Asymmetrical Information

I'm not really clear on why there is so much furor, either (or even how much furor there is). I wonder how much of it is a function of Summers' reputation for jerkiness.

Today's Boston Globe has a front-page feature asking if Summers' leadership style and penchant for picking fights is driving away faculty to other universities. Beyond the previous departures of most of the Af-Am Studies Department.

To compare governing styles, he seems to be the Prince Charles to Neil Rudenstine's Queen Elizabeth.

I think the liberal academic monoculture has a few good points, and I wonder if we should really try to change it.

1. It discredits the academy. Universities are increasingly being seen as little more than ritualistic diploma mills, where one patiently sits through four years of silliness to get the credentials needed to leap over barriers-to-entry and land in some cushy rent-seeking job - which is really all they ever deserved to be seen as in the first place.

2. It keeps the left out of the culture mainstream. On the colleges they have no relevence, but send them out into the streets and they might do some damage. Remember in the seventies when we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill? One would see them staggering down any urban street chatting to themselves and trying to catch imaginary flies. Deinstitutionalizing the academic left would have similar effects. Best to keep them where they can't do any mischief to themselves or others.

3. It enfeebles the left-wing mind. Their current state of intellectual flabbiness is the result of twenty years of shunning debate. Another decade of this and the difference between them and us will be as obvious as the difference between East and West Berlin. Just as the liberal media is marching them over a cliff - as Mark Steyn observed - so too the liberal academy is conspiring to make them dumb and dumber.

I say don't interrupt your enemy when he's losing.

Prediction: In the past few years, the left has been denying the existence of liberal media bias by pointing out that corporations are running things, and therefore conservative views must be in charge - because after all, all corporations are conservative, right? Well, I predict that in the next few years they'll start pointing out the corporate gifts and grants that fund much of academia - the rich guy's name on the science building, the corporation's name on the football field, etc. - and use this to deny the idea of liberal academic bias. Just you wait.

This controversy mirrors what goes on in the comments sections of Max Sawicky, Brad DeLong, and several other leftish bloggers. Some people are simply tempermentally incapable of listening to a contrary point of view, no matter how gently--and Summers was bending over backwards to be nice--it is made.

Professor Georgi, being a case in point with his remarks made to the NY Times:

' "It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference," Professor Georgi added. "It's socialization. We've trained young women to be average. We've trained young men to be adventurous." '

Almost perfectly circular reasoning. One wonders if Larry Summers political predilictions can survive intact.

"I'm not really clear on why there is so much furor, either (or even how much furor there is). I wonder how much of it is a function of Summers' reputation for jerkiness." - SomecallhimTim

It doesn't appear that way from the text of his remarks. It's hard to imagine how he could have put it more diplomatically. It seems that his crime is having entertained an idea outside the orthodoxy. Summers' critics are heirs to those who persecuted Galileo -- not that Summers will be proven right, as Galileo was, but that they are willing to punish someone for asking a question that, depending on the answer, may threaten the validity of the orthodoxy.

Why ignore the 800 lb gorilla in the room? Everyone knows that women are less interested in the hard sciences than men are. This is observable even in grammar school.

Does this mean women are stupid/inferior/etc etc? Of course not, in fact, looking at a distribution of women's intelligence overlayed with a distribution of women's intelligence, you find that the roughly symmetrical female curve has shorter tails and a higher hump, while the male's hump is flatter and has longer tails. Therefore, men's intelligence is more variable than women's. Doesn't even matter.

Women are hard-wired to be, on the margin, less likely to be interested in hard science. Summers never said they can't be/shouldn't be/aren't interested in hard science. Just that there might be innate difference that might explain some of the variation. What is really shameful is the apology that he had to come up with and backtrack from his earlier statements. Makes him look like a pussy and the feminazis look like they were right.

David:

I was referring to something like this (which I quote from a dsquared comment on CT): "I reiterate my suspicion at the time; a large amount of communication is non-verbal, and Summers is world-renowned in the economics profession for his ability to nonverbally communicate the message “I am a supercilious prick who thinks he was born better than you”." http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003260.html

I'm almost certain I read something similar about Summers close to a decade ago when he was in the Clinton Admin. Words have meaning in context, and if you have a reputation as an ass, people are likely to give your words the most asinine reading available.

But, yeah, I think Summers is probably getting it too much in the neck.

“Universities are increasingly being seen as little more than ritualistic diploma mills”

Yup, and that’s what I’ve been saying for a long time. Harvard University is vastly overrated. Many of its graduates have been granted degrees merely because they are willing to be sluts for the liberal zeitgeist and the Democratic Party. And Harvard, I willingly concede, is one of the best schools in the United States! It rapidly goes downhill after that.

Uh, er, Solyom, I think you're wrong on the 'girls don't like the hard sciences.' I'm a grad student in chemistry and I see as many girls enter the program as guys. And then five years later, half the girls have dropped out. That's the question that Summers is trying to answer, I think. I think these girls (my colleagues) like science as much as guys, but something else (childrearing) is going on.

As a Harvard alum who went on to get a Caltech Ph.D. in molecular biology, and who generally has had no use for political correctness, I'd like to say:

Please don't judge all Harvard students by the goofiest possible image that the media manages to serve up of them. Or even by their professors (many of whom are good folks, but, again, the goofy ones get more publicity).

When I was there, the place was a mixture of some truly confused students and teachers along with some truly good and brilliant ones. I suspect it hasn't changed. Harvard (along with the rest of U.S. academic culture) needs to be reformed while preserving the very substantial good that it already contains -- not just tossed on the ash heap.

While I think the reaction is a little bit out of proportion to Summers' comments, I don't think he had a right to make them without controversy any more than the president of the United States has the right to publicly muse about nuking North Korea without causing an international incident.

People in positions of power have to vet their words, end of story. Had he made contentious comments in another direction (I don't know, something contentious about 9/11...), he'd be in as big trouble with another group.

> I don't think he had a right to make them without controversy any more than the president of the United States has the right to publicly muse about nuking North Korea without causing an international incident.

Ah yes, West is so concerned with "upset".

Except that he isn't. He's thrilled when people are "controversial" in ways that he likes. He merely wants to censor those who don't speak as he would wish.

Then again, he's Canadian.

Uh, er, Klug - Let's see where should I begin?

And then five years later, half the girls have dropped out. That's the question that Summers is trying to answer, I think. I think these girls (my colleagues) like science as much as guys, but something else (childrearing) is going on.

First off, you are conflating a couple things --- namely interest and selection bias.

1) I would expect any woman once in/or applying to a chem grad. program to 'like' science as much as any male. (BTW you used the word 'like' - I did not.) That is called 'selection bias'. But let's take a look at the student (male and female) population at:

1) undergrad level before selection of major
2) grad level

My bet is that women are less likely to become 'hard' (NB: 'Hard' is a silly word but I think you understand what I mean.) science majors than men are - in both the undergrad and grad. levels.

BTW I don't doubt that childrearing is more important to women than men. But that does not do away with the fact, again easily observable, that women, on average (before grad school), do not find science as interesting as men.

There is no need to deny that there ARE distinct differences, both mental and physical, between men and women. So what? Like I mentioned in my first post, men's intelligence is more variable -- that is, there are more intelligent men in any given population compared to women, just as there are more stupid men in the same population, compared to the same female population.

Forbes just had a good piece about this:
(http://forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/0228/100.html?_requestid=17653)

(Use Bugmenot to get the whole thing.) Some excerpts:

"But Summers has certain numbers on his side. Three telling details: 1) A 2001 survey conducted by the National Science Foundation established that there were 285,500 individuals with Ph.D.s working as mathematicians, computer scientists, physical scientists and engineers, and only 11.5% of them were women. 2) In the index of a math text the names attached to mathematical discoveries--Gauss, Euler, Riemann, Newton, Legendre, Poisson, Fourier, Cauchy and so on--almost invariably belong to men. 3) Since 1938 only 3 of the 335 winners in the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition have been women. The test, whose graders do not know the names of the contestants, is one of ingenuity, not knowledge, so a possible lack of access to advanced math courses is not very relevant to the outcome. "


Next is a greater male variability in intellectual skills. In math and many other disciplines men are overrepresented at the extremes: more gifted students but also more who are learning-disabled...A final reason for the shortage of women in math and the physical sciences is a lack of female interest in the core content of these fields--many of which tend to emphasize abstract and mechanical themes. Studies matching equally gifted men and women, all of whom have the ability to make it in the physical sciences, have shown that the men are about eight times as likely as the women to enter these fields. The talented women repeatedly look around for something else, preferably involving disciplines affecting human beings (like, say, biology). A lot of research supports the idea that the male-female difference in interests is hormonal."

Last thing, I asked my girlfriend* to give me her thoughts on behalf** of all women everywhere about this --- Her response: "Duh. Science is boring. Every woman knows that."

*she has a master's in economics
**obviously a joke

Heh, a fine of example of the oft quoted cliche" Why are University politics so vicious? Because they mean so little".

I think there's a non-trivial distinction between Summers and your typical tenure shielded academic. He's an administrator in a managerial and leadership position at his institution(i.e.,he's the boss,he's not a prof anymore). He has decision making input into the hiring process. I'm generally predisposed towards agreeing with the perspective of his comments but I think that the nature of his position necessitates a certain degree of diplomacy in how he expresses himself. His public words aren't just idle intellectual forrays. They potentially reflect his institution's policy and a different degree of discretion is therefore appropriate.

Ramster demonstrates the reality of tenure - it's not about intellectual CONTENT, it's about protecting faculty. You see, Summers isn't tenured. Tenure isn't for administrators. Tenure isn't even about protecting ideas.

Ramster is presenting the case as understood by, among others, the American Association of University Presidents.

Tim:

I'm not really clear on why there is so much furor, either (or even how much furor there is). I wonder how much of it is a function of Summers' reputation for jerkiness.

Not so much "reputation for jerkiness" but Summers has been demanding a confrontation with Cornel West and others from the celebrity leftist contingent since the day he took the job. It's not surprising that they and their sympathizers grabbed an opportunity to settle scores with him.

Tom:

While I think the reaction is a little bit out of proportion to Summers' comments, I don't think he had a right to make them without controversy any more than the president of the United States has the right to publicly muse about nuking North Korea without causing an international incident.

"Controversy" is one thing, but what I find disturbing about the response to him is 1) the shameless mischaracterization of what he said and 2) declaring his speculations outside the realm of permissible. There's a huge difference between "You're wrong!" and "You must never say that! Beg for forgiveness!"

I'm not worried about Summers -- if he could deal with Bill Clinton, he can deal with Nancy Hopkins. But if this is the way the president of Harvard Freaking University is treated, can you imagine how an undergrad feels about voicing a differing opinion in class?

Vicki Hearne has a chapter on it, excerpts on why no women in math http://home.att.net/~rhhardin9/vickihearne.womenmath.txt
that seems right to me.

Larry Summers, politically much more adept than his critics here, seems to have pulled off a great example of 'rope-a-dope' by delaying the release of his remarks. The US college professoriate is currently driving its collective credibility off a cliff. Summers helped them along by offering them a 'door to nowhere', and they marched right through it.

I think the key to what he did lies in the comment he made somewhere about not being interested in just giving an uncontroversial speech on this occasion. He has decided that if he has to bow down before the political correctness zealots then he's no longer interested in the job.

In this sense he wins, whether they fire him or not. Good for him, and for us.

Political correctness is now reaping what it sowed twenty years ago

Larry Summers made some suggestions about the causes of female underrepresentation in the "hard" sciences.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 19, 2005 08:58 AM

If Summers had just said that women are underrepresented because male scientists are "little Eichmans," the Left would be defending him.

I hate to say this, but it seems to me that women's reaction to this issue (and it is almost exclusively women reacting to Summers) is as good of an indicator of how ill-suited women are to scientific work as anything I've seen! Clearly, anyone who is not able to rationally deal with raw data, even if the data is not in keeping with their preconceived notions about the subject of study, is simply not suited to working in the hard sciences. Just to be clear, I'm not of the opinion that women are inherently unsuited to be scientists, just that those who are raising issue with Summers are unintentionally serving to prove otherwise to the public and scientific community by their actions.

Result- Harvard will probably 'pay penance' for Summer's perceived gaffe by granting tenure to a disproportionate number of women in the sciences, and these women will probably be ignored in the field at large by men who will assume that they're mere 'diversifiers', regardless of qualifications or abilities.

