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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 poin

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

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.