I attended the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) convention in Austin today. Sally Ride was the keynote speaker. She was quite funny and very interesting. She brought pictures of her time in space, talked about how she got into the Astronaut program, and her future goals to keep our kids interested in science.

She said that research was done to find out where we lose the students. In 4th grade 2/3 of boys and girls said they like science, by high school we've lost a majority of them. She wondered in this day and age if, especially girls, but boys too, are still receiving cultural messages discouraging them from pursuing further education in science, math and tech.

Anyway Sally rocks!

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

You're lucky. I hope someday I can see Ms. Ride in person, as she is one of my heroes!
And, by the way:

I'm a girl and science rocks!
(Eat that, demographic researchers)

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

I think it has more to do with overall studiousness than anything. Science and math require more rigor than say, . . . home ec, woodshop, and even serious subjects like history and English. As kids lose their zest for schoolwork, the first to go by the wayside are the studies that require the most discipline and effort. What you end up with by the end of high school are the geeks (mostly, but a smattering of others as well) - the kids who enjoy challenging and often difficult work that takes time and focus.

I guess what I'm saying is that by the time they finish 12th grade, there are not that many kids (as a portion of the whole) that still like to perform difficult academic work - regardless of topic.

And don't flame on me about how many of you enjoy a tough mental challenge. This board is hardly a representative sample of the general population.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Have you ever watched old TV shows like Mr. Wizard? One thing I notice about them is the unbounded optimism. The message of Mr. Wizard is that the universe is very cool, that you can understand it, and that being smart has made our lives better. It's also embodied in a song of the time, _Swing of a Star_ "do you want to be happy and smart, or do you want to just be an animal?" The message: you can better yourself. There is something worthwhile to strive for.

Compare that to every single educational show today - and I do mean all of them. Without exception, they all give at least a passing nod to doom-and-gloom, we're all going to die, the future really isn't that bright, why bother trying, type of thinking. Every single animal is either endangered or extinct, global warming is going to finish us off, and everything beautiful is polluted and sick.

The astronomy shows were one of the last holdouts, but now even they are mostly sensational. They're usually about what a nearby GRBs or nearby supernova would do to us, or if they're about a planet it's always "this is what's going to happen to Earth one day."

So we wonder why kids aren't interested in science. Well, what is there to be interested in, exactly? We've destroyed the Earth. Every animal will be extinct soon. It's all hopeless. Are there any great achievements from the past to motivate them? No. Apollo was a hoax. Your country is an evil empire. You personally fall into one of two groups: a) you're oppressed b) your ancestors were evil people who raped and stole.

Hey wait, why aren't you interested in physics? Gee, this is really a shock to me!

And by the way, this has absolutely nothing to do with truth. Obviously, the truth is that the planet isn't in great shape. I'm not disputing that. What I'm saying is that motivation has absolutely nothing to do with your present situation - it's about your belief in the future. You think global warming is bad? Ha! Our parents grew up under a threat of instant fiery death by nuclear war. But they were optimistic nonetheless. Kids today have the optimism beaten out of them. And I'd be willing to bet large sums of money that any kids who *are* interested in science, are interested because some amazing teacher filled them with wonder and amazement and optimism. If society did the same thing, we'd have a shortage of American Idol contestants and a glut of scientists.

Seriously, am I the only one who noticed the optimism in the old TV shows?

I went to a one-day session celebrating the tenth anniversary of Apollo-Soyuz. Of all the speakers - and this included a bunch of astronauts, the NASA administrator, and Carl Sagan - Sally Ride was the one who impressed me the most.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

She did mention the media, but in a different way. She said they had children draw a picture of a scientist. Way too many of the pictures students drew depicted a man who looked somewhat like Albert Einstein with a lab coat. Not exactly how students would like picture themselves in their future lives.

As a teacher it made me very conscious of the way I treat the students. I shall endeavor to be even more supportive of students interest in science. I already spend a few minutes a period looking at and discussing the APOD. My hope is that at least they'll take away a bit of curiosity and wonder about our universe.

ToSeek she really galvanized me into action.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Dr. Carolyn Porco could have been the next Carl Sagan, I think. I remember the first time I saw her, it was the late '80s I think. It was an episode of Nova about the Voyager missions. She's nearly as articulate and passionate as Sagan. I wish she was more visible.

But anyway keep in mind, there will always be more male scientists than female. This isn't a result of sexism and discrimination in our culture, it's a byproduct of the fact that we're a sexual species. You can fight millions of years of evolution if you want to, but you can't beat it.

tofu mentioned the contrast between the optimism of Mr Wizard and the pessimism of modern science shows.

I have noticed a similar dichotomy between "Golden Age" science fiction and much of the more modern stuff.

