Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who studied the origins of life and its differentiation into the various species also contemplated the abilities of men and women:
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn [sic] by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain--whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the uses of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music--comprising composition and performance, history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of deviation of averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton in his work on 'Hereditary Genius,' that if men are capable of decided eminence over women in many subjects, the average standard of mental power in men must be above that of women. --Darwin, The descent of man. Vol. II., Sexual selection, cont. Chapter. XIX. Secondary Sexual Characters of Man, p. 327.
Now, perhaps there is something in what Darwin is saying, at least as regards lists.
Readers of the Sunday Times (London) were asked in January '99 to nominate the greatest works in art, architecture, literature, science, of the past millennium. The results of the reader poll was published later, in March ["Simply the best." The Sunday Times, Culture Supplement, 28 March 1999, pp. 12-13.]
The list was headed up by Shakespeare for such as Hamlet (1) and King Lear (4), and Michelangelo for his David (2), Pieta (3), and Sistine Chapel (5). Darwin himself placed 6th for his Origin of the Species, the only work of science to appear in the top 50. The first--and only--appearance of a woman is item number 36: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin.
But look again at what Darwin is saying.
His point is not about lists as such, but about the differential abilities of men and women. He declares that women in the aggregate are significantly--even vastly--less gifted than men artistically and intellectually, and that is why they don't show up in lists of the eminent.
Now, he could have suggested that--should we find some "eminence" list shorter for women than for men--would it not be interesting, even important, systematically to explore what factors might possibly underlie such a discrepancy: artifacts of polling or sampling; differential educational opportunities; gender discrimination; personal choice--voluntary or forced--about where to invest one's energies.
But, having already made up his mind on the matter, Darwin says nothing of the sort. About this issue at least, to the extent that what constitutes science is the use of reason and observation to gain knowledge of the natural world, Darwin is not proposing to be scientific about it.
If there is something wrong, or at least precipitous, in Darwin's thinking about the abilities of men and women, might there be problems lurking behind the intellectual stance for which he is more well-known, namely his theory of evolution?
Some people are finding such. Most prominent recently is biochemist Michael Behe who points out how Darwin developed his theories of the origin of life in the absence of knowledge of the levels of complexity within the interior of the cell, specifically that cellular structure exhibits "irreducible complexity," namely that it could not have developed in the gradualist manner that the theory of evolution calls for, but rather supports a theory of design, not chance.
The other source of discord lies in the fossil record, precisely where one would expect to find the most support for Darwin's theories. What's needed to support Darwin is not to be found, and what is found supports a series of extremely rapid (on a paleobiological scale) bursts of species emerging, not the gradualism that Darwin's theories propose.
I've read somewhere that the most striking scientific event of the early decades of the millennium will be the abandonment by the scientific community of Darwinian evolution as a tenable theory. Whoever wrote that said as well that that abandonment may well require someone of the stature of a Stephen J. Gould getting up at a major conference and declaring that Darwinism is ended.
And, why would the demise of Darwinism require someone of Gould-level prestige to step up and declare it over?
Simply because science, particularly academic science, rests its orthodoxies in the outlooks of its most famed and established members, and woe unto he or she who thinks otherwise.
I recall one of my former graduate students telling me how, on a job-hunting talk at a major mid-western university, he was torn to pieces by the AI people in the audience, but only after the department head--a major AI figure whose name you would immediately recognize--joined the group and took the first (hostile) shot. Prior to the "great man"'s arrival, the lesser departmental figures--whatever their private thoughts--had either made noncommittal comments or simply remained silent, not quite knowing whether and how to comment until the head had arrived and, for them, settled the question.
Similarly, no one of novice or middling stature is going risk blighting their career by getting up at some conference and directly challenging the evolutionary view, to get riddled and ridiculed by the Dawkinses, Dennets, Pinkers...and their perhaps lesser ilk...of academe.
In his review of Richard Dawkins' book Unweaving the Rainbow, Stephen M. Barr--a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Institute of the University of Delaware--writes concerning the air of negativity some associate with Dawkins' writings :
This book is based in its entirety on a simple mistake. It is not often that one can find exactly the point where an author goes off the track, but here one can. It is in the fifth sentence of the preface of the book, which begins, "Similar accusations of barren desolation, of promoting an arid and joyless message, are frequently flung at science in general." However, what people object to in Dawkins is not the science but the atheism. Because he cannot see the difference, he writes a book that is a 300-page non sequitur...In answering the charge that his atheism is a joyless creed, he says, in essence, that his atheism allows him to derive pleasure from the beauty and magnificence of Nature as revealed by science...Those who believe in God, including the very substantial proportion of scientists who do, are every bit as able to thrill to scientific discovery as Dawkins is...But they have as well the joy of their faith which tells them that the beauty of Nature points to something higher, to a Wisdom greater than their own. For Dawkins it points to nothing. He is welcome to that conclusion, but there is not the slightest reason why any scientist or scientifically minded person should share it.
[From Books in Review, First Things, August/September 1999, pp. 55-56.]
This personal misunderstanding of what science is, and is about, is not peculiar to Dawkins--though surprising and certainly ironic in someone, namely Dawkins, who holds an endowed chair in the "Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford University.
The underlying problem seems to be, amongst scientific popularizers who, like Dawkins, are also atheists, is that they confound science--which is the use of reason and observation to gain knowledge of the natural world--with materialism, the doctrine that all phenomena can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of physical matter. Committed up front to the view that the material world is all that there is, they must systematically and unrelentingly reject out of hand any and all evidence that might suggest otherwise.
This reduction of the larger role of reason to a narrow and prematurely constricted view of what science is the subject of some observations by Richard Swinburne, Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford, in the Introduction to his book Is There a God? puts the matter this way:
For the last twenty or thirty years there has been a revival of serious debate among philosophers in Britain and the United States about the existence of God, conducted at a high level of intellectual rigor...Little of this, however, has reached the general public, who have been led by journalists and broadcasters to believe that the existence of God is, intellectually, a lost cause and that religious faith is an entirely non-rational matter.
The public thinking about such issues has been influenced by several books by distinguished scientists, among them Richard Dawkins'The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1988). With the scientific theories advocated in theses books I have relatively little quarrel, and can only admire Hawking's depth of physical intuition and Dawkins' clarity of exposition. But these books carry the suggestion that their scientific theories indicate that there is no God who is in any way involved in sustaining the world. These authors are not, however, very familiar with the philosophical debate and are often unaware of the extent to which their views about God are open to criticism. My aim in writing this book is to help to remedy this situation by putting forward...the positive case for the existence of God...
The basic structure of my argument is this. Scientists, historians, and detectives observe data and proceed thence to some theory about what best explains the occurrence of these data. We can analyse the criteria which they use in reaching a conclusion that a certain theory is better supported by the data than a different theory--that is, more likely, on the basis of those data, to be true. Using those same criteria, we find that the view that there is a God explains everything we observe, not just some narrow range of data. It explains the fact that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains conscious animals and humans with very complex intricately organized bodies, that we have abundant opportunities for developing ourselves and the world, as well as the more particular data that humans report miracles and have religions experiences. In so far as scientific causes and laws explain some of these things (and in part they do), these very causes and laws need explaining, and God's action explains them. The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence. [Pp. 1-2; italics in original.]
Note, again, that the difficulty seems to lie in the partiality and bias of the outlook of those scientists who take the methods of science to be in the service of their personal a priori assumptions about what, upon examining nature, they will find. The temptation is to find only that which agrees with their assumptions, ignoring what does not conform.
Swinburne, Richard. Is There a God? Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996.