January 20, 2005

"EPPUR SI MUOVE"-BUT IT MOVES

Summers: 'I Was Wrong'
President apologizes for comments on women in science

"Facing mounting pressure on campus and in the national press, University President Lawrence H. Summers issued last night his most extensive apology since suggesting on Friday that “innate differences” between the sexes may account in part for the underrepresentation of women on elite science faculties.
“I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully,” Summers wrote in an open letter to the Harvard community..."

        When Galileo, using the scientific method of observation, argued in favor of the heliocentric theory, Church scholars indignantly demanded he recant. A leader among them was Cardinal Bellarmin. "...He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin's stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the Sun and not about the Earth. Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that "his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation." Father Lecazre declared "it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation." Others declared, "It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?" Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church..."
        Legend has it that after recanting before the Inquisition and thereby saving his life, Galileo rose from his knees and said “but it moves”. Will Summers be stripped of his academic honors by the feminist inquisition? Will Summers's multiple apologies be enough? The Inquisition spared Galileo death at the stake. Now that Summers, to save his job, has thoroughly emasculated himself by abandoning his defense of the scientific method, perhaps his politically correct feminist accusers will be satisfied. However, President Summers, Galileo was right: 'eppur si muove'.