C M Y K ID NAME: Nxxx,2005-01-24,A,001,Bs-BK,E3 YELO MAG CYAN BLK 3 7 15 25 50 75 85 93 97 President Bush’s second-term clout is already being tested by Re- publican doubts about his domestic agenda, unease about Iraq and the threat of overreaching, officials in both parties say. PAGE A14 A Second-Term Challenge VOL. CLIV .. No. 53,104 Copyright © 2005 The New York Times NEW YORK, MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2005 New York: Today, some sun early, a few flurries late, high 26. Tonight, evening flurries, low 21. Tomorrow, partly cloudy, high 33. Yesterday, high 26, low 17. Details, Page B8. ONE DOLLAR Late Edition NEWS SUMMARY A2 Arts ......................................................... E1-10 Business Day ........................................ C1-12 Editorial, Op-Ed ................................ A16-17 International ........................................ A3-11 Metro ........................................................ B1-5 National ............................................... A12-15 SportsMonday ........................................ D1-9 Obituaries ............ B6-7 Weather .................. B8 Classified Ads ................ D9 Auto Exchange .......... D10 Updated news: nytimes.com Tomorrow in The Times: Page B8 0 354613 9 05105 FOR HOME DELIVERY CALL 1-800-NYTIMES By ROBERT D. McFADDEN Air travel remained a mess, but highways and many streets were passable, railroads ran mostly on time and New York metropolitan area residents began digging out yes- terday as a powerful weekend storm that buried much of the Northeast under a foot or two of snow churned out into the Atlantic. As the trailing edge of the vast storm passed, blue skies and bril- liant sunshine broke through the gloom just after noon in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. And as if on cue, battalions of shovelers, sledders, skiers and dog-walkers emerged from a day of hibernation — bundled up against 20-degree cold and 30-mile-an-hour winds — to labor and frolic in the drifts. But with 12 to 18 inches of snow on the ground in New York City and 18 to 21 inches in parts of New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut, a huge cleanup remained. City officials said the snowplows would be out all night, and the commuter railroads and bus lines said this morning’s commute would be near normal, if the hordes that usually drive to work heed the officials’ advice to use mass transit. A fire in a subway signal relay room, however, meant that service on the A and C lines, two of the city’s busiest, would be suspended or sharply reduced throughout today, transit officials said. Five storm-related deaths were reported in the city, including that of a 10-year-old Brooklyn girl who was struck by a city plow as she played in a snowbank at Wolcott and Richards Streets in Red Hook. The driver, who apparently did not notice the child, drove away and was being sought, the police said. Four other people died, apparently of heart attacks, while shoveling snow, city officials said. A woman was killed by a Long Island Rail Road train at the Mal- verne station, but it was not clear whether the death was weather-re- lated. New York City schools will be open today, but all after-school programs and field trips have been canceled, said Margie Feinberg, a spokeswom- an for the city’s Department of Edu- cation. Some buses may be canceled or delayed, she noted. In New Jersey and Connecticut, the decision to open late or cancel classes is usually made by individual districts. The morning forecast called for sunshine and temperatures in the 20’s. The aftermath of the storm brought a quiet loveliness to the land- scape. The snow filled country hol- lows, painted the corners of window- panes and left creamy sculptures atop homes and fences. Cars were buried at curbsides by plowed snow or drifts, but owners were told not to worry: The city has suspended alter- nate-side parking regulations until Saturday. Jeff Warner, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University, Across Northeast, Out Come Shovels and Sleds Snowstorm Disrupts Hundreds of Flights Through Weekend Continued on Page B4 By DEXTER FILKINS BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 21 — With the Shiites on the brink of capturing power here for the first time, their political leaders say they have de- cided to put a secular face on the new Iraqi government they plan to form, relegating Islam to a supporting role. The senior leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of mostly Shiite groups that is poised to cap- ture the most votes in the election next Sunday, have agreed that the Iraqi whom they nominate to be the country’s next prime minister would be a lay person, not an Islamic cleric. The Shiite leaders say there is a similar but less formal agreement that clerics will also be excluded from running the government minis- tries. “There will be no turbans in the government,” said Adnan Ali, a sen- ior leader of the Dawa Party, one of the largest Shiite parties. “Everyone agrees on that.” The decision appears to formalize the growing dominance of secular leaders among the Shiite political leadership, and it also reflects an in- clination by the country’s powerful religious hierarchy to stay out of the day-to-day governing of the country. Among the Shiite