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_DonBradley
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Post by _DonBradley »

A Light in the Darkness wrote:This is a more serious response that requires a more serious, less flippant reply. Hopefully, I'll be able to offer one shortly. The short of it is that Baron-Cohen has two modes. His formally refereed work makes claims more limited in scope, while his pop-work, especially semi-op-ed work, does not. That's where he does things like mention one study he had published to support a general theory that differences in cognitive development mediated by sexual dimorphism explain sex differences in math testing yet fails to mention said study thus far has not been replicated and is contradicted by a host of similar studies (I.e. virtually every study on the subject). Whoops. His formal publishing is just an experimental report, a mundane affair. Even when we are talking about his more formal expertise his views are closer to the margins, if clinging to the realm of legitimate debate. For instance, the "extreme-male brain" theory of autism is not exactly in vogue among the cognitive scientists and psychologists who study autism. To say Baron-Cohen has demonstrated a broad claim like the genetic differences explaining the observed differences in gender aptitudes, preferences, and roles, such as mathematical talent, is unequivocably false. It is false in the sense that his views are representative of the state of academic research and it is false in the sense that his views are compellingly supported. And when he runs to the press to make claims that most scientists will respectfully disagree with and does so in a misleading fashion, he is not acting as a responsible scholar. Then you end up with situations where someone like Tal laps it up and uses it as a hammer to bludgeon feminists he seems to barely understand.


Hi ALITD,

I appreciate this more substantial response.

I'm not as familiar as you and Tal are with Baron-Cohen's newspaper writings, nor with the social-science literature on the different career choices of men and women, and how this may or may not relate to differences in cognition.

I still doubt, however, that Simon Baron-Cohen is a "hack" in either his peer-reviewed or public writing. And some of the arguments you make to lead to this conclusion seem to me badly flawed. If, for instance, Baron-Cohen fails to cite studies not replicating a given result, I would question whether this is a sin not committed in peer-reviewed publications. Does this particular lapse place him outside the margin of error within academia, making him the Erich Von Daniken of sex differences? Or if Baron-Cohen's "extreme male brain" theory of autism isn't the prevailing theory, does this make him marginal or hacklike within his discipline? Not remotely. That the extreme male brain theory is a serious theory that provides a fruitful paradigm for research is crystal clear from the record of peer-reviewed publications it has generated. Baron-Cohen appears to me to have largely built his career on this theory, and has in the process secured a position at Cambridge quite early in life. How typical is this for fringe theorists?

As for whether the majority of scientists working in the area of sex differences in cognition differ sharply with Baron-Cohen, I'd be interested in evidence for this assertion.

Perhaps when I get a chance I'll check the reviews of Baron-Cohen's book in peer-reviewed publications, and assess this for myself.

by the way, have you done something like this? Or are you relying on one of Baron-Cohen's critics? How do you know the majority view among researchers in this field?

And, finally, does taking a minority position in one's discipline make one a hack?

Don
_Nortahn
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Post by _Nortahn »

Gender is a social construct in the same sense race is. It refers to a series of social expectations for what behaviors and roles fulfill a given gender type. Like race, there is a biological component to these expectations, but the notion itself is a construct of social boundaries. That's why one's physical sex is a different concept than one's gender. I know of almost no one who argues all of the variance between men and women is a result of social conditioning. Rather, it is argued that a very significant portion of it when explaining this or that (e.g. differences in amount of Ph.D's in math or literature) is best explained by differences in social factors.


While there are many studies that claim they've measured so-called gender differences the fact is they don't know how much is biologically determined and how much is socially influenced. They simply declare it a gender difference and they have a self-fulfilling hypothesis. This is the rule in gender so-called science:

It is therefore more common to use gender differences as a blanket term for sex and gender difference when speaking about people because you can’t separate them from their environment. The generic rule of thumb must therefore be:

If you know that the difference is 100% biological it's a Sex Difference,

Everything else must be considered a Gender Difference.

http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/difference.html


How do you know if a difference is 100% biological? You don't, so you declare it a gender difference - abracadabara you have evidence of gender discrimination all over the place!

