I have to assume you haven’t bothered reading this, because section 2.3 points out flaws in the methodology of the studies looked at which the methodology in this study kind of tries to address (whether or not it’s a good job of it is left for everyone else to figure out). You shouldn’t dismiss a result out of hand because it doesn’t fit preconceived notions, but it’s absolutely a reason to try to dig in to the methodology of the new study and make sure it’s not flawed.
That said, this meta-analysis is also filled with some crazy statements. It seems to imply sexual dimorphism is only really visible in repro organs but women necessarily need to have wider hips to facilitate child birth among other differences.
This obvious point should have also been noted when comparing differences in organ mass, since mothers of babies with larger heads are more likely to die so this is selected against. Not an issue with lungs, heart etc., hence larger % differences in sexes there.
These aren’t egregious omissions in and of themselves, but it’s certainly useful context I’d like to have were I not familiar with sexual dimorphism.
The dismissiveness of a 1.6 fold increase in SDN size of human males compared to human women is bad. That’s enormous! Not something I would prepend with “only” and repeatedly call “small”, even when not comparing the differences between M/F humans and M/F rodents.
Bizarre that none of the authors objected to this phrasing, because it’s poisoned reading the rest of this paper for me. How am I meant to trust the authors’ opinion of what a “small” difference is?
Some of the points are a bit more compelling, like in section 5.1 where they point out that a difference attributed to M/F was replicated in much smaller size by concentrating on volume instead, or in 5.2 where they point out a few papers that missed crucial nuance.
But overall after reading a few thousand words of this, the nicest thing I can say about it is that I agree that it is indeed gigantic.