coalition’s 228 can- didates for the national assembly, fewer than a half dozen are clerics, according to the group’s leaders. The decision to exclude clerics from the government appears to mean that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a cleric who is the chief of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the scion of a prominent reli- gious family and an oft-mentioned candidate for prime minister, would be relegated to the background. The five Shiites most likely to be picked as prime minister are well-known secular figures. Shiite leaders say their decision to move away from an Islamist govern- ment was largely shaped by the pre- sumption that the Iraqi people would reject such a model. But they con- cede that it also reflects certain polit- ical realities — American officials, who wield vast influence here, would be troubled by an overtly Islamist government. So would the Kurds, who Iraqi and American officials worry might be tempted to break with the Iraqi state. The emerging policies appear to be a rejection of an Iranian-style the- ocracy. Iran has given both moral SHIITES IN IRAQ SAY GOVERNMENT WILL BE SECULAR A LESSER ROLE FOR ISLAM Leaders Cite Voters’ Views and Influence of Both U.S. and the Kurds Continued on Page A10 By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — The Pentagon has created battlefield in- telligence units that for the first time have been assigned to work directly with Special Operations forces on se- cret counterterrorism missions, tasks that had been largely the prov- ince of the Central Intelligence Agen- cy, senior Defense Department offi- cials said Sunday. The small clandestine teams, drawn from specialists within the Defense Intelligence Agency, pro- vide the military’s elite Special Op- erations units with battlefield intelli- gence using advanced technology, re- cruit spies in foreign countries, and scout potential targets, the officials said. The teams, which officials say have been operating in Iraq, Afghan- istan and other countries for about two years, represent a prime exam- ple of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s desire to expand the Pentagon’s ability to collect human intelligence — information gathered by spies rather than by technological means — both within the military services and the Defense Intelli- gence Agency, whose focus is on in- telligence used on the battlefield. “It is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its longstanding human intelligence ca- pability,” the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said in a state- ment on Sunday. “A principal conclu- sion of the 9/11 commission report is that the U.S. human intelligence ca- pability must be improved across the board.” Mr. Di Rita’s statement came in response to an article in The Wash- ington Post on Sunday that disclosed the existence of the clandestine units. Some intelligence experts said the creation of the units was the latest chapter in a long-running battle for intelligence dominance between Mr. Rumsfeld’s Defense Department and the C.I.A., a battle that has only intensified since the 9/11 commis- sion recommended creating the job of national intelligence director to oversee all intelligence programs. “This is really a giant turf battle,” said Walter P. Lang, a former head of the Defense Human Intelligence Service, a branch of the Defense In- telligence Agency. Among the C.I.A.’s concerns, for- mer intelligence officials have said, are that an expanded Pentagon role in intelligence-gathering could, by design or effect, escape the strict Congressional oversight imposed by law on such operations when they are carried out by intelligence agen- cies. Senator John McCain, Republican Pentagon Sends Its Spies to Join Fight on Terror Role May Encroach on Territory of the C.I.A. Continued on Page A11 By JAMES BARRON Three firefighters were killed yes- terday in two blazes at opposite ends of New York City — two in a desper- ate plunge from an apartment in the Bronx as they tried to escape a fire that had burst through from the floor below, the other after he had become trapped in the basement of a burning house in Brooklyn. On a morning of swirling snow and brutal cold, the Bronx fire escalated in a matter of minutes into a three- alarm blaze that 150 firefighters struggled to bring under control. Of- ficials suspected it began when sparks from an extension cord at- tached to a heater set fire to a mat- tress inside a third-floor apartment at 236 East 178th Street in Morris Heights. Six firefighters rushed to the fourth floor after hearing that up- stairs tenants might have been trapped. Back on the third floor, something went wrong — officials described a sudden loss of water pressure in a hose — and flames surged through the ceiling of the burning apartment, trapping the firefighters on the fourth floor. Mayday calls went out on their ra- dios as the firefighters headed out the windows, hoping to survive. Two of the six men — Lt. Curtis W. Meyran, 46, and Firefighter John G. Bellew, 37 — did not. The four others 3 Firefighters Killed in Bronx And Brooklyn Continued on Page B5 Vincent Laforet/The New York Times The building in the Bronx where fire forced six firefighters to jump from a fourth-floor apartment. Two died there; a third was killed in Brooklyn. By RICHARD