More on Summers

Following up on Larry Summers and the women in science catfight, here is an interesting story in the Times on some of the natural differences in male/female brain processes.

Jonah Goldberg has a great column as well, outlining many of the same differences, and taking shrill complainer-in-chief Nancy Hopkins to task for her national outrage campaign:

In fact, the scientific consensus is that there are innate cognitive differences between men and women — as groups. Individual men and women can be geniuses or morons (though the data suggest that men tend to produce more of both than women).

Men tend to perform better at spatial tasks — rotating three-dimensional objects in their mind, for example — as well as some mathematical and navigational tests. Women, on the other hand, are better at word games of various kinds, and they beat men at identifying matching items rapidly and putting the right-shaped pegs in the right holes. This is all fairly uncontroversial stuff — you can find a nice summary on the web in a Scientific American article called "Sex Differences in the Brain" from May 13, 2002. But don't show it to Nancy Hopkins. She may lose her lunch.