Citizen Premier - 25 August 2005 11:06 PM

Also, Maegan, women don’t have to make babies if they don’t want to, and any smart woman would know that they won’t be able to devote as much time to their careers (be they academic or not) if they have a child.  But if she really is the world’s smartest woman, then she’ll be raising smart kids who should give her credit when they grow up.

I know that a woman doesn’t HAVE to get pregnant…But her desire to mother may outweigh her desire to have a career.  So, if you have enough of these genius mothers who have taken themselves out of the educational and career arenas, then they can’t be tested.

Beyond even that…unless every man, woman, and child was given a test, there is no way to tell which sex is the smarter sex.  And even still, some people test differently.  Some people do well with a standardized format - you read, then answer.  Others may do better if the question is read to them.  (I was actually a student helper at a homeschool testing center one year.  I had to read the test to a group of 7th graders.  They weren’t stupid kids they just didn’t comprehend the info when it was read to them.  I personally knew one kids testing.  Later, he showed me his scores - he was testing at least 2 grades higher in all his subjects.)  IQ tests are stupid.  My husband and I take the goofy internet ones every once in a while - both of us have tested higher than the other…and our scores keep changing w/i a few points of each other.

And the smartest parent can have the dumbest kids.  And vice versa.

Charybdis - 25 August 2005 02:21 PM

Because of this duplication, women also tend to be protected from faulty genes more then men, which is the main thrust of the article.

Women have faulty genes only…...

* (hides for cover….) *

Okay, more serious now: I agree, IQ test say next to nothing. Intelligence can present itself in so many different aspects of life, not just the ones tested in this kind of myopic tests.

I think Men and Women are equal.

I don’t see men and women as being equal, really.  I just don’t see either being better overall than the other.  Men tend to be better at some specific things than women, while women tend to be better at specific things than men.  So it more-or-less balances out.

Whether men or women tend to be more clever, I don’t know.  If there is a difference, I don’t think that it would be a very great one.  I agree with Citizen Premier that a lot of apparent intelligence has to do with culture:  if men are given decent educations and are sent off to colleges while the women are expected to sit around at home being vacant-minded ornaments, then of course the men in that culture will appear to be more intelligent.  Even the more intelligent women may pretend to be less so, so as to not break social expectations.

Personally I think tests like these are more dangerous than they are helpful. By separating the population into such broad categories as male/female it is easy to lose sight of many of the issues. There many and varied types of intelligence. While it is known that men in general rate higher in some areas and women in others, this does not factor in the amount of women who display characteristics of a typically “male” brain or vice-versa. I found Maegans point intriguing and I think it was glossed over a little. However, one could equally argue that a bum on the street might be the smartest person on the planet, but sadly he never had access to education. At the end of the day what good can come of a study like this really. It is merely yet another point for people to flog each other with. I have always gone by the theory that people are people pure and simple, feeling all the same emotions in their own little way. The mind works in such a complex and personal way to try and understand it through sex seems, to me anyway, to be an old fashioned and counter productive approach.

Yeah, this study doesn’t really show anything.  What we need, if anything, is a study into how we can equalize education levels for all groups.  It’s not as easy as simply providing good education, because some cultures simply have more respect for education than others.  In the black social groups at my school, for example, getting good grades doesn’t seem to increase the social level.  Perhaps if hollywood didn’t persistantly portray blacks as flippant and uncaring, then young african americans might take more of an interest in their schools.

But I think in the end, if groups are to be equal in education, they will have to be led by their own members.

I agree with LaMa that IQ tests measure nothing particularly useful nor revealing. Perhaps if more focus was made on making people smarter, better educated, better informed, more widely experienced or whatever - instead of concentrating on pointless metrics like SATs, GPAs, etc. - schooling would be more effective and possibly even better appreciated by the ungrateful little ingrates it is inflicted upon.

Then we could at last turn to cross breeding a pig, a lemming and a pigeon; and pigs would not only fly, but home in on the nearest abatoir and throw themselves into the bacon slicers!

(Bitter me? Like, quinine baby, yeah!)