Widespread sex differences in gene expression in the human brain (2013)

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131122/ncomms3771/full/ncomms3771.html

by crassus • 12 years ago

129 200 12 years ago

FD3SA• 12 years ago

It is my sincere hope that this understanding becomes pervasive in society, such that the inane social movements based upon naught but angry emotional mob mentality become part of history.

As it stands, young boys are medicated with psychiatric drugs for beings boys, and this is deemed acceptable by society. Boys are failing at every step in public institutions, with higher drop out rates at all levels of schooling.

All of this based upon the misguided idea that a Y chromosome is equivalent to an X chromosome, such that sex differences are "socialy conditioned". This madness must stop now, before our children are harmed any further.

PhasmaFelis8• 12 years ago

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as it often does. It's fallacious to assume that there are no inborn differences between men and women. It's equally fallacious to insist (as many do and will, probably citing this study) that there are vast and uncrossable gulfs between men and women, and that anyone who crosses those gulfs anyway must be some sort of deviant.

Humans are complex, the product of both nature and nurture. We need to recognize and encourage natural differences, but we also need to shut down social conditioning that attempts to enforce a particular set of differences without regard for individual context.

stcredzero6• 12 years ago

We'll said! Also, we should be careful not to impose new restrictive social conditioning while eliminating the legacy conditioning. We will never entirely succeed, but we should try. (In the same way that one can't drive 100% straight but one should still make a good effort.)

Once one's movement for justice has crossed the line, where there are apologetics for the abandonment of that effort, it is then creating injustice.

demallien2• 12 years ago

Yes. I didn't read the whole paper, just the abstract, but I would not be surprised to learn (based on previous studies) that the difference between men and women is smaller than the variance amongst men, or the variance amongst women, which is the case for nearly all non-primary sexual differences between men and women.

maratd• 12 years ago

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what your comment actually means.

What gulfs?

Men and women are complimentary. The masculine and the feminine interplay between each other and cooperate toward mutual benefit. There is no gulf.

I reject the notion that we somehow have to eliminate the feminine and the masculine, to be left with some sort of androgynous average. That's just nonsense.

And yes, some men can be feminine and some women can be masculine, and we all certainly have characteristics that can be described as one or the other, but they can and should be described as one or the other. Not as some gender-less PC nonsense.

There is nothing wrong with being a masculine man. There is nothing wrong with being a feminine woman. And there is nothing wrong with the array of all the other possibilities. There are no gulfs that need bridging.

Dewie2• 12 years ago

Assuming that there is a middle ground is also a fallacy, however intuitive that middle ground seems to be on the surface.

jb172• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone is denying physical differences between people with XX and XY chromosomes. I also think it's common knowledge by now that sex influences the development of diseases (which is what the paper is about).

What the debate is usually about is inequalities in social power relations and whether these can be attributed to what you call 'social conditioning' or biology. This paper doesn't contribute anything to that question.

You seem to suggest that people are completely determined by their biological setup, and that there are no influences from society. I don't think that's right.

AutoCorrect3• 12 years ago

I think what the GP means is that there is a very vocal, very vitriolic subsection of the feminist movement that claim there is NO reason for the differences in men and women, other than the historical repression of women by men. Which couldn't be further from the truth: up until recently, women were very much at the mercy of the groups of men around them (physically), and only recently has the value of women in society dropped to that of men. </dons flamesuit>

mikegreiling• 12 years ago

There's a feminist-led campaign on wikipedia to get tripe like this added to articles on human sexual differences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sex_differences_in...

"The smaller difference in lower body strength may be due to the fact that during childhood, both males and females frequently exercise their leg muscles during activities like running, walking, and playing. Males, however, are socially pressured to enhance their upper body muscles, leading to a wider difference in upper body strength"

----

Thankfully this has since been removed.

sliverstorm3• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone is denying physical differences between people with XX and XY chromosomes.

What the debate is usually about is inequalities in social power relations and whether these can be attributed to what you call 'social conditioning' or biology.

Why is this even a question? We already know:

- Powerful men tend to be taller than other men

- Women tend to be shorter than men

There's an understood physical difference that is more than likely playing to unbalance social power relations.

einhverfr12• 12 years ago

You also have a significant problem, when looking back at the historical record, at defining social inequality. Is this a purely formal analysis? If it is than wage gaps are no issue, but economic liberty is overrated. The industrial economy, even though it produces significant social inequality on a substantial level, is very good at hiding it behind formal equality.

