The traditional notion of Male Supremacy is under attack yet again by Women, who are said to be quite Inferior.
The new threat has been triggered by the unfortunate, and apparently unguarded, but not necessarily untrue, word from Lawrence H. Summers, the President of Harvard University, who, one would think, should know, being the President of Harvard, after all.
Here's the story, or at least a story, written by Boston Globe columnist Deborah Blum, the mother of two children, and a woman.
While you're looking at that, let's take look at "doll evidence." According to the article, Summers relied on doll evidence, always a risky proposition:
According to a number of irate women who heard the speech, Harvard's president used a particular anecdote to illustrate the case for sex-specific biology. He'd once given his young daughter a pair of toy trucks as a gift. She turned them into a rather charming single-parent truck family, naming them "Daddy Truck" and "Baby Truck." I can't claim to be offended by that story since I tell the same kind of tales on my two sons, although mine tend to involve dismembering Barbies. There's nothing like being the parent of a small child to convince you that biology is a powerful influence on behavior - and vice versa.
The research to support the latter idea is getting better all the time. There are some terrific studies from the National Institutes of Health showing that parenting style itself can affect the way behavioral genes are expressed; countless others demonstrate that the way we behave helps shape both the structure and function of our brain. Behavioral researchers have found, for instance, that constant anxiety can alter pathways in the brain that produce stress hormones, raising the levels to such an extent that the body resets into a constant nervous state. Further, the compounds produced in that stress-chain reaction can cause damage to certain parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, which helps regulate memory. In other words, if you suffer from memory problems during stress, chances are it's because stress has altered your brain.
So, nature impacts nurture - and vice versa. They dance together throughout our lives, so closely intertwined in their particular waltz, that it becomes simplistic to argue that a behavior is just one or the other.
But according to members of his audience, Summers took the simplistic approach, using his truck anecdote to imply that little girls' lack of interest in the mechanical aspects of toy trucks preordained their future failure in the analytical world of math and science. This, he said, helps explain the fact that while women make up 35 percent of the faculty in American universities, they constitute only 20 percent of the science and engineering departments.
He's right about those numbers, and it's to his credit that he sees them as a problem. It's also true that there are some good studies on childhood play, which indicate that hormones, such as testosterone, contribute to the stereotypical rough-and-tumble style of boys. Other research shows that girls with unusually high levels of testosterone often play rough, disdain dolls, and prefer trucks to be trucks.
We've seen doll evidence in two other significant legal areas. The first was in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) the famous public school integration case, the biggest civil rights case of them all, which holds that separate is not equal in school facilities and never was, despite Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
Footnote 11 in Brown v. Board, refers to psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. Attorney Thurgood Marshall, later Justice Marshall, in bringing Brown and its comanion cases up from the trial courts, challenging school segregation in the south, needed a psychologist to testify how racial segregation, enforced by law, had a deleterious effect on the self-esteem of the children directly affected, Negro children kept apart from whites.
[ Footnote 11 ] K. B. Clark, Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development (Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950); Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making (1952), c. VI; Deutscher and Chein, The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation: A Survey of Social Science Opinion, 26 J. Psychol. 259 (1948); Chein, What are the Psychological Effects of [347 U.S. 483, 495] Segregation Under Conditions of Equal Facilities?, 3 Int. J. Opinion and Attitude Res. 229 (1949); Brameld, Educational Costs, in Discrimination and National Welfare (MacIver, ed., (1949), 44-48; Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949), 674-681. And see generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944).
According to The Warren Court and American Politics (Belknap/Harvard, 2000) by Lucas A. Powe, Jr., Constitutional Law professor at the University of Texas, Clark testified that he had provided two groups of African-American children, ages six through nine, in both the North and South, with black and white dolls, and asked them questions such as which was white and which looked like you.
When the children answered that the white doll was the nice one, Clark concluded that he had shown that segregation generated feelings of inferiority. He did not consider other potential causes such as low socioeconomic status or disparate treatment by the dominant white society.
He repeated his study in Clarendon County, South Carolina, using pictures of dolls and testified about the results in trial court.