A practical upshot of this is that regardless of the theoretical definition of gender, the term is increasingly used as a synonym for sex. For example, an military friend of mine was given a survey to fill out by one of his headquarter offices. One of the questions "What gender is your supervisor?" (well her sex is female, but our "don't ask, don't tell" policy precludes an honest answer about her gender). This is not just anecdotal story but part of an actual trend. Here's how it's playing out in scientific literature:

Cursory inspection revealed that the increased use of 'gender' in SCI titles does not reflect an equally dramatic shift in scientific interest from understanding the biological determinants of sex to understanding the cultural determinants of gender. Rather, the rise of 'gender' appears to be the result of well-meaning attempts to signal sympathy with the ideas and goals of feminism. This has had the paradoxical outcome of undercutting and blurring the distinction which feminists sought to emphasize by distinguishing sex from gender.

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v25/n4/full/ng0800_373a.html


The author is being polite in the above quote. What it is doing is supplying feminists with a body of junk-science evidence (or advocacy research if you will) to support an otherwise unprovable tenet of their ideology.

In short, the neurophysiological evidence showing sex differences is science; feminist gender-studies are currently fashionable nonsense.

In general see: P. R. Gross, N. Levitt and M. W. Lewis, "The Flight from Science and Reason," ed. B. M. Boland, New York Academy of Sciences, New York, 1996, vol. 775, 593.
_A Light in the Darkness
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Post by _A Light in the Darkness »

DonBradley wrote:I still doubt, however, that Simon Baron-Cohen is a "hack" in either his peer-reviewed or public writing. And some of the arguments you make to lead to this conclusion seem to me badly flawed. If, for instance, Baron-Cohen fails to cite studies not replicating a given result, I would question whether this is a sin not committed in peer-reviewed publications. Does this particular lapse place him outside the margin of error within academia, making him the Erich Von Daniken of sex differences? Or if Baron-Cohen's "extreme male brain" theory of autism isn't the prevailing theory, does this make him marginal or hacklike within his discipline? Not remotely. That the extreme male brain theory is a serious theory that provides a fruitful paradigm for research is crystal clear from the record of peer-reviewed publications it has generated. Baron-Cohen appears to me to have largely built his career on this theory, and has in the process secured a position at Cambridge quite early in life. How typical is this for fringe theorists?


Perahps we share different notions of what the term hack means. I tried to qualify my meaning by comparing him to Linus Pauling. Pauling did publish a lot of pop-articles on the amazing curative properties of Vitamin C and had published research as well. This did not disfqualify him from the hack label as far as I am concerned. As for "extreme male brain" theory of autism, it is no longer that well thought of. At a minimum, it is in need of a significant amount of revision that reduces its explanatory role. Autism once was believed to be caused by inattentive mothers. There is an extensive publishing record on this theory. But today, it would be called fringe at best. The "extreme male brain" theory is in a better state than that, but is now on the margins in cognitive science. How am I familiar with this? Without revealing too much, I work with autistic patients as part of my general profession and attempt to keep read on the relevant literature. As far as nature/nuture sex differences research is concerned, this is again is a function of being aware of the field. I'm not sure how I can translate that to you, but it is no different than how I know that situationalism is a fringe view in personality psychology and trait theory is not.

Not to rely on Chris too much, but "

Most of the work on the relationship between theory of mind and autism has been conducted by Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues. Baron-Cohen (B-C) has theorized that there are two general cognitive styles: empathizing and systemizing. Empathizing, according to B-C, consists of a "drive to identify emotions and thoughts in others and to respond to these appropriately" (p. 302). Systemizing, on the other hand, involves "drive to analyze and build systems, with the aim of understanding and predicting non-agentive events" (p. 302)1. He believes that there are three general types of individuals: those who have strong empathizing skills and relatively weak systemizing skills; those who have strong systemizing skills and weak empathizing skills; and those who have balanced empathizing and systemizing skills. On average, males tend to be strong systemizers, while women tend to be strong empathizers. B-C has used this classification system to explain all sorts of behavioral differences between males and females, including differences in mathematical ability. While his theory that males and females exhibit differences in these abilities, on average, is highly controversial and, to say the least, not widely accepted among cognitive psychologists (see, e.g., this paper for a short critique of his empirical evidence), B-C has extended it to explain many of the symptoms of autism spectrum disorders. He believes that individuals with autism are extreme systemizers, and thus calls his theory the Extreme Mail Brain theory of autism2.

