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You raise a good point. Wikipedia's policy of NPOV (neutral point-of-view) effectively means "mainstream"; while I grant that "controversy" on this subject exis

You raise a good point. Wikipedia's policy of NPOV (neutral point-of-view) effectively means "mainstream"; while I grant that "controversy" on this subject exists in the mainstream, I believe in this case the mainstream is unhinged from reality. Thus, on this point, so is Wikipedia. [1] Given the dramatically different reproductive incentives for women (one egg per month for ~25 years, 9 months of pregnancy plus lactation, etc.) and men (millions of sperm per week and potentially no more than a few minutes' commitment), biologically determined cognitive and behavioral differences are obviously the null hypothesis. In other words, the burden of proof is on those who claim that women and men don't exhibit cognitive dimorphism. Does this strike you as the "mainstream" view? For example, there are many who claim (or, much more often, merely imply) that women and men must on average be equally well-suited to engineering. Are such people routinely called out by NPR and the New York Times to produce evidence to support their position? Um, no. So, we can see that the mainstream is in error: even if it turns that there is such evidence, the mainstream doesn't generally demand it. (Indeed, those who do demand it risk censure for their beliefs.) A survey of different cultures around the world tends to confirm the null hypothesis: a belief that women and men have different natures is a human universal. [2] For a rigorous account of the positive case that women and men differ in their cognitive and behavioral characteristics, I can recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. [3] If you're short on time, see his TED talk for a quick overview. [4] [1]: If creationism were mainstream, Wikipedia would claim a "controversy" over evolution. Indeed, many creationists make just such a claim. This doesn't make them right. [2]: http://humanuniversals.com/human-universals/ http://humanuniversals.com/human-universals/ [3]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/0142003344 http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420... [4]: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_blank_slate.html http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_b...

dalke 13y ago
I'm not the one who started by pointing to Wikipedia. ;) "the burden of proof is on those who claim that women and men don't exhibit cognitive dimorphism" As for example Maccoby, Eleanor Emmons, and Carol Nagy Jacklin, eds. The psychology of sex differences. Vol. 1. Stanford University Press, 1974? And the additional analysis by Janet Hyde in papers like "How large are cognitive gender differences? A meta-analysis using! w² and d.." American Psychologist 36.8 (1981): 892? (Plus more recent work. Those citations come from the full paper behind the link I posted previously, which lists many more references.) There's a century of work on this topic. Some say there are differences, others say there aren't any. The ones that say there are differences don't seem to be that reproducible. There's publication bias as well - someone finds a difference, but when the test is repeated the difference decreases or even disappears. This is expected for the reasons behind http://xkcd.com/882/ http://xkcd.com/882/ and elaborated in that 1974 reference as: > We shall return now to the importance of the null hypothesis - to point with some alarm to the tendency for isolated positive findings to sweep through the literature, while findings of no difference, or even later findings of opposite results, are ignored. Studies with nonreplicable[sic] positive findings are reprinted in books of readings, cited in textbooks, and used to buttress theories about the nature of the development of sex typing. along with a quote about their hypothesis for why beliefs about cognitive sex persist: > An ancient truth is worth stating here: if a generalization about a group of people is believed, whenever a member of that group behaves in the expected way the observer notes it and his belief is confirmed and strengthened; when a member of the group behaves in a way that is not consistent with the observer's expectations, the instance is likely to pass unnoticed, and the observer's generalized belief is protected from disconfirmation. We believe that this well-documented process occurs continually in relation to the expected and perceived behavior of males and females, and results in the perpetuation of myths that would otherwise die out under the impact of negative evidence. Or there's papers like Feingold, Alan. "Cognitive gender differences are disappearing." American Psychologist 43.2 (1988): 95. If cognitive gender differences are innate, and easily measurable, then there wouldn't be a change over time. That there's a decrease says they are either not innate or not easily measurable. You wrote: "So, we can see that the mainstream is in error: even if it turns that there is such evidence, the mainstream doesn't generally demand it. (Indeed, those who do demand it risk censure for their beliefs.)" Are you kidding me? There's a bajillion people who say there's evidence for cognitive sex differences. Here's one citation: > '"Educational systems could be improved by acknowledging that, in general, boys and girls are different," said David Geary, MU professor of psychological science. "For example, in trying to close the sex gap in math scores, the reading gap was left behind. ..."' Quote from http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2013/0313-international-gender-difference-in-math-and-reading-scores-persists-regardless-of-nations%E2%80%99-gender-equality-levels-says-mu-psychologist/ http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2013/0313-internati... . Author's home page http://psychology.missouri.edu/gearyd http://psychology.missouri.edu/gearyd . How has this person been censured? The paper is freely available. It points out that there are measured sex differences, and in hypothesis #3 that it might be "biological in origin, see pp.291–294, pp.411–412 of [10]", but "At this point, we have no definite