Is this universal? I am not sure, but I think I read somewhere that in Netherlands (or somewhere) women had more outliers in IQ tests. Even if it is universal, I think it is bit premature to say that men have a biological advantage.

"Notable is the fact that numerous countries had a normalized SD difference that was insignificantly different from zero, with 3 even having a negative value, that is, greater female variability. Neither the 10th-grade 2003 PISA nor 12th-grade 1995 TIMSS data gave any indication of greater male variability in mathematics for either Denmark or the Netherlands."

- http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.full

Clearly not universal given what you cited. It's definitely premature, I don't think we conclusively know much about where sex differences come from. I personally find the idea that much of the difference is related to biology in some way to be more plausible than the reverse. Though, sometimes the line blurs anyhow.

A person with an X chromosome wears earrings. That same person, had they been born with a Y chromosome, would not have worn earrings. Chromosome difference is a biological difference, so is the use of earrings biologically determined?

ROFL...data cherry picking FTW? 10th grade 2003? 12 grade 1995? In two countries out of many? There is so much you can do with statistics and picking and dishonestly choosing your data sets that I don't trust a word of this study that's not a specific fact. Read the bull****:

What a load of horse ****. That argument isn't defensible at all. Still, it's hard to expect much else than sociological we're-all-equal-let's-hold-hands-and-smoke-the-pot from a couple of broads at UC Berkeley.

Well... Actually, I'd say yes, there is overall a biological reason for women to tend to wear earrings more than men.

I guess now it becomes apparent that the distinction between biological and cultural can be a tough one to make. If it is possible to eliminate a difference betweens genders culturally, yet most real or imaginable cultures tend to develop such a difference, is this a biological or a cultural one? I would sooner call it a biological one.

I would consider men's clothes having buttons on the right and women's clothes on the left a completely cultural difference. I do not think cultures have a systematic tendency to develop this difference.

Or hell, now that I think of it, given that most people are right handed, so writing or any sequential manual task is likely to develop as going from left to right, so a clothesmaker looking down on the piece of clothing is more likely to start from the left side, and start by adding the buttons rather than button holes, so the buttons are more likely to end up on the left side looking down on the piece of clothing or right side from being within the clothing, and mens clothes are more universal than women's so it is more likely that buttons are bound to start being placed differently for women and left the same for men not the other way around... I guess there might be biological basis for why buttons are on the right for men and left for women...

But you get the idea.

Sure, but it's not like it is 10 kids that were tested. I dont know what TIMSS is, but PISA is a fairly recognized test of 15-year olds and each country has at least 5000 kids tested.

Sure

I am not really claiming anything here one way or another.

Doesn't have to be anything obvious or purposefully malicious. Toys, ways the parents raise their children, social expectations and etc. could possibly have a huge effect.

Allthough I can definitely imagine that men might have a naturally higher inclination for things like poker, violent video games and competetion and risk in general.

No, not really.

Well I have experiences of the opposite sort. I am also pretty sure that girls are generally beatings boys in high school math here in Finland.

I get the sense that there was an O/U on the # of pages on how quickly this thread would degenerate into a discussion about IQ.

I mean again, if it's about just obediently working with certain material, I have no problem believing girls do better.

The test I was talking about, was just on random day some stranger unexpectedly walking in with a bunch of tests that had nothing to do with anything we had been recently studying.

Bottom line, I guess I'm not really too certain in my position either. It just seems to me that way, that's all. Sorry for being louder than justified. It's an anxious day for me.

Um... I guess I can draw at least really pathetic stickman quality illustration.

I mean you agree that males are generally less social than females, right? I mean, you don't ever really see a species where the males are social but females asocial, but you see plenty of species where the females are social but males asocial, right? I mean gorilla, walrus, whatever...

It seems like a general biological tendency, for males to be much more likely to creep around in solitude fighting with each other, and females sorta much more likely to chill out in groups in the background. For males, there is less to socialise about and more to think, how am I going to get to be the boss.

Well, for humans, abstract thinking is the tool for doing just that. Obviously not to the extent we see in an SMP forum, this is merely the case of an extreme overshoot. And obviously, it is a very subtle mechanic, abstract thinking is very much helpful for females as well, and socialising is very much helpful for males as well. All I'm saying is there is this kind of mechanic and it is present in human beings to some weak extent.

I am often downright frightened how similar humans really are to other animals. It is scary. All the stupid incredibly simple-minded transparent things you see in animals... They are all present in humans. Worst of all, in myself.

I do feel bad saying this, like I'm going to be the next target of verbal abuse over using evolutionary psychology in an incredibly naive way, but I do think the difference between men and women in the abstract thinking vs socialising, is a legitimate phenomenon of this kind.