B-C has conducted what I consider to be thoroughly uninteresting experiments to test his systemizing-empathizing view of autism, using mostly Asperger patients. Here's an example experiment3: Asperger patients and non-autistic individuals, who have been matched for IQ (in other words, there's no IQ difference between the two groups) are given a systemizing and an empathizing task. The systemizing task involves making predictions in a simple folk mechanics task, while the empathizing task involves recognizing social faux pas in a set of social stories.

Pause here for a moment here, and look briefly at the diagnostic criteria for autism and Asperger specifically. You'll notice that one of the diagnostic criteria for Asperger (A. 3) is almost identical to B-C's definition of empathizing! Furthermore, one of the most common symptoms of both Asperger Syndrome and autism in general is an inability to perceive social nuances. I'll give you a real life examples. Asperger patients tend to have little knowledge of what is and is not appropriate in a given social context, and thus are unable to recognize faux pas. A doctor I know who works with Asperger patients once met with one for the first time, and in the course of their conversation, the patient used the word "“F”" constantly. He didn't know this doctor from Adam, and any non-autistic person would have avoided cussing in that context, but the Asperger patient used it over and over and over again. Another consequence of failing to pick up social nuances is an almost complete inability to recognize lies and figurative speech, and thus take everything literally. Here's another real life example. Another doctor I know was meeting an Asperger patient for the first time. The patient had just come from the funeral of a male cousin. When he told the doctor this, the doctor said, "Oh, I'm sorry, were you close to him?" The patient replied, "About 5 feet."

In short, B-C's empathizing is exactly what we already knew individuals who fall within the autism spectrum don't do very well! So imagine the surprise B-C and his colleagues must have felt when they learned that Asperger patients performed worse on the faux pas task than non-autistic individuals! I don't think I need to point out to you that if they hadn't performed worse, THEY WOULDN'T BE AUTISTIC! That's not a prediction, it's a truism. It might be somewhat surprising that they found that on a folk mechanics tasks, in which the participants had to had to predict the movement of objects in diagrams, the Asperger patients performed better on average than the non-autistic females (there was no difference between the Asperger patients and non-autistic males). From this, B-C concludes that Asperger patients do, in fact, have extremely male brains (though it would appear that at the top end of the spectrum, Asperger patients just have normal male brains).

OK, now that I've gotten my utter dismay at that totally inane experiment out of my system, I can move on to B-C's more interesting work. This work is on the actual relationship between theory of mind and autism. He and his colleagues have conducted more than 30 experiments, most of which used some version of the false belief task, on children with autism, and in almost every case, autistic children show developmental delays in theory of mind. Of course, there are problems with the use of false belief tasks in testing theory of mind abilities. He and his colleagues have also conducted neuroimaging research, focusing on the amygdala. The amygdala is thought to be important for social reasoning, particularly in the recognition of thought, intention, and emotion in the faces of other individuals. In one experiment, individuals with Asperger syndrome and normal individuals (matched for IQ, again) looked at photos of people's eyes (which also show the eyebrows, and parts of the nose and forehead), and attempted to guess what the people were thinking. Non-autistic individuals perform quite well on this task, while Asperger patients perform very poorly. While the participants were performing the task, their brains were scanned using an fMRI machine. Consistent with the theory of mind theory of autism, non-autistic participants displayed increased activation in the amygdala, while Asperger participants displayed no increased activation, when performing the task4. If you want to look at the figure above (from the Baron-Cohen et al. paper, see footnote 4), the sides are reversed (the right side of the figure is the left side of the brain), the yellow indicates that the area was only active in the non-autistic participants, the red indicates that the area was only active in the Asperger participants, and the blue indicates that the area was active in both. The left amygdala is that little yellow area of activation that is in the middle (from top to bottom) and slightly to the right (meaning it's on the left side of the brain) in the image labeled -7.

