When Feminism Attacks...

After reading the fascinating and provacative new post on Bixi's blog, I was inspired to churn out a 600-word comment, which really should be posted (with mild editing) here instead of dangling from her entry like a bloated appendix. I was moved to respond because the issues Bixi discusses--feminism, science, and the intersecton of the two--dovetail well with the current story I'm working on, about scientists working on a evolutionary theory that explains human belief in God. My comment responds to Bixi's comments about a recent NPR report on fetal cells in mothers.

Fittingly, I heard the tail end of this motherhood NPR report on the way to conduct an interview with a prestigious evolutionary psychologist at Florida Atlantic University. Now, if the term "evolutionary psychologist" hasn't yet set off feminist warning bells in your head, it should. They're the folks who conduct the experiments exploring "innate" differences between woman and men that Bixi calls "bogus and unnecessary and of questionable ethical standing."

This particular scientist, David Bjorklund, has investigated gender differences, including a current experiment that shows that baby girls don't seem to have the immediate capacity for spatial reasoning that baby boys do. As a feminist, albeit an occasionally heretical one, my hackles rose when he mentioned this. But they remained down when Bjorklund discussed the main topic I was interviewing him about: whether the human propensity to believe in God and an afterlife is merely an accidental creation of evolution.

My hackles were down not because Bjorklund's work in this area is any more legitimate than his work gender differences--they are all similar projects which use similar methodology and experimental methods--but rather because I have no political or personal beef with the hypothesis that God is a hallucination of the human mind. I would venture that the other readers of this blog would be similarly unbothered, because they, too, are politically and socially ok with atheism. But we’re feminists, and have major beef with experiments that smell of gender inequality. And therein lies the problem—we’re applying our political agenda to science, which by definition must remain untainted by agendas of any sort. 

While we might seethe when scientists conduct experiments that have unfortunate political and social ramifications for chicks vs. dicks, we can't follow Bixi's suggestion that we avoid such experimentation altogether ("Does that mean don’t do the research? Um, yes…"). We can't fall prey to the temptation to gag what we may perceive as our opposition, even when our opposition wields something as fearsome as scientific proof that women and men are innately different. The impulse to censor all experimentation on the topic will only hamstring us feminists, just as Creationsts' refusal to acknowledge evolution relegates them to the sidelines of the debate about human nature.

Instead, we have to fall on Bixi's backup plan: make scientists admit "the social consequences and contexts" of their work. It is a fundamental requirement of the scientific method that consequences and contexts of an experiment be fully divulged. Bjorklund was more than forthcoming when I spoke with him--indeed, he expressed surprise that campus feminists at FAU weren't expressing outrage about his experiments. I promise, Bix, scientists are not "chuckling joyfully behind their unassailable shield of 'objectivity.'" Quite the opposite: another religion scientist, Jesse Bering, who told me this morning that he "has God by the throat," is hungrily attempting to engage his fellow scientists and the public about the implications and context of his work, and no one is giving it to him.

Nope, we've got to jump in there and engage with the science as it stands, for better or for worse. (Good 'ole Larry Summers was trying to do just that in a hamfisted way last spring--but his trademark bluntness blurred the line between what he saw as the 'cause' of the problem of woman in academia and the social reality of that problem.)

While we're at it, let's build a stout wall between scientific findings and social goals. We must acknowledge that, yes, some experiments show that there are evolutionary and biological differences between women and men. But we must also argue that this has no bearing on how we should treat them.