Some of us are more ignorant than others, I agree. Apparently, there are those who think that a Harvard president should not be among those some.

Interestingly, according to your Wikipedia link Professor Summers was not fired -- he resigned. So there was no eating of one's own, per se.

Nor did his resignation from the position of president seem to have had an unbearable toll on his well-being:

As for Steven Pinker, I realise that he's a popular writer and all, but why go to a linguist for an opinion on genetics?

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

I'd call Steven Pinker an evolutionary physcologist, not a linguist. Some of his big work has been on language and how and why it developed, of course.

Summers was forced to resign, not officially fired. Small difference. Second, I didn't say Summers suffered any harm to his well-being. He's fine and dandy. Indeed, I hope the whole thing was a valuable lesson to him on the dangers of PC run amok and letting radicals become entrenched in power.

What I worry about are those who won't be fine and dandy if they run afoul of the thought police, and worse, if we let those thought police get the their hands on the power of the state, to make laws enforcing the correct thoughts.

-Richard

I'd argue that control over the educational system and scientific community qualifies as control over power of the state. Not only are they attempting to control the top minds of the country, they are training the future leaders of America that thought control is perfectly acceptable.

Pinker's comment about spatial and quantitative skills varying *within a gender* based on sex hormone levels sparked my interest and made me recall reading the research showing sex hormones have profound effects on the development of the brain in a fetus.

There is much similiar research being done. Here's an interesting one:

http://www.bio.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.d...CycleMRTmh.pdf

This finds signigicant variation in womens' spatial skills over the menstrual cycle as sex hormones fluctuate. Testosterone improves spatial skils and estrogens reduce it.

Another older found estrogens improve verbal skills as well as fine motor skills.

-Richard

No, it followed previous posts in this thread.

You don't like the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles 2000 (NATSAL II) that found 2.6% of men reported having sex with a man in the previous five years? There are numerous other recent mass population studies that find numbers well below 10%.

The several years was perhaps more than the absolute minimum, but if you consider the time to get back in shape and retrain up to the standard of the best in the world, it will be longer than just the pure period of the pregnancy. Also, I'm not trying to say it completely justifies the focus, just that it could potentially be a valid reason for a slightly unbalanced view of female vs male athletes starting families.

Oh, and I'm all for anyone adopting. I'd definitely be in the first category of response on that question.

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WANTED:

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Dead And Alive

well you men have a nice discussion, I'm off to burning man . Have a nice week, see you next Sunday or Monday.

Here's a nice summary on this subject:

http://www.sfu.ca/~dkimura/articles/NEL.htm

Note that it is much more complex than a simple (on average) "men are better at math" and "women are better at verbal". For example, women tend to do better at numerical tasks, repetitive arithmetic operations, than men.

On verbal, the female advantage is in verbal fluency and memory, not in vocabulary or verbal reasoning. And then there's motor skills. Women show advantage in fine precision motor skills, while men do better at "hitting moving targets".

The whole thing is much more complex than the simple generalizations made. It's darn fascinating.

And it says that most researchers into cognitive sex differences think they are evoloutionary -- pressures selected for certain abilities in women vs other abilities in men.

And note the first name of the author of that is Doreen.

-Richard

Thank you.

Quoted for Truth.

And another interesting little quote from Dr. Diane Halpern in her book, "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities" published in 2000:

Halpern is a past president of the APA.

Piles of journal articles...... So it seems there is far more than squat evidence to support the hypothesis that got Larry Summers fired.

-Richard

And here's a good Slate article at the time on the contoversy:

http://www.slate.com/id/2112570/

-Richard

I'm not sure that is an accurate summary of the situation-- generally in such situations a public broohaha over some remark is just the "straw that breaks the camel's back". Most likely Summers had enemies for other reasons, who simply used the remark as an excuse to dump him. Given that he was once an economist for the World Bank, generally viewed as villains by progressives, I'll bet he was already of dubious standing among those you claim "ate their own".

I presume that is because Churchill was actually conducting research. Was Summers? (No.) For the record, I think Ward's work was pure schlock, and academic misconduct is precisely the right charge to level against him, just as spectacular stupidity is the right charge to level at Summers in this case. (It is indeed stupid for university presidents to go on the record "wondering" things. If I'm a university president and I "wonder" if blacks have innately inferior intellectual abilities, given their relative lack of achievement per capita in the US, am I doing my job or being a horse's rear that cannot see the obvious societal causes of that?)

