Men: Time to Make Peace With Your Inner Testosterone

Feminists and social scientists of gender are constantly underestimating the effects of testosterone on the male brain. The primary reason why males at the elite levels of higher math, hard science, and advanced engineering do so much better on average than females at elite levels of those fields, is the testosterone exposure from prenatal periods into adolescence and adulthood.

In a research study led by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at U. of Cambridge, researchers discovered one important way in which the brains of infant boys are influenced by their exposure to different levels of testosterone in the womb.

In this study, they tested a unique cohort of boys, 8 years of age, whose fetal testosterone had been previously measured from amniotic fluid at 13 weeks gestation. The boys were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to assess changes in brain activity while viewing pictures of negative (fear), positive (happy), neutral, or scrambled faces.

They found that increased fetal testosterone predicted more sensitivity in the brain's reward system to positively, compared to negatively, valenced facial cues. This means that reward-related brain regions of boys with higher fetal testosterone levels respond more to positive facial emotion compared to negative facial emotion than boys who with smaller levels of fetal testosterone.

In addition, increased fetal testosterone levels predicted increased behavioural approach tendencies later in life via its influence on the brain's reward system...

Although present at low levels in females, testosterone is one of the primary sex hormones that exerts substantial influence over the emergence of differences between males and females.

...In adults and adolescents, heightened testosterone has been shown to reduce fear, lower sensitivity to punishment, increase risk-tasking, and enhance attention to threat. These effects interact substantially with context to affect social behaviour. This knowledge about the effects of testosterone in adolescence and adulthood suggests that it is related to influencing the balance between approach and avoidance behaviour. These same behaviours are heightened in the teenage years... _MedIndia

More on prenatal testosterone exposure:

"We have discovered that in young boys, in parallel to what happens in adult men, exposure to prenatal testosterone predicts shape variation in their faces," said Katrin Schaefer, professor of anthropology at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the study. "We now know that the prenatal environment influences the shape of the face in male children as well as adult men, so the association is present before puberty." _Cosmos

Prenatal testosterone levels can also influence later language development in infancy and early childhood.

Testosterone has a powerful influence on brain and body development from the prenatal period, and throughout childhood and adolescence into adulthood. One of the primary reasons why men are being so thoroughly supplanted on college campuses by women, is the refusal of educational systems from K12 and beyond to acknowledge the differences in the ways that boys learn -- largely as a result of different hormonal effects in the brains of men vs women.

Modern educational systems are now being run largely by women for the benefit of women -- at the expense of men. This approach has been good for particular political and economic factions, but it has not been good for US society as a whole, and is not sustainable in the long run.

The sooner that men make peace with their inner testosterone, the better a society they can help to create for both men and women.

It is unlikely that women will ever make peace with men's inner testosterone, but as long as most men do so, most women should be able to accomodate themselves.

What Compelled 20+ Black Men to Rape One 11 year old Girl?

Gang Rape Suspects
The gang rape allegedly occurred months ago, but is just now hitting the news more widely, due to attempts by NY Times reporters and black activists to make the accused into victims, and the 11 yo victim into the perpetrator.

Steve Sailer takes the NYTimes to task for its one-sided coverage of the story. And for good reason. More from Jezebel.com, which does a better job of covering the story than the NYTimes!

In December, police learned of the assault when an elementary school student told a teacher about a cellphone video featuring one of her classmates. Authorities say that on November 28, the girl was offered a ride by a 19-year-old who took her to his house, then ordered her to take her clothes off, saying she's be beaten if she didn't. She was raped by several men and boys, then moved to the trailer where more assaults occurred as the attackers took cellphone videos and photographs.

The New York Times published a story today about how the case has torn apart the town, and the paper chooses to focus on the plight of the accused men. The author says the town is wondering "how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?" as if they were tricked into gang raping a child. Then there's this quote:

"It's just destroyed our community," said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. "These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives."

