Re: NYTimes article: women more genetically complex ...
On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 03:47:24PM -0700, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
> On 2005-03-21, David Nusinow penned:
> >
> > I'm not even going to begin to touch the NYT article directly, as it makes
> > my stomache churn. The findings have interesting implications for sexual
> > dimorphisms, and perhaps more importantly differences between individuals.
> > In no way though, does this imply that women are genetically superior to
> > men. I give the NYT article a big "Troll" rating.
>
> Thanks for the alternate point of view. The article "smelled" iffy to me, but
> I don't have the biology background to evaluate it myself.
No problem. That's actually what I expected, which is why I felt compelled
to give my long writeup :-)
> FWIW, I never read it as seriously suggesting that women are "better" -- just
> that they might exhibit a wider range of behaviors across the board. Is that
> plausible?
Plausible, yes, but how do we know that women experience a wider range of
behaviors across the board? It seems like you're begging the question to me.
> My first thought, actually, was that these studies could possibly
> indicate that medical research for women should involve a wider sampling, or
> be taken with a bigger grain of salt, or something. I could imagine that
> these genetic differences might relate to differences in the risk for certain
> diseases or tolerance for certain drugs.
This is definitely possible and important to consider, although we should be
wary of making too much of the idea. You're right about the possible
implications for disease and such, but a properly done study or group of
studies will take actual gene expression profiles in to account, especially
with modern technology, so these should already be handled. That said, there
are a lot of bad studies out there, but these findings won't help stop that :-)
- David Nusinow
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