New APPS

Rebecca Jordan-Young and Cordelia Fine (to name folks working in neurofeminism who will most likely be familiar to New APPS readers) are among the co-authors of this open-access article, "Plasticity, Plasticity, Plasticity … and the rigid problem of sex." The article points out two disconnects.

The first is the most obvious, the disconnect between contemporary science and pop-culture treatments: "In recent months, a new book co-authored by best-selling author John Gray hit the shelves that, like his many other books, claims there are ‘hardwired’ differences in thebrains of females and males…"

This sort of thing could occur in many domains of science. What is more interesting, and provocative, is the second disconnect they identify, within science itself, which amounts to a refusal to take plasticity seriously: 

Humans have evolved an adaptively plastic brain that is responsive to environmental conditions and experiences, and the modulation of endocrine function by those experiential factors contributes to that plasticity. Why, then, do popular understandings of female/male behavior as rooted in a biological core remain entrenched in scientific ideas characteristic of the previous century? Is it, in part, because the sex/gender science within these three fields is similarly entrenched?

The major account of sexual differentiation of the brain, brain organization theory, still posits that prenatal hormones give rise to (or ‘hardwire’) permanent structural and functional sex differences, despite considerable and long-standing evidence that early hormonal effects are not permanent (see [10]). In functional neuroimaging,  investigation of experience-dependent plasticity has only rarely been applied to the emergence, maintenance, and plasticity of gendered behavior (e.g., [11]). Instead, studies tend simply to compare the biological sexes, as though the implicit aim were to identify fixed, universal female versus male signatures [12]. Similarly, investigations of female/male differences in ‘sex hormones’ and social behavior are often correlational, with analyses implying that hormonal level is a ‘pure’ biological and causally primary variable, rather than taking into account the fact that biological factors are ‘entangled’ with the individual’s social history and current social context (see [13]). In addition, in evolutionary psychology investigations of female–male differences, it tends to be left to researchers outside the field to identify the environmental and cultural factors that are important in moderating supposedly ‘universal’ sex-related preferences (see [9,14]).