I agree, but that's the purpose-- to examine the implications of an exaggerated case. Or another example would be dog breeding-- I wonder if there are any gender-unspecific attributes (like intelligence or coat markings) that can be bred in only male dogs-- without showing up in both males and females. Dog breeders might know more about that.

Assuming there are such things-- that's very much the question.

Yes, that's just what I'm suggesting-- it might only increase the math acuity of the population as a whole, even though the situation was engineered to exert the survival pressure only on males.

I'm glad you are bringing more detailed knowledge to the table. How much do we know about the intersection of male-type development and specific flavors of human intelligence like math skills? I'd say the OP is pretty clear evidence that there isn't much, though it could also be that males and females are really not subject to significantly different survival pressures in that regard (hunting versus caregiving activities notwithstanding).

Geeze a week out on the playa and an all over tan and you guys are still on about this.

The answer is that it can go either way. Evolution uses whatever mutations come up, and a mutation for increasing mathematical intelligence could come up in a form that is sex-linked, or in a form that is not. (And we already know that fetal development of the brain is mostly the same for both sexes but does have some little differences in response to sex hormones, so examples of both sex-linked and sex-unlinked genes for something about the brain are already established.) Sometimes the same trait that was sex-linked at first can even become unlinked, or the other way around, if the creation or breaking of the link is beneficial in selection. For example, in Asian elephants, having tusks is a male trait, but in African elephants, both sexes have tusks. So whichever way it was in their last common ancestor, it had to have changed (becoming sex-linked or losing that link) in at least one of those species since then.

If we used tests to measure something about one sex or the other in our own species as you describe, so it only really matters to one sex, then the other sex would still be free to go along for the ride and be affected by the change, or not. In fact, I can give an example of it, or something like it, that doesn't seem to be connected to brain action (at least not very directly). Humans and our ancestors, over the last several million years, have kept getting more and more lightly built, with narrower bones, less muscle mass as a percentage of total mass, and smaller tendon attachment sites on the bones. Given the obvious differences between male & female skeletons & muscles, I'm sure you can see that this means we've been getting more "feminine" (at least as femininity is defined in this lineage; lions would agree, but bears and eagles would not). But it includes the men getting that way over time too!

There are only a few possible explanations. If it benefits females significantly more than males (and might not benefit males at all, as it seems to actually be detrimental), then males are just being dragged in that direction as a side effect. If it benefits both sexes about equally, then some quirk about the biochemical mechanism by which it works just happens to make it affect females more strongly than it affects males, as a side effect.

The question then would be how the mutation we're selecting for does what it does. If it responds to or is influenced by ambient hormone levels, it will be sex-linked. If it's only affected by conditions that are the same in both sexes such as the levels of certain vitamins or minerals and water and so on, then it won't. It could even appear to be sex-linked without the mechanism having anything to do with X or Y chromosomes or hormone levels. If, for example, it gave a performance boost only to people with a high or low basal metabolic rate, then it would primarily affect only one sex or the other because the male basal metabolic rate is higher than the female one (even in childhood).

That's a good uncontroversial example. In most birds and mammals there are many physical differences between the sexes apart from the reproductive organs, and also differences in behavior. Hardly anyone expects when encountering a new species of bird or mammal that the sexes will be nearly identical in form and behavior.

It's been speculated that the selection pressure was on the males because females preferred more feminine mates. Whether this is true today I leave to those more familiar with female psychology.

A more boring explanation is that when food is scarce (protein in particular) growing huge muscles is expensive and at some point the return from investing in brain development became greater than from investing in muscle development. Being able to make spears and throw them accurately, to build traps, and to use sophisticated hunting strategies may make you a more effective hunter than having huge muscles and relying on running down and beating animals to death with you bare hands.

Hunting may be over-emphasized. Gathering may have been more important than hunting. Obviously brains make you a better gatherer too, and huge muscles are less useful to a gatherer than a hunter.