I'm not worried about Summers -- if he could deal with Bill Clinton, he can deal with Nancy Hopkins. But if this is the way the president of Harvard Freaking University is treated, can you imagine how an undergrad feels about voicing a differing opinion in class? Posted by: JSinger on February 20, 2005 10:07 AM

Whatever the cause, Summers must be quite a threat for Ms. Hopkins to risk the backlash of her peers with admission of this stereotypical response:

MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins ’64 said she felt physically ill while listening to Summers’ speech at a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) luncheon on Friday, and left the conference room half-way through the president’s remarks.

Heavens, she's "having the vapors."

All we need to know about this tempest in a teapot is that no less a liberal icon than Alan Dershowitz, in ardent defense of Summers, has criticized Summers' faculty antagonists as members of the "radical left." But then again, Dershowitz has a history of defending anybody's right to say anything.

It is my fervent hope that the tenured professors of Harvard who are so outraged by Summers' harmless and well-intended comments follow through on their threats and leave for another liberal insitution more homogenous to their ultra-liberal pedagogy.

Heh, a fine of example of the oft quoted cliche" Why are University politics so vicious? Because they mean so little".

Allow me to don my "Summer" clothes. Now, would this observation partially explain the situation we find outselves in now with the likes of Howard Dean (who hates all Republicans), Michael Moore (ick), and other rabid lefties poisoning the national political debate such as they have? Perhaps they are simply bringing their collegiate "debating style" to the national debate, with little or no self-awareness of how they come off to the rest of America?

I will admit that Dean has poisoned the political debate a bit less than Moore, but he also has a new job were his brand of poison can be more toxic.

It is really interesting to read & listen to the academy argue for unlimited, unencumbered, unquestionable freedom of speech rights for tenured faculty member Ward Churchill, and then turnaround and excoriate Larry Summers for not being properly sensitive for how his opinion might be received.

You'll forgive me if I completely fail to understand how saying that the people who died on 9/11 deserved to die deserves a higher level of protection than Summers pronouncement that maybe-perhaps-possibly there is some innate reason that there are fewer women than men in hard sciences.

I find the re-education of Larry Summers to be all about assertion of power by a group who had their shibboleths questioned.

Just a note of clarification, Summers almost
certainly has a courtesy appointment with
tenure, in the Harvard economics department.
If he resigns as president he will go back
to being a regular prof, not down to the
unemployment office. This is how administrative
appointments work in academia.

Jeff

Larry Summers is a brilliant guy who speaks his mind and simply introduced a topic for further study. What kind of place is Harvard to allow people to attempt to stifle intellectual investigation?

I'm a newly hired scientist at Harvard, and I have been amazed by the fact that almost all of my colleagues agree that this hypothesis (that biological differences contribute to the persistent discrepancy between the numbers of men and women in the natural sciences and mathematics) should not even be considered. To let politics direct scientific inquiry undermines the integrity of the research process, and I warn my colleagues here that they need to rethink their policy very carefully.

One reason why they should rethink this policy of not considering a biological-differences hypothesis is because in many cases, the most obvious, parsimonious, and best supported hypothesis for gender differences in behavior is that men and women are -- on average -- "wired" differently. Looking at violent behavior, there is ample evidence that men are simply more violent than women, and it has a lot to do with the way they think and their continual production of androgens. No matter what culture or time in history, men are more likely to be in prison for violent crimes, have almost exclusive possession of seats on death rows, and are much more prone to using violent methods when committing suicide than women. There has been only one female serial killer in the U.S., and she was lesbian. When you administer testosterone to baby chicks, they start fighting each other (as well as grow combs and start crowing); this is a common demonstration in animal behavior classes.

My suspicion is that liberal politics have not eliminated a biological-differences hypothesis entirely, just when it makes women look bad. Thus, not only have scientists here let politicians tell them what hypotheses they can investigate, they have let politicians destroy their intellectual consistency.

Jeff, Summers is a world-class economist (or was when he went into management). Before he left to work in government, he was one of the youngest people to become a full professor at Harvard. I don't doubt that tenured appointments are part of the package for academic executives, but Summers' case involves reappointment to a position he previously competed successfully for.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but about 6-8 weeks ago there was a flurry of activity in the blogosphere re: the dearth of conservatives/Republicans on university faculties. If I recall, the general, not to mention immediate, consensus among liberal/Democrat professors was that Republicans either didn't have the intellectual oomph to be professors, or just preferred to do other things. Natural selection, in other words, certainly not any sort of bias. We now have Harvard jumping through hoops to explain the dearth of female professors in math and science departments. They're not quite sure why this condition endures, except for the fact that it absolutely, positively, ain't natural selection. Strangely enough, this was another immediate, reflexive consensus, excepting Mr. Summers' brief but embarrassing romp off of the intellectual plantation.

Summers introduced his idea in a most timid way, then was trounced by the inane nitwits for "having a reputation of jerkiness." If you look long enough, you nitwit, you can find just about anybody in public life being referred to as a jerk, or worse.

One other issue that made it appropriate for Summers as an economist to bring this up.

The role of comparative advantage in trade and specialization means that even a tiny difference genetically (assume male female differences are 99% environmental and 1% genetic) could have disproportionately huge effects at the margin. Indeed, comparative advantage effects could work even if women were superior to men on ALL margins, so long as the opportunity costs for women to enter academia (because of child-rearing, etc.) were greater than for men.

But I have often seen a resistance by factions of the left and whole swathes of the humanities and social sciences, to any sort of economic reasoning.

At my own institution, a member of the philosophy department referred to attempts to apply economic theories to psychology, politics, and history as EVIL. (This was a public statement, not just an off the cuff remark.)

As I noted at Belmont Club:

I walk about constantly amazed, nowadays. Gays are said to be biologically predisposed to their orientation (though if they weren't, their civil liberties would precipitate the same politics by another route). We're asked to accept this as uncontroversial; indeed, to controvert it is to invite charges of homophobia. But let Summers suggest that there may be differences between men and women, and all hell breaks loose. We're obliged to accept notions of radical genetic distinctions within gender, but it seems we're as obliged to deny any distinctions between genders. As far as I can tell, the world is insane.

As to the question why so few women don't go into the "more intellectually challenging" fields of the higher mathematics and hard sciences, the answer is obvious. Because those fields are boring and there's no money in them. What these "intellectuals" are really saying is that women are stupid and cannot compete in "highly intellectually challenging" fields, which really are for brainy boys who sit around arguing over who's smarter. Oh, really. I grew up watching my mother, who never attended an hour of college in her life, build on the most successful real estate companies in South Texas. In fact, she's one of the most respected brokers in the state. What is commonly unacknowleged or little known is that women control over 70% of the real estate in this country. In other words, some 3/4 of the real estate in the U.S. cannot be bought or sold without the signature of a woman. When I try to explain this to stupid guys, I usually put it something like this: "They're not taking over, boys. They took over a long time ago! Now they're just managing. They already have total control over 70% of the real estate, and they're working on the other 30%. Wake up! While you boys are out banging your heads on beer bars, they're out buying property." Women are not stupid. They know where the real money is, in real estate. It's ludicrous to suggest that any woman would choose a career in listening to brainy boys argue over who's the smartest, when there's money to be made. Women pursue careers that are of interest to them. It's that simple. Some choose real estate (90% of residential realtors are women); others choose whatever career sparks their interest. As for the brainy boys, they all have one thing in common. They all live in their wives' houses.

There's a comparison between Dr. Summers' assertion about innate differences of ability between the sexes in the hard sciences at the high end and the assertion that "The events of 9/11 are, in part, a response to American foreign policy in the Middle East".

There's a good chance that both Dr. Summers' remarks and the 9/11 comment have some truth to them. Both assertions can't really be proved conclusively one way or another. And finally, a public figure making either assertion in a public forum is in big trouble (albeit with different, but large, groups of people).

Why?

Because a lot of people understand that the effect of the remark stretches a lot further than the comment in and of itself. They feel that the pragmatic cost outweighs the freedom to express remarks that may or may not be accurate (but likely have some element of accuracy to them).

The trouble in Summers' remarks is that a belief in differences in innate ability will absolutely be used to account for differences in numbers because of deliberate or unconcious discrimination. The trouble with the 9/11 assertion is that it is used primarly to deflect judgment of the hijacker's actions and to move the debate away from tackling the issues of dealing with terrorism.

In both cases, the comments are pretty much guaranteed to have repercussions that are not necessarily intended by the speaker, but will have those consequences nonetheless.

Is it any suprise that people with interest in sexual discrimination or the fight against terrorism try to prevent such comments from entering public discourse? No. It's perfectly rational and common sense.

No, West, nobody is trying to keep Ward Churchill's remarks out of the public realm. But now that his witless remarks are in the public realm they are fair game for criticism. Just as Summers' remarks are fair game for criticism.

In fact, it would be wonderful if Summers' remarks were tested in the scientific laboratory. Are you game, West, for doing that? Do you have the equipment needed?

Summers' remarks were scientific, that is, they were falsifiable. Churchill's remarks were merely inflammatory.

We're obliged to accept notions of radical genetic distinctions within gender, but it seems we're as obliged to deny any distinctions between genders. As far as I can tell, the world is insane.
Posted by: rasqual on February 20, 2005 12:22 PM

Don't forget the grief given to the authors of The Bell Curve back in the mid-1990s. I don't know whether their hypotheses were right, but the reaction by their critics was another example of politically-correct herd-thinking trumping scienctific inquiry.

Every time something this happens, I can't help but think that the Left would be happier with somebody like "Dr. Zaius, Chief Scientist and Defender of the Faith" in charge.

I once wrote a story whose effect was based on the presence of an obese woman character, and posted it on the net. It drew many complaints, none of which was from a fat person. In fact, all the complainers were self-described as slim and fit. They were complaining not because they were offended, but because someone who might be fat and might encounter the story might be offended. So I actually welcome Hopkin's womb-bat response; it was hers. Is anybody else heartily tired of prospective vicarious snits? We've raised up a class of university denizens sensitive to the point of erethism, who are self-appointed to speak up for the offendees and offendettes. God forbid the poor victims be allowed to speak for themselves, and God forbid the speakers ever admit to any offense on their own part. There's a spherical perfection to it, capable of repelling investigation or attack from any quadrant: you can never confront them, because it isn't them, it's their warm-heartedness on behalf of unspecifiable others.

"Summers' remarks were scientific, that is, they were falsifiable. Churchill's remarks were merely inflammatory." - Some Call me Your Majesty

Not only are Summers' remarks falsifiable, they were couched in quite diplomatic language. He was trying to present an idea some around might find offensive in the least offensive way possible. Churchill went out of his way to use an offensive, and poor, analogy to present an idea that many would find offensive.

The difference between Summers' and Churchill's statements lies not only in their respective potenials for study, but in the emotional response each man sought to engender. Summers wanted people, regardless of their views on his idea, to consider that idea. Churchill wanted blind approval from his fellow travellers and rage from his ideological opponents.

Assuming Summers is a tenured faculty (as someone mentioned, most university presidents have tenure in one of the departments), no one is calling to fire him from his tenured faculty position. So people are not opposing his right as a tenured faculty to voice controvresial or unpopular opinions.

Many are asking that he be fired from his administrator position. This is different from asking a tenured professor to be fired for his controversial opinions. That will not hold up against the tenure rules of most universities.
That would be outrageous. But it is not outrageous for asking a administrator to be fired for making controversial statements.

In this particular case, after having read Summer's transcript, I personally do not think he should be fired. He brought the issue the most polite way possible, said it in a sensitive way, and said over and over again that he would like to be proved wrong.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is the theory that the true underpinnings of the reaction to Summer's statements have little to do with the feminist angle and everything to do with his comments on Affirmative Action. I think there is something to this, at least on a subconscious level for his critics who immediately came out swinging after his speech.

What he said about AA was something that just isn't said out-loud in acedemic circles. That is, that perhaps a scientific study of AA would be productive, or at least enlightening. I suspect the reason he brought up the subject was due to conflicting, actually diametrically opposing, aspects of AA when it is applied in real life on a college campus. Here is Stanley Kurtz commenting on this very subject.

Do diversity searches really find top quality professors who were only being overlooked because they are minorities, or do these searches only yield professors of middling or low quality? Summers also points out contradictions in what diversity advocates are asking for. Some of them want faculty picked on purely objective criteria like number of papers published. This will supposedly eliminate subtle hiring discrimination. But other diversity advocates want the opposite. They call for choosing minority candidates based on subjective considerations like potential and collegiality, supposedly to overcome the discrimination built into “objective” criteria. Summers asks, which is it? He also wants data to back up the choice of strategy. So in this talk, Summers is subtly but clearly exposing the contradictions and secrets of the campus diversity industry. By calling for objective proof that diversity searches really produce faculty equal in quality to color blind or sex blind searches, Summers is laying out a standard that he knows diversity proponents can’t meet. And the contradictory criteria thrown up by diversity advocates are just different ways of getting to the numbers they want. By calling for objective studies of which strategy actually works, Summers is exposing the failings and contradictions of the whole diversity enterprise. I think this is the deeper reason why Summers is in trouble. His pro-affirmative action opponents can’t openly condemn him for asking these questions, so they’ve focused on the biology issue instead.

