The state of independent publishing

One-quarter of the top 100 Amazon sellers are independently published:

As many as a quarter of the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com are from indie publishers, according to data revealed at a trade presentation by the retailer. A chart detailing the 25 top-selling indie titles in 2012 was passed on by an audience member via Twitter. Though the term indie is broad, covering everything from self-published authors to publishing houses that fall outside the big six, the news has been interpreted as a victory for the go-it-alone author. However in the US the term has come to mean self-published. A spokeswoman for Amazon.com said: “This figure is referring to Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012, with ‘indie’ meaning books self-published via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). So a quarter of the top 100 bestselling Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012 were self-published via KDP.”

Amazon is playing a little fast and loose with the term “indie” here. KDP does not require self-publishing; Marcher Lord has multiple Kindle Select titles that are not self-published. I suspect Amazon doesn’t want to rub it in the major publisher’s faces that they are already as much a super-publisher as a retail channel. Indie quite clearly means independent publishers AND self- publishers.

My experience with the both world of conventional mainstream publishing as well as indie ebook publishing may be useful here.  I looked up my old reports from various publishers, which happens to include a few books that were not mine, and found the following numbers for conventionally published books distributed through the the traditional bookstores:

SS1: 12,348
SS2: 43,000
SS3: 8,000
IN1: 4,790
IN2: 3,815
IN3: 3,441
IN4: 2,796

Books in bold are mine. The others are not mine, but the numbers are hard. Now, one year ago today, I published A Throne of Bones with Marcher Lord Hinterlands. In terms of sales, it is basically a pure ebook and it isn’t available in any bookstore.

ATOB: 1,989

Here is where it gets interesting.  Let’s assume, for the simplicity’s sake, that the three novellas and SE are a single ebook called SE+.

SE+ PAID: 2,163
SE+ FREE: 21,681

So, even as a relative nobody, who is primarily known for being hated within the genre, and lacking a single book for sale on a bookshelf anywhere, I am still able to sell nearly as many copies of a book in a single year as a well-established minor conventional publisher managed to sell through traditional channels in a book’s lifetime.  Since IN1 is one of my books, that indicates that I’m only able to sell about half as many books without conventional distribution, but the higher royalty rate balances that out. Conventional publishing will do literally nothing for me unless it is one of the six majors.

That being said, it is clear that even from my non-bestselling experience, the major publishers can still push more books than the same writer can reasonably expect to sell on his own. But since they pay lower royalties, which The Author’s Guild describes as 15% of list on hardcovers and 25% of revenue on ebooks, a major publisher still has to sell twice as many copies just to keep pace with the independent revenues.

But that is far from the only consideration. Pocket signed me to write six books. I only wrote four of them and they only published three of them. Even if you sign a book contract with one of the six major publishers, even if you write and deliver the book, even if the book is edited, accepted, and the second half of the advance is paid, there is still no guarantee that the book will ever be published. Now, it’s not a bad gig, being paid to not write books, but it’s hard to really build on your success that way.

To top it all off, the ability to give ebooks away allows me to reach 10x more readers. I previously worked out that one out of every five free SE+ readers will subsequently buy ATOB. And, most importantly, the primary limiting factor, the publisher’s print run, no longer applies. I could have sold considerably more copies of The War in Heaven and The World in Shadow had they not been limited by the print run; both books sold through their respective print runs, which caused the vice-president to call me up, congratulate me, and promptly signed me to two more books… neither of which were either completed or published due to organizational changes that had nothing to do with me. Hence the absence of Stalking the Beast from my literary oeuvre

Here is how I see the pros and cons of independent publishing:

Pros: higher royalties, no print runs, no 6-18 months publishing delays, guaranteed publication, no gatekeeping, total freedom.

Cons: lower sales numbers, no books in bookstores, no marketing, no advances, no professional validation, no free editing and cover art.

Since print runs and publisher reorgs have been the bane of my publishing history, and since I insist on being heavily involved with my covers, there simply isn’t any doubt that indie publishing is my preference. If, on the other hand, all you’re really looking for is professional validation, then you probably won’t be happy with publishing independently.

I tend to suspect that Hugh Howey has demonstrated the future of the industry for the successful writer, which is to publish the ebooks independently and publish print books through a mainstream publisher.  However, it will be very difficult for established writers to swing this and an independent probably has to sell at least 100k ebooks per year before the major publishers will be seriously interested in that sort of arrangement.