Certainly there are physiological differences between men and women, that's not controversial. The question was, if we select males for math ability in the blatant and artificial way I mentioned above, would the evolutionary effects take women along "for the ride" as well, or would it not? It sounds like the answer from those with more detailed knowledge is: we don't know, because mechanisms can be considered that would do either. We're not likely to try the experiment, but my point is simply, if we don't even know the genetic consequences of such a blatant and extreme selection pressure, why should we expect genetic differences in math ability due to the incredibly flimsy suggestions we've seen on this thread?

As long as that is the case, and as long as cultural influences continue to be so obvious, and as long as the reduction of those cultural pressures results in a trend toward equalizing men's and women's math scores, I'd say it's a complete no-brainer that the hypothesis that women are innately and genetically caused to be less adept in math, either on the average or at the top end, is as completely unsubstantiated as the hypothesis that UFOs have been conducting experiments on farmers. That's pretty much all I've been saying.

But it's well known that that UFO's are conducting experiments on farmers!!! Therefore we have no choice but to conclude that men are better at math than women!!

Ken G. I don't agree with some of the ideas you have presented here on BAUT, but I think this is the best summation of the the evidence presented here so far. As a woman I have spent a good deal of my short life being treated as if being a woman in and of itself makes me less skilled at certain tasks. I have been well schooled in what is expected of me if I am to fulfill my feminine gender role. As a result, I am in complete agreement with you in the belief that culture and expected gender-roles are the basic influence on any differences that may, or may not, actually be measured.

One reason I am as adamant about genetics playing the larger role is that it has been borne out time and again in research. Twin studies, where they study twin siblings separated at birth, are quite revealing - personality, aptitude, talents, temperment, preferred spouse body type and career field - all turn out to be basically identical even though the twins were raised in vastly different environments.

And also the David/Brenda sex change case, in which one of a pair of twin boys had a botched circumcision, and they decided to raise him as a girl.

It was supposed to be the crowning achievement of the nurture supporters. If this boy could be raised alongside his twin brother as a girl, and turn out normally, then it would prove that environment is the cause of the gender roles we play.

Instead it proved exactly the opposite. Brenda was always unhappy with her assigned gender, made primarily male friends in her peer group, suffered from extreme depression, and when she learned that she had been a boy at birth opted to have a sex change to return to being a man.

After that he lived a relatively happy life.

(Edit : And since I have a feeling Ken G will try to paint this as an isolated case and thus "inadmissible" :

What about transgendered people? They ignore the gender role they are supposed to play according to society. Clearly, their gender has been programmed differently from their physical body. I can certainly think of no person who would *choose* to endure the excessive humiliation, shunning, loss of family and friends, financial ruin, and dangerous surgery that accompany the transition from one gender to another. Unless it was simply programmed in to them, and they could not feel right until their sex matched their gender.)

Maybe I'm just a product of my upbringing (pun intended) but I don't find the comparison apt at all. I asked a woman today, who happened to be a psychology major, if she thought that the idea of women and men developing different aptitudes because of hundreds of thousands of years of separate roles was a sexist idea.

I even mentioned specifically spatial acuity, sense of direction/navigation, logic, and calculation.

She agreed that this was the case based on what she'd learned in school, and that no it wasn't sexist at all, it was just reality.

She was however quick to point out the advantages that women have, in the areas of language, communication, and social relationships.

To me it seems far more credulous to disbelieve gender differences than to see them when they stare you in the face. But that's probably because I was raised in an environment where free thinking was not stifled and "politically correct" was said more as a curse than it ever was as a blessing.

Other may not have been so fortunate and I understand that. It's hard to go against what you've been raised to believe - no matter what the evidence confronting you happens to be.

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See post above concerning David/Brenda.

