The sexes don’t feel pain the same way
nature.com
nature.com
The more newsworthy headline here is that biological and physiological studies will have varying results across test subjects with differing genetics, and that testing against genetically identical test subjects will give overly specific results. This seems to be a fundamental problem in the methodology of a lot of biological studies.
We've done a very good job at creating an invulnerable lab mouse.
You won't find any experts to disagree with you on this part.
In my experience it works out more like, scientists make their studies as big as funding will allow for while tracking and justifying every single expenditure to your grant providers who can withdraw funding if they're not happy with the way their money's being used.
I can tell from your comment that you understand this already but we should avoid talking about improving statistical significance when what we really mean is reducing the sampling error or the systematic effects---which would of course actually reduce the significance if the hypothesis is incorrect.
It's also the opposite. There's a strain of far left ideology that claims men and women are mentally identical, despite much scientific evidence to the contrary. If they were identical, studies on both genders would be unnecessary.
I've never seen anyone actually claim this. Often, people on the right want people on the left to be claiming this because it would be easy to refute. But in fact what people on the left are usually doing is expressing skepticism that various aspects of the status quo (such as the distribution of genders in various professions) are explained primarily by the - typically small - average cognitive differences between men and women.
In a similar way, one might argue that "races" don't really have any objective existence, and yet still acknowledge that e.g. African-Americans are less likely to go to college than Asian Americans. Such stats aren't invalidated by the lack of any objective biological definition of "race", or by the existence of some people with mixed African/Asian heritage, etc. etc.
It fairly obviously is not. That sex traits are multidimensional and that there are more than two ways that that they present in combination is...not really a matte about which there can be serious, fact-based debate.
> and that the existence of intersex people somehow disproves the idea of male/female sexes.
It (and a number of other phenomena that aren't typically labelled intersex, including, but not limited to, the way certain physical sex-linked traits other than external genitalia in transexuals are, on average, more typical of the sex corresponding to their gender identity than to sex identified by their at-birh genitalia or combination of sex chromosomes) obviously disproves the idea of exclusive stereotypical male and female sexes.
But none of that is relevant to the upthread issue, which was the supposed claim that males and females are mentally identical. That is a rather distinct claim from “sex is more complex than a male/female binary distinction”.
That being said, I would be surprised if you could find an example of anyone at all prominent or influential on the left expressing in writing the position that you quote.
How about this for a prominent and influential source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x
The headline is "Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains"
Under the sub-heading "Cultural paths":
"So if it’s not brain hard-wiring, how do we explain the often stark differences in behaviour and interests between men and women? Here is where we get to Rippon’s thesis on the impact of a gendered world on the human brain."
You can inject people with testosterone and estrogen and observe behavioral changes (as people attest to in this very thread), so it's certainly a pretty strange position to have. Neuroscience is too important for these nonfactual statements to be accepted, let alone be published in Nature. There's a pretty thorough counter argument here: https://quillette.com/2019/03/29/denying-the-neuroscience-of...
The brain is a bit of a red herring here. We know little about the brain -- far too little to be able to draw any conclusions from whatever differences there may be between average male and female brains. We do, however, have reliable behavioral evidence of small cognitive differences between men and women on average. My point was that there are few if any people who deny the existence of such differences.
I can't leave links to my life experiences, but as I finish my undergrad I have heard every type of teacher and student maintain that the only differences between men and women are socially constructed. It is common knowledge and thus not really debated. The one time I saw a teacher maintain otherwise, it was a guy in the biology department who was retiring. The class session dissolved into a shouting match between students with the teacher looking on.
I suspect that you weren't listening very carefully to what people were actually saying.
This isn't a problem, though. This is probably what happens when it turns out the Russian bogeyman was just a fever dream. Indeed, being in a public University in the North East as well as 2 of my 3 concentrations being in the liberal arts, I'm quite used to people ignoring actual fires as they continuously harangue everyone about potential fires.
I cannot see any connection between the second paragraph of your comment and what we're talking about.
If sex-linked behavioral changes at explainable by hormone differences and can reproduced by in vivo manipulation of hormone levels, that supports rather than refutes the idea that intrinsic brain differences are not responsible for the differences.
