| Your evidence (of the absence of sexual dimorphism in the human brain) is that rats with identical genes can be trained in different directions? (Your second link is behind a paywall, for me anyway.) > I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study of what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful interests, they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their parents' expectations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability What you're saying is that your hypothesis (the absence of human sexual dimorphism in brain neuroanatomy) can't be proved false by any practical experiment. Nor can the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Imagine you lived in a world (perhaps the world of 100 years ago) in which everyone believed in human sexual dimorphism in neuroanatomy. (BTW, here's the top link I get when I google that: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/6/490.short). Lacking MRI scans, these uneducated people give as evidence the fact that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers. Your job is to convince them otherwise. You say: my theory is that it's possible that girls prefer dolls and boys prefer tin soldiers because of thousands of years of cultural conditioning, etc. You've offered an alternative hypothesis to explain facts that both of you observe. You haven't even begun to explain why your hypothesis should be believed over the existing null hypothesis. Your listeners ask: what evidence makes your hypothesis more plausible than mine? That genetically identical rats can be trained to do different things? What does this tell me about human sexual dimorphism? But actually, it's not as bleak as you think. Society today has enough parents and scientists who believe in the absence of sexual dimorphism above the neck, that this experiment has not gone unperformed. One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#Sex_reassignment_of... |