Gender roles are very much a genetic matter. That they are reinforced by culture certainly doesn't hurt, but in Brenda's case she was encouraged (far more than any other girl in her peer group) to normalize, but was unable to do so - her genes had programmed her to be a boy.

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Read it, but I'm unimpressed.

A botched circumcision and they raise him as a girl?? Talk about confusion!! I don't think the case a thing to do with much of anything being discussed here!! If it impresses you that's up to you, but appears to prove nothing that I can see.

A proof of genetics being more important than environmental factors.

It has everything to do with the discussion at hand. One side is advocating that culture is responsible for perceived and demonstrated differences between genders. I'm pointing out that it is clearly not the case.

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Maybe for some, but I doubt that it convinces many.


Not at all. This case has so many holes in it that it proves nothing. The individual is aware that they were born male; there could be many purely psychological reasons that account for the reactions rather than genetic predisposition. I don't expect you to agree, you want the results to prove your point, but I am unimpressed.

Do a Google search. It convinced millions.

As I already noted, the individual was not aware she/he was born male.

It was only at the age of 14 after having been forced to be a girl for all that time and refusing that his parents revealed to him the true nature of his birth.

http://www.moss-fritch.com/medical_error.htm

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I probably don't either.

Thank you, it is good to get the opinion of an expert with experience on this matter.

I guess everything I carefully described about the difference between individuals and a population slipped past you. They're different, and this thread is about populations. I doubt anyone has doubt that intellectual capabilities of individuals can be passed genetically to offspring in some cases. Male or female offspring, by the way-- that's the on-topic point you keep forgetting.

The problem is not that it is "inadmissable", it is that it is irrelevant and off topic. It comes as no surprise that males have a Y chromosome, and females do not, and there are consequences of this. The thread is about what those consequences are, as a population, and what evidence exists to make clalims about math aptitude. I don't see your recent posts advancing that issue one iota. Please try to stay on topic.
It's sad how misinformed she is. Do her the favor of letting her read the OP, and heck, the rest of the thread too. She should not labor under the misconceptions her "education" has handed her, it's very unfair to her and sets up the problem of the "self-fulfilling prophecy".
Yup, that's precisely the problem here-- you have one thing right.

The David/Brenda thing is far from the only case. I routinely hear examples of stories such as boys (usually not physically damaged or abnormal) being given dolls such as Barbies to play with and then using them as if they were toy guns or cars, because that's what they wanted play with but they weren't given any because of their parents' idealistic attempts to raise them not to be violent or macho or whatever... or kids who have access to both kinds of toys clearly choosing the stereotypical kind of their own volition... and so on. Pick on the "kids doing what they want to do" stuff all you want, but it's a bigger field of issues than just the case of David/Brenda.

* * *

There's still something I'm not getting about "the other side"'s case. It's already established that differences in the structure of the brain between males and females begin appearing in utero in response to the same early burst of sex hormones that determines whether the genitalia will develop into the female form or the male form, and that those design differences persist throughout life. If there's no biological/genetic difference in what male and female brains do, then what are the sex hormones doing to the brain so early in development, and why are they doing it if the different structural details yield no difference in results? Given a single starting point, differentiating something's design into two forms implies that the purpose is to yield two different types of functional result, so I don't understand looking at a case of design differentiation and saying that the two resulting designs are still meant to have precisely the same function. How does that logic work?

A Master's degree in psychology is hardly a "misconception" handed to her that will cripple her with a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

Being able to see reality regardless of political correctness is far from a handicap. One thing she related to me was how funny she found it when she was working at the post office while going to school. A man offered to help her lift an extremely heavy sack, then apologized and said, "Not that you can't do it yourself..."

She just laughed and said not to apologize. It's a matter of physics. A 100-pound woman will not be able to lift as much as a 200-pound man. That people are so sensitive about the topic as to apologize for offering *to help* someone, to me suggests that the entire purpose of feminism and the political correctness movements has been derailed.

The adherents to this movement can no longer see the forest because of the trees.

