|
|
 | | From: | sufaud | | Subject: | NYT/OpEd: Sex Ed at Harvard | | Date: | Mon, 24 Jan 2005 03:56:24 +0000 |
|
|
 | The New York Times
January 23, 2005
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
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 es 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.
This scholarship shows a notable imbalance, however: scholarship on the
environmental sources of male-female differences tends to be stale (wade
through a recent assessment of 172 studies of gender differences in
parenting involving 28,000 children, and you will discover that two-thirds
of the boys were discouraged from playing with dolls - but were nurtured
pretty much the same as girls in every other way); but scholarship about
innate male-female differences has the vibrancy and excitement of an
important new field gaining momentum. A recent notable example is "The
Essential Difference," published in 2003 by Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge
University, which presents a grand unified theory of male and female
cognition that may well be a historic breakthrough.
"Exciting" is the right word for this work, not "threatening" or "scary." We
may not know the answers yet, but we can be confident that they will be more
interesting than, say, a discrete gene for science that clicks on for men
differently than it does for women. Rather, it will be a story of the
interaction of many male and female genetic differences, and the way a
person's environment affects those differences. Hardly any of the answers
will lend themselves to simplistic verdicts of "males are better" or vice
versa. For every time there is such a finding favoring males, there will be
another favoring females.
Some people will find the results threatening - because some people find any
group differences threatening - but such fears will be misplaced. We may
find that innate differences give men, as a group, an edge over women, as a
group, in producing, say, terrific mathematicians. But knowing that fact
about the group difference will not change another fact: that some women are
terrific mathematicians. The proportions of men and women mathematicians may
never be equal, but who cares? What's important is that all women with the
potential to become terrific mathematicians have full opportunity to do so.
Of course, new knowledge will not be without costs. Perhaps knowing that
there is a group difference will discourage some women from even trying to
become mathematicians or engineers or circus clowns. We - scientists,
parents, educators, employers - must do everything we can to prevent such
unwarranted reactions. And the best way to do that is to put the
individual's abilities, not group membership, at the center of our
attention.
Against the cost of the new knowledge is the far greater cost of
obliviousness, which can lead us to pursue policies that try to make society
conform to expectations that conflict with what human beings really are. In
the study of gender, large and growing bodies of good science are helping us
understand the sources of human abilities and limitations. It is time to
accept their existence, their seriousness and their legitimacy.
Charles Murray is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23murray.html
|
|
|
