steve said:
What are the physical characteristics of male vs female brains?
In the womb the male baby gets a testosterone bath that destroys somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 of the connectors between left and right brain. This is the difference that allows men to be focused and analytical, blocking out everything except what they are concentrating on while women tend to take in all the sensory input from everything.
I can recall a time when men were referred to as "brain damaged" after the studies proving this were published but haven't heard that in a long time. The ability to do current scans of brain activity to monitor the flow of activity demonstrates that men's and women's brains are *not* the same. There are perhaps other differences, but the destruction of connectors between left and right brain in males is huge.
The thing is, it isn't just the physical brain it's how the brain is controlled and it turns out the human body isn't nearly as in control of itself as we might think. The research into the microbiome is still so cutting edge that we don't know enough to know what we don't know at this point. The body has trillions of microbes living in it with millions of genes and the microbes are responsible for all kinds of things and interact with the genes in our bodies, turning them on and off in ways we don't understand. However, what we do understand is that over time a husband and wives will "normalize" to the same microbiome. Call it "becoming one flesh."
When one considers the effect of the microbiome on the body, which impacts digestion, mood, susceptibility to things like allergies and asthma, hypertension, fatty liver disease, depression, schizophrenia, a host of things most people never consider. For example, the gut bacteria produces about 95% of the bodies serotonin and affects bile acid metabolism, which can affect satiety feelings as well as fat production and storage. Autism has been linked to a set of three specific varieties of bacteria in the gut. I remember seeing a link to dyslexia in a study last year. The list goes on and on.
Just from the microbiome viewpoint, crazy appears to be contagious.
In terms of human genetics, when a woman is pregnant fetal cells from the baby invade the mothers body and they are almost all stem cells which go to whatever area of the mother's body needs help to repair it. The stem cells from the baby get half the DNA from the father of the child, and that DNA permanently becomes part of the mother. And, there's the act of sex itself, in which the woman is designed to absorb a lot of prostaglandins from the man contained in his semen that the woman's body does not produce.
Folks, watch this carefully. Currently I know of NO research being done in the area of DNA transmission specifically through intercourse and it is practically forbidden. I asked some friends and they told me it's off the table. Why? Because it there is
DNA transmission from mother to child in the act of breastfeeding, then there has to be some DNA transmission during sexual intercourse because the woman's body provably absorbs the compounds in the semen through the mucosa in the vagina, cervix and uterus.
A few years ago some studies were published on the subject of male microchimerism in the female. The money quote:
"CONCLUSIONS: Male microchimerism was not infrequent in women without sons. Besides known pregnancies, other possible sources of male microchimerism include unrecognized spontaneous abortion, vanished male twin, an older brother transferred by the maternal circulation, or SEXUAL INTERCOURSE. Male microchimerism was significantly more frequent and levels were higher in women with induced abortion than in women with other pregnancy histories. Further studies are needed to determine specific origins of male microchimerism in women." Emphasis Added
It's not politically correct to correlate induced abortions with sexual promiscuity. That's a no-no. At any rate, there were a number of articles that picked up on the DNA transmission between man and woman during sex (you can google them) and the grant money spigot was turned off on anything that might fuel such non-PC research. Because nothing must be allowed to interfere with the promotion of sexual promiscuity and miscegenation.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16084184/
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0045592#pone.0045592
Which brings us back to the Biblical point that God placed a great deal of importance on virginity and made sex the act that begins marriage. Perhaps it begins to explain Leviticus 21:13-15 and the corresponding comments to the priests in Malachai 2:14-17, both of which reference marrying a virgin and link it to Godly offspring that are not profaned.