More and more diversity

If 50 million Mexican immigrants are good for the economy, imagine how much better 100 million Chinese immigrants would be. We’ll all live like kings!

U.S. immigration officials are considering a proposal from Chinese
investors to create a multibillion-dollar development in New York’s
Catskills called “China City” — raising concerns among critics about
the potential cost to U.S. taxpayers and, according to one analyst, the
possibility it could be a “stalking horse” for the Beijing government.

A spokesman from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told
FoxNews.com that the proposal for Thompson, N.Y., has not been approved
but is under consideration.

The mysterious proposed development appears to be a step beyond the
types of ethnic enclaves scattered throughout U.S. cities, like the
Chinatown sections of New York City or San Francisco. The 600-acre
“China City of America” is located far outside New York City in upstate
New York’s wetlands and is a meticulously planned project, calling for
family housing, a college and student residences, among other
structures.

I have a better idea. Let’s just give them New York City along with all of its residents, most of whom are avid supporters of mass immigration. Then move all the post-1965 immigrants into New York state.  All of the promised economic benefits with none of the social costs.

How can those who have repeatedly claimed that the magic of geographical relocation transforms serfs and savages into true blue Constitution-loving Americans possibly object to establishing large Chinese cities in their midst? And how could anyone suspect that the new Chinese-Americans would harbor any loyalties to Beijing? They’re here for the opportunity, after all!  They love America!

The outdated Neo-Darwinists

As usual, I appear to be well in advance of the scientists. Isn’t it simply astonishing that a non-scientist can so readily and reliably predict the inaccuracy and unreliability of the current scientific consensus? How is that even theoretically possible? How can ignorance trump credentials and actual science education? And yet….

In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.

The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.

The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.

There isn’t a mystery here. The TENS true believers keep thinking that genetics will color in the lines of their rudimentary evolution-based models, but instead, the science keeps breaking their lines. All of the conceptual models are wrong. Pretty much all of the carefully calculated timelines are wrong. Evolution by natural selection is a red herring of a theory that was developed at a time when the scientific tools were crude and largely unscientific. So, it should be absolutely no surprise that the improved data being provided by advancements in genetic science is repeatedly overturning the conclusions that were previously reached.

““This would not have been possible even a year ago,” said Juan Luis
Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a
co-author of the paper. Finding such ancient human DNA was a major advance, said David Reich, a
geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the
research. “That’s an amazing, game-changing thing,” he said.”

The game will change, but it will take time. I am aware that most scientists are still holding firmly to the natural selection model. This, too, is as expected, as per Kuhn. We’ll have to wait until all the Dawkinses and Myerses die off before geneticists with a sufficiently open mind can throw out the theory altogether. As it happens, they’re already beginning to throw out Mr. Dawkins’s signature concept:

Mendel didn’t expose the physical gene, of course (that would come a
century later), but the conceptual gene. And this conceptual gene,
revealed in the tables and calculations of this math-friendly monk,
seemed an agent of mathematical neatness. Mendel’s thousands of
crossings showed that the traits he studied — smooth skin versus
wrinkled, for instance, or purple flower versus white — appeared or
disappeared in consistent ratios dictated by clear mathematical
formulas. Inheritance appeared to work like algebra. Anything so
math-friendly had to be driven by discrete integers.
It was beautiful work. Yet when Mendel first published his findings in 1866, just seven years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,
no one noticed. Starting in 1900, however, biologists rediscovering his
work began to see that these units of heredity he’d discovered — dubbed
genes in 1909 — filled a crucial gap in Darwin’s theory of evolution. This recognition was the Holy Shit! moment that launched genetics’ Holy Shit! century. It seemed to explain everything. And it saved Darwin.

Darwin had legitimised evolution by proposing for it a viable
mechanism — natural selection, in which organisms with the most
favourable traits survive and multiply at higher rates than do others.
But he could not explain what created or altered traits. Mendel could. Genes created traits, and both would spread through a
population if a gene created a trait that survived selection….

These days, Dawkins makes the news so often for buffoonery that some might wonder how he ever became so celebrated. The Selfish Gene
is how. To read this book is to be amazed, entertained, transported.
For instance, when Dawkins describes how life might have begun — how a
randomly generated strand of chemicals pulled from the ether could
happen to become a ‘replicator’, a little machine that starts to build
other strands like itself, and then generates organisms to carry it — he
creates one of the most thrilling stretches of explanatory writing ever
penned. It’s breathtaking.