But to get to a substantive analysis, one has to look at what people's options in life are. If women can't seek divorce but can murder their husbands with impunity provided that certain cultural fictions remain intact (the case in ancient Athens, see Chris Faraone's "Ancient Greek Love Magic" covering poisonous love potions as a defence against murder, and note too that a purpose of the potions was to abate anger), then the right to divorce is totally subsumed in more substantial, even extreme, options.

If one accepts substantial realities as the measure of equality, then women are less equal today politically and economically than they were in 1800.

jforman• 12 years ago

What "understanding"? This paper provides no evidence whatsoever that sex-biased gene expression is due to nature rather than nurture. They collected data from adults only (well, 2 people were under 20 out of 137 subjects).

You aren't sporting much evidence to justify a righteous rant against your "angry emotional mob mentality."

drewcrawford• 12 years ago

While you are correct that this particular study offers no real evidence in the nature/nurture debate, my understanding of neuroscience is that the existence of early differences in gender-based behavior are so well established in the discipline that to publish on that result is no longer interesting to neuroscientists. What remains at this point is to figure out a mechanism behind that result. So the line of inquiry behind this paper is not so much "whither behavioral differences?" but rather "Given this large body of research over the past 10 years that demonstrates behavioral differences, what can we see in the brain that might be a mechanism for this result?"

If you are not familiar with that earlier body of research establishing behavioral differences, these studies might be a place to start, and then of course you can walk the bibliographies to find more.

http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/e...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571891304...

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9219513/

http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dcampb/Campbell.InfantMetaALSex...

rayiner3• 12 years ago

I quite favor the idea of gender-segregated schooling, because I do think boys as a whole get the short-end of the stick in K-6 because the school environment isn't structured as well for them.

That said, the structure of schooling isn't arbitrary. It's a reflection of the needs of a modern knowledge economy. It's something that doesn't just affect boys versus girls, but certain kinds of boys versus other kinds of boys. Compare your stereotypical programmer to the stereotypical kid who bullied him in 5th grade. More likely than not, the bully had less patience and a lower attention span, more physical strength and greater size, and a well-developed ability to get others to follow him through a mixture of coercion and manipulation. A thousand years ago, at least in Europe, these skills would have been a ticket to higher social status through violence and war. The programmer stereotype, if he was lucky, might have found reprieve in a monastery or something. Of course the shoe is quite on the other foot today, isn't it? The ability to do tedious, boring work for long hours is now valuable, and is basically what modern K-12 education prepares you to do.

Is our modern economy unfair to the bully?

MarkTee• 12 years ago

The structure of the modern school system (the one employed in the western world, at least) dates back to the Industrial Revolution. It's hardly "a reflection of the needs of a modern knowledge economy".

onetwofiveten• 12 years ago

This paper examines adults, and does not resolve the nature vs nurture argument. The conclusions you have drawn from it are premature, and, I suspect, indicate what you want to believe. The "inane" social movements you attack are based on a desire to achieve equality and fairness between genders. A desire for a better, fairer, more liberal world. Even if misguided, they have good intentions. Your attachment to gender essentialism is equally "emotional" and "inane" and a tad more suspicious.

All of which is unimportant. Even if there are innate biological differences between the sexes, they are at most trends, not hard barriers. There is almost complete overlap. I've personally seen every kind of behaviour from every possible gender identity. So it doesn't make any sense to prejudge people by their gender, or force gender roles on children.

The issue of whether or not ADHD/ADD are real diseases, and whether children are being over-medicated is completely different to the issue of gender essentialism. I suspect you're lumping them in together because they are two things that are new that you don't like.

lsc• 12 years ago

young boys are medicated with psychiatric drugs for beings boys

I grew up with ADD, and did not obtain medication, by choice, until I reached adulthood. I perceive the medication to be supporting what I'd generally call "masculine values" - it's good for deadening the emotions and producing things. I'll skip it if I know the day is going to be mostly social, or even if I know that I will have a meeting where my ability to schmooze is more important than my ability to focus and complete a task. I describe being medicated as being "two drinks more sober" - Focus is easier, yes. It's easier to get things done, sure. But social stuff, unless there is a clear and directed goal, becomes rather less interesting and rather more awkward in a way that could be described imprecisely and offensively as "a little bit autistic."