answer to what can explain the correlation, which means that it requires further study." And that's the issue - there is evidence of differences, but there isn't strong or significant evidence that those differences are biological in nature. But it's very easy to see the difference and assume it must be biological. I see that you reference popular science books and lectures as basis for your decisions. Moreover, all of those resources came from a single person. That is not rigorous. Pinker could be misinterpreting the data and you wouldn't know. Where is the primary data? How are the experiments done? What confounding effects might be in the data? How reproducible is it? Can you point me to some of the peer reviewed literature? I looked at the 'human universals' link. It immediately made me distrustful, since the first one is "environment, adjustments to". All life adjusts to the environment, so this isn't particularly special for humans. It's like saying that eating and defecating are human universals; while true, I note they aren't on the list. But there's easily things in there which are not universal. My cousin doesn't prefer sweets. There are people who feel no pain (congenital analgesia). Those without thumbs/hands/arms have no thumb sucking. Yet those people are obviously human. More likely, these "universals" are not actually universal, no? Or take "males dominate public/political realm"? How universal can that be given that Andorra and Rwanda have respectively 50% and 56% female parliamentarians? If there ever is a country with a majority of female politicians across all levels, would this mean Pinker's universals hypothesis is completely false? Or would the list be adjusted to fit whatever is the current conditions?
- lexcorvus 13y ago
  I appreciate your detailed response. As you might guess, I find many points of disagreement, but rather than belabor the matter with an enumeration of such points, let me just note that my comment wasn't a dissertation, so accusations of a lack of rigor are misplaced. In particular, my purpose in citing Pinker was to point you to an accessible introduction to the subject, not to do a comprehensive literature review. Moreover, what you dismiss as a "popular science book" has hundreds of footnotes to refereed publications. Take a look at it—you might be surprised at what you find.
  - dalke 13y ago
    As you yourself have implied, creationist books also have 'hundreds of footnotes to refereed publications.' ;) I have a hard time trusting Pinker's views, or most of the work of evolutionary psychology. They in general do not seem to understand evolution. That is, they seem to think that everything is an adaptive result of specific evolution, and don't consider the idea that some mechanisms are neutral with respect to selection. I also believe they have make conclusions based on insufficient evidence. My own experiments with genetic algorithms show just how much crap there can be, which has nothing to do with evolutionary fitness. But I at best dabble in evolutionary biology (my own work is related to small-molecule chemistry, and my training is in structural biophysics, so only tangentially related to evolution). Instead, see http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/28/tackling-pinkers-defense-of-evolutionary-psychology/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/28/tackling-p... and http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/15/when-in-doubt-just-question-the-motives-of-evolutionary-psychology-critics/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/15/when-in-do... for the comments of an evolutionary biologist commenting on evolutionary psychology, and on Pinker in specific. "Take a look at [them]—you might be surprised at what you find." ;) Quoting from the latter: > Have I ever said that we shouldn’t study gender or racial differences? No. We know there are going to be differences. The catch is that they have to be studied very, very well, with rigor and careful analysis, because they are socially loaded and because science has a deeply deplorable history of using poor methods to reach bad conclusions that are used as ideological props for the status quo. The first of those links has 654 comments, with all sorts of viewpoints ... and a number of references, like from #516: > In this paper, we use meta-analysis to analyze gender differences in recent studies of mathematics performance. First, we meta-analyzed data from 242 studies published between 1990 and 2007, representing the testing of 1,286,350 people. Overall, d = .05, indicating no gender difference, and VR = 1.08, indicating nearly equal male and female variances. Second, we analyzed data from large data sets based on probability sampling of U.S. adolescents over the past 20 years: the NLSY, NELS88, LSAY, and NAEP. Effect sizes for the gender difference ranged between −0.15 and +0.22. Variance ratios ranged from 0.88 to 1.34. Taken together these findings support the view that males and females perform similarly in mathematics. The paper is online for free at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/ , and it highlights the difficulties of doing this research: > These stereotypes are of concern for several reasons. First, in the language of cognitive social learning theory, stereotypes can influence competency beliefs or self-efficacy; correlational research does indeed show that parents' and teachers' stereotypes about gender and mathematics predict children's perceptions of their own abilities, even with actual mathematics performance controlled (Bouchey & Harter, 2005; Frome & Eccles, 1998; Keller, 2001; Tiedemann, 2000). ... A second concern is that stereotypes can have a deleterious effect on actual performance. Stereotype threat effects (Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995) have been found for women in mathematics. ... Stereotypes play a role in policy decisions as well as personal decision-making. For example, schools and states may base decisions to offer single-sex mathematics classes on the belief that these gender differences exist (Arms, 2007). Note that these two confounding cultural effects are not genetic, and seemingly much stronger than any biologically-based difference which might exist.

