About 15 years ago I first heard that men generally have higher standard deviation than women over various measurable properties including IQ. I didn't know it was controversial until Damore's controversy at Google in 2017.
I still think it sounds highly plausible, since I didn't hear of any studies that would disprove it (links are appreciated).
If true it would constitute a benign at least partial explanation for men/women imbalance in some professions.
- IQ is known to be mostly genetic (see e.g. Pinker's "Blank Slate"), so it's unlikely (though not impossible) that the differences in IQ stddev are cultural
- Wikipedia cites another study that found similar effect in birds: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7423667/. This kind of difference could evolve due to different reproduction strategies for males and females.
I suspect things have changed somewhat since 1928, but it likely boils down to something quite normal, like, boys are interested in different things to women. Which is surely just an evolutionary thing.
Its also likely to be a direct reflection, back then, of the expectations of that era.
The social construct is such an abstract nonexistent idea that many think is the way it should be, but it that just because we have the ability to reason etc...
Look at where we are holistically, are we really better off today if you look at every comparable data point across time?
The reasoning I've always heard (over 15 years or so) was that girls/women exhibit autistic traits differently from boys/men, leading to a different in diagnosis rates.
Less genome redundancy? Men have a single copy of most X chromosome genes. So if any of them are defective and affect cognition, there is no backup. Women have a second X chromosome, that reduces the impact of a defective gene there. Daltonism and hemophilia are less prevalent in women for this reason.
There are also significance physical differences between the sexes, but not between races. Maybe hormones or genes have an effect? The former should be easily testable.
AFAIK the greatest genetic variability is within sub-Saharan Africa, the most likely variations will be within groups there. Comparing white to black Americans seems a waste of time at best, and looking for a desired result at worst.
Opponents of such studies are seem to make the racist assumption that the only difference that might be found is that white people are superior. Surely the opposite is just as likely (maybe even more so as black Africans have fewer non-homo sapiens genes).
I is also pretty certain that any difference (between races or sexes) would not be swamped by individual variation. The only noticeable difference would be in the far tails of the distributions.
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I still think it sounds highly plausible, since I didn't hear of any studies that would disprove it (links are appreciated).
If true it would constitute a benign at least partial explanation for men/women imbalance in some professions.
IMHO the evidence points to this being a cultural effect that can be changed with policy.
- Wikipedia cites the study that showed this effect for the brain size (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8675415/)
- IQ is known to be mostly genetic (see e.g. Pinker's "Blank Slate"), so it's unlikely (though not impossible) that the differences in IQ stddev are cultural
- Wikipedia cites another study that found similar effect in birds: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7423667/. This kind of difference could evolve due to different reproduction strategies for males and females.
Its also likely to be a direct reflection, back then, of the expectations of that era.
The social construct is such an abstract nonexistent idea that many think is the way it should be, but it that just because we have the ability to reason etc...
Look at where we are holistically, are we really better off today if you look at every comparable data point across time?
Larry Summers just got appointed to the board of OpenAI.
Is society ready to have this conversation? Probably not.
It's amazing how long racist nonsense can sustain itself in a culture once it gets started.
On race, more than race itself the issue lies on lacking proper food and resources and parents or neighbours having a role to be reflected.
Tulsa used to it fine in the US with succeding, educated Black people, but you know what happened.
Don't open that can of worms, because it can backslash lots of smartasses.
AFAIK the greatest genetic variability is within sub-Saharan Africa, the most likely variations will be within groups there. Comparing white to black Americans seems a waste of time at best, and looking for a desired result at worst.
Opponents of such studies are seem to make the racist assumption that the only difference that might be found is that white people are superior. Surely the opposite is just as likely (maybe even more so as black Africans have fewer non-homo sapiens genes).
I is also pretty certain that any difference (between races or sexes) would not be swamped by individual variation. The only noticeable difference would be in the far tails of the distributions.
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