Sex Differences In The Brain: It's Prenatal Testosterone, Not Prenatal Television
Claire Lehmann, at Quilette, interviews sex researcher and neuroscientist Deborah Soh:
Soh: Acknowledging sex differences in neuroscience is "An Issue Whose Time Has Come." The topic of sex differences in the brain is extremely important, as is the corresponding research, because they have important implications for our health and wellbeing. The denial of these differences, and thereby science, is harmful and damaging.Part of the problem is that those touting the "there are no sex differences" point of view are shouting the loudest. As I wrote in my op-ed, the no-sex differences crowd were very encouraged by a recent study which found that you can't tell male and female brains apart. This study got a lot of press and a lot of exposure. But a team of researchers re-analyzed the exact same brain data from that study -- and they were able to tell those brains apart 69-77% of the time. Another study used higher-resolution neuroimaging data and was able to tell with 93% accuracy. But these studies didn't receive the amount of publicity the first study did.
There is a large and longstanding body of research -- thousands of studies -- showing the effects of prenatal testosterone on masculinizing the brain, not to mention all of the other ways research has shown that men and women differ: brain structure, cognitive function, functional activation, personality, etc.
Sex differences have nothing to do with gender equality. I understand where people are coming from in that they fear these differences will be used to justify female oppression. But instead of distorting science, we should be challenging why female-typical traits are seen as inferior and undesirable in the first place.
Lehman: You've stated before that talking about sex differences doesn't make one sexist. I agree. Do you think that the fear of "neurosexism" is slowly going out of fashion, or is it still a prevalent concern within neuroscience?
Soh: It's still a concern. And it's a concern because this is a case of a political agenda attempting to silence legitimate science. I think it's important that we speak up against it.
It's become controversial to talk about biology. People think you're sexist if you agree that there are biological sex differences. We should never be afraid to speak the truth about facts or science, but that's the direction we're heading in.
via @PsychoSchmitt
See also.
Crid at January 23, 2017 9:57 PM
we should be challenging why female-typical traits are seen as inferior and undesirable in the first place.
Becuase women deem them so.
I'm nearly 40, and maybe its different for the generations older than me, but I grew up with the notion that everyone should be equal before the law.
Yet, the funny thing is, whenever I see another guy being insulted by women they are generally being called women by those women. Calling a guy a woman is generally the biggest insult a woman comes up with
I've seen a few truly sexist men in my time, but in my experience it is generally women who tear each other down.
lujlp at January 23, 2017 10:24 PM
People think of testosterone the wrong way though.
My favorite thing Sapolsky has ever said about testosterone is:
"Behavior drives testosterone not the other way around. Testosterone exists only to exaggerate the pre-existing social structure. It does turn "on" aggression but it turns on the volume only if it is already "on"."
How do we know what Sapolsky says is true?
The more prior experiences a male has to aggression, the less of a drop off in aggression even if we remove testosterone. What about if we add *alot* of testosterone? You still will not be able to predict who will be more aggressive by measuring testosterone levels alone. What IS a good measure of predicting aggression though? Boyhood environment.
So remember testosterone exists for amplifying what already is an established social structure. This is why young men in America don't go around beating the shit out of us despite having the same testosterone as men in other cultures who find it an amusing pastime.
(There is one mammal where the female has more testosterone than the male--Spotted Hyenas. The male gets erections only when they are terrified and stressed)
If you want further reading I highly recommend Sapolsky book on Testosterone. He also goes into an amusing story about how baboons got fat with high blood pressure eating western tourist carb ladden trash.
Ppen at January 23, 2017 11:33 PM
Hi Amy.
Crid at January 24, 2017 4:12 AM
Totally Hi there.
Crid at January 24, 2017 4:14 AM
Thanks, Ppen -- didn't know that about testosterone. It's reminiscent of the interplay between genes and environment.
Life history theory is little known outside evolutionary psychology. I've described it here before:
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2010/06/18/why_we_need_to_1.html
Growing up in a stable environment tends to trigger behaviors like saving money, waiting longer to have sex, and not having a whole bunch of children without a daddy. This is adaptive for this environment -- *as is the triggering of the opposite behaviors in an environment where life is cheap and risky.