dalke 13y ago

I'm not the one who started by pointing to Wikipedia. ;) "the burden of proof is on those who claim that women and men don't exhibit cognitive dimorphism" As for example Maccoby, Eleanor Emmons, and Carol Nagy Jacklin, eds. The psychology of sex differences. Vol. 1. Stanford University Press, 1974? And the additional analysis by Janet Hyde in papers like "How large are cognitive gender differences? A meta-analysis using! w² and d.." American Psychologist 36.8 (1981): 892? (Plus more recent work. Those citations come from the full paper behind the link I posted previously, which lists many more references.) There's a century of work on this topic. Some say there are differences, others say there aren't any. The ones that say there are differences don't seem to be that reproducible. There's publication bias as well - someone finds a difference, but when the test is repeated the difference decreases or even disappears. This is expected for the reasons behind http://xkcd.com/882/ http://xkcd.com/882/ and elaborated in that 1974 reference as: > We shall return now to the importance of the null hypothesis - to point with some alarm to the tendency for isolated positive findings to sweep through the literature, while findings of no difference, or even later findings of opposite results, are ignored. Studies with nonreplicable[sic] positive findings are reprinted in books of readings, cited in textbooks, and used to buttress theories about the nature of the development of sex typing. along with a quote about their hypothesis for why beliefs about cognitive sex persist: > An ancient truth is worth stating here: if a generalization about a group of people is believed, whenever a member of that group behaves in the expected way the observer notes it and his belief is confirmed and strengthened; when a member of the group behaves in a way that is not consistent with the observer's expectations, the instance is likely to pass unnoticed, and the observer's generalized belief is protected from disconfirmation. We believe that this well-documented process occurs continually in relation to the expected and perceived behavior of males and females, and results in the perpetuation of myths that would otherwise die out under the impact of negative evidence. Or there's papers like Feingold, Alan. "Cognitive gender differences are disappearing." American Psychologist 43.2 (1988): 95. If cognitive gender differences are innate, and easily measurable, then there wouldn't be a change over time. That there's a decrease says they are either not innate or not easily measurable. You wrote: "So, we can see that the mainstream is in error: even if it turns that there is such evidence, the mainstream doesn't generally demand it. (Indeed, those who do demand it risk censure for their beliefs.)" Are you kidding me? There's a bajillion people who say there's evidence for cognitive sex differences. Here's one citation: > '"Educational systems could be improved by acknowledging that, in general, boys and girls are different," said David Geary, MU professor of psychological science. "For example, in trying to close the sex gap in math scores, the reading gap was left behind. ..."' Quote from http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2013/0313-international-gender-difference-in-math-and-reading-scores-persists-regardless-of-nations%E2%80%99-gender-equality-levels-says-mu-psychologist/ http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2013/0313-internati... . Author's home page http://psychology.missouri.edu/gearyd http://psychology.missouri.edu/gearyd . How has this person been censured? The paper is freely available. It points out that there are measured sex differences, and in hypothesis #3 that it might be "biological in origin, see pp.291–294, pp.411–412 of [10]", but "At this point, we have no definite answer to what can explain the correlation, which means that it requires further study." And that's the issue - there is evidence of differences, but there isn't strong or significant evidence that those differences are biological in nature. But it's very easy to see the difference and assume it must be biological. I see that you reference popular science books and lectures as basis for your decisions. Moreover, all of those resources came from a single person. That is not rigorous. Pinker could be misinterpreting the data and you wouldn't know. Where is the primary data? How are the experiments done? What confounding effects might be in the data? How reproducible is it? Can you point me to some of the peer reviewed literature? I looked at the 'human universals' link. It immediately made me distrustful, since the first one is "environment, adjustments to". All life adjusts to the environment, so this isn't particularly special for humans. It's like saying that eating and defecating are human universals; while true, I note they aren't on the list. But there's easily things in there which are not universal. My cousin doesn't prefer sweets. There are people who feel no pain (congenital analgesia). Those without thumbs/hands/arms have no thumb sucking. Yet those people are obviously human. More likely, these "universals" are not actually universal, no? Or take "males dominate public/political realm"? How universal can that be given that Andorra and Rwanda have respectively 50% and 56% female parliamentarians? If there ever is a country with a majority of female politicians across all levels, would this mean Pinker's universals hypothesis is completely false? Or would the list be adjusted to fit whatever is the current conditions?