BTW, I rarely missed an episode of Mr Wizard and did many of the things he showed.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

There was a time when I was young that I wanted to be a scientist, or an astronaut. Starting from about age 5 I fell in love with dinosaurs, and became interested in paleontology, and then astronomy. I started to read everything I could that had to do with science, often reading from books and magazines that were far above my grade level. My teachers were always impressed by how much I seemed to know about science for my age, and tried to encourage me to become a scientist someday.

Fast forward to high school. By my sophomore year I had no desire to be a scientist. My teachers did nothing to make science even the slightest bit interesting, and the lab work was all incredibly boring. I wondered if a career in science would be as boring as my science classes, and didn't think I could face looking at petri dishes all day and writing notes on a clipboard. I suppose I realized I was more interested in the results of scientific research than actually doing the work. I still read as much as I can about science in my free time, even though I went to art school and am now a graphic designer.

I would have to agree with tofu about how depressing science has become. At one time, we felt we could solve anything with technology. The future was bright and shiny, and people were going to explore the planets. Now, every other article in any science magazine or web site is about how global warming will kill us all, and we're stuck in earth orbit, most likely for the rest of my life.

And people wonder why no one wants to be a scientist these days?

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I agree. Let's hope they never come after archeology shows.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Women have evolved into non-scientists?

Yeah, I'm left wondering how on Earth it was that men evolved into scientists, when there was no such thing as science for 99% of human existence.

Interesting unscientific opinions.

And perhaps an illustration of another reason why not enough children are interested in science. We've been implicitly telling 50% of them not to bother at the outset.

P.S. Love the Abbey Road picture!

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

One story Dr. Ride told was about a middle school aged girl. The mom brought the girl to meet Dr. Ride at a science event. The mom went on and on about how brilliant her daughter was (and apparently the girl was). But then the mom stated how she didn't know where the girl had gotten her flair for math. No other female in the family could do math.

Dr. Ride said that that may be part of the problem. Here the girl is already set apart from all the other women she knows. Does that mean she's a freak? As adults we don't see it that way, but kids don't particularly want to be different, even different in a good way. We've got to make science the cool thing to do... in the way kids think is cool.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

I don't see what the big deal is. The fact is we're graduating more PhD's than ever before. Probably a lot of the new one's are in "Women's Studies" and such, but hey, if they can get the grant money to fund their departments, who am I to question that?

Science isn't everything. It's a great way to while away the hours when you have nothing better to do. But that's about it.

I would never advise a young person to go into science these days. Better to do something practical: like business, or medicine, or law, or--wow what a concept--engineering!

But yeah: Sally Ride is cool.

And how has the proportion of PhDs born and educated in the United States evolved?

Besides, education is not just for PhDs.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

Dr. Ride was speaking of science, math and technology.

Medicine is science and so is engineering.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Engineering and such are very important, yes. But science is how we learn the things that get used in those professions. Whithout science, there is no engineering, and medicine is restricted to prayer and leeches.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

you mean you've never seen the shows where they dig up some ancient city, and explain how that city died out becasue it's inhabitants essentially killed themselves off by various means? one example was a show i watched about the Mayans, and how their own ability to cut down the forests and turn it into farmland eventually led to a local climate change, which led to their demise as a civilization.
if this isn't gloom and doom, i don't now what is. they could have just as easily done a show about the great advances of the Mayans, how their culture worked, and what their contribution to central American society was. but, no, they focused on how they killed themselves.
i've seen several shows like this about cultures all around the world. they might talk briefly about the cultural contributions of those cultures, but invariably, they always talk about how they did themselves in.
but this is just an extension of the environment we live in today. some groups are telling us that our evil SUV's are killing our planet. some are telling us that we are going to get blown up by some disgruntled guy from the middle east. some are telling us that our greed is going to make the so-called "first world" countries are going to turn into "third world" countries. and in the USA, American Idol is a huge hit. if these things aren't signs that our culture seems to be getting more and more negative, i don't know what is.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Yawn. The fascinating thing about the Mayans has always been that they were a brilliant civilisation which disappeared a bit suddenly and mysteriously. Plus lots of advances in the understanding of how and why this happened were made in recent years. It's only natural that scientists will make documentaries about what they're discovering now!

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

Dang! It's extremely difficult to respond to that without getting banned!
Everything you own, you owe to science, one way or another! I for one, owe my very life to medical science!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

No, I haven't, actually. Besides, I'm more into Egyptology than Mayan Studies.
It's a shame archeology is a soft science, so it doesn't really count for this discussion that I want to be an archeologist.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

It's a pity.

I never lost my love for science.