In any case, though, the article does not support the upthread claims of either a view that there are no sex differences in mentality or that there are no physically-based differences in behavior, and all are social, because it addresses not behavior or mentality but brains.
Strange that, having been on the left my whole adult life and had substantial contact with the far left, I've frequently run into people on the right talking about this strain of far left ideology, but never actually encountered it outside of those descriptions.
The NIH's change in requirements to include does/dams largely follows from the finding out of McGill [0] that showed male rats will change their pain tolerances in response to testosterone smells emitted by male researchers. That particular finding invalidated a LOT of pain research from a few decades past. There had been calls for a long time to include female rats in research, but the rodent estrus cycle is very difficult to deal with and control for, hence female absence from most rat studies. Bucks are very pheremonal and will also greatly change behavior when does are around, another confound to experiments. The McGill work was the straw that broke the camel's back and finally forced the change from the NIH.
[0]https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/scent-man-23549...
But who cares if it leads to better research.
The issue I have with it is that we are talking about animal studies. And asking scientists to justify the use of male vs female mice sound like asking physicists to justify the choice between spherical and cubic cows. A point of using mice is that experiments can be done easily and cheaply before moving on to more detailed research using more varied, more expensive animals, ending up with humans.
Forcing scientists to compare male and female mice can lead to better research... on mice. But does it result in better research on humans is debatable (and debated in the paper I linked). After a quick read, what I find unfortunate is that the conclusion is supported more by political arguments than with hard data.
But she's significantly worse at dealing with cold, heat and high brightness. One thing is that her body may be worse at regulating temperature, but she can't stand going out in the cold even for a few minutes unless she's dressed like she's visiting one of the poles.
Me on the other hand have little problem handling the discomfort of being cold or too hot. I also have no issue handling very bright sunny days without sunglasses, while she cannot.
Writing this it seems tempting to view it in an evolutionary perspective... giving birth is a very painful event one must endure, and when hunting it certainly helps to keep pushing even though you're too cold or too hot... or maybe it's just the way the two of us are wired up.
Can’t tolerate extreme temperatures (especially cold), but have a fairly high tolerance for physical pain compared to what’s normal I think.
And I am INFAMOUS for needing sunglasses. Whenever I’m visiting my folks, they know it’s the thing I’ll complain about if I’ll be in the sun and my mom will usually have bought sunglasses just for me.
Random source is random:
On the other hand, I perceive I'm much more sensitive to light and temperature. Indeed I literally can't hold her coffee cups, drink hot drinks and soup, or hold microwaved meals because of pain overload which she can without thought. And I assure you this isn't because of conditional exposure or anything on her behalf to harsh conditions, she's a relatively delicate creature.
Growing up, I often wondered whether there's just a greater deal of variation in pain and sensory perception in the population than generally accepted. I remember watching people jump into cold pools during swimming carnivals, and I had to seriously wonder whether those people were experiencing what I was experiencing, because, while I'm being a bit melodramatic here, you might as well ask me to consider putting my hand in a fire, and some of these people I swear were amidst revelling in it...
I don’t get it.
I'll happily go outside down to -5 C/20 F weather outside wearing shorts and a warm jacket, as long as it isn't too windy.
You are correct, and it's kind of insane to me how much of a "baseline" there is to what "tolerable temperatures" feel like. You start to notice this a lot living in a place with radical temperature swings. If gets up to 35F in February, I can wear a T-shirt. When it first drops to 45F in October, it feels like the arctic.
But my point was that my gf can't stand being cold. I don't enjoy it, but I don't mind being cold. It's not pleasant when you start to lose sensation in your limbs, but I can deal with it fine. My gf can't stand 3 seconds outside in -5C without at least five layers of insulation from top to toe.
watch out for cataract
If you spent a lot of time in the outdoors/elements as a kid, you're going to be a lot better at handling adverse environmental conditions.
I spent my childhood wearing shorts and sandals to school, even when it was literally freezing outside (never really got much below freezing though). I also think that 15 C is comfortable inside temperature because half the houses in New Zealand don't have good insulation and heating, if any. I also never need sunglasses; I never wore them as a kid because I wore prescription glasses instead.