Amy Alkon at January 24, 2017 4:16 AM
Amy, riffing on your last statement. The bit that Ppen quoted from Sapolsky seems paradoxical to me, in this manner: If behavior causes hormones, then what causes behavior? Nobody does anything without a motivation. A few human behaviors are instinctual, but the vast majority are not. It seems to circle back to the old question about how civilization came to be. If it was an evolutionary response to environment, then how was the gap bridged between the first appearance of Homo sapiens and the first civilizations?
Cousin Dave at January 24, 2017 7:26 AM
If you want to find differences between things, and do a study badly, you won't be able to tell the difference. For a sufficiently bad photo, lots of women look like Beyonce. Thus the first study that could not tell the brains apart could have been (I have no idea) done badly. "no difference" is only meaningful if you can demonstrate what degree of difference your method would allow you to detect.
Another example is studies that claimed there are no negative effects of divorce on children. They used very gross metrics such as incarceration (and I believe it was suburban kids who don't go to jail much). They didn't measure more subtle effects.
The insistence that boys and girls are identical is so absurd. I know a little boy with 3 older sisters who constantly try to calm him down, make him be more girly. It has no effect. He is a nonstop toy truck-loving, sports obsessed, tiger-obsessed boy.
Sapolsky's comments that behavior drives testosterone is only partly true. No doubt a culture can amplify the effects of testosterone, and maybe make the body produce more, but it will not make girls act like boys. Culture can only act on what is already there.
cc at January 24, 2017 8:40 AM
Excerpt from Gail Evans' Play like a Man, Win like a Woman:
The answer would be easy if men and women were born with similar instincts and were similarly socialized. But that isn’t the case. In fact, the general thinking among biogeneticists is that the social skills of males and females are inherently different. After that, according to the sociologists, they’re raised in ways that accentuate that difference.
Let me tell you about my three children, two boys and a girl, whom I was committed to raising in a thoroughly nonsexist environment. Starting from day one, I could spot gender-based disparities among them. For instance, the way in which my sons and daughters nursed: My two boys behaved alike. They sucked until their stomachs were full, they burped, filled their diapers, and promptly went to sleep. It was a quick, effortless transaction. End of story.
My daughter gave a different performance. She sucked a little, she closed her eyes, then she’d touch, reach out, feel, suck, rest, try to open her eyes, burble, suck, touch, and so on. It was clear from the earliest moment that she was interested in some kind of social relationship with me. She wanted to know who I was and where she was. The boys just wanted to get their fill.
Nurture also has a say in gender distinctions. While teaching a course on gender issues in business at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, I asked my students about the games they played as children. What was the object of the game, how many other children participated, what lessons did they take away from them, and so on?
As usual, the sharpest young man was the first to raise his hand. “I always hung around with at least a half dozen other boys,” he said. “We played games like pick-up baseball, soccer, street hockey.” He added, “The silliest question you asked was about the object of the game. We played to win. What else is there?”
“Oh, my God,” interrupted a young woman. She explained how she usually played with one, or maybe two, other girls at a time, rather than a large group, and that they were always more concerned with building a friendship than with winning. Then she told us a story about playing a game of jacks with two friends at camp. When one of the girls was about to win, they all made up new rules so they wouldn’t have to stop. “The object was to keep the game going as long as possible,” she said. “And we wanted everyone to win.”
Conan the Grammarian at January 24, 2017 10:37 AM
Sapolsky isn't saying girls= boys except culture.
He is saying people think testosterone exists to turn "on" aggression. When actually in mammals testosterone exists as a violent enforcer of existing social mores. So pre-existing social behavior is driving your reaction to testosterone. Testosterone isn't driving your behavior it is only ramping it up, turning "up" the behavior so to speak.
If we take subordinate male monkeys and give them testosterone they don't go around challenging established dominant males. They will go around beating the shit out of lower ranking male and female monkeys. But they were already doing that--except now it is at an increased volume and they become a nuisance for the troupe.
If we go around taking the testosterone levels of random men it will not be a very good predictor of aggressive behavior. It is only when we "know" the men that we can predict their reaction to increased levels of testosterone. And even if we castrate violent men, it will not stop their aggression. It will only (possibly) turn down the volume of aggression.