Powe states that there are numerous problems with Clark's study. The samples were too small, there was no control group, and his interpretation amounted to "Heads, I win, Tails, you lose." If the children picked the African-American doll as looking nice, he could conclude that segregation reinforced feelings of race and isolation. But if they picked the white doll, he could conclude as he did, for otherwise they would have picked the doll that looked like them.
All Clark appears to have shown is the primitive state of social science, according to Powe. The Court would have done better to have omitted Footnote 11, which was the suggestion of a law clerk. It gave the South a fat target to ridicule and oppose Brown v. Board and integration. Massive resistance followed. P. 43.
Concerning the interaction of children with "anatomical dolls" for use as evidence in child molestation cases, the California Court of Appeal, in In re Amber B., 191 Cal. App. 3d 682 (1987), held them no longer admissible, because they were pseudo-scientific nonsense, in effect, for failing to meet the requirements of the old Kelly-Frye test in California. Kelly (state) and Frye (federal) required that new techniques that purported to be scientific, such as the interaction of children with dolls having penises and vaginas, must be "generally accepted within the relevant scientific community."
The Frye test has been rejected in federal court in Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceutical (1993). The problem before the Court was to devise a means that allowed new, good science to be used in court, despite the lack of general acceptance, to welcome the next Galileo sooner rather than later, while warding off trash masquerading as science. Daubert was thus known as the junk science case.
Here's the Daubert headnote:
Held:
The Federal Rules of Evidence, not Frye, provide the standard for admitting expert scientific testimony in a federal trial. Pp. 4-17.
(a) Frye's "general acceptance" test was superseded by the Rules' adoption. The Rules occupy the field, United States v. Abel, 469 U.S. 45, 49 , and, although the common law of evidence may serve as an aid to their application, id., at 51-52, respondent's assertion that they somehow assimilated Frye is unconvincing. Nothing in the Rules as a [509 U.S. 579, 2] whole or in the text and drafting history of Rule 702, which specifically governs expert testimony, gives any indication that "general acceptance" is a necessary precondition to the admissibility of scientific evidence. Moreover, such a rigid standard would be at odds with the Rules' liberal thrust and their general approach of relaxing the traditional barriers to "opinion" testimony. Pp. 4-8.
(b) The Rules - especially Rule 702 - place appropriate limits on the admissibility of purportedly scientific evidence by assigning to the trial judge the task of ensuring that an expert's testimony both rests on a reliable foundation and is relevant to the task at hand. The reliability standard is established by Rule 702's requirement that an expert's testimony pertain to "scientific . . . knowledge," since the adjective "scientific" implies a grounding in science's methods and procedures, while the word "knowledge" connotes a body of known facts or of ideas inferred from such facts or accepted as true on good grounds. The Rule's requirement that the testimony "assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue" goes primarily to relevance by demanding a valid scientific connection to the pertinent inquiry as a precondition to admissibility. Pp. 9-12.
(c) Faced with a proffer of expert scientific testimony under Rule 702, the trial judge, pursuant to Rule 104(a), must make a preliminary assessment of whether the testimony's underlying reasoning or methodology is scientifically valid and properly can be applied to the facts at issue. Many considerations will bear on the inquiry, including whether the theory or technique in question can be (and has been) tested, whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication, its known or potential error rate and the existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation, and whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community. The inquiry is a flexible one, and its focus must be solely on principles and methodology, not on the conclusions that they generate. Throughout, the judge should also be mindful of other applicable Rules. Pp. 12-15.
(d) Cross-examination, presentation of contrary evidence, and careful instruction on the burden of proof, rather than wholesale exclusion under an uncompromising "general acceptance" standard, is the appropriate means by which evidence based on valid principles may be challenged. That even limited screening by the trial judge, on occasion, will prevent the jury from hearing of authentic scientific breakthroughs is simply a consequence of the fact that the Rules are not designed to seek cosmic understanding but, rather, to resolve legal disputes. Pp. 15-17.
Karl Popper distinguished between true science and pseudo-science by requiring that the assertion be capable of being tested as true or false. Absent that criteria, it was a value claim or a myth, but not true science.
It doesn't look as though either Kenneth Clark's evidence or Lawrence Summer's would meet either the old Kelly-Frye standard or the current Daubert standard.
