"As hardy perennials go, there is little to beat that science hacks' favourite: the hard-wiring of male and female brains."

Writes Guardian science editor Robin McKie (who's a male, if that matters to you)"

For more than 30 years, I have seen a stream of tales about gender differences in brain structure under headlines that assure me that from birth men are innately more rational and better at map-reading than women, who are emotional, empathetic multi-taskers, useless at telling jokes...

And there are no signs that this flow is drying up...

McKie, being male, slips in a menopause joke.

... with last week witnessing publication of a particularly lurid example of the genre. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia revealed they had used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to show that the neurons in men's brains are connected to each other in a very different way from neurons in women's brains....

It is biological determinism at its silly, trivial worst. Yes, men and women probably do have differently wired brains, but there is little convincing evidence to suggest these variations are caused by anything other than cultural factors...

Equally, when gender differences are uncovered by researchers they are frequently found to be trivial, a point made by Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at London's Institute of Psychiatry, whose studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal development is due to their gender....

Read the whole thing. And try to maintain some rationality this time. Especially you men. I know it's hard for you. Oh, no, Althouse, being female, could not have made a joke. I must with heavier, manly hands crack that joke in the comments, that joke that she could not have made.