And some of these children aren't encouraged by anyone (except teachers, who hopefully are patient and supportive) to maintain and develop their interest.

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“I shall always be convinced that a watch proves a watchmaker, and that a universe proves a God” ~Voltaire

there have been may shows abut the rise and fall of Egypt- probably more than there have been about the intricacies of Egyptian civilization and the technological and civil advances that have come from there.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I've never seen one, unless you mean documentaries about Cleopatra. There are plenty of those.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

Ha ha! I know you're joking, but seriously, I didn't say that. It's typical though, that if I say "fewer women will do X" that people twist the words around to mean, "tofu thinks women can't do X." The truth is, both sexes probably have about equal ability. The difference is in preference. Men and women have simply evolved different preferences. This is not a cultural artifact, it's just the reality of our species.

This guy (and eminent social psychologist) explains it pretty well but I'll try to summarize:

1. Successful males have many children. Unsuccessful males have zero. Meanwhile, almost all women have children and the difference in the number of children is nowhere near as large as it is in men - a very successful male might have hundreds of children, while a very successful female might have ten. Incidentally, this explains what we were talking about in this thread

2. Risk-taking behavior has always increased a male's chances for reproducing (assuming he survives) but benefits women very little. This is because the difference between success and failure is much smaller for women than for men. Of the males who take enormous risks, some of them are unlucky and die leaving zero children, but others are lucky and leave large numbers of children - the reward could be in the hundreds. Hundreds of new children carrying the genes for male risk-taking behavior, and for female preference of males who take risks. Meanwhile, the men who don't take risks might leave a few children, but not as many as the risk takers, so their offspring are just overwhelmed. As a result, the genes for risk-taking in males and female preference for it have diffused throughout our species. Of course, in every generation there are women who take risks, but since there's little or no selective advantage to it, their genes do not become more common. This is natural selection 101.

3. This difference between men and women manifests itself in different average tolerances for risk. Men are (are average) simply willing to take greater risks than women.

Given hhEb and Disinfo's misunderstanding of my previous post, I'd like to take an aside here to preempt the response I *know* I'm going to get. When I point out the fact that women tend to be more risk averse, invariably someone is going to respond, "nuh uh! Not aaaalllll women!" and so I'd like to tell you a little story. On average, men tend to be taller than women. But my sister is taller than me.

Does the fact that my sister is taller than me in any way refute the fact that, on average, men tend to be taller than women? No, certainly not. One is an anecdote, the other is a statistic. So please, when I say that men and women are different, or that men tend to take more risks, or (later) that this leads to more male scientists, please don't make a fool out of yourself replying with an anecdote. What I'm saying is true for the group, but cannot and must not be used to make some prejudgement of an individual.

4. The different levels of risk tolerance lead to different preferences in all sorts of things like for example career choice. Science is risky. Surely men and women have equal aptitudes for it, men flock to it precisely because of the risk. They enjoy it. It's instinctive.

My point here is that there are two rather dangerous, certainly counterproductive memes in society, and it's having an effect on our education system. The first is that we think equal opportunity only really exists when you have equal outcomes, and we see unequal outcomes as proof of unequal opportunity. We think that if less than 50% of scientists are women, this indicates that our culture is oppressing women, and we hem and haw and waste so much time and money and create so much tension in society over this - but it's based on a complete fallacy! Men and women are different. And this isn't a moral issue of right or wrong, it just is. What's important is ensuring that everyone has opportunity.

Back on the original subject of this thread, Ken Robinson makes some interesting points in the linked video about how "we educate people out of their creativity." Children, he says, start out willing to take risks, but we too often discourage them.

I'd like you to watch that video because he makes a couple of points about brain differences between the sexes. But what's interesting is that each difference he points to is phrased so as to be complimentary of women. And that's fine. I'm sure that what he's saying is true. But this leads me to the second counterproductive meme, political correctness. I imagine Disinfo Agent will watch this video and nod approvingly and have nothing further to say. But when I say essentially the same thing, except that what I say is complimentary of women, he (intentionally?) misrepresents it as: That's not even remotely close to what I said, any more than Ken Robinson, when he says in the video above that women are better at multitasking, is implicitly telling men that they cannot be project managers.

Yes, it is. You're saying that women are inevitably less likely to be good at (or "prefer" in your latest post, but that doesn't change anything) the sciences than men. That is rubbish, and unproven rubbish. A textbook example of how a scientist should not reason.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

No, it isn't. Look DA, your inability to follow this conversation and understand all the big words, though sad and even a little pathetic, is not a great concern for me. So this is the last time I'm going to waste effort correcting you.
Not once have I said or implied that. If I had, I'm sure you would have quoted it.
Yes, I did say prefer. I have not said "less likely to be good at"
It doesn't change anything??? I don't know if you're a native english speaker, but "prefer" is an entirely different concept than "good at" and I'll even give you an example: My grandfather was a great cook. He was good at it. But he didn't particularly like it, so when I went to visit he was less likely to cook than my grandmother. He's less likely to do it, and yet he was better at it. Those two concepts are completely separate.

