'The Female Brain'

I am a big fan of brainy females. As evidence I offer my dear wife Lee, the smartest gal I know, and Louise Riofrio (A Babe in the Universe - above) clearly a female and a brainy one at that. All my Zone Bridge partners are smart women.

I believe that women have the same general intelligence as men, as is evident on standardized tests. Male and female IQ distributions peak at the same value, but there is some evidence that the male distribution is wider, with more men than women at the very lowest end (largely men who still think Castro is cool) and at the highest end (largely neocons and physicists). On the average, males and females are just as smart, only different. Feminists have long denied the differences, but all normal people appreciate them.

Now these differences have been quantified and analyzed in a new book The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine. Many of the scientific findings validate differences we all instinctively know are true. For example, women talk more and read more than men, resulting in larger female vocabularies. The typical woman uses about 20,000 words a day while a man uses about 7,000. Men mostly look at pictures (see above) and grunt a lot.

In the chapter on the birth of the female brain, Brizendine observes:

“Common sense tells us that boys and girls behave differently. We see it every day at home, on the playground, and in classrooms. But what the culture hasn't told us is that the brain dictates these divergent behaviors. The impulses of children are so innate that they kick in even if we adults try to nudge them in another direction.”

Last year, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, told an academic conference that his young daughter, when given two trucks in another effort of gender-neutral parenting, treated them like dolls, calling one "daddy truck" and the other "baby truck". Parents of both boys and girls, or at least 97.4% of us, will nod our heads in recognition of this obvious difference. (More on the remaining 2.6% later)

Brizendine’s description of the evolution of brains in utero is fascinating.

“Imagine for a moment that you are in a microcapsule speeding up the vaginal canal, hitting warp drive through the cervix ahead of the tsunami of sperm. Once inside the uterus, you'll see a giant, undulating egg waiting for that lucky tadpole with enough moxie to penetrate the surface. Let's say the sperm that led the charge carries an X and not a Y chromosome. Voilà, the fertilized egg is a girl.

“Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female - female is nature's default gender setting. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones.

A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. Girls do not experience the testosterone surge in utero that shrinks the centers for communication, observation, and processing of emotion.”

Males and females have different brain structures. The female’s communication center and emotional memory center are bigger than the male’s. Boys generally use language to command others, get things done, brag, threaten, ignore a partner's suggestion, and override each other's attempts to speak. The testosterone-soaked boy brain simply doesn't look for social connection in the same way a girl brain does.

Males have much larger sections of the brain for action and aggression and more than 2.5 times the amount of brain space devoted to sexual drive, meaning they think about sex, on average, every 52 seconds. Drug companies make $2.5 billion a year selling sexual dysfunction drugs to men, while more women suffer from it than men. Yet the drug industry has failed women miserably, Pfizer conceding that its famous blue pill only works for men. "I hate to say it, but women are much more complex than men," said Beverly Whipple, the sex researcher who wrote The G-Spot.

Returning to the Larry Summers incident, Nancy Hopkins a biologist from MIT, walked out of the meeting, later saying leaving was the only option, otherwise "I would've either blacked out or thrown up". In an interview later she said: "It's so upsetting that all these brilliant young women are being led by a man who views them this way." Summers' real crime was when he hypothesised that genetics, more than environment, might explain the dearth of women in science and engineering, especially at the highest levels.

Now Elizabeth S. Spelke of Harvard has written “Sex Differences in Intrinsic Aptitude for Mathematics and Science? A Critical Review.” Spelke considers three claims that cognitive sex differences account for the higher numbers of men than women in high-level careers in mathematics and science: (a) males are more focused on objects from childhood and are therefore better at learning about mechanical systems; (b) males have higher spatial and numerical abilities producing greater aptitude for mathematics; and (c) males are more variable in their cognitive abilities and therefore predominate at the highest levels of mathematical talent (and the lowest). Spelke claims that research on cognitive development in human infants, preschool children, and students fail to support these claims.

You’d have to hold a graduate degree to believe this.

But there are many brainy women in science. Louise (above) is in cosmology and she developed a formula predicting that the speed of light is time dependent (slowing down). Jackie Floyd is a geophysicist at Exxon-Mobil who blogs at Element. I play bridge with Judy her mom. Mahndisa Rigmaiden is finishing her physics degree, has an interest in strings and quantum gravity and blogs at Mhandisa’s Thoughts. Christine Dantas (Brazil) is an astrophysicist with an interest in quantum gravity who blogs at Christine’s Background Independence. Risa Weschler is a Hubble Fellow at U. Chicago and JoAnn Hewett is an Assoc. Prof. at Stanford (SLAC) -- both blog at Cosmic Variance. These are some smart cookies.