I find it amazing that the only plausible reason for women not advancing in science is sexism and sexist behavior. This is the conclusion at Havard, the liberal university.

Academics at Harvard will suffer if Larry Summers is dismissed over his remarks. The fault should be blamed on women, who become another scapegoat for the lowering of standards in many of our institutions.

Ironic isn't it?

"Heh, a fine of example of the oft quoted cliche "Why are University politics so vicious? Because they mean so little"."

The sad thing is that a smart guy like Dr. Summers can be disrespected by not smart people.

The Boston Globe point that Dr. Summers is "driving faculty away" should be taken as an endorsement of Dr. Summers and his efforts to remake Harvard into an academy of serious scholarship. Ethnic Studies, in general, Cornel West and Churchill in particular are not serious.

Shame on Princeton...

A problem here is that a statistic, i.e., the number of women who succeed in certain elite positions, is being used as a means for judging whether women have been treated equally while advancing to that position. For this reasoning to be valid it is necessary to assume men and women have equal aptitudes for that field. If this cannot be assumed, then it will take careful comparisons of how individuals actually are treated to prove or disprove bias, and of course, no one wants to work that hard!
The idea that men show greater variability in testing is often invoked to explain why women are underrepresented in elite positions. If my memories of a psychology course taken 40 years ago are correct, the problem is even greater than that. Intelligence tests are designed to yield the result that men as a group and women as a group have equal mean scores in the test. In the construction of the test, questions are drawn from a large set of questions that have earlier been tried on sample populations of men and women. There are some kinds of questions that more men than women answer correctly (spatial reasoning?) and there are other kinds of questions that more women than men answer correctly (verbal reasoning?). The test is constructed by taking just the right mix of the two kinds of questions to even things out so that the two groups get equal mean scores on the selected mix of questions. The problem is that perhaps the kind of questions that men do better on happen to be just those that are the best predictors for success in the hard sciences. Thus, this whole controversy may be in part simply the result of oversimplified testing that fails to evaluate the multiple kinds of intelligence.

Solyom:

First, I think that you're missing my point, which is that people (Summers included) are even more concerned about the attrition rate or 'the failure of advance' than the overall entrance rate into the sciences. So I ask again, why are the women in my program leaving?

But anyway, I get your point. Girls are less likely to be interested in the hard sciences (and thus less likely to select it as a major) and it may be biological/hormonal in nature.
(P.S. I appreciate your very civil response.)
I'm not sure that it is so; could they be entering biology because that's where all the female professors are? I'm also unconvinced that the desire for human contact (as opposed to being shut in a lab) is a male/female thing. I agree that there are differences in the male/female brain, but I don't think that this is one of them.

Finally, I suggest a middle ground between you and I, Solyom, on the attrition issue. Could it be that there is a bell curve on 'obsession' between men and women similar to your intelligence curve? I suggest that men are more likely to be obsessives about science because of 'brain issues' and that's what's getting them through graduate school and tenure selection (to the detriment of personal hygiene, women, etc.)

Larry Summers made some suggestions about the causes of female underrepresentation in the "hard" sciences.

I don't think that's what people are objecting to. Rather they are reacting to his explicit statement that, in his view, the most likely explanation for the substantial disparities... documented...with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions is the high-powered job hypothesis. I'm not familiar with this hypothesis, but here's an analysis from someone who is.

Why are University politics so vicious? Because they mean so little.

If you're gonna quote a cliche, quote it right. The classic (and much more effective) second sentence is "Because the stakes are so low." Though I don't know who said it first.

Summer's comments are falsifiable? Just how do you propose to measure innate potential to do high end mathematics free of environmental influence?

At the risk of diluting my point...

Besides, are we talking about the innate ability to do high end physics, ability to write grant proposals, network with colleagues, teach lectures, or the the thousand other duties that professors must master to be successful.

The days of the genius professor alone scribbling on his paper in his office are *long* over.

...though I don't know who said it first.

Brainyquotes.com attributes it to Henry Kissinger, though I have heard credit given to Woodrow Wilson, who was President at Princeton before being elected to the White House. It sounds like Kissinger.

SYMPTOM: The leading institutions of the American Left, the Democrat party, academia, mainstream media and Hollywood are in the midst of feverish meltdown as I write this.

PROGNOSIS: Ultimately, these institutions, in their own way, are important to the long-term survival and success of the Republic. But just as the creative destruction of capitalism is critically important to the long-term health of the economy, so too is the creative destruction of "political competition" to the nation's polity.

PRESCRIPTION: Enjoy it while you can - it's a hell of a lot of fun (for me, at least) watching the American Left destroy itself - but this won't last forever. They'll eventually figure it out (because they'll have to, to survive), reform themselves and begin to reassert themselves in the nation's political discourse. But until then, enjoy the ride! It will be over before we know it, and won't be coming back soon thereafter – kinda like Halley’s Comet.

Klug,

Pinker has written a succint op-ed piece about this:

(BTW he touches on this subject in his most recent book, "The Blank Slate" - which is a fantastic.)

(From: http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi%3D20050214%26s%3Dpinker021405)
(use bugmenot)

Summers did not, of course, say that women are "natively inferior," that "they just can't cut it," that they suffer "an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences," or that men have "a monopoly on basic math ability," as many academics and journalists assumed. Only a madman could believe such things. Summers's analysis of why there might be fewer women in mathematics and science is commonplace among economists who study gender disparities in employment, though it is rarely mentioned in the press or in academia when it comes to discussions of the gender gap in science and engineering. The fact that women make up only 20 percent of the workforce in science, engineering, and technology development has at least three possible (and not mutually exclusive) explanations.

The analysis should have been unexceptionable. Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.") To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.

Many of Summers's critics believe that talk of innate gender differences is a relic of Victorian pseudoscience, such as the old theory that cogitation harms women by diverting blood from their ovaries to their brains. In fact, much of the scientific literature has reported numerous statistical differences between men and women. As I noted in The Blank Slate, for instance, men are, on average, better at mental rotation and mathematical word problems; women are better at remembering locations and at mathematical calculation. Women match shapes more quickly, are better at reading faces, are better spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal material. Men take greater risks and place a higher premium on status; women are more solicitous to their children.
Since most sex differences are small and many favor women, they don't necessarily give an advantage to men in school or on the job. But Summers invoked yet another difference that may be more consequential. In many traits, men show greater variance than women, and are disproportionately found at both the low and high ends of the distribution. Boys are more likely to be learning disabled or retarded but also more likely to reach the top percentiles in assessments of mathematical ability, even though boys and girls are similar in the bulk of the bell curve. The pattern is readily explained by evolutionary biology. Since a male can have more offspring than a female--but also has a greater chance of being childless (the victims of other males who impregnate the available females)--natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males. That is because the advantage of an exceptional daughter (who still can have only as many children as a female can bear and nurse in a lifetime) would be canceled out by her unexceptional sisters, whereas an exceptional son who might sire several dozen grandchildren can more than make up for his dull childless brothers. One doesn't have to accept the evolutionary explanation to appreciate how greater male variability could explain, in part, why more men end up with extreme levels of achievement.

Read the whole thing...

i notice a few other points...

almost all women in my phd program worth their salt received nsf fellowships. there were many guys who were clearly much brighter who did not... this speaks to summers implicit point about AA - for whatever reason there simply aren't as many smart girls interested in the hard sciences, and there definitely aren't as many genius girls interested in hard sciences as guys.

a second point, is the prevalence of autism amongst boys vs. girls. i know many bright scientists with absolutely terrible interpersonal skills. most really smart girls i did my phd with went into consulting, because they were brilliant and could also communicate, and why not take a consulting job for 2-3 times more $$

finally, it's worth pointing out that one of the few peers i consider a genius scientist is a french girl.... all people should be considered as individuals, not examples of stereotypes (as in the biasest method of AA)

Even liberals admit that Harvard and other academic institutions are bastions of liberalism. They say this is so because the smart people who naturally gravitate to universities are, of course, liberals. This includes the faculty in the hard sciences. Since women are "underrepresented" in the hard sciences at universities, does this mean liberals hate women? Just asking is all.

I believe it was Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the California Assembly, who said academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Unruh is also the one who said that money is the mother’s milk of politics.

"There's a comparison between Dr. Summers' assertion about innate differences of ability between the sexes in the hard sciences at the high end and the assertion that 'The events of 9/11 are, in part, a response to American foreign policy in the Middle East'. "

My understanding is that Churchill said the people who died in the WTC were not innocent victims, but were rather "little Eichmans."

That is qualitatively different from just saying that American foreign policy was a contributing factor in the attack. It was hateful and wrong.

This blogger is proud to have gotten it right on both academic controversies: women and republicans need to stop whine less, and publish more.
On Larry Summers

On Republicans in academia.

Those with inquiring minds might be interested enough in the subject [ male female IQ differences ] to read a chapter in a book edited by Professor Nyborg: The scientific study of general intelligence: Tribute to Arthur R. Jensen. Oxford: Elsevier Science. 2003. Chapter 10 Sex differences in g by Helmuth Nyborg

Two points should be noted and can be gleaned from his text: 1) IQ tests generally have been structured such that the mean IQ IS the same for males and females. That is, the tests are biased to obtain a SAME mean. 2) Above IQ 130 ( 2 sigma ) males predominate in increasing ratio as sigma increases. The graphs [ 2 in number ] are the key to see this.

I am 63 and went to an Ivy League school ( Doctorate and Post Doctorate ) in the 60's and 70's before affirmative action began. There were few women in the hard sciences at that time and place. None were the really bright students I competed with. My ex-girlfriend ( undergraduate at Bryn Mawr ) went to Stanford in Chemistry and stopped at a Masters. She couldn't compete and now works for the EPA. My wife got her Ph.D. in Anatomy and Physiology at an Ivy League University. Both were brilliant in school but neither were as bright as some of their male schoolmates and they knew it because they told me about it at the time: they encountered male students who never seemed to study but always seemed to understand what was going on and could always explain something without effort and would be reading novels instead of doing their work. My son typifies brilliant males. He is working toward a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in a top ten in the world university. Twenty four students were admitted to the Masters program. Six with full fellowships; he had one. After 2 and a half years 11 of the 24 had Masters. Two of the 24 have been offered Ph.D. fellowships (he is one of the two). His work ethic is low and always has been: he does not study much or hard and never has. However, he produces results. As an undergrad, he taught himself Finite Element Analysis to do problems his 2nd year. As a graduate student he taught himself Statistical Mechanics so that he could take a course that advised students to take a course in statistical mechanics before taking that course. He was interested in Vector Algebra/Matrix Algebra so he took a course in it at the graduate level his first quarter. 124+ graduate students started the 5 credit level 500 class. About 70 students were in the class after Drop Day. Two got A grades in the class, one was my son the other was a student working for a Ph.D. in Math. His ability in math and science is a reflection of pure g and there are NO females at this level at his University in Mechanical Engineering, only White males and Northern Asian Males areat that level. ( BTW, my wife and I had him tested when he was 13 for IQ (as his school did not do IQ testing except for slow students) at which time he was scored at 172. )

Speaking of vicious. . .a post at DKos on this very subject has led to a free-for-all, and God help anyone who gets in the middle of it.

Having crossed swords with Armando a few times at the more placid--if not completely mellow--confines of Tacitus, I can testify that he's capable of calm, reasoned discussion when the mood strikes him and the forum rules demand a certain degree of cordial behavior. In this discussion, he waded in swinging with both fists, and his targets are willing to respond in kind--it isn't pretty.

I'm also unconvinced that the desire for human contact (as opposed to being shut in a lab) is a male/female thing.

I beg to differ, I have observed FAR more men who were capable of talking to nothing but machinery and paper for hours on end, than women. Similarly-capable women exist but invariably in far smaller numbers, because on the whole the female of the species tends more social. Given an option, once I have my projects layed out I will happily kick out everyone else for the bulk of the day (unnecessary distractions) and plug away at my hardware. There will be plenty of time for conversation after the workday ends. I have a mother and two sisters, however, who would not be happy at all if they had to work in that kind of setting. Unsurprisingly, the first is an assistant librarian, the second is a nurse, and the third is currently studying dental hygiene.

