“If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.” - Camille Paglia

I think that tests for intelligence are inherently biased in favour of the people who design them.

I agree with that: probably more on average male-typical interests though possible for women too. Women can often have great ambition or daring (plenty of intrepid female climbers or explorers) but it tends to be directed at other fields.

Otoh it would have been hard until recently to build ships etc

Agree re weapons too.

My DH has several patents and I have none. So he has definitely invented more things than me.

I wouldnt say he is a risk taker. He just enjoys the thought processes and is happy to explore ideas to problems we dont have, many of which go nowhere.

We do solve day to day problems differentlly though. But that might just be us, not a man woman thing.

The difference between us can be seen in gardening. we had a boggy garden. My strategy was to work with that and have a raised deck in the bog for people, plant lots of plants that love that condition, have a seasonal pond and then have specimen plants that need dry conditions in pots. His strategy was to put in masses of drainage and make the garden the environment he wanted it to be. Mainly because he is stronger than me and doing all that digging and piping work, heaving stones around just was not something I could do so i didnt spend time thinking about how the drainage could work.

His patents dont involve strength but I just think he got more used to exploring all the possibilities not just those he can achieve.

Yes, I may be wrong and used a poorly thought out description of what propels some men. I am not sure I even know the reason behind the attitudes of massive ambition and determination against all the odds displayed in the sorts of buildings I described before. It’s just that personally I do regard them as driven by male urges and instincts. ( And very useful.)

The weapons of destruction I do think are for dominance, power, and the wiping out of other men on the one hand, and protection on the other.

I partly agree but I think that's a bit pessimistic? A powerful ship or lighthouse or railway isn't necessarily an expression of 'ownership' or 'victory over' nature.

I think men like to assert their ownership, presence, and victory over nature, by making things like lighthouses on rocks out at sea, impossible bridges, castles on rocks, ships that can go around the world, thousands of miles long railroads, skyscrapers, cars and planes. These things might have seemed impossible.

Also atomic bombs, guns etc Killing tools.

Re Nobel Prizes, I think it's fair to point out that the Matilda Effect arguably robbed several women of prizes they deserved to have shared in.

Top of the list would be..
Rosalind Franklin for DNA structure and
Lise Meitner for nuclear fission, but other strong contenders are..
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Frieda Robscheit-Robbins
Marietta Blau
Hertha Wambacher
Esther Lederberg
Chien-Shiung Wu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_effect

With chart

@IrishSelkie
Genuinely, why does this matter? These are outliers. The rare exceptions. You don’t need to be a genius to invent something so more or fewer outliers has no impact on civilisation.

Patents and Nobel prizes correlate extremely strongly with IQ, and it’s not linear.

So if that’s a good proxy for civilisational innovation then the number of extreme high IQ outliers matters more than the mean IQ. That’s not denying non-IQ things matter a lot too.

Sorry I missed this before. I agree intelligence isn't just inherited and that how it's inherited is complicated. Also what is "intelligence" is complicated as well. IQ tests are arguably naturally biased and most actual experts in that area acknowledge the limitations.
Boys are specifically relevant if someone is talking about differences in female and male intelligent levels and trying to argue there is an evolutionary reason. If I wanted to argue that men had evolved to be more intelligent than women (or vice versa) because they were the ones needing to count sabre toothed tigers or something then (if intelligence is on the X chromosome) that argument wouldn't make sense since boys are inheriting their intelligence (or lack of) from their mother. So it's not possible for the "clever gene" to be passed from father to son. I do agree it's way more complicated than "a clever gene" and I don't really agree with that theory, but that's exactly why those simplistic arguments that (eg) men are better at chemistry than women "because evolution" are silly.
Likewise mens susceptibility to certain hereditary mental impairments probably isn't because it's advantageous for men to have more intellectual variation (any more than men's increased risk of haemophillia is.) It's just where those genes happen to be.

For what it's worth of you want to talk about the evolution of language and language skills I do have a pet theory that this was largely driven by women. Women are still the main drivers in introducing new language innovations (speech patterns, words etc) across societies and women are largely the most responsible for teaching infants to talk. There is evidence that females in other mammals (horses, lions etc) sometimes use group cooperation to e.g. stop the male eating their young. So it's entirely reasonable to suggest that female humans also used communication and group solidarity to defend against male aggression. However, even there I think probably the biggest evolutionary pressure came from other species. If there was less cooperation between males and females then you would expect greater sexual dimorphism. When in reality we evolved in the opposite direction. Likewise the living in family structures (with males as well as females sometimes remaining part of the group) is more likely to foster cooperation between males/females than competition which could also explain the reduction in sexual dimorphism. That doesn't mean prehistoric times were all cuddly and that men never use their strength to act like dicks of course.

However, my theory on women being the first ones to "invent" language is still only a theory. There is no way to evidence it one way or the other. It's fun to imagine/speculate but I get frustrated when people (eg Brett Weinstein, Peterson, Paglia) pretend their speculations are facts and logic. And, just because women are "better" at some forms of communication than men it doesn't mean that communication is a "female trait". It's a human trait.

Yes they were. Neanderthalsnwere.more intelligent and closer to humans than originally thought. Maybe they were nicer than us. Who knows. It could have only been chance that homosapiens dominated. This is why I'm wary of cod evolutionary biology type arguments. It's extrapolation often based on incomplete knowledge. However, even if I do try to explain everything with evolutionary biology it doesn't support the assumptions made by the likes of Paglia.

You can't argue that sexual dimorphism is an evolutionary advantage** and support that argument with the fact the species we evolved from had greater sexual dimorphism. Think about it....