Though, of course, the accused are innocent until proven guilty, it's hard to believe that anyone's first concern would be about how the men will live with what they did. It's even more incredible that the Times decided to include the quote in the story, but it doesn't end there. _Jezebel

Black men commit far more violent crime than men of other races, although the reasons for this difference are not entirely clear. Some attribute the differences to hormonal levels, other focus on low intelligence levels. Al Fin sociologists feel that "a culture of resentment" running rampant inside black communities and cultures is at least partially responsible for high crime rates among black men.

One additional factor which must be discussed is the issue of "impulse control", one part of pre-frontal lobe "executive function." Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi published a detailed look at the relationship between impulse control and crime. It should be noted that executive function -- like IQ -- is highly heritable. It should also be noted that the developmental window for optimising executive function through training, is open between the ages of roughly 4 to 8 years of age. In communities where the illegitimacy rate is roughly 70%, early childhood training is likely to be poor to non-existent.

Here's a quick look at one particular hormone, testosterone:

Take testosterone in a prison. Dabbs' team found that criminal violence and aggressive dominance among women in prison is linked to higher levels of testosterone. An earlier study of male inmates found testosterone levels to be highest among male inmates convicted of violent crimes such as rape, murder and assault. Variables such as age, social factors and other hormones were seen as important in these studies.

Take testosterone and 'delinquency'. Comparing college students with men and women of similar age in a "delinquent urban subculture" (identified as skinheads, bouncers, bartenders, strippers), "delinquents" had higher testosterone levels than college students. (Personally, boxing the range of research subjects into a "delinquent urban subculture" sounds questionable, but anyway...)

Take testosterone in the workplace. Dabbs' team examined the salivary testosterone in seven vocation groups of men, as well as an unemployed group. They found that actors and footy players had higher levels than religious ministers. Dabbs related testosterone to dominance and antisocial tendencies, which in turn, he suggests, effect vocational preferences in subtle ways. Other studies reveal traditional 'white collar' workers possess lower testosterone than traditional 'blue collar' workers. _abc.net

Many more factors are involved, and free testosterone is not the only androgenic hormone in circulation. In addition, androgenic receptors come in different types, and different receptor types may influence behavioural reaction to any given testosterone level differently.

We know from examples such as the Wichita Massacre and the Knoxville Horror, that there is almost certainly an element of racial hatred involved when such gang rapes are combined with murder. Young women students who are raped and murdered on and near college campuses in American cities are often the victim of whatever combination of racial hatred, hormonal imbalance, low impulse control, and low intelligence which may drive young black male crime.

In the case of the young Texas girl, at least she was not murdered. I am personally more concerned about her future welfare than that of the rapists. It is true, however that society is going to have to live with these bad boys for many years. So it would be best for society to stop covering up this type of crime, stop making excuses for the perpetrators, and get to the bottom of what is driving this all-too-common type of interracial crime.

More: Here is the NYTimes story about the gang rape, published about 3 months after the assault, written more like a PC cover-up than a belated news report. Contrast this excuse-making "coverage" with the unrelenting attacks by the NYT against the Duke lacrosse team players who were later found innocent of all charges against them.

Update -- 14March2011 -- Meanwhile in Sweden: 20 Muslim Immigrants Gang Rape 11 yo Swedish Girl and Gang Rape and Genocide in Cote d'Ivoire and on it goes in ghetto after township after shanty town

High Pre-Natal Testosterone Exposure & Genius, ADHD, Autism

"There seems to be some evidence that excessive prenatal exposure to testosterone facilitates increased connections in the brain, especially in the right prefrontal cortex," said Mrazik. "That's why we see some intellectually gifted people with distinct personality characteristics that you don't see in the normal population."...Mrazik's notion came from observations made during clinical assessments of gifted individuals. _SD

Genius is more commonly seen in males than females, and males certainly receive much higher pre-natal exposures to testosterone than females, on average. In addition, high pre-natal exposures to testosterone have also been associated with increased rates of ADHD and autism, two disorders more commonly seen in males than females, like genius.

ADHD has recently been associated with greater creativity:

A new study in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences found adults with ADHD enjoyed more creative achievement than those who didn’t have the disorder.

