New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Two disconnects

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?

Jesse Prinz against the Male Warrior

Many readers will have already seen Jess Prinz’s recent blog post criticizing a psychological study defending the Male Warrior hypothesis, according to which men are evolved to seek out violent conflicts in order to get women. He now has a reply to the objections raised by two other bloggers, one of them one of the authors of the study (H/T Feminist Philosophers). I’m not sure this is appropriate language for blogging, but I just can’t help myself: Prinz is really kicking ass, there is no better way to describe it. Some excerpts:

Female sexuality on the sensory cortex

The summer holiday is officially over for me, but I haven’t been able to resume blogging on account of being in lovely Ljubljana for ESSLLI this week (today I gave a talk at the logical constants workshop). So still not much time for blogging, but there is one article which I came across last week and would like to talk about, with the admittedly not so felicitous title "Sex on the brain: What turns women on, mapped out". (Quite a change from London riots!) Here is how it starts:

It's what women have been telling men for decades: stimulating the vagina is not the same as stimulating the clitoris. Now brain scan data has added weight to their argument. The precise locations that correspond to the vagina, cervix and female nipples on the brain's sensory cortex have been mapped for the first time, proving that vaginal stimulation activates different brain regions to stimulation of the clitoris. 

Engendering Dialogue website now active; Bodies of Thought audio available

Here is the description for the Engendering Dialogue project: 

Engendering Dialogue: Feminist Thought and Contemporary Debates in Art, Science, and Education

This project is funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network Award for the Arts and Humanities. Its aim is to build links between feminist philosophers, and researchers and practitioners in other key areas of philosophical, cultural and educational debate. By targeting debates in education, the visual arts, and cognitive science (a field in which Scottish HEIs have an internationally recognised expertise), the Network will increase awareness of the significance of gender in key areas of intellectual and cultural activity as well as in the development of educational policies and practices.

Much of the work undertaken in recent feminist thought – on areas such as the body and materiality, representation and power relations, or relational identities and difference – is also relevant to key issues in the philosophy of cognitive science (particularly embodied cognition and extended mind) as well as to the concerns of contemporary artistic and educational practice. The Network aims to make space for greater dialogue in each of these areas. Three Network conferences will bring together established thinkers and practitioners with those in earlier stages of their research or practice, while the Network website will publicise and document these events, house papers, offer links to further resources, and provide an opportunity for building further connections between Network participants.

The Network is organised by Dr Rachel Jones (Philosophy, University of Dundee) together with Project Assistant Carrie Giunta (Doctoral Researcher, Philosophy, University of Dundee). For further information or to be added to the email list for the project, please contact us at: [email protected]

The audio files for the "Bodies of Thought" conference are here. A summary of the conference is reproduced below the fold.

Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences

In a number of discussions of neurofeminism, Catarina and I have expressed our admiration for Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender. Several people have recommended this new book as well, and it does look great: Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard, 2010). A well-designed website for the book is here.

Book description: Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads.

In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all.

Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. “The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure…Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.”

De-gendering vs. de-stereotyping

Alva Noë has a recent post on gender, commenting on some of the experimental results described in Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender (some readers may recall that John Protevi and I are huge fans of her work, and of this book in particular). (Btw, Noë’s post even got linked by Leiter – it’s great to see Leiter drawing attention to gender issues.) I quote from Noë’s post:

Conjure before your mind the image of a physics professor. Imagine what his life is like. Now pretend, for a few moments, that you are that person. Try to get a feel for what it is like to be him.

Now let's start anew. This time think of a cheerleader. Picture her; imagine what her life is like. Now pretend to be her. Imagine what it is like to be her.

Gender equality on the domestic front II

A few days ago I posted the first installment of a discussion of how gender inequality on the domestic front may affect gender inequality professionally. I discussed women’s limitations in terms of traveling for work, and now I will focus on similar limitations concerning professional relocation. But let me start with a caveat, which occurred to me after writing the first installment: the observations here do not pertain primarily to philosophy, in fact they seem to hold at least of the academic career in general. Indeed, traveling to conferences and the willingness to relocate so as to go after advantageous jobs seem to be part and parcel of academic work in general. So the observations offered here cannot in any way explain why gender balance in philosophy is so much worse than in other disciplines. Nevertheless, I think it is still useful to reflect for a moment on the effects of gender inequality on the domestic front, and possibly on ways to mitigate them.

In order to discuss the issue of relocation, let me start with two anecdotes. The first concerns a distinguished young philosopher/logician who is now just forming a new, exciting research center. He has hired something like ten people to get the center started, and unfortunately all of them are male. I asked him in private what he thought about it; he replied that he deeply regretted this outcome, and that he had made serious efforts to prevent this from happening, in particular by approaching several female potential candidates and encouraging them to apply for the many positions available at the center. But they would often reply that they couldn’t apply, as relocation was out of the question; their partners had jobs elsewhere. (I have to admit having been one of the female potential candidates who gave him this exact reply…) So in the end they had virtually no female candidates applying, and thus no wonder that there were no female hires.

Gary Williams: thoughts on Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender"

Williams provides some thoughtful remarks on a book we have mentioned several times lately on this blog. 

His punchline:

The only thing “essential” about the female and male brain is the essential tendency to change, adapt, and robustly respond to varying environmental conditions.

