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Image from Prefrontal.org: The Story Behind the Atlantic Salmon

Unfortunate news for “evolutionary psychologists” who use fMRI brain scans to “prove” things about people’s gendered neural wiring. Here’s a link to a cool poster from Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, using real science and real fMRI brain scans, that “demonstrates” how different areas of a brain “light up” when the subject is asked to categorize the facial expressions of people in photographs. The brain they used was an atlantic salmon brain. A dead atlantic salmon brain!

From the introduction:

With the extreme dimensionality of functional neuroimaging data comes extreme risk for false positives. Across the 130,000 voxels in a typical fMRI volume the probability of a false positive is almost certain. ... To illustrate the magnitude of the problem we carried out a real experiment that demonstrates the danger of not correcting for chance properly.

From the discussion

Can we conclude from this data that the [dead!] salmon is engaging in the perspective-taking task? Certainly not.

Again, as always, not to say one can’t do brain research with fMRI technology. Just that it’s going to take more work than the average “evolutionary psychologist” (who, remember, may not have taken a biology class since high-school!!!) is going to have the funding, or the technical background, to use fMRI techniques to conclusively prove that, say, brain-reward circuits “exhibit a linear increase in activation with increased judgments of attractiveness.”

Again, not to say it can’t be done (it almost certainly can, now or in the not too distant future.) Or is it to say that it couldn’t be true. Just that you probably need to be able to demonstrate that the same results couldn’t be derived from a dead fish brain before we take your “conclusions” very seriously.

And yes, I did use an awful lot of scare quotes in this post.

(Via Mark Liberman. Complete discussion in a blog post from the author, Craig Bennett, here.)

It used to really annoy me when a partner (or employer!) told me I had to shave my beard and moustache and so I really don’t think anyone should tell someone else to shave his or her pubic hair. That said, While I’ve never kissed anyone with a beard so I can’t really compare it to kissing someone’s vulva who hasn’t shaved. But I have been kissed both with and without a beard and there’s… just… so much more sensation when someone kisses my face when I’ve shaved it than when I’ve had a beard. So while I probably wouldn’t shave my face because someone else told me I had to I do shave my face for me.

Turns out Mark Liberman of Language Log, before whom (eek, or is it who?!?! :-)) I often non-literally bow, had a more quantitatively sophisticated take on Ross Douthat’s New York Times misogyny than I did in my post. Leiberman says (emphasis mine.)

This is exactly what happened the last time that the Stevenson-Wolfers work was touted in the NYT: many if not most readers took generic statements about “men” and “women” to characterize general properties of the groups, or at least of most members of the groups, whereas the effect under discussion is a shift of a few percentage points, mostly accomplished by shifting the opinions of around 5 women in a hundred from “very happy” to “pretty happy”.

He said it here.

A five percent difference is small enough that if you were to overlap the graphs the difference would be roughly the size of the free edge of a well-trimmed fingernail.

Not much at all with which to hang all of feminism on, but a lovely metaphor for anti-feminism’s frantic clawing against progress.

It gets worse, by the way. As Lieberman elegantly puts it

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves “Very happy”, while 1.5% fewer reported themselves “Not too happy”.

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women’s self-reported happiness was closer to men’s, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves “Very happy”, while 0.1% fewer reported themselves “Not too happy”.

As a description of these facts, Douthat’s assertion that “In postfeminist America, men are happier than women” is, at best, bizarrely off base.

And it gets even more worse! From previous reports I’d gotten the impression the research covered the period from publication of Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique and so in my previous post I listed only earlier conservative bugaboos that Douthat could have blamed for the general decline in reported happiness had he chosen to be merely conservative instead of fractiously anti-feminist (over fractional differences no less.) Leiberman says the reporting period goes to 1972 so to this list from the early 1960s

• introduction of The Pill
• Brown vs. Board of Education
• prohibition of (forced) prayer in school
• the British Invasion (Beatles, Stones, etc.)
• industrial competition from Japan and other Asian nations
• civil rights agitation
• voting rights
• discovery of LSD by the counterculture

• the Miranda Rights decision

add the following from the 1970s and 1980s

• “stagflation
• vegetarianism
• the emergence of A-rab oil
• A-rab oil embargoes and resulting gas-price increases
• Earth day
• Pollution controls on cars
• Banning DDT
• The movie Deep Throat
• The rise of Cosmopolitan magazine (maybe not, like Douthat Cosmo is deeply anti-feminist)
• Publication of The Joy of Sex, The Happy Hooker, The Sensuous Woman, Fear of Flying, and anything by Nancy Friday.
• The introduction of the vibrator
• The mainstreaming of pornography
• The cancellation of Gunsmoke
• The death of John Wayne
• Watergate

• etc.

But no, while lesser right-wingers would have contented themselves with any or all of those possible reasons, Douthat lasered in on feminism as the only possible cause of what he wants us to see as women’s decline in happiness since 1972.

And by the way he really must specifically dislike feminism because to make his point he had to specifically disregard the nearly equal (ooh, that word!) decline in men’s happiness to do so.