Boys are failing at every step in public institutions, with higher drop out rates at all levels of schooling.

I have a different theory on why that is.

I think that the causation of the correlation between formal education and money sometimes runs opposite the traditionally assumed direction; if you have the prerequisites to make a lot of money (either your parents are upper middle-class or are obviously really smart and very hardworking and know when to conform and when to rebel) you are far more likely to go to school. I mean, it works the regular way, too; some people do come out of school with skills that have a high market value, I'm just saying, a lot of those people would be valuable either way.

That fits into my theory on why boys are dropping out more than girls. I would suggest that boys are raised to be results oriented. If you can get the ball through the hoop, or the oblong object between the poles, people will like you. As you get older, that's the nice car and house. We are taught that people value us for what we can produce, what we can accomplish, not who we are. Sure, confidence is important, but that's mostly because you need [to at least be able to fake] confidence to accomplish anything that involves other people.

[as an aside, my experience as a man is that the reality is that people value you for your money, yes, but it's dramatically less important than I was led to believe as a boy. Now, I still believe that I'm largely judged by my accomplishments, my prestige, but it's way more complex than just money; in fact, a degree would have been a useful minimum social proof of accomplishment, and would have helped me in that arena far more than I thought it would have when I made the decision.

Still, that perception that how much money I made was the primary thing others would value me on was very strong when I was younger, as I think it is in most young men, and it had a large effect on my life decisions when I was making the work/college decision, as I think it does for most young men.]

My perception is that girls and women are primarily valued for their characteristics; who they are (or, at least, how they look and how they act towards others.) over what they can produce. This... is a very different set of incentives. Of course, I didn't grow up as a girl, and haven't experienced life as a woman. I have no idea how much my perception is shared by people who have.

College is... well, my perception is that it's not about increasing what you produce, primarily, It's about changing who you are. Making you a better (or some would say, more culturally middle-class) person. From a raw "what can I produce?" standpoint, if your parents aren't rich enough to pay for it, you are quite likely better off getting that construction job, or that front-line tech support or computer repair position than you would be working on an art history degree. But if you are trying to learn how to deal with other people, how to be charming and interesting? art history, or maybe literature isn't a bad bet.

Of course, I'm not advancing this viewpoint as an absolute "this is the way it is" - I don't know that it is. These are just my perceptions as a person who perhaps put more thought into gender roles than most people did while growing up.

einhverfr12• 12 years ago

It's funny. I grew up with ADD and ended up on medication by accident when I was a teenager (I was medicated for misdiagnosed depression). It was helpful but I was not on the typical medications for ADD.

My son has ADD too, and so far we have been able to get by without pharmaceuticals. He does drink coffee most mornings and that really helps him. But we'd avoid medications if possible.

Here in Indonesia such things are still very stigmatized but there's a positive side to that too, in that the definition of "normal" is much more expansive. To a remarkable extent by destigmatizing these things we've paved the way in the US to allow the elision of "normal" from descriptions of actual, living, breathing people.

mudil4• 12 years ago

That's exactly why we don't have many women in tech and most readers of HN are guys. All this political correctness and attacks on PG are simply BS: men and women are different. Not better, not worse, just different.

It's evolution of sex, stupid.

PS. My previous comment on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7041221

Fomite11• 12 years ago

How does this explain fields where the gender balance has drifted considerably over time?

api4• 12 years ago

Kudos sir or ma'am.

The same argument can be levied at racism. If you go back to the year 1000AD, it's obvious that Europeans are of vastly inferior stock. The Chinese and the Arabs were doing optics and stuff while the Europeans were basically playing in the dirt.

sliverstorm3• 12 years ago

Fields can drift too.

sp332• 12 years ago

But you haven't even tried to make a connection between the physical differences and the social differences. You just assume that all social differences are explained biologically.

api4• 12 years ago

By default conservatives tend to assume that social differences are explained biologically while liberals assume they're explained culturally. Both are extreme and likely very wrong positions.

bsdetector• 12 years ago

What we know for sure is that there are physical differences, and from this study we know there are mental differences.

