Phylomeny

I had promoted on this blog a study by my computer scientist friend Amaç Herdağdelen that looks at Twitter data for gender differences. Amaç has developed the project further, and I redesigned the whole thing; we give you Tweetolife, a website that presents the differences in the contents of tweets in Twitter according to the gender of the users and time of the day. You can enter your own queries and see the results right away. I personally love the Detailed Query part the most.

Let’s close with a passage from How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.

The male and female reproductive organs are a vivid reminder that qualitatively different designs are possible for the sexes, and we know that the differences come from the special gadget of a genetic “switch,” which triggers a line of biochemical dominoes that activate and deactivate families of genes throughout the brain and body. I will present evidence that some of these effects cause differences in how the mind works. In another of the ironies that run through the academic politics of human nature, this evolution-inspired research has proposed sex differences that are tightly focused on reproduction and related domains, and are far less invidious than the differences proudly claimed by some schools of feminism. (…) But ultimately we cannot just look at who is portrayed more flatteringly; the question is what to make of any group differences we do stumble upon.

[The previous post about this project has been modified into this one, so don't go look for it.]