If your only justifications for sexism are stupid, you should maybe stop making them

Once again, we get stupid answers to a good question. A a guest post on the Curious Wavefunction decides that Larry Summers was right, there are innate differences between men and women. (Curiously, this is the same blog that posted a positive review of Nicholas Wade’s book — strange how sympathy for racism and sexism go hand in hand). It starts off well by pointing out a real phenomenon, the different sex ratios found in different scientific disciplines.

Here are statistics on the sex ratio among graduate students. The order here is by level of analysis (with computer science thrown in somewhat arbitrarily next to physics). The first number is men; the second number is women.

Physics:   1694: 448
Computer Science:  1465: 380
Chemistry:  1520: 897
Biology:  3936:4494
Psychology   1047:2566
Anthropology:  186: 360:
Sociology: 230: 400
Political Science: 422: 303

Why is that, you might wonder…and of course, the answer we’re going to get is that there’s something about the Y chromosome or the hormonal environment that predisposes one to like computers vs. cells, or experiments with lab rats vs. electronic gadgets. Which, simply on the face of it, is complete bullshit.

I’ve noticed that these arguments often prefer to show a current snapshot of the statistics to make their point: looking at historical trends tends to screw up their assertion of a biological difference. A century ago, virtually none of these disciplines had a preponderance of women enrolled in them, and women professors were extremely rare. I guess there has been a remarkable degree of selection extinguishing all those stupid women from the population in the last 100 years. It’s simply not possible that cultural factors might strongly influence the pattern.

Similarly, we could ask questions about aptitude. Women just don’t like those disciplines with low female enrollment, because ladybrains. But how do we account for historical shifts in ability? Look what’s going on in the British school system.

The relative improvement in girls’ performance in examinations at 16 has been achieved over the last ten years. In the l960s, boys outperformed girls by about 5%; for the next fifteen years, boys and girls were performing at almost equivalent levels. However, from 1987 only about 80 boys to every hundred girls achieved 5 high grade passes at 16+. Boys lost their advantage in terms of school leaving credentials and are now struggling to keep up to girls’ success rate. In the mid l980s, girls turned the tide of credentialism, even at least temporarily, in their favour.

Oddly, no one seems willing to advance the bold hypothesis that maybe boys’ genes and hormones make them less scientific. It’s always the other way around, that women are less capable, because ladyparts…even in defiance of the evidence that women are performing better than men.

OK, well I promised we’d have some good questions. I lied. This guy asks stupid questions.

This brings us to two related questions: Why is the percentage of women somewhat proportional to the “socialness” of the science?

WHAT THE HELL…? Look at the list up above. Can you tell me which of those disciplines is more “social” than the others? Science in every discipline is an extremely social enterprise — if you’re going to succeed in it, you have to be able to engage with your colleagues, present your work publicly, collaborate, teach, and work in committees. If you think you can crawl into a basement and do computer science without bathing for 5 years, well, you can…but you won’t get a job afterwards, and you won’t be able to be a significant team member. Really, I know computer scientists. They do bathe regularly, and they can be friendly and engaging.

This assumption is a classic example of circular reasoning. Women are more social; some disciplines have more women than men; therefore, biology must be more social than physics; and the evidence for that is that biology has a higher proportion of women graduate students than physics. Ta-daa. QED. Guys win.

And why don’t women choose academic careers after they finish graduate school? To answer these questions, it’s worth looking at Steven Pinker’s contribution to the post-Larry Summers debate at Harvard.

Wait. That’s a different question, and it’s informative that the distinction isn’t addressed. Women are succeeding in greater numbers in graduate school than they are in post-doctoral careers. That’s revealing! By getting through graduate school, which is a pain-in-the-ass and a major sacrifice of time and money, these women have already shown a strong interest and ability in science. They are full-on dedicated scientists.

What’s the difference in the transition from life as a graduate student to the professoriate? More expectations for teaching, networking, committee work, grant writing, and collaboration. More of those “social” skills we’ve just been told women are naturally better at. As usual, none of this argument makes any sense, and consists entirely of sloppy attempts to rationalize prior biases.

