The much-reviled Charles Murray...

...comments in the NY Times on the Larry Summers affair.

We may find that innate differences give men, as a group, an edge over women, as a group, in producing, say, terrific mathematicians. But knowing that fact about the group difference will not change another fact: that some women are terrific mathematicians. The proportions of men and women mathematicians may never be equal, but who cares? What's important is that all women with the potential to become terrific mathematicians have full opportunity to do so.

Murray points out something that has been ignored by nearly all the "reporting" on Summers' remarks: he was speaking of groups, not individuals. And he was suggesting possibilities to be investigated, not making pronouncements of Truth. Beware your single source. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23murray.html

UPDATE: The National Association of Scholars (NAS) Online Forum for Friday 21 January has more on the Summers thing. Not too surprisingly they are critical of his critics. http://www.nas.org/forum.html

Another update: Ruth Marcus, editorial staff of the Washington Post concludes:

The Summers storm might have been easy to forecast. But it says less, in the end, about the Harvard president than it does about the unwillingness of the modern academy to tolerate the kind of freewheeling inquiry that academics and intellectuals above all ought to prize rather than revile.

Is Summers in retreat exactly when people are coming his support?thttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27819-2005Jan21.html

UPDATE III: The Washington Post has this:

One of the women sharply critical of Summers at the meeting was Denice D. Denton, chancellor-designate of the University of California at Santa Cruz. She took issue with his suggestion that women are less likely to achieve top professional positions than men because they are encumbered by child-rearing and family commitments. "Four of the 10 campuses at the University of California are run by women, who are all highly respected in their field," said Denton, an electrical engineer by training. "These are all clear examples of women reaching the top of their profession."

Four out of ten is less than half. Doesn't that datum in isolation support "less likely," whatever the actual cause? Denton's anecdote is meaningless: it is possible that UC through assiduous affirmative action, has found and employed all four of the women in the world who are capable of running a UC campus. This is untrue, but Denton's statement doesn't prove it untrue. Also, un-noted is whethor any of them have children. It is quite likely tho that given the low quality of reporting on this, her comments were both distorted and taken out of context: perhaps this is more revelatory of the reporter than the reported. Summers, as far as I can tell from the lousy reportage on this story, never said all women are less capable than men, only that it is possible that the distribution is different, and that if that is the case, one of the possible explanations is genetic differences, and that another is family commitments which are not identical to those of men competing for the same jobs.

This story is enough to make a critic of journalism spit: absolutely awful reporting of what the guy actually said with enough context to let the reader decide. Could there be a reason for that? I expect it is sheer laziness, not malevolence, but the result is the same.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19181-2005Jan18.html

UPDATE IV: This seems to have taken a life. Monday's NY Times has a decent article on the issue of sex-based differences which is less breathless than many. Conclusion: Of course there are differences, but what do they mean when sex-based discrimination in socialization and employment are clear and of greater import? Of course, the inability to explain the causes of the differences- to distinguish between those which are inherent, those which are socialized, and those which might be a combination remains a problem. Thanks to Volokh Conspiracy (http://volokh.com/) for the pointer. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/24women.html?oref=login