The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Logical comments on the controversy by Steven Pinker Click here
During nearly four years as president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers has earned a reputation for blunt, sometimes brutal comments. After upsetting African Americans early in his tenure, he has provoked a new storm of controversy by suggesting that the shortage of elite female scientists may stem in part from "innate" differences between men and women.
"I felt I was going to be sick," said Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who listened to part of Summers's speech Friday at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. She walked out in what she described as a physical sense of disgust.
The political correctness of Harvard is the issue here as there are obvious statistical differences in the proclivities of men and women, but the cause of such differences is not on the table here and I’d like to reiterate how such differences are explained by my theory.
The same reasons behind the cause of developmental disorders are the reasons behind the tendencies of various characteristics to be more or less often found in males or females. All of the developmental disorders (ADD, Asperger’s, Autism) are roughly 5-to-1 male-to-female. The extremes of mathematical ability found in autistic savants and the extremes of focus of these people on non-emotional technical subject matter that is not as interesting to most healthy people is the entire explanation of why there are more men than women in the top positions of science.
This woman who walked out of that speech in disgust has a very good chance of exhibiting the kind of Asperger’s or autistic traits commonly found in teachers or students at her school. Not all of these people have such traits but the socially clumsy stereotype of the eccentric scientist type is not just a stereotype. Those at the very extremes of ability in the mathematical sciences follow a different standard of what can be defined as normal or mentally healthy. This kind of thing explains what is in the numbers: men are more often interested in technical/mathematical subject matter (about 5-to-1 compared to women) and more often able to score extremely high scores in such testing (about 5-to-1) but in the healthy/normal range there is little difference between men and women (with women actually scoring higher statistically in the normal range as women have less development impairment than men). This explains statistical differences but does not predict the ability of performance of individuals.
The factors that are behind the statistical occurrences of any disorder in a population are also behind the statistical occurrences of any personality type that is a milder form of that disorder. Every personality type taken to an extreme becomes a disorder. The nerdy scientist type of person taken to an extreme is autistic (or is autistic without any change). If the numbers of those with the disorder are 5-to-1 male-to-female, then it is likely that the same gender differences will be found in those who are of a personality type that is similar but not diagnosed as disordered.
The “nerdy” nature of people who are often found in these fields, men or women, has something to do with a greater or lesser amount of autism that is more common in these areas of academia. So when you really understand why there are fewer women in the sciences, it is not an insult to women as the explanation is that women statistically have better mental health than men
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
