As much as I believe in the 'nurture' argument, given that our brains are wired very differently based on gender, I find it difficult to believe that this won't cause differences in both desire and aptitude. It seems absurd to me that so many smart people have to make the nurture XOR nature argument, and that there are so few people making nurture AND nature arguments.
Adjunct to this is that old chestnut about how we socialise girls to like toys they can care for and boys to like cars. Here we also now have evidence that suggests that we are born this way and the socialisation is just on top of what we started with [1].
I'm not trying to make the argument that it is more nature than nurture or that I know the precise underpinnings of a decent model. I just think that we needlessly politicise something which in my opinion will eventually be in the reach of empiricism.
I hope that the open-minded liberals will fare better than traditionalists in managing the separation between science and their own values.
As much as I believe in the 'nurture' argument, given that our brains are wired very differently based on gender, I find it difficult to believe that this won't cause differences in both desire and aptitude. It seems absurd to me that so many smart people have to make the nurture XOR nature argument, and that there are so few people making nurture AND nature arguments.
Adjunct to this is that old chestnut about how we socialise girls to like toys they can care for and boys to like cars. Here we also now have evidence that suggests that we are born this way and the socialisation is just on top of what we started with [1].
I'm not trying to make the argument that it is more nature than nurture or that I know the precise underpinnings of a decent model. I just think that we needlessly politicise something which in my opinion will eventually be in the reach of empiricism.
I hope that the open-minded liberals will fare better than traditionalists in managing the separation between science and their own values.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/male-and-f...
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/