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!

http://safercampus.org/

The link above points to the blog of safercampus.org, their mission statement as follows:

"SAFER is a national non-profit organization committed to empowering students to hold colleges accountable for sexual assault in their on- and off-campus communities. SAFER achieves its goals by training students in effective organizing tactics and challenging them to examine the overlapping links between sexual assault and all forms of individual and institutional violence."


This site is actually worded rather well, more than I can say for the video though. "One in every 4 college women will be sexually assaulted". I can think of two things wrong with this: 1) 1/4 is a rediculous number, most of us are aware that it is a non-supported statistic overused from the 70's and 80's. 2) She made the often overlooked mistake of referring to women specifically, if you ask me, this is actually a grossly sexist statement which demeans male victims of sexual assault on college campuses, I know of at least 5 all from the same university.

But under this disguise is the feminist dominated blog: http://safercampus.org/blog/?p=199
Again, the use of language completely scews the point: "The rapist (who, statistically, is more often than not popular and athletic) decides that he will have sex with someone (this sets the tone for the entire interaction with his victim–his outlook is manipulative and strategic, not accidental)."

I know I'm kind of splitting hairs but consider the butterfly effect: One small change can lead to massive outcomes and if you're not careful with the way you use words, you will cause all sorts of trouble. So we have to split hairs to a certain extent... and I think I've crossed that extent for now. So if you feel so inclined, scope about on that blog, comment lines are now open.