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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9571818" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading Rebecca Jordan-Young's 2011 book <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674063518" target="_blank">Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences</a>, and there's a lot to digest, here.I picked this one up after a discussion with a friend of mine regarding the question of nature vs. nurture with regard to men and women. Several sources were thrown around, some of which I knew (such as the January/February, 2017, issue of the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/10974547/2017/95/1-2" target="_blank">Journal of Neuroscience Research</a>, which was devoted to the "nature" aspect of the topic), and some of which I didn't, which was this book. Looking to correct that, I picked up a copy of Jordan-Young's work and started in on it.My major takeaway from this is that there's a reason why so much of the nonfiction I've read over the last two years (when I started making a dedicated effort to read more) has been in the areas of the arts, history, and "soft" sciences. Given that this book is concerned with examining neuroscience research, and so is very much in the "hard" sciences, I found it to be a slog. Not because it was difficult (it wasn't)—outside of some specific chemicals that I hadn't heard of before, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol" target="_blank">diethylstilbestrol</a>, there wasn't much here in the way of difficult vocabulary—but because I'm simply not that interested in this area (even that research journal I mentioned before was one that I'd found for work-related reasons). As such, reading through this felt like a chore, which severely dampened the enjoyment I usually take in recreational reading.Having said that, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find this book to be very interesting...though not quite convincing (or at least, not as much as the author clearly hoped). I'll try and summarize the book's basic points below:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Research on "brain organization theory" (i.e. the theory that brain hormones are responsible for the intrinsic psychosexual differences between men and women, including things such as sex-typed interests, wherein men are more aggressive and women are more nurturing, etc.) cannot be conducted as experiments per se. That's because an experiment involves control for all factors except one, and observing the changes, which cannot be done to humans where hormonal development of the brain is concerned, as that would involve unethical treatment of gestating fetuses and infants as well as an impossible-to-achieve level of isolation to control for external factors.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">As such, neurologists instead perform <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-experiment" target="_blank">quasi-experiments</a> to try and find evidence of brain organization theory in action.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Since quasi-experiments can only look at certain variables, different variables regarding the same hypothesis need to agree with each other in order to confirm that hypothesis. Since there are numerous instances of brain organization theory quasi-experiments disagreeing with each other, this threshold has not been reached where that theory is concerned.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">However, despite the lack of convincing evidence, both the scientific community and the public at large seem to be under the impression that brain organization theory is, if not proven outright, highly credible.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Those quasi-experiments that do seem to suggest that brain organization theory is real have (serious) methodological problems and/or have issues with unconscious bias on the part of the researcher(s) involved.</li> </ol>The bulk of the book is concerned with expounding on these points, particularly that last one: a large number of specific quasi-experiments are addressed in terms of their failings.Now, to be clear, Jordan-Young doesn't go quite so far as to suggest that brain organization theory has been debunked, nor does she refer to it as any sort of pseudoscience. Quite the contrary, she notes at multiple points that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Likewise, she suggests that there's good reason to posit that those differences exist, and even that they're salient (essentially echoing a statement that <a href="https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different/" target="_blank">Stanford Medicine</a> would later make when summarizing the journal I linked to above, in that "The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.")However, she does suggest that the present viewpoint(s) regarding brain organization theory are antiquated (to the point of calling it "folklore" at the end of the book) and in dire need of updating. By the last chapter, she's instead advocating for what is essentially a cyclical model whereby biology and environment are continuously shaping each other over the course of a person's life, from the womb until the day they die. Men and women have differences, she grants, but they're neither deterministic nor absolute.For my part, I think she makes a very good case...mostly.I say that because, in the course of reading this book, there were a few things which seemed (for lack of a better word) off. The major one was how the author, when noting information that didn't fit with her point, had a tendency to speculate how that information could be wrong, without actually showing that it was.For instance, in an early chapter she pulls a quote from a scientist talking about how brain organization theory became dominant around 1967 or so. That quote is in the body of the chapter, which makes it seem rather sus (as the young people of today say) that the remainder of the quote was relegated to an end note, where that same scientist notes that brain organization theory had been largely dismissed by the scientific community around 1980. Jordan-Young then spends nearly half a page speculating why that scientist would say something so obviously wrong, settling on "she's a biologist, rather than a neurologist, so she probably misread the field."Obviously I'm paraphrasing there (and for pretty much all of my characterization of this book), but that is nevertheless a less-than-evenhanded treatment of the subject, and it casts doubt on the validity of Jordan-Young's work. Worse, that's not the only time that happens; a later notation about how two of the largest surveys of the gay community in Britain found that gay men did exhibit feminized cognition compared to straight men (whereas three smaller studies didn't find that) had another long end note where Jordan-Young speculates about how those two large studies could have suffered from selection bias. She presents no evidence that they actually did, nor acknowledges the possibility that the three smaller studies suffered from selection bias; instead, she simply posits that the studies which disagree with her point might have, and leaves us to draw the conclusion.That's a problem that is infrequent, but nevertheless keeps cropping up throughout this book. It was enough to make me want to go back and look at some of the specific studies that Jordan-Young was critiquing, but that led to another problem, which was that a lot of them (particularly the older ones) are behind paywalls, so even if you wanted to go back and make your own evaluations, that's exceptionally difficult to do. I don't hold that particular gripe against this book—it's not the author's job to make those old studies available to all and sundry—but the aforementioned issue of presentation makes me reluctant to trust that salient details aren't being glossed over (which is, ironically enough, one of the major issues that Jordan-Young herself has with many of these quasi-experiments).Overall, though, this book still offered quite a bit of food for thought. I just wish the author hadn't undercut herself in presenting her points, as that serves to make the entire thing less airtight than it might otherwise have been.</blockquote>

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