AbbaZaba2000:

gzuckier:

...so women have thicker corpus callosums, and that supposedly gives them an advantage in language and emotional processing. well, there are patients who have had their corpus callosums completely severed surgically, and a few who have been discovered to not have one; is it possible to identify these people by their language and emotional skills? no, not at all. well, if not having any corpus callosum doesn't result in any identifiable change, it's hard to imagine that having one that's a bit larger or smaller will be significant.

Interesting question, though, is it possible to identify men versus women by their language and emotional skills? Perhaps not through qualitative assessments of their vocabulary, ability to answer SAT questions, or typing speed, but what about a Turing test?

I know that when I've read novels told in the first person with a male protagonist written by a female author, I can usuallly tell that something seems "off." I've also read comments from women about the opposite case, that men writing as women seems "off."

Certainly some of that is cultural - perhaps it'd be easier to trip up the average women with a football question than the average man, or perhaps not, but I'm thinking more about the emotional qualities of the writing.

--s

well i definitely notice a difference in social interactions between the two sexes, on the average, but i wonder how much of that is learned. and then, how much of the learned is builtin, so to speak; for instance, suppose (as i sometimes wonder) if it's all down to the fact that little girls figure out early on that their mother is a girl like them; and little boys figure out there mother is a girl, and they're not; and that this sets girls off on a path of sort of having things in common, while boys are set off on a path of differences. (on the average). that's sort of environmental, then, but there's not a lot you can do about the fact that girls are born female and boys aren't, which makes it essentially hereditary. the "control group" of course would be babies whose primary caretakers are male, particularly where there's a female parent figure who plays the role a male does most of the time, i.e. secondary caretaker; but that's still pretty rare. and in cultures where babies are breastfed, obviously it's going to stay pretty rare. so there are questions which can't be answered from the top down, i guess; they'll have to wait until we get at them from the bottom up, so to speak, i.e. understanding genetics and development on the cellular and molecular level. and that's going to be a looooooong time from now.