Lawrence pointed out that autism, for example — an almost exclusively male phenomenon — is an extreme example of a trait, possibly linked to testosterone, which fosters obsessive focus on the minutia of inanimate objects. Mild autism actually pays off in many branches of science, such as those which require classifying hundreds of thousands of species of beetles. These scientific fields tend to be male-dominated.

Originally posted by Cisco Bunny:

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Originally posted by madget:

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Originally posted by Cisco Bunny:
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K

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Window on The Week

Alan Dershowitz is no right-winger. So when even he describes the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers as “an academic coup d’etat by . . . the die-hard Left of the faculty,” things must be bad. It’s true that Summers got bruised in turf wars with professors and deans, but he probably could have survived those scuffles absent his politics. What are those politics? He opposed calls for Harvard to divest its holdings in companies that do business with Israel; he defended ROTC; and he nudged Cornel West to try his hand at scholarship in addition to rap music. Sounds pretty radical to us. Most controversial was his asking whether innate differences in the cognitive abilities of men and women might account for the low representation of women in math and science. That proposition should be tested with dispassionate scholarship. Instead, the faculty screamed Summers down and gave him a no-confidence vote. To his shame, he apologized rather than defend academic freedom, but on the whole he was a force for good in the ivory tower. We wish him well — and await academe’s next attempt to castrate those who question received notions of veritas.

Harvard's president didn't merely say that men and women are biologically different. The response to that is, as my wife would say, "No shit, Sherlock".

What he said was that those biological differences give women a lesser aptitude for math, science, and engineering, as an explanation for their lesser prominence in those fields--as opposed to, say, cultural biases.

Originally posted by matthew23:

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What he said was that biological differences give women a lesser aptitude for math, science, and engineering

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

*****

It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.

*****

There may also be elements, by the way, of differing, there is some, particularly in some attributes, that bear on engineering, there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization....I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize. There are two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis for two reasons. First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true. The second empirical problem is that girls are persisting longer and longer. When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are twenty, or when people are twenty-five, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again, to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address.

*****

[answering a question]My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization.[emphasis added]

Originally posted by Pat ONeill:

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Originally posted by David Porta:

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Originally posted by matthew23:

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What he said was that biological differences give women a lesser aptitude for math, science, and engineering

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No, he didn't.

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