Monday, January 24, 2005
Sex Ed at Harvard
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Sex Ed at Harvard:
By CHARLES MURRAY
Washington
FORTY-SIX years ago, in 'The Two Cultures,' C. P. Snow famously warned of the dangers when communication breaks down between the sciences and the humanities. The reaction to remarks by Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, about the differences between men and women was yet another sign of a breakdown that takes Snow's worries to a new level: the wholesale denial that certain bodies of scientific knowledge exist.
Mr. Summers's comments, at a supposedly off-the-record gathering, were mild. He offered, as an interesting though unproved possibility, that innate sex differences might explain why so few women are on science and engineering faculties, and he told a story about how nature seemed to trump nurture in his own daughter.
To judge from the subsequent furor, one might conclude that Mr. Summers was advancing a radical idea backed only by personal anecdotes and a fringe of cranks. In truth, it's the other way around. If you were to query all the scholars who deal professionally with data about the cognitive repertoires of men and women, all but a fringe would accept that the sexes are different, and that genes are clearly implicated.
How our genetic makeup is implicated remains largely unknown, but our geneticists and neuroscientists are doing a great deal of work to unravel the story. When David C. Geary's landmark book 'Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences' was published in 1998, the bibliography of technical articles ran to 52 pages - and that was seven years ago. Hundreds if not thousands of articles have been published since."............
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By CHARLES MURRAY
Washington
FORTY-SIX years ago, in 'The Two Cultures,' C. P. Snow famously warned of the dangers when communication breaks down between the sciences and the humanities. The reaction to remarks by Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, about the differences between men and women was yet another sign of a breakdown that takes Snow's worries to a new level: the wholesale denial that certain bodies of scientific knowledge exist.
Mr. Summers's comments, at a supposedly off-the-record gathering, were mild. He offered, as an interesting though unproved possibility, that innate sex differences might explain why so few women are on science and engineering faculties, and he told a story about how nature seemed to trump nurture in his own daughter.
To judge from the subsequent furor, one might conclude that Mr. Summers was advancing a radical idea backed only by personal anecdotes and a fringe of cranks. In truth, it's the other way around. If you were to query all the scholars who deal professionally with data about the cognitive repertoires of men and women, all but a fringe would accept that the sexes are different, and that genes are clearly implicated.
How our genetic makeup is implicated remains largely unknown, but our geneticists and neuroscientists are doing a great deal of work to unravel the story. When David C. Geary's landmark book 'Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences' was published in 1998, the bibliography of technical articles ran to 52 pages - and that was seven years ago. Hundreds if not thousands of articles have been published since."............
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