We are promised evidence that women are simply less suited to working in science. Let’s see the list.

The full debate is also worth reading in full—and I apologize for giving Elizabeth Spelke, Pinker’s opponent, short shrift here–but this is Pinker’s summary of the psychological differences between men and women:
1. Men, on average, prioritize status, while women weigh status and family equally.
2. Women, on average, are more interested in people; men are more interested in things and abstract rule systems. 
3. Men are by far the more reckless sex.
4. Men, on average, have a superior ability to do three-dimensional mental transformations.
5. Men, on average, are superior at mathematical reasoning.
6. Men have more variability than women across traits, which means that men are over-represented in the upper and lower tails of ability distributions.

Jebus. Those are just assertions. Who says women don’t “prioritize” status? How was that measured? Do women just sit around content to be egalitarian? Has anyone considered the possibility that status-seeking is going to be entirely culture dependent, and that there are different ways for different people to achieve high status? (I know they have, but those complexities are always jettisoned by the advocates for male superiority — the parameters of male dominance are naturally and obviously the only ones that matter, and they are objectively independent of societal constraints.)

I’m not going to was time going through these bald assertions one by one, but let me just say, they don’t apply. We’re already looking at a fairly rarefied subset of human endeavor occupied by people of largely above average socio-economic status, from families with an already above average emphasis on education. You can’t derive the properties of an already select subset from generalizations about the population as a whole, or you’d have to conclude that most scientists are blue-collar and service workers. We already know that there are strong cultural and familial influences that bias some women to pursue careers in science — factors that are not present for most women. Or most men. So even if their generalizations about the abilities of women were valid on the whole (and I don’t agree that they are; #2, 4, and 5 are clearly influenced by social conditioning, and #3 is statistically true but again probably influenced by social expectations), you simply can’t use them to talk about a small population that is both self-selected and strongly constrained by socioeconomic opportunities.

But #6…oh, #6, how I despise you, and how I constantly hear it trotted out as a justification. Look at the structure of that argument. We can clearly show that more men than women have mental disabilities and illness, therefore, we should expect that more men should show a greater range of high intelligence.

WHY? That makes no sense. It’s some kind of weird appeal to statistical fairness — that for some reason, Nature must balance every curse with a blessing, that every curve must be a perfectly symmetrical bell shape. But that is not true. There is no reason to expect it to be true.

It’s also selectively applied. I noted up top that the same people who argue for differences in intellectual aptitude between the sexes also like to argue for differences in intellectual aptitude between races. Yet for some reason, you’ll never see them suggest that since black people have a higher frequency of criminals and ignorant, uneducated men (I’d suggest that poverty and discrimination play a strong role in that, but you know these guys — they say it’s objective evidence of genetic inferiority), they must therefore also have a greater proportion of saints and geniuses in their populations.

It would be only fair, you know. Everything has to balance.

Or we never see this interesting proposal: malnutrition also increases the variability in a population. Therefore, if we want more supergeniuses, we should starve children — sure, we’d get a lot of death and illness, but the ones who thrive are going to be tough and brilliant.

I find myself endlessly exasperated by these transparently stupid justifications. They aren’t even internally consistent.

Muslim creationists are as obtuse as the Christian kind

Over the last few days, I’ve had a ‘conversation’ with a Muslim creationist on Twitter. He’s claiming that the embryology in the Quran is accurate and specific, and amusingly, he’s citing this article on the web to support his claim, saying that it is on his side. He starts off with some criticisms — he doesn’t like the tone, it’s not sciencey enough — but he says that it confirms that the “Quran is more specific and very different in the level of detail then Greek”.

There’s an amusing bit where it suddenly sinks into his thick skull that I’m the author of the article.

That’s not going to stop him, though. Watch. He still insists that I wrote the opposite of what I actually wrote.

Clinic Stories

Robin Marty proposes to do in-depth investigative reporting on the stresses on family planning clinics.

