One is tempted to respond, did anyone doubt this? But never mind.
From The Scientist , we learn that different researchers have offered different opinions:
To neurobiologist Larry Cahill’s mind, sex is the biggest factor driving brain size, so even if connectivity differs according to brain size, there is still a strong sex influence, on average, on connectivity patterns. “While we can and should debate what these findings mean,” said Cahill, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, “the findings leave little doubt that there exist striking differences in the ways in which the brains of women, on average, and men, on average, are wired.”
But Cordelia Fine, a neuropsychologist at the University of Melbourne and author of Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, said that “it’s an important and plausible possibility that these wiring differences are largely or entirely an effect of brain size, and may have little bearing on our understanding of sex differences in behavior.”
– O’Leary for News read Fine’s book and would recommend it. But Cahill is probably onto something too.
New atheist Sam Harris pointed out (correctly but dangerously) that
Violence is different for women than it is for men. Unlike men, they don’t tend to get into fistfights with strangers after an escalating series of insults. It is far more common for a woman to be attacked, physically controlled, and sexually assaulted by a man. Outside the walls of a prison, adult males almost never have to think about getting raped. For most women, rape is a very real, lifelong concern. Women also suffer from domestic violence in ways that men rarely do. Most of these differences can be explained by general disparities in size, strength, and aggressiveness between the sexes.
Um, yeah. Size does matter, especially if, for whatever reason, you want to see tomorrow, and your best bet is to just not to be there when the violence happens. Would that not help shape brain wiring over time? Probably, everybody they study is already a legal adult.
Speaking of which, the whole debate sounds like a PC hairpuller. News’d recommend just staying clear.
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