misogynists. If you disagree show me what you believe to be an acceptable use.
I can see places in her paper right now where she directly references sexually dimorphic structures. She is not making an argument against sexual dimorphism. For example,
Stop making shit up. This whole paragraph was literally a waste of your time. Consider working on your reading comprehension. If you still disagree quote where she argued against sexual dimorphism.
I used “male brain” and “female brain” with both of the words within scare quotes because the issue with professor Joel’s talk had to do with the shitty accuracy and usefulness of an archetypical “male brain” or “female brain”. It’s an idealized standard that ignores too much that is not legitimately limited to males or females. The way you just phrased it (separating the male and female) can be used to refer to an individual brain from a male or female. Acknowledge the fucking issue that I and professor Joel are actually talking about. The conceptual object is the union of the two words into a idealized measuring stick.
The parts of these conditions that actually skew the ratios will be small things compared to the rest of the organism and it’s interactions with the environment. The ratio skew will be due to the interaction of the small part(s) with the greater asexual features of the whole. Demonstrate how a “male brain” or “female brain” archetype is useful here. Such a grossly unspecific term tells me nothing useful about the ratio bias. I actually read about my own sex biased state of being for fun and profit, tourette’s syndrome. You will need more than what you present to be convincing.
@105 Brony
A transcript. How helpful! The italicized comments are from the transcript.
But then I read the paper I told you about in the beginning, the one that found that stress can change the sex of the brain, and I realized that this logic was flawed.
Of course the logic is flawed because that isn’t what the paper found : stress doesn’t change the sex of the brain.
So we can say dendrites in this region have a male form which is sparse spines and a female form which is dense spines.
No we can’t. This is where the strawman makes its appearance. Females in proestrus have a higher density of spines, not females in general.
There are no male brains and no female brains.
Therefore, their existence cannot explain fundamental differences between men and women.
I agree with the second sentence as I’ve said all along.
That is an assumption on your part, not a conclusion based on any data.
@chris61 106
So I give you a transcript and now you can point to what you don’t like. Just wow.
I can admit that her wording was bad there. It did seem to imply that the Shors 2001 paper used the “male brain” and “female brain” concept. You can believe what you want of her intentions.
I think that most reasonable explanation is a bad transition from the preceding section where she discussed all the culture that used “male brain” and “female brain” and presented the paper as that culture might see it, “changing the sex of the brain”. Her discussion of the paper in the talk from that point, and in her paper about the whole subject, does not imply this about the Shors paper. All the discussion of brains having a sex was in a cultural bias context.
@107 Brony
So we agree.
I don’t think that the concept of male and female brains can completely explain fundamental differences because too much of human behavior is acquired rather than innate. They may explain some differences though and may be important to understanding some neuropathologies. If we pretend human brains don’t show differences in the way they function and attempt to lay it all at the feet of socialization we may end up completely missing out on important insights. There was an interesting paper recently describing a finding that in humans both absolute numbers and cell density in olfactory bulbs is much higher in females than in males. New neurons apparently don’t form in human olfactory bulbs in adults so this is not a difference that will change with environment. What does it mean? I liked the headline “women smell better than men” although no doubt it’s more complicated than that.
Irrelevant. There are plenty of examples of single genes or even single amino acid changes within those genes that profoundly affect phenotype. Changes in a single gene can and often does result in changes in expression of many other genes. Of course male and female human brains are mostly unlike by virtue of being human but that doesn’t mean that the differences aren’t important. And it shouldn’t mean that just because Joel apparently thinks they aren’t important that she should play fast and loose with citing other people’s papers.
@ 107 Brony
One could have but no one did because the data didn’t and doesn’t justify it. Just Joel and she did it to create a straw man that she could then demolish. That was my point and that’s why I disagreed with her video.
Of course that should read male and female human brains are mostly alike, not unalike.