Dear Mr Luse has a post up in which he fails to share with us his feelings on finding his toothpaste tube emptied of toothpaste. He does allude to a thread somewhere on the Interweb discussing the relative intelligence of men and women, and then provides his own commentary, including a salacious confession to asking three -- three! -- women to be his Valentine.
Go read the post, it's good. Meanwhile, I am happy to report that two men asked me to be their Valentine and I said yes to both of them. So there. (Neither of them blog.) And on the topic of "are men smarter than women" I just have a few things to say:
1. Even if it's true that twice as many men as women have 120 +IQ's, that still means that the big differences are going to be on the skinny ends of the bell curve, where the extremes show up. Most men and most women are going to fall in the vast middle of the curve.
2. For most of us, lofty talk about averages and populations and medians and percentiles isn't going to be of much use in our daily lives. We'll never meet The Average Man and The Average Woman because they don't exist. We're going to meet individuals: Adam, Eve, Sally, Joe. And it doesn't matter where The Average Woman and The Average Man fall on the bell curves; what will matter is what Adam and Eve and Sally and Joe can do. They'll each possess their own unique constellations of intelligence and virtue. More men than women might be super-geniuses, but that doesn't mean Joe is a super-genius -- or that Sally is not.
3. Speaking of virtue, this would be a good place to note that without traits such as perseverance and self-control, the only thing a high I.Q. for good for is membership in Mensa.
3.5 Plus, as we know from comics and the movies, having a very high IQ puts one at risk for becoming a megalomaniac sociopathic super-villain.
4. Given how theories about average intelligence of populations have been misused in the past to justify mistreating individuals... well, maybe there was something to the idea of an Index.
I am happy to report that my Valentine is a really smart guy. After dinner on Wednesday, he announced, "Skip the dishes. Let's go watch 'Persuasion
One of the best parts of Persuasion is a friendly debate between two characters on the differences between women and men:
..."I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps, you will say, these were all written by men.""Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything."
The whole passage is in the extended entry.
