Why aren't men stupid? (Evolution)

[GenderRealistBloke]

Or rather: given the massive and ancient sex-specific selection pressures we evolved under, why have men and women turned out to be of basically the same intelligence?

Being intelligent has a cost, in terms of energy that can't be spent on other things. To oversimplify a bit, species only evolve features that really make a difference. Too much or too little of something tends to get evolved away.

My intuition is that being a woman required more intelligence than being a man, in the evolutionary environment (raising children and managing social relations seems a lot more complex than coordinating to hunt and fight). But whichever way your intuition runs on that, isn't it weird that it's turned out to be pretty much exactly the same?

(I've reported to request a move to Chat, as this isn't really Sex & Gender, or not really in that way anyway).

Isn’t it just more that men and women have different strengths. Off the top of
my head, women are better with communication/language/skills associated with care giving and men have better spatial ability.

Why wouldn’t it work the opposite way though? In my experience, women tend to prefer men of higher intelligence so if you think along lines of natural selection then men would get more intelligent with time.

How can anyone have 'too much' intelligence? Unlike some physical characteristics - there's a real calorie cost in being too big - there's not much, if any, incremental 'cost' between being more or less intelligent. It may be that people who think more clearly have lower 'costs' directly as well as indirectly.

Work smart, not hard!

I'm not a biologist, but I believe there's a big calorie cost to being intelligent too (so, a trade-off vs strength and other things), plus you need a bigger head, which has a cost on women because the birth canal has to be different.

Some other disadvantages of being more intelligent might be that everyone ends up with their own ideas. Some species have a single leader (like bees) and others aren't expected to do too much thinking. But for humans, I think it's mainly the calorie cost.

Takes a lot of communication and leadership skills to coordinate hunting and fighting op so I have literally no idea what you're on about

Yes, that might be what keeps the two sexes roughly even (i.e. intelligent species just intrinsically need a partner that's on the same level).

But as for men and women having different strengths: I don't deny innate differences in distribution of strengths of interests (or even tiny differences in IQ at the mean, or small differences in the tails). What puzzles me is why men and women aren't 20, 30, 50 IQ points different.

To my intuition, women should be far more intelligent than men. But even if I've got my intuition the wrong way round (maybe hunting is much more complex than babies+social relations), I'm puzzled that it's turned out so similar.

Men and women are the same species. An intelligent mother will pass her genes for intelligence onto her children of both sexes.

Fine -- but isn't it odd that hunting+fighting turned out to need basically the same intelligence as children+social relations? It's the sameness that I find weird, even if my intuition about which sex needs more IQ is backwards.

Nope! Don't follow at all sorry!

Hunting and fighting IS social relations.

'All we have is each other' etc

Yes, but why? She doesn't pass her height on to her children in equal measure.

She passes on genes to both, and those genes express differently in sons and daughters, calibrated (presumably) to what worked out well in the evolutionary environment.

But women also hunted? You’re talking about a very specific period of time.

Not many people hunt now, and it’s mostly for leisure.

The roles of men and women are constantly evolving, now they do similar jobs and both play a role in providing for offspring. I read (albeit a while ago), that people pick partners with a similar IQ, so that would pretty much explain why men and women’s IQ are similar.

There's an evolutionary reason why men and women are different strength, because biology meant that we ended up with different social roles, and we evolved to optimise for that.

I would expect intelligence to do the same thing as strength, as intelligence certainly carries an evolutionary cost.

If intelligence did do the same thing, then isn't it weird that the optimal amount of intelligence for each sex's historical role is basically the same?

That seems like a weird coincidence, so I'm assuming there's some other explanation that I don't understand.

Yes, but almost none of our evolutionary history is the modern era. Whereas for almost all our evolutionary history humans have hunted (mostly men, per my understanding) and raised children/formed cohesive groups (mostly women, per my understanding).

Even if we discount social roles totally (which I think would be unjustified), we know that only women do childbirth. That's already a big difference that drives a lot of other adaptations, so why not for IQ?

(I'm not making any very confident claim about which sex 'should' be more intelligent. It feels intuitive to me that it should be women. But I'm surprised that the answer turns out to be 'neither sex').

intelligence certainly carries an evolutionary cost.

I remain unconvinced that the cost outweighs the benefits. Do you have any data to support that assertion?

We all have roughly the same 'hardware', relative to our overall size, the ability to use your brain better probably has no incremental cost and is likely to save you energy.

I'm unconvinced too

Whereas for almost all our evolutionary history humans have hunted (mostly men, per my understanding) and raised children/formed cohesive groups (mostly women, per my understanding).

There seems to be evidence now of fit younger women also participating in hunting, with older people doing more of the childcare and 'gathering' type of work (digging for roots etc).

One of the crucial differences between humans and other species is our longevity, remaining fit beyond our reproductive years. One of the reasons this is so important for us is for learning - passing down knowledge to younger generations. The older men can participate in this for sure. What use would a stupid grandfather be?

...and of course men's reproductive potential isn't as time limited. In our evolutionary history, clever men will have been able to survive longer and father more children.

I think your assumptions about it being mainly men hunting are fast becoming out of date, and very possible the same applied about assumptions about social groups /child rearing? Though I haven't read evidence about that

The evolutionary advantage of a big brain and high intelligence enabled humans to dominate other species. That goes for both sexes.

No, recent findings suggest that both men and women hunted historically.

Women carry the offspring, so that’s the biology part.

IQ is a new concept. It doesn’t measure ‘intelligence’, it measures how good people are at certain tests. How are you defining intelligence? Good social skills, good at maths, quick learner, brilliant artist. What you are saying doesn’t really make sense.

Some links
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/women-hunted-often-prehistory-men-b2451528.html

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/nov/analysis-did-prehistoric-women-hunt-new-research-suggests-so

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-hunters-not-just-gatherers-study-suggests-180982459/

But having a larger brain has a big cost in terms of energy (brain is some of the most energy-intensive tissue in the body). It also produces a lot of benefits.

But that's energy that can't be spent on something else. So we expect species to evolve to only 'spend' energy on brainpower for as long as the benefit of 'more brain' outweighs the benefit of spending that energy on more strength or more speed (or whatever else).

It's not about whether more brain is useful (it is, if it had no cost). It's about whether, at the margin, it's more useful than more strength, speed, etc.

Given that we know that strength, speed etc. aren't kept equal between the sexes, I'm surprised that brain for some reason seems to be.

I'd make a terrible god, because I would have traded off some brainpower in men in exchange for more strength and speed (better for hunting/fighting), and bought intelligence in women (better for child-rearing, social relations, which seem to me to be more cognitively demanding).

It’s no different in other species though is is

male or female
crow
cow
dog
koala

all similar intelligence to each other even though they exhibit different behaviours defined by their sex.

also you keep mentioning energy for bigger brains that can’t be used elsewhere but it literally turns into ideas that save energy expenditure elsewhere so using energy and time saving machines that would have been done by hand or learning strategies to hunt and making tools or traps that would have been running alone with a stone in your hands hoping you’d manage to catch something

Eh? You don’t think women are far smarter than men? I do!