SEVERO and BILL CARTER Johnny Carson, the droll, puckish, near-effortless comedian who domi- nated late-night television for 30 years, tucking millions of Americans into bed as the host of the “Tonight” show, died yesterday in Los Angeles. He was 79. The cause was the effects of em- physema, family members said. Mr. Carson took over the “To- night” show from Jack Paar on Oct. 1, 1962, and, preferring to retire at the top of his game, voluntarily sur- rendered it to Jay Leno on May 22, 1992. During those three decades, he became the biggest, most popular star American television has known. Virtually every American with a television set saw and heard a Car- son monologue at some point in those years. At his height, between 10 mil- lion and 15 million Americans slept better weeknights because of him. Mr. Carson was often called “the king of late night,” and he wielded an almost regal power. Beyond his enor- mous impact on popular culture, Mr. Carson more than any other individ- ual shifted the nexus of power in tele- vision from New York to Los Ange- les, with his decision in 1972 to move his show from its base in Rockefeller Center in New York to NBC’s West Coast studios in Burbank, Calif. That same move was critical in the changeover of much of television from live to taped performances. In his monologue and in his time, Mr. Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private Johnny Carson, Low-Key King Of Late-Night TV, Dies at 79 Douglas C. Pizac/Associated Press Johnny Carson in 1992. Continued on Page B6 By NATALIE ANGIER and KENNETH CHANG When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, sug- gested this month that one factor in women’s lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brim- stone into a debate that has sim- mered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point? Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex dispari- ties in the relevant skills, or per- haps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular? Researchers who have ex- plored the subject of sex differ- ences from every conceivable an- gle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies be- tween men and women — in their average scores on tests of quanti- tative skills, in their attitudes to- ward math and science, in the ar- chitecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain. Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows. “We can’t get anywhere deny- ing that there are neurological and hormonal differences be- tween males and females, be- cause there clearly are,” said Vir- ginia Valian, a psychology profes- sor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book “Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.” “The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance.” For example, neuroscientists have shown that women’s brains are about 10 percent smaller than men’s, on average, even after ac- counting for women’s compara- tively smaller body size. But throughout history, people have cited anatomical distinc- tions in support of overarching hypotheses that turn out merely to reflect the societal and cultural prejudices of the time. A century ago, the French sci- entist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women — closer in size to gorillas’, he said — and said that explained the “fickleness, inconstancy, absence Gray Matter and the Sexes: Still a Scientific Gray Area Continued on Page A15 INSIDE Jim Bourg/Reuters Tom Brady led the Patriots to their third Super Bowl appearance in four years in a 41-27 victory over the Steelers. New England will meet Philadel- phia on Feb. 6. The Eagles won the National Football Conference title game, 27-10 over Atlanta, after failing in three straight title games. SPORTSMONDAY Super Bowl: Patriots Are Back; Eagles Break Through His face disfigured by poisoning, Viktor A. Yushchenko was sworn in as Ukraine’s president, vowing to unite his na- tion and lead it into the European main- stream. He declared a “beautiful” victory over tyranny and elec- toral fraud. PAGE A9 Ukraine’s New President The immigrants who remade New York City in the 1990’s are indelibly shaping its future. Six in 10 babies born in the city since 2000 have at least one foreign-born parent, ac- cording to the most detailed portrait of immigrant New York ever by the City Planning Department. It esti- mates the number of immigrant res- idents at 3.2 million. PAGE B1 In Record Immigration, A New York Transformed Even as Sudan celebrates the re- cent end of one civil war, the ethnic violence that has devastated villages in the western region of Darfur con- tinues unchecked . PAGE A3 Civilians Terrorized in Sudan
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C M Y KID NAME: Nxxx,2005-01-24,A,001,Bs-BK,E3 YELO MAG CYAN BLK 3 7 15 25 50 75 85 93 97
President Bush’s second-termclout is already being tested by Re-publican doubts about his domesticagenda, unease about Iraq and thethreat of overreaching, officials inboth parties say. PAGE A14
A Second-Term Challenge
VOL. CLIV . . No. 53,104 Copyright © 2005 The New York Times NEW YORK, MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2005
New York: Today, some sun early, afew flurries late, high 26. Tonight,evening flurries, low 21. Tomorrow,partly cloudy, high 33. Yesterday,high 26, low 17. Details, Page B8.