The unknowns are how mental differences (expression of genes) are caused by environment or effect the environment.

This means we don't know whether a 50/50 split in some field is natural or a result of society railroading people into the field. It seems to me that the best way to handle policy is not to base it on unknowns, so that's why I favor policy that ensures opportunity to work in specific fields but doesn't try to balance them.

mudil4• 12 years ago

Those of you who downgrade my comment should put that PC stuff aside, and consider reading about the evolution of sexuality. Such as "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.

All your wishful thinking will never make women and men the same.

api4• 12 years ago

Nobody's arguing they're the same.

Fomite11• 12 years ago

That's not what I downvoted you for sparky, nor has anyone particularly made that argument.

acdha2• 12 years ago

You weren't downvoted for making the tautological observation that men and women aren't the same but for attempting to use science as a cloak for shoddy reasoning:

There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels.

There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.

plg2• 12 years ago

Not to be too cheeky here, but what was the null hypothesis? That male and female brains would look exactly the same? Seems a bit like a so-called "straw man" (or straw woman?) hypothesis to me.

toufka• 12 years ago

In hard science, the null hypothesis is often 'straw-man-like', and that's usually just fine. Because, oftentimes the straw-man haunts by being kind of true, sometimes. Reality is so strange that doing en experiment that controls well enough to (near-) conclusively exclude even a trivial hypothesis is a good experiment. Not the best experiment, but a good experiment.

vacri5• 12 years ago

You don't need a null hypothesis to do science. If you want to measure the strength of the Moon's gravitational pull, no-one's going to complain that you haven't outlined a null hypothesis.

There's all kinds of good science done that doesn't use the null hypothesis - it's a myth that if one isn't presented, then it's "not science".

Fomite11• 12 years ago

Hell, given the null hypothesis is an assertion of perfect equality, I'd argue it's inherently a straw-man. It's one of the reasons behind "Fail to reject H0" rather than "Accept".

pygy_• 12 years ago

Note that some of the differences in expression may be the result of environmental factors.

It should also be noted that the average age at death was around 60 years old, which means that most women were post-menopause. The effect of estrogen on gene expression is thus underestimated.

discostrings• 12 years ago

It's disappointing to see so many people here read the title of the article and immediately start the see,-social-differences-are-the-result-of-vast-differences-between-the-binary-sexes wheel rolling again. It's nowhere near a valid conclusion from the article's content. There are racial differences in gene expression (though much smaller), too, but I doubt anyone would upvote it or start a similar conversation about race if an article about it were posted here.

There are clearly differences between the physiology of the average man and the average woman, but those differences appear to be more of a spectrum than a binary split. Given that, I don't understand how people with an axe to grind against the "gender is cultural" idea would like society to look. Why argue against the idea that individual differences are vast, and that the best approach is not to create groups that are defined at birth? What's the alternative being suggested?

agentultra2• 12 years ago

I expected it but am no less disappointed.

Anyone with an extreme emotional investment in the "gender respresentation" issue isn't even going to read the article before proselytizing HN with their beliefs.

This is an article about gene expressions and their correlation to the development of various neurological disorders.

However it mentions differences between males and females... so it's going to trigger a completely off-topic flame war.

kyberias• 12 years ago

It mentions? Mentions? Come on now. It's stated in the beginning of the title of the article, and right in the beginning of the abstract, for crying out loud. "Widespread sex differences"

jcromartie• 12 years ago

those differences appear to be more of a spectrum than a binary split

Except when you compare the average male and female.

s_baby7• 12 years ago

It's disappointing to see so many people here read the title of the article and immediately start the see,-social-differences-are-the-result-of-vast-differences-between-the-binary-sexes wheel rolling again.

But it's alright to just accept we're all products of socialization as a valid conclusion?

What's the alternative being suggested?

A nuanced conversation on the interplay of biology and environment. Which there is very little of.

LanceH• 12 years ago

Let's say you were President of Harvard and you suggested such a conversation...

pessimizer• 12 years ago

People are excited to interpret any random observation in terms of their own prejudices.

There are racial differences in gene expression (though much smaller), too, but I doubt anyone would upvote it or start a similar conversation about race if an article about it were posted here.

