RE: Sex Differences: Do females and males have different brains?
in case you have the memory of a goldfish
Ha! Or squirrels... (I think I heard or read or made it up that they are always misplacing or can’t find their nuts - even or especially the females ;p)
About your post
This one is a bit harder to follow. My Cc is still evolving. Or something. So... the conclusion here is brain size differs. —I decided to read all the comments before commenting and got distracted—
Besides your personal search for the differences between the sexes, (feel free to elaborate on your reasons for this and maybe that is the answer) is there a point to this post...? In the sense that if men or women have different brains would that change something? Because once people do get an answer they will just use it to argue a point that is most likely subjective. Like hiring or the ability to perform a certain task.
While I’m no sicientist or any other kind of ist, based on my limited and unscientific interactions with actual humans, of varying kinds, (think metaphorically: melting pot) it seems that most humans are exactly the same in that they are infinitely different (or visa versa).
I.e. Some men I know think like some women I know. All men think exactly the same about one finite exact specific thing. Or women from this culture do or think this way almost all the time - until they experience a different way of thinking.
These are all just examples I made up to try to express how:while there may be biological, physiological differences between male and female brains, I truly believe that experience is one of the most important and influencing factors associated with human development of behavior, ability, knowledge, etc., over a lifetime.
I think you're probably right about everything you said.
When I was writing other posts in the past, be it biology or philosophy, I knew beforehand what I was driving at. This is the first time I'm actually learning as I write. So I spend a week let's say reading several papers, and then I have enough material to write a post, but that doesn't mean it all has a definite point or that it all coalesces into something specific, so sometimes it gets a bit more disorganized, like this post probably is. And then maybe the reader ends up feeling "what was the point of all this?" So this series, to an extent, could be likened to those "what I learned this week" posts. I do think that the stuff I share here tho have objective interest. Like I stated in my first post of this series, I think it's an inherently interesting topic, this whole sex differences thing.
I'm not on a personal search for differences between the sexes, I'm on a personal search of whether there are differences between the sexes and, if so, what they are. It's just among my broader interests, because I'm also very interested in the insights of feminism and consider myself a feminist.
I'm also interested in matters of love and the sexual relations between men and women, in the question whether women are more monogamous than men and men are polygynous etc. I see marriages barely holding up nowadays, everyone's on pills and has a therapist; whereas in cultures where women are decked in black and men are allowed to have many of them while they get stoned to death if they cheat, people generally seem to be in much less need of pills and have many more children than we do! I don't know, I just have an inherent interest in knowing the truth about things, and when I observe the different ways these cultures approach marriage and gender relations, I instinctively want to know which way is closer to our real nature. Europeans seem to think they got it all right, but soon we're gonna be putting crashed pills in our morning flakes in order to get by! I just think something's way wrong, and maybe the way men and women treat each other is part of the reason.
You're right about individual differences being the thing that matters most at the end of the day. It's not as if I'm gonna meet a woman for the first time and think "the average woman is x, therefore this woman is probably x". Individual differences are much greater than the average of the two sexes. An individual should be treated as an individual. If you later recognize certain characteristics in them, maybe your knowledge of sex differences will help you to understand them better.
And also these posts teach us about all these people who don't fit neatly into our preordained categories of "male" and "female", but somewhere in-between, and learning about them fosters tolerance and understanding.