If there is a normal distribution of something that determines who frequents this board and that is strongly asymmetrical across the sexes with males having more of whatever it is than females¹ — and this certainly seems to be the case — then that same something will tend to show up more in males who do frequent the board than females who do frequent the board. Whether that is interest in the subject matter, knowledge of it, or capacity for it doesn't matter much — men posting here will tend to have more of it than women. It is not much of a stretch from there to characterizing as strong the posting of those who have lots of interest or knowledge or capacity, whichever it is, and as weak those who are, you know, weak in those areas — all it takes is that in addition to helping determine tendency to post, it is something we tend to be able to see in posts, and that's true of the obvious candidate factors.

Yes, some will take this as meaning that females aren't as smart or as logical as males, and in fact that's probably one of the things it does imply to many people, but the reason it will be taken as implying that is that we all start out knowing that lots of people here believe that, not that that's how he said it; in fact, because he implied (incorrectly imo) that the driving factor was interest rather than capacity his statement is pretty neutral.


¹ This will be the case unless it is a binary thing, something one either has or doesn't, and I strongly doubt that's the case.

I agree. I think many cultures developed independently, so if something applies in most/all of them, I'm comfortable calling it "biological." By the same token, I have to acknowledge that by this standard "biological" doesn't imply "inevitable."

I'm not sure anything can imply "inevitable."

And modern society is growing into an environment radically different (due to technology) from any environment in which human cultures have previously existed. This may change how the biological traits are expressed.

So everything is up in the air, and there's no way to clearly characterize differences as biological, cultural, or much of anything else. (Not until we have much more data and arguably a better understanding of the mechanisms by which "this stuff" happens.)

This is a quite far out statement. First of all I am pretty sure you are going to have a hard time to find a culture that developed independently. Second I am not so sure that just because two people realize that fire makes you warm and sharp things can be used to kill can really be called "biological", I would rather call it "environmental inevitability". Sure the brain power that allowed them to make these observations was biological, but by the same logic figuring out special relativity and quantum mechanics is "biological".

One reason I dont entirely buy that evolutionary psychology can explain too much is that it is that it does not seem entirely likely that it is economical to have genes for everything when you can have just a brain that allows you to figure it out on it's own and adapt to different settings. Plus once you learn something you can pass the information so that even those without a genetic advantage will not be handicapped in the particular subject.

By this standard everything is "environmental inevitability." Even eye color depends on environmental interactions. You could distinguish between internal environment, epigenetic environment, and external environment, but even that probably doesn't hold up.

Doesnt matter. The point was that calling something "biological" simply because it seems to be common is not adequete or else everything is "biological".

Universal within cultures and near-universal among cultures isn't the same as "common."

Sure, but do you think there is a "bow gene" or a "cavepainting deers gene"? If every spacefaring alien species in the universe has figured out calculus, would there be a reason to belive that all spacefaring alien species have a "calculus gene" or are biologically wired to do calculus?

The idea of an "x gene" is absurd, it almost never works like that.

As far as I'm aware, the majority of human cultures have not worn bows, done calculus, or painted. I doubt the majority of alien cultures will have done so throughout their natural histories, either. So none of this is really applicable.

I do think human women are biologically wired to ornament themselves, for example.

Yes it is absurd, that's the point. It would be incredibly messy and uneconomical to have such things as bow making and painting horses biologically wired into us at birth.

Fine, give me something every culture has done. The space faring culture was perfectly applicable btw. The space faring cultures exist in a specific environment and while you might need a specific feature to survive in that enviromment it doesn't mean it is biologically wired into them.

based on what?

The figuring out and adaption part has been becoming more and more important throughout human evolution.

It's just that as soon as it was important enough, we got an explosion of articulate thinking and technology and culture and lots of people walking about wondering about it.

It is actually inevitable that human mind is very inefficient in exactly the way you find it hard to believe it would be. Because we started out with very minimal presence of this brilliant mechanism, and it kept getting stronger and stronger, and as soon as it was strong *enough*, bam, you have civilisation and people posting on an internet forum wondering about it. But just strong enough, is still pretty damn inefficient. It would actually not make sense if it was not badly inefficient.

You need to have extremely simple means of surviving or have to have a pretty bloated software to be able survive in any complex environment if you dont have the ability to adapt and learn. It doesn't just apply to high level abstract thinking, it can also apply to learning how to walk, knowing where the water is, what is good to eat and where is good to hunt. I am definitely not saying that you are a tabula rasa, but if I had to bet on it you are not going to find a satisfying explanation why you didn't like Star Wars from your genes.

You're missing my point. It's not absurd for x to be genetic, it's absurd for there to be an "x gene." That's not how genetics works.

