Pink Brain, Blue Brain...more to come

Lise Eliot's Pink Brain Blue Brain (One World) has an interesting collection of evidence on the early development of language. Her evidence suggests that girls begin to talk, mostly, about four weeks before boys, and that their sentences soon become more complex. These small differences, she suggests, grow into the larger ones that we see in school tests and examinations, though they can be countered by effective early education and literacy teaching. This piece in the Guardian has more on the same theme. A key effect might be to remove the concept of "hardwiring" from the debate on intelligence, where it is often misleading (cf Baron Cohen's idea of hardwiring in relation to gender differences, and Chomsky's discredited language acquisition device). We don't have wires in our brains, and it does not help to suggest that we do, even by analogy. Our electrical connections work differently, and are more elaborate than we yet know. We need more precision in the way we discuss these matters.