Today’s Independent has a feature highlighting a story from the latest issue of New Scientist. It is the latest shot in the ongoing war over whether men and women have “different” brains. Are men aliens from Mars who are incapable of understanding shopping or asking for directions, or are they just crippled by their upbringing? As the Indy rather breathlessly puts it:

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

Well maybe. Or maybe not. The actual New Scientist article is subscriber-only, but I’m sufficiently interested to stump up the cash when I have time to read it. I don’t, however, expect the study to be at all definitive, and the comments listed at the end of the Indy article are pretty much indicative of what I expect in the way of reactions.

By far the most important point here is that there is no binary. If the development of human brains is affected by chemical balances in the womb, and by your environment, then the resulting mix of human beings will not be all either “male-brained” or “female-brained”, they will be on a probability distribution that is weighted strongly to the extremes, but doesn’t fall to zero even in the middle. And in some cases “brain sex” and “body sex” won’t match up.