This post is about, you may have guessed, gender and intelligence. I'll draw on certain theories and explanations that I have come across recently be it from my psychology class, discussion with friends or surfing the media.

I'll start with the most popular; 'men have larger brains and are therefore more intelligent', I'll start by mentioning that it has been proven that encephaly (brain mass) is loosely connected, if at all, to intelligence. A study on micro-cephaly (small brains) found an MC sufferer that had normal IQ and there have been many many many other instances (Falk et al., published in Science March 4, 2005).
So this means that while the brain of men may be larger, it doesn't necessarily mean higher intelligence.

Another theory is that women are smarter because the corpus collosum, which organises information, is larger. This was put forward at the time when larger brains = more intelligence, but what gets me is, how can women be smarter if the corpus collosum is larger? This never really made sense to me, I could never see the evolutionary advantage to having a more organised brain for less grey matter and also that the brain doesn't need organisation because the correct neural paths are always fired, organising neurons is a huge waste of resources for the brain. It is akin to defragmenting your computer over and over again until the hard drive dies out.

So no, women are not smarter due to an oversized defrager lodged in their skulls.

The last one claims that men are more intelligent due to a higher average IQ score, while this may be true, I call the external validity of the intelligence quotient system into question. This is because IQ tests were invented, by men if that's important, to quantify how a person thinks when presented with certain tasks. I disagree with IQ because we still do not know what intelligence is, we have developed a concept for it, we know it's there, that it influences our daily lives but no one knows how to define it... what it means to be intelligent. Of course intelligence spans over a huge number of skills and thought processes that we may never have discovered yet but we still manage to quantify it and judge people on how they do, personally I think it's tripe.

So who is more intelligent? ... we don't know.

We don't know because we can't define intelligence objectively, we can't agree on one definition because there're always too many things wrong with it. I don't think we are even meant to know who comes out better in most skills, that is dangerous information. The point of finding out things is to use the information to improve our lives, this will only make it worse.

Discuss!