At Least One of Them Really Is Dangerous

Just minutes after I finished writing the previous post on "dangerous ideas," I stumbled across this post (via Pandagon) on a NYT opinion article by David Brooks. Unfortunately, the David Brooks article is available by subscription only, but the part of the article quoted in the post has exactly what I needed: a dangerous misuse of one of the ideas mentioned in the "dangerous ideas" post. Here's Brooks:

Her third mistake is to not even grapple with the fact that men and women are wired differently. The Larry Summers flap produced an outpouring of work on the neurological differences between men and women. I'd especially recommend "The Inequality Taboo" by Charles Murray in Commentary and a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke in the online magazine Edge.

One of the findings of this research is that men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people. (You can come up with your own Darwinian explanation as to why.

Oh look, there's Simon Baron-Cohen again, this time in the mouth of Brooks, helping a misogynist hack to argue that women should stay home with the family instead of having careers. But there are two problems with the way Brooks uses this. First, "abstract rules" and "systematizing" aren't quite the same things. I don't know of any recent researcher who has argued that men are more interested in abstract rules specifically. I suppose it depends on what kinds of rules we're talking about.

The second problem, is that there's really no good evidence for Baron-Cohen's systematizing-empathizing distinction, and there aren't really any other explanations in cognitive science of the old stereotype that men like objects and women like people that get any attention. Elizabeth Spelke did a good job of describing the research that bears on Baron-Cohen's theory, and pointing out how none of it really supported his theory, in her in press paper on sex differences in math ability, which you can read here (the discussion of B-C's work is in the first section after the introduction, beginning on p. 5). Thus, Brooks is using a theory with no empirical support to argue for his misogynistic beliefs.

And you can't really blame Brooks; he's a rabid misogynist, and he will look for anything to justify that. You have to blame Baron-Cohen, and people like Steven Pinker, who make these claims public before they've undergone rigorous scientific scrutiny. Once they're out there, it's damn near impossible to get rid of them, no matter how many scientists come forward to say that it turns out the evidence tells a different story. Responsible scientists don't build large theories on one or two unreplicated studies, and then spend a great deal of time talking about them to the media, or writing books for laypeople about them, all the while ignoring a wealth of conflicting evidence. This, I think, is the main reason why people like me have such a strong dislike towards Evolutionary Psychologists, a dislike that goes beyond simply believing that their work is subpar. They are dangerous, not because of what they say, but because of whom they say it to.