Finally, I note that once again the "research" on this topic is not controlled for societal pressures. I really find it unconvincing logic that societal pressures cause genetic differences which then show up in these studies-- when many of those same societal pressures are still present in the studies, often in a really obvious way!

I'll give another example. Look at the results of math competitions in the US. You will note a lot of boys, yes, but you will note something else even more obvious: a lot of people with Asian names! Now, what shall we conclude from that? What happens to these absurd "men hunted so are now better in math" arguments there? I wasn't aware Asians did so much more hunting that Europeans.

Strange, I missed the part where it referred to "mathematical ability". Rather I see references to "hitting moving targets", an obvious evolutionary difference in cognitive ability. Please try to use real logic in support of your argument. And I'll quote this for truth, from the above:

Now, tell me again why Summers is justified in wondering if, from the Wiki, "many factors outside of socialization could explain why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering positions"? Still think that was not a brainless remark for a university president who has authority over hiring faculty and accepting students? I'm baffled.

"Many factors other than socialization" does not imply "girls are not as good at math as boys."

Socialization suggests that girls are being held back in math because they were told they could not do it and believed it.

How about:

1. Institutional bias against accepting female applicants to university science programs and engineering programs?

2. Instiutional bias against accepting female applicants for engineering and science jobs?

3. Life choices - choosing to have a family and stay at home instead of using exceptional skills to gain employment in those fields.

4. Domestic violence, which happens much more often to women than to men, and causes homelessness and unemployment?

5. Depression and other motivation-crippling disorders, which women have been shown to be more susceptible to, causing women not to get the degrees needed for jobs in those fields.

Any of those could be considered "other factors"

But no, the kneejerk reactionaries chose to read his statement as "girls are not as good at math, because they're icky."

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That is merely one way in which socialization enters. I'll settle for all the ways that you think social pressures caused genetic differences which today outweigh those very same social pressures.
How about it? That's a "socialization" issue!
Ditto.
Ditto.
Yup, another socialization issue.
Congratulations, you thought of 5 other reasons why Summers' was being a fool.
Nope.

Realistically, if the factors are social in nature, the changing social nature will eventually cause changes in the qualifier.
So it doesn't matter.

And that's just on accepting the claim that women have a lower aptitude at math. Which I have yet, still, to see any hard evidence for.

It's like surveys and social studies- They select a small percentage and test that small percentage.
And even so, how can you demonstrate that the girls selected in that small percentage weren't a bunch that just really didn't care for math very much?


An interesting side note:
I saw a science program in which doctors did scans of the human brain.
They scanned a female brain.
They scanned a male brain.
They compared the brain scans of several men and women, and concluded that men and women brains operate differently.
THen they scanned a transgender (Male to female) brain.
It had the same exact patterns as a female brain.
A woman trapped in a mans body?

I've seen the same studies Neverfly, as well as ones that were performed post-mortem.

I'd suggest that being transgendered or gay is not a life choice as some people suggest, but is genetically caused. Perhaps by an uncommon release of hormones while in the womb, causing brain structure / mental patterns that more closely match the opposite sex.

There are also intersexed people who are both male and female, either hormonally, chromosomally, or physically. What of those people? Do they have the unique psychological and neurological aspects of both sexes?

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Or choosing to have a career that's in some other field rather than math or a math-heavy science.

To just toss the label "socialization" on everything is to insist that there can't possibly be any biological (or even still other) influence. That's putting the desired so-called "conclusion" first and then trying to smash the evidence into its shape.

I agree. I used to think it was a choice but after having talked about it to some gay folks, and hearing their life stories, I could see no way that it could be a choice.
Science demonstrates that it is not a choice.
But, with all things, even inherent genetics are subject to human will, regardless of how a person feels on a matter, they can still resist it using choice.
But you hit my point exactly:
Say a transgender group was tested to determine mathematical ability or aptitude.
What would those results yield?

Depends on what your definition of "transgender" happens to be.

There are different kinds of people that fall under the TG category:

1. Crossdressers - essentially men, who dress up but have no desire to be seen dressed as the opposite gender or take on the reverse gender role.

