The Science of Difference by Steven Pinker in The New Republic:
In 2000, he reported asking university students their opinions of unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to buy and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the highest-bidding parents. He found that most of his respondents did not even try to refute the proposals but expressed shock and outrage at having been asked to entertain them. They refused to consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them. Sound familiar?
Body of Evidence by Martin Peretz:
Summers’s “problem” is that he submits every argument with a grain of evidence behind it to serious and scrupulous scrutiny. And this scares our supposedly daring academic culture, which lives in fear of what it refuses to know.
Different but (Probably) Equal by Olivia Judson:
The science of sex differences, even in fruit flies and toads, is a ferociously complex subject. It’s also famously fraught, given its malignant history. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when I would have balked at the whole enterprise: the idea there might be intrinsic cognitive differences between men and women was one I found insulting. But science is a great persuader. The jackdaws and spoon worms have forced me to change my mind. Now I’m keen to know what sets men and women apart – and no longer afraid of what we may find.
Related: Much ado about women & Larry Summers
Posted by razib at 11:53 AM