**If you are arguing women and men are different in intelligence etc because of evolution then that's what you are doing effectively.

Great you added wolves to the planet. Another nice 🍒

See my other post on how maternal line doesn’t equate to only the X chromosome

Early humans was referring to the species we have evolved from. The ones we didn’t would not matter in this discussion. Recent discoveries have shown that earlier human species (homo sapiens ‘——-´) were able to work in large, complex groups.

1. I was focusing on larger predators/prey. If you want to talk about smaller predators then yes, a human male could fend of a wolf more effectively than a human female could. Of course, wolves make up for their smaller size by hunting in packs. Exactly the same evolutionary route Humans took. And to fend of a pack of wolves you would want to be either part of a group of humans OR use your brains to invent a defense/climb a tree/start a fire. Evolution is an arms race a lot of the time. We largely responded to that arms race by evolving sophisticated communication and problem solving. Women and men.(Wolves are a very interesting example because ultimately we teamed up with them.)
2. The predators and prey thing is different I agree. But see my point about wolves.
3. You are right they didn't. That's probably why sexual dimorphism existed. Male mammals have more spare capacity to evolve physical traits to compete with other males because they don't bear children. Hence peacocks can afford fancy tails, male lions have manes and are big enough to fight other male lions etc. But, that doesn't mean they would evolve those traits at the expense of intelligence for example. It might be that being intelligent/incentive is too important to sacrifice for the "nice to haves" (fancy tail etc). Plus, there is no reason to as it isn't zero sum. Also, if intelligence is inherited through the female line (a theory thats debatable) then any advantage conferred by a male being more/less intelligent wouldn't be passed down anyway. If that theory is true then the evolution of intelligence and communication skills would be driven by the pressures on human females. Which would mean even if there was more need for human females to be intelligent than human males, boys and girls would inherit those traits from the X chromosome.
4. Early humans didn't show greater sexual dimorphism. Our early human ancestors did. Big difference. Effectively the other sapien species we evolved from/outcompeted were similar to us in some ways but none of them evolved the capacity to work in large complex groups. Our prehuman ancestors didn't have the same intellectual capacity, and didn't have the same communication skills as us. The evolution of those is what made humans distinct and likely what made them successful. That this happened at the same time (seemingly) that sexual dimorphism reduced is interesting and supports rather than negates my argument.

Thanks for spotting the error. I did mean 1 of their Chromosomes but as often happens I can’t type as fast as I think.

Often a blessing short term and a curse permanently thereafter.

One of their X chromosomes. We have 2, remember - every egg contains a maternal one.

'Boys tend to be given much more encouragement and funds by parents to set them up for success in the future'

Is this still mainly the case now? Really disappointing if so.

Until you invent fire and burn your grass hut down.
Every technological advancement is both a blessing and a curse.

Well, the flaws in your logic are

• only populating the planet with humans, woolly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers- both a lone man or woman would die quickly against either one. However, there are a lot more of the medium sized animals that a man could more capably fend off with a stick compared to a woman.

• confusing hunting- where humans are the predator with being hunted, where humans are the prey. Yes, much of hunting the very large animals was a cooperative entreprise that involved both sexes.

• assuming all the humans got along famously and the smaller, weaker female ones never had to fight off or defer to or convince the bigger, stronger male humans that a brilliant idea was their idea all along.

• neglecting the fact that early humans had a greater sexual dimorphism than modern humans. So the men were proportionally alot bigger than the women compared to today’s humans.

I have a couple of disagreements with this.

'Girls are discriminated against all through education which is why so few take A-levels in subjects such as maths, physics, accountancy and computing which then excludes most from many high-paid jobs'

• can you elaborate on how education now discriminates against girls? There is much misogyny around but I'm not convinced there's huge sexism in the school system..there's plenty of evidence that schools if anything are more likely to use learning styles etc that are suited to the average girl more than the average boy.

Most teachers are female, moreover : you'd hope this might lessen sexism towards girls.

In the most equal countries, the Nordic ones, women are even more likely to go into non-STEM jobs. Maybe this is partly because preferences on average tend to differ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife/article/20190831-the-paradox-of-working-in-the-worlds-most-equal-countries

Money isn't everything. Women need financial independence but I don't think pushing people who don't want to do STEM into STEM should be a feminist goal.

I do think it's key for women to have ways to influence what's going on in STEM. Too often women are ignored: look at the misogyny in AI companies, for one. .

@persephonia
Basically if "intelligence is on the X chromosome" there would be more likelihood of men reaching the extremes since they don't inherit 2 chromosomes balancing each other out.

I did not say intelligence is on the X chromosome, you have over simplified what is a more complex process. Intelligence is 40-80% genetic, with the genetics coming from the maternal side, some directly via the father. Maternal genetics are not only on the X chromosome. The Y chromosome will have the father’s mother’s mRNA. And of course, the X chromosome for all girls will come from the father too. The rest of intelligence comes from the developmental environment of the baby/child. As with most things, it is nature + nurture.

If it was true that would also imply everyone inherits their intelligence from their mother's and that how clever or not fathers are doesn't really matter for their childrens Intelligence.

Your assumption is that the bulk of the genetics for intelligence is through the maternal line means it’s all in a handful of genes on the X chromosome. Girls get their X chromosome from their father so the father matters too. Unless you’re defaulting to only consider male children?

As in, you think it’s only value-neutral if you ignore that?

Stuff is not usually invented by individuals anyway, it is usually a team effort.

We're starting to learn the hard way that technological advances can be very negative. Think nuclear bombs, carbon emissions causing global warming, AI, pollution, etc. Grass huts sound like paradise compared with where the world is hearing.