ONE of the best things about science is its ability to correct itself, spot flaws, poor evidence and bad claims, track the myths they spawn to their roots – and axe them. This process is vital, especially in areas such as race, IQ and gender, where false steps derail fields for years.

Take fruit fly experiments by British biologist Angus Bateman in the 1940s. These ended up underpinning many claims about evolved psychological differences between the sexes. One such was a theory by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, which claimed a bigger parental investment by females than males. Claims such as these fuelled myths such as men being more competitive or bigger risk-takers than women.

Psychologist Cordelia Fine questions these myths. In her new book, Testosterone Rex, she tackles the biggest myth of all: that every difference can be traced to testosterone. This she labels the Testosterone Rex world view, where differences are touted as “natural” rather than cultural. But if we look harder at the evidence, it doesn’t stack up, says Fine.

Take risk-taking. Girls/women can and do take risks and compete to the same degree as boys/men, says Fine. Seeing sex differences turns out to depend on what you ask women to compete at and which women you ask. So women are more likely to compete within “more neutral” or “feminine” competitive contexts such as dancing, verbal ability or fashion knowledge. And cultural background and level of economic development seem linked with greater competitiveness; for example, Han Chinese or Armenian girls are as competitive as their male counterparts.

Fine doesn’t deny testosterone’s effects on brains, bodies and behaviour, but it is “neither… king nor… kingmaker”. Testosterone isn’t “the potent, hormonal essence of competitive, risk-taking masculinity” we assume it to be, she says: it is just part of a complex bio-cultural mix.

Fine shows how new studies can upend earlier research by unearthing those confirmation biases on which many myths of sex differences precariously perch. Back with Bateman’s fruit flies, Fine shows his data “had been biased towards counting the offspring of males”, in part due to less sophisticated methods used in the 1940s, but also because people tend to look for what they want to find without realising it.

“Whether or not you see sex differences in risk taking turns out to depend on what you ask and who”

Aside from research design biases, Fine also notes how social constructions of gender shape the situations people encounter, and their subjective meaning. She throws out a challenge: “We’re used to thinking of testosterone as… a cause of gender… what if the direction of that familiar pathway also needs to be reversed?”

To answer, Fine lays out some of the more recent research. Take University of Illinois psychologist Dov Cohen and his colleagues, who showed how male testosterone levels can increase in reaction to a small challenge to status. Then there is the behavioural endocrinologist Richard Francis and his colleagues and their work on cichlid fish, which shows how social events regulate the gonads. Or recent findings by Marie-Louise Healy and her colleagues at St James’s Hospital, Dublin, that one in six elite male athletes have testosterone levels below the normal reference range.

Another key tenet of the Testosterone Rex world view is the emphasis on differences between male and female thinking and behaviour. Instead, Fine stresses the similarities. Differences, for her, are idiosyncratic mixes of “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics and gendered qualities. It may be that some differences compensate for others, and end up making the sexes similar, not different.

Ultimately, Fine leaves us clear that Testosterone Rex’s old stories are unjustified. What happens next is “a question for our values, not science”, says Fine, arguing for a world where cultural and gender norms sit with evolution, genetics and hormones to take account of all the influences. Then comes the hard work, as she calls on us to imagine the society we want to create. But no fruit flies this time.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Unravelling gender myths”

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These days, anyone wanting to .

That awareness seems to be the spirit in which Stephanie Rosenthal, artistic director of the 2016 Sydney Biennale, has recycled William Gibson’s quote about the future already being here, just not very evenly distributed. It is a way of loosely binding the hundreds of artists, artworks and events in the festival.

On leave from her job as chief curator at the Hayward Gallery in London, the point of the Biennale for Rosenthal, and indeed of Gibson’s quote, is not to focus on the future. “We are thinking about now,” she emphasises, adding that she wants the festival to create a space to observe “what’s happening right in front of us”.

But given the loose framework, the festival’s long timeframe and the large number of venues, it benefits from a filter of seven “Embassies of Thought”. Rosenthal says the Embassy of Disappearance (Carriageworks, Sydney’s former Eveleigh Rail Yards, reborn) is what she would have chosen if she could have had only one.

That’s because disappearance is an idea that many artists closely relate to, she says. Why? Because, says Rosenthal, we have to try to make some futures disappear. Gibson’s point is that the future is here, now, and that we always make the future from the present, so let’s think as well as can about where we are now and about which futures we want to imagine.

Otherwise, “things” will just end up happening to us.

Embassy of Disappearance

Among the 20 artworks at the Embassy of Disappearance, three by Singaporean artist Robert Zhao Renhui underscore the idea of unwelcome futures by focusing on Christmas Island’s endangered or extinct species, and the recent attempts to deal with invasive species.

Renhui spent eight weeks on Christmas Island, speaking with ecologists and documenting attempts to deal with what happens in dynamic ecosystems when invasive species, such as feral cats, dogs and yellow “crazy” ants, are introduced. His works include Memorial to the Last Cat on Christmas Island, and a fictional conservation plan, Life After Humans – Rewilding Island Ecosystems, which explores what happens when you take the removal of “invasive species” to its logical end – relocating the island’s human communities on the Australian mainland.

Renhui develops this in written for an audience in 2066, long after the humans have been relocated. His pieces play with unintended ecological consequences, such as the which can never be released into the wildĚýbecause its natural habitat will never be safe for it.

And he asks deep and perennial questions about what we mean by “natural” and “pristine” when human intervention and invader species come into play.

As an ironic counterpoint to ideas about fragile island ecosystems and invasive species, Christmas Island is currently an offshore detention centre, a place to keep what some consider another form of “invasive species” – asylum seekers.

Sea cables

Alongside Renhui is disappearance of another kind. Charles Lim’s silent clap of the status quo, is a collection of “inspection videos” of underwater sea cables (which the majority of the world’s internet communications run through). He uses them to show how artificial infrastructures, often driven by the politics of economic expansion, transform the maritime environment and challenge the cultural idea of the sea as unoccupiable.

Jamie North’s Succession with its towering, derelict concrete pylons and vibrant plant life bursting through, also calls to mind a post-human world, where plants thrive and grow without us.

One of the most intimate pieces comes under the banner of The Future of Disappearance, curated by writer André Lepecki. Here, Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine builds on the plot of Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451, where people secretly memorise books to preserve them in a society where banning and burning of all written texts is the norm.

Edvardsen’s performers have selected a book and memorised it, thereby turning themselves into “living books” who can “read” a particular book to visitors.

This creates a surprisingly intimate experience as you listen to a performer who is always on the edge of remembering and forgetting: an uncomfortable meditation on the nature of the ephemeral.

In an “after” talk, Lepecki underlined one of the less obvious upsides to disappearance – the freedom it can create and how being without reference points opens up a huge array of future options that can be taken from the present. This connects to another work in his collection, also by Edvardsen, called No Title.

Here Edvardsen gradually removes all reference points, with a seemingly never-ending list of everything that has “gone”: walls, compass points, and eventually lights, so that part of the work is performed in the dark. “In total disorientation what happens is you have a total potentiality to reorient life,” says Lepecki.

Now there’s an interesting way to deal with the future, spread evenly or otherwise.

The 20th Biennale of Sydney is on until 5 June