drwex | Three great new words

"neurosexism", "neurononsense", and "blobology". All from Cordelia Fine's new book "Delusions of Gender."

Review here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091002678.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzhead

I haven't read the book yet, but the review makes it seem like Fine is supporting every intuition I've had about this stuff. I hate the current fetishism with fMRIs and the attempt to use pretty colored pictures to support dubious claims of all sorts. According to the reviewer (Wray Herbert), Fine "demolish[es] the sloppy science being used today to justify gender stereotypes." Bravo, say I!

You don't usually get a lot of credit in the scientific world for doing the dirty work Fine has done of fact-checking hundreds of scientific citations, but without people doing that dirty work we'd have even more crap published as "science".

For the record, I'm still open to being convinced that there are differences between bio-male and bio-female brains. Given that our brains are neuro-chemical soups built in part by chromosomal instructions and then subjected to hormonal influences starting in the womb I'd be shocked if there weren't SOME differences. What I believe is that the evidence presented so far for such differences is at best speculative and at worst utter crap. Even if convincing evidence emerged of systematic structural differences you'd still have a long way to go in associating any such differences with anything observable such as adult behavioral tendencies.