But I think the disparity results in a basic propensity to distinguish reason from emotion. Women, with higher levels of estrogen and a biological imperative to be the child bearers and subsequently their nurturers, will tend to make decisions more so on feeling than objective analysis. When you kill a boar, as men did in early humanity, it only matters that the arrow has the right trajectory, not the tone in which you speak to the arrow.

Good grief that is ignorant. You might want to read Marvin Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine” — human intelligence is impossible without emotion. Your last sentence suggests, very wrongly, that autism is a survival trait.

it’s still bloody sexist to say “Men Win”.

There’s nothing sexist about it, any more than it would have been sexist to say “Women Win” if the numbers had been the other way around. Such misuse of terms like “sexist” devalue them.

I’m a woman and an athiest, the Pope is a man, but shame on my sex eh?

Strawman. “Men Win” simply doesn’t mean “every man wins” — it’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to a statistical difference.

Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennet also gave glowing reviews of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate which deals with gender dispairites.

“how courageous to buck the liberal trend in science, while remaining in person the best sort of liberal”, perhaps recalling his own struggle with creationism. “We academics are too sophisticated to fall for taboos,” Dan Dennett adds, with approval.”

Did your mother teach you to prevaricate like that? Dawkins and Dennett were referring to the general nature/nurture debate, not to the specific claims of gender disparity that you’re hawking.

Not surprising a WOMEN’S STUDIES prof did it

ad hominem much? And Elizabeth Spelke is not “a women’s studies prof”.

I notice others are very willing to jump to some extreme conclusions. Skeptics, are we?

As Richard Dawkins said (paraphrasing): “We should be open minded, but so much that our brains fall out.”

You managed to get the import of Dawkins’ adage exactly backwards. Dawkins is saying that one should be skeptical, while you’re using it as a rebuttal to someone arguing that you are being insufficiently skeptical — that your mind is so open to evopsych that your brain is falling out. Regardless of the truth of the matter of evopsych or who is or is not sufficiently skeptical, your appeal to Dawkins’ statement here is a big fail. Oh, and here’s an even bigger one:

But while good arguments exist on both sides, the majority of the data speaks to a basic biological cause of gender disparities. Many, including PC Meyer, dismiss this evidence in much the same manner as ID-iots dismiss evolutionary proof.

If you’re going to slander someone, at least try to get his name somewhat right. PZ Myers does not dismiss any evidence, what he dismisses are fallacies and misrepresentations wielded by ideologues like yourself.

No, actually, one should not accept a claim on evidence that is merely suggestive, and certainly should not elevate it to “a truth” — to do so is the behavior of an ideologue.

“told by the president of Harvard’s they are probably inherently less capable”

He didn’t say that, and the belief that he did resembles a religious myth, coupled with a failure to comprehend the most basic fundamentals about statistics. Summers addressed the factually low numbers of women in academia — since he was talking to women in academia, he wasn’t talking about their capabilities, which are presumed to be as high, or higher than those of men in academia. And he was talking about a statistical difference, which doesn’t apply to any specific woman. But most importantly, it’s a blatant falsehood that he spoke of inherent inferiority. What he said was that there tends to be larger variance in males than in females; the bell curve is flatter and the tails are longer for men, resulting in greater extremes, so you get more very tall men and very short men than you do women. And he hypothesized that the same was true of intellectual factors, producing more idiots among men — and more geniuses. That does not imply that women generally are inherently less capable than men, or that any specific woman is in any way less capable than any specific man; it especially doesn’t say that the women in academia are less capable, since they are known to be at the high end of the curve. You can easily find his speech online and see that that’s what he said, and not the uncomprehending, ignorant, and downright dishonest myth that has been propagated.

The main reason why most of us don’t give much credence to evopsych is that it can be used to prove anything. If men are shown to be aggressive rapists, evo-psychologists argue that it’s because men don’t have as much biological imperative as women to commit to their children. On the other hand, if men are shown to be kind, nurturing parents, it’s explained away as a result of the higher survivability of that man’s children. And so on. You can figure out some explanation for really any kind of behavior that will make some sense. The problem is that we have zero hard evidence that this was actually the case. The things that make a species successful are so complicated and so circumstantial that to argue that a specific behavior we see today must have made ancient humans adaptive is hogwash. We just don’t have the evidence. I’m not saying that therefore it must all be social, it’s just it’s almost impossible to get evidence that something is definitely biologically determined while it’s easy to see that the genders are treated in very different ways. Maybe the gender differences we see are biological, maybe they aren’t, but we’ll never really know until we see a society that treats both genders fairly and equally, which will probably never happen in our lifetimes. The whole discussion is as much opinion as fact as it stands now.

In any case, it’s just as good a question to ask why men are less religious as it is to ask why women are more so. We know that men are shown less emotion from birth onwards, are given less emotional support, and allowed to display emotion far less than women. Maybe men just have less to lose than women?

On a more humorous note, I still think that the half-naked Jesuses might make a small difference. If they strung the walls with nearly nude women I betcha a few more men would show up on Sunday mornings.

If the evidence suggests a truth, no matter how socially unappealing, one should accept it. Apparently, PC atheists like to tell this to hardcore religious freaks, but can’t follow their own advice.

I see you’re attempting to make a broader point about reasoning skills and somehow claim that this survey is support for that. I don’t think that this survey lends support to your argument until you at least account for education level, which would seem quite prudent.

I’m talking about being unwilling to extrapolate anything other than what the data shows from the Pew survey.

Is that PC? Hmm… how strange. I just don’t understand the culture wars sometimes.

About 1/2 of pray daily but about 40% of them don’t know what, if anything, they are praying to.