ONE DOLLAR
Late Edition
NEWS SUMMARY A2
Arts ......................................................... E1-10Business Day ........................................ C1-12Editorial, Op-Ed ................................ A16-17International ........................................ A3-11Metro ........................................................ B1-5 National ............................................... A12-15SportsMonday ........................................ D1-9
Obituaries ............ B6-7 Weather .................. B8
Classified Ads ................ D9 Auto Exchange .......... D10
Updated news: nytimes.com
Tomorrow in The Times: Page B8
0 3 5 4 6 1 3 9 0 5 1 0 5
FOR HOME DELIVERY CALL 1-800-NYTIMES
By ROBERT D. McFADDENAir travel remained a mess, but
highways and many streets werepassable, railroads ran mostly ontime and New York metropolitanarea residents began digging out yes-terday as a powerful weekend stormthat buried much of the Northeastunder a foot or two of snow churnedout into the Atlantic.
As the trailing edge of the vaststorm passed, blue skies and bril-liant sunshine broke through thegloom just after noon in New York,New Jersey and Connecticut. And asif on cue, battalions of shovelers,sledders, skiers and dog-walkersemerged from a day of hibernation— bundled up against 20-degree coldand 30-mile-an-hour winds — to laborand frolic in the drifts.
But with 12 to 18 inches of snow onthe ground in New York City and 18to 21 inches in parts of New Jersey,Long Island and Connecticut, a hugecleanup remained. City officials saidthe snowplows would be out all night,and the commuter railroads and buslines said this morning’s commutewould be near normal, if the hordesthat usually drive to work heed theofficials’ advice to use mass transit.
A fire in a subway signal relayroom, however, meant that serviceon the A and C lines, two of the city’sbusiest, would be suspended orsharply reduced throughout today,transit officials said.
Five storm-related deaths werereported in the city, including that ofa 10-year-old Brooklyn girl who wasstruck by a city plow as she played ina snowbank at Wolcott and RichardsStreets in Red Hook. The driver, who
apparently did not notice the child,drove away and was being sought,the police said. Four other peopledied, apparently of heart attacks,while shoveling snow, city officialssaid. A woman was killed by a LongIsland Rail Road train at the Mal-verne station, but it was not clearwhether the death was weather-re-lated.
New York City schools will be opentoday, but all after-school programsand field trips have been canceled,said Margie Feinberg, a spokeswom-
an for the city’s Department of Edu-cation. Some buses may be canceledor delayed, she noted. In New Jerseyand Connecticut, the decision to openlate or cancel classes is usuallymade by individual districts. Themorning forecast called for sunshineand temperatures in the 20’s.
The aftermath of the stormbrought a quiet loveliness to the land-scape. The snow filled country hol-lows, painted the corners of window-panes and left creamy sculpturesatop homes and fences. Cars wereburied at curbsides by plowed snowor drifts, but owners were told not toworry: The city has suspended alter-nate-side parking regulations untilSaturday.
Jeff Warner, a meteorologist atPennsylvania State University,
Across Northeast, Out Come Shovels and Sleds
Snowstorm Disrupts
Hundreds of Flights
Through Weekend
Continued on Page B4
By DEXTER FILKINSBAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 21 — With
the Shiites on the brink of capturingpower here for the first time, theirpolitical leaders say they have de-cided to put a secular face on the newIraqi government they plan to form,relegating Islam to a supporting role.
The senior leaders of the UnitedIraqi Alliance, the coalition of mostlyShiite groups that is poised to cap-ture the most votes in the electionnext Sunday, have agreed that theIraqi whom they nominate to be thecountry’s next prime minister wouldbe a lay person, not an Islamic cleric.
The Shiite leaders say there is asimilar but less formal agreementthat clerics will also be excludedfrom running the government minis-tries.
“There will be no turbans in thegovernment,” said Adnan Ali, a sen-ior leader of the Dawa Party, one ofthe largest Shiite parties. “Everyoneagrees on that.”
The decision appears to formalizethe growing dominance of secularleaders among the Shiite politicalleadership, and it also reflects an in-clination by the country’s powerfulreligious hierarchy to stay out of theday-to-day governing of the country.Among the Shiite coalition’s 228 can-didates for the national assembly,fewer than a half dozen are clerics,according to the group’s leaders.
The decision to exclude clericsfrom the government appears tomean that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, acleric who is the chief of the SupremeCouncil for the Islamic Revolution inIraq, the scion of a prominent reli-gious family and an oft-mentionedcandidate for prime minister, wouldbe relegated to the background. Thefive Shiites most likely to be pickedas prime minister are well-knownsecular figures.
Shiite leaders say their decision tomove away from an Islamist govern-ment was largely shaped by the pre-sumption that the Iraqi people wouldreject such a model. But they con-cede that it also reflects certain polit-ical realities — American officials,who wield vast influence here, wouldbe troubled by an overtly Islamistgovernment. So would the Kurds,who Iraqi and American officialsworry might be tempted to breakwith the Iraqi state.
