Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is over. Scientists at Stanford have stumbled upon an incredible discovery, answering once and for all a heretofore unanswerable question:

Thanks to the work of these scientists, and to the vigilant reporting of the Telegraph, the truth is before us, and all can bask in this great leap forward for humanity.

The groundbreaking study notes differences in sex-specific brain-activity patterns across key brain regions, including an “area of the brain thought to be the neurological centre for ‘self’” that “is important in introspection and retrieving personal memories.”

While sociologists have long marked differences in the ways men and women behave, neurologists were unable to trace these differences to the way their brains work. Enter the AI model:

Wow. Impressive stuff.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The scientist interviewed about the breakthrough “added that further research is needed to fully understand the implications of the findings.”

Nellie Bowles, at the Free Press, has a solution:

Well, Stanford professors, you’re in luck: I have in my phone the numbers of at least 200 women in straight relationships who can and will give you PhD-level analyses of these differences. The implications will have subsections and footnotes. You let me know. It’ll honestly be hard to get them off the phone once it starts.

All right, all right — sarcasm aside, there lurks in this “revelation” a greater corruption of epistemological standards that must be confronted. Why do we need expensive studies, MRI scans, and white coats to tell us the obvious? The capitulation of all knowledge to the deductive sciences leads to such “discoveries” of well-known realities.

Philosophers, theologians, and poets of old could have made (and many did) a strong case for the differences between the natures of men and women. But I am sure common sense — that great faculty at the ground of all human reasoning, according to Aristotle — could have done just as fine a job.

That money can’t buy happiness doesn’t require a study by sociologists to prove, just as the fact that good nutrition and exercise will help alleviate symptoms of depression doesn’t require extensive study by psychologists. We have come to credit truths only if told in the form of an analyzed data set.

We would do well to remember there are other — better — fonts of wisdom from which to draw.