My point in this thread is that unequal outcomes (there being fewer women scientists) is a manifestation of differences in brain chemistry that evolved hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of culture, and cannot therefore be evidence of cultural bias. There may in fact still be cultural biases, but unequal outcomes are not, in and of themselves, evidence of it.

What makes a society fair or not fair is when it affords equal or unequal opportunities.

This step in the logic about the evolution of human risk assessment is not sound, and not necessary to get to your point. It claims that "risk-taking" is necessarily always a net benefit, rather than a net loss, which is not an established fact and often is false for the given situation; plenty of risks are not worth it despite the fact that some are (because the actual answer varies from one situation to another). If it were true, men would have no level of caution about anything and might not even possess the emotion of fear, and women's alleged preference for that would be an overwhelming utter disgusted rejection of any many who shows caution about something the instant he does so.

Perhaps what you meant was not as absolute as it appears in what you wrote, but more a matter of balance, that the correct (most effective) balance between risk-taking and caution is to some extent more toward the former for men and more toward the latter for women. But even that doesn't have to rely on the unfounded assertion of risk takers getting laid more because women are just so turned off by non-suicidalness. Men had a rough and dangerous job to do and needed to be willing to do it or it wouldn't get done. More willingness to do the hard work would mean more productivity for the good of one's own offspring and for one's immediate social community (social-scale evolution being something people seem to tend to forget about; a community with a trait that helps the community does better than a community without it). But even going that route is still unnecessary, because this doesn't need to be talked about in terms of "risk" at all in the first place, which itself is only connected to science rather weakly.

Science is about how things work in the real, physical, geometrical world. Men's pre-industrial job calls for direct use of physical and geometrical principles. It makes sense to design a critter's mind to be predisposed to doing what its body is going to need to do, so it makes sense for moles to want to dig, hawks to want to fly, wolves to want to chase things, and men to want to do stuff that applies physical and geometrical principles (especially for a practical purpose).

That's a more direct route for explaining how it came to be that men like science more than women, without cutting away from science to something else like "risk" and then back to it again or adding any extra assertions... but even THAT much theorizing is still unnecessary and not a particularly good way to make an argument about human nature, as far as I'm concerned. The problem with theoretical explanations about how our behavior must have evolved is that they can be made up to explain ANYTHING about human behavior, whether it's even true or not, and try to make it sound like inevitable, solid, "scientific fact". As a result, it gets used to justify every quacky idea anybody ever wants to assert about human nature by using evolutionary "science" as the "proof" that we are whatever they want to say we are because we simply must be. For every such argument about human behavior that's constructed, another to prove exactly the opposite claim about human behavior could be instead (and I've done it before, just to show people the problem). Because that means the story is practically always concocted as proof of a conclusion that someone came up with first and just wanted to prove and sound like an expert about, this only encourages a less scientific approach to issues of human behavior, while allowing the pretense that it's more scientific and giving the illusion of validity to any and all ideas about humanity no matter how quacky they are.

What we should be doing instead is starting by dealing only with how people really actually are right now. Only once that is established is there any value in seeking its explanations; in science you don't come up with theories to explain facts that aren't facts. Stories about how our past could have led to this outcome or that outcome (such as men being more inclined to want to do science, or not) do nothing to establish which of those outcomes is the one that really happened, but that is EXACTLY how this kind of reasoning is almost always used and how you just used it yourself; to support a disputed assertion about our present state. If there's disagreement about the present nature of humanity, it can only be settled by more information about what people do in the present, not stories made up about the past. Otherwise you're putting theory and ideas in a superior position to facts, using them to argue about facts, when it's supposed to be precisely the other way around. So I have to object to that kind of line of reasoning even when it's on my side. (I consider the fact that males are more inclined to like science than females so simple and obvious that there can't even be any doubt or real disagreement about it, so that anyone claiming it's not the case is simply engaging in the ultimate in PC dishonesty and pretentiousness... but human evolutionary logic like this just isn't a valid way to support it...)

So Dr. Ride and all of the other women in science are engaging in the ultimate PC dishonesty and pretentiousness encouraging girls to continue to love science? Girls aren't inclined of being good at math, science, technology?

Exactly what are the simple and obvious facts?

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

I started a new thread to respond so that we don't have to take this one any further off topic.

I responded to your post too if you're interested.