Gender equality on the domestic front I

By now, it is no news to the readers of this blog that I (among many other people) worry about the gender imbalance among professional philosophers. In several fora, and notably in the Feminist Philosophers blog, we try both to unearth the causes of imbalance, and to figure out measures that might be effective in countering it. Usually, it is features of how the profession is organized that come to the fore, in particular the possible effects of implicit biases and stereotypes. But today, I would like to outline domestic factors that may be contributing to the situation of imbalance. Lest anyone should think otherwise, I am *not* claiming that the domestic factors I will be discussing here are more significant and have more impact than the institutional factors that are usually discussed; I am also not suggesting that nothing should be done on the institutional front as long as the domestic aspects involved in gender imbalance are not redressed. But I think that, if we really want to understand what is going on, we need to look at the situation globally (I am with Eric Schliesser in disliking mono-causal explanations for social phenomena).

Actually, it was upon reading Cordelia Fine’s wonderful book that some of the vague intuitions I had on what seems to be happening on the domestic front became substantiated by her informed analysis. So let me discuss two aspects specifically, namely women’s presence at conferences, and their willingness to relocate so as to take up new jobs (the second point will be discussed in a next installment). (Also, let me add the proviso that my comments below apply mainly to heterosexual couples in a stable relationship, in particular those with children. While this is of course not the situation of many female philosophers, I take it that the proportion of women in this situation is sufficiently high for the observations here to apply to a significant number of them.)

Cordelia Fine on self-fulfilling prophecies in "neurosexism"

At the end of Chapter 16 of her Delusions of Gender (New York: Norton, 2010), the concluding chapter of the section on "neurosexism," Cordelia Fine discusses the way speculative claims about biological explanations of gendered behavioral differences always end up being refuted (and sometimes even retracted!) -- though of course with the bold claim making headlines, while the refutations that follow a few months later are buried on p. 14, below the fold. She then writes on p. 186:

But before this {the refutation] happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here, they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our mind, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.

Today's LOL moment

Courtesy of Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender (New York: Norton, 2010).

After demonstrating the weakness of the evidence allegedly supporting a link between fetal testosterone and cognitive performance, Fine writes on p. 129: 

And so it seems as though fetal testosterone has become the explanation of choice for gender inequality in science. In a 2005 conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, controversially suggested that women might be intrinsically less capable, on average, of high-level science. Fetal testosterone was rushed to the scene of the mishap. In the New Republic, Steven Pinker ...

Altriciality and gender differences in humans

I am finally reading Cordelia Fine’s ‘Delusions of Gender’, and so far enjoying it very much. She’s done a terrific job at offering a comprehensive review of the literature on the alleged biological grounds for gender differences, in particular by exposing the methodological frailness of many of the studies that claim to have identified these biological grounds. I’m so glad this book is out there; from now on, all we have to do whenever neuro-sexist discourse gets started is just to slam the book on the table.

However, I’m more than halfway, and so far the book has not mentioned the altriciality of the human species as an important factor (it is not one of the indexed terms either). I am a bit surprised, given that I take altriciality to be one of the strongest arguments against the existence of fundamental, biological gender differences in the human species, in particular but not exclusively with respect to parenting. For those of you whose biology classes were too long ago, let me remind you that altriciality, which literally means "requiring nourishment", refers to a pattern of growth and development in organisms which are incapable of moving around on their own soon after hatching or being born. It refers to the need for newborns to be fed and taken care of for a long duration before they are viable individuals on their own (Gould talks a lot about the altriciality of humans in his 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny'). Now, as any parent knows, human babies are pretty helpless little things when they are born; by contrast, a baby chimp has fairly developed motor skills upon being born, comparable to the motor skills of a 12 month-old human infant. When still very young, a baby chimp can hold on to its mother’s body while she moves around minding her usual business; a human mother needs to dedicate at least one arm to holding the baby, which obviously severely limits her movements (that is, until the fabulous invention of the baby sling!).

Review of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender"

The review, by Ben Barres of Stanford Medical School, is here. (Link to publisher's page for Delusions of Gender is here). Excerpts from Barres's review: 

No one disputes that male and female brains are different or that males and females differ in their accomplishments. But are these two facts related? A few years ago Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that the answer is yes. He proposed that innate brain differences help to account for the dearth of successful women in science, provoking much heated debate. Reporters called it the story that would not die. Unlike most news stories that exhaust themselves after a few days, this story stayed in the news for months, and even years later continues to inspire debate. Apparently many of us think we already know the answer to this question—the subject of Cordelia Fine's highly readable and enjoyable new book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference [1]. At least half of us—not just the men—seem to think the answer is yes whereas the other half say not so.

You all know where I stand on this issue. Based on my experiences as a neurobiologist and as a transgendered person, I have previously argued that innate sex differences in the brain are not relevant to real-world accomplishments [2],[3]. Without question, male and female brains have different circuits that help to control their different reproductive behaviors. So it has long seemed an easy step to believe that such anatomic changes also underlie supposed gender differences in cognitive abilities. Rather, in a theme that Fine elegantly expands on, it is the idea itself that women are innately less capable that may be the primary cause of differences in accomplishment. This idea Fine appropriately dubs “neurosexism.” This idea was long ago powerfully encapsulated in the concept of “stereotype threat,” the phenomenon in which members of a sex or race perform substantially worse on a test—and perhaps in real-world environments—when they are led to believe before the test that they are innately less capable [4].

I'm happy to say that Professor Fine will have an essay in Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Neuroscience, edited by Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson, and Heidi Maibom, forthcoming in 2011 in New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, a series with Palgrave Macmillan that I co-edit with Mike Wheeler of the University of Stirling.