from Hacker News

New Research Finds Differences Between Male and Female Brains

by draugadrotten on 6/25/24, 3:02 PM with 18 comments

• by lsy on 6/25/24, 5:16 PM

  This is a great example of the type of question-begging and junk science "deep learning models" enable. The methodology is to take time series MRI of hundreds of regions of the brain and, labeling each data point as "male" or "female", train a model to differentiate between the two, then pick out the most determinative bits. The issue, of course, is that you are searching for what you want to find. With so much data, of course there is going to be some feature that has maximal differentiating power, so it's totally unsurprising to see a result showing maximal differentiation, since that was what the model was being trained for.

  However, nothing in this points towards any intelligent conclusion… the highest differentiating region is called "R DLPFC, Subdivision A9l", with "R DLPFC, Subdivision A9/46d" coming close behind. No doubt though this will be passed around as evidence that gender disparities in professional fields and economic outcomes are biologically determined.

• by dinkleberg on 6/25/24, 5:18 PM

  No overlap is rather surprising, though as others have mentioned the article doesn't do a good job explaining what is actually being measured here.

  The idea that the male and female brains are identical has always seemed to be more grounded in political expediency rather than in reality. While there are always outliers (which is why the purported no overlap seems odd), when you actually interact with people in the real world it doesn't take long to identify behaviors and ways of thinking that are more common with either men or women.

  I suppose the root of a lot of the trouble here is that some people just suck and have to make everything a competition. If men and women are different, then one must be better than the other, right? Surely we couldn't just accept and come to understand our differences and therefore work better together.

• by johnea on 6/25/24, 7:06 PM

  This research goes into a lot of new details relating brain structure to cognitive fuunction, which I'm sure is ground breaking. But the ability to identify gender by examing the anatomy of a brain is not a new phenomenen. It's been true for decades.

  > Men and women are turning out to be different

  ? Did anyone ever really think otherwise?

  It's really sad that people are latching onto to social stigmas, like whether one wears a skirt or a business suite, and infering from that, that their physical bodies are "wrong".

  The only thing wrong is monkeys mistreating each other. Correcting that doesn't require any surgery, but somehow seems much farther out of reach.

• by beefman on 6/25/24, 5:23 PM

  Paper (no free full text, alas): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310012121

• by bluefirebrand on 6/25/24, 4:58 PM

  I don't know how legit the source is, but if this is to be believed then it's a pretty interesting finding. It seems likely to spark off some pretty big social conversations and a lot more research into this particular area

  I don't have time to dig deeper at the moment but I'm very curious about this topic

• by causi on 6/25/24, 4:59 PM

  A fascinating article but I'm not entirely clear on what is being measured. What are tSNE 1 and 2?

• by ralferoo on 6/25/24, 4:55 PM

  > The researchers found no overlap between male and female

  That's kind of a bold claim...

  EDIT: Interesting that I'm getting massively modded down by people who have clearly not even read the article. There's a bunch of graphs that show "no overlap" without any explanation of what they are actually even showing on the graphs. And then they make claims like "found no overlap between male and female" when what they actually means is "in some poorly specified tests, where they don't actually tell you what they were doing and how they determined this, they found data that was different between male and female". It also seems like the author of the article isn't grounded in statistics or he'd be calling it "no correlation" not "no overlap".

  But sure, just carry on down-voting me if you can't be bothered to actually read the article.

• by friend_and_foe on 6/26/24, 2:41 AM

  I for one am old enough to remember when this was widely accepted. It seems it's out of fashion now, but I remember progressive people talking about male and female brains and how transgender people are born with the opposite brain, and it's proven, and if you don't believe it youre a science denier. I find it just a little suspicious that nobody is willing to admit that they said this out loud, almost as if it was not about science at all.

  This just in: new research finds differences between male and female anatomy.