How a Study Challenging an Official Narrative Went AWOL
An academic has gone on record alleging his research paper was deliberately lost.
Ted Hill, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Tech and current Research Scholar at California Polytech State University, devised a mathematical argument demonstrating how biological and evolutionary principles account for differences between the sexes within the same species, focusing on how it explains the variables of intelligence found in human males compared to human females.
Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found, those exceptions aside, that in the animal kingdom there was more variety among males than females.
Tying in with this theme is The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, (GMVH) proposed over a hundred years ago which concluded more geniuses and idiots existed among men than women.
Examples being more men than women among Nobel laureates, music composers and chess champions and conversely more homeless people, suicide victims and prison inmates are men.
Many studies since have backed the argument, with boys and men found to be overrepresented at both the high and low ends of the diversity spectrum across the board.
Darwin also raised the question of why such differences exist, setting Hill on a quest for a scientific explanation, enlisting a Professor of Mathematics to help flesh out his model.
The pushback begins
Their findings completed they looked for a publisher and decided on a spot in the viewpoints section of The Mathematical Intelligencer, where different views on contentious issues were welcomed.
The Editor-in-Chief, Marjorie Wilder Senechal, Professor Emerita of Mathematics and the History of Science at Smith College, liked their article and didn’t have a problem with it.
In fact she even suggested the article be pepped up by mentioning Harvard President Professor Larry Summers, who was dismissed in 2005 for saying the GMVH might be a contributing factor to the dearth of women in physics and mathematics at top universities.
The manuscript was officially accepted for publication on April 3 2017 and scheduled to appear in the international journal’s first issue of 2018.
The problems began when Hill’s colleague, Sergei Tebachnikov, posted a preprint of the accepted article on his website.
A representative of the Women in Mathematics chapter in his department at Penn State University warned him the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women.
She contacted Sergei again a few days later, inviting him to a luncheon for ‘a frank and open discussion about the paper’ where he would be allowed 15 minutes to describe and explain the results in a friendly environment.
On September 4 Sergei emailed Hill saying ‘the scandal at our department shows no signs of abating, he had spent “endless hours” talking to people who explained the paper was “bad and harmful” and tried to convince him to “withdraw my name to restore peace at the department to avoid losing whatever political capital I may still have.”
The department even went as far as implying academic freedoms and freedom of speech was not the- be-end- all- there were other considerations as well.
Then there were a further two unexpected developments;
The National Science Foundation wrote to Sergei requesting acknowledgement of NSF funding be removed from the paper with immediate effect.
The Editor-in-Chief of the Mathematical Intelligencer notified the scientists she was rescinding her prior acceptance of their article ‘with deep regret’.
But let this sink in- she confided she was warned by colleagues there was a real possibility that right-wing media would pick up this article and hype it internationally.
Then, faced with career-threatening reprisals from his own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei withdrew his name from the research.
Hill, retired at that stage and immune to threats to his career revised the paper and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives.
Then a lifeline appeared in the form of Igor Rivin, editor of the New York Journal of Mathematics asking Hill if he would submit a revised draft for publication.
Hill then received correspondence confirming publication on November 6 2017.
Three days later, the paper vanished.
And a few days after that, a completely different paper by different authors appeared at exactly the same page of the same volume (NYJM Volume 23, p 1641+) where Hill’s article had once been.
As it turns out Amie Wilkinson, a senior professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago was married to Benson Farb, a member of the NYJM editorial board.
She’d initially written to the Mathematical Intelligencer to complain about the article, and when she got wind of the acceptance of Hill’s revised work got her husband to pen a furious letter to the NYJM editor-in-chief.
In it he attacked Igor Rivin as someone with extremist views who likes to pick fights via inflammatory statements and called Hill’s paper politically charged, pseudoscience and a piece of crap.
But that wasn’t the end of it, the editor-in-chief informed Hill he was left with no choice in the matter as half his editorial board had threatened to resign if the article wasn’t pulled, even vowing to ‘harass the journal’ he founded twenty five years earlier, ‘until it died.’
What we can glean from the study
As a rule, evolutionary and biological factors like diversity determine the number of male geniuses considerably outnumber females.
In contrast females lean towards the average by default, just like in the animal kingdom, with anything falling outside this parameter at the upper and lower ends, the exception.
I remember being mesmerized by the sight of an exceptionable lioness, she was enormous, a magnificent creature, a phenomenal specimen, with the regal temperament so common to the King of the Beasts, and she knew it, taking our obvious admiration in her stride, as if she expected nothing less.
Yes, capable women should be given every opportunity to hone and apply their skills, this goes without saying.
Silicon Valley hasn’t been immune to this diversity-type controversy either, remember when Google engineer James Damore was fired for suggesting in a memo that biological factors including gender differences in variability might help explain gender inequalities in Silicon Valley hi-tech jobs.
Why the resistance to science?
Science rules for the most part until it clashes with politics, then all bets are off.
The trouble is women have been sold a lie that has to be maintained at all costs.
False hopes have been raised with women collectively told they’re capable of anything so if they haven’t reached the pinnacle of a career just yet it’s due to oppression, or lack of opportunity by another name.
The reason men hog the limelight in the hard sciences and hi-tech is because they’re predisposed to excel in these areas, nothing whatsoever to do with societal power or whatever else one chooses to call it.
Ambitious women should strive to achieve their goals in the area they’re most gifted, realistically assessing where their passions, strengths and weaknesses lie.
Shouting about the over-representation of males in certain professions while pushing prescriptive quotas only serves the interest of the political class and women who cling to a culture of perceived victimhood and compensating entitlement at the expense of all else.
A woman has the last word
Camille Paglia is a woman with the mind of a scholar as well as the credentials to speak into the culture of our times, ranking twentieth on the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals.
One of her quotes reads;
Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures.
I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.
She list some attributes possessed by men that give them a kick-start in the genius stakes.
The first is their ability to conceptualize, which is indicative of those with high IQ’s where women show-up at the mid-point of the range.
The second is the tendency of men to be obsessive to the exclusion of everything else, as is the nature of the creative genius, even to the point of mania, something women lack.
Thirdly by nature men are driven to succeed.
But as she notes, obsession in men has a downside apart from the creative, resulting in sexual deviancy or aggression.
Paglia then describes the nature of male drivenness in a profound way;
Men are driven toward hallucination of obsession and diversion from the priority of women’s power over them.