I handle direct pain fairly well too, because I grew up with two older brothers, one of whom enjoyed hitting me to the point that in retrospect I'd classify it as sibling abuse. I also spent a lot of my adolescence and university years doing physical work in kitchens and on building sites. Injuries such as burns, bruises, and cuts don't really bother me. Loud noises don't bother me either, from a combination of power tools, using firearms without adequate protection, and spending too long in front of large speakers in nightclubs and at festivals.
People who haven't grown up handling particular discomforts and conditions will be less willing and/or capable of handling them as an adult.
I definitely spent a lot of time in the cold as a kid. During walks in the forest during winter I would play with streams, building dams etc, even though the stream was starting to freeze over. I also didn't wear much clothing compared to others during winter. My gf did no such thing.
It's probably a mix of gender-related biological differences, personal differences, and cultural differences. Is it cultural that women are expected to keep going (taking care of children and household) in the face of discomfort, pain, injury and/or illness? Or are they biologically better equipped to do so?
A common (not pain-related) claim used to be that women are better at multi-tasking than men, but as I understand it, that turned out to be caused by cultural expectations, with women culturally expected to manage multiple things at once while men were allowed to focus on a single task. Similarly, other aspects we think of as biological have turned out to be nurture rather than nature.
But there's also likely to be many biological differences that haven't been sufficiently explored yet. As the article points out, research is often done primarily on male mice (and male people), ignoring the possibility that things might work differently for women.
It seems like different kinds of pain affect me differently.
Stubbing my toes or getting slapped has never been painful to me, but I've had messed up hormone levels all my life. This seem to have stayed the same.
The pains from doing exercises really lowered. Muscle cramps after going to the gyms are much more easier to ignore.
However I've noticed that since my main hormone is estrogen other kinds of pain are really painful. Cold hurts a lot, to the point where I had to change my winter wardrobe. I've also noticed that the pain that comes from laser hair removal also increased but that may be due to the skin getting thinner and more sensitive.
There's definitively more of an emotional weight to pain now. Stubbing my toes will make me very angry, tripping might make me sad, etc. Before my transition, it was all the same annoying dull emotion of "ow, I'm in pain". Sometimes, I carry the emotional pain a bit longer than the physical pain. Reliving that same emotion later can bring back the physical pain.
Hormones are fun!
Unfortunately, like the "doctors" of the bad old days, for medical purposes we don't really have a choice, do we?
We do, however, have a choice when it comes to cosmetics and non-critical research, and I stand by my conviction to use cosmetics not tested on animals exclusively.
However, since testing human medicines on other species does have some sense, we would consider it unethical to run potentially risky tests on humans if that can be avoided by doing preliminary tests on animals instead. If it turns out that some drug which seems safe in vitro actually turns out harmful in the whole organism, then we do want to determine that before trying it out on humans even if that process takes the lives of a lot of lab mice.
If your experimentation kills a patient because you intentionally didn't do the due diligence in order to save some animals, that's not an excuse, that's IMHO as good as murder.
However the hypocrisy of the current state of things is staggering to me. Using words like 'ethical' and 'unethical' makes it worse. Nothing makes a human being's life more important than the life of a lab mouse. To avoid a result "as good as murder" in humans, we are actually murdering other animals.
Is this hyperbole, or do you seriously believe this?
It really should be necessary for people who don't believe it to explain themselves. That is rejecting the null hypothesis, so to speak.
Why does it come down to self awareness and emotional development? Because of suffering? Nothing about this is obvious, but I believe (given lack of evidence to the contrary and given that mice and human brains are similar enough) that mice suffer as much as humans. This is my belief -- not an argument intended to convince others.
> saying that their lives are worth as much as human lives is ridiculous and insulting to all humans.
Anything unconventional is ridiculous. But how is it insulting to humans? Are we supposed to be at the top somehow? This is a religious argument you seem to be making.
This is a touchy topic, and I don't think productive discussion will obtain here, so I will not make any further comments in this thread.
It might not convince you completely of this point, but it will force you to seriously consider your arguments, and is therefore in my opinion a great intellectual exercise.
The level of self awareness is pretty much the only thing we can grade life. I might even like mice, but their lives are endless cycle of eat - fuck - sleep - shit. Human lives are much more productive, creative, interesting and therefore more valuable. And all of that starts with self-awareness.