I already did that, ornamentation.

This only applies is all or nearly all cultures of that species have been space faring. This might apply for a genetically-engineered species, but I can't see it happening for a "natural" species.

Based on the fact that human women have ornamented themselves in every documented culture.

Um, OP, really? Nichlemmmmmnnnn (I hate trying to spell his username) already explained why your poll is fairly meaningless in this tiny niche of the world, aside from reflecting back the obvious.

And of course the rest of the thread is a bunch of guys opining about gender differences in authoritative tones that rehearse a bunch of tired themes about "abstract thinking" and IQ and didn't we already do this thread?

Let me take a shortcut, skip 84 pages of posts, and announce the results ahead of time:

"All unsourced, sweeping claims, upon being challenged, are walked back to safely vague statements of the trivial. All pithy and sloganeering descriptions are ignored or easily shown to be 95 parts mud to 5 parts light. What remains in the thread that is of substance and educational value are a few links to Wikipedia and some technical articles, and occasionally posts by actual experts speaking both on topic and in their area of specialization."

All of which is appropriate since we're not trying to support our own claims, but to show that the claims of the tabula rasa "sexes are equal" people are unfounded.

There is a plausible mechanism for this.

It is similar to why the products of inbreeding are more likely to have a higher variance distribution of genetic traits than the products of outbreeding.

The Y chromosome has fewer genes than the X chromosome.
This means that genes that interact linearly will have net effects with higher variance in men than in women. Women get to "run it twice," men don't.

If I knew nothing about the sexes, sociology, etc, I would make these two predictions based on linear genes:

1) Men have an identical mean (in most "positive" measurements, IQ / life expectancy / etc).
2) Men have a higher variance (in most "positive" measurements).

However, as we all know, there are non-linear sex based genes. This is the basis of numerous sex-linked genetic disorders (the "x-linked recessive" disorders, like baldness / hemophilia / color blindness / etc).

Despite all the terrible x-linked disorders, we actually can not make any predictions relating gene copy number and outcome with respect to non-linear genes, with the exception of variance. So...

Due to non-linear interactions, gene copy number for men should cause...

1) Men should have a DIFFERENT mean (although direction is not obvious, I will provide a hypothetical example to show how it can be positiive).
2) Men should have a higher variance (obvious).

Given that there are numerous examples of bad X-linked non-linear genes (for men), how could it be good for men?

A theoretical non-linear effect that would be beneficial to men

Suppose there are two genes, "A" and "B." These genes are brain-suppressors, so if they're functioning, they lower your IQ (they evolved because if you don't suppress your brain, you end up wasting too much time on 2+2). If you have a mutated form, denote it "a" / "b." If you have no copy of "A" or "B," suppose you get +10 IQ points. Suppose women have two copies of both A and B, but men only have one copy of A and B. Lastly suppose that the probability of inheriting "a" and "b" = 50%.

Then, 25% of men will be ab, but only 6.25% of women will be aabb.

Given that the average IQ is defined as 100, what will be the gender averages in the brain suppressor example? Assume everyone who is not genotype "ab" or "aabb" has an identical IQ.


Non-linear brain suppressors!?

This is probably more plausible than it sounds. Here are a few speculations:

1) If you accept this premise: "antisocial people have a better shot at abstract thinking than social people" -> it follows that inherited social disorders could be thought of as the non-functional brain suppressor.

2) There are genes that affect neuroplasticity, and they are super-nonlinear (e.g. FOXP2). We just don't know enough about the field.

3) There may be genes that affect attention span.

4) There may be genes that affect self control.

For example, if one had no self control, an absurd attention span, and no ability to understand what other people found interesting, they'd likely invent algebra problems related to genetic distributions, solve them, then hide the solution with spoiler tags.

Gene is a string of code that is hereditary, beyond that I am not seeing how the dynamic is that relevant to the discussion.

The human genome has around 700 megabytes of information and I think even most of that is useless. Your genome contains 20 times less information than your installation of windows 7. If you claim that you are going to find specific instructions on how to make bows or paint horses from that 700 megabytes my reaction will be to laught at your face. Sure the instruction to make bows would probably not take too much space out of that, but there is about a billion other things that the genome actually can be shown to affect and a billion other things that would be far more usefull. Even ignoring the absurd notion that such instructions actually got somehow coded there in the first place.

FYI: young children are not even afraid of snakes automatically.

Okay, but it should be easy to come up with more.

What? I am pretty sure that you need to know calculus in order to go to space.

You think ornaments are more common and been around longer than bows for example? Why are we biologically inclined to make ornaments and not bows? Is the biological inclination it simply "shiny things look pretty" or do you think it is something more complex?

I am going to go to bed.