“For the same reason that ADHD might create problems, like distraction, it can also allow an openness to new ideas,” says Holly White, assistant professor of cognitive psychology at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida and co-author of the paper. “Not being completely focused on a task lets the mind make associations that might not have happened otherwise.” _SB

Of course one would need to unravel all the different associations involved. Just as not all males are geniuses, neither are all persons with ADHD exceptionally creative. The situation cries out for extensive genetic analysis in conjunction with an analysis of hormonal history, family history, and life experience. Here's more on a particular gene, RORA, associated with autism.

"Autism has a huge sex bias, and it's been proposed that higher levels of fetal testosterone may put a fetus at risk," said study researcher Valerie Hu, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "We've provided an explanation of how this works."

Normally, RORA's job in cells is to turn on several other genes, Hu said. When a cell has high levels of testosterone, RORA levels run low, which affects every gene that RORA is supposed to turn on. The researchers based their findings on tests of neurons growing in lab dishes.
The research does not show that low levels of RORA cause autism, only that they are associated with the condition, Hu said. But other research has suggested that a RORA deficiency could explain many of the effects seen in autism. _MSNBC

...more is known about what derails the brain’s normal development, thus charting what makes gifted people gifted is very much a new frontier. Mrazik hopes that devices such as the Functional MRI scanner will give them a deeper understanding of the role of neurobiology in the development of the gifted brain.

“It’s really hard to say what does put the brain in a pathway where it’s going to be much more precocious,” he said. “The next steps in this research lay in finding out what exact stimuli causes this atypical brain development.” _Eurekalert

Asperger's Syndrome is 9 times more common in males than females, and is also thought to be associated with male genius.

But Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, of Cambridge University, says it is more accurate to describe this creativity as "systemising" - a strong drive to analyse detail.

"This might be in mathematics, machines, natural phenomena or anatomy, to identify rules that govern a system and any variations in that system."

While those whose strength lies in rational analysis are by no means exclusively male, it is described as a male brain trait compared with the so-called female ability to empathise - a characteristic weak spot for those with Asperger's.

"The condition does tend to affect men more than women, especially among those who are high-functioning. Males outnumber females nine to one in this diagnosis," he says. _PDF BBC PDF

If politically influential feminists truly wish to eliminate the gender gap in math-intensive areas such as physics, advanced engineering, theoretical computer science, and other hard sciences and technical fields, perhaps they should legislate pre-natal testosterone levels for all fetuses. The world would lose a great deal in variety and emotional colour, but achieving such a leveling would no doubt give these feminists a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

More Smart Men than Smart Women?

For instance, at the near-genius level (an IQ of 145), brilliant men outnumber brilliant women by 8 to one. That's statistics, not sexism. _DM_via_ReferenceFrame

ImgSource
The tested mean IQ of men and women is the same -- 100 -- in a "standard" population. Women are also doing better than men in higher education. So if men and women have the same IQ, and women are out-performing men in college and university, why was almost every complex technology one can think of invented by a man (or group of men), and almost every feat of path-breaking exploration accomplished by men? Why are the best musicians, chefs, composers, writers, scientists, mathematicians, inventors, engineers, and technologists mostly men?

Of course, in normal daily life, there's not much real difference between a man with an IQ of 105 and a woman with an IQ of
100. The real difference only emerges as we rise up the IQ scale to the sort of level that the really top jobs require and as we drop lower down the scale - because men, as it turns out, have a much wider range of intelligence than women.

As a result, there are not only far more men with high IQs than there are women, but there are also, as I'm sure any woman would tell you, far more stupid men around than there are stupid women.

There is, as yet, no simple or, indeed, totally convincing explanation as to why this is, but while the abundance of stupid men has always caused social problems, it is the relative abundance of highly intelligent men that has caused problems for several generations of emancipated, liberated, ambitious women.

As a result, when these women get close to the top, they are simply out-numbered by highly intelligent and often ruthlessly ambitious men. _DM

Lynn points out a crucial fact: it is not only the number of smarter men that make it harder for smarter women to reach the top -- it is the ambition (testosterone) possessed by the higher numbers of smarter men which administers the coup de grace.