I will give you one thing though - even a Master's degree in psychology only covers * psychology * - IE, the origin of personality and the development of personality from childhood to adult. It does not cover what happens before birth - genetics, although it does inform quite a bit on the current consensus on the nature vs. nurture debate.

I tihnk I've made it clear what that consensus is.

However, I have little doubt if I were to confer with a geneticist (male or female) I would find the same answer.

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Quoted for truth.

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Please stay on topic. Are you saying David/Brenda was given a math exam at some point? I'm missing the relevance. Is there going to be some other evidence introduced at some point, or are we starting a new thread now?The issue of the thread is, is there any credible culturally-controlled evidence that the differences include math aptitude. That's the thread, and I thought the OP rather put the issue to bed, 19 pages ago. But in the following 19 pages, the answer is still no, no such evidence has been raised in this thread. Squat. Do you have some?

A Master's degree in psychology can certainly be just that. Do I have to trot out the PhDs to put your argument in its place? That's another thread, if you want to start it.
Another complete non sequitur. This may be hard for you to grasp, but people apologizing for lifting heavy packages does not have one single thing to do with this thread. Stay on topic, please.
Apparently, you did not read the OP. That's the consensus on the issue of the thread. I've no idea what non sequiturs you are referring to now.

Differences in brain structure are irrelevant unless it is shown to be clearly and directly relevant to the subjects in question (for instance, mathematical ability). If you assume there must be a biologically based difference, you're making an assumption that is just as bad as the so-called "PC" (or "nurture") assumption that there can be no biologically based difference.

If somebody argued that preference for the color pink is based on neurological differences between genders, would you consider that reasonable on the face of it? Or would you require careful and specific experiment, taking culture into consideration, before you accepted it?

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A basic or general structural difference should not be able to account for personal tastes or details- But it should be able to account for general tastes etc.

Breaking things down to the tiny, will still reveal chemical, electrical and physical causes for what makes that particular individual into that particular individual.
We currently are not yet that sophisticated with our scanning.

However, I do think that if we were, we would be able to tell anything about a person with a very very sophisticated scan- up to and including their favorite ice cream.

Even that would be only fleeting.

I know my favorite ice cream flavor changes periodically

And if we are then going to generalize it even more into one gender against the other- considering the minute and amazing properties of the brain...

I can only laugh.

If there are a bunch of women out there that have less mathematical aptitude than some men- I can assure you that there are a bunch of women out there that have more aptitude than some men too.

The article which is linked from the OP tells of one test which yields one result (neutrality), and another which yields a different result (boys scoring higher in math). It tries to cover up the latter with some excuses and hand-waving but does not give that kind of treatment to the former, and uses a title which only acknowledges the existence of the former. It's underwhelming.

Do you really think you can compare "the importance of genetics" with "the importance of the environment" in abstract?!

Isn't it more the case that genetics and environment have varying degrees of importance, depending on which human characteristic one is studying? And that there exists a full spectrum between, say, blood type (100% genetic) and native language (100% environmental)?

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

But remember, the real issue here is-- what controlled evidence exists that the cause of marginal signals in some math test data are due to innate genetic differences? That evidence is what is underwhelming here, in spades.

Indeed, I already suggested a good way to do this, which no one trying to make the case has seized on. Simply plot the difference in test scores against some independent measure of cultural bias against women's education, and look for a trend between the former and the latter. That trend will give a sense of the "y intercept", especially if there are cultures with little pressure, which will give a controlled measure of the innate effect. But we already know what such an exercise will reveal-- because the "y intercept" will be closest to the culture with the least bias pressure, which will be represented by the OP study, and the marginal effects we are discussing now will indicate that extrapolation to the "y axis" is going to show just what I'm claiming-- zilch.

