The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Science Is Messy... And Mostly Wrong

There are several important conclusions for the layman to be drawn from Rippon’s well-written and rather more than merely comprehensive book. First, brains are incredibly complex organs which we in fact are only beginning to understand. Second, the purported differences in male and female brains are almost entirely mythical though claims about them persist in both professional and popular accounts. But for me the most interesting implication of her history of brain research is just how much fake news there is claiming to be science at any given time.

The latest scientific results are typically taken as revelatory in brain research. Tests, measurements, and experiments correlate with some hypothesis which is considered as scientifically confirmed. The results are then reported and cited in various professional journals, thus providing credibility to the confirmation. This news then finds its way into the popular press as ‘established scientific findings,’ and becomes part of a type of scientific folklore. Like any other story, this new scientific ‘fact’ is verified by its sheer ubiquity - not just in professional and popular journals, but also on the worldwide web.

Yet, when it comes to the brain, the results of almost all research are subsequently shown to be wrong. Errors in experimental design, researcher bias, spurious correlations, bogus references, among many other flaws seem almost de riguer in all research into the brain. Starting with cranial measurements in the 19th century, but continuing with high-tech MRI imaging, it seems that all the errors to be made have probably been made... and more than once. Sometimes the results of previous research can be re-interpreted in light of new findings; but, mostly, old research is simply intellectual junk.

It might be argued that this is the way of science, and always has been, namely that the process of discovering the truth is necessarily messy, but that ultimately the right answers, or at least better ones, emerge from investigative chaos. Perhaps. But the problem is that there is a reticence to admit that the issue of junk science is permanently recurring. Every generation of scientific investigators believe that their results are closer to the truth than previous generations. Yet every previous generation has been shown to be profoundly misguided. Scientifically speaking, it seems a good bet that this generation will also shown to less competent than it now thinks it is. The vast bulk of its work will also be shown to be... well, bunk.

In light of Rippon’s detailed and informed description of the actual process of science in an area of research which includes not just medicine and physical sciences like chemistry and developmental biology but also ‘softer’ disciplines like psychology and sociology, I wonder at those who think they have a solution to the problem of fake news in politics or business or technology. Most news is fake in the same sense that most scientific results are fake, that is future events will demonstrate that the conclusions we have reached on the information we have are mostly silly. Whatever consensus that exists now about what the truth is will be replaced by a different, often contradictory, consensus in the future.

Only by convention do we dare term tomorrow’s consensus ‘progress.’ Progress is a criterion which means different things to different people. Consensus is such only among those who are part of the consensus, a self-defining and changeable mob. The specific criterion of progress probably changes as frequently as the results of the science involved. As indeed does the criterion of truth about the news of the day. Conditions change, interests change, economics change, all frequently as a result of what the news is, scientific or otherwise.

Thus science itself is a sort of free for all in which the rules get made up as we go along. The closest relative to science is, perhaps surprisingly, literature. In fact science at its best seems to be a cadet branch of literature, modelled on literature in its attempt to describe, interpret and integrate what it sees in imaginative ways. Most literature turns out to be junk as well, fake news that ends up in discount shops and the remaindering warehouse. The only thing actually ‘better’ about modern literature over, say, that of Attic Greece is that there is lots more of it. Science, like literature, is inherently wasteful. But that’s what it takes to find out why they are done at all.

Postscript 14May20: Here is another piece provided by a GR reader on the character of real science: https://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837...

Postscript 21/10/21: An example of how most of the science at any one time is simple nonsense: https://apple.news/AA27bMZ17QuCqAo51e...

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