Gender science is a complicated business. Quite aside from the difficulties of doing the job, you have to somehow steer a path between the idiot males who assume that any slight biological difference (such as having boobies) is scientific proof that all females are inferior to all males in every way, and the equally daft hardline feminists who refuse to countenance any biological difference whatsoever. Nevertheless, people still persist in trying to find ways in which male and female behavior might somehow be defined by biology. One of the reasons that they may not have got very far is that in many animals the source of difference may not be in the brain, but in the nose.

Yes, you read that right. Most vertebrates have a small sensory organ in the nose called the vomeronasal organ. Recent research in Harvard has discovered that, at least in mice, this organ controls gender-specific behavior. Remove that organ from an adult female mouse, and she’ll start adopting typical male gendered behavior, including becoming sexually aggressive and losing interest in child-rearing. Hormone levels in the female mice were unaffected.

Mice, of course, are not humans. To start with we, in common with our nearest primate relatives, do not have a vomeronasal organ. Also we have larger brains and complex social behaviors that all help complicate the issue of gender. Nevertheless, the discovery that an apparently unrelated organ can have such a dramatic effect on gendered behavior has thrown a huge spanner in the works of gender science. The more we find out, the more we discover that we don’t understand.

Here too is a question for those evolutionary biologists who love to concoct theories as to why arbitrary social codes are the result of evolutionary necessity. How come higher primates evolved to lose this organ which so successfully suppresses male-like behavior in females? Could it be that, for highly intelligent and social animals, having strong gendered behavioral differences proved a disadvantage?

(On second thoughts, don’t answer that. Quite enough nonsense gets talked under the banner of evolutionary biology already. Let’s not create more wild hypotheses.)