Why on earth should science be a topic of public debate? This is an argument that I just don't get.
Summers was speaking unofficially at a conference of biologists, chemists, economists, psychologists and probably other interested fields. Why do they have these conferences if scientists just need to go back to their labs and work by themselves until they find the truth? You have a view of incremental science which works when scientists have a clear objective within one domain and the path to pursue it is also clear to all. However, the whole purpose of this conference was to discuss "provocative hypotheses" that would help set up new models, tests, and ways of thinking about the problem of why there are so few women in science and engineering fields. This is what I meant by debate, debate about the questions and the ways of devising experiments. I did not mean idle debate about what the outcome of tests might be when they could instead just go do the tests. Summers is an economist and the process of proposing hypotheses and counter hypotheses and ways of testing those hypotheses is often done publicly so that all agree on what a critical test might be before going off and doing the test.
Perhaps this is different in other fields but the view of Science as purely an incremental process done by scientists doing work on their own is largely discredited by Thomas Kuhn's work on the "Structure of Scientific Revolution", the view you have is the one largely held by Popper and Kuhn sees it as not really being the way that one theory usually replaces another.
By the way, the funny thing about this whole debate, why there are so few women faculty in Science and Engineering is, in my opinion, really a sub point to the real issue. If you go to a conference in Electrical Engineering in a US University, out of 100 Phd students present, at most 10 are from the US. Of the 10 maybe 3 are women. Of the 90 foreign students almost all are men. While we are focusing on education and why there aren't more women in the sciences, the real issue should probably be on why there aren't more US students interested in getting Phd's in science and engineering. Maybe Bill Gates' initiative for High School education will do something about that. |