The emerging policies appear tobe a rejection of an Iranian-style the-ocracy. Iran has given both moral
SHIITES IN IRAQSAY GOVERNMENTWILL BE SECULAR
A LESSER ROLE FOR ISLAM
Leaders Cite Voters’ Views
and Influence of Both
U.S. and the Kurds
Continued on Page A10
By ERIC SCHMITTWASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — The
Pentagon has created battlefield in-telligence units that for the first timehave been assigned to work directlywith Special Operations forces on se-cret counterterrorism missions,tasks that had been largely the prov-ince of the Central Intelligence Agen-cy, senior Defense Department offi-cials said Sunday.
The small clandestine teams,drawn from specialists within theDefense Intelligence Agency, pro-vide the military’s elite Special Op-erations units with battlefield intelli-gence using advanced technology, re-cruit spies in foreign countries, andscout potential targets, the officialssaid.
The teams, which officials sayhave been operating in Iraq, Afghan-istan and other countries for abouttwo years, represent a prime exam-ple of Defense Secretary Donald H.Rumsfeld’s desire to expand thePentagon’s ability to collect humanintelligence — information gatheredby spies rather than by technologicalmeans — both within the militaryservices and the Defense Intelli-gence Agency, whose focus is on in-telligence used on the battlefield.
“It is accurate and should not besurprising that the Department ofDefense is attempting to improve itslongstanding human intelligence ca-pability,” the Pentagon spokesman,Lawrence Di Rita, said in a state-ment on Sunday. “A principal conclu-sion of the 9/11 commission report isthat the U.S. human intelligence ca-pability must be improved across theboard.”
Mr. Di Rita’s statement came inresponse to an article in The Wash-ington Post on Sunday that disclosedthe existence of the clandestine units.
Some intelligence experts said thecreation of the units was the latestchapter in a long-running battle forintelligence dominance between Mr.Rumsfeld’s Defense Departmentand the C.I.A., a battle that has onlyintensified since the 9/11 commis-sion recommended creating the jobof national intelligence director tooversee all intelligence programs.
“This is really a giant turf battle,”said Walter P. Lang, a former headof the Defense Human IntelligenceService, a branch of the Defense In-telligence Agency.
Among the C.I.A.’s concerns, for-mer intelligence officials have said,are that an expanded Pentagon rolein intelligence-gathering could, bydesign or effect, escape the strictCongressional oversight imposed bylaw on such operations when theyare carried out by intelligence agen-cies.
Senator John McCain, Republican
Pentagon SendsIts Spies to JoinFight on Terror
Role May Encroach on
Territory of the C.I.A.
Continued on Page A11
By JAMES BARRONThree firefighters were killed yes-
terday in two blazes at opposite endsof New York City — two in a desper-ate plunge from an apartment in theBronx as they tried to escape a firethat had burst through from the floorbelow, the other after he had becometrapped in the basement of a burninghouse in Brooklyn.
On a morning of swirling snow andbrutal cold, the Bronx fire escalatedin a matter of minutes into a three-alarm blaze that 150 firefightersstruggled to bring under control. Of-ficials suspected it began whensparks from an extension cord at-tached to a heater set fire to a mat-tress inside a third-floor apartmentat 236 East 178th Street in MorrisHeights.
Six firefighters rushed to thefourth floor after hearing that up-stairs tenants might have beentrapped. Back on the third floor,something went wrong — officialsdescribed a sudden loss of waterpressure in a hose — and flamessurged through the ceiling of theburning apartment, trapping thefirefighters on the fourth floor.
Mayday calls went out on their ra-dios as the firefighters headed outthe windows, hoping to survive.
Two of the six men — Lt. Curtis W.Meyran, 46, and Firefighter John G.Bellew, 37 — did not. The four others
3 FirefightersKilled in BronxAnd Brooklyn
Continued on Page B5
Vincent Laforet/The New York Times
The building in the Bronx where fire forced six firefighters to jump from a fourth-floor apartment. Two died there; a third was killed in Brooklyn.
By RICHARD SEVERO and BILL CARTER
Johnny Carson, the droll, puckish,near-effortless comedian who domi-nated late-night television for 30years, tucking millions of Americansinto bed as the host of the “Tonight”show, died yesterday in Los Angeles.He was 79.
The cause was the effects of em-physema, family members said.