In addition to the amygdala theory of autism and theory of mind, others have argued, speculatively, that a type of neuron that may be found in the human left prefrontal cortex (they're found in the analogous region in monkeys, but there's no direct evidence, as of yet, that they exist in humans) called mirror neurons may be involved in autism as well. In monkeys, mirror neurons facilitate imitation. In humans, left frontal cortex lesions are associated with deficits in the ability to imitate the actions of others. Autism patients also tend to show lower levels of activity in the left medial frontal cortex than non-autistic individuals (e.g., in the Baron-Cohen et al study I just described) in response to theory of mind tasks. Some have speculated, then, that autistic individuals may not have a fully functioning mirror neuron system5. If there is a mirror neuron system in the human left medial frontal cortex analogous to the one in monkeys, then it is likely that this system is associated with theory of mind, and lower levels of activation in this area in autistic individuals indicates that, mirror neuron system or no, an area of their the brains associated with imitation is not as active as it is in non-autistic individuals.

There are some problems with the theory of mind theory of autism. For one, some autistic patients do perform well on theory of mind tasks, and by adolescence, most are able to perform the most common theory of mind task, the false belief test. In addition, it doesn't seem to explain the range of symptoms in the autism spectrum. Asperger patients clearly have serious theory of mind deficits, but show few of the other cognitive or linguistic deficits that characterize more extreme forms of autism. If theory of mind deficits are the primary symptom of autism, how can this be? It certainly doesn't explain B-C's (s****y) data suggesting that autism patients are extreme systemisers. At most, the theory of mind theory just describes the systemizing-empathizing symptoms (remember, people can be balanced -- being good at one doesn't preclude being good at the other). Furthermore, neither the theory of mind theory or B-C's systemizing-empathizing distinction speaks to another aspect of autism. On some types of tasks, even highly autistic individuals tend to perform better than non-autistic individuals (I'll describe some of those tasks in a moment).

The holes in the theory of mind theory of autism have led some to look for alternative theories. The most prominent alternative theory today is the weak central coherence theory, first espoused by Uta Frith6. Frith uses "central coherence" to refer to the tendency of non-autistic individuals to process information globally, e.g., at the level of the scene as opposed to the level of individual objects in the scene. It is this tendency that is responsible, among other things, for the schematic memory effects that have been demonstrated by cognitive psychologists over the last 40 years, and of which I am so fond (as you may know, if you've been reading this blog). In schematic memory effect, people tend to remember the "gist" of a story or scene quite well, but forget many of the specific details. This is because while they encode the details, they don't spend much time processing them, instead focusing their resources on the overall context. Autistics, Frith argues, do the opposite: they focus on the details, to the exclusion of the overall context. Whereas non-autistic individuals process information globally, autistics process it locally.

What's most interesting about this theory is that it makes some very interesting predictions. For instance, it predicts that in certain tasks in which the global focus of non-autistics produces errors or poorer memory, autistics will outperform them. These predictions have been confirmed in several different types of tasks. For example, in one experiment7, Francesca Happéé had autistics look at illusion-inducing visual stimuli, such as the Titchner Circles:


These circles produce a classic perceptual illusion. Non-autistic individuals tend to say that the middle circle in the group on the right is larger than the middle circle in the group on the left, despite the fact that they are the same size.Happépé argues that this is because autistics, because they process each of the circles at the local level, are immune to the illusion-inducing effects of the overal context (the surrounding circles). Elsewhere, she has detailed several other cases in which autistics display similar "local perception biases," including a reduced susceptibility to the McGurk effect, in autistics8.

Autistics also perform better on a different sort of task that requires segmenting parts of a scene instead of analyzing the scene as a whole, or Gestalt. This task, called the Embedded Figures Task, involves finding a shape, or several shapes, that is embedded within a complex scene. Non-autistics tend to be pretty slow at this. Autistics, it turns out, are able to find the shapes faster than non-autistics9. This is consistent with the weak central coherence theory: autistics are able to find the shapes faster because they are processing local features, and are not distracted by the overall Gestalt. Further supporting this view, using the Embedded Figures Task and fMRI, Ring et al.10 found that non-autistic participants showed greater activation than autistic participants in brain areas associated with working memory in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, while autistic participants showed greater activation than non-autistic controls in ventro occipitotemporal regions (the cuneus, infrior occipital gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus), which are parts of the visual system. They interpreted these results as indicating that the control participants were utilizing working memory to analyze the scene as a whole, while autistic participants were using the visual system for "object feature analysis."

