Aug 10, 2020 05:01 PM
Cyncial comment: It's a distrustful mess either way you go because the human sciences are corrupted and rife with survival requirements. In terms of needing a steady output of papers (publish or perish - replication crisis), funding procurements, career advancements and garnering promotional assets for lecture circuits. Those dangling carrots and brownie points consisting of what's fashionable in public service duties, business/industry goals, and political agendas (not to mention old-fashioned dogmas still hanging around to be catered to). A prescriptive background cluster for setting-up studies and interpreting data to satisfy or accommodate those biased incentives and reward-givers.
Science is becoming more and more like art -- where the practitioner is "creating" as much as "finding", with the former requiring novelty and/or controversial attraction to separate from the banality of the herd.
Brain scientists haven’t been able to find major differences between women’s and men’s brains, despite over a century of searching
https://theconversation.com/brain-scient...ing-143516
INTRO: People have searched for sex differences in human brains since at least the 19th century, when scientist Samuel George Morton poured seeds and lead shot into human skulls to measure their volumes. Gustave Le Bon found men’s brains are usually larger than women’s, which prompted Alexander Bains and George Romanes to argue this size difference makes men smarter. But John Stuart Mill pointed out, by this criterion, elephants and whales should be smarter than people.
So focus shifted to the relative sizes of brain regions. Phrenologists suggested the part of the cerebrum above the eyes, called the frontal lobe, is most important for intelligence and is proportionally larger in men, while the parietal lobe, just behind the frontal lobe, is proportionally larger in women. Later, neuroanatomists argued instead the parietal lobe is more important for intelligence and men’s are actually larger.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, researchers looked for distinctively female or male characteristics in smaller brain subdivisions. As a behavioral neurobiologist and author, I think this search is misguided because human brains are so varied... (MORE)
Science is becoming more and more like art -- where the practitioner is "creating" as much as "finding", with the former requiring novelty and/or controversial attraction to separate from the banality of the herd.
Brain scientists haven’t been able to find major differences between women’s and men’s brains, despite over a century of searching
https://theconversation.com/brain-scient...ing-143516
INTRO: People have searched for sex differences in human brains since at least the 19th century, when scientist Samuel George Morton poured seeds and lead shot into human skulls to measure their volumes. Gustave Le Bon found men’s brains are usually larger than women’s, which prompted Alexander Bains and George Romanes to argue this size difference makes men smarter. But John Stuart Mill pointed out, by this criterion, elephants and whales should be smarter than people.
So focus shifted to the relative sizes of brain regions. Phrenologists suggested the part of the cerebrum above the eyes, called the frontal lobe, is most important for intelligence and is proportionally larger in men, while the parietal lobe, just behind the frontal lobe, is proportionally larger in women. Later, neuroanatomists argued instead the parietal lobe is more important for intelligence and men’s are actually larger.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, researchers looked for distinctively female or male characteristics in smaller brain subdivisions. As a behavioral neurobiologist and author, I think this search is misguided because human brains are so varied... (MORE)