Nick Cohen on Larry Summers.

Ahem.

The normally perfect in every way grammar school boy that is Nick Cohen has made a slight boo boo I’m afraid. The main part of his column is on fox hunting and as Marcus points out, is fine (although the comments section is already filling up with those who disagree). But in explaining Larry Summers’ remarks he doesn’t quite get what he was actually proposing:

His critics hounded him out for being a sexist who believed that nature had made men better engineers and physicists than women. Even the BBC reported last week that he faced a second no-confidence vote because he had said women had less 'intrinsic aptitude' than men for science.

He said nothing of the sort. What he did do, in January last year, was go into a long and complicated discussion about why there were more men than women at the very top in maths and physics. He was talking about the few thousand people in the world who understand, say, string theory and wondering aloud if nature or nurture accounted for the sexual imbalance.

Maybe nature matters at the highest levels, or maybe breaks for childbirth and social pressures that push young women away from studying science fully explain the difference. Even if he got the emphasis wrong, it ought to a legitimate area for debate. But his enemies didn't want inquiries of any sort. They spun his remarks and pretended he had said that any woman mathematician or physicist had less intrinsic aptitude for science than a bloke in the pub, which is clearly nonsense.

Not quite. His actual musing (for that is correct, he wan’t making a statement of fact, rather running through the various factors that might explain things) was that in men there is greater variation about the mean.

We actually see this in many things and there are theories about why this might be so. The one I am drawn to is the one about XX and XY chromosome pairs, the very things that make us men and women. The Y is such a stunted little remnant that if there is some genetic abnormality in the X then it can’t cover for it with its own version. Whereas women, with the XX pair have greater cover.

This leads to the idea that men are genetically more variable than women. Certainly, we see more miscarriages of male fetuses, more deaths among male children, more genetic abnormalities in men (Asperger’s, autism, haemophilia etc etc) than we do in women.

If you are indeed looking for those last few thousand of the population who are extreme in almost any manner, you’re likely to find more men there. More morons and more geniuses, a wider variation around the mean than you will find in women.

So when you go looking for that couple of thousand people who are weird enough to understand string theory you shouldn’t be all that surprised to find that the majority of them are men. Precisely because you do have to be genetically abnormal to do so, way way out in the right hand part of the Bell Curve of human intelligence, that’s exactly what you would expect.

Just as you would expect there to be a preponderance of men amongst those dribbling lumps of meat with scarcely enough intelligence to keep breathing. Which as all women, not just the feminists, know, is absolutely true (e.g. Chelsea fans).