[extropy-chat] Steven Pinker on Harvard president's gender comments; other info

[Neil Halelamien]

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker had some interesting words to
add to the debate other the Harvard president's recent comments on
gender and science:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505366

I recommend reading the entire thing, but here's a quote: "First,
let's be clear what the hypothesis is—every one of Summers' critics
has misunderstood it. The hypothesis is, first, that the statistical
distributions of men's and women's quantitative and spatial abilities
are not identical—that the average for men may be a bit higher than
the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit
higher than the variance for women (both implying that there would be
a slightly higher proportion of men at the high end of the scale). It
does not mean that all men are better at quantitative abilities than
all women! That's why it would be immoral and illogical to
discriminate against individual women even if it were shown that some
of the statistidcal differences were innate.

"... Incidentally, another sign that we are dealing with a taboo is
that when it comes to this issue, ordinarily intelligent scientists
suddenly lose their ability to think quantitatively and warp
statistical hypotheses into crude dichotomies."

Some recent research by Haier and others at UCI adds interesting data
to the debate. From their release:

http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1261
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5

"In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray
matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have
nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence
than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the
brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections
between – these processing centers.

"This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of
the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks
requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend
to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed
gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language
facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity
centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad
measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence
tests."

Here's a pretty good article by the New York Times on this (use
bugmenot.com for password):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/24women.html?oref=login&oref=login

The BBC has an article talking about research on the link between
differences in ring/index finger length ratio (an indicator of
testosterone levels) and driving ability and various spatial skill
metrics:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4202199.stm