The general conclusion: Proper methodology identifies a male advantage in g that increases exponentially at higher levels, relates to brain size, and explains, at least in part, the universal male dominance in society. _Nyborg PDF

So while women scientists such as Baroness Greenfield, Liz Spelke, or Nancy Hopkins may be upset that smarter women are not achieving top-level success as often as men, the truth is that nature has stacked the deck against them. Not only are there more smarter men than smarter women, but the men are turbo-boosted with testosterone.

Something to consider as the Obama - Pelosi regime takes the wrecking ball to ever wider swathes of American society and institutions: If radical progressive leftists attempt to generate equal results artificially, via executive order or bureaucratic regulation, how much more damage will be done to the infrastructure of economic freedom and prosperity? Just how deeply do our leaders wish to push us into economic devastation?

Remember that Gender Gap That Wasn't Supposed to Be There? It's Bigger and More Real Than Ever

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

What do you call people who refuse to admit the obvious? They are called "reality disadvantaged." That describes the legions of leftists in academia, media, and government who continue to deny important differences between men and women.

...a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

....When Dr. Deaner looks at, say, the top 40 finishers of each sex in a race, he typically finds two to four times as many relatively fast male runners as relatively fast female runners.

This large gender gap has persisted for two decades in all kinds of races — high school and college meets, elite and nonelite road races — and it jibes with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring “sex difference in competitiveness,” he concludes, “must be considered a genuine failure for the sociocultural conditions hypothesis” that the personality gap will shrink as new roles open for women. _NYT_via_Impactlab

While it is clear that men make up the vast majority of high achievers in math-intensive fields such as physics, rigorous engineering fields, mathematics, theoretical computer science, and the more math-intensive subfields in chemistry and other sciences, it is also clear that greater male competitiveness explains much of the relatively high achievement by males in fields that accept as many women as men at the entry level.

Testosterone makes a difference in the trajectory of a person's life, from the intrauterine environment to the neural development at critical developmental periods, to mature adult interests and personality quirks. In modern societies, both men and women are freer to be who they want to be. And guess what? They choose to be different from each other in overwhelming numbers.

But why do they make these divergent choices? Testosterone is far more of an explanatory factor than social programming. From conception to death, that one steroid hormone drives men to be who they are, while the much lower concentrations of vitamin T in women has a huge influence in who a woman chooses to become.

Brave Feminists Rage against the Testicle

Recent news stories about finding stem cells in the testicles of mice and humans has prompted a backlash from courageous feminist professors of Women's Studies at Balwynne College. Dr. Letisha Snotsberry and Dr. Nadine Bulsnort have graciously agreed to be interviewed by Al Fin, on this important issue.

AF: Thank you for speaking with me today. I wonder if you can each summarize your objections to the latest stem cell news, starting with Dr. Snotsberry.

LS: The issue is very simple, Al. Feminism in the western world is based upon the fact that all bad things in the world come from the human testicle. Testosterone is the maker of war, the source of domestic abuse, and the reason for the subjugation of women everywhere . . .

NB: . . . Not only that, but the testicle produces sperm, and sperm causes pregnancy which stops many women from achieving their potential. You have no idea how many women drop out of school, or even careers, just to have a sniveling little baby. It's uncivilized.

AF: But surely you can see the necessity of propagating the species, after all if there were no babies, the entire human race would . . . .

NB: . . . Don't give me that nonsense, Al. If women stopped allowing men to use them as babymakers, men would have to invent another way to have babies. Women are just too convenient . . .

LS: . . . Getting back to the topic of the human testicle, I think it's pretty clear that it already had two strikes against it. Now with the news of stem cells being derived from the human testicle--well it's simply too much! The testicle simply contains too many things--it could lead us all back to the patriarchy again.

AF: Excuse me, you are saying that because the human testicle is turning out to be the Swiss Army Knife of human organs, it should be downgraded somehow?

LS: Well, obviously, Al. For one thing, why do all men have two testicles?