Mr. Carson took over the “To-night” show from Jack Paar on Oct.1, 1962, and, preferring to retire atthe top of his game, voluntarily sur-rendered it to Jay Leno on May 22,1992. During those three decades, hebecame the biggest, most popularstar American television has known.Virtually every American with atelevision set saw and heard a Car-son monologue at some point in thoseyears. At his height, between 10 mil-lion and 15 million Americans sleptbetter weeknights because of him.
Mr. Carson was often called “theking of late night,” and he wielded analmost regal power. Beyond his enor-mous impact on popular culture, Mr.Carson more than any other individ-ual shifted the nexus of power in tele-vision from New York to Los Ange-les, with his decision in 1972 to movehis show from its base in RockefellerCenter in New York to NBC’s WestCoast studios in Burbank, Calif. Thatsame move was critical in thechangeover of much of televisionfrom live to taped performances.
In his monologue and in his time,Mr. Carson impaled the foibles ofseven presidents and their aides aswell as the doings of assorted nabobsand stuffed shirts from the private
Johnny Carson, Low-Key King
Of Late-Night TV, Dies at 79
Douglas C. Pizac/Associated Press
Johnny Carson in 1992.
Continued on Page B6
By NATALIE ANGIER and KENNETH CHANGWhen Lawrence H. Summers,
the president of Harvard, sug-gested this month that one factorin women’s lagging progress inscience and mathematics mightbe innate differences between thesexes, he slapped a bit of brim-stone into a debate that has sim-mered for decades. And thoughhis comments elicited so manyfierce reactions that he quicklyapologized, many were left towonder: Did he have a point?
Has science found compellingevidence of inherent sex dispari-ties in the relevant skills, or per-haps in the drive to succeed at allcosts, that could help account forthe persistent paucity of womenin science generally, and at theupper tiers of the profession inparticular?
Researchers who have ex-plored the subject of sex differ-ences from every conceivable an-gle and organ say that yes, thereare a host of discrepancies be-tween men and women — in theiraverage scores on tests of quanti-tative skills, in their attitudes to-ward math and science, in the ar-chitecture of their brains, in theway they metabolize medications,including those that affect thebrain.
Yet despite the desire for tidyand definitive answers to complex
questions, researchers warn thatthe mere finding of a difference inform does not mean a differencein function or output inevitablyfollows.
“We can’t get anywhere deny-ing that there are neurologicaland hormonal differences be-tween males and females, be-cause there clearly are,” said Vir-ginia Valian, a psychology profes-sor at Hunter College who wrotethe 1998 book “Why So Slow? TheAdvancement of Women.” “Thetrouble we have as scientists is inassessing their significance toreal-life performance.”
For example, neuroscientistshave shown that women’s brainsare about 10 percent smaller thanmen’s, on average, even after ac-counting for women’s compara-tively smaller body size.
But throughout history, peoplehave cited anatomical distinc-tions in support of overarchinghypotheses that turn out merelyto reflect the societal and culturalprejudices of the time.
A century ago, the French sci-entist Gustav Le Bon pointed tothe smaller brains of women —closer in size to gorillas’, he said— and said that explained the“fickleness, inconstancy, absence
Gray Matter and the Sexes:
Still a Scientific Gray Area
Continued on Page A15
INSIDE
Jim Bourg/Reuters
Tom Brady led the Patriots to their third Super Bowl appearance in fouryears in a 41-27 victory over the Steelers. New England will meet Philadel-phia on Feb. 6. The Eagles won the National Football Conference title game,27-10 over Atlanta, after failing in three straight title games. SPORTSMONDAY
Super Bowl: Patriots Are Back; Eagles Break Through
His face disfigured by poisoning,Viktor A. Yushchenkowas sworn in asUkraine’s president,vowing to unite his na-tion and lead it into theEuropean main-stream. He declared a“beautiful” victoryover tyranny and elec-toral fraud. PAGE A9
Ukraine’s New President
The immigrants who remade NewYork City in the 1990’s are indeliblyshaping its future. Six in 10 babiesborn in the city since 2000 have atleast one foreign-born parent, ac-cording to the most detailed portraitof immigrant New York ever by theCity Planning Department. It esti-mates the number of immigrant res-idents at 3.2 million. PAGE B1
In Record Immigration,
A New York Transformed
Even as Sudan celebrates the re-cent end of one civil war, the ethnicviolence that has devastated villagesin the western region of Darfur con-tinues unchecked . PAGE A3
Civilians Terrorized in Sudan
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