I attended a top (and highly selective) engineering school, founded in the late nineteenth century, where the first female student didn't arrive until sometime midway through the twentieth century. Thereafter the female enrollment gradually rose, reached 20%...and stabilized thence. Some freshman classes jump as high as 25-30%, but after transfers to other universities and burnouts (both sexes), the school overall holds around 20% female.

Speculate all you like on the reasons, but the enrollment ratio isn't for any lack of trying on the part of the university.

I think that Dan Kurt's comments reflect my experience very well. When I was in highschool, I was always able to learn an absolutely minimal amount of facts, and just reason my way through the rest of the curriculum. That is one reason I was drawn to math, because the number of facts needed to do most things is pretty small. I've met a few other people who have similar abilities, and all of them were men. I don't know why this is. It's possibly innate, but it could also be socialization. I found grade school so ridiculously easy that I never studied for anything, ever. So when I got to harder courses, I needed to find a way to cope and I chose not to learn study skills. I learned to find the minimal things I could learn, and reason my way through the rest. It's possible that women are encouraged to study hard regardless of whether they need to or not. I've certainly known a lot of women who were compulsively driven to succeed--studying for tests even when they didn't need to, etc.

The thing is, that the minimalist model of studying frequently forces you to very quickly think your way out of solutions, which very probably increases creativity and speed of thought. Furthermore, as one progresses to higher maths, it becomes practically impossible to succeed solely by studying and learning facts. Math needs to become a language which you can think in, and this skill is learned much earlier if you're forced to think about math in high-pressure situations (eg exams).

Summers missed the real travesty... there are no women playing in the NFL!!!! Innate differences or male conspiracy?? Have I started another controversy storm? Heaven forbid!

Oh, and what about those cheerleaders. No hairy men in cute skirts? What's the deal with that?! Time for some afirmative action.

Just asking can't hurt can it, Larry? Better spend millions to do some research.

Netsape the other day had up as one of its "useless facts" that differences in length between the pointer finger and the middle finger tend to indicate math ability.

I wonder why no one has brought this fact into the debate?

BTW the difference is thought to be chemically induced (testosterone) rather than genetic.

Is there more freedom of speech on Netscape than in the academy?

I think what this portends is pretty obvious. Colleges are dinosaurs. Orthodoxy can no longer be enforced. Death is on its way. Why? Because we have an institution that is not even remotely adapted to its environment.

When Netscape is smarter than Harvard the end is nigh.

I had my moment in the Navy.

I was always good at math, physics, chemistry etc.

I was sitting in the back of the Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Class (Thermodynamics) considered the most difficult in the cirriculum. I never studied. Cut into my liberty time.

The Naval Officer (a prof from Berkeley - a very good science school at the time) was droning on while I was reading a motorcycle magazine. Well you know. After a few weeks of my ignoring him in class he decided to put me on the hot seat. He was on the third board of a truly long derrivation of some net energy bit. And asked me what the next term was. Of course I told him I couldn't give him the next term. (Aha, I was in his sights) Because, I said there was an error 1 1/2 boards back. (Uh, Oh) Well he goes back to the place I pointed to. Checks it out. Damn.

Funny thing is my reading habits in class never seemed to bother him after that.

Well any way. I have met some very top notch women in science and engineering in my time. They are few and far between.

brett,

You might want to consider The University of Chicago.

Students are not given alum points if a parent went to the institution.

I'm an alum. My son is 2nd year languages.

When I went to the parent's convocation for 1st year students I was the only alum I met out of 20 or 30 sets of parents I talked to.

I can imagine such a controversy (Summers) at UC. It would, however, be argued on the merits. Facts would be marshalled.

My understanding is that Churchill said the people who died in the WTC were not innocent victims, but were rather "little Eichmans."

Forgive my lack of clarity. The point I was trying to make was that if a public figure like Summers made the much milder comment, he would be in the crosshairs of controversy at the moment, not for the content of the remark, but for the ramifications.

Churchill's idiocy had nothing to do with my comment, except to illustrate that the rank and file has say something *completely* stupid before they'll be noticed by the press.

Anony-mouse: I'm honored that you comment upon my statement. I suppose what I was saying is that I doubt the female desire for sociability could be tied to a hormonal factor, like Solyom was suggesting. I certainly was not trying to argue that the ratio was 50/50. However, I think that if you were to add up the number of women in all fields who preferred to work alone (secretaries, photolab ladies, I don't know...), they would probably come close to all us nerds cooped up in a lab. I would not be surprised to learn that our esteemed hostess preferred to work alone in her former job as a network guru.

I suppose the chemist in me wishes for some ridiculous Rube Goldberg explanation as to why estrogen/testosterone/lack thereof explains why girls are bored by science. Hell, I'm a 'nature' guy mostly, but doesn't 'nurture' count for anything?

Tom West: I cannot find an operative difference between your statements and just plain refusing to consider a possibility because it is politically incorrect. Such an attitude does not belong in academia AT ALL.

"IQ tests generally have been structured such that the mean IQ IS the same for males and females. That is, the tests are biased to obtain a SAME mean."

I wouldn't exactly call it "biased", but the balancing process is pretty significant to this debate. It turns out that women are better at answering some questions and men are better at others. So, IQ test developers try out their questions on test groups, and then mix the ones favoring men and the ones favoring women so the test is gender-neutral overall.

In other words, there ARE "different intelligences", and they are gender-related.

"Please don't judge all Harvard students by the goofiest possible image that the media manages to serve up of them."

I second that. I graduated from Harvard Law not that long ago (1998), and my experience was that fewer than half of the law professors were left liberals (as opposed to classical liberals or small-l libertarians). In fact, it was in my HLS classes that I first learned much of the basic economics that underpins many non-left positions -- that price caps (such as rent control) lead to shortages, that a policy seeking wealth redistribution can cause stagnation, etc. I came in as what would now be considered a Dean Democrat and left much more like a McCain Republican.

I read about half the comments here and sort of got disgusted and gave up and came down here. I have no doubt that Summers comments are correct on a general level. But I have known too many brilliant female scientists get crapped on to believe there is no discrimination at work either.

If women are so bad at sciences, why are 50% of all graduates from med school women?

The problems with statements like "As this report/study shows [insert specific group type here] are generally not able to do [insert area in which they are under-represented]..." is that then you make a vast generalization which, obviously, there will be pleanty of exceptions to.

And this discussion thread is the perfect example of how, when someone says, "girls can't do math" as some sort of generalization (although, as a generalization, and only as a generalization it may be somewhat true) that other, closed minded people will laud that statement and take it further. Their defense is, "Well, it's true." but it's not precisely. It's true under specific circumstances and if you don't understand the nuances of the statement -- then you end up with a whole group of people who just have gotten sh*t upon for no good reason except their part of the specific group.

It's not that we can't say that girls can't do math, it's that we have to allow those girls who do math to excel as far as they can go.

I have to take a tiny bit of issue with the two commenters who implied that because the men they met in top-flight engineering/science programs were better than the women in those programs that men are smarter than women in all aspects of intelligence. In my experience--and I went to a pretty prestigious little college with one of the higher concentrations of 1600 SAT scores in academia, so I'm commenting about the same pool of 1-in-10,000 intelligences that Summers was talking about when he made his comments--I agree, every really brilliant math/science student I met was male...but conversely, the really brilliantly verbal ones were overwhelmingly (not universally, but 80-90% or so) female. Now, for a very large portion of the most prestigious jobs, verbal skills (the ability to read and comprehend complicated material, synthesize the knowledge gleaned from that material to answer other questions, and communicate your synthesized knowledge clearly to others) are more relevant than mathematical skills. Lawyers, judges, and intelligence analysts/diplomats are probably the best examples of high-prestige jobs that require excellent verbal intelligence, but even some of the "softer" sciences like medicine store and transmit more of their knowledge in prose than in complex equations. (Think about it--which would you prefer in your doctor, the ability to solve a biochemical equation showing how a particular drug is metabolized by the body or the ability to comprehend and synthesize the massive volume of journal articles necessary to keep up in the field? [I'm talking about your personal doctor, not a researcher.]) So can we agree that although males and females may have different intelligences and that males may blow females away in this one narrow field of endeavor, that this does not mean that that the smartest men are smarter than the smartest women overall?

Why ignore the 800 lb gorilla in the room? Everyone knows that women are less interested in the hard sciences than men are. This is observable even in grammar school.

Some might argue that this isn’t so much because young girls in grammar school are not as interested in the hard sciences but it might be because they are discouraged (sometimes inadvertently by a teacher or social pressure from her peers) from those interests or actively encouraged to go into some other area. A young child will probably gravitate towards those areas where s/he feels encouragement and shy away from those where s/he is discouraged either by an adult or his/her peers.

Keep in mind that in a country of some 280 million people there may not be any one overriding systematic reason why individuals make these choices and we’re reduced to speculating and making generalizations about anecdotes.

The ideas expressed by Summers are obvious rubbish, but the reaction of the faculty is more egregious. Since when does stupidity make you faint? Are academics such wilting flowers that they can't confront a bit of nonsense and refute it? These folks better stay in the ivory tower, because life outside will be too much for them.

Hi Thorley Winston,

You assume 'teachers/society' sheperd little boys and little girls into distinct groups, boys are encouraged to like science and girls are not encouraged. (eerily mimicking the long disproven hippie idea/ideal about little boys and guns vs. little girls and dolls.) Implicit in this notion, is that females and males are just as likely to be interested in science.

Why would/should that be? We know that females and male are different in many ways, physically, emotionally and mentally. Now this is not a normative statement --- this is a fact.

Why would teachers/society complicitly, moreover, collectively encourage males to go into science while discouraging females? I dunno. Probably cuz they don't. (Anecdotally I might add, my 4th, 5th, 7th and 8th grade science teachers as was my chem teacher in HS, were all female. Hhhhhhmmm -- perhaps they all encouraged the girls towards science and maybe gave me detention to discourage me (a male) from science. Or it may have been cuz I was a loud-mouth/class-clown who deserved it. Time to apply Occam's razor, no? :) )

Lastly, Klug --- you are asking the most relevant/interesting question in this whole stupid overblown ball of wax ---- you really take a look at how Pinker addresses your very question in 'The Blank Slate' --- these reviews sum it up well:

[Pinker] makes his main argument persuasively and with great verve.... The Blank Slate ought to be read by anybody who feels they have had enough of nature-nurture rows or who thinks they already know where they stand on the science wars. It could change their minds. ... If nothing else, Mr Pinker's book is a wonderfully readable taster of new research, much of it ingenious, designed to show that many more of our emotional biases and mental aptitudes than previously thought are hard-wired or, to use the old word, innate. ... This is a breath of air for a topic that has been politicised for too long.
—The Economist, Sept. 19, 2002

Steven Pinker is a man of encyclopedic knowledge and an incisive style of argument. His argument in The Blank Slate is that intellectual life in the West, and much of our social and political policy, was increasingly dominated through the twentieth century by a view of human nature that is fundamentally flawed; that this domination has been backed by something that amounts to academic terrorism (he does not put it quite so strongly): and that we would benefit substantially from a more realistic view. Pinker's exposition is thoroughly readable and of enviable clarity. His explanation of such a difficult technical matter as the analysis of variance and regression in twin studies, for example, would be very hard to better. He is not afraid of using strong language: "boo-word", "basket-case" and (for the technical term "psychopath") "evil"; in addition, parts of the book are delightfully funny.
—John R. G. Turner, Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 27, 2002

The Blank Slate is ... a stylish piece of work. I won't say it is better than The Language Instinct or How the Mind Works, but it is as good—which is very high praise indeed. What a superb thinker and writer he is: what a role model to young scientists. And how courageous to buck the liberal trend in science, while remaining in person the best sort of liberal. Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him.
—Richard Dawkins, Times Literary Supplement, 2002

Medical school has nothing to do with the kind of science that Summers was talking about. Getting into medical school requires only the barest introduction to scientific topics, and no engineering, higher math, or higher physics.

Women go to medical school and law school partly for the prestige and income, and partly because they are bored by science, math and engineering. Males waste a lot of time pondering how the universe works. I suppose they are compelled to think that way.

Verbal skills come more naturally to women, and modern life is good to people with verbal skills. Men may be better at spatial and math skills, but in today's competetive environment they must be very, very good to make a mark.

