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?

Yes: they puzzle me too! (though actually, I haven't seen any studies on intelligence by sex in those species, but it doesn't seem to be obviously different).

Ok, none of what you are saying makes sense!

You’re basing this on only men hunting, which everyone has told you is false. Big brains don’t equal higher intelligence, we don’t even use all of it. We have the same brain to body ratio as mice. You keep mentioning intelligence but you talk about IQ which isn’t a measure of intelligence.

You’re assuming that women raised children. Many anthropologists believe that in pre-history child rearing would have been more of a crèche-type affair, with large groups of children of all ages being watched by elders of the community and essentially also minding out for each other. Women hunted, women gathered, women farmed. Women didn’t sit around nurturing their own children and teaching them phonics or cave art.

I think your over staying the calorie cost of 10 or 20 extra IQ points. People with less intelligence don't generally have smaller heads. They still need their full brain structure because so little of the brain is focused on actual intelligence. Most of it is about how our bodies work, and the capacity to have intelligent conversations, think laterally, remember our history etc. the difference you talk about wouldn't mean that men walked around with noticeably different sized heads.

As for passing on IQ, it isn't as simple as sharing it evenly between kids. Even same sex siblings can have massively different IQs just as they do hair colour, height, eye colour etc. it's a complex interplay of genetics, epigenetics and nurture.

Hunter man would have needed excellent spatial skills to determine how far away prey and other hunting animals were, would have need good communication skills to communicate with the tribe, good navigation skills to not get lost. Then depending on how sexual mates were selected, they needed to outwit the other men who wanted the same woman / had to woo the woman of choice etc.

He wouldn't have just been an idiot roaming round the forest clubbing anything that moved, bringing it home to a woman to cook then forcing her to have sex and infinitum.

No, but I'm surprised they aren't! : )

It all seems surprisingly similar to me.

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.

Well given the outcome of men not all being thick hunks, perhaps that's your proof that brains are worth the cost - and remember you're only talking about small incremental increases in brain size as we evolve. If the clever hominid can 'work smarter not harder' then he's the one who will win out. Who uses less energy - the one who can remember, learn and plan, or the one who can't?

How many differences are there between activities? Hunting and baby care both require a lot of looking around, being aware of potential dangers, the ability to react quickly, be it throwing a spear at a deer or grabbing baby's hand before she sticks it in the fire. At a base level, there may be similar cognitive loads. Plus it's also likely roles weren't rigidly determined by sex anyway.

If you're all sat round the fire, you're not likely to sit back and stop a child who is about to burn himself, whether you're male or female. If there are strict gender roles, you might later tear a strip off the other adult, "why do you don't you take better care of your child, why weren't you watching him properly, do I have to do everything round here?" But you wouldn't let harm arise unless you were psychopath.

Only men hunting: I haven't said that. (Though primarily, yes. And if I'm wrong on that then my puzzle becomes less puzzling).

Everyone has told me [that only men hunt] is false: they haven't. It would be strange if they had as that isn't my claim, or the only thing my puzzle relies on.

Big brains don't equal higher intelligence: compared across species, they absolutely are related (EDIT: I originally wrote 'the absolutely do' but that is too simplistic). I think even within species they correlate to a small extent. (EDIT: But brain calorie cost is the main way I think the trade-off happens, not size).

For this purpose, I'm using IQ and intelligence interchangeably (in other contexts, I'd be happy to distinguish, but in this case my puzzle is that differences aren't massive, so nuance of precise definitions aren't really the point). You are welcome to use them differently so long as we are all clear what we mean.

They still need their full brain structure because so little of the brain is focused on actual intelligence. Most of it is about how our bodies work

Yes... terrier vs Labrador.

Men's bigger brains were once thought to mean they were bound to be cleverer than women ... but actually it's just because they've got bigger bodies.

Using IQ as a measure of intelligence is like using sudoku to measure intelligence. Would you be surprised that men and women were equally good/bad at sudoku?

The hunting thing is a bit of a red herring. It's the learning, having ideas and passing them down which is crucial to humans - there's no reason at all why both sexes can't participate equally I; this.

Yes, possibly, though that feels like assuming the conclusion!