Clinic Stories is a 12 part series that will look at 12 different clinics or cities in the country, telling the history of legal abortion through location and the people inside and outside it.

Each Clinic Story will be an intensely researched, longform article anywhere between 5000 and 10,000 words, detailing the history of the clinic and its role in the movement, tracking laws that it has challenged, protesters it has faced, anti-abortion and pro-abortion rights groups that have worked for it or against it, and where it fits into the greater history of the last four decades of the abortion rights movement. It will include interviews with current and former workers, escorts and even those who have worked to shut those clinics down.

Robin is writer with a fine track record who has been fighting for abortion rights for years, and this should be a very good addition to our knowledge. She’s looking for support — this is going to take time and effort to do well — so she’s asking for donations. Help her out, it will be worth the investment.

Not even creationists want to be associated with creationism

You wouldn’t guess it from the name, but the Akron Fossil and Science Museum isn’t really a museum, has nothing to do with science, and they think their fossils are less than 6,000 years old. It’s also not in Akron; it’s in Copley, Ohio. It would be hard to come up with a more misleading title.

One possible reason is that it’s a way to lure in participation from public schools. At least one teacher, by error or devious intent, has taken students from the Cuyahoga Falls public school district to this creation exhibit, so maybe it’s an underhanded game.

I suspect a more common reason. Creationists love to ape the trappings of real science, and are a bit ashamed of the low reputation their stupid beliefs have, so they play these games. It makes no sense to me. I wouldn’t rename my courses “Jesus’s Holy and Sacred Revelation of Biology”, just to sucker in the rubes. But then I’m not peddling bullshit.

Because Indians are magic!

So you wish you were an Indian, because they’re so spiritual and noble and one with nature — they’re so magical that having a name like Manny Two Feathers or Vicki Ghost Horse means the crap you sell on e-bay has extra cred and is worth more money.

Now you can be! It’s easy. There are plastic tribes popping up all over the place, and all it takes to become one is money.

The "United Cherokee Nation," which did not respond to Phoenix inquiries, charges a $35 application fee, while the "Western Cherokee Nation of Arkansas and Missouri" has a $60 application fee and a $10 annual roll fee. The "Cherokee of Lawrence County" don’t charge for membership but instead asks its members to "make it a priority to send $10 a month to help with the tribe" and $12 to subscribe to its newsletter.

Membership fees and dues are just two signs a "Cherokee" group isn’t legitimate, task force members said. Other signs include members using Indian-sounding names such as "Two Feathers" and "Wind Caller," acting and dressing like Hollywood-stereotyped Indians or Plains Indians, asking for money to perform DNA tests or genealogical research, requirements to wear regalia to meetings and requirements to go through an Indian-naming ceremony.

Once admitted into the groups, members usually get membership cards, bogus "Certified Degree of Indian Blood" cards and genealogy certificates "proving" they are eligible for membership.

You might notice the Cherokee mystique: most of the fake tribes seem to be some branch of the Cherokee nation. Apparently nobody wants to be a long lost member of the Humptulips tribe, or a Stillaguamish — although you’d think Lakota, with their history as the stereotypical Plains Indian, would be more popular.

They usually dress it up more, of course. The Red Nation of the Cherokee (totally fake) thinks that if you really feel like an Indian in your heart, then you ought to join the tribe.

We do not need to follow the standards of the antiquated BIA regulations/policies of the late 1700’s or after any longer! Which, dices people up into fractions and percentages, we are true human beings and a whole person.

Our beliefs are, if an individual is of multi-Nations, then they should be allowed to honor each of them in their own way, not being forced to choose one over the other.

We of the Red Clay People of all Nations believe, we should not have to prove our heritage’s on the talking leaves paper, but be allowed to prove in the older way, what is truth in our hearts.

The Creator has heard the prayers of the people, and gave vision to start RedNation of the Cherokee. To make a place, for all the people to have a home and family, to come to and to be finally called brother or sister and to be recognized as blood.

