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?

Do you have an example of species where one sex is significantly smarter than the other?

You also don't need the entire species to be uniformly intelligent ...

The head size point is a good one. Within species, intelligence correlates with brain size, so at least one type of cost has to be paid regardless.

On calories, I agree that brain/strength/speed all use energy but that's why I'd expect them to get traded off. I agree it all gets a bit speculative beyond that point on what sort of roles need more brainpower (less obvious than for hunting/fighting). Nonetheless, as strength/speed were selected for in men, it's interesting that that didn't get paid for in brain power. Maybe you're right that that shows calories weren't the main limiting factor. The birth canal vs speed trade-off is a mechanical one. There might be a rather grim reason why weaker women ended up having more offspring too, unrelated to calories.

Not that I know of, but I have to say that that puzzles me too.

It's the principle of optimising for a particular role (and the fact we clearly see that in other attributes) that led me be surprised.

But that I think is a reason to think society might have been able to function OK with a lopsided M/F intelligence. We manage reasonably well with pretty large disparities between individuals.

But I accept that might not work in a small society quite as well, when everyone needs to be more of a generalist and everyone needs to relate effectively with each other. And between partners perhaps there is just a very strong sex selection for mates of similar intelligence. That's what we see between individuals now.

Female and male lions hunt. One is still bigger and stronger than the other. I don't think it's the social roles that determined the differences between the species, but the opposite - they took the roles that worked with how they already were.

If females were much smarter than the likelihood of them mating with the males would be smaller - they'd not find them attractive + outsmart them even if they are not strong enough to defend themselves from them. So they'd be not much of continuity of that type of species.

We are how we are not so much because of human evolution (and their adapted social roles) but evolution of all living things in general. And we would not be the same species or carry on mating if there was a huge difference in intelligence. (Like homo sapiens and homo erectus were different species, different in intelligence).

You're still missing the point a bit I think. In order for one sex to have less intelligence than the other, there needs to be a reason why equal intelligence creates a disadvantage.

For instance, there's an evolutionary reason why human females are generally smaller and less strong than men. Humans usually only give birth to one child, as a result women can only make roughly one new human a year. Men on the other hand can if needed have sex with hundreds of women a year, and thus produce hundreds of children.

This makes men more disposable than women. If women all go off to war, or fight the leopard etc. and half of them get killed, the birth rate of the tribe drops substantially. If men go, and half of them get killed, no drop in birth rate, because the women are the limiting factor. As a result, we've evolved so that in most human societies, men do the fighting. Bigger, stronger men are more likely to survive to father offspring, therefore evolution selects for bigger stronger men, and so men become stronger than women.

In species where females produce larger litters, it's less important to keep females safe, so there's less incentive to keep females out of dangerous situations. As a result females get involved in the hunting, the fighting, and there's less of a size differential.

Cause: Low birth rate => Effect: Bigger, stronger males.

You're trying to work out why we don't have the effect of "Less intelligent males" @GenderRealistBloke , but you haven't found an evolutionary cause for that to happen. Without that cause, you're not going to get a major difference in intelligence levels.

From Google and ChatGPT there is lots on how intelligence differences in men and women may have evolved (meaning small differences in aptitudes for different things)

You might want to probe that a bit more....make sure you're not asking loaded questions!
Afaik it's not clearcut how much of our aptitudes for different things are nature and how much is nurture. Women wrongly used to be considered incapable of many intellectual tasks - they weren't exposed to the right training, there was 'stereotype threat' etc. Things like the 'spatial awareness', shape rotation type of thing may well be related by the sorts of games and toys boys played with vs girls. Our brains are highly 'plastic' - while each persons basic hardware isn't the same in terms of capacity for memory, speed of thought etc, our training makes a huge difference to how they develop.

Also, don't forget that the majority of AI has been programmed by men more than women, which may have built biases into it.

may have built in bias ?

May?

You're missing the real trade-off for male strength & speed. Women grow babies. This requires a whole extra organ - two during pregnancy, plus a foetus - with its own vascularisation, etc. Women create a human being from their own body tissue, birth it, then continue to carry it around and feed it from their own bodies for months afterwards. Propagation of the species being first priority for any life form, resources go towards that in females, rather than muscle bulk.

By and large, the two sexes have evolved complementary strengths: two examples would be colour perception vs distance vision; explosive force vs endurance; there are loads of these differences, which make female and male more effective together than either sex by itself.

