Sunday, August 23, 2020

Another Recent Study that is Consistent with my Third Law

 Since I usually focus on genetic studies, I wanted to highligtht more "Behavioral neuroscience" studies since this seems to be the fallback for the failure of genetic studies to deliver. This preprint study debunks some of the male/female brain disparity stuff. 

Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size

Here is the money quote from the abstract:

 In sum, male/female brain differences are non-binary and trivial relative to the total variance across human populations. Properly speaking, the human brain is not sexually-dimorphic.

 That we still have to debunk phrenology, just because it's repackaged in the form of MRI's is hard to fathom. I understand that one might argue that MRI ostensibly measures brain size and traditional phrenology measured the skull with implied brain size differences. But is the reason phrenology is mocked, because skull bumps don't properly measure brain bumps, or is it because measuring brains itself is folly and invariably clouded by the racist (or in these cases, sexist) biases of those doing the studies? 

Again, I'll put my Third Law of the Behavioral Genetics Fallacy here:

Differences in human behavior, intelligence and personality are not accounted for by structural or functional differences in the brain.


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