tempests and tales challenges to the study of sex differences in the brain风暴和故事挑战大脑的性别差异的研究.pdfVIP

McCarthy and Ball Biology of Sex Differences 2011, 2:4 /content/2/1/4 BOOK REVIEW Open Access Tempests and tales: challenges to the study of sex differences in the brain Margaret M McCarthy1* and Gregory F Ball2 The topic of sex differences in brain and behavior con- LeVay’s 1991 Science paper [7] because it employed a tinues to garner broad interest and generate consider- very simple categorization of its subjects into “men, able controversy. A spate of popular books in the past women and gay men.” She questioned the value of such decade has heralded many of the recent advances in the a scheme, given the lack of sharp categorical boundaries study of the biological basis of human brain differences she had experienced in her own work. When trying to in relation to sex and gender. Volumes such as Doreen understand the possible causes of correlations between Kimura’s Sex and Cognition [1], Simon Baron-Cohen’s brain structure and human sexual behavior identified by The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Gorski et al. [8], LeVay [7] and Swaab [9], to name a Male Brain [2], Melissa Hines’s Brain Gender [3] and few, she learned about the organizational and activa- Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain [4] have tional hypothesis proposed by Phoenix et al. in 1959 reviewed, and in some instances overinterpreted, the [10]. The now iconic organizational and activational current state-of-the-art. This flurry of attention has also hypothesis codifies the concept that early hormone generated lightning rods for criticism, as evidenced by