You've been here long enough to know that isn't true. Plenty of people on this site have a passionate belief in the simultaneous superiority of and tyranny of the inferior masses over white males within the civilization that they built with their own hands.

kapnobatairza• 12 years ago

Seriously, this wasn't even a particularly dense paper to read. The only conclusions one can draw from this research is that "sex differences in gene expression in human brain relate and may even help explain well-recognised differences between men and women in disease incidence and presentation"... I.E. MS, Schizophrenia, AD & Vascular dementira, depressive & anxiety disorders, parkinson's, autism, etc.

Fomite11• 12 years ago

I am coming to the observation that Hacker News, as a population, tends not to read the scientific papers they talk about.

bluekeybox4• 12 years ago

immediately start the see,-social-differences-are-the-result-of-vast-differences-between-the-binary-sexes wheel rolling again

That's not the wheel I'm interested in rolling. I'm rather interested in critiquing the current humanist-sociological status quo mantra that biological differences are irrelevant or can be abstracted away. A rather large difference between the two goals.

aydinghajar• 12 years ago

I think I just read that gender impacts gene expression in the human brain. Ummm, great that they observed evidence to to confirm that, but, duh?

spellboots• 12 years ago

Oh dear, trainwreck comments here.

GrahamsNumber• 12 years ago

Stong independent womyn don't read no man's study

bluekeybox4• 12 years ago

Yea, better burn that oppressive cis-heteronormative literature before it triggers a micro-aggression. Also don't forget to send the authors to a Gulag.

thecosas• 12 years ago

New research title:

"People cite title of article to support existing opinions while admitting TL;DR."

cwaniak4• 12 years ago

What? You say men and women are not identical? I'm sure that this must be news for Leftists over here...

14573892• 12 years ago

It is really annoying me that biology papers so rarely use SD as opposed to SEM. As a researcher I know the pain involved in making your hard fought data look any less significant, but please include some SD values because otherwise we have no clue about individual variation in the sample.

I'm just looking at all these comments saying "there is a spectrum of individual variation" and it is infuriating that the paper offers no way to confirm or deny this assertion, despite its importance to the conclusions.

egocodedinsol• 12 years ago

Worth noting is that the median age was 58, and the minimum age was 16. Apparently there were no differences pre-post menopause, but an interesting question is whether gene expression, splicing, and regulatory networks are initiated via external factors in early youth, or in development via more automatic mechanisms.

There might be reasons this isn't the case, but it is apparently true that maternal behavior influences which parent you express genes from in mice (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20616232). I'm not sure (and not qualified to answer) whether similar mechanisms are at play here, but it does suggest that evolution has found a way to use early experience to modulate genetic expression. That might be the case here, too.

gaussdiditfirst• 12 years ago

There is currently very little evidence linking the measured expression of specific genes in the brain with phenotypic traits such as personality. Scientists find it hard enough even to link almost certainly genetic attributes (such as various cancers and other disease) to a consistent set of genes in analyses of differential gene expression.

fnl• 12 years ago

From the article:

We show that sex differences in gene expression and splicing are widespread in adult human brain, being detectable in all major brain regions and involving 2.5% of all expressed genes.

While I don't have a similar number, inter-racial differences of gene expression will be quite similar, if not even higher. This is the reason why RNAseq experiments these days in some cases can even find opposing evidence, given the genetic background of the subjects, such as in the recent bladder cancer publications regarding the role of STAG2 [1].

Please do not claim (or, rather, proselytize...) the "evidence" for sex differences based on a Nature article most people taking positions in that respect probably do not even quite comprehend.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nrc/journal/v13/n12/full/nrc3631.html

xamebax• 12 years ago

Citing the article: "These findings suggest that sex differences in gene expression in human brain relate and may even help explain well-recognised differences between men and women in disease incidence and presentation"

I think that's a useful study, since male and female organism react differently to some illnesses (check out sex differences in heart attack symptoms; here ignorance can literally be lethal).

What I do find funny is how quite some people here didn't bother to read the article and, upon seeing the title, so happily shout "FINALLY! DIE FEMINISM, DIE!" Sorry guys, wrong cue.

Widespread sex differences in gene expression in the human brain (2013)

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