In addition to areas in which autistics' performance is superior to that of non-autistics, the areas in which autistics perform as well as non-autistics support a weak central coherence theory as well. For example, while autistics are worse than non-autistics at recalling information that requires global processing (e.g., temporal sequences and the source of a memory), they are just as good at memory tasks that are not always subject to schema effects, such as recognition memory11.

But the most powerful test of a theory of autism is to use it to explain the deficits that appear in autism. This is what the theory of mind theory of autism was designed to do, and the weak central coherence theory will have to do it as well if it is going to be a viable alternative. I'll give one such explanation of a deficit here, and then describe how it might be related to some of the other deficits. A couple years ago, Blake et al.12 conducted an interesting experiment in which they presented autistic children and non-autistic controls with two types of motion. One type involved small lines moving together to form a group. The other involved point-light animation of human movement (see the figures on this webpage to get an idea of what point-light animation is). Autistics and controls performed equally well on the line movement task, but autistics were much worse at recognizing biological motion in the point-light animation task. Blake et al. interpreted this finding as support for the theory of mind theory, arguing that deficits in theory of mind make it more difficult to interpret biological motion.

But there's another possible interpretation. In the same year, Bertone et al.13 published a study in which they presented autistic and control participants with tasks involving two different kinds of motion, and asked them to indicate the direction of motion. The two types of motion in this study were first and second-order motion. Previous neuroscientific research has shown that first-order motion (in this study, motion defined by changing the luminance across the screen), which doesn't involve the integration of multiple sources of information, is processed early in the visual system in the primary visual cortex, while second-order motion (in this case, motion defined by changing texture across the screen) is processed further along in the visual system, because it requires integrating multiple sources of visual information. Bertone et al. predicted that, consistent with the weak central coherence theory, autistics would peform well on first-order motion tasks that do not involve integration, but poorly on second-order visual tasks that do, and thus demand a more global processing approach. And that's what they found. Biological motion tasks like those used in the Blake et al. study are second-order tasks, in that the viewer has to integrate the information (often conflicting, directionally, at the local level) in order to perceive and identify biological motion. It could be, then, as Bertone et al. argue, that difficulties in processing complex, integrated visual information underlie theory of mind deficits in autism, rather than the other way around. Much of what makes up theory of mind in humans involves integrating multiple sources of sensory information at a higher level (e.g., faciaexpressionsns, bodily movements, and auditory cues including verbal and nonverbal expressions). If the primary deficit in autism is one of integrating information at a global level, it stands to reason that theory of mind would suffer (perceiving biological motion certainly would).

Baron-Cohen and some others feel that the weak central coherence theory is actually a compliment to the theory of mind theory. They don't think it can stand on its own. It doesn't, for instance, explain B-C's systemizing v. empathizing data. Then again, neither does the theory of mind theory, but B-C's never let that deter him. But for all intents and purposes, the jury is still out. As of yet, there's no direct data that can directly explain the relationship between global processing difficulties and theory of mind deficits in autism. They may be causally related, they may share a common cause, or they may be completely unrelated. Neither theory can as of yet explain all there is to explain about the cognitive deficits in autism, so it's unlikely that either will end up standing alone. We'll have to wait and see.