At Harvard, some kinds of sexism are okay:

http://ridingsun.blogspot.com/2005/02/sexism-harvard-likes.html

I deducted with refigerator magnets the basics of magnetism on my kitchen floor when i was six. That is pure nature, no nuture. I suspect most real top-flight scientists have similar stories, indicating that nuture may not have so much to do with it.

didn't einstein's teachers think he was fairly dumb when it came to math? where's the nuturing in that?

as a good friend explained to me when i was young and trying to understand my first gf - men and women think so differently, they might as well be on acid (or vice-versa from the female point of view)

I'm sure we all have anecdotes about both men and women. My favorite involves my sister, who I explained algebra to when she was in elementary school. She thought that was cool. Majored in the sciences in college, but tests poorly, so she did not do well on her MSATS (for medical school). So she got her MS in radiation physics instead and went to work for the Bureau of Radiological Health (part of the FDA) examining and certifying new catscanners for the market. Later, along with raising three children, she got her Sc.D. in medical engineering. I think that if I had never explained algebra to her while she was still young, she wouldn't have gone into science.

There are, IIRC, significant gender preferences in the med school admissions racket.

However, I think that if you were to add up the number of women in all fields who preferred to work alone (secretaries, photolab ladies, I don't know...), they would probably come close to all us nerds cooped up in a lab.

In my observation, those kinds of professions still involve significant amounts of social interaction, sometimes with the public, sometimes with fellow workers, often both. Even someone in a narrowly focused position -- e.g. data-entry clerking -- tends to operate in an open office environment and can easily turn away from the duties at hand for two minutes' small-talk about what happened over the weekend.

Many common types of lab positions, by contrast, are very isolating for the duration of a task -- significant events have to be noted as they happen, devices or solutions have to be precision calibrated, etc., and then there are often cleanliness requirements and/or safety gear that must be respected when moving to and from an experiment area. A distraction-free environment, entered into for extended periods, is frequently going to be averse to informal socialization.

I can't speak for the whole of humanity, but I can say anecdotally that most of the women and only a few of the men I know would whither up and die in that kind of environment, whereas most of the men and only a few of the women I know would be quite content with it. Assuming this observation is a subset of a broader trend, that right there might enforce a significant degree of self-selection in the educaiton process, apart from any aptitude considerations (although such considerations may also be present).

I read about half the comments here and sort of got disgusted and gave up and came down here. I have no doubt that Summers comments are correct on a general level. But I have known too many brilliant female scientists get crapped on to believe there is no discrimination at work either.

I read all of them, and I think you missed out on a very good read. Moreover, I don't see many of the comments here taking the interpretation that you have ascribed ('girls are bad at math/science').

Yes, there is sometimes discrimination against women in the sciences, but the whole point of Summers' remarks -- as I have gathered, anyway -- is that while discrimination may exist, looking only to discrimination as a cause of discrepancy is potentially to ignore half of the picture.

And if that is the case, ignoring that other half will be disadvantageous to all partiesm because it will (or, perhaps, already has) lead to bad policy-making.

But why the hostility to considering that possibility? Properly understood, it reflects not one wit on your intelligence or accomplishments, just as a possible inherent capability of men at higher mathematics didn't help me in the slightest when struggling through differential equations (twice -- 'F' the first time, then a 'D' by the skin of my teeth the second time).

edit -- to correctly capture my thought, take that line "just as a possible inherent capability of men at higher mathematics" from my last sentence and change "inherent" to "general". Obviously, not all men have an inherent capability, even if it turns out that more men than women, on average, have the ability to excel in the field.

Sent the following to the LA Times --

"To the Editor:

Harvard University president and former Clinton administration Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers finds himself on the receiving end of multiple inquisitions by Harvard faculty enraged at his having mentioned research that suggests that the underrepresentation of women in math and engineering may involve innate cognitive differences, on average, between male and female minds.

Considering that it seems to be an article of faith of conventional left-liberal thinking -- to which a majority of Harvard academics demonstrably subscribe -- that sexual orientation is innate, and likely based in genetics, the irony of Summers' travails is palpable Apparently how one thinks about sex must be determined by yet-unascertained genetic differences -- but how one thinks about math cannot possibly be influenced by the biggest genetic difference of all, that between men and women.

So much for the American university as a forum for open inquiry. Let one of their own sacred cows be questioned, and secular liberal academics reveal themselves capable of making junk-science creationists look like Sir Isaac bloody Newton in comparison. Note to the Harvard faculty: When the man you're interviewing murmurs "Eppur si muove" on the way out of the room, it's a good sign you're on the wrong side."

My succinct diagnosis of Summers' problem: speaking to a bunch of chunderheads too thick or too emotionally involved to distinguish between an average and a stereotype.

Hey, anony-mouse: I tend to agree with you, but I'm unconvinced by your hunch that "I can say anecdotally that most of the women and only a few of the men I know would whither up and die in that kind of environment, whereas most of the men and only a few of the women I know would be quite content with it." First of all, I'm not so sure that there are that many technical/scientific/engineering positions that require *that* much isolation. (What are you thinking of -- clean rooms?) Secondly, I'm not sure that most men would be quite content with that kind of environment. Eh -- it's all semantics, you're probably right, I don't have a whole lot of skepticism for your point.

But here's my Grand Unified version of what I'm finding in this thread: Some people believe that the 'missing' women in the hard sciences are due to differences between men and women at the biological level. I am skeptical because what I want hasn't been provided (and can't by current science, to be fair): I want a biochemical/neurological explanation for the differences. Is it testosterone or lack thereof? Is it estrogen or lack thereof? Is there a 'science' gene that men have that women do not? Are there boy 'science brain' parts that girls do not have? Do girls have a 'holisitic neuron' that makes them less likely to obsess about muons?

Until these questions are answered, I think there is plenty of room for 'socialization' to be the answer. (Or until I read that book that Solyom keeps advocation (or is his real name Stephen Pinker???? ;))

Edit: When I said biochemical/neurological explanation, I meant 'mechanism'. Not just some binary "boys have testosterone, girls don't" sort of thing, but a rudimentary biochemical pathway.

Klug -- I believe the mechanisms you are looking for would require some research to properly identify. And if this incident has taught us anything, it is that research of that kind is unlikely to be conducted anytime soon. Anyone who tried to conduct such research would likely be hung from the nearest lamppost.

Which means that there will continue to be plenty of room for "socialization" to be the answer -- the *only* answer. Which is kind of the point.

DRB -- sadly, that's probably true. I suppose that someone wealthy and interested should get involved. Say, I'll bet that Larry Summers has enough money for a small endowment...

well stated, Klug.

we're pretty far away from understanding such a complex neural network as the human brain, but it certainly is an intriguing question what mechanisms control IQ through which genes....

gattica here we come!

Klug,

I think the point isn't that there's not plenty of room for socialization to be the answer...it's that there's clearly plenty of room for innate differences to be the answer, and yet fainting professors had to be carried out and fanned with their petticoats at the merest suggestion thereof.

I figure it's probably more innate, despite having scored higher on the verbal than on the math my own male self...just a guess, though.

Ken: Yeah, I'm not going to defend Nancy Hopkins' behavior at the seminar. Exchange of ideas, intellectual intestinal fortitude, etc., etc. Hey -- I scored better on my verbal SAT than my math, too, despite my maleness. Maybe that's why I have trouble seeing certain transition states.

Until these questions are answered, I think there is plenty of room for 'socialization' to be the answer. (Or until I read that book that Solyom keeps advocation (or is his real name Stephen Pinker???? ;))
HAH! I wish I was 1/1000th as insightful as Pinker. Read the book, he basically grabs all the issues that you have mentioned by the horns and addresses them very rationally from the vantage of multiple disciplines: evolutionary biology, anthropology, and economics.

Ken:
When you say, I think the point isn't that there's not plenty of room for socialization to be the answer...it's that there's clearly plenty of room for innate differences to be the answer, and yet fainting professors had to be carried out and fanned with their petticoats at the merest suggestion thereof. you are thankfully wrong. Once again, back to Pinker, that is exactly what is looking at. Check his, ironically, Harvard page out:

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/teaching/index.html

This is the stuff I find most interesting:

Ev. Psych.

http://ocw2.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/9-250Evolutionary-PsychologySpring1999/CourseHome/index.htm

Lots of good comments, but almost all seem beside the point. The political correctors at Harvard want Summers's scalp because he effectively challenged the very rationale for affirmative action/diversity. He made the argument that discrimination hurts the discriminator (an idea propounded by Gary Becker, as the economics grads out there probably know). He actually asked why, if there was a group of academics held back by anti-female or other discrimination, some university or department didn't hire them all and thereby create a superior university or super-department. After all, the baseball and football teams that first employed black players became immediately better as a result, and eventually all their competitors did the same.

When Summers posed the question like that -- which he pretty much did -- it threatened the activists both ideologically and financially. That's when activists and radicals go the wildest -- when it's both dogma and dollars at work. Everybody knows that there is no deep hidden pool of held-back female or minority talent in academia. There is really no answer to Summers's question. That's why they're after his blood.

Yes, there is sometimes discrimination against women in the sciences, but the whole point of Summers' remarks -- as I have gathered, anyway -- is that while discrimination may exist, looking only to discrimination as a cause of discrepancy is potentially to ignore half of the picture.

And if that is the case, ignoring that other half will be disadvantageous to all parties because it will lead to bad policy-making.

Care to illuminate us as to what those bad policies might be?

As far as I see it, the *only* results that I can see by acceptance of innate differences (something we cannot test because we cannot remove environment) are negative.

• Reinforcement of existing prejudice. Way too many in the hard sciences automatically dismiss the achievements of a women scientist. Summers' remarks help give them a cover of "scientific justification".


• Judgement follows belief. In cases where there are equally qualified candidates, people's beliefs will trump. The greater the belief that "women can't excel in science" (not necessarily what he said, but definitely the meme that was spread), the greater the chance that people will follow their gut instincts and turn down women candidates (this is different from above, because the judgers are trying to obtain the best candidate, regardless of sex). There are some examples of this in HR people evaluating people from resumes with randomized photographs and blind auditions for orchestras. In the absence of hard facts (and choosing among the final set of candidates for most jobs is a often a matter of judgment), people's beliefs win out, turning a tilted "natural" ratio into a huge deficit.


• Society orders itself to make life even harder for the exceptions. It's far too common for girl's schools to have inadequate physics programs. The more the "girl's can't do science" meme grows (I know, not the research, but does *anyone* actually believe that isn't what will be taken from it...), the less pressure to actually accomodate those who are able and willing.


• Less pressure to fix real problems. Sure, we all acknowledge that there's real discrimination, but once we've got "scientific explanation" for it, people naturally use that to justify *any* achievement gap. Natural ability may lie behind 10% of the results, but it'll account for 100% of the reason why we aren't obligated to do anything about it...


• Those women who do excel in hard sciences are considered "freaks". Life is tought for those who are seen to ignore societies guidance, but it's even less forgiving in its attitudes towards those who really are genetically different. Belief in innate differences provides even greater pressure for to suppress or hide "unnatural" abilities.

I eagerly await a *single* positive outcome of accepting the assertion of men's greater ability at high end hard sciences.

Yes, there are fools who are afraid to do the research, afraid of what they may learn. We have always known that.

It is important for us to know if males and females have different strengths and learning styles. Society faces unprecedented challenges and it is vital that resources be applied where they will do the most good.

Women do well in medicine, as I can attest. They also do well in law, social sciences, humanities, and politics. But those fields do not really expand the options of society, do not create new pies. They merely rearrange the slices of the pie that exists. In order to make new wealth, to create entirely new fields of endeavor with vast numbers of new jobs, professions, and vocations, we must train as many top notch engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and top level computer scientists.

Sadly, men generally occupy the top notches in those pivotal fields. Society desperately needs these top performers, and more of them.

But what we see is society looking in the wrong place. Like the drunk who looks under the streetlamp for his keys, despite knowing that he really lost them a few blocks back in the dark. Society would know where to look if it had the courage to do the research and follow up on it.

Yes, there are fools who are afraid to do the research, afraid of what they may learn.

<sarcasm>Indeed, scientific study has taught us that certain races are innately criminal, it is unsuitable to give women an education, etc., etc. And certainly the policies enacted because of that scientific proof such as the Asian exclusion act and so on benefited society to no end.</sarcasm>

Of course, this time will be different. We can't possibly be misled again...

First, the study of sex or racial differences in mental abilities is one where properly conducted, controlled studies are impossible. Any physicist would shudder at the non-controlled variables that are unavoidable in any study of this type.

Secondly, if differences are found and we choose to assume that the studies are valid, the only outcome is to end up *raising* barriers rather than bringing them down. I have yet to see any case of where lowering expectations aided the group involved.

Thirdly, does *anyone* think that such studies will not be misuderstood ("girls can't do math") and misapplied?

