On Intelligence

Today is one of those grueling days at work without even a break for lunch. It's finally slowed down just a bit, so I can take a few minutes to eat something and call it dinner (and slip in a short blog post), before I have to get back to it. No telling what time I'll be leaving for home.

I'm not stupid. Really, I'm not, even though the latest study out of Canada says men are more intelligent than women. The Daily Mail (UK) reported the story today.

It is research that is guaranteed to delight men - and infuriate the women in their lives. A controversial new study has claimed that men really are more intelligent than women.

The study - carried out by a man - concluded that men's IQs are almost four points higher than women's.

A focus on a factors such as the ability to quickly grasp a complex concept, verbal reasoning skills and creativity - some of they key ingredients of intelligence - revealed the male teenagers had IQs that were an average of 3.63 points higher. The average person has an IQ of around 100.

I'm curious about the test. Did they place more emphasis on spatial skills, where men tend to excel, than on verbal skills, where women tend to excel? Or was it evenly balanced between men's and women's strengths?

The good professor, John Philippe Rushton, has this to offer as an explanation of the results:

'We know that men have larger brains, even when you take into account larger body size,' said the researcher. 'That means there are more neurons. The question is what these neurons are doing in a man - and they probably have an advantage in processing information.'

It is thought the difference may date back to the Stone Age, with women seeking out men who are more intelligent than them in a bid to pass on the best genes to their children.

Of course! Stone Age women were looking for good genes in men. I'm sure that's what they called it, too. And all this time, I thought they were on the prowl for a rich guy--somebody with lots of stones for throwing at prey, or with a beefy club arm. Silly me. I must not be very intelligent.

Critics claim Prof Rushton's results could have been skewed by the inclusion of more test results from females than form (sic) males.

Did Rushton choose all the top males and pick a broad sample of females? I'm not sure what the critics are trying to say with their criticism. It seems to me that if you oversample females and that skews the results of females lower, then you're just confirming that girls test lower on intelligence tests.

'These are unpopular conclusions,' [Rushton] said. 'People should not be made to feel afraid to study controversial issues.

An earlier British study had similar results:

The analyses of more than 20,000 verbal reasoning tests taken by university students from around the world revealed that women's IQs are up to five points lower than men's .

So there you have it. Men are more intelligent than women, in general. That says nothing about individuals, though, whose intelligence can vary widely.

But I have a different theory to explain the difference: Most of the winners of the Darwin Awards are men. This proves that the stupid men are eliminating themselves from the gene pool at a higher rate than stupid women are.