Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

Okay.

And thank you for saying it so clearly because there's some really important points here.

I think what you just said and what we're going to talk about in terms of childhood shows that you cannot judge anyone by their current testosterone levels.

You can't predict that much.

You can't attribute all variation in behavior and individual differences in behavior necessarily to current testosterone levels.

And even within that, if you do have current levels, often

Yeah, you can't predict much in terms of, say, sexual behavior or aggressive behavior.

You certainly can't with kids because they don't have any differences.

They hardly have any testosterone at all.

What they do have is on average, I should have said this before, but all of this is on average.

There is tremendous variation.

The only thing that differentiates the sexes cleanly and essentially is the gamete production.

Sperm and eggs.

What has evolution designed you for?

If you're XY and you're going to be making sperm, there's going to be a suite of characteristics, generally, that are going to be different from the suite of characteristics.

that a female who has ovaries and eggs will need to maximize reproduction.

So all evolution cares about is what portion of your genes are making it into future generations.

So the design here is about reproductive strategies that coordinate how your body grows, what your body is like, what physical features you develop, coordinates the hormones, coordinate that with certain hormones

patterns of behavior on average.

All of the bodies and the behavior can vary across XX and XYs.