We know enough about human behaviour to anticipate that people are killed when someone yells "Fire" in a crowded place. Nobody is obliging people to panic. We just happen to know how people behave, and, in this case, prohibit the behaviour that sets it off. In the case of science, I see no reason to encourage study in an area where:

• the results will never be clear,


• thus the results generally determine what the scientist wanted to prove,


• the results produce policy that is harmful to society as a while,


• the results will be generally misinterpreted to produce even *more* harm to society

Fools indeed to pretend that such "knowledge" will not cause harm. I'm *still* waiting for a *single* possible positive outcome.

I eagerly await a *single* positive outcome of accepting the assertion of men's greater ability at high end hard sciences.

If the assertion is true, then learning that's the case and accepting it is inherently a positive outcome. Science is about truth, not what's politically convenient. Learning the truth is always good -- being ignorant of it is always bad.

Tom West, I can just imagine the things you'd have said four hundred years ago.

"We can't determine whether the celestial objects go around the Earth or the Sun. We lack the technical ability to perform experiments that would confirm this, and all mathematical examiniations of the issue have been inconclusive. Teaching the heliocentric model induces the common man to doubt the authority of the Church, leading him astray and imperiling his immortal soul. There can be no benefits to society from further examining the heliocentric hypothesis, and there are substantial harms; therefore, proponents of the hypothesis should be silenced for the good of all."

Tom West: what about the potentially harmful continuation of certain affirmative action policies? No one wants talented women from being discouraged from a career in the sciences. What about talented men?

Harm can be done in many ways.

Helen:
"It is important for us to know if males and females have different strengths and learning styles. Society faces unprecedented challenges and it is vital that resources be applied where they will do the most good."

Why is it important ?
"Society" does not do anything.
People study what they like best. Let anyone stdudy and do what he likes, whther male, female, natural sciences or social sciences !

You would not want "Society" to say: "girls move over, natural sciences is for boys only !"
(In the case a study found that indeed men are better at natural sciences).

"It is important for us to know if males and females have different strengths and learning styles."
That is a collectivist concept. We shouldn't try to judge or deduce a person's capabilities from the group (gender group) he belongs to.

Knowing if "males and females have different strengths and learning styles" is at best a statistical artifact, and does not apply to individual persons, so this knowledge is of no use at all.

Knowledge about the statistical linkage of mental abilities is useful in one way: it makes it easier to determine when gender disparity is due to cultural bias and when it's the result of inherent tendencies.

It's not extraordinarily useful, since there are significant economic factors involved as well, but it does help.

To the obvious contrary, knowing whether males and females have different strengths and learning styles has profound beneficial effects on policy making. Clearly such knowledge would allow society (in the form of the government collective) to dispense with counter-productive policies which tend to relegate large numbers of its otherwise valuable members to the garbage bin.

Water runs downhill. Knowing that allows society to build hydroelectric generating plants, tidal generating plants, current-flow generating plants, and other useful devices. Society, as a collective.

Knowledge is valuable to a society which has limited resources to devote to critical problems. People with training in economics, such as our most intelligent hostess Jane, know that only too well.

Knowing that water runs downhill isn't quite the same as knowing that men are more likely to possess significant mathematical talent.

Dunno what Ann Coulter would recommend. Maybe that Summers dude shoulda' talked to her first. But, anyone who thinks women are the same as guys has never done a nature call in a slit trench in zero weather, without even so much as a wind break, about 100 yds from hostile forces. There would be a severe morale problem about whether the shovel handle should be left up or down!

bob

The positive aspects of knowing the truth are simply the avoidance of the negative aspects of the converse. If the "nature" hypothesis has some validity, then forcing a fit to an invalid distribution curve leads to an inefficient allocation of resources: people with less aptitude/desire are employed in place of people who would be more productive -- not just in the hard sciences, but also in the social sciences/services which are similarly deprived.

Even worse, though, is the very question being asked. Tom West's challenge assumes the proper value of a scientific inquiry is the indirect social consequences it may have. This is an explicit endorsement of the politicization of science.

What I was suggesting is that some people here apparently are unaware that water runs downhill. Among other things . . .

Point noted, Helen. I'd say that everyone's aware that water flows downhill - it's just that some people insist that it's because the water had a traumatic upbringing in the clouds and moves downwards as a form of rebellious self-expression.

If society and reality conflict, we should be editing our society to match reality, not trying it the other way around. Even if we removed all of the economic factors that make it hard for women to perform well in certain careers, there's still not going to be equal proportions of men and women in those careers, and we shouldn't bother striving for that any more than we should work to make water flow uphill of its own accord.

Selection vs choice: As an undergrad in Chemistry in the early 70s there was clearly a majority of men in my chem classes; less so 5 years later when I started grad school at the end of the decade. But when I started working- I cant tell you how many women scientists - chem engineers mostly- that chose not to return to the paid workforce after the birth of their child.
I dont believe there are any real structural barriers to women entering the sciences like there used to be. But do we need "parity", equal numbers of men and women in this or any other field? I think not.

Tom West: The only people I have ever encountered who believe that areas of scientific inquiry should be avoided because of the effects of what may be discovered are certain Mormon leaders and political liberals. The ghost of Cardinal Bellarmine is alive and well.

Whatever happened to pursuing the truth for the sake of the truth? If nothing else, for researchers to adopt a see-no-evil policy with respect to "dangerous" areas of inquiry will diminish their credibility across the board, because we must presume that on any question, we are only getting part of the story.

I understand you to be saying that since it is difficult to separate environment from genetics, therefore we must presume that genetics have nothing to do with anything, and that environment and invidious discrimination must account, by themselves, for any disproportions we encounter between male and female participation in certain fields.

Do political liberals follow this approach on other questions? Do they decline to research global warming, because it's difficult or impossible to distinguish how much warming is caused by CO2 emissions vs. solar fluctuations or other forces? Do they conclude that homosexuality is entirely determined by environment?

Fiat veritas ruat coelum, to coin a paraphrase.

"Do they decline to research global warming, because it's difficult or impossible to distinguish how much warming is caused by CO2 emissions vs. solar fluctuations or other forces?"

Actually, yes. That's partly why they take it for a given and research the hypothetical effects of global warming instead.

Science is about truth, not what's politically convenient. Learning the truth is always good -- being ignorant of it is always bad.

Nonsense. Take a far more extreme example. How about research into producing the most deadly car-bomb that can be produced using over-the-counter materials? How about research into how to effectively deliver toxins into the water supply.)

These *are* bonafide areas of research, but I don't see anyone complaining that funding for these is difficult to come by (and likely to end up in a jail sentence.

So, now we've disposed of the "all knowledge is good knowledge", we can debate *which* knowledge is it worth spending public money upon. (I'm assuming that we're all in agreement that *private* research of areas that won't actively endanger people is not to be restricted except by possible social disapproval.)

It seems that given limited scientific resources, one might want to concentrate them in areas where the people paying for them will see some benefit.

It's interesting to note that the only positive benefits people have implied are that we can avoid devoting resources to exceptional female in the sciences. Pardon me if that does not seem the ideal way to increase the number of great minds in the field! It seems to me the net result is like one common opinion taken from the Bell Curve. We shouldn't waste money trying to educate blacks (above some minimal level...)

By the way, for the logic impaired among us, the existence of innate differences would not diminish the AA argument unless one really believed that there is no environmental discrimination. One can argue one way or another about AA, but research in this area won't alter arguments.

All of the research in this vein seems to try and eliminate one of the tenets that I believe made America a primary power - the belief in the equality of opportunity - the idea that men's and women's are to be judged by their achievements rather than their sex and race.

Do we really want to see a society that optimizes for presumed ability? How about only spending money trying to educate the educated, since there's thought to be a high genetic correlation in IQ/g/whatever you want to call it today.

Just want we want to see - a class system based on dubious science. I think most of the rest of the world has already tried it, and funny thing, America's on top.

Tom:

"Do we really want to see a society that optimizes for presumed ability?"

No. I want to see a society that treats people equally. You apparently want to see a society that optimizes for presumed inability -- perhaps a noble, egalitarian goal, after a manner of speaking, but ultimately a lost cause. There are some people who you could spend $7,000, $50,000, or $1,000,000 per year educating, and they'll never be as intelligent or capable as a naturally-gifted person educated on a shoestring. Them's just the breaks.

"By the way, for the logic impaired among us, the existence of innate differences would not diminish the AA argument unless one really believed that there is no environmental discrimination."

Why is that? (I must be "logic impaired.") The argument for affirmative action is that the government should handicap for presumed discrimination. But how is it to know how much the handicap should be? Should we presume that 50% of statistical disparaties in representation are caused by discrimination? 25%? 75%?

The fallacy with your argument is essentially that you're insisting that because it's difficult to determine what respective percentages of disparaties are caused by innate differences vs. environmental discrimination, therefore we must presume that all differences are caused by discrimination. Think it through; that's the inevitable consequence of your argument that if environmental discrimination can't be entirely eliminated from the equation, the possibility of innate differences shouldn't be considered at all in deciding what weight to grant affirmative-action preferences.

"It's interesting to note that the only positive benefits people have implied are that we can avoid devoting resources to exceptional female in the sciences."

Objection; mischaracterizes prior testimony. It's not avoiding "devoting resources" to exceptional women; it's devoting disproportionate resources to that woman -- who, being a citizen equal with other citizens, is entitled to equal treatment with those others.

"All of the research in this vein seems to try and eliminate one of the tenets that I believe made America a primary power - the belief in the equality of opportunity - the idea that men's and women's are to be judged by their achievements rather than their sex and race."

To the contrary, it is precisely because we want men and women to be judged by their achievements rather than by their sex and race that we should try to obtain an accurate picture of how much, if any, of the disparaties between their respective representation in various fields is caused by discrimination, i.e. their being judged by sex and race. The default setting seems to be that innate differences cannot have any effect -- and if affirmative action policies are set with the correspondingly following goal in mind of perfect statistical equality, that goal can only be achieved by race- and sex-conscious weighting -- judging people by sex and race.

Nonsense. Take a far more extreme example. How about research into producing the most deadly car-bomb that can be produced using over-the-counter materials? How about research into how to effectively deliver toxins into the water supply.)

Because obviously we don't want to know what kinds of chemicals we might want to consider restricting, or what kinds of bombs we should be searching for and how they can be located, or produce counters for likely strategies for introducing toxins into the water supply.

The way to protect ourselves from dangers is to learn about them, not keep ourselves ignorant of them. What we don't know can and will hurt us.

No. I want to see a society that treats people equally. You apparently want to see a society that optimizes for presumed inability

Ahh, I suspect I see the core of the disagreement here. You're concerned about resources being spent on women over an equivalent per capita amount on men to offset the results of discrimination - essentially AA. I'm talking about the removal of the few elements that accomodate high achieving women.

As for AA (and sorry about "logic-impaired"), I don't think *anyone* assumes that all the skew in the sex ratio is automatically accounted for by discrimination. As Summers said correctly (and Jane mentioned earlier), there is also the fact that the academic job requirements don't really fit in with having kids, a life, etc. This is not sexual discrimination and it's not generally considered justification for AA. (And it's probably the *biggest* factor of the two (or three)).

So... it's *already* not assumed that the whole difference in ratios is a result of discrimination and adding a third element into the mix isn't going to resolve the argument any further. I really don't see the results of this sort of research having any bearing on AA policies at all. (Besides are there really AA policies out there in physics? I thought diversity was where it's at...)

However, you get books like the Bell Curve suggesting educational policies be aimed at the statistical abilities of races, and I see exactly the same sort of claim being advanced for women on the same sort of dubious research.

We have to educate based on statistical norms (obviously). I do not see any benefit to society assuming that those norms are different between men or women (or between races). Not to mention that I think any presumed results in this area will magnify present discrimination reducing society's ability to take advantage of exceptional individuals.

Because obviously we don't want to know what kinds of chemicals we might want to consider restricting, or what kinds of bombs we should be searching for and how they can be located, or produce counters for likely strategies for introducing toxins into the water supply.

Okay, let me add that there is military research which I don't think is really covered in our argument here. Try and publish the results of your research and see how long it takes to get a visit from the FBI...

Individuals should be judged on their own personal capabilities and not acording to gender or race. (Anybody disagrees ???)
Ergo: Afirmative Action is wrong !!
Discrimination is wrong too, but two wrongs don't make one right.

Nobody can deny that there ARE exceptionally gifted women in the sciences also. So the satistics of the case don't matter. It does not matter if the number of gifted men is greater or smaller than the number of gifted women. You need to judge EACH PERSON ON HIS OWN MERIT.