The “talking leaves paper”? Jebus. I know a lot of local Indians (UMM offers free tuition to people of real Indian descent, verified by membership on a real tribal roll), and not a one talks like that. They also don’t wear fringed buckskin clothes with feathers in their hair. You will occasionally see them in traditional costume — which is usually jeans and a plaid work shirt, with maybe a decorative bit of bead jewelry, or a feather in their cowboy hat — when artists and cultural representatives show up on campus for our yearly powwow of native music and dancing. But get real, these are human beings who are part of a changing culture — they are not the TV Indians who never left the 18th century.

I did find this fake tribe’s rationale amusing.

Another group asking for federal recognition is the Cherokee of Lawrence County, Tenn. The tribe’s principal chief, Joe "Sitting Owl" White, said he eventually expects his tribe to be federally recognized because he and his 800 fellow members are Cherokee, and he cites photography as proof.

We’ve been called every name in the book, but we are Cherokee, he said. We can take photos of our members and hold them up and see the Cherokee in us.

He also said his tribe has scientifically proven with DNA evidence that the Cherokee people are Jewish.

You know, I actually wouldn’t be at all surprised if some members of the Cherokee of Lawrence County were certifiably and demonstrably of Jewish descent, so he might not be wrong about that. I should apply and join — they could test me and prove that Indians were also Celts who drifted over on a coracle, and Vikings who colonized the entire continent.

Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group Inaugural Meeting | Center for Inquiry

This just isn’t fair. The east coast has Women in Secularism in the spring, and now the west coast has LAWAAG every month.

Join us for the inaugural meeting of The Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group!

LAWAAG was formed by multi-media artist Amy Davis Roth with the goal of fostering a safe and supportive space for those who primarily identify as women, who are leaving faith, or who already live a secular or atheist-based lifestyle.

LAWAAG will meet the first Tuesday of every month at 7pm at CFI-L.A.. Along with regular monthly meetups, the group also organizes art, activism and outreach projects, and works towards building community and support for women without faith.

In order to foster a safe space that acknowledges and can focus on the specific issues women encounter and deal with in a secular community, we currently only accept members who primarily identify as women. However, we often participate in and sponsor co-ed events. We welcome new members at our monthly meetup and welcome all to attend our publicized co-ed events. Please go to our events page for a list of upcoming and current events.

Please contact Amy Roth with any questions or media inquiries.

There’s a gaping void in the middle of the country. Quick, someone set up something similar in Minneapolis! Or the South! Or in every state!

Oh, and by the way, Secular Woman is two years old now.

Molyneux makes no sense

Stefan Molyneux is an atheist, an author, a philosopher, an online radio show host (he’s fond of declaring it the “world’s most popular philosophy show”), and is apparently frequently invited to speak at Libertarian conferences. His book on atheism (I haven’t even seen it) has a foreword by Peter Boghossian, the hot new It Boy of the atheist movement. He’s a fanatical and extreme Libertarian who advocates for statelessness, Bitcoin, and other weird, impractical, libertarian schemes. He’s also a misogynist idiot.

Here’s a short excerpt from a two hour youtube rant in which he assigns all responsibility for all the evil in the world to…women.

You don’t want to sit through it? I don’t blame you. It makes no sense at all. He’s talking about how assholes come to be, and it’s all silly buggers about a complex character trait that’s transmitted in an absurdly simple and nonsensical way. So I’ve translated his rant into genetics-speak to help myself understand what he’s trying to say, since I’m not fluent in either Libertarian or Misogynist.

  1. Assholism is a strongly heritable trait.

  2. Assholism is only transmitted by males; women do not carry it, but only passively enable male carriers to transmit it to the next generation.

  3. Assholism is under extremely strong sexual selection. Women will only have sex with men who carry it, spurning those who lack it.

  4. Assholism is otherwise so deleterious that the trait would go to extinction in a single generation, absent support from women. It is basically a conditional lethal mutation.

