Philip Copeman

Author and Activist

Men are from Physics and Women are from Psychology

Response to a public lecture by Dr Helena Cronin of the London School of Economics at the Africa Genome Institute. This is an extension of her lecture What is keeping women out of the labs.

First let me thank Wilmot James and Dr Cronin for these lectures - they are stimulating and thought provoking. I was unfortunately 10 minutes late for this lecture and did not get confirmation of the statistical methods used to accumulate this data.

The hypothesis put forward by Dr Cronin is that the reason for the disparity that favors men over women in scientific fields has an evolutionary basis and thus has implications on policy for 50/50 gender equality programs. Dr Cronin presents kurtosis over the results of a number of cognitive tests as an explanation for the prevalence of men in scientific positions and balances this with a sweetner that on the reverse side there are more stupid men – this is the “Dumbells and Nobels” description of men.

The arguments against cognitive tests of the Bell Curve and Social Darwinism are well documented, but without access to the data that Dr Cronin uses to draw her conclusions, my comments are blunted. The basic industry argument is that these cognitive tests are subjective tests. Even to pick “mathematics” as a test is a subjective. There are many other factors than evolution that can cloud data bringing men to the top in these areas. Just exactly how this relates back to evolution and the positive correlation of diversity with competition was also not fully explained.

There will always be arguments on the subjective nature of the tests and the resulting kurtosis. There can be only one true way to relate this to evolution and that is by direct analysis of the genome. This is where we are likely to encounter some real problems with Dr Cronin's hypothesis. I suspect that Dr Cronisn data is based on European populations. If you are familiar with the Out of Africa theory, then you will know that Diversity in African populations way exceeds the diversity of European populations. So you can expect diversity in African males to be far greater than diversity in European males. When I last looked, African males weren't exactly racking up the science Nobels. Under Dr Cronins logic this would be the case. We are forced to the conclusion, much that a male applied mathematician like myself may wish otherwise, that science and mathematics is not necessarily a true test of evolutionary intelligence, but is in fact a test of a number of other cultural factors that could just as easily mitigate against female participation as against African participation.

Further tests on the errors of these cognitive tests are unlikely to reveal homoscedasticity. What happens at the top of the curve is highly unlikely to be mirrored at the bottom. In particular, qualities of dumbness are unlikely to mirror the qualities of high intelligence. The Dumbbell and Nobel idea, while having a melodic ring in its tone, seems an appeasement and an attempt to be obsequiously courteous to women on results which clearly reflect male superiority on the tests. Further what happens at the bottom of the distribution is of less relevance to the species, because sadly for them these guys get out competed anyway. Ladies, if you are high enough up the curve to follow what I am saying here, it is that it is the system and not the biology that is against you.

So this leads us now to the question of 50/50 gender policy. Here we have to answer the question – what are we trying to achieve? If we are trying to overcome the non Darwinian social inequalities caused by some as yet to be ascribed Neomarshallian dark force, then 50/50 applies. If we are simply trying to produce the greatest intellectual output then forcing women into mathematical science teams is about as logical as putting a slow runner in your relay team. To take resources away from sciences that favor male participation is like refusing to use computers in research because we want to promote the interests of the computer illiterate. Sadly no amount affirmative action is going to change a womans DNA. I don't run Universities, I run open source software projects. You decide what goals you are trying to achieve.

I am not trying to say that men and women are not different. Thank Darwin we are. However the only way that we can reliably link this back to evolutionary theory is by genetics, and unless these cognitive tests can be corroborated genetically in the same sense that we use genetics to confirm results in paleoanthropology, the results will always be doubtful and border on being anecdotal. This is why I believe that recursive partitioning and in particular the analysis of the African Genome has such a promising future. In genetics terms we seriously are more than from different departments than those scientific gals, because when you consider that we share 67 million base pairs on the y chromosome with chimpanzees and not with women, it is surely true to say that men are closer to chimpanzee males than their own sisters. Now you don't see much Pan troglodyte in Stockholm in October.

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