That plays into the human advantage, which is our ability to communicate and work together. Compared to other animals, we're pretty crap: our senses are dull, we can't run very fast or jump very high, we're much weaker than other large animals, our juveniles are helpless for a long time. But we have the intelligence to deduce, adapt, strategise; we can share our learning, plan together, alert one another to changes, communicate instructions and update one another.

For best results, we need all members of the 'tribe' to be intelligent, preferably to have a wide range of abilities between them, and to be communicative.

And fertile, of course.

Couldn't be arsed to look up references.

We've definitely got lots wrong in the past by bringing our cultural preconceptions to, and I'm sure we're still doing that today.

My rule of thumb: whatever the fashionable or convenient view is (in whatever circle, on whatever issue), you should probably adjust slightly in the other direction.

In the case of the likes of ChatGPT, it's probably not so much the AI as the source material it's trained on. Afaik a disproportionate amount of Wikipedia etc has been written by men (and some appears to have been quite aggressively edited by people with anti-women biases).

@Bobbotgegrinch
But my challenge to you would just be a mirror of that. Why are you taking equal as the default, requiring some massive force to deviate from?

We know that evolved attributes can be extremely fine-grained.

And we know that male and female roles are sufficiently different to create very stark differences in other high-cost attributes like strength and speed.

And we know that brains are high-energy, and that energy is an important 'currency' in which different attributes are traded off.

In any other "economy", if you change the investment return on any major asset, you will change the optimal allocation across all assets.

We know that in many of the other 'big ticket items' (strength, speed, etc) the spends/the investment returns are different between the sexes. So I'd expect that to affect allocation to that other big ticket item too between the sexes.

That's why I don't think "but they're the same species" works as a sort of blanket reason. Because the relevant comparator involves the other things being traded off against (some of which we know do vary starkly)

There may be some effects that do strictly relate to the sameness/difference between the sexes (e.g. maybe mates want similar IQs, or small societies can't vary too much in intelligence if they want to share knowledge, or something). I suspect that must be part of the answer.

Anyway..... I do recognise from the outset that I am clearly wrong in my intuition (otherwise I wouldn't be surprised)! But I do think it's something that needs a special explanation.

Yes - that still feels like speculation, but it would make sense.

Basically, that we have complementary strengths in many areas, for efficiency (specialisation and gains from trade). We don't see that with intelligence because parity of intelligence is required to underpin all the other trades (cooperate on complex plans, share concepts, etc. etc.).

For sure. Though bias in the training data is more of an issue than in the 'programming', because it's much less visible/correctable.

As I mentioned in a previous post, its because we're mammals. Mammals don't do huge differences in sexual dimorphism. Height and weight can differ by small amounts, and obviously our sex characteristics like genitals, breasts etc differ, but our overall body plans don't. It's partially due to the way we develop, all mammals start off in the womb developing to the exact same body plan, only differing by sex later in gestation. (In humans about 6-7 weeks.)

This is an innate part of what a mammal is, like being warm blooded etc. Something would have had to be very different hundreds of millions of years ago for mammal evolution to favour sexual dimorphism.

So given that our general body shapes and sizes have to be roughly the same, there would need to be some kind of evolutionary pressure for male and female to have vastly different intelligences. You've mentioned the calorie cost of high intelligence, that's not how it actually works. The calorie cost is actually caused by bigger brains, not how intelligent that brain is. So lets say that evolutionary pressure causes males to have smaller brains. They can't have smaller heads because we've already established males and females have to stick to a similar body plan, so now you've got small brains smooshing around in a big skull. Thats not good for brain injuries. Maybe men grow a thicker skull? Thats got a calorie cost all of its own.

Evolution isn't looking for a perfect design, it's not looking for anything, its a series of random changes and the poor fuckers who get the shit ones die. Evolution finds good enough and then sticks with it until something better randomly comes along and out competes it. Generally, more intelligent is going to outcompete less intelligent.

I'm not saying that its impossible to have an intelligent species with big dumb males and small intelligent females. Hell, a few asteroid impacts with different timings and it could have been crabs. They have huge levels of sexual dimorphism, and it's been evidenced that they're tool and language users.

But you're never going to get it in a mammal, our same-ness is too deeply baked into our DNA.

Great post @Bobbotgegrinch. I am now having a bit of a freak out about that sliding doors moment that could’ve meant the world being run by an intelligent crab civilisation.

I’m out of my depth now but I wonder if there’s something around when sexual dimorphism kicks in as well - seems like a bunch of the physiological differences between human males and females beyond reproductive organs only really start to be expressed at puberty and are influenced by sex hormones. Whereas intelligence at an earlier age is always going to benefit both sexes in terms of children quickly learning skills that help them survive to adulthood and reproduce.