Augury

So a few days ago I came across an article about Ben Barres’ article in Nature. (Very meta, I know, writing an article about an article about an article.) You can find a hundred of these with no effort, simply search on Google for “Barres” and “Nature” — The specific one I read isn’t important. Just for easy reference, here is the version from the Boston Globe that I’m quoting from.

In an interview with the Globe, Barres said his understanding of what it’s like to be a woman and a man in the sciences proves that women face significant discrimination. But he did not become an active feminist until January 2005, when Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers, who stepped down two weeks ago, suggested that women lack the same “intrinsic aptitude” for science as men.

Barres’ article is part of a coordinated media campaign to control the aftermath of the Larry Summers affair. According to the papers, Barres’ personal (anecdotal) experience outweighs the reams of evidence that support the fact that Men and Women are biologically different and that these differences can explain some of the variations of distribution we see in the real world. Anyone with even a moderately scientifically informed world-view can see that Barres’ experience is just that — His own. The thesis being presented here is, “Larry Summers spoke in heavily qualified terms about well-established scientific and common sense facts. One man’s experience shows that Summers was wrong!”

The statements that Summers, Pinker, and Mansfield made about women “are all wrongful and personal attacks on my character and capabilities, as well as on my colleagues’ and students’ abilities and self-esteem,” Barres wrote in Nature. “I will certainly not sit around silently and endure them.”

The agenda here is truly preposterous, so I was glad when I saw Agnostic over at Gene Expression do a takedown of Barres’ article. Agnostic does a better job at demolishing the antiscientific attitudes behind Barres opining than I could do, so read the whole thing.