Here’s an interesting article about brain differences that contribute to empathic versus systematizing skills, how those skills seem to be distributed slightly unequally between men and women, and how heritability of those properties might contribute to autism and autism spectrum disorders like Asperger’s. Here’s another discussing the relationship between autism spectrum disorders and skills in math and sciences, and describing how “geek colonies” created by workplaces like those in Silicon Valley seem to both confirm the genetic hypothesis and the link between autism and math/science-oriented careers.
Here’s an article presenting one self-identified geek’s opinion about why other geeks seem to find reductive and rigidly-structured ideologies like Objectivism so appealling. Here’s another explaining that most volunteers for Kamikaze units in the Japanese air force were 20-something university students, usually in the sciences. Here’s another discussing how Islamist suicide bombers share that profile.
Most Islamic scholars characterize Islamist theology and interpretation as an obscene cartoon of the real thing; hence many analysts have argued that highly secularized, science-oriented individuals figure largely in the ranks of Islamist terrorists because they are more susceptible to indoctrination in Islamist ideology due to their pre-existing ignorance of Islamic tradition. It’s easier to fill up an empty vessel than to get someone to look at an old belief system in a dramatically different way, goes the thinking. But it may be instead that the same non-empathic, systematized way of thinking that leads a person to math and science pursuits also tends to lead a person to a rigid and totalizing simple-rules-oriented ideology like Islamism to pick an example at random.
What difference does any of this make? Oh, probably none. But it’s kind of interesting.
Disclaimer: Most geeks are totally harmless, some of my best friends are geeks, I'm a geek, but not of the sciency kind so I can "pass." Etc. etc.