It is likely that I'll be ignored again, but I might as well just repost the first part of my post from page 3 of this thread, since no one commented on it (though I haven't really been paying attention to the back-and-forth here), and it is still completely relevant:

For a related datapoint, Culture, Gender and Math, published in the 30 May 2008 issue of Science. Guiso et al. found that the math gender gap essentially vanishes in countries with better gender equality (as measured by a variety of independent sources), and the reading gap actually increases. If a small math gender gap still exists in the US, it may simply be because gender equality (society's treatment of women in general) hasn't been reached yet.

This result does make sense when compared with the improving test scores for various minority/immigrant populations in the US (e.g. Irish in the early 1900s, African American's in the 80's and 90's), where test scores improved as the particular group's station in life improved.

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"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

I didn't comment on that only because I didn't see it. That's exactly the kind of dataset I suspected existed. Finally, some real science, not junk, because it makes the obvious attempt to establish controls on cultural pressures.

It is the most logical case presented and I also missed it. Sorry about that Parejkoj.
All things considered, it's the only thing that makes sense- Provide equal education- you will find equally educated folks.

In the case of personality and aptitude environment has almost no contribution, because of the twin studies and gender studies that I've cited showing unequivocally that environment is little more than a distraction. You are who you are.

Environment can influence worldview (politically correct or reality-based, aggressively nationalistic or globalist) or religious bias (literal sacred text thumper vs. atheist) but as far as personality and capability those are hardwired. You can keep a person with high aptitude ignorant and we will not develop that potential. And you can give great education to a person with low aptitude and he'll develop average or slightly above average skill.

But the aptitudes themselves are not variables. Personality types are not variables. Gender (internal, not organs) is not a variable either - you're either born with an internal gender that matches your external sex, or you are born with one that is in conflict. No amount of cajoling by your environment is going to change the fact either way.

Sexuality as well. You don't "decide" to become gay or bisexual - you're born with the tendency to be attracted to the opposite, same, or both sexes. Whether you feel *guilty* about said preference is a matter of upbringing, but that's it.

The things which environment actually does affect are largely peripheral, although certainly fanaticism, self-hating, and poorly-conceived worldviews are a handicap.

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That is clearly a false inference from the twin studies. Are you saying that twin studies reveal virtually identical personalities, and nearly identical aptitudes? Please cite the studies that reached this dubious conclusion. In my poking around, I find widespread lack of consensus on the meaning of these studies, and many are just anecdotal, others involving methodological problems (like the way people associate with particular astrological signs and achieve false positives when the studies are not carefully controlled).

Now, anyone who has ever had kids knows that different kids will have different personalities and aptitudes even if they have identical environment. It's not going to come as news to anyone. The issue here is your "almost no contribution" claim.

Problem is-- how do you define and measure "aptitude", anyway? Non-environmentally, I mean. Good luck!

In particular, this thread is about math aptitude. Not personality, whatever is precisely measurable about that.

Now you're being ridiculous. The very definition of the word aptitude is "innate talent."

You can test a ten year old's IQ just as you can a 40 year old's IQ because aptitude remains the same regardless of education. You just include less advanced questions on the 10 year old's test than on the 40 year old's test to account for the gap in education.

If the 10 year old has aptitude in a certain area, even if he has not received much training in it, it will show. Same for the 40 year old. That is why we give people aptitude and IQ tests - because by and large they work.

Someone asked me to clarify why I thought genetics played the larger role in shaping a person. I explained why. If this offends you somehow, I suggest you give up the conversation because you've clearly lost perspective and will continue to be offended.

And yes, you can measure personality. You can determine someone's temperment (how often they are prone to anger), their hobby, career, and lifestyle preferences, sense of humor, etc.

When twins separated at birth develop all of those same traits, and have the same aptitudes, it's clear evidence that genetics dominates those areas. I'd suggest you stick to arguing that math aptitude in particular is not genetic - that it least is a plausible position to take. That such things as innate ability, sexuality, personality traits, etc, are determined by genetics is well-established.

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