The only purpose an investigation about innate abilities of men vs. women can serve is to combat AA - i.e. you employ a collectivist tool to combat a collectivist policy. I don't like that.
You combat a wrong policy with rational arguments. AA is wrong, no need to seek statistical data to trim or modify AA one way or another.

Of course, anyone is free to investigate anything he wishes, but I don't see why Larry Summers should promote SPECIFICALLY this investigation. It was a silly suggestion. (Though, by no means, a faught-pas).

Tom,

"I'm talking about the removal of the few elements that accomodate high achieving women."

What does that mean, exactly? It seems to me that high-achieving women are amply accommodated by the same elements that accommodate high-achieving men, namely, the possibility of competing for academic jobs. Why does a "high-achieving woman" need her credentials to be "weighted" according to her sex? Even assuming the top ranks of people gifted and interested in the hard sciences are split 80-20 between males and females, the 20 high-achieving women should have no more problem succeeding than the 80 high-achieving men. (I should note that as far as math and the hard sciences are concerned, I am definitely not among those 80 men.)

What people object to about AA is that, because of some people's more-or-less arbitrary determination that 80-20 is the "wrong" ratio, 30 of the high-achieving men are passed over in favor of lesser-achieving women, whose gender is weighted to compensate for their lesser abilities.

Based on my geologist brother's experience (he's currently interviewing for teaching positions in California colleges), there is NO possibility that any truly high-achieving woman or minority person will be passed over for an academic job. Academic institutions are so desperate not to fill their science departments with the nerdy white males who make up the vast majority of the applicants that not only will they pounce on any underrepresented person who applies, they will actually re-do the recruiting process if the pool of applicants fails to yield enough "diversity" candidates.

Just treating people equally and letting them compete on their merits is sufficient to accommodate high-achieving people of both sexes.

"However, you get books like the Bell Curve suggesting educational policies be aimed at the statistical abilities of races, and I see exactly the same sort of claim being advanced for women on the same sort of dubious research."

I actually didn't read "The Bell Curve"; most of my information is derived from reviews. Did the book actually suggest that "educational policies be aimed at the statistical abilities of races"? Do you have a quote?

As for that book's research being "dubious," I've never seen its statistical analysis of IQ distribution refuted.

As Heinlein had it, if environment were all that important you could teach calculus to a horse.

The difficulty in isolating environmental causes from genetic ones is no barrier to other research in psychology or biology, is it? It's a tough nut to crack, surely, but with a large enough and well enough selected and interviewed sample, your results can lead you to supportable conclusions. After all, in studying the effects of cigarette smoking, we don't go find a group of never-smokers, pay or otherwise compel half the group to smoke for twenty years, and observe the differences - we find two groups of subjects, one comprising people who have chosen to smoke, the other people who have chosen not to, and make careful note of the various other characteristics of the individuals in each group so as to approximate a control. It's not perfect, but that's how you do ethical science involving human subjects. The same principles can apply to intelligence, aptitude, etc. As in the case of "The Bell Curve," if a conclusion is scary to people of good will, that's important information; science can (and should) try in every way to bust the hypothesis, experimental design, sampling protocol, methodology, etc. - but not by merely attacking the scientists. Ditto global warming.

Klug:

I want a biochemical/neurological explanation for the differences.

There already is one, although the full range of its implications is probably unknown, as yet: the link between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Prenatally, this link develops to roughly equal sizes between males and females, but later in the pregnancy a hormone release in male fetuses destroys a significant portion of the link. Consequently, though there are individual variances as always, and even outright inversions (men who "think" in feminine patterns and women who "think" in masculine patterns -- which FWIW does not necessarily imply homosexuality), men on average have less interhemispherical communication than women.

The known effects vary. Unfortunately I don't have a study handy, just some key points from memory, so take what follows with a grain of salt, but --

"Women's intuition" may be an artifact of this; when a woman thinks, she can actively evaluate both logical, left-brained stimulus and creative, right-brained input simultaneously (which could be incredibly useful if, say, an interlocutor was giving a stunningly compelling logical argument for something, but giving off subtle body language cues that s/he was lying through the pearly whites). Conversely, when a man thinks, he is more likely to be "switch flipping" -- give him a logical argument, and the left hemisphere dominates his brain activity for a while (which may explain why charges of "insensitivity" are more often levied at men, by women).

Give a man a significant word, like romance, and he may have to process the meaning of the word logically for a couple seconds before shifting to the right hemisphere to find images of roses, chocolate, and reproduction. Give a woman the same word, and the images will often flow from them instanatly.

On the other hand, a man can often attack a logical problem with extended vigor, even when an emotionally-complex issue is at stake, because the right half of the brain (and any confusion it might interject) is effectively shut out of the mental conversation.

If you start with that, and synthesize it with the known behavioral-differenting effects of male and female hormones (and the fact that the female's hormones cycle in quantity across the month), you might be a good ways toward your answer.

Tom West:

Care to illuminate us as to what those bad policies might be?

The continued discource I've observed in the last dozen posts suggests that you're looking for new proselytes more than debaters, but just in case that's a wrong impression (and I've been known to be wrong), let me try answering with a related example:

In recent decades, there has been a huge push to give every possible person with a spark of aptitude a "college degree." The testing regimens in high school reflect this; the AP tests allow high-achieving students to test past freshman-level college credits, there is significant pressure to take and score high in the ACT and SAT tests, and so forth. Many high schools provide elective courses in vocational/technical training, bt mostly to students who actively look for it.

But what if this approach nets persons who, though they have enough intelligence to move into a college-degree track, would be much happier and more successful in a vocational/technical track? The system doesn't account for them too well, because apart from the usual Shop -- ahem, "Industrial Arts" -- course in some middle schools and industrial arts/automechanics courses in some high schools, it is not designed to identify and promote vocational/technical skill early on. That's not an optimal outcome, for the individual or for society.

Understanding the picture in full may not always lead to optimal outcomes either, but it greatly improves the odds. Shouting "Oh no! Some people will use misuse the knowledge!" is not a productive answer. Pretty much all knowledge has been misused at some point; properly applied, pretty much all knowledge has also lead to the general bettering of mankind.

"...there is NO possibility that any truly high-achieving woman or minority person will be passed over for an academic job."

I totally disagree with this statement, and I think that discrimination has been discounted in this discussion. While I don't think it's the most important factor in why women are underrepresented as professors in the hard sciences, it's definitely a factor (personally, as a female engineer, I think socialization is the biggest factor, but that's just me). The sciences are an "old boys club", if you will, and it's hard to break into that club.

I'm currently working on my PhD & my lab is in the process of hiring post-docs. Learning how they select & discuss candidates to come for an interview has been quite an eye-opener. Candidates, who have excellent resumes, have been argued about simply because it's been rumored they might be too quiet (I mean come on. We're in the sciences. We're supposed to be introverts). I bring this up to say that if you don't "fit it", for whatever reason (gender or race), you won't get hired. Fitting in is arbitrary standard, and if you're a woman coming to an all male faculty and they have no incentive to hire you, it's a lot harder to do.

As female engineer & scientist, I've discussed this topic with others, and we take Summer's comments personally. I realize that what he said that was that it's possible that women cannot be as high achieving as men in the sciences because of innate differences. What that comes off as, however, is that female scientists generally tend to be average, that's the reason they don't get hired. You say that's not what he meant, ok fine, it still makes me angry. As a most important factor, it also has a flaw in that it overlooks the fact that all the genius males aren't necessarily working at universities, some are in industry, thus a number of the male faculty are "average" & if this is true, why don't more "average" female get hired?

Another reason my friends & I were riled up is that he said the biology reason was _the_ most important reason that women are underrepresented in the sciences. Never mind that some of their elementary school teachers tell them "that girls can't do math", or that "it's just a fluke you're doing so well in algebra. when you get to the higher maths, you won't do so well", so they don't bother to major in math & science. Also, disregard the fact that girls are given dolls to play with & boys are given things to build & take apart from their youth, so they don't develop interests in how things work, but in nurturing & family. Finally, disregard the fact that it's well-known that women professors who have children take 2-3 times as long to get tenure as those professors who do not have primary child rearing responsibilities, so why go that route if you know you want a family? These are just a few instances of how socialization could affect why women are underrepresented in science.

Finally, again, it's not what he said, and maybe it's because I'm sensitive as a woman in science who constantly has to excel because I am expected to not do well, but I hate that biological differences as the main reason boils down to boys are smarter than girls. Personally I agree with Tom West that no good could come of that research. It panders to the idea that women need an excuse for not being in the upper echelons of science, and what better way than to say that we aren't genetically wired to do it. Also, if the research were proved true, it basically says that I can't ever do ground-breaking research because I am a woman, so I might as well not try. I think women who want to, deserve the right to still be able to try to excel in the hard sciences.

"I'm talking about the removal of the few elements that accomodate high achieving women."

What does that mean, exactly?

Okay, let's start with scaling back AP Physics programs in girl's schools, followed by not bothering to try and recruit girls for extra-curricular programs for gifted students in maths and sciences. It's already hard enough to get teachers and administrators to spend the time and effort on what is a small number of students. Now reduce those small numbers of teachers even further by helping them realize they really are working against nature.

I don't think people understand the psychological impact of scientists telling us that we are fundamentally mentally unequal. They're certainly fooling themselves if they think we won't generalize on that principle.

What people object to about AA is that, because of some people's more-or-less arbitrary determination that 80-20 is the "wrong" ratio, 30 of the high-achieving men are passed over in favor of lesser-achieving women, whose gender is weighted to compensate for their lesser abilities.

I understand that. However, as I've pointed out in previous posts, results "proving" an innate difference aren't going to reduce the justification for AA because the existence of an innate difference does not disprove the existence of discrimination.

Come on people, it's simple logic. The outcome of this research HAS NO BEARING ON WHETHER AA SHOULD EXIST OR NOT! (Personally, I'm not a particularly big fan of AA, but I can see definite points in favour of trying to obtain a diverse staff.)

Academic institutions are so desperate not to fill their science departments with the nerdy white males who make up the vast majority of the applicants they pounce on any underrepresented person who applies

I find it pretty odd that *despite* this, the winning candidate is almost a nerdy white (or asian) male. However, there are, as noted above, a lot of reasons why women are forced out of the race by lifestyle requirements rather than discrimination.

"However, you get books like the Bell Curve suggesting educational policies be aimed at the statistical abilities of races, and I see exactly the same sort of claim being advanced for women on the same sort of dubious research."

I actually didn't read "The Bell Curve"; most of my information is derived from reviews. Did the book actually suggest that "educational policies be aimed at the statistical abilities of races"? Do you have a quote?

Try chapters 18, "The Leveling of American Education", 21 "The Way we are Headed", and especially 22 "A Place for Everyone".

However, to be honest, the most odious reactions were by commentators - "Why are we wasting money educating the uneducatable" stuck in my mind. Besides, we already design our educational system, around the standard student, plus/minus 2 or so standard deviations. If we find "proof" of differences, it would be *illogical* not to design the system to take into account differences in ability that we apparently know will exist. Why spend money providing advanced classes for women if only those 3 or 4 standard deviations above normal will benefit? (You can imagine what commentators were saying about spending money educating minorities...)

As for that book's research being "dubious," I've never seen its statistical analysis of IQ distribution refuted.

Some quotes:

Stephen Gould points out that, "Herrnstein and Murray's correlation coefficients are generally low enough by themselves to inspire lack of confidence. Although low figures are not atypical for large social science surveys involving many variables, most of Herrnstein and Murray's correlations are very weak - often in the 0.2 to 0.4 range. Now, 0.4 may sound respectably strong, but - and this is the key point- R squared is the square of the correlation coefficent, and the square of a number between zero and one is less than the number itself, so a 0.4 correlation yields an r-squared of only .16. In appendix 4, then one discovers that the vast majority of the conventional measure of R squared, excluded from the main body of the test, are less than 0.1. These very low values of R squared expose the true weakness, in any meaningful vernacular sense, of nearly all the relationships that form the meat of The Bell Curve." In other words Herrnstein and Murray's conclusions are not scientifically valid.

The Bell Curve also mistreats genetics. According to Gregg Easterbrook, "the authors treat inheritance from parents as if it could be charted in straight lines. Smart parents A beget smart kids B, etc. This is a common blunder. Trait-inheritance charts more often look like zigzags, as phenotypes bounce around among offspring and may skip entire generations. Two red-haired parents may have two brunette children, each of whom in turn have one red and one black-haired child and so on. Herrnstein and Murray allude in a few sentences to the common outcome that the children of very bright parents may be only somewhat above average in intellect, but otherwise depict IQ as reliably passed through generations in straight-line fashion. If IQ does pass down generations in straight lines, then the cause must be mainly the environment families create, since genetic traits don't express so predictably."

