Is This a Clever Thing to Say About a Woman's IQ?

Parent Cafe
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<p>Bit of a wind-up…Not as big a threat to me as I am well over 125…though not at 155. How many CC women are above 155 I wonder?</p>

<p>*</p>

<p>Is this a clever thing to say about women’s IQ?
By Tony Halpin, Education Editor, The Times</p>

<p>HALF the population will dismiss this story, but a study claims that the cleverest people are much more likely to be men than women.
Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for “tasks of high complexity”, according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. </p>

<p>Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded. </p>

<p>They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees. </p>

<p>When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. </p>

<p>Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, said that he was uncomfortable with the findings. But he added that the evidence was clear despite the insistence of many academics that there were “no meaningful sex differences” in levels of intelligence. </p>

<p>“For personal reasons I would like to believe that men and women are equal, and broadly that’s true. But over a period of time the evidence in favour of biological factors has become stronger and stronger,” he said. </p>

<p>“I have been dragged in a direction that I don’t particularly like, but it would be sensible if the debate was based on what we pretty much know to be the case.” </p>

<p>The findings from the study involving 24,000 students will intensify a battle of the sexes that was triggered last week by Michael Buerk, the BBC newscaster, who complained that “life is now being lived according to women’s rules”. He said that men had been reduced to little more than sperm-donors because of the female domin- ance of society. </p>

<p>Professor Lynn, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster, is no stranger to inflammatory conclusions as the author of a number of publications arguing that there are differences in intelligence between racial groups. </p>

<p>He published a controversial study in 2003 that identified a clear correlation between the levels of prosperity in 60 countries and the average IQ of their populations. </p>

<p>Professor Lynn argued in a letter to The Psychologist this month that the differences between the sexes were explained by a link between IQ and brain size. He said: “Men have larger brains than women by about 10 per cent and larger brains confer greater brain power, so men must necessarily be on average more intelligent than women.”*</p>

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<p>Generally, “genius” IQ is considered to start at the 3rd standard deviation, which is above 144. </p>

<p>What is interesting to me in this article is that the author didn’t point out that the uneven distribution of IQs also occurs at the lower levels. More boys than girls have learning disabilities and low IQs.</p>

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<p>Is 136 IQ good or bad?</p>

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<p>Sigh. MEN designed the IQ test. Perhaps we can design another test - equally as valid of a yardstick - that would have men coming out behind women.</p>

<p>Marilyn Vos Savant (oh, highest IQ in the world? A woman? Hum…) had a wonderful article on this subject a while back. She pointed out that IQ tests (and she would know!) are imperfect measures of intelligence. She also pointed out that the smartest women don’t always migrate towards the sciences. </p>

<p>I always thought that more men than women won Nobel prizes because of years of gender discrimination, but apparently, it’s because, even in 1920, women had equal opportunities as men but just weren’t bright enough to take them.</p>

<p>FYI: The only IQ test I took put me at 158. I’ll still say that those things aren’t valid measures of intelligence. </p>

<p>Rant over.</p>

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<p>Akluftxcl,
An IQ of 136 is high when compared to the majority of the population.</p>

<p>An interesting study, assuming it was performed in a valid manner. I wonder if they would find the opposite if they measured EQ?</p>

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<p>to the above poster ariesathena, WRONG!</p>

<p>Sho Yano (born in Portland, Oregon) is a Japanese American and Korean American boy who at the age of 12 held the title of world’s highest recorded IQ with a figure so high that it was unmeasurable. He graduated from Loyola University magna cum laude at age 12, and attends the University of Chicago Medical School on a full scholarship. He scored 1500 on the SAT at the age of 8.</p>

<p>if you are interesting in sho yano click here <a href=“http://uttm.com/stories/2000/12/05/60II/main254786.shtml[/url]”>http://uttm.com/stories/2000/12/05/60II/main254786.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Uh huh…well, this doesn’t seem to explain why every single valedictorian in the history of my high school was a girl. The way I figure, this is just another pseudo-study to try and elevate men at the expense of women. Forget about those “statistics.” Just take a look at the real world. Women dominate a large portion of business, education, medicine, and other areas. Men are still a higher percentage, true, but that’s because they’re encouraged to pursue advanced degrees to a greater extent than women. Look at real life examples, not obscure results from some study by psychologists and doctor’s we’ve never heard about.</p>

