blake johnson

I found yet another article responding to Summer’s remarks: The New Republic Online: Body of Evidence. I really liked the concluding paragraph:

Summers’s “problem” is that he submits every argument with a grain of evidence behind it to serious and scrupulous scrutiny. And this scares our supposedly daring academic culture, which lives in fear of what it refuses to know. As yet another of Curie’s biographers suggested, “She had survived because she had made men believe that they were not just dealing with an equal, but with an insensitive equal.” Summers knows that the age of such painful self-denial is gone, and good riddance. Still, the academy is the academy; it is not a community center. Students ought to know more than they do, and it is on Summers’s agenda that they will. No American university has yet truly grasped how the revelations of science touch on history and art, philosophy and poetry, and it is on Summers’s agenda that at least Harvard will try. In all this, he imperils the unexamined orthodoxies of the ensconced. And now, his enemies see a chance to counterattack. Let’s hope they fail and he succeeds.

Harvard Professor Steven Pinker weighed in on the woman in science “scandal” created by Larry Summers. His response to the issue is classic Pinker:

when it comes to this issue, ordinarily intelligent scientists suddenly lose their ability to think quantitatively and warp statistical hypotheses into crude dichotomies.

My response: yes.

There are two opinion pieces in the times today regarding Lawrence Summers’ remarks on women and science: Op-Ed Contributor: Sex Ed at Harvard and Different but (Probably) Equal. I am glad to see that both articles stress the importance and ground breaking nature of current studies into the innate differences between men and women.

Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, jumped back into the national spotlight this weekend after making some controversial remarks at a conference last friday. His speech discussed the gender gap in the sciences in academia and new research which offers some possible explanations. One of these explanations is that men may have an innate genetic advantage over women in the sciences.

Coverage of this issue differs widely between the national/international media like BBC News and the The Harvard Crimson. Something that the national media is leaving out is that Summers apparently followed his comment about innate differences with the statement: “I’d like to be proven wrong on this one.”

The impetus for Summers comment is recent research which shows that the variance in science test scores is greater for men than for women. Consequently, there are more men that are really good at science, but also more men that are really bad at science.

This controversy seems awfully reminiscent of what Steven Pinker shows in The Blank Slate: modern society displays great resisitance to any explanation which is based on genetics rather than on social factors. That is not to say that in the particular case of women in science social factors are unimportant. But, clearly there are differences between men and women, and if there are factors which make men more inclined toward science, we should try to discover what those factors are, rather than ignoring them.

The posters for the Harvard-Yale Football Concert have come back from the printers. They look fantastic, so I’m going to make sure they are put up all over the house.

Come to our concert! We are singing some very good music, including a premier of a piece commissioned for the Harvard Glee Club, composed by a Minnesotan named Carol Barnett. It is set to the text of a sermon given by John Donn in the 17th century. Barnett expresses the meaning of the text very skillfully in the many musical textures of the piece. I think you will like it.