But we already knew that.

Echidne of the Snakes raises and issue dear to my heart: the obsession some people have with “proving” the gender status quo.

There’s no field called ‘the study of gender or sex similarities’. No fledgling assistant professor will make tenure or get promoted by publishing an article which points out that men and women really are rather similar in some characteristic. Just imagine the sensation that would be caused by a book titled Men Are From Baltimore. Women Are From Philadelphia. Snores.

She said it here.

It occurs to me that what’s weird about researching sex differences is that so many sex differences are so freaking obvious! Like, gee, the metabolic requirements for growing eight to eleven pounds of incredibly complex new human being, and modifying and sustaining the associated maternal organs during and after pregnancy have functional impacts on other body systems including (temporarily) cognitive functions? Or that kicking a man in the groin will induce higher subsequent risk-avoidance behavior than in women? Do tell!

Some of those differences are even genetic. (The Y chromosome codes for critical-to-fetal-male-differentiating increased testosterone… and hairy ears. The X chromosome not so much. Case closed.)

Problem is no matter how much research you do you’re only going to further refine the good… oh… let’s be generous and say five percent of human biology and behavior can be explained by innate gender differences in the first place. Leaving…

The other 95 percent of commonalities that are generally overlooked. Overlooked not least by the absolutely unexamined assumptions that men and women are as different as night and day, Mars and Venus, or the deceptively convincing black and white symbols of yin and yang.

There’s a possibly-apocryphal but instructively popular anecdote about construction of one of the early cyclotrons. These are large circular machines, dozens, sometimes hundreds of feet in diameter back then, with tons of magnets that physicists use to accelerate subatomic particles to high speeds. Controlled collisions of such particles can reveal quite a lot about the nature of matter, but in order for such machines to function properly they have to be circular. Really, really, millimeter-perfect circles.

Anyway, the story goes that builders of the cyclotron measured everything meticulously at every step, using micrometers to insure that each part was aligned perfectly with its neighbor. When they turned it on… nothing happened. So they got out their micrometers again and measured and adjusted, measured and adjusted, eliminating even the fractional variations they found. And when they turned it on… nothing happened again! So out came the tools, this time even more precise… and… again nothing happened.

And, the story goes, a janitor/carpenter/passerby/kid got a stick, a string, and a pencil put the stick in the middle of the big ring, tied the string and the pencil together, and traced a big circle and found… the measured-by-millimeters circle was actually more than a foot out of round.

The point of my little digression being that, like the alleged cyclotron builders, gender-difference researchers who spend months looking for minute (or even possibly imaginary structural differences in features of the brain) might ask themselves if our brains are really so different why is it so hard to distinguish them, even with really sophisticated instrumentation, from all the parts that aren’t different…

...when the social-sciences equivalent of a stick and a string can tell you that the genes for growing noticeable-to-passers-by boobs, in combination with other individuals with genes for growing bigger muscles, in combination with social structures that historically have treated people with boobs as exchangeable commodities might explain more than you (well, not you but too many others, evidently) want to hear about the basis of significant gender differences in people with very, very similar brains?

Echidne adds,

Why does any of this matter? First, because these studies are always a defense of the status quo. That status quo is always “the worst of times and the best of times” for women; the worst because the studies have established that women really can’t (and don’t even want to be) be equal with men due to all those hard-wired (by some prehistoric electrician) sex differences, and the best because the current arrangements in the society are the best women really can hope for. But of course the status quo of the different-humors theory was different from the status quo of the late nineteenth century which is different from the status quo of today.

Second, bad just-so theories about the difference between men and women affect more than what people talk about at cocktail parties. They affect the culture and its norms, and they affect the beliefs, aspirations and self-confidence of girls and boys yet not born.

Hear, hear. Despite the decidedly non-catchy title Men Are From Baltimore. Women Are From Philadelphia would actually be a much more interesting book! Just for starters, it would start to explain how and why men, women, and those in between use the same parts of their brains to respond to differential environmental and social inputs.

There are a million different possibilities but, this being ostensibly a sex blog… and since “sex sells,” such a book might contain inquiries into (nonexistent as far as I know) studies into how heterosexual male college students react when they’re considerably outnumbered on campus by increasingly sexually-assertive heterosexual women. It might contain data about women’s reactions to partners who are sexually cooler than they are. It might compare and contrast stereotypical beliefs against the realities of men who have a hard time having orgasms and women who come “prematurely…” and lose interest before their partners are done. And in general it might spend a lot of time looking at (also next to nonexistent as far as I know) studies explaining how men, women, and people in between respond to situations where their socialized gender conditioning is screened or filtered out.

Again, I’m not saying men and women are identical — see genes for boobs, hairy ears, above. And so I’m not saying explorations of the similarities would turn up only similarities. I’m just saying I expect science to try and tell us stuff we don’t know, not to reinforce what we do. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, a great way to do that would be to begin with the assumption that we’re the same instead of different and see what comes out of that.