Dawkins assembles genetics’ dry materials and abstract maths into a
rich but orderly landscape through which he guides you with grace,
charm, urbanity, and humour. He replicates in prose the process he
describes. He gives agency to chemical chains, logic to confounding
behaviour. He takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it almost
impossible to misunderstand. He reveals the gene as not just the centre
of the cell but the centre of all life, agency, and behaviour. By the
time you’ve finished his book, or well before that, Dawkins has made of
the tiny gene — this replicator, this strip of chemicals little more
than an abstraction — a huge, relentlessly turning gearwheel of steel,
its teeth driving smaller cogs to make all of life happen. It’s a
gorgeous argument. Along with its beauty and other advantageous traits,
it is amenable to maths and, at its core, wonderfully simple.

Unfortunately, say Wray, West-Eberhard and others, it’s wrong.

The best part of all this is that Dawkins clearly knows it’s wrong too. Not that he’s going to admit it, though, not yet.

I phoned Richard Dawkins to see what he thought of all this. Did
genes follow rather than lead? I asked him specifically about whether
processes such as gene accommodation might lead instead. Then he did
something so slick and wonderful I didn’t quite realise what he’d done
till after we hung up: he dismissed genetic accommodation… by
accommodating it. Specifically, he said that genetic accommodation
doesn’t really change anything, because since the gene ends up locking
in the change and carrying it forward, it all comes back to the gene
anyway.

‘This doesn’t modify the gene-centric model at all,’ he said. ‘The
gene-centric model is all about the gene being the unit in the hierarchy
of life that is selected. That remains the gene.’

‘He’s backfilling,’ said West-Eberhard. ‘He and others have long been
arguing for the primacy of an individual gene that creates a trait that
either survives or doesn’t.’

They backtest and they backfill. That’s due to the crumbling state of TENS. They’re still clinging to natural selection, of course. But the TENS model is in crisis and it will collapse soon enough. It is even beginning to look as if we may get to see it happen in our lifetimes. Gene expression is more compatible with Intelligent Design than with TENS. We are not evolved, we are created. DNA is our C++ equivalent, and the womb is our compiler. Compile it differently, get different results. This is not New Age mumbo jumbo, but a scientific hypothesis that will be testable once we understand it well enough to become proficient in programming it ourselves.

New Fighter Verse CD

Jamsco and company have a new Fighter Verse CD out. The video below is not exactly what I would call my style of music, but then, I am given to understand that not everyone listens primarily to techno-industrial these days. The CD includes music from six song writers and thirty-seven musicians in various styles including capella, bluegrass, folk, reggae, jazz, Brazilian and one cowboy song.

Strangely enough, neither Psykosonik nor My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult were invited to contribute. A little hurt, I am.

“The rare trick”

Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, reviews both Quantum Mortis books:

Short review: Murder mystery with rayguns IN SPACE!

Longer review: Both works are set in the distant future, and center around one Graven Tower…. It has been interesting watching SF wrestle with the question of the ongoing IT revolution of the last few decades, especially since society as a whole has not yet figured out how to deal with the Internet. If you read older science fiction, the computers of the future were supposed to be the computer from STAR TREK, Wintermute, and Tron-style virtual reality. No one anticipated the banal reality of YouTube, Hulu, Internet pornography, and people Instagramming pictures of their breakfast toast. All of a sudden, science fiction novels have to wrestle with a future containing smartphones and the Internet, and this book does a good job of grafting the IT revolution onto a space-opera framework.

Of course, the book isn’t all deep thoughts – there are a lot of battles with particle weapons, lasers, missiles, more particle weapons, and flying cars. Graven uses a lot of guns – the book achieves the rare trick of writing gun porn about guns that do not actually exist. It is an interesting look at the IT-augmented warfare of the future (or the present, really), when attacking the enemy’s computer systems is just as effective, if not more so, as attacking his troops and food supplies.

Read the whole review there. Jonathan always has an intelligent take on things and usually somehow manages to observe an aspect of the novel that even the writer doesn’t realize is there until it is pointed out to him.

