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Edge: Cover Story – Publico Sunday Magazine

When the world’s great scientific thinkers change their minds

My two favourites:

Helena Cronin, philosopher, London School of Economics

I used to think that these patterns of sex differences resulted mainly from average differences between men and women in innate talents, tastes and temperaments. After all, in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so. But I have now changed my mind. It is not a matter of averages, but of extremes. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But, among males, the variance—the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst—can be vast. So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top. I think of this as ‘more dumbbells but more Nobels’.

I have been saying this for years.

Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist, Reading University

“There is an overbearing censorship to the way we are allowed to think and talk about the diversity of people on Earth. Officially we are all the same: there are no races. Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. What this all means is that, like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations—including differences that may even correspond to old categories of ‘race’—that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem. This in no way says one group is in general ‘superior’ to another, or that one group should be preferred over another. But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations.”

This too. I hate the tired line people trot out about the level of genetic difference between populations being less than whatever percent. The actual amount varies by idiot.

The fact is we are also 99.madeupnumber the same genetically as chimpanzees. This does not make us the same as a chimp. Not that I don’t like chimps.

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This entry was posted by McFatty on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 10:45 am and is filed under Atheism, Skepticism, Unpopular Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.