Vive la difference

"The Kiss" by August Rodin (1886, Marble, Musee Rodin, Paris)

"I've been trying to understand the differences between males and females," writes Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. Haven't we all? But Baron-Cohen, expanding on studies that suggest autism might be the result of having two parents share a thinking style called "systemizing," has done some fascinating field work [published in 2001] on newborns and developed an "Assortative Mating Theory" that would warm the cockles of Harvard President Larry Summers's heart and cause MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins to reach for the vapors. From an interview in Edge The Third Culture:

There's been a slight of hand, mostly in the States, such that the word "sex" has been replaced by the word "gender" . . . Why has this happened?  Presumably, because your sex is determined by your chromosomes.  And in the States the ideology is that we shouldn't be determined by anything; we should be able to be anything we choose.  The blank slate. Gender refers to how you think of yourself:  as masculine or feminine.  It's much more subjective and is commonly believed to be culturally constructed.

Although a British academic might be forgiven for thinking so, it isn't Americans in general who think this way.  Most of us trust our eyes and conduct our lives as if there's something within us called human nature. The gender benders are the marxist feminists of academia, who've tried to ram the G word down our throats, with their accompanying p.c. denial of any psychological differences between the sexes based upon biological mechanisms that might be worth investigating. Baron-Cohen continues:

In our own work, we have been focused very much on fetal testosterone -- the hormone that the fetus is producing in the womb, to see whether that has any effect on later behavior. We've been conducting laboratory studies on the amniotic fluid in the womb — the fetus is effectively swimming in this amniotic fluid. We analyze how much testosterone, the so-called male hormone, is in the amniotic fluid. It's not actually a male hormone, because both sexes produce it, it's just that males produce a lot more than females. That's because it comes from the testes. Females also produce it in the adrenal glands. What we found is that the higher the baby's level of fetal testosterone, the less eye contact the child makes at 12 months old. And also the slower they are to develop language at 18 months old.

One experiment we conducted here in Cambridge was at the local maternity hospital . . . to find out whether sex differences that you observe later in life could be traced back to birth . . . we looked at just over one hundred newborn babies, 24 hours old . . . we presented each baby with a human face to look at, and then a mechanical mobile suspended above the crib. Each baby got to see both objects . . . we found more boys than girls looked longer at the mechanical mobile. And more girls than boys looked longer at the human face. Given that it was a sex difference that emerged at birth, it means that you can't attribute the difference to experience or culture.

I do not discount environmental factors; I'm just saying, don't forget about biology. To me that sounds very moderate. But for some people in the field of gender studies, even that is too extreme. They want it to be all environment and no biology. You can understand that politically that was an important position in the 1960s, in an effort to try to change society. But is it a true description, scientifically, of what goes on? It's time to distinguish politics and science, and just look at the evidence.

As a Forbes article on the show trials of Larry Summers asked a couple of months back, "Is it really absurd to think there might be innate gender differences in mathematical ability?":

An avalanche of scientific research, not to mention the wisdom of your grandmother, supports the idea of significant innate differences between the sexes. Some scholars, notably David Geary of the University of Missouri-Columbia, have argued persuasively that this premise is in fact required by the logic of Darwinian natural selection . . . Yet when Summers mentioned the possibility of innate differences -- and asked whether they might be related to underrepresentation of female academics in math and science -- he got seriously pounded by fellow academics, the public and the press. His apologies ended with a fair amount of groveling.

Don't confuse leftist academics with the facts. They prefer the false security of their shackles of denial to the risk-taking freedom of the marketplace of ideas.

Comments

[goomp]

The dream world of academia is scary. What if they convince our youth they are right and we live by their rules while the Mullahs eliminate us?

[Scott]

"And in the States the ideology is that we shouldn't be determined by anything; we should be able to be anything we choose. The blank slate."

Eh? Didn't we just have a big debate (still going in some places) here in America about the idea that people's sexual preference is genetically pre-determined?