No, not that Calvin, this one:

The right wing has settled on a standard response to the Summers spectacle, I guess. I'm seeing the same thing over and over:

• Summers shouldn't have apologized, he has caved in to the forces of political correctness!
• Statistics prove that Summers was right.
• Don't those liberals know how stupid it is to think everyone is exactly identical?
• Steven Pinker is my hero.

Here's a perfect example: not to pick on King, but it is an ideal synthesis of the standard, wrong, conservative response.

There's the usual expression of disappointment. I don't know, I think it's a good thing when someone apologizes if they say something stupid. Maybe Summers is learning, and that's always a good thing.

Then there is the usual statistical argument, that I've also seen come up in the comments here.

The distribution of natural endowments for math abilities for men show the same mean but greater variance than math abilities for women. Therefore, men will be disproportionately represented at the tails of the distribution relative to women. In other words, there are likely to be more men in society than women with unusually poor and below-average math skills.

To play the same game, though, there's another statistical fact: if there is even a slight, pervasive bias against one group, that shifts the mean a small amount in one direction, that also means you will have a disproportionate effect on their representation in the tail of the distribution.

But hey, guess what? Correlation is not causation, and you can't use these kinds of distributions to argue for innate differences—they can be equally well (better, to my mind) explained by environmental factors. Also, these statistical games may be correct, but if and only if the property of success in science and math is a simple one, with one quantifiable attribute that is an indicator of this mysterious parameter called "math ability". It's like IQ—one number, bang, we can take a complex human being and fit them into a slot on a histogram, and define and predict their performance. It's an assumption that there is a single optimum and a denial that there are multiple strategies for success in science and math. I know some few scientists and mathematicians, and they are all different; the simplistic reduction of complex properties to one-dimensional cartoons that support comfortable stereotypes is patently false.

A commenter at SCSU Scholars doesn't comprehend this, and makes a lovely straw man:

For anybody to say that given only the above two variables (not to mention dozens of others) - to maintain that the brains of individuals have to be identical - shows that person must either be hopelessly uneducated or worse must be disposed to a religious like fanaticism towards some highly questionable ideals.

He's got it backwards. We aren't saying men and women are the same, but that they may very well have some slightly different intellectual properties, and most importantly, all individuals are different. Meanwhile, people like Summers are trying to impose a single simplistic standard on scientists, modeled on a few extremes, all male. Summers even suggested that in his remarks about "80 hour work weeks"—if your ideals are pathologically freakish males, don't be surprised when few females fit the template. But don't think you are selecting for good scientists; you're selecting for freakish males, instead.

(Speaking of freakish males, one mathematical ideal would be Paul Erdös. If we selected for his peculiar set of traits in job searches for mathematicians, we might get some fine researchers, but very few women. But are all great mathematicians like Erdös? I would hope not.

By the way, Erdös also weighed in on this issue, in his own strange terminology:

Two of his brightest epsilons [children] once asked why there were so few female mathematicians. He explained that it wasn't a lack of ability: "suppose the slave children (boys) would be brought up with the idea that, if they are very clever, the bosses (girls) will not like them—would there be then many boys who do mathematics?" Both said well, perhaps not so many.

Pretty damn smart, that Erdös. But I wouldn't want to live like him.)

One extremely popular source among the defenders of chauvinism is Steven Pinker.

Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is "offensive" even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.

I don't think he's a very credible source, because he has a conflict of interest. If people started walking out on presentations of fact-free, unsupported hypotheses, Pinker wouldn't have a career.

Pinker is spinning the story. People weren't irate because Summers presented a tentative hypothesis, but because Summers, an administrator with much clout in hiring and firing, presented a badly formed hypothesis with no evidence to support it, that contradicted what we know about the complexity of biology, and he misrepresented it as the result of current, "cutting-edge research." This is exactly what we see from creationists, too. They will say that the idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old is simply a legitimate scientific hypothesis, supported by many top-notch researchers, and we're violating the spirit of free inquiry by rejecting it. But it's not. It's been considered and rejected, and is an utterly ludicrous idea. And if the president of my university smugly spouted off such garbage, I'd be outraged and looking to see him fired too, as someone patently incompetent to lead a research university.

Context matters. We consider hypotheses of innate differences all the time in science; that's very different from an administrator using half-baked ideas to rationalize away cultural stereotypes and prejudicial policies.

It just seems to me that the fact that women are subject to widespread, long-term bias against their scientific abilities, yet some still persevere and manage to make it, is convincing evidence that the "hypothesis" that they are innately inferior in these fields is bogus. You can come back and tell me about "distribution curves" and "long tails" when the playing field is level and you can actually legitimately provide appropriate data.