  5. Assholism is strongly dominant and epistatic to all other personality traits: if you inherit the assholism factor from your father, you are an asshole, no matter what other inheritance or experience you have.

  6. On the other hand, males are completely plastic. Their personalities are entirely defined by the influence of women.

  7. The influence of women is invariably directed towards fostering assholism in their sons, never towards ameliorating it.

  8. Therefore, while men are invariably the perpetrators of all evil, from brutal prison guards to nuclear weapons, they are actually blameless puppets, manipulated by their asshole factor, inherited from their fathers. Their fathers are also not to blame, because their mothers sexually selected them.

  9. Final conclusion: Women are evil, and everything is their fault.

None of it makes any sense. And this guy is amazingly popular. I’ve looked through a few other youtube videos featuring him or criticisms of him, and there always troops of fawning Libertarian fanbois drooling over him and declaring how reasonable and sensible he is. It’s a mystery. It’s also a mystery that he gets away with calling his crap “philosophy”. I keep expecting a mob of real philosophers to show up with truncheons and rough him up to get him to stop. Although, of course, the philosophy goon squad never shows up for Plantinga, either, so I’m constantly disappointed.

Another mystery: he’s Canadian. Canadians are always so nice and rational when I meet them, but apparently the national psyche harbors a few bizarre twists here and there.

The courts giveth, and the courts taketh away

While we’ve all been pleased to see the courts enforcing minority rights by striking down restrictions on same sex marriage, the flip side also happens: the Supreme Court has now ruled that abortion protesters can’t be restricted by a ‘buffer zone’ around clinics. Their rationale is some nonsense about “sidewalk counseling”.

Some of the individuals who stand outside Massachusetts abortion clinics are fairly described as protestors, who express their moral or religious opposition to abortion through signs and chants or, in some cases, more aggressive methods such as face-to-face confrontation. Petitioners take a different tack. They attempt to engage women approaching the clinics in what they call “sidewalk counseling,” which involves offering information about alternatives to abortion and help pursuing those options. Petitioner Eleanor McCullen, for instance, will typically initiate a conversation this way: “Good morning, may I give you my literature? Is there anything I can do for you? I’m available if you have any questions.” If the woman seems receptive, McCullen will provide additional information. McCullen and the other petitioners consider it essential to maintain a caring demeanor, a calm tone of voice, and direct eye contact during these exchanges. Such interactions, petitioners believe, are a much more effective means of dissuading women from having abortions than confrontational methods such as shouting or brandishing signs, which in petitioners’ view tend only to antagonize their intended audience. In unrefuted testimony, petitioners say they have collectively persuaded hundreds of women to forgo abortions.

So the court recognizes that many protesters use “aggressive methods”, but they side with the sweet little lady who claims to be kindly offering pamphlets, rather than with the women who are being frightened away from medical care. If there is a buffer zone, poor Ms McCullen is denied her right to be condescending, but if there is no buffer zone, patients are denied the right to seek legal medical treatment without harassment.

I fail to see how this “unrefuted” claim that their tactics of suppression actually work is relevant to their claim that their right to lie to patients trumps the patients’ rights to care.

But I wonder how the court deals with the stark reality that abortion clinics need volunteer clinic escorts to help women get through the lines of shouting protesters? Isn’t the fact of their existence evidence that there is a problem with access? Apparently not. The escorts are the problem.

…theBoston clinic uses “escorts” to greet women as they approach the clinic, accompanying them through the zones to the clinic entrance. Petitioners claim that the escorts sometimes thwart petitioners’ attempts to communicate with patients by blocking petitioners from handing literature to patients, telling patients not to “pay any attention” or “listen to” petitioners, and disparaging petitioners as “crazy.”

It’s clear where the judges’ sympathies lie.

It’s great when the courts are on the side of justice, but not so great when you’ve got bought & paid-for clowns of the reactionary right, like Roberts and Scalia, calling the shots.

This is amusing. The Supreme Court is surrounded by a rather restrictive barrier.

scotusbarrier

But what if I want to give the justices some ‘sidewalk counseling’?