1 Lawson, J., Baron-Cohen, S., & Wheelwright, S. (2004). Empathising ansystemizingng in adults with and without Asperger Syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(3), 301-310.
2 Baron-Cohen, S. (1999). The extreme male-brain theory of autism. In H. Tager-Flusberg (Ed.), Neurodevelopmental Disorders. MIT Press.
3 Lawson, Baron-Cohen, & Wheelwright (2004).
4Baron-Cohen, S., Ring, H.A., Bullmore, E.T., Wheelwright, S., Ashwina, C., & Williams, S.C.R. (2000). The amygdala theory of autism. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 24, 355–364. The brain scans are from Figure 2, p. 361.
5 Williams, J.H.G., Whiten, A., & Perrett, D.I. (2001). Imitation, mirror neurons and autism. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 25, 287-295.
6 Frith, U. (1989). Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Blackwell Science.
7 Happé, F.G.E. (1996) Studying weak central coherence at low levels: children with autism do not succumb to visual illusions: a research note. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 37, 873–877.
8 Happé, F.G.E. (1999). Autism: Cognitive deficit or cognitive style? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3(6), 216-222.
9 Jolliffe, T., & Baron-Cohen, S. (1997). Are people with autism and Asperger syndrome faster than normal on the Embedded Figures Test?
Journal of Child Psycholology & Psychiatry, 38, 527‚–534.
10 Ring, H.A., Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Williams, S.C.R., Brammer, M., Andrew, C., & Bullmore, E.T. (1999). Cerebral correlates of preserved cognitive skills in autism: A functional MRI study of Embedded Figures Task performance. Brain, 122, 1305-1315.
11 Bemnetto, L., Pennington, B.F., & Rogers, S.J. (1996). Intact and impaired memory functions in autism. Child Development, 67(4), 1816-1835.
12 Blake, R., Turner, L.M., Smoski, M.J., Pozdol, S.L., & Stone, W.L. (2003). Visual recognition of biological motion is impaired in children with autism. Psychological Science, 14(2), 151-157.
13 Bertone, A., Mottron, L., Jelenic, P, & Faubert, J. (2003). Motion perception in autism: A "complex" issue. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(2), 218-225.


http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/0 ... -mind.html

And, finally, does taking a minority position in one's discipline make one a hack?


It doesn't. It's the other things on top of it that earn the label for me. I've already listed those. I don't think they bear repeating.

Don[/quote]

How do you know if a difference is 100% biological? You don't, so you declare it a gender difference - abracadabara you have evidence of gender discrimination all over the place!


Attacking strawmen is fun.

In short, the neurophysiological evidence showing sex differences is science; feminist gender-studies are currently fashionable nonsense.


One of the fun things about the Larry Summers affair was all the pop-op-eds that came out saying something to the effect, "We should be couragous enough to rationally investigate the hypothesis that differences in academic positions in mathematics, etc. is caused by innate sex differences." You know what's strange about a statement like this? We have investigated it extensively. The answer, more or less, is that these differences are largely not explainable in those terms and are instead mediated by social differences, just as was the case with biology, medicine, literature, anthropology, and virtually every other discipline that women caught up with and surpassed men in. Spelke isn't publishing from a gender-studies department. I guess this is a comment on how specialization of knowledge isolates people from being aware of what we already know. These are the sort of things mainstream feminists are pointing out. Tal, taking a marginal view, endorses people like Pinker and calls the dominant scientific position something feminists maintain out of ideology. He does this with no more basis than glib denials, backpeddaling, misunderstanding what he is criticizing, and so on. Indeed, for Tal the mere listing a sex differences seems to be enough to show they are innate followed by condescendingly telling people read a few pop-sci works written by the minority.
_Tal Bachman
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Post by _Tal Bachman »

Hi Inifinite Void in the Darkness

This is basically a repeat of my post from a few days before, which you haven't returned to:

***

1.) I googled "David Brooks misogyny" and, in the few minutes I spent looking, didn't find anything that seemed even remotely credible or sensible. Would you be so kind as to post here at least one excerpt from Brooks's writing, but preferably two or three, which to you demonstrates his "rabid misogyny"? If you do, I will be happy to concede your point. Let's see your incriminating quote(s).

2.) I don't think my evolution question was analogous to the wife-beating question, but I'll recast it anyway:

Would you, or would you not, disavow a Darwinian explanation for the origin of human life on earth, if an official First Presidency statement enunciating LDS doctrine on just that question ruled out that explanation?

I await your reply, amigo. Then we can get started on the harder stuff.

Tal
_barrelomonkeys
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Post by _barrelomonkeys »

How did I miss this thread? Autism! Woo! And Feminism? Double Woo!

On the other hand, those who insist that male-female differences in cognition are purely socially constructed, without examining the empirical data openly, they are idealogues.



I would say those that insist male-female differences in cognition are purely biological, without examining the empirical data openly, they are idealogues. Seems there's a few of these on this thread.

