Are there any innate differences between men and women?

Just wondering - what's the situation with other species? Are male chimps more adept at learning how to stack boxes to reach bunches of bananas or putting different shaped pegs into the correct holes to earn a food reward? Are female chimps better at learning sign language to communicate their feelings? Or is there no difference. I suppose this isn't really relevant to a species which mostly hasn't hunted its food in packs since the dawn of agriculture and has evolved away from chimps a good bit, but still vaguely interesting.

I don't disagree at all.

I use height as an example because it is a simple thing that people can understand, where there is much variation within groups and much overlap between groups.

We've both said that brains are multi-dimensional.

Sorry, was answering Trills.

All of that is the true.

It would indeed be possible, in theory, to measure multiple neurological functions of the brain A-Z, find what the average for each function was for male and females, match them to each other and call one the average female brain and the other the average male brain.

But we can't. Because none of the averages match up with each other. Somebody who has an average female brain part A is no more likely to have an average female brain part B, or C, or D and so on. And at any point, under the right conditions, the individual with average female brain part A can experience a life event which turn out that average female brain part into an extreme male brain part. Which part are we going to pick to define the brain as female? A, C, U, Z? None of them correlate to each other so you can't make an average of the different parts.

If an average female brain was like average female height, height would work like this:

There would be no correlation in an individual between the size of different body parts. It would be entirely normal and common to be five foot eight inches tall, but have size one feet, the world's smallest torso but an exceptionally long neck, while other people who were five foot eight would have size fifteen feet, tiny legs and an enormous torso. It would no longer be possible to calculate stature from leg length, or spine length, because nothing would be related to each other. Because no individual's body parts would match to any other body part. And also, people would routinely go to bed one night and wake up the next to find their legs had grown six inches in the night but their torso had shrunk two inches. They might never change back, or they might change back at some random point.

Who in that situation has masculine legs? Who has feminine legs? If no body part correlates to each other or to overall height? It just doesn't make any sense as a concept.

Particularly when we do use the words male and female to refer to things that match with each other 99% of the time, genes, gametes and gonads.

No neurological function has any great amount of accuracy in identifying sexual dimporhism and they don't match to each other.

here is a detailed scientific review on the question.
www.careerpioneernetwork.org/wwwroot/userfiles/files/the_gender_similarities_hypothesis.pdf
www.academia.edu/download/30581130/hydescience06.pdf

from memory, the biggest differences are

• men can throw further
• men are more agressive
• men are marginally better at rotating imaginary lego blocks in their heads (real world relevance is not clear).

when it comes to maths / science / language / cognitive tasks etc, then the strong evidence favours gender similarity

Height is a thing that exists in one dimension.

"Brains" have many many dimensions, and are generally difficult to measure.

But the inability to immediately tell which group an item belongs to does not mean that there are no differences between the groups.

Are we not talking about the neurological differences between the brains of males and females?

Obviously the actual size of the brain is different, but the size of the brain does not lead to any actual differences in function.

There is no average male brain or average female brain. There is such a thing as average male height and average female height.

You can't look at a brain and say if is male or female.

And you can't measure someone's height and say if they are male or female.

That doesn't mean that average differences don't exist, just that there is a lot of overlap.

I thought testosterone leaves men with a predisposition to behave in certain ways, be able to perform certain physical tasks easier.

Women can do the same, just the males physiology is more efficient.

Risk/reward behaviors can all be socialized in or out, I'm guessing? I never bought the 'women cant think technically crap', its all exposure, boys from a young age have massively more spacial awareness 'play' than girls e.g lego v barbie so boys will get a headstart.

Women can perform equally well as men, our last CEO was a woman, they have just been held back by silly old men and other women.

In a recent study from Stanford it was shown that men's brains are blue on the inside. Fact.

Please Buffy, pretty pleeeeease look at it from a post structuralist perspective. It would be soooo much fun!

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh! MAnnie was asking about differences in brains.....

I was about to say..... if he doesn't know the difference between boys and girls by now.........

"More research is needed, says Dr Trivial Bullshit, head of the faculty of Pointless Shite at the University of Journalist Fodder"

Love this!

Oh Buffy!

Oh lummy!

m.youtube.com/watch?v=kKeKCxPApKQ

There are no neurological differences in the brains of males and females. There are differences in the physiology of the brain - amount of grey matter. But if you looked at a physical brain and studied any neurological feature, or any combination of neurological features together, it would be impossible to say whether or not that brain was from a male or female.

trills has described it best

lem i think most of us understand the concepts of basic science and clinical, and i don't think noddingoff was suggesting one was more important than the other

it's the bullshit extrapolations justifying/justified by unchallenged social "truths" that are frustrating

Petula - I prefer the journal of obscure results

If you don't think men and women are different then you are deluded. Yes there is a lot of psuedo science and the science that is often printed in the press has been misinterpreted by a mediocre journalist but the research is valid. Not all scientific research needs to be about curing disease. That attitude is niave and infuriating. My PhD was "basic"research. Avery small piece of a greater picture. Basic research is the basis upon which clinical research is based. (My research was not on sexual dimorphism). I did, in my distant past, attend a series of lectures on sexual differentiation and it was very interesting but really. You don't need a phd in neuroscience to know that men and women are different. Not in all areas. But in some and some of these are neurological. , both chemical and structural.

"Dr Trivial Bullshit, head of the faculty of Pointless Shite at the University of Journalist Fodder"

ROAR

If there were an innate difference in male and female brains, and if it were as large as the difference in heights, would even that be a reasonable basis for treating men and women (boys and girls) differently?

If we drew a line and said "everyone 5 foot 6 and under gets the girl treatment, everyone over that gets the boy aaaumptions" then looking around me at work I can see that a rather large proportion of people would end up being treated the "wrong" way.

That my best illustration for "lots of variation within the group, lots of overlap between the groups".

My stance is that there almost certainly are differences, but we don't know for sure what they are, it's very difficult to measure them, that the environment has a huge effect, and there's so much overlap as to make it pointless to try to make any decisions or take any actions based on the differences (even if you could measure them).

I suspect there may be some tiny differences but so so small as to pale into insignificance beside the normal variation between individuals. I really don't understand the intense fascination with trying to put the biggest magnifying glass possible on the subject to scrutinise any possible difference, then reporting it in the Crap Science bit of tabloid newspapers. "Scientists have discovered the perfect arse/hip ratio to light up a man's brain!!!" - with accompanying picture of a woman's arse " "Why men can't concentrate on anything more than football+beer drinking, whilst women can multitask all the housework at once" - with some crap proof that this is our genetic lot in life. "More research is needed, says Dr Trivial Bullshit, head of the faculty of Pointless Shite at the University of Journalist Fodder"
Who funds this stuff and what possible use can it have in developing proper medical treatments? Surely there's more important stuff to pay for in the field of neuroscience.
Wasn't there a fashion over 100 years ago to try to prove as many differences as possible between black and white people (with the covert agenda of "proving" that black people were stupider therefore unfit to rule their own countries or something?)