My thoughts on a two-year old article.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1274952/Men-ARE-brainy-women-says-scientist-Professor-Richard-Lynn.html

Okay. Wow. I guess I initially felt anger at reading this, as I'm sure any woman would. (If you don't, then maybe we value different things in life.) But as I read on, I tried to understand it more from an objective, scientific point of view, as the author who is also the scientist, is trying to make me see. (And I failed, sort of. I'm sorry man but you're basically calling the entire women race dumber than men. Not just one woman, but the entire gender, basically. Objective, really?) And I suppose someone has to say these things, but did he have to say it this way?


He basically just looks at why men are smarter, and worse still, writes in an "apologetic" tone which just comes off as "I'm sorry we're smarter than you". He mentions, sparsely, that women might not do better because of the social hours and distractions that we're genetically geared to, like becoming the mothers to geniuses like you guys.


But pray tell me, who decided that intelligence is about "a range of cognitive abilities that include reasoning, problem-solving, spatial ability, general knowledge and memory"? Probably men... I happen to know that yes, studies have shown that women aren't so good at some of these things, like spatial ability. Convenient, isn't it, how our standards of what is intelligence is determined by men and it's in things that they're good at?


The article also talks about how women are better at foreign language skills and verbal skills, which he devotes a couple of statements to, because I guess to a male psychologist like him, having those skills mean nothing.


He goes on and on about evolutionary psychology to explain this phenomenon of men being smarter, as though we just cannot help that men were hunter-gatherers. So he's basically saying the smartest hunter was the one that killed more deer, hence men have inherited those bigger brains, hence smarter. That, ladies and gentlemen, is our standards for intelligence. Who can wage bigger wars, create bigger machines, and look further into the universe.

He even says this: 

"They were the high-status males of their day and - provocative as it is to say so - must have possessed far sharper minds than those of women engaged in the relatively simple tasks of gathering berries and raising children."

Wow! Raising children...simple?? I'd like to see you try it.

We've clearly just taken for granted the definitions of what is intelligent, and what is simple, and what is valued in this world. That is really my problem with the article and the way this asshole of a male psychologist  is tackling the issue. (I'm starting to really dislike this profession. The only one that beats this is economists. My God economists are assholes.)

Which is funny, because he is clearly open-minded enough to blame it on the system when he says this: "The ever-growing success of girls at GCSE, A-level and now at university would seem to refute this - but the blame lies with our exam system, with its emphasis on coursework, which rewards diligence more than it does intelligence."


Yeah, sucks doesn't it that all of your intelligent men are dying out because they are not being rewarded correctly? I wonder if that'll affect the ratio of men: women in fields of higher intelligence. Probably.


Also, I don't buy all this evolutionary bullshit about men just being born smarter than women. The brain is extremely flexible, and men aren't born smarter than women. That's just really stupid and facile. Maybe in child prodigies, sure, but for the average boy and girl, we're probably born equal. Because the brain is so flexible, anything we do during our childhood development will determine our intelligence in life. Brains of professional violinists apparently have a larger region of motor cortex and musicians on a whole have brains that are adapted to learning more. Boys play with Lego blocks, G.I. Joe figures and probably more sports than women. This probably affects spatial ability. If girls weren't bombarded so heavily with such emotional representations of who we should be, maybe we would develop better reasoning skills. Or maybe being emotional is a good thing. Maybe we shouldn't kill deer, and we should pluck berries instead. Who ever decided one thing was going to be better than the other?


A lot of scientific advancements have come from men, and I am deeply grateful for that. I'm not saying, FUCK MALE SCIENTISTS, but I am saying let's not think writing novels or successfully negotiating world peace because you can speak ten languages not as great of an achievement as curing cancer. I think all these pockets of intelligence influence one another. It is a sad world without art or languages, just as it is without science.


Also, it's not that we care about having fewer female scientists, it's that we don't want the difference to be so goddamn much. We know nothing will ever be 50:50, and that's fine. We just want it to be at least 60:40, and not 90:10. I don't even know if I'm doing this ratio thing right, but whatever. We're not going to complain at 60:40. At least, I won't.


The problem with this article was that it should have been written by someone who would have been more critical of things. I don't want these figures to not be published either, but I definitely don't want them presented by some asshole who is out to convince the whole world that men are smarter than women and we can't do anything about it.