Also, for those who are interested, I’ve started a Quantum Mortis wiki to help Steve and I keep track of who is who and what is what. If you feel like pitching in and contributing to it, please feel free to do so. I’m also throwing together a Traveller-style sector map that I expect to post there sometime next week.

On the translation front, there are now Finnish (2), French (2), Bahasa Indonesia, and Latin works in progress. So, if you’re a native speaker of some other non-English language and you’re interested in receiving a bigger revenue share than Simon & Schuster used to provide to Dan Brown and me at the turn of the century, shoot me an email. I’m particularly interested finding translators for Deutsch, Schwyzerdütsch, and Italiano.

He who shows up, wins

A Catholic priest mourns the corruption and decline of the Catholic family in reflecting how his parishioners have contracepted their parochial school out of existence:

A stranger came into the sacristy after Sunday Mass. In an incriminating huff he said, “I have been away from the area for fifteen years; where are the people? And now you are tearing down the school? I went there as a kid.”

I put my hands up to quiet him from further talking and I calmly said, “Let me ask you a question: How many kids did you have?” He said, “Two.” Then I said, “So did everyone else. When you only have two kids per family there is no growth.” His demeanor changed, and then he dropped his head and said, “And they aren’t even going to Mass anymore.”

I never thought I would be asking that question, but since I had to close our parish school, I’ve grown bolder and I started to ask that question more often. When I came to my parish five years ago, the school was on its proverbial “last legs.” In its last two years we did everything we could to recruit more students, but eventually I had to face the fact that after 103 years of education the school was no longer viable.

In one of the pre-closure brain-storming sessions with teachers, I was asked what to do to get more students. I replied, “Well, I know what to do, but it takes seven years.” The older teachers laughed, but the others needed me to state the obvious to the oblivious, viz. we need more babies….

I have modestly preached against contraception and sterilization, but
for many of my parishioners it is too late. Most of them are done with
raising more children. They have had their two kids twenty, thirty,
forty years ago and some women don’t want to hear about the Culture of
Death. They decide to go to other parishes where the pastor doesn’t
prick their consciences.

I am reminded of a diocesan official in his talk to us young pro-life,
pro-family priests twenty years ago. He said, “Yes, you can preach
against abortion and contraception, but remember, you have to put a roof
over your churches.” Now, our diocese is closing and merging these same
parishes, but you know what—they all have good roofs.

Pastors, if the demographic winter or bomb seems someone else’s
problem, try this at your parish as I recently did at mine. I took the
last ten burials and printed out their obituaries. At Sts. Peter and
Paul Cemetery we had six men and four women with an average age of 80
years. With the ten, I counted the number of siblings for a total of 45
and divided by 10 which came to 4.5 children per family. Then I counted
the ten’s children and divided by ten. The next generation had 28 kids
which I divided by ten and came to 2.8 per family. I then moved on to
the third generation, the grandchildren. These ten deceased had 48
grandchildren from their 28 children. When dividing these numbers, I
came to a figure of 1.714 per family. The national average number of children per household is 1.91; while the replacement level is 2.1 children per family.

I don’t claim to have answers on how to turn around a dying parish or
diocese. In fact, I am more at a loss as to what to say than ever
before. To defend the Church’s teaching against contraception and
sterilization is like going back to ancient Rome and warning them about
the dangers of indoor lead plumbing. No matter what you would say their
only response back would come in various levels of volume, “But it’s
indoor plumbing!” In other words, no matter the real threat to one’s
physical health from contraception and sterilization, the immediate
perceived benefits outweigh the moral and physical downside.

I’m not anti-contraception myself, but I am against the short-sightedness of small families.The Jews have it right and three is the bare minimum that any Christian couple should have, assuming they can have children. I understand that it is sometimes hard to see past the cost and the challenges that come with raising children, but I don’t know a single family with children who regrets the youngest. And most of the families I know, regardless of size, speak a little wistfully about how it would have been nice to have just one more.

If we’re going to win the future, our children have to show up for it.

Pink SF vs Blue SF

A few people have asked me what I mean by differentiating between Pink SF and Blue SF.  Pink SF is the dominant form of science fiction today. Or rather, more properly, the currently dominant form of SyFy. It is necrobestial love triangles. It is using the superficial trappings of science fiction or fantasy or war fiction to tell exactly the same sort of goopy, narcissistic female-oriented story that has already been told in ten thousand Harlequin novels and children’s tales and Hollywood comeuppance fantasies.