About Asperger's and the study of autism and gender roles: Interestingly enough girls and boys with asperger's (and there is quite a bit of debate as to whether asperger's really is high functioning autism - look at IQ scores and see the performance and verbal scores) are not quite the same on the empathy level. This has not been attributed to the biology of Asperger's solely, rather it has been attributed to the social groupings that girls vs. boys grow up in. As far as I can tell there has been limited research on this subject and there needs to be more so.
.

I'm not googling anything, but you can if you want. Knock yourselves out if you're interested.
_barrelomonkeys
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Post by _barrelomonkeys »

A Light in the Darkness wrote: For instance, the "extreme-male brain" theory of autism is not exactly in vogue among the cognitive scientists and psychologists who study autism. To say Baron-Cohen has demonstrated a broad claim like the genetic differences explaining the observed differences in gender aptitudes, preferences, and roles, such as mathematical talent, is unequivocably false. It is false in the sense that his views are representative of the state of academic research and it is false in the sense that his views are compellingly supported. And when he runs to the press to make claims that most scientists will respectfully disagree with and does so in a misleading fashion, he is not acting as a responsible scholar. Then you end up with situations where someone like Tal laps it up and uses it as a hammer to bludgeon feminists he seems to barely understand.


I disagree with the extreme male brain scenario. Part of Baron-Cohen's extreme male brain theory stems from the "fact" that men are less empathetic than females and this is a trait of autism/Asperger's. I think the discovery of mirror neurons is the most underreported discovery of our time, and I believe one of the most important. I did a search to see if Baron-Cohen has addressed this and couldn't come up with anything.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 163427.htm

Baron-Cohen contends that there are just more males that have Asperger’s than females. This of course is being disputed because females are actually under represented and have a much harder time getting the help and diagnosis they need. Why? Well (this sort of helps his cause) most girls/women with Asperger's actually do handle social situations better than their male counterparts. Yet, this hurts his theory of the extreme male brain scenario, because a woman can have empathy, can learn to interact socially (this has been attributed to social factors and not biological by the way, look up at the mirror neurons) and still has Asperger's syndrome. My daughter has Asperger's syndrome. She is not a male, does not have a male brain. She has a brain that has issues with mirror neurons, and THIS is the current theory on it, and I believe the one that is supported by the most modern science.

He drew a lot of his theory from the "fact" that more boys than girls have autism and therefore there's something there. The boys/men he looked at with Asperger’s are very different than many girls with Asperger's. This actually is a fact. He believes that because the males with Asperger's are low on empathy and high on the systemization that this proves that they are very male brained. Of course not looking at the girls that have higher empathy and do not systemize in the same way the boys do (for instance girls with Asperger's more often than not are drawn to literature, horses, girl things) are less seen as "male" brained and are in essence ignored by many that were doing the diagnosis. Interestingly enough Baron-Cohen has a list of criteria for autism/Asperger's (and it is not really appropriate to put those terms or diagnosis together) and he labeled them as being evidence for an extreme "male brain". Unfortunately for him there are more females being diagnosed that do not have this "male brain" and are yet still diagnosed as having Asperger's. That is his problem.

It's odd really... if he had realized early on that females with Asperger's do indeed still have qualities that he deems as being inherently female that wouldn't have hurt his research. Indeed he could have said, "Look even within the individuals with Asperger's there are definite differences between the sexes." His problem is he did not see that and labeled certain behavior as being only "male" and discounted the many females (that incidentally have many stereotypical qualities of females) that actually have Asperger's.

So in essence his problem is this: He stated that more males have autism/Asperger's than females. He sees that these people with autism/Asperger's have certain traits. He links these traits as being male (since most of the people diagnosed with autism/Asperger's are male) and concludes that this is maleness being amplified. His problem: Females with Asperger's that are QUITE different than the males with Asperger's and that they were ignored or underrepresented for years. And why would they be ignored? Makes perfect sense. If you have a set of criteria that say only "maleness" of this degree is seen as being a part of the diagnosis then of course you don't let the females that do not have that "maleness" in as part of the diagnosed. Anyway. Mirror neurons are the key. The problem with his theory is that he based much of it on autism; and in that he was just plain out wrong when it comes to the differences of females and males with Asperger's.