Skip the dolls.
When they're not too suggestible for the kids, they're too suggestible for the adults to use.
Either way you wind up with a false result.
The prejudice outweighs the proof.
Ask Mr. Summers, who has been apologizing all week, more or less...
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There's another alleged use of dolls that helped to cause a huge miscarriage of justice, and that was during the Salem Witch Hunt of 1692. According to dramatist Arthur Miller, author of The Crucible, dolls, called poppets, were instrumental in somehow helping to terrify the girls who made the accusations. It's been awhile since I've seen the play or the more recent movie, but I do recall the "poppets."
I've read the surviving preliminary hearing transcripts (by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression) of the witchcraft proceedings, but have no recollection of dolls being used as evidence in court. That's beside the point, however. A doll that is used formally or informally to influence a child who later testifies in court, convincingly, because she has come to believe something that is false, is a dangerous weapon.
In California, the use of the testimony of a witness who has undergone hypnosis as an alleged memory restorer, is prohibited. The testimony is inadmissible. Peo. v. Shirley (1982) 31 Cal.3d 18.
The work of psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Stephen Ceci, shows the suggestibility of children to all sorts of verbal and visual cues, resulting in false claims of recollection of what wasn't there.
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Why do you think ventriloquists use dolls?
You're so busy looking at the moving mouth of the dummy that you forget that what you're hearing are the words of the master manipulator behind it.
You've been fooled.
You've become the dummy.
Again.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, but remember, you are the easiest person to fool. Richard Feynman.
It happens in court... a lot.
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And just ignore the man behind the green curtain... Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz.
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Lucas Powe uses the expression, "Heads I win, Tails you lose," to describe the interpretation error used by psychologist Kenneth Clark and relied on by the Supreme, Court unnecessarily, in Brown v. Board.
It is an apt expression, indeed.
When intensely studying the evidence used during the false child sexual molestation outbreak of the 1980s, which coincided, not coincidentally, with my defense of a father similarly accused and facing over 400 years in prison, I used a different term to denote the same thing: The Trick Mirror Approach.
The Trick Mirror Approach allows your opponent to flip the evidence from positive to negative and still come out with the same favorable result. Favorable to the theory being advanced, that is, i.e. guilt, in these cases.
Here's how the game works.
The prosecution offers evidence that the child said to have been molested made an immediate report. Good, says the DA, this proves she was molested, for there was no delay in reporting.
But, if the child delayed in reporting, this proves she was molested, for molested children often do not report right away, because they were molested and afraid, or ashamed, or didn't realize the significance, etc.
Either way the prosecution claims that the theory of guilt is supported.
Suppose the child provides a coherent account with graphic detail.
Good. argues the prosecution, this proves the molestation.
But if the child is unable to provide either or both, Good, says the prosecution, this proves the fact of molestation because molested children are often unable to provide these.
Or the child sticks to her story. Good, the prosecution asserts, this proves she was molested.
But if the child recants? Good, argues the prosecution, this proves she was molested, for so many children who have been molested later recant for one reason or another.
Why do some allegedly molested children recant?
The prosecution is often reluctant to believe it is because the child was not molested, as she may now be trying to explain. It is because she's been "reached," somehow by the guilty defendant.
Heads I win, tails you lose. There are many such examples, some of them noted in my articles on such cases on this site. You'll have to Google on "trick mirror" to pop them up.
The Trick Mirror Approach always wins, unless you, the lawyer, are onto the game and can effectively point out to the jury how dangerous it is, because heads the prosecution convicts, and tails the falsely accused defendant loses, no matter how innocent he may be.
This is what jury trials have been about since time immemorial. It is bad enough when the prosecution resorts to such reasoning, but it is even worse when the jurors resort to it, for by then there is no recourse, as appellate courts do not second-guess findings-of-fact made by juries.
Traditionally, jurors have not been allowed to impeach their own verdicts, although there have been some changes in the past 35 years. It is not uncommon now for defense attorneys to have an investigator interview jurors post-verdict to detect misconduct in the jury room, such as the juror who conducted unauthorized inspection or an experiment outside the jury room, which may lead to a motion for a new trial.