Pink SF primarily concerns a) choosing between two lovers, b) being true to yourself, or c) enacting ex post facto revenge upon the badthinkers and meanies who made the author feel bad about herself at school. Pink SF is about feelings rather than ideas or actions.

Pink SF is an invasion. Pink SF is a cancer. Pink SF is a parasitical perversion. Pink SF is the little death that kills every literary subgenre. And Pink SF isn’t limited to SF; there is a very good reason the Sports Guy’s meme “Women Ruin Everything” applies so perfectly to most forms of literature. The one exception is the One True Female Genre, which is the Pillow Book. Read Murasaki Shikibu or Sei Shonagon; women have been writing the same thing over and over for more than 1,000 years now and very, very few do it as well as the Lady Murasaki did. Pink SF is the girls coming to play in the boys’ sandbox and then shitting in it like cats.

Consider the way Pink SF has now invaded even that most masculine of subgenres, War Fiction. Books 1, 3, and 5 on Amazon’s War Fiction Top 100 free list are not genuine “war fiction” any more than Pink SF is actual science fiction. It’s WereSEAL porn. It’s 50 Shades of Sexy Soldiers.

So what, in contrast, is Blue SF? Blue SF is a return to the manly adventure fiction of the past. Blue SF says “fuck that” to strong independent female protagonists who ride rainbow-farting unicorns and flex their nonexistent muscles when they aren’t being mounted by corpses and canids.  Blue SF says “fuck that” to sexual equality, salutes la difference, and doesn’t deign to throw bones to women who might feelbad that their oh-so-tender feelingses isn’t being gently massaged. And Blue SF says “fuck off” to every idiot of either sex who whines about it being too this or not enough that.

Blue SF does not apologize for being male, for being insufficiently inclusive, or for refusing to fall in line with the dynamic demand for character quotas concerning sex, race, religion, and sexual preferences. Unlike Pink SF, Blue SF is sufficiently confident to be what it is rather than deceptively market itself as what it manifestly is not. Can you even imagine genuine science fiction trying to sneak into the romance market and pretending that it’s all proper romance when actually there is little more than action and technology and ideas under a very thin and superficial veil of romantic intrigue and self-centered drama?

At the Baen Bar, a retired airborne infantry master sergeant left a comment about QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted that perhaps is not irrelevant in this regard: “I read it and enjoyed it greatly. Baen might want to talk to the authors because they would fit right in. These guys like guns and prefer big guns. Guns that leave big body counts and lots of wreckage. They like hand-carried particle beams, lasers, slug throwers and vehicle-mounted missiles, cannons and chain guns. MCID would fit right in with Monster Hunters International only with better weapons. But the attitude is there. The simple arrest in the park is an all-time classic. I’ll buy the sequels.”

That’s right. Quantum Mortis actually outgunned Larry Correia. And that, in a nutshell, is what Blue SF is all about. Masculine ideas. Masculine challenges. Masculine action. Masculine energy. And, of course, masculine competition.

Pink SF, on the other hand, is the female equivalent of writing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and somehow failing to realize that it is a parody.

We have an answer

The Chateau’s response to the brain study is about as calm and understated as one would expect….

As is so often the case, though, there is something hard and logical beneath the savage provocation. I very strongly suspect, as, I think, Heartiste does as well, that the wiring of Gamma brains will show up differently on brain scans than other male brains.

Here is my scientific hypothesis: The reason Gamma male thought processes and conclusions tend have more in common with female thought processes and conclusions than with normal male thought processes and conclusions is because they have more of the inter-hemisphere connections and less of the intra-hemisphere connections than normal men.

Retreat and revolution

The head of CNN finally tires of being repeatedly prison-raped in the ratings every night by Fox News and throws in the towel:

After
almost a year of tinkering, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has
concluded that a news channel cannot subsist on news alone. So
he is planning much broader changes for the network—including a
prime-time shakeup that’s likely to make CNN traditionalists cringe.

Once,
CNN’s vanilla coverage was a point of pride. Now, the boss boasts about
the ratings for his unscripted series, and documentaries like the Sea
World-slamming film Blackfish. Zucker, in his first one-on-one interview
since taking control of CNN last January, told Capital he wants news
coverage “that is just not being so obvious.”

