One wonders how long society can keep pretending that the dismal achievements by women in science and philosophy can be attributed to past "patriarchal oppression". They'll probably be able to mine at least another forty or fifty years out of it, I guess.Sex and the brain
October 01, 2005
Are men more likely than women to be born with the potential for abstract brilliance in science, mathematics, the arts or music? Los Angeles correspondent Robert Lusetich reports on new research claims from the author of The Bell Curve.
THE idea is as simple as its implications are seismic: women, as a group, lack the evolutionary genetic intelligence to master the highest strata of mathematics and the hard sciences. This is the central tenet of a contentious theory forwarded by famed US social scientist Charles Murray, who a decade ago made similarly explosive claims about the inferior genetic intelligence of blacks in his best-selling book The Bell Curve.
"It's quite satisfying to see that I didn't get nearly the hostile reaction I was expecting this time," Murray says from his home near Washington. "After The Bell Curve, I was the Antichrist, so perhaps we have moved on and we can start looking at this data in an un-hysterical way."
Perhaps. Another explanation may be that Murray has used up his 15 minutes of fame. Lisa Randall, an eminent Harvard theoretical physicist and cosmologist, had agreed to dissect Murray's work, which appeared in the September issue of Commentary magazine in the US, for Inquirer but on reflection declined to respond. "The reason is that this just isn't news and it's not worthy of being covered," she says. "If it really gets to the point where people accept it, I can explain the many logical fallacies in his piece."
Murray counters with the shrug of a man who has heard it all before; he is fully prepared to take it on the chin from the "women's studies crowd".
"Universities are supposed to be places where we talk about these things, not run from them," he says. "These are, in the end, questions of data, not my opinion."
The 62-year-old Murray is regarded as one of the foremost conservative thinkers in the US, responsible for a number of theories on issues such as welfare reform that have shaped views in Republican administrations for decades. He is bankrolled by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation -- the most influential financial supporter of right-wing ideas in the US -- and works out of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington.
He had not intended to delve again into the genetic nature of group intelligence -- he received death threats after publishing, along with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve in 1994 -- until a controversy erupted at Harvard last January over comments made by its president, former Clinton administration cabinet officer Lawrence Summers.
Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tended to score around the top on standardised maths tests and wondered aloud in casual remarks whether that chasm stemmed from biological differences between the sexes. It was a radical idea and not well received within the academic community. After being shouted down at almost every turn Summers, not surprisingly, quickly backpedalled.
"It absolutely appalled me, the reaction to what was a fairly unremarkable observation that men seem more predisposed to excel in these areas than women," Murray says. "I mean, it's true, isn't it? He had actually done his homework, which is more than I can say for those who attacked him."
And so Murray set about writing The Inequality Taboo, which was published in September.
"The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy," he writes. "That assumption is wrong. When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.
"The historical reality of male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument. The question is whether the social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this situation or whether sex-specific characteristics are also at work."
And it at this intersection that Murray begins to head down a dangerous road, paved by eugenicists -- those who believe in selective breeding of superior humans -- before him: is basic intelligence predetermined, as are physical characteristics?
Opinion is widely divided on how encompassing a role genetics plays in intelligence. But Murray -- who believes intelligence is the most important attribute if society is to become a true meritocracy -- is convinced that new breakthroughs will reveal that biology plays an overwhelming role in intelligence quotient, which in turn helps predict societal success. In examining the differences between the sexes, he cites as proof the fact that, among mathematically gifted students, seven times as many boys as girls scored in the top percentile of the standardised American SAT mathematics test.
"Evolutionary biologists have some theories that feed into an explanation for the disparity," he writes. "In primitive societies, men did the hunting, which often took them far from home. Males with the ability to recognise landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage. Men who could process trajectories in three dimensions -- the trajectory, say, of a spear thrown at an edible mammal -- also had a survival advantage.
"Women did the gathering. Those who could distinguish among complex arrays of vegetation, remembering which were the poisonous plants and which the nourishing ones, also had a survival advantage. Thus the logic for explaining why men should have developed elevated three-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations, differences that show up in specialised tests today.
"It has been known for years that, even after adjusting for body size, men have larger brains than women. Yet most psychometricians conclude that men and women have the same mean [average] IQ (although debate on this issue is growing). One hypothesis for explaining this paradox is that three-dimensional processing absorbs the extra male capacity. In the [past] few years, magnetic-resonance imaging has refined the evidence for this hypothesis, revealing that parts of the brain's parietal cortex associated with space perception are proportionally bigger in men than in women.
"What does space perception have to do with scores on math tests? Enter the psychometricians, who demonstrate that when visuospatial ability is taken into account, the sex difference in SAT math scores shrinks substantially.
