Chromosomes Don't Count

The Conning Tower ^ | January 22, 2005 | Trentino

[Davis]

Last Friday at a conference on economics at Harvard, Larry Summers, economist and President of that university ventured to explain the paucity of women at high levels of science and math; it might be due in part to "innate differences" between men and women. Fortunately, it was winter in Cambridge so no fans were in operation, but the hit was palpable.

"Innate differences!" Horrors.

It would take a master parodist to construct a more Victorian response than that given by Nancy Hopkins, an MIT biologist. She was "profoundly disturbed" "I felt I was going to be sick." "My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow…….I was extremely upset." She was thus compelled to leave midway through President Summers' remarks. Had she stayed, Hopkins later told reporters, she would have "either blacked out or thrown up."

Five other distinguished attendees contacted by the Boston Globe also found Summers' comments deeply offensive, but but none of them gave voice to their revulsion with Hopkins’ hysterical intensity. Summers himself expressed the hope that his hypothesis of innate differences would be proved wrong.

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It is hardly worth arguing that women and men differ innately. Of course they do. There's no reason to trot out reams of statistics to prove the point. But feminist dogma requires that men and women be the same. Not equal in dignity or in law or in God's eyes. The same. Identical beings with identical outcomes in this world. It's a social imperative, so the facts must comply.

Not even the most virulently rabid Lefty could maintain with a straight face—I take that back. A Lefty friend of mine, a quite ordinary fellow otherwise, mild and affable, practices believing at least three preposterous ideas every weekday before lunch. But even he would hesitate before leaping to the conclusion that women and men are identical.

Obvious physical differences between the sexes don't raise feminist hackles. You are allowed to observe that women in the aggregate are smaller, weaker, their skulls smaller, their reproductive equipment different, their body frames and brow ridges different. You are even allowed to attribute these differences to women's XX chromosome versus men's XY chromosome. But it is absolutely verboten to cause anguish among the frailer members of either sex by directing their attention to aptitude difference, cognitive difference, emotional difference—mind stuff, you see, centered in the brain.

The feminist creed declares the brain out of bounds. No chromosomal influence allowed north of the neck. Endocrine secretions will stay where they are told. Those damn chromosomes with their capitalist genes must yield in matters of equity, must erase gaps between particular human aggregates.

Those gaps, among them the gap between male performance in science and math, are decreed to be the result of action of an arrogant tyrannical malevolent hegemonic society. This a declaration, not a finding of fact. Facts be damned. It is an irrebuttable presumption that society has been stacking the deck and dealing from the bottom of it when in any activity the number of any group of participants is less (or greater) than that group's proportion of the general population. It can never be the result of innate differences. Those who suggest, however gingerly, that it stems from human diversity must be silenced.

Note that all of this has nothing to do with individual behavior, individual merit. Only statistics counts. Consequently, it has nothing to do with justice.

It's enough to make you sick to your stomach.

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