Race and gender differences

There has been a lot of hoopla lately because of the statement by Harvard President Lawrence Summers concerning the possibility that biological differences between men and women might be the cause of there being more men in the field of science than women. This is similar to the argument that some races might be genetically superior to other races.

In an attempt to eliminate prejudice, our society has decided that there are no differences in intelligence between the different races, but what if that isn't true. What if there are statistical differences in intelligence between the average intelligence of one race versus another? No one has proven that all of the races are the same, but heaven help anyone who might suggest otherwise.

The whole thing reminds me of something I read in high school. I don't remember the name of the book, but it was something like an autobiography of a fur trapper among the Eskimos some hundred years ago or so. Apparently, the Eskimos believed that a women couldn't get pregnant by having sex with a man only one time. This is going to seem like a bit of a tangent, but I'll show the connection in a bit.

The Eskimos had no police. If a man was murdered, it was up to his family to avenge his death. This threat of revenge was the main incentive to not kill people. However, when a man visited a village far from his own, he didn't have any family in the area to avenge his death, so for his own survival he had to be "adopted" into a local family. The "adoption" was formalized by the man having sex with the wife of the adopting family. Avenging a man's death was a dangerous thing, and simply saying that you would be willing to avenge someones murder in the event that they get killed wouldn't be enough. Too many people would back out of it if there weren't any real emotional bond. Sharing your wife with your guest provided that bond.

However, there is a catch here. If a child is born from that union, who is responsible for raising it? Often, it may not be clear who the father is. To get around this, the Eskimos convinced themselves that a women can't get pregnant from one sexual encounter. They even continued to believe this after they encountered the European fur trappers and started having babies with red hair.

The point here is that societies are perfectly capable of inventing whatever beliefs are necessary for their society to function smoothly, and they'll strongly resist acknowledging any evidence to the contrary.

I know this is somewhat heretical, but I don't think it really matters, because I think it's clear that the range of intelligence, or any other virtue for that matter, within a race or gender is greater than any possible difference between them. Regardless of anything scientists are going to discover about differences in the way men and women think, for example, the smartest woman is always going to be smarter than the dumbest man, and vice versa. When you're interviewing someone for a job, you don't care what the averages are, you care only about the individual that you're interviewing.

Now, as I write this, it occurs to me that the averages do matter in terms of trying to ascertain whether or not there is bias in the job market based on race or gender. If, for example, science does determine that math ability differs between men and women by 3%, and one sex outnumbers the other in math related fields by 10%, then we might be able to say that there is some bias not related to ability that may need to be corrected. However, as far as its impact on society and the way we lead our day-to-day lives, I don't think it matters.