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<p>ariesathena wasn’t just pulling that out of the blue: Marilyn Savant really is listed in the Book of World Records. She’s on CBS News, has a column in Parade, she’s everywhere. And one of my personal role models.</p>

<p>IMHO, and I’m what everyone at school calls “smart,” intelligence has only a little to do with IQ. How do you think Mozart would have scored on the SATs? I swear some of my friends are ten times smarter than I am, though I get the the class ranking. They can deal with people, they know how to take care of themselves, they are happy while I am on Prozac.</p>

<p>If men have bigger brains than women, good for them. But there’s more to a person than neurons.</p>

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<p>Yeah, but I’ve always figured that either her supposed genius is being sadly wasted or it is totally bogus. If she is the smartest person in the world, why is she wasting our time and her intelligence solving lame middle-school level brain teasers in that great journal of intellectual thought, Parade Magazine? </p>

<p>Someone that smart should be off pondering and solving the Big Questions. 100 years from now the list of the great geniuses will still include Da Vinci, Newton, and Einstein, but Marilyn V.S. will be long forgotten.</p>

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<p>Coureur: true, true.</p>

<p>My point was only that the person recorded as having the highest IQ is female. Your point (re: her supposed genius) is somewhat derivative of my other point: IQ tests aren’t really measuring much. </p>

<p>For the psych/history people out there, I refer you to Kohlberg’s levels of moral development. He derived them from a set of upper-class young men. Women, on his scale, repeatedly come out as being “less moral.” Well, what do you expect from a test which was developed without using any girls as guideposts? Kohlberg’s protege developed her own scale for women’s moral development - parallel to that of men. Of course, on that scale, women were fine.</p>

<p>Whoever frames the issue, wins the debate. Men have been framing the intelligence issue using their IQ tests, their moral development tests, and the like - and then declaring women to be substandard. It’s like measuring someone’s physical prowess exclusively by a 100 meter hurdle event and declaring that to be the definitive, final determination of strength. </p>

<p>This really does irritate me - for centuries, men have been trying to scientifically prove that women are less intelligent than they are. That stance is in a position of continual retreat - from the 19th century, when the vast majority of women were considered to be inferiour to men, from the time when women were thought to have a “movable uterus” which made them irrational and hysterical, to our modern incarnation of “just a little less intelligent” or “fewer women on the high end of the intelligence spectrum.” It also echoes the attempts of 200 years ago to prove that African Americans were primitive forms of Europeans. Dred Scott, anyone?</p>

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<p>I remember a documentary on IQ that I saw years ago. They cited Crick and Watson of the double helix of DNA. One had an IQ of 100; the other the typical 140 plus. They interviewed a number of postman and ordinary workers with IQ’s over 150 or some such. I remember one of them saying: “Yeah, I have always been smart enough to do what I want. I did well on those tests, but never had much interest in education and all that type of stuff”</p>

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<p>Watson and Crick stole the idea from Roselyn Franklin. She’s the one who took the photo and proposed took the measurements that made the double helix theory obvious. W&C published it, but there were probably many other people who worked with them.</p>

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<p>Although I think it’s ridiculous to use IQ tests when you go “off the scale” (they lose accuracy greatly once you start going to the very top and very bottom percentiles, thus if you’re top 1%, congrats – no one knows if you’re top 0.001% or top 0.00001%).</p>

<p>As for Sho Yano, it clearly states in the article his IQ was measured at 200, not holding the “world’s highest recorded IQ with a figure so high that it was unmeasurable.” Please check articles before you post incorrect information.</p>

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<p>to the above poster:</p>

<p>i did not post incorrect information </p>

<p>Marilyn vos Savant (born August 11, 1946) is an American newspaper columnist who deals with mathematical and logical puzzles, as well as more traditional self-help advice. Her column Ask Marilyn appears in Parade magazine, and she has used it as the basis of two books. </p>

<p>Her adult IQ has been estimated to be 180 using more modern techniques than were available in the 1960s. </p>

