Can you imagine a man acting this way?
This space is a big fan of Steven Pinker, the now-Harvard, formerly MIT professor who posits humans as, among other things, highly engineered beings whose male and female hardware and software were designed to maximize survival in those awful millions of years as hunter-gatherers or worse.
Humans are programmed to be great at a billion things and not so great at a billion others. There is, for example, a tiny area of the brain that is devoted to face recognition alone, and keeps these images over many years — a friend or foe thing apparently. Likewise, men and women each have specialized capabilities and interests which are helpful to their surviving and prospering.
So today we read some more tidbits about the Lawrence Summers controversy:
Among the attendees who stormed out of the intellectual bull session where Summers made his gender remarks was Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Had she not walked out of the conference, she explained, she “would have either blacked out or thrown up.”
Here’s the question: can you imagine a man acting this way?