Posted on 06/10/2005 5:26:32 PM PDT by quidnunc
Harvard President Lawrence Summers continues to beg forgiveness for having wondered aloud whether "intrinsic human nature" might be one of the factors that explain the high male-to-female ratio in science. Among other things, Harvard has just announced it will spend $50 million on efforts to diversify the school's faculty, though it will not go so far as to make Summers wear a dress. Yet.
The uproar at Harvard has generated enough hot air to dry out Phil Spector's white-man afro. But it also has generated some thoughtful discussion, such as a recent debate between Harvard psych profs Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Pinker noted that the bell-curve distributions for male height and female height overlap, but are not identical. "It's not the case that all men are taller than all women. But while at 5' 10" there are 30 men for every woman, at 6' there are 2,000 men for every woman. Now, sex differences in cognition tend not to be so extreme, but the statistical phenomenon is the same." And males tend to vary more at either ends of the bell curve. In short, while the vast majority of men and women are equally smart, the male cohort contains "more prodigies, [and] more idiots."
Ms. Spelke cited other facts, including a study that examined perceptions of candidates for university tenure-track positions. When professors were given the résumé of a candidate who could "walk on water," it didn't matter whether the name at the top was male or female. But when the résumé reflected only average performance, the professors tended to rate the fictional candidate higher when a male name was at the top.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at timesdispatch.com ...
Don't these people have other more important things to do? What a waste of human skin.
The German 3 k's....kinder, kuchen, und kirche
And which cohort contains more airheads?
Women, because if you switch testosterone for estrogen, the temperment which would make a woman an airhead makes a man a jerk.
The way the Harvard faculty is rehabilitating Summers is absolutely ingenious. They have all exposed themselves as babbling idiots, so Summers looks pretty good next to them.
Excerpt from article http://www.townhall.com/news/politics.
Ref: Judge Gerald O'Brien, Pasco County, Fla.
"Judge O'Brien stated [...] that the notion of two genders is an outdated, 19th century, stereotypic concept"..."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.