John Davison of our list was referred to by one of our authors as “incorrigible” (so much so that the author hastened to print his views! – a good sign).
Well, here’s another one for you.
Agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove, not content to take on Darwin, apparently had the intellectual courage, as a friend puts it, to challenge the current bloviating about the “intellectual equality of men and women”.
Questioning that politically correct tenet as it applies to the sciences cost Harvard honcho Larry Summers his job.
Stove analyzes the case for the intellectual equality of men and women in the same slow, careful way that he analyzes the case for neo-Darwinism, and dismisses it – at least so far as human beings are concerned – because the actual evidence does not support it.
That is, men have consistently outperformed women in intellectual feats over history, and Stove doubts that that can be explained merely by pointing out that women have been oppressed through the ages:
What would convince me of the equal intellectual capacity of men and women is, simply, the kind of evidence which, as things are, convinces me of the opposite: that is, equal intellectual performance, over a long time, and in the widest variety of circumstances.
He argues that, as the burden of childrearing has fallen disproportionately to women and that childrearing does not require much intelligence, therefore women did not need to be as intelligent as men, and hence were not.
Now, I am not politically correct myself, so I am not just going to just threaten to be sick, as one of Summers’ other female opponents did. I indeed have a cat in the fight, but I do not have a weak stomach.
I would say a couple of things against his thesis, however, and I do say them at the Post-Darwinist, which provides a link to his paper.
I am breaking this story at the Post-Darwinist and linking here now so that PC Darwinists can freak about something they discovered for themselves instead of using this paper to undermine Stove’s powerful critique
 of neo-Darwinism.