Also, if the research were proved true, it basically says that I can't ever do ground-breaking research because I am a woman, so I might as well not try.

Actually, not quite true. But that's how it will be interpreted by oh, about 99% of the population.

[It would merely mean that you're more standard deviations above the mean than you thought! Sadly, that wouldn't save capable women from being discouraged from trying, and those in positions to encourage them from giving up.]

Anyway, I think that Amanda's comments are probably the most cogent summary of why Summers' comments were corrosive and wrong-headed.

And her comments about hiring are bang on. I didn't want to bring it up here, but here it goes. It's actually very unusual to have *the superior candidate* when looking at applicants. Usually, after winnowing the bunch, you end up with a few good candidates, and then you pretty much go by gut instinct. Funny thing, but gut instinct almost always follows belief. (There are some well-documented studies about this.) If you believe that it's very unlikely that a random woman will be as competent a random male, you're really likely to ignore the evidence of equal ability and judge in favor of your instinct. What it means is that even if no one is *trying* to exclude female candidates, there's a very good chance that those choosing will end up excluding them. (Obviously, a women candidate head and shoulders above the rest would be hired, but usually *nobody* is head and shoulders above the rest.) The "fitting in" part compounds the problem even further.

One example of this phenomenon was when classical orchestras started doing blind auditions, the hiring rate of women rose substantially, despite the fact that those hiring had been trying to get the best players they could. Likewise HR interviewers will give higher marks to resumes accompanied by photographs of those they think fit the job profile (tested with randomized photographs).

As humans we generalize and we act on those generalizations. Create some "scientific proof" about innate differences, and we've made what is already a strong mindset that "women don't really do hard science" even more entrenched. And thus increased the barriers to capable women getting a chance to use their talents.

But Tom (West), what you appear to be saying is that even if there is good scientific evidence for genetic differences in aptitude for science between men and women *as groups,* we should ignore, and even sequester, that evidence in order to prevent the wrong social outcome. (I'm assuming that when you said "Create some 'scientific proof' about innate differences," you meant "establish that there is scientific evidence for innate difference" rather than your words on their face, which would instead point to your holding the position that there's no chance that differences in adoption of and success in high-level science as a career might be genetic.) Is that what you believe? If so, I urge you to rethink the notion - it's, like, the definition of politicized science, and it WILL turn and bite you (everybody) in the butt, even if your own allies are currently in favor in the sciences.

Thank goodness for people like Amanda and Tom West, who are thoughtful enough to decide on behalf of all of us whether any good can come of knowing the answers to research questions.

"Thank goodness for people like Amanda and Tom West, who are thoughtful enough to decide on behalf of all of us whether any good can come of knowing the answers to research questions."

While I still don't think any good would come of this particular research, as a scientist, I wouldn't persecute any others who chose to persue this line of research. And I do belive that I said, _I_ don't think any good could come of it. That's my personal opinion, and I gave reasons as to why that is.

As my female colleagues and I have discussed, Summer's comments only serve to reinforce stereotypes about women in the sciences. The idea that other reasons, beyond biology, can't possibly be as important in the explanation of why women haven't advanced as far in the sciences speaks to the underlying beliefs deeply entrenched in our society. Women are lesser when it comes to math and science. Validating this idea by trying to "research" it, gives credence to those who use this belief (whether it is subconsciously or consciously) to deny those same women positions, belittle their intelligence, and discourage the next generation of would-be female scientists.

It's good to see that I'm not the only graduate student in here. As far as Amanda's comments go, some are not so complementary to her:

"I realize that what he said that was that it's possible that women cannot be as high achieving as men in the sciences because of innate differences. What that comes off as, however, is that female scientists generally tend to be average, that's the reason they don't get hired. You say that's not what he meant, ok fine, it still makes me angry."

I think this is a good example of how this debate has gone off the tracks -- emotion is clearly trumping whatever facts are around.

And how can emotions not win out? Guys that I know are not any more rational about the issue. I'm a male graduate student in organic synthesis -- the job market hasn't been all that great. (Vioxx, anyone? No? How about some Celebrex?) However, two girls just got hired out of my lab straight into industry positions. (One really deserved it -- the other, not so much.) If you polled the men who make up the majority of their peers, you would clearly get the 'industry needs women' factor as one of the main reasons they were hired. I do not like to admit it at all (and perhaps we have an overly irritable group of guys), but there is a clear resentment of the extra 'help' female graduate students receive in the department. Worse yet, there is no good way to make 'apples to apples' comparisons between men and women in our department. So both memes ('girls don't seem to be all that great' and 'guys are dismissive of women scientists') live on and on and on...

Finally, I think it's time that someone put the 'blind audition' story to some amount of scrutiny. I know that it is raised (as it has been here, by Tom West) as a clear example of unconscious bias, but has anyone actually read the relevant studies, etc.? I'm sure that it has some factual basis, but y now, it's approaching 'urban legend' status where it has lost all specificity.

Amanda said:

"While I still don't think any good would come of this particular research, as a scientist, I wouldn't persecute any others who chose to persue this line of research."

Of course you wouldn't persecute such a person. You merely oppose even asking the question.

"And I do belive that I said, _I_ don't think any good could come of it. That's my personal opinion, and I gave reasons as to why that is."

Here's hoping that nobody with a perspective as unscientific as yours is ever in a position to evaluate your research program based on her personal opinions.

"As my female colleagues and I have discussed, Summer's comments only serve to reinforce stereotypes about women in the sciences."

Only?

"The idea that other reasons, beyond biology, can't possibly be as important in the explanation of why women haven't advanced as far in the sciences speaks to the underlying beliefs deeply entrenched in our society."

If you think that's what he said, then your reading comprehension needs work.

"Women are lesser when it comes to math and science. Validating this idea by trying to "research" it,..."

Why the scare quotes?

Klug:
"I think this is a good example of how this debate has gone off the tracks -- emotion is clearly trumping whatever facts are around."

Actually, I'd agree with you there. In my original post, I stated what you were responding to in order to say why there was so much furor raised over his statements. To me, what he said feels like an attack on my validity as a scientist/engineer.

"So both memes ('girls don't seem to be all that great' and 'guys are dismissive of women scientists') live on and on and on... "

There doesn't seem to be a way to stop either school of thought. I wish hiring could be based solely on merit, but it isn't. This year, listening to my advisor & the other profs in my group try to hire people, I've learned a lot about how people in my field will look at my resume & discuss conversations with my references. It's not just your work that influences whether you get hired; it's also whether you'll 'fit in'. I sympathize with the guys who feel like they've lost a spot to an undeserving woman, and agree that this helps perpetuate stereotypes & shouldn't happen. However, it's generally been my feeling that every brilliant woman (in science) is looked at as an exception & the average intelligence woman (in science) is looked at as the norm.

Don:
"If you think that's what he said, then your reading comprehension needs work."

Please explain to me where I went wrong. I'm pretty sure that Summers did say that he thought that innate differences (which I called biology, which I would also consider the same as a wider distribution of intelligence for men) were the most important factor in why women were underrepresented in the sciences (he then listed socialization, discrimination, & family (he didn't call it that - but I tend to lump that in with socialization as women are socialized to be primary child care givers) all as lesser contributers and he ordered them). He later apologized and said he didn't give socialization and other factors as much weight as he should have.

"Why the scare quotes?"
Duly noted. They were added because I was thinking in terms of researching the idea that that women are lesser when it comes to math & science, not that male intelligence has a wider distribution than female intelligence. The former, I don't think of as research at all. As I said above, the original statements felt like an attack on my validity as a scientist/engineer, so I just got a little carried away there.

"Here's hoping that nobody with a perspective as unscientific as yours is ever in a position to evaluate your research program based on her personal opinions."

Do I have an 'unscientific perspective' because I don't think the idea is worth researching? If that's the case then there are plenty of reviewers at the NIH who have an unscientific perspective as well; they refuse to fund hundreds (if not thousands) of grant applications every year. As far as it being based on my personal opinion, it's not like I have a proposal in front of me that I slammed without reading. This is off the cuff response to comments.

Thank goodness for people like Tom West, who are thoughtful enough to decide on behalf of all of us whether any good can come of knowing the answers to research questions.

Let's get real. Science doesn't just happen. Somebody is making decisions about which research to fund, which specialities to hire, and thus, which areas *not* to research. They do this based on many factors including whether they think the results are worthwhile. Being human, their definition of "worthwhile" is mostly influenced by the approval or disapproval of society as a whole.

By indicating your support for innate ability research, you're doing your small part in influencing society towards such research at the expense of other research. I'm doing my part to sway society away from that research. The idea that my opinions are malign while yours are benign is just a little ego-centric.

Quite frankly, your comment sounds like you'd disapprove of voting, because that's telling others how to be ruled. We try and influence politics, businesses, schools, and anything else that affects our lives. Research is no different.

definition of politicized science, and it WILL turn and bite you (everybody) in the butt, even if your own allies are currently in favor in the sciences.

Politics is simply the business of making decisions when people disagree. Three people deciding where to eat is political. Allocating scarce funding to research is political. There is no non-politicized science. There's no universal measure of good science vs. bad science. We decide that "How giving a professor a million dollars affects his happiness levels" is bad science by general social rules that we all influence.

We can certainly decide that we hold no opinion and let everyone else provide the influence that will dictate the decisions that are made. But to pretend that if we don't express an opinion, no one else will is ludicrous. You can't pretend society doesn't exist and doesn't influence these decisions. Without society, there's be no science.

Why the scare quotes?

1. Because any research done in the area of differences of innate ability between sexes and research is going to be done by scientists with an agenda or exploited by those with one. Read "The Mismeasure of Man" for the long tale of woe about this field.
2. The science behind trying to remove the uncountable number of variables that also influence the figures means that the results will be easily challengable and ambiguous enough that opposing views will be able to dismiss it.
3. The results will be ignored anyway. Just imagine someone how quickly someone who had a paper indicating that men and women had exactly the same ability at birth would be dismissed here. Why? Because they'd never be able to prove beyond most people's doubt that their results are correct.

Hey, Amanda: Maybe I'm the exception, but I don't see the brilliant/exception and average/norm at my school. Granted, I work in a field (especially total synthesis of natural products) which is considered especially male-dominated. Maybe it is also a field where I think that 'effort' and 'ability' are so intertwined that it obscures the brilliant/non-brilliant discussion.

For example, one of my best friends here is female and the best graduate student in the department. She's wicked smart about organic chemistry -- she's also been applying herself the entire time (most grad students only get serious after the 2nd year, it seems). I know women who have decided to treat graduate school as a 9-to-5 job -- those are the ones who wash out.

I suppose what I'm saying is that (for one reason or another) there are so few women in my field, I don't see forests, I just see trees. Maybe in time (time for my 13-yr-old sister, I hope) there will be forests.

--

Finally, maybe it's just me and my crazy view of affirmative action. I don't necessarily sympathize with those who are affected by being borderline and being passed over for a girl. It's not the girl's fault the guy's borderline.

Tom W:

Sure, when you're designing a study or an experiment you have to start with a hypothesis, yes? Which we can see as a kind of bias, because you go into the process making an assumption about the outcome? But if you're a scientist, you're supposed, then, to interpret the data with as much objectivity as a human being can muster (which in some cases might not be all that much, but this is the idealized view of the scientific method).

It's different from politicized science. If you're doing politics instead of science, you start with such a strong preconceived notion of your results that you either deliberately seek out only such data as support your view or design your study/experiment such that its outcome is likeliest to support your view. Or, as in this case, you mark an area "unworthy of study because if my hypothesis is false I hate the thought of the social consequences."

That said, Amanda's point is well taken: not every subject is worth study; some are just silly. (And in industry, I guess, some are just too expensive with too little possibility of commercial exploitation - I don't see industry's ruling such areas out as a flaw, being a free marketeer and all.) This one, I think, is not silly, because obviously any outcome to its study will be terribly important to all parties. What it is, is explosive and controversial, which shouldn't necessarily rule it out. But boy, I hope if anyone does decide to undertake it, s/he is GOOD. A bad scientist exploring this area would be HORRIBLE.

It's different from politicized science.

Quite frankly, I can't see anyone undertaking this area of research who *doesn't* have a chip on their shoulder (in *either* direction) large enough to possibly impair their work.

There are too many more scientifically valuable and interesting areas to interest researchers who don't have something to prove...

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