Instead,
he wants more of “an attitude and a take”: “We’re all regurgitating the
same information. I want people to say, ‘You know what? That was
interesting. I hadn’t thought of that,’” Zucker said. “The goal for the
next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.”

Zucker—“rhymes
with hooker,” he likes to say—also expanded on comments he has made
about breaking CNN out of a mindset created by historic rivalries with
MSNBC and Fox. He wants the network to attract “viewers who are watching
places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.”

“People
who traditionally just watch the cable news networks [are] a great
audience,” he said. “I’m not trying to alienate that audience. But the
overall cable news audience has not grown in the last 12 years, OK? So,
all we’re doing is trading [audience] share. … We also want to broaden
what people can expect from CNN.”

The 48-year-old
Zucker initially faced internal resistance to his experiments beyond the
realm of hard news, but he now has an irrefutable retort: The No. 1
show on CNN is now “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” a travel-adventure
show featuring the bad-boy celebrity chef. Zucker said that inside CNN,
his formula has finally been accepted “because people have seen the
results.”

As JartStar commented: “It will be amusing
that in another year or two CNN will have less to do with the news and
more to do with reality TV than SyFy has with science fiction”.

And
fitting. What Fox has done to CNN is exactly what Larry, Mike, Tom,
Sara, and me are going to do to the world of Pink SF. By presenting an
ideological alternative that appeals to more than half of the
prospective audience that is ignored and denigrated by the monolithic
gatekeepers, our market is far less saturated. Having lost their former
ability to keep us out of print and out of the bookstores, there is
nothing the genre publishers can do except watch helplessly as we cut
into their sales in the same way that Fox News cut into CNN’s ratings.

I
only wish Amazon permitted authors to give away Kindle Select
books on an ongoing basis. Every individual who downloads a free copy of
The Last Witchking or The Wardog’s Coin and reads it isn’t merely a potential buyer of A Throne of Bones or Quantum Mortis, he is also one more book sale lost to the gatekeepers.

They
are the dinosaurs, heavy with overhead and thin operating margins. We
are the mammals, able to write and publish a book in the time it takes
them to bring a finished book to market. That’s why we are going to win
despite their best efforts to pretend we don’t even exist.

Speaking
of which, I’m looking for translators who are interested in translating
my books in return for a share in the revenue. If you are a native
speaker of a language other than English and you want to take active part in the Blue
SF Revolution, fire me an email.

Sex differences are hard-wired

This research on brain connections won’t come as any surprise to anyone who isn’t ideologically bound to the idea that sex differences are cultural, but it should suffice to explode any last vestiges of biology-based sexual equalitarianism:

“What we’ve identified is that, when looked at in groups, there are
connections in the brain that are hardwired differently in men and
women. Functional tests have already shown than when they carry out
certain tasks, men and women engage different parts of the brain,”
Professor Verma said.

The research was carried out on 949
individuals – 521 females and 428 males – aged between 8 and 22. The
brain differences between the sexes only became apparent after
adolescence, the study found.

A special brain-scanning technique
called diffusion tensor imaging, which can measure the flow of water
along a nerve pathway, established the level of connectivity between
nearly 100 regions of the brain, creating a neural map of the brain
called the “connectome”, Professor Verma said.

“It tells you
whether one region of the brain is physically connected to another part
of the brain and you can get significant differences between two
populations,” Professor Verma said. “In women most of the
connections go between left and right across the two hemispheres while
in men most of the connections go between the front and the back of the
brain,” she said.

Because the female connections link the left
hemisphere, which is associated with logical thinking, with the right,
which is linked with intuition, this could help to explain why women
tend to do better than men at intuitive tasks, she added.

It’s amusing how they can’t help but describe their findings in a futile attempt to appeal to women rather than to offend them. It’s not the map-reading that is relevant; the real takeaway here is that women are less logical on average because their right hemisphere interferes with the ability of their left hemisphere to logically process information. It’s never been any secret that women are less logical; among other things, that’s why women weren’t permitted to vote in the first place. But now, thanks to science, we are beginning to understand that limits such as these weren’t set out of simple prejudice, but rather out of the straightforward desire for societal self-preservation.

And, as the consequences have demonstrated, the West violated those limits at its peril, a mistake for which we are all, men and women alike, paying the price.

It should be fascinating to see what happens when similar studies begin providing unavoidable scientific explanations for the differences between various human population groups that everyone observes, but affects to either deny or explain away.