2. Transvestites - people who feel compelled to dress and be seen dressed up and taking on the reverse gender role.

3. Transgendered, people who feel they are honestly "in the wrong body" and wish to disavow their implied gender assigned to them by their birth sex.

4. Transsexuals, people who feel they are in the wrong body and take surgical steps to correct the situation.

I'd say it's a range from the "weekend warrior" to the closet crossdresser to the public transvestite to men living as women (or women living as men) to transsexuals who have actually had sexual reassignment surgery.

It would be interesting to see the results of such tests from MTF and FTM transsexuals though.

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The point we have been debating since the inception of the thread is whether female accomplishment discrepancies in math and analytic logic that we find in school and careers are due to innate genetic differences, or are due primarily to our society. It's not an issue as insignificant as "labeling", it is an issue of whether or not we are hamstringing our women via our societal norms, and then turning around and blaming their physiology for that. Is that not what we are talking about? Am I reading the wrong thread here?

They are looking at that. There's reference to it in that summary article from the SFU site. They're looking at the roles sex hormones play in all this. They shape development in the womb, but also have a continued "activating" role in adulthood. Transexuals and homosexuals are good groups to look at this.

I remember they've found a lot of interesting stuff, but can't remember the details.

-Richard

What would it tell you? Thinking scientifically, if you want to know the role of "hormones" in transgender individuals' math abilities, you are going to need to control for everything else that would, by common sense, likely be much more important. Now, how long will we need to brainstorm to come up with non-hormonal issues that might effect the effectiveness of a transgendered person's high school education?

EXACTLY

Which is my main issue with these "studies."

Well, the eating their own certainly a political judgement. That's a good point about the World Bank, one that escaped me, and another big one was the tift with Cornell West.

What set me off was Disinfo Agent's characterization of Summers as "ignorant". I sensed a political caricature of Summers was being formed based on a quick reaction to his comment and I wanted to strongly point own his actual political coordinates were much different.

And yes, I agree making that remark was incredibly stupid. He should've known what a firestorm it would cause. I can't help but chuckle. But hey, academic poo-bahs make stupid comments all the time, many of which have the same effect on me as Summers did on that MIT professor who had the fit over it. But my sensitivities aren't on the PC radar much at all.

I'm not making that particular argument, as I undestand it. That is I'm not saying it's cultural norms saying men do this and women do that that cause evolutionary changes to enforce it in some self-fulfilling prophecy type of thing.

My argument would be that for whatever reasons, evolutionary pressures over the hundreds of millenia of human development did select for different abilities between men and women and that biological signal is present along with the effects of modern cultural biases, and the biological signal perhaps shaped the latter.


-Richard

One question I would pose that fascinates me when I get to thinking about it:

Why do you think it is only in the last 10 years or so that transsexuals have been coming out in large numbers?

Could it be that being a woman is now a * desirable * trait? That the perceived advantages are beginning to outweigh the perceived disadvantages, and that it may seem that women actually have the upper hand, thanks to the feminist movement?

Partly I think it is because the idea of transgendered people has finally become * somewhat * accepted. Although it is still trailing behind the gay/bi civil rights movement, mostly because the majority of people who are TG do not want to be identified as being a part of it. The whole point of the surgery and hormones is to * not * draw attention to yourself.

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And that really elevated the factual content of our discussion, no doubt. I think the problem here is that very smart and very informed people can sometimes have "blind spots" in their judgement, as opposed to being uniformly wise and well informed. I agree it is a shame when one such blind spot can bring down an otherwise accomplished person, but I'm not sure it's fair to blame the PC culture for that-- at its best, PC is about eliminating blind spots. Summers may have made his own bed to lie in on that one. Is PC to blame for bringing him down, or is he to blame for missing the opportunity to benefit from PC awareness that he may have chosen to reject?

I think that would be a good question to put to all university presidents: do you view the PC culture as a stiltifying atmosphere in which you have to watch your every move to avoid a witch hunt, or do you find that it provides you with the tools to enter into discussions on sensitive topics that you would otherwise be ill-equipped to address? Or put differently: does PC awareness keep you awake at night in fear of reprisals, or help you sleep at night confident that you understand the wider impact of things you "wonder about" in public? Perhaps they would find a little bit of both to agree with.
Yeah, notwithstanding the possible harm it can do to Harvard's reputation (given that Ivy League schools are already trying to come out from the image of being white-male-dominated institutions), he should have known it would simply not sit well.