NB: Exactly, Tish! It's total overkill. One testicle is plenty--maybe even too much. We've had discussions in national committee about a "Testicles-Optional Policy", or TOP for short. All newborn males would come under the policy, all overseen by a Bioethics Committee staffed by professors of Women's Studies from the local college or university.

AF: Wait a minute, Doctor. Are you suggesting neutering baby boys when they are born?

LS: Let me answer that. No, Al, you are making it sound worse than it is. The informed consent would clearly give the option of retaining one testicle or none. The parents are given a vote in the matter, along with each member of the Bioethics Committee. It is all quite democratic.

AF: But what would be done with the testicles that are removed?

The two professors exchange a quick glance, then check their watches for the time.

LS: Oh dear, Al, it seems to be getting quite late. We have another appointment--if you'll please excuse us . . .

NB: . . . Yes, we're in a big hurry Al, sorry.

AF: But surely you have some plans for the little boys' testicles?

NB: You're making too much of a big deal out of this, Al. We already told you that testicles are the source of everything bad in the world. What would we want with testicles? You seem to be insinuating . . .

AF: . . . No, not at all. I am simply curious . . .

LS: Thank you so much, Al. We have both really enjoyed this.

The professors walk away whispering furiously to each other.

AF: Well, ladies and gentlemen, I certainly appreciate the professors' sharing their thoughts. Apparently the human testicle is more controversial than I had thought previously. Please stay tuned for further developments.

Sex Differences, Gender Differences in Brain s

No other topic is as likely to raise blood pressures and voices in academia, than the topic of sex differences in the brains of men and women. This newsrelease from the Society for Neuroscience, discusses a report on sex differences in the brains of mice. The research is published in the 1 Feb 2006 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

“We found unexpected differences in the white matter of male and female brains, which may have implications for the study of diseases that affect one gender more than the other, like multiple sclerosis,” says co-author and team leader Robert Skoff, PhD, of Wayne State University School of Medicine.

Myelin, a major component of the brain’s white matter, coats nerve cells and helps conduct messages through the central nervous system. The dramatic difference was “much greater than we anticipated,” the team noted.

Clarifying how sex differences in the brain are generated may provide critical insight into why disorders such as multiple sclerosis, autism, and depression have a much greater incidence in one gender over the other, says Christine Wagner, PhD, at the University at Albany, who has also reported on sex-based brain differences in rats.

Skoff’s team also discovered that the lifespan of myelin-forming cells is much shorter in female mice. Female mice produced up to twice the number of cells as males, and twice as many of these cells died in female brains. The greater turnover of cells in female brains may mean that myelin itself generates—and degenerates—at a greater rate in females, says Skoff. This finding could have implications for research on multiple sclerosis, a debilitating autoimmune disease characterized by myelin degeneration. About 400,000 Americans have multiple sclerosis, with two of three cases occurring in women.

Skoff’s team also showed that the composition of the brain’s white matter is regulated by hormones. Just like the female mice, castrated male mice showed greater turnover of myelin-forming cells. “These results show that hormones made outside the central nervous system, presumably testosterone, help regulate the number of myelin-forming cells and the amount of central nervous system myelin,” says Skoff. Recent studies show testosterone may have a protective effect in multiple sclerosis.

“The fact that sex hormones affect these cells and influence turnover rates extends our notions of how and where sex hormones act in the brain well beyond where most people are aware,” says Bruce McEwen, PhD, an expert on sex hormones at Rockefeller University.

Recent controversy over the Lawrence Summers Affair, has led some people to look into a possible neurobiological basis of sex differences, and caused other people to attempt to slam the lid on the entire issue.

A thorough look into the issue of sex differences and gender differences in brain function is likely to stir up much controversy. Even if excellent scientific research demonstrated valid, meaningful, and significant sex differences and gender differences in male and female brain function, in the current atomosphere of quasi-censorship it is unlikely that the research would be financed or duplicated.

The importance of understanding sex differences and gender difference is in being able to determine whether current social policy is warranted, or perhaps misguided in emphasis.