I just did a search on HW Wilson, saw his latest research exploring this very topic. Below is a quote and if anyone would like the full text of the study please pm me as I've saved a copy.

Empathising and Systemising in Adults with and without
Asperger Syndrome
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 34, No. 3, June 2004 ( 2004)

Table II. Summary of Participant Information
n Mean age SD Mean IQ SD Range
AS-males 18 36 11.26 117 6.68 47
Non-AS-males 44 30 14.20 113 10.28 36
Non-AS-females 45 28 13.06 112 8.31 36

Please take note that not one female diagnosed with AS was even a part of this study. PROBLEM!!!!!!!!! For me at least. Look at the title of this study, "Empathising and Systemising in Adults with and without Asperger Syndrome" Is anyone comfortable with this title? Is anyone comfortable that he included non AS female participants if he did not have any AS diagnosed female participants? What precisely was he measuring? Certainly not looking at AS from a diagnosed female perspective and yet he had neuro typical females to represent all females in this study. Why did he not have one female with AS a part of this study. THIS is why there are problems with his research and his theories.
Last edited by Guest on Sun Jul 15, 2007 6:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.
_Tal Bachman
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Post by _Tal Bachman »

I would say those that insist male-female differences in cognition are purely biological, without examining the empirical data openly, they are idealogues. Seems there's a few of these on this thread.


Barrel

I've never heard ANYONE EVER say that (all) "male-female differences in cognition are purely biological". Have you? Talk about a straw person...!
_Tarski
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Post by _Tarski »

Tal Bachman wrote:
I would say those that insist male-female differences in cognition are purely biological, without examining the empirical data openly, they are idealogues. Seems there's a few of these on this thread.


Barrel

I've never heard ANYONE EVER say that (all) "male-female differences in cognition are purely biological". Have you? Talk about a straw person...!


Here is my view.

Language: Humans have the innate ability to think in and use language. We are biological pre-wired to use nouns and verbs etc.
However, our environment determines how this gets played out in terms of vocabulary and word order etc.
The social environment determines how the innate categories get manifested (lke Chomsky's suface structure idea).

Gender. We all are born pre-wired to key in on gender distinctions and to identify and pick up on the "gender vocabulary" in use in the particular and contingent social environment (women have long hair in my society etc.). But socialization does play a big role and gender is potentially as maleable in its manifestations as is language.

So were victorian women pre-wired to tend statistically avoid the hard sciences and mathematics or are they pre-wired to pick up on the fact that their particular society is manifesting gender roles in such a way as to steer females away from the hard science?
Could it go the other way in some future society?
These issues are open.
_barrelomonkeys
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Post by _barrelomonkeys »

Tal Bachman wrote:
I would say those that insist male-female differences in cognition are purely biological, without examining the empirical data openly, they are idealogues. Seems there's a few of these on this thread.


Barrel

I've never heard ANYONE EVER say that (all) "male-female differences in cognition are purely biological". Have you? Talk about a straw person...!


I have heard this viewpoint. As a matter of fact there are people that grasp on to studies that show the different type of brains that try to discount any social conditioning. I think it's rather fortunate for you that you haven't stumbled onto any of these cave"persons". I have.

Did you see the study Baron-Cohen did on his autism research where he didn't even include any females that have autism? I find that very interesting. I went back and put that portion in bold, since you probably didn't wade through my ranting. :)


He did however include neuro-typical females in the study. And wala! There's his evidence of male brained autism. I wouldn't toot his horn if I were you.
_Tal Bachman
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Post by _Tal Bachman »

Barrel

My comments on Baron-Cohen were a reply to "I Am Truly Humbled To Be A Light Amidst Your Unfortunate Darkness"'s comment that he was a "hack". (Pretty rich coming from someone who no doubt would never refer to the sorry likes of John Gee, who is as marginalized as possible within what should have been his academic field, as a hack). No doubt Baron-Cohen has made some mistakes, but I am not sure that would qualify him as a "hack".

No, I didn't read all through your essay; I've gotten consumed with the David Hume thread. I'll have to come back to this or my head will explode!

In any case, my original point was that there is good evidence that there tend to be innate differences between male and female brains. (This of course does not rule the importance of environment). I'll come back and defend that once I get done with the other thread.
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