Two months ago, Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard, set off a fire storm by suggesting that some of the disparity in female and male representation in the sciences might be related to innate differences in our "wiring." I used this imbroglio to illustrate the non rational, faith based religion of the liberals and the left. In my post on Political Religion, I concluded:
When people refuse to even allow a question to be asked, they are no longer in the realm of reason but have entered the halls of religion.
In effect, the meme suggests that there are no inherent differences (Nature) between men and women and all differences in outcome can be attributed to social influences (Nurture). If you have any doubts that this is a religious belief rather than a fact based opinion, do the following thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a room full of Homosexual activists. Imagine yourself giving a talk in which you suggest that Homosexuality is the outcome of a complex interaction between a child's inherent constitutional make up (Nature), including the structure of his brain, and his emotional development in relation to his early childhood and parenting experiences (Nature). The idea that Homosexuality is genetic... is a "given", scarcely more open to discussion than the idea that women and men are not equal.
I would suggest that a great many of the core beliefs of the Liberals and the Left are no longer supported by the data available to us in laboratories or in nature (history). Liberalism has become a religious philosophy.
The May Scientific American has just been published, and adds some detail to the blindingly obvious. It is only available by subscription, so I will offer some highlights. The author, Larry Cahill, does a good job summarizing some of the recent histological, physiologic (especially PET and fMRI [functional MRI]), and behavioral evidence of innate differences between the sexes.
The histological and anatomic evidence (that is, the evidence of microscopic and macroscopic differences sin brain morphology) showed that women have a greater density of neurons in the parts of the brain involved in language which is reflected in greater relative bulk of the language cortex; women also tend to have relatively larger limbic systems (the emotional circuitry in the brain). Men, on the other hand, have more brain mass devoted to parts of the brain involved in the perception and manipulation of space, and a larger amygdala, a small body involved in our response to emotionally charged material.
The fMRI and PET work has shown that women and men process emotionally charged material on opposite sides of the brain (men use their right amygdala, women use their left.) Other studies have shown differences in how emotional events are stored in memory.
Finally, on the behavioral front, the experience of millions of parents has been more rigorously examined.
Through the years, many researchers have demonstrated that when selecting toys, young boys and girls part ways. Boys tend to gravitate toward balls or toy cars, whereas girls more typically reach for a doll. But no one could really say whether those preferences are dictated by culture or by innate brain biology.
In order to better understand these preferences, and attempt to remove cultural effects, researchers examined vervet monkeys, who are unlikely to respond to cultural pressures and found:
...male monkeys spent more time playing with the "masculine" toys...and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls.
Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at Cambridge went further and looked at one day old babies, also unlikely to be influenced by culture, and found in a double blind study of infant preferences, when given a choice of looking at a female student or the mobile she was holding, "the girls spent more time looking at the student, whereas the boys spent more time looking at the mechanical object."
There is no question boys and girls are wired differently. We pay attention to different things, from birth, and organize our perceptions in different ways. We think differently. In some areas, it is almost certain men think, and problem solve, more effectively; in other areas, it is almost certain that women think, and problem solve, more effectively. The feminists would have it that we can not look at these differences or discuss these differences, but this approach will lead us to neglect what should be the obvious outcome. We need to know better how men and women think; only then can we discover how to maximize the brainpower both bring to the table.
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