"There is nothing inherent in being a woman that precludes high math ability. But there remains a distributional difference in male and female characteristics that leads to a larger number of men with high visuospatial skills. The difference has an evolutionary rationale, a physiological basis and a direct correlation with math scores."
Murray goes on to acknowledge that women have their own cognitive advantages over men, "many of them involving verbal fluency and interpersonal skills". He also says that motherhood tends to interrupt the flow of brilliant women in these fields, noting that only 2 per cent of Nobel prizes in sciences were awarded to women in the 20th century.
"Among women who have become mothers, the possibilities for high-level accomplishment in the arts and sciences shrink because, for innate reasons, the distractions of parenthood are greater," Murray posits. "A father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her daycare arrangement or full-time nanny may be.
"My point is not that women must choose between a career and children but that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand. We should not be surprised or dismayed to find that motherhood reduces the proportion of highly talented young women who are willing to make that trade-off.
"Some numbers can be put to this observation through a study of nearly 2000 men and women who were identified as extraordinarily talented in math at age 13 and were followed up 20 years later. The women in the sample came of age in the 1970s and early 1980s, when women were actively socialised to resist gender stereotypes. In many ways, these talented women did resist. By their early 30s, both the men and women had become exceptional achievers, receiving advanced degrees in roughly equal proportions. And yet. The women with careers were 4 1/2 times more likely than men to say they preferred to work fewer than 40 hours per week. The men placed greater importance on 'being successful in my line of work' and 'inventing or creating something that will have an impact', while the women found greater value in 'having strong friendships', 'living close to parents and relatives' and 'having a meaningful spiritual life'. As the authors concluded, 'these men and women appear to have constructed satisfying and meaningful lives that took somewhat different forms'.
"The different forms, which directly influence the likelihood that men will dominate at the extreme levels of achievement, are consistent with a constellation of differences between men and women that have biological roots. I have omitted perhaps the most obvious reason men and women differ at the highest levels of accomplishment: men take more risks, are more competitive and are more aggressive than women. The word testosterone may come to mind, and appropriately."
Testosterone is a word that does indeed come to mind for Jean Morrison, a geologist and professor at the University of Southern California, as she absorbs Murray's theory.
She balances teaching, research work, rearing two young children -- she is married to another scientist -- and running the university's Women in Sciences and Engineering Program. The program was started five years ago when an anonymous donor pledged $US20 million to the university to boost the numbers of women in these fields.
"It's maddening that we are having this kind of sexist, antiquated conversation in 2005," Morrison says. "These are, to put it mildly, bizarre perspectives on historical evolution. And they overlook this little fact: for much of history, women weren't invented. Universities were men-only clubs and it's naive to think that you can undo those biases in a short period of time."
While Murray acknowledges those historical banishments, he argues that equality policies should have produced a narrowing in the gap between men and women over the past few decades. Not everyone agrees.
Robin Garrell, who teaches chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, recalls being the first female science professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the '80s. "Even then, and remember it's only 20 years ago, there were male members on the faculty who thought it was a waste to invest anything in a woman because we'd just go off and have babies," she says.
Garrell argues that environmental and cultural factors are far more important in assessing outcomes for people than, for instance, brain size, which she says is so slightly different between the sexes that "you can't extrapolate anything from it".
"This idea that women's brains are just not wired to handle big abstract thinking hasn't been proved, by Charles Murray or anyone else," she says.
She points to a study that showed innate biases, in both sexes, may be far more important. Two candidates, one male and one female, with virtually identical qualifications were put before a university faculty committee, made up of men and women, which concluded that the man was more competent, even though they had no evidence that he was.
"What's dangerous about what Murray does is that he relies on premises that are questionable, yet he makes them sound much more robust than they really are," she says. "For instance, he doesn't address the biases inherent in intelligence tests at all. If you've never been taught trigonometry, then of course you won't get those questions correct ... We've found that SAT scores, forexample, have very little predictive value for success."
There is also the thornier issue, for Murray, of his tie with the far-right Pioneer Fund, which gives money to scientists who work towards proving a discrepancy in intelligence between races. A number of experts cited in The Bell Curve received research grants from the Pioneer Fund, whose early mission was to promote eugenics. Murray, however, remains unrepentant. "Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified," he writes.
In education, he says that the taboo has hurt boys because educators see their development as an aberration and girls as the norm. "I am confronting realities, dealing with the way the world exists," he says. "There are group differences but they don't preclude an individual from rising above them. Of course there will be brilliant women mathematicians, and we should encourage that, but we should also understand that there are group characteristics.
"This stuff isn't that scary. Just because I accept the data that men are different [from] women, blacks are different [from] whites, that doesn't change the fact that I'm listening to a tape right now by a brilliant linguist who happens to be black."
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