How to apologize

Here, by the way, are links to Summers' actual remarks and his "me so sorry" letter from the Harvard website.

And for the extremely lazy, an outline of the remarks.

Paragraph 1: Don't get your knickers in a twist, we're just talking here.
P 2: Here is what I'll be talking about.
P 3: All high-powered professions have this problem, not just academics and science. All those long hours, you know, and well, men are more likely to commit to that than Moms.
P 4: A relatively simple hypothesis: Men's brains are better at science. "It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population."
P 5: Girls like dolls, boys like trucks. "I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something."
P 6: Discrimination is not the whole answer, or even the only answer. "So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination."
P 7: What to do? What to do.....
P 8: I could be totally wrong here.

Obviously, Dr. Summers' remarks were far more thoughtful than my outline would suggest. (That's so like a blogger.) And certainly people have had a good time seizing on the quotes I've included and Dr. Summers said repeatedly that he is merely speculating. He could have given the usual canned "here's what we are doing" speech, but he wanted to bring up some topics for actual debate.

I have always felt that the way to disprove incorrect hypothesis is by coming up with better arguments, not by suppression. If Dr. Summers wants to speculate that women just aren't as science minded as men, we need to refute that. Let the debate continue.

“Well, in all my years I ain’t never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. Hell yeah! I’m for debating anything. Rhode Island says yea!” Stephen Hopkins, 1776