True enough, those were others' comments I just happened to reference in a response to you. I just wanted to clarify your position on that.

But that's a big "perhaps" in that last statement! Yes, anything is possible, the issue is-- do we make a habit of speculating genetic differences every time we see differing capabilities in a culture? When it is perfectly possible to trace the evolution of the culture through periods vastly more discouraging to women's education and intellect, is it such a stretch that some vestiges of that remain? Are those vestiges not vastly more obvious than tiny differences that show up in cognition exams, that are not even controlled for those same cultural influences? Why would we gravitate to a genetic explanation for such unconvincing study results, without eliminating more blatant influences first? I mentioned how good Chinese people often are at ping pong, dominating the world stage. What about the studies quoted above is not the same as concluding Chinese genetic evolution selected for the skills you need for ping pong?

For example, let's take the world's most obvious example: black slaves in the 1800s in the southern US. Imagine someone giving a survey to them, and writing a paper in which they suggest that the results show poor mathematical abilities owing to evolutionary pressures in their native Africa. Would that sound like a reasonable scientific conclusion under the circumstances? Is it useful to arbitrarily single out one possible cause of the results, with no attempt to control for other more obvious potential causes? What kinds of controls are applied in the cited studies above that would lead us to infer a genetic causation?

I don't remember if I said this already, but it seems to me there is a very straightforward way to control for cultural influences-- just give the test to men and women in different cultures! If one has an independent way to asses how much each culture nurtures or stunts intellectual growth in its women, then one need only plot the test results against that independent measure. If one sees a trend, one has the cultural (as opposed to genetic) influences right there. Then one can look for a nonzero "y intercept" as evidence for innate differences. My money says there just won't be one, but I certainly wouldn't be convinced by anything less than such scientifically controlled evidence.

The fact that there are genetic differences between us that are well known suggests that there are other differences which are as yet unproven but are perfectly reasonable to posit as causes for discrepancies on tests.

For example:

Only women can bear children.

Women have two areas that can be considered sexual - one of which can be viewed as primarily a feeding source for children, although I'd call that view rather cynical. And in any case, all characteristics that men do not share.

Women have a fertility period in which their hormone production changes over roughly 28 days and an egg is released and then discarded if not fertilized.

Women typically have a shorter height and smaller build.

Female hair (head) grows finer, women tend to have much less body hair, women have different average results in scans of brain activity.

Women have smaller hands, which may explain why they score higher in tasks involving precision dexterity. However, they score lower in tests that involve spatial acuity.

I do not see why pointing out physical differences, and positive skill differences (better dexterity, higher average aptitude for language and communication, etc) is acceptable, but pointing out negative skill differences (slightly poorer spatial acuity, slightly poorer logic/mathematics processing) is not.

If the science supports it, it supports it.

If you ask me women are getting the better end of the deal - I'm clumsy as heck and could use the extra dexterity. And in our modern world the ability to effectively communicate both in spoken words and text is far more valuable than the ability to crunch numbers, which is a function that is largely delegated to computers at this point.

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Porn. Judging from the content of some of the stuff that gets in my spam folder, the notion of, how shall we put this, an otherwise woman but with male external plumbing seems to be growing in popularity in some quarters. I understand it's pretty big in Thailand and Brazil.

I remember watching some cable news network piece about "escort services" in Washington after the former governor of NY got in some trouble. They interviewed some of the prositutes about their high profile clients, many of whom we see on TV a lot, the prostitutes said. One of them was a transsexual who claimed s/he was in high demand, and at the Pentagon with some big brass who paid highly for hi/er services.

That formed a mental picture in mind that had me rolling in the floor, but I won't detail it here.

-Richard

No kidding. That is not the issue, the issue is, do we have any current evidence that there are genetic causes for the things we are actually talking about in this thread.
Personally I have said nothing at all about those first things you claim are "OK", and I'm not aware of them as being relevant to this thread at all-- they certainly weren't in the OP. The problem is you interpret some sort of moral dimension here, but this forum is about interpreting scientific evidence not morality.
That is certainly an iron-clad argument, but unfortunately the science does not support it-- that's rather the point.
No one cares who is getting the "better end", one merely wants to see scientific reality trump cultural prejudice.