lexcorvus 13y ago
I appreciate your detailed response. As you might guess, I find many points of disagreement, but rather than belabor the matter with an enumeration of such points, let me just note that my comment wasn't a dissertation, so accusations of a lack of rigor are misplaced. In particular, my purpose in citing Pinker was to point you to an accessible introduction to the subject, not to do a comprehensive literature review. Moreover, what you dismiss as a "popular science book" has hundreds of footnotes to refereed publications. Take a look at it—you might be surprised at what you find.
- dalke 13y ago
  As you yourself have implied, creationist books also have 'hundreds of footnotes to refereed publications.' ;) I have a hard time trusting Pinker's views, or most of the work of evolutionary psychology. They in general do not seem to understand evolution. That is, they seem to think that everything is an adaptive result of specific evolution, and don't consider the idea that some mechanisms are neutral with respect to selection. I also believe they have make conclusions based on insufficient evidence. My own experiments with genetic algorithms show just how much crap there can be, which has nothing to do with evolutionary fitness. But I at best dabble in evolutionary biology (my own work is related to small-molecule chemistry, and my training is in structural biophysics, so only tangentially related to evolution). Instead, see http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/28/tackling-pinkers-defense-of-evolutionary-psychology/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/28/tackling-p... and http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/15/when-in-doubt-just-question-the-motives-of-evolutionary-psychology-critics/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/15/when-in-do... for the comments of an evolutionary biologist commenting on evolutionary psychology, and on Pinker in specific. "Take a look at [them]—you might be surprised at what you find." ;) Quoting from the latter: > Have I ever said that we shouldn’t study gender or racial differences? No. We know there are going to be differences. The catch is that they have to be studied very, very well, with rigor and careful analysis, because they are socially loaded and because science has a deeply deplorable history of using poor methods to reach bad conclusions that are used as ideological props for the status quo. The first of those links has 654 comments, with all sorts of viewpoints ... and a number of references, like from #516: > In this paper, we use meta-analysis to analyze gender differences in recent studies of mathematics performance. First, we meta-analyzed data from 242 studies published between 1990 and 2007, representing the testing of 1,286,350 people. Overall, d = .05, indicating no gender difference, and VR = 1.08, indicating nearly equal male and female variances. Second, we analyzed data from large data sets based on probability sampling of U.S. adolescents over the past 20 years: the NLSY, NELS88, LSAY, and NAEP. Effect sizes for the gender difference ranged between −0.15 and +0.22. Variance ratios ranged from 0.88 to 1.34. Taken together these findings support the view that males and females perform similarly in mathematics. The paper is online for free at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/ , and it highlights the difficulties of doing this research: > These stereotypes are of concern for several reasons. First, in the language of cognitive social learning theory, stereotypes can influence competency beliefs or self-efficacy; correlational research does indeed show that parents' and teachers' stereotypes about gender and mathematics predict children's perceptions of their own abilities, even with actual mathematics performance controlled (Bouchey & Harter, 2005; Frome & Eccles, 1998; Keller, 2001; Tiedemann, 2000). ... A second concern is that stereotypes can have a deleterious effect on actual performance. Stereotype threat effects (Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995) have been found for women in mathematics. ... Stereotypes play a role in policy decisions as well as personal decision-making. For example, schools and states may base decisions to offer single-sex mathematics classes on the belief that these gender differences exist (Arms, 2007). Note that these two confounding cultural effects are not genetic, and seemingly much stronger than any biologically-based difference which might exist.