terug
Sex Ed at Harvard
 | ||
Sex Ed at Harvard | ||
| By CHARLES MURRAY | ||
| Washington | ||
| 1 | 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. | ||
| 2 | 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. | ||
| 3 | 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. | ||
| 4 | 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. | ||
| 5 | 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. | ||
| 6 | “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. | ||
| 35 , 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. | ||
| 7 | 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. | ||
| 8 | 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. | ||
| 9 | 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. | ||
| http://www.nytimes.com |