So let's take it all the way. What makes the life of a lab mouse more valuable than the life of a single cell of yeast?
I think answers about awareness and capability just rationalize the fact that intuitively some life forms are more sympathetic to us than others. We will draw the line at some level of sympathy, but only as far as practicality allows us.
A human life is more valuable than the life of a lab mouse because a human is more sympathetic than a mouse and it is impractical to value lab mice highly. That's the only answer.
Which isn't to say that we necessarily should be interacting with the rest of the universe as though everything is human, because... well honestly I'm not sure I can express the concept in a way that it is even remotely likely to be understood, but I think it would suffice to say that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we are somehow special and preferred by the universe. We may prefer ourselves simply because we are us, but at the same time our concept of self is incredibly expandable. Even within those arguing against parent there are people willing to include non-human species among that definition because they display similar cognitive qualities, and there are humans who would exclude other humans for various reasons. The line is arbitrary and subjective to the point that I make the following assertion: it is entirely illusory, an imposition of our mind's desire to categorize.
The only "obvious" answer I could see from the perspective of the entire universe is that the value of a single life is zero.
But that perspective isn't useful for most moral decisions.
If you evaluate that mouse = human = nonzero, I don't think that's "completely and obviously true" at all.
Let's remove the issue of human exceptionalism, even. It is not "completely and obviously true" that mouse = tapeworm = nonzero, either.
A lot of your argument is just that humans are not categorically different, which is not the same discussion as whether different species have different multipliers.
I do wonder how long it will be before people start vandalizing statues of historical figures because they ate meat.
(Wow, this got off topic quickly.)
They might eyeroll at the "obvious" of "smoke is bad for your lungs, don't mix waste disposal and drinking water" not being able to do something hard isn't reasonable - we might grimace at amputations for gangrene but without suitable antibiotics.
If anything they would judge those who don't adopt when it becomes viable.
It's very likely that people find meat tasty because it's nutritious, just as we find sugar and plant fats tasty. Your comment makes it sound as if eating meat is some kind of indulgence, like eating sweets.
Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more justification than that to want to eat other animals. There are practical matters of efficiency and of the ethics of kiling animals at scale, in industrial farming, that are far more important and interesting to discuss than the nebulous idea of the morality of eating any meat at all.
At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?
>> At least the research animals have some benefit beyond a single person's satiation.
I don't understand this. Even a chicken is large enough to feed two people. Larger animals can feed a family for several days.
Really, it is. It doesn't make a lot of sense to eat meat from an efficiency point of view, or from the sense of impact on the climate.
>Meat is a rich source of protein and energy. We don't need any more justification than that to want to eat other animals.
I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first.
> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?
Humans plus livestock make up 96% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. Domesticated poultry is 60% of the birds. That makes us a special case in terms of impact, to put it mildly.
From an animal welfare point of view, it's also different to kill a wild animal for food compared to shutting it in a cage and pumping it full of hormones and antibiotics for a few months before killing it.
>> I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first.
It follows because we need protein and energy.
>> That makes us a special case in terms of impact, to put it mildly.
That makes us a special case in the way we find meat to eat.
But why are we a special case when it comes to eating meat?
It's not logical to say we need to tackle the biggest problems first before tackling the smaller problems. Tackling the easier problems first, or tackling as many problems as we can simultaneously makes more sense.
It's also wrong to imply that food is not a major contributor to climate change. It's hard to compare (because of methane emissions v CO2 emissions, food is transported on vehicles etc.) but it looks like food production is similar in impact to transport.
> Why would we first limit a fundamental need
Eating food is a fundamental need, but not eating meat.
Of course farming uses transport, just as everything else does. But the emissions from transporting food come from transport vehicles. I don't see how these must be assigned to farming. If we reduce transport emissions, we'll reduce all transport emissions, including those from transporting food. If we only reduce emissions from farming we'll still have to deal with transport emissions.
In any case, going by the graphs on this wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Anthropogenic_g...
- It really looks like a clear majority of total emissions is from energy production, transport and industry.
It's a question of moral agency. Generally animals are not held to any kind of moral standard at all - no one thinks a dog that bites a child is "evil", just dangerous. You'd be more likely to blame the owner for not training/controlling it properly.
