Must I stand accused of feminine hysteria in reacting to the chauvinist George Will who cynically attacked the MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins for her “hysterical” reaction to Harvard’s president suggesting that genetics — “a gender difference in cognition” — helps explain the lack of women’s proclivity to science? Will promptly attributes the professor’s hysterics to the “solecism” on the part of Harvard’s Summers daring to offend “progressive sensibilities.” Not unlike the infamous Thomas Sowell, Will opportunistically exploits an honest rebuttal to an unsubstantiated view as offensive to “progressives.” Putting aside the female privilege of histrionics, Hopkins’ counter argument was that Summers perceived fifty percent of the brightest minds in America do not have the “right aptitude” for science. Granted she overstated her inference, to an equally overstated hypothesis fed into — surely not progressive — her scientific mind, nonetheless, there was merit in defending women’s intellectual ability.
In citing statistics of men overwhelmingly positioned in the scientific world, Will blatantly ignores that men have had a two thousand year head start. His premise is that human nature starts with a brain with built-in characteristics and therefore the natural proclivity of free, bright men turn to science and math. It is only in the past “several hundred years” that the “political left” has superimposed a “blank slate” whereupon nurture, not nature develops the mind. Neither, of course, is correct: human nature’s mind has nothing to do with gender, but does require the right genes or inner tools to assimilate variable nurtures and acculturation. Will’s statistic that men far excel women in science is as illogical as stating women in the US far outnumber Muslim women in science owing to natural proclivity, rather than lack of opportunity to nurture such skills.
King George of sophistry does not end it with this academic skirmish. He takes a quantum leap by sinuously deferring to Bush’s inaugural address in pontificating natural rights “dedicated to the idea of a nation, as Lincoln said, to the preposition that all men are created equal” as though it were born of the caveman and not the nourishing of “progressive” ideas throughout the ages. George Will has thus turned human history on its head by contending that nature simply holds up the sign of freedom and is there for the taking, except for women who have a different nature.
Copyright © 2005 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: January 30, 2005.
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