Quite a good video from Justicar again. And he is quite right to emphasize what appears to be the essence of Edward Clint’s really quite awesome take-down of Rebecca Watson’s talk, i.e., that Watson is essentially engaging in what is tantamount to science denialism or that she is betraying a rather poor understanding of the nature and processes of science – in either case, somewhat of a black mark against her claims to be a skeptic and a credible spokesperson.masakari2012 wrote:
Although I note that Clint – in his intial “Points of agreement†– actually conceded that Watson made some good points about the abuses of evolutionary psychology and several of the flawed studies within the discipline along with, in particular, the point in Clint’s words that “stereotypes [are] capable of being very harmful to society.†However, I think that, as Clint persuasively shows, Watson herself is just as guilty of that reliance on stereotypes in using those few “abuses and flawed studies†to infer and conclude – on virtually no evidence whatsoever – that that applies to the entire discipline and corpus.
But what I find somewhat amusing, although highly problematic, is the political dimension to the contretemps, the apparent aversion of feminists to any suggestion that significant portions of gender are not socially constructed and that those portions are in fact entirely genetic. And it is that bias and that prior allegiance to feminism which, I think, tends to cause them to discount and ignore the facts of the matter. For instance, consider the following from one of the sources cited by Clint, a Science/AAAS paper by Diane F. Halpern, which I think points to that same problematic tendency to stereotyping:
Consider a biopsychosocial model in which individuals are predisposed by their biology to learn certain skills more readily than others while everyone selects experiences that are biased by prior learning histories, opportunities afforded in their environments, and beliefs about appropriate behaviors for females and males. Experiences change neural structures, which in turn alter how individuals respond, and so on. As many stereotypes about sex differences reflect group differences between males and females, by learning and endorsing them, individuals may also be selecting environments and experiences that increase or reduce these differences.
A relatively recent paradigm shows just how complicated sex differences can be. Several different researchers examined the way sex differences vary as a function of the gender equality across societies. Consider the ï¬nding that, in more gender-equal societies, females perform as well as males in mathematics (7), much better than males in reading (7), and much worse than males in visuospatial tasks (5). No simple theory, such as the hypothesis that sex differences reflect societal norms or that gender-equal societies will reduce all sex differences, can explain this pattern of results.
And that first paragraph illustrates the fact that very small differences in attributes working over a long period of time can produce very large differences in various distributions. A nice example or analogy of that is, I think, the rings of Saturn which have apparently formed because of the influences – the “stabilizing and destablizing resonances†– due to Saturn’s moons. A more prosaic example is the grouping of pebbles along a beach by size due only to repetitive wave action over long periods of time.
But it is the second paragraph which I think suggests a number of problematic aspects or consequences: a lack of comprehension by some that the “findings†refer to population distributions – some females are going to be better than some males in “visiospatial tasksâ€, for example; that that lack leads to stereotyping; and that somehow, in the minds of some in any case, those differences should justify judgements about personal worth, access to opportunities, and civil rights. The tendency to think that there are no differences seems tantamount to thinking that we should all be the same as peas in a pod or bees in a hive – not a particularly credible philosophy.