So Sapolsky is saying our layman's understanding of testosterone is wrong.
Ppen at January 24, 2017 10:51 AM
A couple years ago, This American Life ran an episode on testosterone.
A quote from it:
Also, women's mechanical aptitude is very nearly one standard deviation less than men's mechanical aptitude.
The patriarchy: is there anything it can't do?
Jeff Guinn at January 24, 2017 11:24 AM
It's useful to compare children with very similar genetics raised in the same home, if you had a reasonable sample size. Three kids is not a reasonable sample size.
I'm not disagreeing with the main idea here, but the fact that we don't routinely have five or more children means that we've stopped seeing the variation among them. "My boys did typical boy things," only means you didn't have the boy who was bookish or timid. "My girls did typical girl things," only means you didn't have the girl who was a tom-boy.
I only really bring this up because it seems to me that the difference in women and men's brains has wide acceptance (if not exactly expressed as such) but rather than oppressing women, there are pushes to make everyone pretend that science doesn't require detachment and objectivity or that we'll somehow be better off if all effort is communal.
As someone who "thought like a boy", at least when it came to school and classroom work, I experienced every new attempt to make school work better for girls as a direct attack on what little success I was able to claim for myself. If you're a girl and *not* good socially but you *are* good at test taking, having that rug pulled out from under you and stuffed in situations where you're going to get screwed over by group-work does not feel like "help".
Synova at January 24, 2017 11:42 AM
"I only really bring this up because it seems to me that the difference in women and men's brains has wide acceptance (if not exactly expressed as such) but rather than oppressing women, there are pushes to make everyone pretend that science doesn't require detachment and objectivity or that we'll somehow be better off if all effort is communal."
The entire global warming consensus in a nut shell.
Most of what passes for science these days really isnt. It has been packaged as such to allow mediocre thinkers to pretend that they are scientists, no matter how unscientific their area of inquiry, and their methodology.
It is also intended to paper over the incredibly non rigorous college degrees now being offered by most colleges.
Isab at January 24, 2017 12:03 PM
> The patriarchy: is there anything
> it can't do?
Excepting humility, no.
There's nothing the patriarchy can't do.
...Breastfeeding.
But excepting humility and breastfeeding, there's nothing the patriarchy can't do.
And you'll have noticed that within that vast (broad?) sector of public life presently described as "feminist," there's not a lot of humility happening, either. So that may be a human nature thing.
Crid at January 24, 2017 12:47 PM
"He is a nonstop toy truck-loving, sports obsessed, tiger-obsessed boy."
If you want to calibrate your BS filter, just ask your audience if Calvin & Hobbes would work as "Susie (Derkins) & Hobbes".
Nope. Nopity, nope, nope.
Radwaste at January 24, 2017 4:41 PM
Just to add to Ppen's comment, testosterone levels aren't the only difference between men and women. So the fact that testosterone isn't a good indicator of male violent behavior doesn't contradict that there are male/female differences. It just means testosterone levels aren't a good indicator of violent behavior.
Now, cocaine levels . . .
Ben at January 24, 2017 5:00 PM
. . . " The male gets erections only when they are terrified and stressed."
Sapolsky's been peeping in my divorce paperwork.
Canvasback at January 24, 2017 5:46 PM
Another thing that testosterone does is inspire caring behaviors and helping behaviors. It has been shown that in primitive cultures men returning from the hunt have elevated testosterone but seem motivated to share their kill. Manly men are also the ones who jump in to save someone from a burning car. The focus on "aggression" is misguided. In the suburbs at least, no one is beating their wife, but testosterone is still useful.
cc at January 25, 2017 9:02 AM
" In the suburbs at least, no one is beating their wife,"
That's because they're too bored to bother.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 25, 2017 2:05 PM
If it was an evolutionary response to environment, then how was the gap bridged between the first appearance of Homo sapiens and the first civilizations?
It was me. I bridged the gap. Figured how to go back in time and just made that gap bridgeable. Just did it, got it done. And it was tremendous, just tremendous I tell you. Best gap-bridging anyone's ever done.
President DJT at January 26, 2017 7:05 PM
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