Scientists have been ignoring sex

Maria Isabel Garcia

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[Science Solitaire] Have you ever wondered why most scientific research are done on males?

Barraged by constant living examples, my female friends and I often half-jokingly tell each other how simple-minded men are relative to women.

But I never realized that this “simplicity” was preferred in most scientific studies. I have only recently discovered that most scientific research are done on males, including humans and other mammals.

And the main reason was that the female hormones would just “ruin” the data.

The male template has been the basic biological template for a majority of studies, treating “maleness” as an experimental template and not a fundamental biological trait to consider in their design and results.

I first came upon this realization a few years ago when I read neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine’s “The “The Male Brain” which she wrote after “The Female Brain.”

She said she too was shocked as a medical student to have found out that most studies were done on males because it eliminated the complications with female menstrual cycles. 

The most recent piece on this issue I came across with was by neuroscientist Dr. Larry Cahill in the brain studies website Dana Foundation, and I thought it clearly made the case that as he pointed out, male and female brains are equal but not the same and science should treat them that way.

First, he said that even as the big majority of scientific studies are done on animal males, research have shown clear and considerable influences of sex hormones on animal brain functions down to the molecular level. He noted that these differences often surprised the ones doing the experiment.

Second, on humans, there is “strikingly consistent” evidence that female brain regions are more interconnected including across the left and right hemispheres than the male brains.

I myself have come across many studies on this including the ones that point to the corpus callosum, the part that connects the right and left hemispheres, is generally bigger in females than males.

Male brains apparently operate locally or what scientists refer to as “modularity.” Women generally describe the male brain with hands cupped to form small isolated packets like cupcakes.

Third, scientists have also uncovered that the genes that express themselves to affect aging, specifically the relationship between the immune system and Alzheimer’s disease, have sex-specific dimensions to them.

Two brain parts that are key here are the hippocampus and the superior frontal gyrus, both known to enable functions like planning and remembering.

In terms of being prone to the genes that play a role in the disease, it is the hippocampus that is more prone for females and the superior forntal gyrus for males. This proves that males and females do not go through the same biological path in terms of aging.

The 4th one is something non-scientists would be most familiar with: stereotypical behavior of males and females.

While the notion of using stereotypes would be frowned upon socially and politically, it is a valid concept to study in science as Cahill noted that in terms of job preferences, stereotypical sex preferences remarkably hold across 53 countries ranging from Pakistan to Norway, nations whose “gender equality” ratings run a wide spectrum. 

His last point is closely related to the 4th one in terms of arguments against culture being able to completely account for sex differences as if biology just applied to infants.

Mother’s limited inlfuence

He cited a very remarkable study that showed the extent and limitations of a mother’s “feminizing” influence on her daughter. Indeed, it showed that the stronger mothers encouraged their daughters to be more “female,” they did behave as such BUT only if they had little of the masculinizing hormone when they were in their mother’s womb.

And if these daughters had more “masculinizing” hormones as babies in the womb, the less their mother’s feminizing encouragement worked.

It seems that mother does not always know best, unless she knows the level of masculinizing hormones she unwittingly gave you when you were in her womb.

Among the most remarkable speakers in TEDTalk I have heard was Andrew Solomon, author, whose book “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,” won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2001 and was also a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer prize.

In his TEDTalk, he succinctly captured what I think is the message of all the points that Cahill mentioned. He recounted a story when they were kids and his brother wanted a red balloon and he wanted a pink one.

His mother insisted to him how he would REALLY want a blue balloon, but Andrew said he was sure he wanted the pink one. And then she “reminded” him of his favorite color, which was blue.

Andrew said that his favorite color now as an adult is blue, but that he is still gay is “evidence of both my mother’s influence and its limits.”

Last week, I wrote a column called “Original Sex” where I cited a study that dated the biological differentiation of “male” and “female” for mammals to have been 180 million years ago. Why scientists doing studies now would eliminate the effect of something as ancient as that fact really baffles me.

Sex does not ruin data. Sex is crucial and also critical data to what makes us tick, as science has been proving to itself but largely ignoring. – Rappler.com 

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, Science Solitaire and Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire. Her column appears every Friday and you can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.

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