<p>**Her IQ of 228 has traditionally been billed as the world’s highest until 2003, when Sho Yano usurped the title with a figure so high that it is unmeasurable, but beyond 228. **</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.quicklyfind.com/info/Marilyn_vos_Savant.htm[/url]”>http://www.quicklyfind.com/info/Marilyn_vos_Savant.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>“At Princeton Hospital, Harvey weighed Einstein’s brain on a grocer’s scale. It was 2.7 pounds — less than the average adult male brain.”</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-brainsex16jun16,0,5806592,full.story[/url]”>http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-brainsex16jun16,0,5806592,full.story&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>So much for the theory that men are smarter because of brain size. If you look hard enough, you can find studies that say almost anything. First, it doesn’t really matter which gender has the most smart people. We all know dumb men - and dumb women. We also know smart people who can’t seem to do anything. Trying to stereotype groups of people serves no purpose. There are many kinds of intelligence, and the IQ test, for what it’s worth, tests only one kind.</p>

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<p>MasterOD, I was referring to your post where you were talking about the boy, not Marilyn vos Savant:</p>

<p>“Sho Yano (born in Portland, Oregon) is a Japanese American and Korean American boy who at the age of 12 held the title of world’s highest recorded IQ with a figure so high that it was unmeasurable.”</p>

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<p>Men have statistically bigger brains (coincidently probably statistically bigger heads as well). But women’s are more detailed and complex. This was taught to me by a female psych professor. Just some random late/early thoughts.</p>

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<p>Watson and Crick didn’t “steal” anything. The photo in question was shown to Watson by Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin’s co-worker and nominal boss at the university. This turned out to be a key piece of data that helped W&C pull together their proposed structure for DNA. This was done without Franklin’s knowledge, and it’s pretty certain she would have objected had she known. But if you want to blame anybody here it would be Wilkins for showing the data, not Watson for seeing it. W&C credited Wilkins and Franklin for providing helpful data in their landmark paper. It has been argued that they should have given a more strongly-worded credit, but that is a quibble over points of academic etiquette rather than anything so outrageous as stealing.</p>

<p>Even though she had important data that helped W&C, Franklin herself did not understand the significance of what she had. Her notebooks reveal that she was on the wrong track in her investigations and was nowhere close to solving the structure herself. She lacked other key data and insights that W&C were working with. Whether she would have eventually come up with it we’ll never know, since W&C came up with it first.</p>

<p>It’s clear that Rosalind Franklin is the tragic figure of the whole episode who, for many years, was not properly credited for her important role. Some have argued that she was cheated out of a share of the Nobel Prize that Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded in 1962. Perhaps so, but that ignores the fact that Franklin had alread died young of ovarian cancer years before the Nobels were awarded, and only living scientists are eligible for Nobel prizes. It’s clear that Franklin herself was not bitter and didn’t feel cheated. In fact she remained good friends with Francis Crick and his wife, and indeed they helped take care of her when she was ill and dying of her cancer.</p>

<p>Unless the Swedes start giving out posthumous Nobel prizes, Franklin’s significant contributions will not be honored in that way. But the historical record has been set straight to give her her proper credit. And her old college honored her by naming the new molecular biology building the Franklin and Wilkins Laboratory (and not the Wilkins and Franklin Laboratory), which I have visited.</p>

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<p>coureur- Watson and Crick spent a good amount of time going around saying Franklin was “difficult to work with” and, essentially, a word which I won’t type here but means female dog. That was their justification for taking her data at the time, which was a poor bit of rationalization to be sure. In all honesty I don’t believe yours to be much better because stealing data is a horrible thing to do and Franlkin was entitled to her own opinion regarding what to do with it. The fact that this and that happened along the way does NOT make it any better.</p>

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<p>I certainly agree that stealing data is horrible thing to do, but you missed the point. W&C did NOT steal any data. Wilkins voluntarily shared it with them, which it was within his rights to do, since he was head of the project. If W&C are guility of anything it would be not crediting proper importance to significance of Franklin’s data when they published their paper. A questionable point to be sure, but does not even come close to rising to the level of theft.</p>