Really…we’re against shooting anyone

This op-ed by Robert Grant, claiming that the New Atheists are ‘dangerous’, was infuriating. What a string of stupid cliches!

While their starting point was the lack of scientific evidence for God’s existence, they quickly expanded their target to argue that religion is the “root of all evil” in the world. Far from being tolerated, religion should be banished. It obstructs the progress of the human race; and progress based on the pursuit of science and reason.

Can anyone find a single quote by a prominent New Atheist that demands that religion be ‘banished’? Anyone? Anywhere? Bueller? How about any one of them stating that the root cause of all evil in the world was religion?

The New Atheists offer a binary world view, neatly divided into good and evil. Science and reason on the one hand, religion and faith on the other. The implication being: if we get rid of religion we get rid of evil.

Oh, nonsense. Morality is always going to be an ongoing struggle; it’s a process, not a state of bliss. Freeing yourself of religion rids yourself of one source of ignorance and flawed thinking. It does not make you perfect.

They make the mistake here of treating evil as if it exists exclusively within a set of beliefs or practices, rather than as an inherent part of human nature.

As journalist Chris Hedges puts it, they externalise evil. Fundamentalist religious groups do the same, only for them evil resides in liberal secularism.

Oops, -100 points for relying on the rabid anti-atheist Chris Hedges.

Again, why does Grant keep claiming these things that are simply not true? He got into an argument with Michael Nugent on this, and Michael rightly hammered him on this claim. He can’t cite one source or give even one quote to back up this assertion (neither can Chris Hedges, who in a recent talk was reduced to this same strategem of equating atheists with fundamentalists, so he could quote fundamentalists, and then announce, “Aha! see! That’s how atheists think!”)

Religion is a specific problem of traditional teaching of invalid and bad ideas. It’s not that we think people are perfect if their brains are freed of the poison of religion — quite the contrary, human brains are faulty and full of shortcuts and limited in their degree of comprehension of the real world. But it doesn’t help if we compound our flaws with lies and lazy excuses and incoherent moral teachings. That’s the objection to religion: that it is counterfactual and destructive.

It’s as if we’re trying to teach that 2 + 2 = 4 in our math classes, but swarms of people were to insist that in their cherished traditional folkways, and in the words of their holy book, 2 + 2 = 3, and they must teach it that way. We should be able to say that that will give them wrong answers. It does not in any way imply that if only they all accept the truth of fourness, math becomes easy and everyone will be doing calculus by the time they hit kindergarten.

On the other hand, teaching people to question religion does mean that maybe, just maybe, they won’t kill other people who also question it. Check out this horror story from Iraq: fanatical Sunni Muslims in ISIS are administering roadside tests to refugees. There is, apparently, an absolutely correct answer to how you hold your hands during prayers: a Sunni way, and a Shiite way, where praying like a Shiite is utterly wrong, and the penalty for failing the quiz is to be led off to the side of the road and get a bullet in the brain.

You won’t find the New Atheists sympathizing with that approach. Rather, we’re appalled that anyone finds these artificial distinctions within bogus superstitions, whether Sunni or Shiite, Catholic or Protestant, to be useful ways to order one’s life. That we point out the futility and waste of these divisions does not imply that we’re planning to take all parties to the side of the road and have them shot — that’s religious thinking, and that’s what seems to be infecting poor Robert Grant’s mind.

Saudi Arabia has no credibility as a member of the UN Human Rights Council

Let me say first that I could never be a diplomat; the slow-motion courtesies of this meeting would drive me mad. I’d also be enraged by the presence of people who simply don’t belong there. In this short segment of a meeting, a member tries to read a statement pointing out that the treatment of Raif Badawi, the Saudi citizen who has been jailed and sentenced to flogging for being an atheist, is barbaric and inhumane…and the Saudi representative interrupts three times to basically tell them to shut up.

They don’t belong there.

Unfortunately, one could reasonably argue that the United States, as one of the greatest world-wide violators of human rights, doesn’t belong there either.