Reddit mentions of Brain, Mind and Behavior: An Introduction to Biopsychology

First of all, webmd or whatever blogs you're using as sources are worthless.

> we actually have direct proof of immense differences in male and female brain anatomy.

It's not "immense". The average differences within each sex are larger than the average differences between sexes.

What's different is that male brains are about 10 to 15% larger than women's brains on average... even when corrected for body size (Allen, et al. 2004). However, this does not confer or imply greater intelligence (Solms and Turnbull, 2002; LeVay, 1997; Pool, 1994)

Male brains have about four billion more neurons in the cerebral cortex, however female brains have more synapses (Pakkenberg and Gundersen, 1997).

Female sensory processing is much more acute than male sensory processing. Hearing is better, sight is better, smell and taste are better. Touch shows the most disparity, with the least sensitive woman being more sensitive than the most sensitive man.

> In fact, it has been shown that males have 6.5 times as much grey matter as females while females have 9.5 times as much white matter as males.

And actually this is factually incorrect:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12725764

For all structures, male volumes were greater than female, but the gray/white (G/W) ratio was consistently higher across structures in women than men.

So actually, according to this study, female brains have more gray matter than white matter.

>Now, the research is still young, but neuroscience is currently correlating grey matter with both IQ and STEM-type problem solving and white matter/frontal lobe organization with language.

lol... so according to YOU, women should have higher IQs and more STEM-type problem solving ability then?

> It's inconceivable that given such different structures, we wouldn't see a measurable difference in both average interests and performance. Here's an interesting collection of graphs with male vs female degrees in stem fields -- note how women are least frequent in the sciences closest to physics.

And there is absolutely zero evidence that this has anything to do with the ratio of brain structures or really anything to do with neurology. And you probably know this too which is why you didn't present any.

Let's be honest here, there are cultural factors at play here, which is why we don't see a consistent percentage of gender distribution across cultures when it comes to fields of study. And we also see the gender distributions changing over time...

>Yet, this is despite the fact that because of societal affirmative action, women earn 57% of all bachelor's degrees.

Women earn more bachelor's degrees because more women go to secondary education in the first place. And the reason behind this is because women have less opportunities for higher-paying jobs right out of college, especially since a lot of those career paths have severe penalties for women due to high rates of sexual harassment (such as the armed forces).

>We also know that IQ is 75% heritable, so from the very start we can tell the issue is largely a genetic one.

You might want to read the article you linked:

>>"We should note, however, that low-income and non-white families are poorly represented in existing adoption studies as well as in most twin samples. Thus it is not yet clear whether these studies apply to the population as a whole. It remains possible that, across the full range of income and ethnicity, between-family differences have more lasting consequences for psychometric intelligence."[7]

And in fact, due to the feminization of poverty, this difference in IQ between sexes can be accounted for using this factor alone.

>Testosterone is linked to risk taking. I believe this is what's usually referred to as "aggression."

Risk taking =/= aggression. Besides, it's not enough to show that testosterone increases aggression. You have to show that the testosterone difference is significant enough to cause aggression that cannot be attributed to social or cultural factors that encourage male violence and aggression.

>There's also evidence that transgender people have different brain makeup than their original sex.

??? This statement doesn't make any sense. People who are transgender do not have an "original sex", any more than cisgender people have one. Transgender people are the same sex throughout their whole lives.

>transgenderism is a physical condition and not a mental one,

Transgenderism is a social movement for acceptance and equal rights for people who are transgender.

>and 2, that male and female brains are different enough that you can tell one from the other.

If you're a trained neuroscientist with special equipment that can detect the minor differences, yes. But you can't tell with the naked eye, because the differences aren't that much. Again, there is more variation within sexes than between sexes.

>I'm adding my example here after. The case was for David Reimer. He was, at 8 months, given a sexual reassignment surgery after a circumcision accident. His parents were told to treat him as a girl. Despite this, he always identified as male, wanted to act like a boy, and ultimately committed suicide due to this. Biology has a role, as if society molded a person, David would have identified as female.

That was one person, it doesn't mean you can conclude that therefore nobody's sexual orientation or identity is influenced by their environment. There is a reason why biological twins only have about a 50% chance of both being homosexual if at least one is homosexual... it's because there are environmental factors that contribute to sexual orientation and identity.

There are other things to consider such as the fact that our understandings of the hormones and social treatments necessary for a successful transition were incomplete at the time and the doctor there did some very bizarre and unethical things such as forcing the brothers to interact with one another and perform simulated sex acts on each other.

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Initial parts are from [Brain, Mind, and Behavior* by Alfred Ernest Jones](http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Mind-Behavior-Introduction-Biopsychology/dp/0536352054).