Now, I think the point you're making is that, in terms of moral agency humans are special, so special that we 're not allowed to eat other animals, even though other animals do it (and they'll eat us if given the chance).
Well, I have to say that I've heard the same claim on both sides of the issue. For example, in the past people have claimed that animals don't have a soul, and in modern times, that they don't feel pain (or don't experience it as humans do) or have emotions (or human emotions) and that, therefore, it's fine to treat them anyway we please. In fact, I believe that this special moral agency of humans is used to justify animal experimentation, at least to some degree.
Obviously, I don't think that this idea of special human moral powers holds any water. We're animals like the rest. We 're part of the same food chain, where living things feed off each other. Why should we be treated differently than all those other living things? They can eat us, and each other, we can eat them.
Jonathan Swift argued the same in A Modest Proposal[1]:
> I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
Swift also argued that eating the babies of the poor also helps prevent famine and breaks the cycle of poverty. Clearly this has more advantages than eating chickens or cows!
> At the end of the day- many animals eat other animals' meat. Why is it any different for humans to do the same?
Animals also rape each other, kill each other over mates and territory, and occasionally commit cannibalism. By your logic, why shouldn’t humans do the same?
> Even a chicken is large enough to feed two people. Larger animals can feed a family for several days.
Depends on the chicken. Almost all male chicks are killed within 3 days of hatching, usually by tossing them into a shredder.[2] I doubt one of them is very filling.
Also: cannibalism, rape, murder etc are illegal in pretty much every territory. What is your point?
Also also: a chicken thrown to the shredder is not eaten, yes.
Can you please explain what you mean without colorful metaphors and attempts at humour? I enjoy those as the next person but they don't help me understand what you mean. If I make an assumption about what you mean and I reply to the assumption in the same way, with metaphors and similes, and you make an assumptiona bout what that meant and reply accordingly, we'll lose the plot very, very quickly.
I'd say avoiding meat could have some health risks.
Imagine what a boon a technological fix for this could be. If we could record the quality and quantity of pain felt by one organism and play it back at high fidelity for another organism, it could be an effective torture device ... but also a way to promote empathy across sexes, races, and species.
But it's probably a fix that will remain a fantasy permanently, because if physiology underlies the difference, one organism would have to physiologically become something else in order to experience the same pain as an other. Probably we're stuck with the same old limited channel for communicating subjective experience: art.
I'm not saying there's no value to research like this, but I also believe that if it makes some people uneasy, their fears come from a good place.
This link seem to say that women experience more pain over a lifetime, not necessary when testing for a large number of different triggers and comparing them to men.
"Research is telling us that women experience a greater number of pain episodes across their lifespan than men, in more bodily areas and with greater frequency."
They also only tested one trigger that is way more related to temperature sensitivity than actual pain tolerance.
"To carry out this research, scientists asked volunteers to place their non-dominant arm in a warm water bath (37 degrees centigrade) for two minutes before transferring the hand into an ice water bath maintained at a temperature of 1 - 2 degrees centigrade."
Since that is unique to our species, animal testing probably won't be helpful there.
Much of the animal kingdom has the same issue of painful childbirth. What you mean by "handle", I can only guess. Perhaps something about recovery and a desire repeat.
Do they? As far as I was aware, humans have a uniquely awkward childbirth due to our cranial size.
Human pregnancy is messed up beyond the obvious issue of squeezing our large brain through out narrow running hips.
I don't see anything human-specific here, this would have been true for all placental animals no?
What was immediately fascinating to me about this article was the relationship between the immune system and pain sensitivity. Women suffer from autoimmune disorders much more than men because of their stronger immune systems. Makes one wonder if differences in the pain pathways are adaptive to the stronger immune system.
Regarding painful child birth, from an evolutionary perspective it would only matter if the pain itself resulted in less reproduction. The pain is rather fleeting, all things considered, and worst for the first child. And there are many ways for natural selection to mitigate any negative impact on reproduction, such as flooding the woman with hormones that make her forget it, increasing sexual desire, etc.
The interesting part is why this wouldn't result in changes for both men and women. I think the answer is that pain sensitivity is useful, so the evolutionary pressure for men kept it up.
I should say that this is my private speculation. I'm not aware of any established science supporting this, though it might exist.