I thought your other ideas were very plausible, e.g. division of young vs old being very significant, and passing down social learning from older generations, and intelligence having a sort of 'multiplied' effect on male fertility versus female intelligence. I was thinking mainly of female intelligence having a direct impact on passing on genes (because of child mortality averted), but male intelligence having a big impact (via more offspring conceived) makes sense.

I'm still puzzled that it's so pretty much exactly the same, but less so.

I think the mistake is thinking that men and women are more different than they actually are.
We are an intelligent species that has been able to thrive despite childbirth being more dangerous due to larger heads and despite our babies being effectively useless for the first few years of their lives.
The advantages of being able to use fire, make tools and work together in groups for survival has meant that humans have had to evolve together.
One half of the population being less intelligent than the other half wouldn't have survived so well.
Survival hasn't exactly been easy either.

I mean, Sudoku is the kind of thing that is often used to measure 'g', which is traditionally what is meant by intelligence. Obviously I wouldn't only use Sudoku to measure intelligence, no.

Would I be surprised if men and women were equally good/bad at Sudoku? Given that I've already said that I'm surprised the general intelligence difference isn't massive (I'm not puzzling about small nuance), by implication yes, I should be surprised by Sudoku too!

On the question of whether men or women are actually more intelligent, I tend to think that given the differences (if any) are so small, it's largely a culturally determined question. If you want men to be more intelligent, you up-weight tests that men do (on average, slightly) better than women at when tested, and if you want the reverse, you do the reverse, and you have a bit of wiggle room on definitions too.

But to me that's not relevant to this thread, which is a puzzle about why we don't see very large differences.

I'm not sure we actually understand enough about why humans are intelligent in the first place to really be able to answer this question. The kind of things you're focussing on here like hunting and child rearing are done perfectly well be animals with far less intelligence than humans, so they probably weren't the primary driving factor to why we developed intelligence in the first place.

I suppose one other possibility is that differentiating by sex itself has a cost (cheaper to just use basically the same plans for men and women). So we may have shifted our social roles to 'spend' that intelligence so that it does balance out exactly.

(At the risk of repeating myself, it's the exactly bit that puzzles me).

So, let's say for sake of argument that hunting isn't taxing enough to take up a full measure of brainpower, but that it costs to evolve men and women differently in the intelligence department, maybe the men shifted their roles slightly to do more of the other more demanding things, until the marginal benefit of intelligence in each sex was equalised. In that way, avoiding the cost of splitting by sex.

In other words, I'm not contesting that men did much more than hunting (and women much more than childrearing/social relations), but wonder if the causality is backwards. i.e. they did a mix of everything in part because they were of equal intelligence.

Yes, that is true.

Mens brains are 10% larger on average than womens, so if intelligence was all about brain size then men would be smarter than women.

Dolphins brains are bigger than humans. But they haven't figured out quantum physics yet.

My intuition is that being a woman required more intelligence than being a man, in the evolutionary environment

I think you have started your argument from a point of incorrect intuition. It's pretty daft imo to assume that all men did was chase after things and kill them. Skillful human interaction of all kinds (leadership, warfare, cooperation, negotiation, navigating relationships) requires intelligence. So does innovation - surely tye most successful, dominant early humans will have been the ones who had good ideas which benefited their family or tribe. And outwitting and killing prey or predators which might be faster, stronger and more dangerous than you - that also requires intelligence and innovation (thinking up and making better weapons etc).

I suppose one other possibility is that differentiating by sex itself has a cost (cheaper to just use basically the same plans for men and women).

Not sure that assumption is valid, there are plenty of species which are way more dimorphic than humans.

Having established that other species can find food and care for their young, you need to think about what humans do with our brains beyond that. As I've said, invention, teaching and learning. How can it be anything but deleterious to the species to have half of them markedly poorer at these things than the other half?

Dolphins brains are bigger than humans. But they haven't figured out quantum physics yet.

OTOH, per Douglas Adam's: “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Yes, there may be something about intelligence that makes it poorly suited to specialisation in the evolutionary environment (I think the modern world is different). That seems plausible: if I'm fast enough to catch an animal for you, you don't need to be fast to eat it. But if you are smart enough to teach me something, I need to be at least somewhat similar to benefit from that.

Intelligence varies a lot between humans though. Wouldn't your theory lead us to predict that wouldn't happen?

They did, it's 42

It's a myth that we don't use 100% of our brains, we do.